Retirement Celebrations
Reception honoring Greg Renneker will be 5 to 7 p.m. June 8 in the lobby of Badin High School
Reception honoring retiring Principal Frank Margello will be 5 to 7 p.m. June 21 in the lobby of Badin High School
HAMILTON — After 41 years in the Badin High School family, English teacher Greg Rennaker will retire at the end of the school year.
A life-long Hamilton resident, Renneker is a 1964 graduate of Hamilton Catholic High School, the all-male precursor to Badin.
“It was a different kind of experience,” he said, “but it has the same mission, the same goals.”
His family lived on Kahn Avenue, and he spent the summers of his youth working at the old Pepsi bottling plant on East Avenue and at the Mosler Safe Company.
“I didn’t really want to work in a factory,” he said. “I didn’t plan to become a teacher, but I just kind of fell into it, and I’m glad I did.”
After graduating from Miami University, he taught for two years at Greenhills High School before joining Badin during the 1970-71 school year. His friend, the late Bill Mulcahey, for whom the Badin gymnasium is named, told him of the opening there and he was eager to apply.
“In that first year, between my family and my wife’s, I taught nine or 10 cousins,” he said. “Every class had two or three people I was related to.”
He also taught all four of his own children as they went through Badin, and coached his sons on the football team.
The hardest thing about teaching, he said, has been getting students motivated.
“There are so many things to draw students’ attention, it’s hard to compete,” he said. “There are just so many things they can do now, and they have a lot more mobility than they used to, but a lot of Badin students are self-motivated, so that makes it easier.”
Renneker has primarily been the Senior English teacher, which focuses on Western Literature, and his favorite author to teach has been J.D. Salinger, but he also taught Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” as contemporary literature three years after it first came out, and continued to teach it every year until the end.
The most remarkable thing about Badin, he said, is the tight, family-like relationships.
“My first game here, every assistant coach but one was my coach in the ‘60s,” he said. “Not long ago, I realized that about 12 or 13 teachers here also went to school here.
“That has to say something about the school that when people graduate, they want to come back here to work. I’ve had students tell me that they want to come back and take my job.
“That’s what I’ll miss the most, the camaraderie in the classroom and among the faculty.
“Short of playing major league baseball, I can’t think of anything I’d rather have done,” he said.
Renneker said he doesn’t have a “bucket list” for his retirement, but he plans to travel some and to set up the American Flyer model train that’s been in his basement all these years for the entertainment of his seven grandchildren.
Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188 or rjones@coxohio.com.
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