Changes and still moving forward

I moved to New Prague in 1999, right before school started that year. There were many things I learned in that year and still continue to participate in. Among them are the Fall Section, the Fall Sports Section and the Dozinky Harvest Festival preview.
Of the course the town was different at that time, there was hardly anything south of Main Street on the east side of town and except for a few houses, the community basically stopped at the Czech National Cemetery. On the east side of town one of the few structures south of Main Street was Holy Trinity Lutheran Church. The houses that people live in along Chalupsky Avenue and other streets had yet to be built. Walgreens and Coborn’s Marketplace and the two roundabouts weren’t even a dream yet. On the west side of town Raven Stream Elementary and quite a bit of the housing hadn’t even been laid out. On the west side there are still two restaurants that were there in 1999, Dairy Queen and what is now The Ettlin’s Cafe.
In my first year there was also doing stories on the New Prague High School Fall Musical. That year it was an all school extravaganza as students from the elementary school, middle school and high school provided a choir for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. One of the stars was a senior by the name of Toby Thietje.
Through my 21 years of covering New Prague and it’s changes, the town has continued to move forward. Through the recession the community found a way to move forward. Some structures have been lost during that time, but others have gone up. The community’s population has continued to rise. When I first came to town it was booming from the roughly 3,000 and some residents. Today there are more than 8,000 people who call New Prague home. People still work here, live here and keep moving forward.