Paging Kevin Bacon
Brian Wilson
“I need a hero I’m holding out for a hero till the end of the night”
Readers of a certain age, will have read those lines and heard Bonnie Tyler belting out the lyrics from the Footloose soundtrack. I apologize for the ear worm that will now inhabit your brain for the next day from it.
You may need to brush off the dust on your DVD player and watch the iconic movie to get it out of your system.
On Friday afternoon I was among those sitting in the Rib Lake High School Gym celebrating the induction of Dr. Kurt Zimmerman into the school’s Alumni Hall of Fame.
Dr. Zimmerman is a research scientist looking for causes and improved treatments to kidney disease. This classifies as being pretty freaking cool in my book, even if I don’t understand half of the words of the biology and medical terminology he uses on a daily basis and get squeamish just being near medical facilities let alone working in a lab.
We will also gloss over the fact that as a 2004 Rib Lake graduate, the odds are pretty good that as a much younger reporter, I covered some event or activity he did either in middle or high school.
“Local Grad Does Good” stories are bread and butter for community newspapers. It is great to share the successes of locals who went on to do stuff that is really cool and who achieve success in their professions. Everyone comes from somewhere and locals should feel a sense of pride whenever someone from their community rises up to the challenge and takes center stage.
On the ride home through the increasing snowstorm, I was thinking about this and about the value of things like the Alumni Hall of Fame.
While I personally wouldn’t describe myself as an overly religious person, one of the legacies of my wide ranging interests is that I picked up a religion minor while in college. Other than being an enduring fan of Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray and of Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the legacies of that was a class I took on the “Concept of Sainthood in Christianity.”
Saints are the superheroes of the Church, who are seen through the lens of faith and history as being largerthan life figures who serve as examples for the rest of us to follow. Sometimes they exemplify specific traits like virtue or piety or service.
Just like the super heroes in popular culture, they serve as examples of how the rest of us should act and behave when facing adversity or challenge. One of the premises of the class was how important for not just the faithful to recognize these paragons, but how important it is from a cultural sense. This is the same sort of idea as your mother casually reminding you for the 57th time that her friend Sally’s son is an orthodontist and just came back from Barbados with supermodel wife and how don’t you wish you had applied yourself a little more in high school, imagine what you could have become.
When I was new to Medford, I attended the Chamber’s annual recognition banquet for the first time. I was still fresh out of school and had a vague notion of using this as a stepping stone to ever greener pastures.
I remember clearly the evening as emcee Chip Courtney read off the achievements of the person being honored that year. In listening to that roll call of service (which has only grown in the decades since), something connected with my younger self about the importance of celebrating the good things people do in their communities and their lives and how I wanted to be a part of that.
It is important to recognize those heroes who put service above self in their communities. If for no other reason than to give an example for others to achieve.
On Friday, Dr. Zimmerman spoke about his teacher who studied for a doctorate and how that opened his eyes that such a goal was possible and achievable, even for someone like him from a small community in rural Wisconsin.
We all need heroes. And unlike the song lyrics, they don’t have to all be larger than life or even know how to dance.
Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.
