The NSB Caps awards for 2010 at New Smyrna Beach High School demonstrated what can be achieved if you work hard and long and are enthusiastic and passionate about what you do. All six of this years award winners showed copious amounts of these qualities.
Jack Mitchell, class of 1944, is no doubt the best known of the six honorees. His photographs have appeared on virtually every national and international publication that deals with the arts.
Mitchell's photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono on the cover of People Magazine a week before Lennon’s death made that issue their biggest seller.
One of Mitchell's unusual accomplishments was to get Veronica Lake to pull back her hair so he could get a full picture of her face.
Mitchell gave special mention of principal H.A. Schubegger who allowed him to cut classes so he could pursue his activities in photography that had started while he was in high school.
Mitchell mentioned that he never went on to college. He mentioned that it was more important to stick with and to love what you were doing and exhibit the ability to “Get It Done.”
A collection of about 180 of Jack Mitchell’s photographs can be seen at the Atlantic Center for The Arts in a special room dedicated to his exhibit.
The first honoree, Ronnie Hanna, from the class of 1954 had an outstanding career in aviation. After graduating from Georgia Tech he became a Navy Pilot. He was so good at that that he ended up as an instructor at Top Gun which is the training program that made so much difference in the performance of U.S. pilots in the Vietnam war and later.
Hanna ended up as a pilot and then an official with American Airlines. He is listed in Who’s Who of American Aviation.
John Gilmore, class of 1946 and University of Florida mechanical engineering graduate had an outstanding career in engineering and management. He is the president of Catalytic International, Inc of London, England and is the CEO of Life sciences International, a company with around 300 employees. He has been honored with the Man of Merit Award by the Polish Petrochemical Industry.
Michelle Ohlson Zahner class of 2000, has had a meteoric career with the United Space Alliance in Houston Texas . Her specialty is thermal phenomena.
Her career started back in NSB high school when she took all of the advanced courses that were available. This put her in an excellent position to excel in college.
With hard work Zahner rose quickly in the space program. She was made Mission Control THOR (Thermal Operations Resources) lead flight controller for Space Shuttle 2009.
Dr. Jane Allen demonstrated that a true love and passion for what you are doing can outweigh all other considerations.
Allen started out her career in nursing. She discovered that nursing was not what she liked to do. However, she used the nursing to finance her way through the University of California at Berkley where she discovered her real love was in the field of archeology and Cultural geography.
Some of the groundwork for her interests was laid in a course taught by Ted Rosa at New Smyrna Beach High school . This course included the study and comparison of various cultures and understanding how the cultures relate to the circumstances of the people.
Her studies were made mainly in Southeast Asia and included about 81 dig sites. Thirty nine of these sites are still being actively pursued.
At the present time her main activity is to make sure that building projects do not destroy anything of archeological value. And by the same token she tries to get the things of archeological value moved or documented in a timely fashion so that the building projects will not suffer undue delay and cost.
Harold E. Nichols, class of 1985, demonstrates that sheer hard work and love for your profession can overcome all obstacles and lead to success.
Nichols' career started at New Smyrna Beach High on the football field. His first dream was to quarterback a major college football team. This was dashed when he found out that he wasn’t big enough or talented enough to play for a team like Florida State. However, he was good enough to start for little Presbyterian College for two years.
His love turned to coaching. He started as an assistant at Presbyterian and then moved on to Georgia Southern.
He became head defensive coach at the University of Rhode Island . Here, he was recognized as the assistant coach of the year by the NCAA.
in January of 2009, he was named as head coach at Presbyterian college.
He concluded his talk by saying that his message for the high school students is have faith in yourself and family, get an education , have a passion for your pursuit, dream big , work hard and by all means have fun doing it.
Nichols takes pride in the fact that he is only one of 119 Division I college head coaches in the country.
These six were the driving force behind a successful CAPS fundraiser this year for scholarship money for graduating seniors who might not otherwide be able to afford college.