149 bid adieu to Mooney

June 5, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

YOUNGSTOWN

We’re outta here.

Those words, painted in red and gold letters on the back window of a brown Kia Sportage, said it all for the Cardinal Mooney High School Class of 2011, which graduated Saturday morning at Stambaugh Auditorium.

“Heck yeah, I’m excited,” said Quinton Lewis as he gathered his cap and gown from his car and prepared to head across the street into the auditorium. “It’s the biggest day of my life.”

Lewis, 17, was among nearly 150 graduates who received their diplomas, marking the end of their high school career and the beginning of the road ahead. He will attend Xavier University in Cincinnati and enter the pre-med program there.

The guest speaker for the event was James Cooney, former Mooney vice principal who retired last year after a 46-year career at the school. He was greeted with a standing ovation from the graduates and staff when he was introduced. The topic of his speech was, appropriately, “The Road Ahead.”

Cooney said the young men and women are entering a phase of their lives during which, for the first time, they will be largely responsible for making the decisions that will shape their futures.

“Your life until now has pretty much been planned,” Cooney said. “Your parents pretty much orchestrated your lives.”

He said though some people already have a clear idea of the career path they will follow, many high school graduates are unsure about the future. To those people, he offered this advice: “Look at your talents. Figure out what you’re good at.”

He encouraged the graduates to “follow their passion” and allow it to help lead them into a career.

“I was lucky enough to find my passion as a teacher, almost by chance. A profession I never even considered when I graduated from high school,” he said, explaining that he originally had pursued a career in the priesthood. A week after he dropped out of seminary school, he was offered a teaching job at Mooney, which he accepted. That, in turn, turned into his long career there.

Cooney encouraged the graduates to be willing to take chances and try different things, and to not fear failure.

“Failure is just God’s way of saying that you’re headed in the wrong direction,” he said.

Preston Caldwell, 18, said he is headed in the direction of Hiram College, where he will major in chemistry and hopes to someday become a pediatric surgeon. Though he was excited about Saturday’s graduation, he said his mother was considerably more emotional.

“Oh yeah, she’s been crying,” he said, smiling. “It started about a week ago, and it just kept on happening.”

Eric Sklenar, 18, said seeing the positive effects that prescription medications had on his late grandfather during an illness a few years ago helped influence his decision to enter the pharmacy program at Ohio Northern University.

“I’ve always liked chemistry, and I want to use that to help people,” he said.

Speech pathology will be Madeline Kopper’s major when she attends Clarion University in the fall. She read a book once about a mother who had to diligently work with her son, who had a severe speech impediment. The boy ultimately learned to speak effectively.

“No one else believed in him, but she did, and I want to be able to help people like that,” said Kopper, who said she’d like to work with patients who have suffered strokes.

Najah Morgan, 18, was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and moved to Youngstown when she was 4. A pep rally before Mooney’s football game against crosstown parochial- school rival Ursuline was a memorable highlight of her high school years, she said.

Morgan said she has loved animals since she was a little girl and has a menagerie of pets at home, including five Pomeranians, a King Charles spaniel, and two siamese cats. Not surprisingly, she will head to the Vet Tech Institute in Pittsburgh in July, studying to become a veterinarian.

“I’m nervous and excited and kind of sad today,” Morgan said. “It’s a lot of things at once.”