It’s been getting a little heavy here lately with column topics about death, the coronavirus and the Indians’ divisive name change, so I figured it was time for something on the lighter side.
So with that, here are a couple tales from my career in journalism to help take the edge off, something I plan to do from time to time to keep things light.
Failing with honors
I never sat in an honors class my entire time at the University of Akron.
But I did sit in one at Kent State University — an experience I’d rather forget.
Soon after getting hired at the Record-Courier in March 1994, I was assigned to cover a speaker who would be talking to a KSU honors class in the Memorial Athletic and Convocation Center about sports culture in Japan. I was excited about the assignment; I have always been fascinated with Japanese culture and was very much looking forward to his presentation.
Our sports editor, Tim Houser, had made arrangements for my coverage with the professor, so everything was set for me to sit in with the class and listen to the talk.
Everything, that is, except available parking spaces at Kent State.
Figuring no college on Earth had a parking situation as nightmarish as Akron’s, I felt confident in my timetable for coverage of the honors class presentation. My comfort level eroded instantly when I pulled into the MAC Center parking lot and was greeted with the glistening metal and glass of cars as far as the eye could see.
There was a college with parking as bad as Akron’s, after all. And only 20 minutes away.
Driving around aimlessly looking for a parking spot was not part of my timetable. After a frantic search, I finally found one that would qualify as an Olympic distance event in relation to the MAC Center. I wasn’t sure I was even still on campus.
I had to hurry, which wasn’t going to be easy in the snow and ice. But at least I was familiar with the facility — my dad had taken me to many Kent State basketball games at Memorial Gym when I was growing up.
After running from the car to the MAC Center door, I walked inside and realized there was a big difference between the old building name and the new building name. The primary difference being that it really wasn’t the old building anymore. It had been modernized and expanded, meaning a classroom I thought would be easy to find was now located in a labyrinth of hallways and corridors.
I began walking in a direction, for no other reason than it was a direction. A clock on the wall indicated I was already five minutes late. Panic set in as I raced around looking for the classroom. I finally saw another human being, asked where this particular room might be located, was pointed in another direction, and arrived at the classroom door in question — a full 15 minutes late.
To avoid the excruciating experience of walking into an in-progress class session full of perfect strangers, I figured I would quietly slip in the back and cover the speech incognito.
I figured wrong.
As I gingerly opened the door hoping to avoid drawing attention to myself, the hinges creaked loudly like in a horror movie, every head in the packed classroom snapping in my direction to see the tardy intruder. The speaker, standing at the podium at the front of the room, stopped talking in mid-sentence. They may as well have darkened the room and put a spotlight on me. I wanted to dig a hole in the floor and jump in.
Having brought the entire class session to an abrupt halt, I looked for a seat in the back of the room to slide into and end my misery.
No such luck.
“Hello, Mr. Hardesty!” said a man I had never seen in my life but assumed it was the professor. “Up here,” he said, waving his arm toward the front of the room. “We have your seat right here.”
“My seat” was situated directly in front of the podium at the front of the room. Wonderful.
So I took the walk of shame in front of the entire class — their puzzled faces clearly wondering “who the hell is this guy?” — and sat in my front-and-center reserved seat. I waited for the speaker to begin talking again, but instead he waited for me to get situated. The sounds of me unzipping my coat, removing it, hanging it over the back of the chair, unzipping my book bag, removing my notebook and flipping through the pages — sounds that normally are barely above the range of human hearing — reverberated throughout the otherwise dead-quiet room. It became an impromptu science experiment to see if dying from embarrassment was indeed possible.
Finally, finished making a spectacle of myself, I was ready to start taking notes. The speaker resumed his talk, I sank down in my seat and counted the minutes until my suffering was over.
I always knew I didn’t belong in honors classes.
Mr. Badwrench
I know nothing about cars.
Yes, I can drive them — unless they’re stick shift. And I can put gas in them — assuming I can operate the ever-more-complicated pumps, which at some point are going to require a degree in engineering to use.
Aside from that, however, cars are not my thing. I’ve never been into cars, I don’t get the whole car culture thing, I don’t break out into cold sweats when I see a certain model going down the road.
When it comes to cars, I just don’t care.
But a basic working knowledge of the automobile certainly would have come in handy while I was covering the Western Reserve Conference track & field championships at Twinsburg High School in 2002. I had spent a miserable day standing out in a steady rain at the event, getting soaked to the bone as I scurried around the stadium collecting results and interviewing athletes and coaches.
Finally, tired and waterlogged, the meet ended for the day and I headed to my car in the school’s parking lot, anxiously anticipating the warm, dry environs of the interior of my vehicle. There was no one left in the stadium by this time, so I assumed my car, as usual, would be the last one left in the parking lot.
It wasn’t. There was another car parked adjacent to mine, which I figured must belong to a meet official who was still wrapping up their day’s work. As I neared my car, suddenly the driver’s side door of the other car swung open, and out sprang a woman with a desperate look on her face.
“Sir! Can you help us?” she pleaded as the rain continued to fall.
“Sure,” I said, hoping I could live up to that response. “What do you need?”
“My daughter and I just got back to our car and it won’t start,” she said, exasperated. “She runs for Kenston and she’s been competing all day, and she’s tired and we just want to go home.”
Car won’t start? I was pretty sure I couldn’t help them. But I had to at least try.
As I opened my car door and put my belongings inside, the woman walked toward me and said, “Do you have jumper cables?”
I did. But I had no idea how to use them. I had been shown countless times, but it never sank in how to actually use them correctly. All I knew was that if you didn’t use them correctly, bad things could happen — like an explosion.
“Yes, I do,” I answered. “They’re in my trunk.”
“Oh, good!” she exclaimed. “We can just jump my car and get going then. It should only take a couple minutes.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. By her wording and tone, she obviously knew her way around jumper cables. I would be spared the humiliation of confessing to her that I didn’t know how to use them.
I pulled my car alongside hers and pulled the cables out of the trunk. I held them in my hand, and she stared at me.
“Do you know how to use them?” she asked.
I froze. I had assumed that she knew how to use them. I stood there, cables in hand, rain pouring down on the both of us, wondering how she and her daughter were going to get home.
This was bad.
“No, I don’t,” I swallowed.
“Do you have a manual or something with instructions on how to jump a car?” she asked.
“I might,” I answered, having no idea if such a document existed. I fumbled around in my car, looking for this wonderful piece of paper that would free us from the Twinsburg High School parking lot. To my amazement, I found something that looked like jumper cable instructions, although it was faded in parts and creased to the point of making it difficult to read.
I poked my head out the window and said, “Yep, found it!” I tried to sound like I knew what I was doing, when in reality I had no idea whatsoever.
“Great!” she said. “What does it say?”
That was the next issue: it was barely readable. I stepped outside the car to see if she could make heads or tails out of it, but neither of us could. Back to square one.
“Wait,” she said. “I know it’s positive on positive. Do you know if it’s negative on negative or negative to ground?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “All I know is if it isn’t done right, the car could explode.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that, too,” she said. “But I think you ground the other cable.”
Figuring she had to know more than I did, I went with it. We hooked up the cables and, after a minute or two, she said, “OK, I’m going to try starting my car.”
Not being comfortable with the words “think” and “explode” being used in sentences so close together, I got out of my car and walked briskly to what I felt was a safe distance from the two vehicles. A few moments later, I heard her car start. No explosion.
Relieved and drenched, I walked back to the cars, we unhooked the cables, she thanked me (I’m not sure why) and drove off.
As I pulled out of the parking lot, I made a mental note that I needed to learn how to use jumper cables.
And someday, I will.
Tom Hardesty is a Portager sports columnist. He was formerly assistant sports editor at the Record-Courier and author of the book Glimpses of Heaven.