As Garth Brooks sings, “Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers.”
For the past 29 years, you have opened your doors to me, offered me a cup of coffee and told me your story. Then you let me share that story with tens of thousands of readers. It’s been an incredible ride, really. I do this job for you, the readers of the newspaper and our websites.
Every year, I read over the hundreds of stories I’ve written that year, and select what I call my “10 Most Intriguing People of the Year.”
Here is that list, in alphabetical order:
‘I’m going to be blessed’
There are some stories you just never know what to expect.
I was told that Ann Brock, an emergency room nurse at Atrium Medical Center and a Monroe firefighter, had lost her left leg below the knee in a serious motorcycle accident.
When I walked into the rehab unit at Atrium, there sat Brock on the edge of a bench.
For the next 30 minutes, we talked and only once did she appear to be uncomfortable. More than anything, she was grateful to be fitted for a prosthetic left leg just in time for Christmas.
“I’m going to be blessed with the ability to walk again,” Brock, 51, of Eaton, told me.
She paused, then added: “And I don’t think there’s a better Christmas gift than that. To me, it’s just like a miracle. That is just so powerful. People take for granted that they can get up and go. This will be the most fantastic feeling.”
‘Prison doesn’t change you’
The classrooms of Cincinnati State Middletown are full of success stories, but none more powerful than Anne Grady’s.
She survived years of drug abuse and human trafficking, plus a few bullets fired her way, to become a 4.0 GPA student who won a $3,000 Leading Women of Cincinnati Scholarship to continue her studies at Cincinnati State. Grady, 51, hopes to become a paralegal, a career that matches her passion and history, she said.
She ran away from her home in Minnesota when she was 13. She spent eight years, starting when she was 16, as a prostitute in Minnesota, Chicago, New York, Detroit and Texas. She was arrested in Texas in 1982 and was charged with 13 felony counts of prostitution because some of the prostitutes with her were under 18. She pleaded guilty to three charges and since she was a first-time offender, she was sentenced to 10 years in the Texas prison system.
“Prison doesn’t change you,” she said. “I didn’t know anything else. I was good at making money. Good at hustling.”
‘I was so lucky’
George Lang, a West Chester Twp. trustee and successful businessman, wasn’t scheduled to speak during the groundbreaking of the Boys & Girls Club of West Chester/Liberty.
Then, Lang told his story, stole the show and left the audience stunned and silent.
In fact, he said, only a few people at the event — even his close friends for the last 25 years — knew his clouded family history. He was born George Fabian Fajardo one month after his mother turned 22. He was her fifth child, and his oldest sister, was seven years his senior.
A few months after Lang was born, his biological father, just a kid himself, took off, unable to handle the stress of fatherhood. That left his mother to raise her five children all under the age of 7. She had no education, no marketable skills, Lang said.
When Lang was 6 months old, he and his four sisters were awarded to the state. Three years later, his mother met Frank Lang, and the first thing he did was reunite the family and change their last names, Lang said.
“I was so lucky, he said. “I had grandma and grandpa Glock (their nickname) as my foster parents. What a beautiful experience I had. Two of my sisters were very similar. What a wonderful, positive impact they had in their formidable years.”
‘You should be dead by now’
If any family has a reason to be bitter, to be mad at the world, to not believe the words printed in their tattered and worn Bibles, it’s the Lyons family.
Instead, when you step into the home of Ted Lyons in Franklin, you feel a calmness where there should be chaos.
Doctors had told the family that Lyons, who never missed a day of work in 30 years, was losing his battle against cancer. Not just once. But three times.
According to Lyons’ daughter, his doctor once told him, “I never thought I’d live to see the day I’d do a surgery like this on you again. Every time he sees my dad in the hospital, he will say, ‘ … You’re a walking miracle. You should be dead by now.”
Ted Lyons, 74, retired from Techmetals in Dayton in 2006, and since then, has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, esophageal cancer, had his aortic valve replaced, and just in case the family had one miracle remaining, was diagnosed with stomach cancer last year.
But during his most recent appointment with his oncologist, the family was told the cancer was gone. There was no medical explanation, but Ted Fielding Lyons was cancer free.
‘We will be different great’
Negative news rarely comes out of the Madison Local School District, and that's perfectly fine for its superintendent, Curtis Philpot.
That, of course, changed on Feb. 29 when James Austin Hancock, 14, an eighth-grader, pulled the trigger on a .380 caliber hand gun and shot two classmates in the cafeteria, setting off an intense situation throughout the community.
In the days and weeks that followed, because of the leadership shown by Philpot, the district improved its security measures and shook off what could have become a tarnished reputation.
Throughout the ordeal, it was Philpot who met with the media, and more importantly, reassured the students and their parents that Madison was a safe place.
After the shooting, he was the face of the district, the man behind all those TV microphones.
“A part of Madison, I don’t want to say died, but it changed that day,” he told me in an exclusive one-on-one interview. “We will never be the same. We will never be the same, but we still will be great. We will be different great. What’s really weird, alumni reached out to me, including my daughter. They are devastated by this. Because they love their school. They are wounded, they are hurt because they know their school is changed.”
“We got to move forward. We don’t know what the new Madison will look like,” he said.
‘It’s like a good-bye’
When I drove to Butler County Lumber Co., I wasn’t sure if it would feel like a visitation or a celebration.
I’m proud to say it was the latter.
The entire Hamilton community threw a party for Phil Poppel, who was given a few weeks or months to live after he was diagnosed with pancreas and liver cancer.
On this day, the cancer didn’t have a chance.
“He’s a super guy, a big friend,” said one of his brothers, Clifford Poppel, 58.
Phil walked up and heard what his brother said.
“Yes,” he said in agreement.
When Poppel was 5, as the family was leaving church, he had a massive convulsion that stopped oxygen from reaching his brain. The 53-year-old rode his bike or walked the short distance from his home on Park Avenue to Butler County Lumber Co., where he had worked for nearly 27 years.
He died Aug. 8.
‘We’re only given one life, one chance’
I'll never forget Vanessa Potter, winner of the Steel Magnolia Award.
As we sat in a lobby at Miami University Middletown, Potter, 32, a single mother of three, talked openly about her life: Being raised by a drug-addicted mother, being beaten by her father, being “sold” to men, and being raised in the foster care system with her brother sometimes in different homes.
Despite the long odds, Potter graduated from LifeSkills Center of Middletown in 2002, one year before she was scheduled to graduate from Fairfield High School, one of the numerous school districts she attended as she bounced from foster home to foster home. Last spring, six years after she enrolled at Miami University Middletown, she graduated with a degree in psychology and bio medical science.
“You have to focus on the rainbow and not let all these storm clouds interfere with that,” she told me. “We’re only given one life, one chance. But if we do it right, it should be enough.”
‘I want to get through it as fast as I can’
As Father's Day neared, I wondered how Fred Shuemake was dealing with the holiday, the first without his baby, Alison Shuemake, who died on Aug. 26, 2015 of a heroin overdose.
Until then, Shuemake, 59, never thought much about Father’s Day, he said. The father of four biological children and one foster child never concerned himself with the gifts he received.
“This one is different,” he said of Father’s Day 2016. “I want to get through it as fast as I can.”
Fred, a retired Middletown detective, and his wife, Dorothy, never hid from their daughter's drug addiction. In her obituary that appeared in the Journal-News, they wrote that Alison, 18, died from a heroin overdose, an unusual statement that drew national attention.
The Shuemakes have dealt with Alison’s death differently. His wife visits Alison’s grave at Woodside Cemetery every day. He hasn’t seen her marker once.
“Their body is not there,” he said when asked why he hasn’t visited his daughter. “I don’t think dead people are at grave sites. You carry their spirit inside you. You see them. All the little giggles, the little frowns, the good and bad. I try to think of the way she was.”
‘That was a sad day there’
There is nothing I like talking about more than baseball and its rich history.
So I was excited to spend an afternoon in Fairfield talking to George A. Thatcher Sr., who 60 years ago played for the Cincinnati Tigers, a Negro League baseball team that was so talented the Cincinnati Reds refused to play them in an exhibition baseball game.
At the time, Thatcher, then a 20-year-old with a steady bat, fast feet and an accurate arm, appeared destined for a Major League career with the Reds. But during the 1957 spring training in Douglas, Ga., Thatcher’s right eye was severely damaged in a freak accident when a teammate accidentally hit him with a baseball.
There is a yellowed newspaper article that shows Thatcher, a medical patch over his eye, being examined by Reds scout Buzz Boyle.
“That was a sad day there,” he said. “That hurt.”
That eye injury ended his dream of joining Frank Robinson, Ted Kluszewski and Joe Nuxhall on the Reds, but it didn’t blur his love of baseball, a game he was introduced to on the streets of West Side Cincinnati as a youngster. With other boys in the neighborhood, Thatcher played baseball from morning to night.
“We just played ball all day long,” said Thatcher, 80. “We enjoyed it. My parents always knew where we were at — a ballpark.”
‘God was on my side that day’
Much of Mark Whitlock’s history can only be traced through documents and family folklore. He has a sheet of paper that says he was honorably discharged by the U.S. Army in 1986; another folder shows he earned his GED after attending Hamilton City Schools for years; and he was told he used to be a truck driver.
He doesn’t know about that man.
“Sometimes when I get with my family,” Whitlock said, “and they start talking about things that happened years ago…” He looked around his Artspace Loft apartment on High Street in Hamilton, and searched for the right words: “…and I don’t know what they’re talking about.”
The 54-year-old has had two lives: the one before his two brain aneurysms nearly six years ago that erased most of his memories; and the one from that day forward.
He should have died that day, he figures. Instead, now, he’s living life to its fullest.
“A gift,” he said when asked about his second chance. “I had to learn how to walk, talk, and retrain my brain. I got lucky. God was on my side that day.”
About the Author
