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When Charles F. "Chic" Dambach was growing up in Worthington in the 1950s, his parents encouraged him to leave the world in a better place than he found it. He took their advice literally.

For the past 40 years, beginning as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1967, Dambach has dedicated his life to the establishment of world peace.

He returned to Thomas Worthington High School on Monday for a ceremony honoring five recipients of the Worthington Schools Distinguished Alumni awards.

Dambach graduated from Worthington High School in 1962, earned a B.S. from Oklahoma State University and an MBA from Wake Forest University before serving in the Peace Corps in Colombia and being elected Peace Corps Volunteer leader for the region.

He was president of the National Peace Corps Association from 1991-97 and created an Emergency Response Network to link former Peace Corps volunteers with the non-government and government agencies to meet special needs throughout the world.

The first major project sent dozens of volunteers to help the United Nations and several agencies in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda.

In 1998, Dambach formed a team of returned Peace Corps volunteers to work with the leaders of Eritrea and Ethiopia to help end their border war.

Their message was: the use of violent force is not the way to determine where borders should be.

He attended the treaty-signing ceremony, where he was approached by Prime Minister Meles of Ethiopia.

"The prime minister said 'I want you to know the war is over and I want to thank you for making this happen'," he told the audience at Thomas Worthington on Monday.

Dambach was an official U.S. delegate to the United Nations World Food Conference in Rome in 2000, and in 2001 received the "Global Coalition Peace Award" from the International Platform Association.

He served eight years as chairman of the Coalition for American Leadership Abroad, a network of 50 major international affairs organizations that cosponsor nationally televised town meetings on foreign policy issues with the U.S. Department of State.

In 2005, he became president and CEO of the Alliances for Peacebuilding, a network of 50 leading organizations worldwide dedicated to reducing violence and fostering peace and security.

"It actually is a more peaceful world," Dambach said on Monday.

He stressed that he is one of many Worthington graduates who have contributed to the improvement of the world.

"High standards is what Worthington is all about," he said.

He encouraged the audience to learn to listen, travel far and wide, move beyond their comfort zones, and, of course, to leave the world a better place.

Dambach has three children and lives with his wife, Kay, in Crownsville, Md.

As an Emmy-winning news anchor in New York City, Dana Tyler has met famous people, been on the front lines covering the attacks on 9/11, and earlier this year was honored as a black broadcast legend.

But for a few minutes on Monday morning, she was grateful to be on the stage at Thomas Worthington High School - a stage she thought she might never experience. She was turned down for a speaking part in "Our Town" when she was a Worthington High School student in the 1970s.

She laughed about being named "stage manager" of the high school play when she accepted the Worthington Schools Distinguished Alumni Award on Monday morning.

Most of her memories of growing of in Worthington are good ones, though, and prepared her well, Tyler said.

"We were lucky to go here, we knew that," she said, remembering that her parents had to leave Worthington to get a mortgage on their Morning Street home in the 1960s.

"It wasn't always easy being a black child in a predominantly white school district," she said.

She attended Colonial Hills Elementary School, Worthingway Middle School, the Kilbourne ninth-grade campus, and Worthington High, where she graduated in 1977.

Some of her more memorable teachers were Gary and Kathy Moore, Paul Jones, and the late Alex Pashovich, who taught her Russian in high school.

"We were challenged, challenged, challenged," she said.

Tyler graduated from Boston University's School of Management with a degree in marketing and broadcast journalism. She began her career at WBNS-TV in Columbus before moving to WCBS as a weekend anchor and reporter.

In 1990 she became a part of history when she and the late Reggie Harris became the first African-American anchor team in the New York market on WCBS-TV.

In 2003, Tyler received Emmy Awards for coverage of an Instant Breaking News Story for anchoring the "New York City Blackout" and for Outstanding Single Newscast, "CBS 2 News at 11: City Hall Shooting."

In 2006, she received a New York Association of Black Journalists Award for her reporting on "The Color Purple."

Tyler was honored by McDonald's at the Museum of Television and Radio as one of the 2007 Black Broadcast Legends. She also has received numerous Emmy nominations for her work.

Tyler participates in numerous station and charity events. After several years as a classroom volunteer, she is a member of the board of trustees of Learning Leaders, the nearly 15,000-member volunteer organization dedicated to New York City's 1.1-million public school students.

She currently co-anchors the CBS 2 News at 6 and 11 p.m. weeknights with Jim Rosenfield. In addition to anchoring, Dana takes viewers inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in her weekly report "CBS 2 at the MET" every Sunday morning.