Four inducted into the Webb City R-7 Hall of Fame

Four graduates were inducted Tuesday into the Webb City R-7 Hall of Fame as part of the annual Webb City R-7 Schools Foundation Honors Banquet at the high school.

Andrew Casella (1997) is the director of the Center for Innovation of Nuclear Materials with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory at Richland, Wash.

In addition to authoring or co-authoring over a hundred journal articles, abstracts and reports, Andrew has participated as a fellow of the inaugural World Nuclear University Summer Institute in 2005. He was the Materials Performance Team Leader from 2020-2022, participated in the Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) Initiative, and is currently the Science Task Manager within the Tritium Technology Program since 2022.

Dorothy Roe Lewis (1920) fell in love with journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Her writing and editing for newspapers, wire services and syndicates took her from coast to coast and back to the midwest. She earned the Missouri Honor Medal in 1959 and was on the J-School faculty until retiring in 1974.

Her daughter, Judy White, attended the ceremony with Lewis’ granddaughter, Jennifer Hagenhoff, who accepted the award.

William C. “Bill” Myers Jr. (1939) won the Missouri Debate Championship while in high school and went to nationals.

He flew the lead plane for his squadron of B-24 bombers during World War II. Upon graduation from law school at the University of Missouri in 1949, he returned to Webb City, where he practiced with his own firm for 34 years. He served two terms as county prosecutor and two terms as a state representative. He was heralded as one of the top trial lawyers in the state and granted privileges to appear before the United States Supreme Court. Meanwhile, he bought the Webb City Sentinel when it was folding so the town would continue to have a newspaper.

Myers’ five daughters were on their way to the ceremony when their travel was interrupted in Kansas City. His nephew, Doug Myers, accepted the honor.

Andrew Watrous (2002) impressed the audience as he explained his expertise in studying mental deficiencies as an assistant professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine.

In his introduction of Watrous, Superintendent Brenten Byrd did his best just to read Watrous’ explanation of what he does. “In both my postdoctoral training in Bonn, Germany and at Columbia University, I measured local field potentials in patients with epilepsy to further characterize the relationship between neural oscillations and human cognitive processing. I continued this line of work as an assistant professor at UT (University of Texas) Austin, where I developed new algorithms and testing platforms for linking naturalistic behaviors to patient-specific neural oscillations. Now at Baylor College of Medicine, the lab has expanded in scope and uses video games and other naturalistic media to study diverse facets of human cognition using a combination of neurofeedback, electrical stimulation, and single neuron recordings.”

The Hall of Fame committee chooses inductees based on the following criteria:

• The alumnus of a school that currently comprises the Webb City R-7 School District;
• Graduated or attended high school at least twenty-five (25) years ago;
• Achieved outstanding recognition in their chosen field;
• Received recognition regionally, state, or national level; and
• Made significant contributions to benefit and serve the community, state, or nation.