SHOREWOOD — After Nick Berg spends his days tending to students, paper work, parents or those many questions and nicks and scrapes that fill the time at St. Robert School in Shorewood, he often sits back and takes pen to pad and begins sketching.
Berg is the office manager at St. Robert and when he gets a little time, he takes up his part-time career as an illustrator. His work in the design world has been in logo creation, patent and auto illustrations and various other work for ad agencies.
His cartoon published above displays a couple items near and dear to Wisconsinites –faith and the Green Bay Packers.
As the Aaron Rodgers-led Packers moves on to challenge the Atlanta Falcons for the NFL’s National Football Conference title on Sunday, the team has displayed a flair for dramatic finishes. This includes three “Hail Mary” (long distance desperation passes) over the last two seasons. (To learn more about this football play and terminology, turn to Fr. Jerry Herda’s column on page Page 5 of this issue’s “myFaith” supplement.
“It just kind of occurred to me that we hear many Hail Mary prayers here at school and we are also hearing about them on the football field,” Berg said. “So I just put the connection together.”
He attests to being a lifelong Packer fan and grew up in Wauwatosa and attended Christ King parish. He is a grad of Waukesha’s Catholic Memorial High before furthering his education and skills at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.
Berg keeps even busier these days as he and his fiancée, Emily Knippel, principal at St. Joseph Elementary School, Racine, are looking to the future and investigating parishes to join once they are married.
And if the Rodgers’ confessor looks a bit familiar, it is because Berg modeled the priest after Emily’s uncle, Fr. Ken Knippel, pastor of St. John Vianney Parish, Brookfield.
