Heritage Center construction making substantial progress
The 10,000 square feet facility will be divided into a large main hall which will be available for rental as well as a lobby, card room, physical fitness center, kitchen, library, craft/quiting center and boardroom.
By SHANNON CRABTREE scrabtree@leader-news.com

L-N Photo by Shannon Crabtree Adding Their Names Bill and Nelda Muns (center and right) offer a $5,000 donation to El Campo Heritage Center Board President Rita Radley. Their names will be placed as sponsors of the center's office. Nelda Muns attended the old Northside school as a senior.

El Campo area seniors should have a new site to sit, spin tales, take on tasks or play a game of dominos by summer as work progresses on the Heritage Center.

The $640,000 building project could be ready by some point in June, Board member Bill Muns said Monday.

A renovation of the former Northside Senior Citizen Center, the Heritage Center broke ground Feb. 28 with BLS Construction taking on the task of modernizing one of the last portions of the old Northside school campus.

Soon it will be an activity center for those ages 50 and older with a modest $15 per year membership fee, board president Rita Radley said.

"It's coming along," she added.

While work progresses, the center is seeking volunteers to man the facility and a funding plan for operations.

The 10,000 square feet facility will be divided into a large main hall which will be available for rental as well as a lobby, card room, physical fitness center, kitchen, library, craft/quiting center and boardroom.

No estimates of how many seniors can be served on a daily basis are available yet, but Radley said, the center is hoping for 500 members.

"We will just have to play it by ear," she said.

With the completion of the Heritage Center, the Northside Education Center effort will be virtually complete.

A city-school district partnership designed to keep a closed school campus an integral part of the community rather than allowing it to become a blight, the Northside Center block now houses a branch of the Wharton County Library, the El Campo Boys & Girls Club, the education center, a Wharton County Junior College Job Training Center and the soon-to-be opened Heritage Center.

Funding for the center came from a variety of grants large and small. Large donations included a $100,000 grant from Gulf Coast Medical Foundation matched with another $100,000 from the M.G. and Lillie A. Johnson Foundation as well as a $50,000 grant from the Meadows Foundation of Dallas.

An additional $100,000 has been donated locally in real dollars and inkind services.

Sponsorships were also offered for each room in the facility as well as benches and individual walkway bricks.

Monday, Bill and Nelda Muns added to the assistance offering $5,000 for sponsorship of the office.

Nelda Muns attended the Northside School in her senior year of 1952.

The area becoming the Heritage Center was the high school cafeteria when her family moved from Kansas.

"It was the flood of '51. My father was a farmer. It flooded 12 times and six we lost everything," but then an aunt in El Campo offered her father a job and place to live here.

They quickly moved.

Bill Muns had been her high school sweetheart in Kansas. He joined the Air Force and was sent to Lackland in San Antonio.

After a three-year stint in Germany, he returned to the area to marry Nelda.

Bill Muns was a school teacher in Garwood, Rice Consolidated and retired from El Campo in 1989 after 15 years as the VOE coordinator.

Nelda Muns taught government at Wharton County Junior College for 35 years also serving as the social and behavioral sciences chair.

"I'm so thrilled to go by here (the old Northside campus) and see it being used," she said. "There is nothing like a run down campus. I'm so happy, I didn't want that in the middle of El Campo. It was the cooperation of the school district and city that brought it about."