Susan Rakosnik Is Jefferson County December Veteran Of The Month

Written by the Muell FamilySusan M. Rakosnik is December’s Jefferson County Veteran of the Month. She was presented with a certificate by the Jefferson County Board of Commissioners and a patriotic wall hanging by Marley Rosener. Rakosnik was born in 1961 at the Humboldt Hospital to a farming family who lived near Pawnee City. She was the youngest of four children. At the age of six her family, being of 100 percent Czechoslovakian descent, moved to Wilber to raise the children in a smaller Czech community.Rakosnik attended K-12 in the Wilber-Clatonia Public School system. She learned to play accordion which she used as her talent to help win Wilber Czech Queen in 1978. While in high school, Rakosnik was a cheerleader for all four years, participated in class plays, played basketball and volleyball. She earned State Honorable Mention her senior year as a volleyball player. During the summer months, Rakosnik had a job working the evening shift in the local nursing home as a nursing assistant. After graduation in May 1979, she committed to joining the Navy to follow in the footsteps of her three older siblings and father. Her Naval Recruiter would come down from Lincoln to spend part of the summer to run and train with Rakosnik to help her prepare for enlistment.New Recruit Rakosnik attended nine weeks of Basic Training at Orlando, Florida and four months at the San Diego, California Hospital Corpsman School. Upon graduation, Hospital Corpsman Rakosnik, with the help of her Recruiter, was stationed with her brother, Lewis, at the hospital at Camp Pendleton, California. Her brother worked in physical therapy and she worked in orthopedics and they were able to share a duplex off base.Prior to that time, no females had been allowed to work very actively in orthopedics. But, due to Corpsman Rakosnik’s work ethic and skills, she was allowed to do so and eventually advanced to Senior Corpsman and was in charge of eight other male corpsmen. She became proficient in “casting” once the doctor set broken bones and was the first woman to be allowed to perform this duty. She also worked in the operating room associated with bone surgeries, set patients up in traction and worked in the emergency room. She received the “Sailor of the Quarter” award once and any plans she had to be stationed in Spain were offset by the desire of the Captain of the orthopedic clinic to have her remain at the Camp Pendleton Hospital. While she was encouraged to go to medical school and become an orthopedic doctor, Rakosnik elected to leave active duty in August, 1983 and move back to Nebraska.Rakosnik moved to Omaha and again lived with Lewis who was attending medical school. She joined the Naval Reserve in Lincoln, Nebraska for the next four years. Her unit was an Environmental Medical Prevention Unit (EMPU). Weekend duties mostly consisted of classroom studies on Environmental Medical Prevention. Each year, the two weeks of active duty were spent at far away locations like California or South Carolina, working at a hospital in orthopedics. She also found time to attend two years of college at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and worked at Bergan Mercy Hospital for 10 years working in physical therapy and performing the duties she learned in the Navy. She married her husband, Gary Muell, and had two children. In 1993, Susan and Gary moved their family to Fairbury for Gary to pursue his career in banking and to be closer to her parents. Rakosnik worked from approximately 1994 to 1997 at Gardenside Long-Term Care as an Orthopedic Technician working closely with Physical Therapy. After that, Rakosnik began working for the Fairbury School System at Central School as the “Cafeteria Lunch Clerk” and has been there over 26 years. Each morning, she assists with breakfast and accounts for the number of students eating that day. Then, she gathers the head counts for all grades from Pre-School through Second Grade for all students who will be eating at the school that day. She coordinates with the Head Cook and performs any and all duties necessary to keep accurate counts of all the ways meals are paid for by students and adults, collects appropriate money from all and performs any other duties necessary to ensure students are well fed on time. Her afternoons are spent compiling appropriate food service records and depositing money for Central School in a local bank account. Rakosnik enjoys her work and has no immediate plans for retirement. In her spare time, she enjoys sharing time with Gary, her husband of 37 years, walking, going to movies, spending time with other family including her two grandchildren. She also follows her daughter Taylor Fox’s career as a professional women’s football player who plays for the Minnesota Vixen.

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