Relay team honors teacher’s memory
AUSTINTOWN
Austintown’s Relay for Life was in full stride Saturday afternoon, and despite the muggy heat, the mood was upbeat.
Twenty-four white tents were grouped around the parking lot of Austintown Elementary School on Idaho Road and provided a respite for team members who continued their marathon walk around the perimeter of the lot – it would be 12 hours this year, having started at 10 a.m. and continuing until 10 p.m.
The annual event will benefit American Cancer Society programs in the community as Relays do in every other community during the spring.
Team members take turns walking, usually around a track in a stadium or gymnasium, for 12 or 24 hours straight to raise money to beat cancer.
Many cancer survivors themselves are there, starting out each Relay with the traditional victory lap.
Here, one such survivor had been Ken Reel. A beloved eighth-grade American history teacher and a girls basketball coach for 27 years at Canfield Middle School, he was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoma in February 2012.
This year was the fourth time that “Team Reel” had come back to the Austintown Relay – to walk, raffle off baskets and wear the T-shirts that have become their traditional fundraiser against cancer. They design a different one each year.
This year’s shirt shows a drawing of Abe Lincoln and the words, “Let’s Make Cancer History” as a play off Reel’s love of Abe Lincoln.
Last year’s shirt was basketball-themed. The year before, green and yellow shirts and a saying about “plowing through cancer” were a take-off on his love of John Deere tractors.
The first year’s shirt said simply: “TEAM REEL” across the front, and across the back, “Disperse ye rebels ...” It was a Revolutionary War saying, meaning it was time to get going. Reel liked to stand in the hall and say it to hurry kids along between their classes.
He taught for 44 years, refusing to retire even after his diagnosis.
When a group of girls at the middle school wanted to raise money for him, he would not accept it. That’s when the idea for the T-shirts was born instead.
He came to his team’s first Austintown Relay and walked the victory lap.
He died June 12, 2013, shortly after the team’s second Relay. He was 67. But to say he is not at Austintown with his team every year would be wrong.
“I’ll do whatever it takes to keep him alive – in our hearts,” said Sabrina Eaton, a middle-school teacher at Canfield now, whose memories of her treasured friend date from beyond when he taught across the hall from her to when she had him as her own eighth-grade history teacher.
She said 40 people were on the team Saturday. Middle school teachers made the baskets to honor Reel and to help other cancer patients.
Reel will live on in their fight against cancer. “I will keep doing this as long as I can keep his memory alive,” Eaton said.