By PHOEBE DONALD ROBINSON / Community Columnist

Clem Muck was awarded the RSVP Spirit Award by Director Marvin Copes at the annual RSVP banquet to celebrate Shelby County’s outstanding senior volunteers. Barry Blount, Edwina Chappel, Jim Choate, Stretch Dunn, Bernice Griffith, Cleta Howell, Mel Shinholster and Johnny A. Jones also received the Spirit Award. Fran Phelps and Mildred Baldwin were honored with the Star Award.

“Clem is ‘Mr. GO TO’ in Shelby County,” said Copes. “If you need something done, go to Clem and it will get done, period. He will go above and beyond what is needed and has had an outstanding impact on our community.”

After retiring from corporate America, Muck, with wife Alice of 51 years, moved to Shelby County to be close to daughter and son-in-law Monica and Doug Duval and their seven children who live in Alabaster. Two other children live in Oregon.

Muck started a new business in January 2002, CTR Bikes in Helena, which provides bicycle packages to LDS missionaries. He is a board member of SKY, Skilled Knowledgeable Youth of Thompson High School, where he was assigned responsibility to “take new side-by-side Ride Along Bicycles for Handy Capable Individuals to full manufacturing, sales, and distribution for THS’s Engineering, Marketing and Business Academies.”

He is board member of the Shelby County Historical Association, works with Acts of Kindness which provides clothing for needy, finds intern jobs Holy Family Christo High School’s students, gives gun safety classes, organizes Memorial Day traffic at Alabama National Cemetery, organized refurbishing of Columbiana City Cemetery and much more.

“The idea of retirement to me means the beginning of the painful walk to the grave,” said Muck. “Volunteering is a deterrent to that journey, and it is my full intention to keep volunteering for at least another 10-15 years. I am vitally concerned about loss of focus in this country with regard to God, family, our freedom, and our history. Volunteering helps to place emphasis and focus on each of these vital principles.”

Muck was also awarded the President’s Volunteer Service Award in 2014 and State of Alabama’s Golden Eagle Lifetime Achievement Award by the Senior Citizens’ Hall of Fame in 2015.