Bruce Hetrick is off for the holidays. But in the hope that you’ll shop the after-Christmas sales locally, helping to spur job retention and growth in central Indiana, he offers the following column, which originally appeared on Oct. 27, 2003. Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat Please put a penny in the old man’s hat If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’ penny will do, If you haven’t got a ha’ penny, then God bless you In…
I wasn’t looking forward to the Thursday afternoon meeting. The issues involved saddened me. And besides, this felt like a decision that could have been reached via e-mail, rather than a 60-mile round-trip drive for a half-hour conversation. But the other fellow said he liked to do things face to face-an old-fashioned notion, he admitted, but his preference nonetheless. So I climbed into my car, drove at breakneck Interstate speed, and covered the distance in 30 minutes. When I arrived…
Several weeks ago, the Carmel City Council voted 4-3 to ban workplace smoking. Before casting their ayes and nays, some councilors explained why they would vote a particular way. One councilor said he had smoked for years and finally quit. He said it was a wise decision. He urged other smokers to quit, too. Then he issued another plea to smokers: He said that even if they wouldn’t quit, they should voluntarily stop smoking in places where their secondhand smoke…
A few weeks ago, my son Zach was named a Student Rotarian by his high school in Fort Wayne. He was invited to be honored at a downtown Rotary Club luncheon in that city, and asked me to attend. The Rotarians met on the second floor of the Summit City’s downtown Holiday Inn. Zach and I went through the buffet line and sat down at a round table with the superintendent of his school system and four other Rotarians. The…
It’s a Saturday night in late October. I am at ease, in the arms of a woman, among 700 swaying souls. We’re at a place called the Music Mill. We arrived a few hours ago with six friends, only two of whom I knew just seven months before. (You must forgive me, for I still measure time from March 5, the day my wife, Pam, died and my world shattered and started anew.) Amos Lee, a young singer-songwriter, is at…
A few months ago, Butler University announced that former presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush would be among the speakers appearing on its Indianapolis campus during the school’s 2005-2006 sesquicentennial celebration. Within hours of the news breaking, my niece, a Butler junior and political science major, sent an e-mail asking if I’d like to join her for the first of these appearances, the one by Clinton on Nov. 8. Having long ago rounded up my fellow neighborhood kids for…
When I was 21, I went to work for a mayor. I was an intern. I wrote speeches, letters, news releases and proclamations; took photographs; set up chairs for news conferences; poured coffee for reporters; sipped tea with sister-city delegations; photocopied documents; scheduled guests for radio and TV shows; produced an audio-visual presentation; showed it to scores of neighborhood associations; told them how great the mayor was. Things like that. I made minimum wage, learned from some wise mentors and…
A friend of mine recently visited his doctor. He was worried about chest pains. The doctor wired him to an EKG, studied the readings, and pronounced him fit. During the exam, my friend asked how the doctor was doing. The physician said he was dreading winter. He said ailing patients would flock to his office seeking cures. He’d tell them they had viruses and they’d recover on their own. They’d demand medicine. He’d tell them none would help. They’d demand…
Hetrick last week won the Lawrence H. Einhorn, M.D. Award from the Little Red Door Cancer Agency. A cancer survivor himself, Hetrick was recognized, in part, for IBJ columns about people with cancer, especially his wife, Pam Klein, who died in March at 49. He also was honored for advocating anti-smoking legislation. Following are excerpts from his prepared acceptance remarks. I don’t deserve this award. I don’t wield a scalpel, administer chemotherapy, invent drugs, change bed pans, hold patients’ hands,…
My mother always said that if aliens arrived from outer space to study life in America, they’d never be able to figure us out. Had I listened to my mother (instead of arguing partisan politics with her), I might have been better prepared for last week’s visit from my friend, E.T. E.T. arrived all agog after intercepting some of my inbound e-mails in cyberspace. “I’m totally confused,” E.T. said. “So am I,” I said, “but that’s normal. You, on the…
In Harrisburg, Pa., last week, a trial was in progress. Attorneys and witnesses weighed in on a federal case involving the Dover Area School District. Last year, school board members there voted 6-3 to impose a curriculum mandate. It said “intelligent design,” the newfangled term for what used to be called Creationism (the biblical explanation of how life began), must be taught in high school biology classes alongside science-based theories such as evolution and random selection. After the vote, the…
Fourteen years ago this month, my new bride and I loaded our belongings onto a moving van in Bloomfield, Conn. We packed our cats, suitcases and a few heirlooms into our cars, and pulled away from our little apartment bound for a place called Indianapolis. As I followed Pam’s blue Accord through New York and New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio, I listened to cassette tapes, trying to drown out the mews from the back seat. With David Sanborn and Stan…
Bruce Hetrick is off this week. In his absence, this column, which appeared on June 9, 2003, is being reprinted. Last year, my colleague, Lisa Sirkin, gave every person in our company a blue file folder. She’d learned about “blue folders” from Jean Deeds when both women worked at the Children’s Museum. Lisa wanted people in our company to know about blue folders and share in their benefits. Blue folders, you see, are for notes of praise and gratitude. These…
Dear Mr. bin Laden: On Sept. 11, 2005, I woke up late. I’d been to dinner and a movie the night before. Then I stayed up reading. So I slept in Sunday morning. I moseyed out of bed, put on gym shorts and a T-shirt, and retrieved the newspapers from the drive. You got beat on the front page by Hurricane Katrina. We like our crises fresh. Yours has grown stale. You made the cover of The New York Times…
In an e-mail last week, my sister-inlaw, Carrie, shared a story about my nephew, Eric. It said: “Eric has been keeping abreast of the hurricane news (as much as a 13-yearold boy might do) and inquired last night if we had made any contributions to the relief effort. I told him that we had contributed online to the Red Cross, but that I truly didn’t know the amount of the contribution since Dave [his dad] had handled it himself. “Eric…
Some colleagues and I drove south into Evansville last week just as the remnants of Hurricane Katrina blew in from the north. As we pulled into the parking lot of our destination, we watched workers battling wind and rain on the walk from their cars to the office. Twice, we saw sturdy umbrellas, held nearly horizontal against the oncoming gale, collapse upon their users. The drenched souls fumbled with the resulting maze of metal and fabric as they struggled across…
Got an invitation in the mail. It was addressed to “Bruce Hetrick and Guest.” The invitation was from a client. It said my guest and I could join him at an upcoming Marsh Symphony on the Prairie performance. I could choose between a pops concert called “The Golden Age of Black and White,” a Mozart classical concert or “Big Band Night.” My guest likes to dance. So I chose “Big Band Night.” The concert was Friday night. Thousands of people…
Last Sunday morning, I awoke before dawn. Dreading what was to come, I lingered in bed, watching the gray light of a cloudy morning illuminate the houses across the way. Around 7:30, I worked up the energy to get out of bed. I took a shower, popped my morning meds, and headed downstairs. As is their teen-age wont, both my boys were still asleep. So I retrieved The Star and The New York Times from the driveway and glanced through…
I was in pain. I lost lots of blood. My blood sugar skyrocketed (I’m diabetic). In the wee hours that Friday morning, nurses pumped me full of morphine, injected me with insulin and watched my vital signs while doctors pressed and squeezed, pushed and prodded, and talked it all over in hushed tones. An hour before surgery, an anesthesiologist visited. He asked lots of questions about allergies and dental work. Then he warned me of potential doom-perhaps even death on…
My former boss loved to challenge our ad agency’s staffers with the wheelbarrow test. Developed by Professor Edward de Bono of Cambridge University and published in David Campbell’s book, “Take the Road to Creativity and Get off Your Dead End,” the instructions read: “Below is a side view of a proposed design for a new wheelbarrow. Write down five comments about the design.” If you’re like most adults, you’ll say the wheel’s too small or the handle too short. That…
