Pull up a chair and tell me your memory.
Why does it matter to you?
I want to hear your story, your point of view.
Tell me what happened to you.
Hi and welcome back to Tell Me What Happened.
The podcast that features folks from all walks of life telling us of one childhood experience
and how that event has impacted who they are today.
I'm your host, Jay Rehack, and like you, I've had my share of childhood experiences that have impacted who I am today.
But I'd like to think that everything that happened, good or bad, has made me a better person.
That may not be true, but that's what I'd like to think.
Tell me what happened is sponsored by Sidelining Publishing, publishers of quality books, including Susan Salazar's classics,
One Little Act of Kindness, and I've Got Peace in My Fingers.
Alright, today I have as my guest a good friend of mine is a neighbor as well, Russ Kletke.
Russ is an independent business writer for the past 20 years and is the author of the book, A Guy's Gotta Eat,
A Regular Guy's Guide to Eating Smart.
Russ is also an avid gardener, sustainability advocate, and has completed in triathlon since 1987,
with his 70th lifetime race already scheduled for 2023.
Welcome, Russ Kletke.
Great to be here, Jay.
Thank you so much for coming, Russ. I really do appreciate it.
And you know, I do know, I've known you for a number of years, and I do know you're like a great athlete. You're just a guy that I've always sort of said,
I want to actually look like that guy someday, you know, so I've been working out lately, but that's not part of the story.
But I do want you to know that I know you're, I didn't realize you were doing triathlons that long, but it doesn't surprise me.
Yeah, it's just this hobby of mine. I never was super serious about it.
I never won very much. Well, I started taking second and third places as I got older, but I had a lot of friends who were quite serious about it.
And I trained with them and it was really hard. And this was when I was in my 30s.
And I kind of reached a point where I said, this is hard. This is really too much work. And I really enjoy the sport.
And so I curtailed it. I cut back. I wasn't so serious about it, but it kept going.
And so in 2023, I'm going to run my 70th lifetime race and enjoy it. And as I do every year.
That's fantastic.
Well, when I, the next triathlon I run to be my first, but we'll see how that goes.
Well, anyway, we live in a city where you can do this. You can do this. I mean, we have 25 miles of lakefront.
You can train on the lakefront if you wish. I train up the North Shore on shared road more often, but you can swim here.
You know, we can swim in the lake and it's a great lake.
I'm going to just have to believe you on that one. So Russ, let me ask you, are you ready to tell your story?
I am.
All right, Russ, as soon as you tell me your story, I'm going to ask you just one question and that one question is going to be, how do you think that childhood experience or event impacted who you are today?
So take it away, Russ.
Okay, good. I didn't grow up in Chicago. I actually grew up in a small town in Western New York, kind of the Buffalo Niagara Falls area.
And I went to a really little school. I went to a small Lutheran school.
They had only like five, six classmates and varied by year. And it was a great education.
We had multiple grades per room too, I should point out.
Third, fourth and fifth grade all in one room, sixth, seventh and eighth grade, the same thing. First and second grade in one room.
Kindergarten all by ourselves. I was in a class of five kids. I had four classmates and that's a teacher student ratio that is not too common.
And I think I benefited from that.
However, I'm here to talk about something I lost, something I lost.
I was generally speaking, the kid who won a lot of stuff, including the annual fire safety fire prevention safety essay contest.
And it started, I think in fourth grade and fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grade is when we would every year we do it.
First prize was $2. Second prize was $1. So is how old I am.
And I won it in fourth grade. And in fifth grade, I won it again.
And then one day after chapel, chapel is always on Wednesday mornings, they said, we have a special announcement to make.
And then all of a sudden my parents walked up in front of the room and they said, Russell Clotkey has won a regional prize for his essay.
I didn't know there was a regional competition.
It's a big deal. I got a big trophy and the fact my father took off of work to be there. That was like amazing.
So of course, I thought it was king of the world. And then the next year came around and I got to thinking that the parameters of the competition were always the same thing.
It was all just repeat what you've learned about fire safety and write an essay about it.
And clearly I had it down already because I want it at least two years in a row. And so I thought, I'm going to do this a little differently.
And so this is around the same time that the Houston Astros built the Astrodome and they had this new product called Astro turf and Astro turf was explained to me it's like a rug.
And part of the learning in this fire essay was to not run electrical wires underneath a rug in your home, your living room.
That's something that people would do sometimes and that would the rug would catch on fire and have an electrical fire and then house burn that you wanted to avoid that.
So I thought, not even knowing the word analogy, I was going to do an analogous situation where I was going to take transfer all those things about fire safety in the home onto a football stadium.
I wasn't even that much of a football fan I just just kind of occurred to me to do it this way.
So I wrote the whole thing, and I just transferred everything from being safe around kitchens and ovens to storing greasy rags that could spontaneously combust combust all the things you're not supposed to do in the home I transferred it over onto the football stadium.
Well, when it came time to announce the winners of that $2 and $1 prize, I didn't get either one of them. I lost my three other classmates, you know, had a shot at it that year.
And yet, even at that point in time, I thought, I felt like I won something because I did it differently.
And I was also willing to let go of being the star for one time.
And I just kind of at that moment in time, I thought, I patted myself on the back for it.
I didn't tell anybody that I just was kind of pleased that I broke from convention.
I tried something different. It didn't win. And yet I was proud of what I did.
So that's my story. And I do think it trailed into my adult life.
I love it, man. I do because I know you're a writer, but I love the idea of a young guy because it's hard when you're in fifth, sixth grade to take that bullet of defeat.
But to realize, and it really does take a pretty smart kid to be able to say, I know what the winning formula is, but I'm going to take a shot and do it a different way.
And the people who maybe evaluated weren't quick enough to pick up on it, but you felt confident enough to say, I know it was good.
That's cool. As a fellow writer, I appreciate that story.
So tell me, Russ, how do you think that story has impacted who you are today?
I always heard a different drummer. And when you're living in a small town, particularly in a parochial school environment,
and might I point out that this little town I was in, it had two churches and both those churches had schools.
Both of those churches were Lutheran. Everybody had a German last name.
You could not find a more culturally defined and limited world than this one. And I kind of knew from an early age, I was going to break away.
And I kind of adopted this, do it different. When everybody else is zigging, I would zag.
And so I think that served me well. I mean, I did well in English classes and other parts of my academic life.
And then yet when it came time to go to college, and I should point out too that the majority of the people I went to school with, their parents did not go to college, nor did my own.
So we were the generation that had it available to us. And so it was a big leap.
But there was also a sense that college is vocational training.
College is to teach you skills to have a particular career and it better be a career that makes darn good money as it costs so much or it was of such great value.
I mean, I think my mother would have liked to have gone to college, but it just wasn't accessible to her.
And she really instilled in my brothers and I that this is what we would be doing.
However, I didn't want to be an engineer, and I did not want to be an accountant.
And those were the two careers, maybe nursing, maybe something in the medical field.
Everything was what we would now today call STEM. And I just, I didn't feel like that was what I wanted to do, you know, so I was a little bit lost in what I was going to do.
But at those essay experiences, as well as pretty good feedback from high school teachers told me that something in writing and that sounded a little bit still a little bit a little airy fairy and just like what are you going to be an English major for.
And then I went to journalism school, and that was more practical and more career connected. But even then I wasn't really thinking about being a journalist.
So I did that though, and despite the fact that I went to an expensive school Syracuse University and, you know, what kind of a career can I expect to pay back all those loans with.
Well, it happened and it's I was willing to move to a big city Chicago, which I totally wanted to do anyway. And I was able to find work in public relations firms, and really loved it.
I mean, really had a great time in the first 15 years of my career working in promotional marketing stuff with writing. And when I was in that PR firm that the last one I was at, I got asked to, there was this whole thing where other each different
account groups would invite people from outside of their account group to brainstorm sessions you'd give an hour to another account and brainstorm and I got invited to a lot of them.
I was considered a creative. And I love, and I love being that creative guy, you know, and I always out of the box, you know, so it kind of goes back to being willing to write about a football stadium when everybody else is writing about a house,
and so that has been kind of my signature as I've gone through my life and my career, and I'm willing to try new things and think of things differently and you walk by my house my gardening is a little bit weirder than everybody else's they do all natural
gardening. I've got a little bitty coach house but I've got solar on it and I get 100% of my electricity from it. So I'm willing to be a little different. And I hope kids growing up today, realize being different isn't such a bad thing.
Let me just ask you one quick follow up question. That year that you didn't win was what were your parents upset with the school or anything or did they come on and say what happened or is it all good.
No, you know, it was kind of in keeping with my mom was like, she would say, you don't always have to be first. Nice, you know, and so my classmates, one that year and they were happy with that too.
And no way did I, I actually expected to lose. I have to tell you that I knew when I was doing it I was thinking, wow, this. And again, it was $2.
I had a paper on it that point I made $5 a week that $2 was nothing to me. So, got it. I like the story I think it's an inspirational story because I do think honestly genuinely, you know young people have to realize that
thinking outside of the box is a good way to live. It doesn't always pay off immediately but it certainly pays off down the road where you feel pretty confident in the things that you do and you say, I don't need the $2 validity to know what I did validation to know what I did.
Very true.
It's a great that to me is a great lesson and I respect you.
Well as an educator, as an educator, maybe you saw similar things.
Oh, absolutely. My students would often ask me if they could do the assignment in a slightly different way. I would give an assignment and I'd go, yes, that's exactly what I want.
As long as you understand the concept, you don't have to follow the dictates of, you know, trying to convince young people that teachers are just, you know, they're just giving it a shot. They don't know, you know, exactly.
So it's like, no, give me your best creative thinking and I would beg for that and I would respect it. You know, even if somebody said, well, you know, it's easier for me to make a movie than it is for me to write something.
I'd say, I'd make the movie do something that articulates the issue, you know, in a way that I can understand and it's all good.
So it definitely worked for me. I do think about the little rust, little sixth grade rust, writing that thing saying, I've won it twice in a row.
All I got to do is follow it and I can get that two bucks again. But I don't need that. I need, you know, I want to do it my way. And so doing it your way, I genuinely believe is a great way to live.
So thank you for your inspiration.
It requires a willingness to lose, too.
Yeah, I like that.
You're willing to lose and know it's not the end of the world.
I mean, I'm amazed the sixth grader can understand that because it's not my story, but I was a terrible loser growing up and I've tried to learn how to become a better loser, you know, when I don't win.
But yeah, I think the writer in me sees that sixth grader so clearly. I really genuinely understand it was like the judge of that article is you, you wrote the essay, you know it was good and you know it was different than you know.
You were zagging instead of zigging as you said, I like that.
Yeah, and you know something else as a writer today, I work in business I interview business people all the time. And one thing I hear all the time from subjects is, that's a really good question.
And the really good question comes from thinking outside the box but also comes from doing research and just digging into what that person's all about or what their business is all about knowing enough about it so so it still comes with doing your homework.
And so, do your work up front. And so it's, it's not like a free for all but to be out of the box but in fact you're better out of the box if you do that work, and then try to come up with something that nobody else has done before.
You know, like a lot of people I interview have been interviewed before I read articles and other people have read about them. And I'm so determined not to write the same thing that somebody else has written.
I think they appreciate that and it now Google algorithms recognize uniqueness to that something else. And so in this digital age, being original has actual value, and I didn't plan that just kind of happen that way, but it's able this oldster to stay viable in the marketplace.
I love it man. So, yeah, you're part of the zeitgeist. I know that you're constantly writing articles that are timely. Well, thank you Russ for being on the show.
It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
Great to know a little bit more about you.
So I'd like to thank my friend, my neighbor Russ Krekke, the author of A Guy's Gotta Eat. Also like to thank my sponsors, LafSaver.com and Sight Lining Publishing.
So until next time, this is Jay Reak asking you all to please stay safe out there and try not to hurt anybody.