Even a Sharp Mind Can Be Confounded by an Unexpected Question

I'm not the kind of guy who spends a lot of time gazing into the rear-view mirror. At least, I don't do it when left to my own devices. Musings of the “good ole days” come fast and furious when gathered with old friends, family or fraternity brothers, but I think that's pretty natural. On my own, not so much.

Because of this lack of self indexing, I was woefully unprepared when asked to come up with 10 things people might not know about me while driving on the media event for the all-new 2017 Nissan Rogue Sport in the Nashville area recently. Umm, well, ah, hmm, ah...what was the question?

My buddy Nik Miles reached out to me a few days before the event asking if I had a drive partner lined up. Many of us who have made the rounds of the carmaker media drives for a while try to secure a driving partner as early as possible. The last thing you want is to be paired with some Bozo who thinks he is the second coming of Juan Manuel Fangio. Also to be avoided are the self-involved snots who have begun populating these events in ever-greater numbers over the past three or four years. You know you've stumbled upon one of these when you climb into a car and they ask what the third pedal is for, as they sit, thumbs poised over the keyboard of their smartphone ready to transmit the answer across several social media platforms.

So, Nik and I conspired to share a car on the Rogue Sport event. Nik has a Website called Testmiles.com and also does on-camera reporting on the auto industry for scores of TV stations scattered around the country. Nik and I have developed a friendship over the past few years consisting mostly of giving one another as much crap as possible at every opportunity. We had never before driven together.

Because Nik's schtick is video, I fully expected our test Rogue Sport to be festooned with cameras. I wasn't disappointed. Before embarking on the morning's drive, Nik arranged cameras inside and outside the crossover. My little video setup for just3things seems positively amateurish when compared to Nik's array of video gear.

Nik is a Brit whose heart and soul is still grounded in the Motherland. When faced with a little free time, he watches British comedies on YouTube, and gets some of his news from BBC broadcasts, as he did for the first 15 minutes of our day together. His politics are a mixed bag, which really didn't matter much as applied to our time together. We had other topics to discuss. 

When Nik reached up, snapped on the camera suction cupped to the inside of the windshield and asked, what are 10 things most people don't know about Russ Heaps? I was like a deer caught in the headlights. You can find the video here.

Thankfully Nik simplified the task by asking questions. Left to my own devices, it may well have been a 3-hour video. It was a fun exercise, but later I thought of a couple of things that I can't believe I didn't bring up on my own.

First, I attended military school. Yes, it's true. I was Cadet Heaps in fifth, sixth and seventh grades at Linsly Military Institute in Wheeling, West Virginia. Although there were a number of students who boarded there, I was among the townies who attended as day students. My father's first church posting was in Wheeling. My parents, concerned with the quality of the area public schools, decided to enroll me. I was all for it. The church housing for us was in a rather affluent neighborhood and many of the friends I made during the summer were enrolled there. It was there that I learned to address elders as “sir” and “mam.”

Did it mold me into the fine, upstanding citizen I am today. Well, somebody or something must bear the responsibility, but I'm not certain three years is really sufficient time to mold someone. But when I found myself thrust back into the public school system in Louisville, Kentucky, I was easily a full year ahead of my classmates in both math and English/reading/writing. Oh, and I could read music, a skill now long lost.

The second thing I could have mentioned among my 10 things is that I won a few awards and trophies at public-speaking events in high school. I attended J.M. Atherton High School in Louisville. I think it is quite fitting that J.M. Atherton was a local bourbon distiller of some renown in the late 1800s. Sadly, though, the school was named for a different J.M. Oh, well....

I placed first one year and second the following year in the Louisville Optimist Oratory Contest while in junior high school. These weren't one-day affairs, but a series of speak-offs spanning several city-wide competitions. I followed this up by joining Atherton's speech team. This encompassed a number of categories including debate, extemporaneous speaking, story telling and so forth. My forte was story telling. I competed for three years, mostly with yarns told by Mark Twain when he was earning money on stage. “My Grandfather's Old Ram” was my favorite to tell.

So, there you have it. I am now much better prepared for the next time someone asks the 10-things question. What are the chances?