Biography of Mike Heydinger

On my fourteenth birthday in ’56, I announced to our eighth grade class that I was going away to become a man of the cloth. After a summer of farm work for Sandy Ridge Fruit Farm east of Norwalk, I lit out that fall for Worthington OH and the Pontifical College Josephinum. That’s the last some of you heard of me.

Life at the Josephinum was according to the Benedictine Rule - Orare et Laborare – pray and work - plenty of the former, more of the latter. The studies and the work were incessant and difficult. Despite that, I received a top rate education for seven years and made friendships with other like-minded young men from all over the world, friendships that last to this day. In 1968, the starting class of 1956 ordained 15 men to the priesthood. I was not among them.

On my twenty-first birthday, I announced to my family that I was abandoning the cloth idea and would not be returning to the Josephinum in the fall. My parents never showed their disappointment but supported the move, seeing me off then to the University of Dayton in the fall of ’63. They were determined that all of their kids would be educated, no matter where. Unfortunately not all my seminary credits transferred to Dayton, so I needed another two years of undergraduate work. By the time Dayton finally kicked me out, I had amassed a ton of undergraduate semester hours, no debt, and a 1954 pink Pontiac. That was it for my worldly possessions. I would have been richer as a man of the cloth.

As luck would have it, though, I had been driving a beer truck for Maple City Ice in Norwalk (Vocation change – from consecrating wine to pushing the stuff!) until I could obtain a teaching job. While in Huron delivering one late August afternoon, one Rocky Larizza who used to coach at St. Paul in the early ‘50’s, hired me right there off the beer truck to teach Latin. My career as a full time beer hauler ended that day, and a week later I was standing in a high school Latin class before a group of seniors only six years my junior. We survived the year, and I spent thirty-six more years in the same school, teaching Latin, the sciences, English, and humanities. In 2002 I saw that in another two years I would have had the grandkids of those first students of mine, and so I decided it was time to get out.

I enjoyed those many years in Huron. My greatest accomplishment there was marrying my first wife Dolores at the end of that initial school year. There was no honeymoon as grad school started immediately. I took an MA in English from BGSU, concentrating in Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature. Real demand for that stuff there was back then! Soon my wife started getting pregnant, and before we could discover what was causing it, we had produced four sons, three of whom survived. After the last one, it was back to school for a Specialist’s Degree in curriculum development, aka, a Poor Man’s Doctorate, because in those days it required no residency (Who would have wanted three kids on campus in a married’s dorm?) and no research thesis. Got through that, got a raise, got fired from hauling beer after all those years, so began my own summer business of house painting. (You think it’s EASY getting a job talking medieval English! Try it sometime.) After ten years of my climbing the wrong kind of ladders, Dee was hired full time in the Sandusky City Schools as a kindergarten teacher, and I retired my paint brushes. At Huron, I became department chair someplace in there, and enjoyed setting up a program that made Huron tops in language arts instruction in the area. BGSU Firelands also put me on their payroll during that same time, so we were able to put the boys through college without their having a huge terminal debt.

Dee and I both retired the summer of ’02, then, not wanting to see a yellow bus, took a victory lap that August, heading westward till the ocean stopped us, then turned north and across the border and on up further into the Canadian Rockies, till in late October the snows started to come and we decided to come home. We had no winter underwear. We had seen only one yellow bus the whole time, so we were purged. Fat chance! When we returned, I promptly got back into the business again, part time I thought, as the executive secretary of Huron’s Alumni Association. Today, between the HHSAA, my winter humanities class at BGSU, serving on the James McBride Arboretum board, and whittling down the honey-do list, it feels as if I am still fully employed. Today when Dee is feeling up to it, we enjoy travel, both in the States and abroad, our latest trip being to Italy and the Western Mediterranean in the fall of 2009. In my spare time, I am also working on converting an old barn on the property into two apartments, and in between keep up a large garden and orchard, trying to go off the food grid. I’m even back into raising the granddaughter Tali’s pets, a few chickens, despite a learned antipathy for the creatures as a result of an accident with the birds a number of years back that almost killed me and cost me my voice for a few years. (Still enjoy KFC, though.)

The love of our life now is that Taliesin, our eight year old granddaughter, the only child of our only married son, an architect and therefore a clue as to her name. The oldest son is employed by Lexmark in Lexington KY where he designs the computer chips that tell the dots where to go on your printers. A confirmed bachelor, he loves kids and volunteers at a children’s science museum in his spare time and makes movies with them – the GOOD kind – for the Lexington Schools and their PBS affiliate. The films use students to teach science concepts to elementary teachers and how to teach them to their students. He also is organist at the cathedral there in Lexington. The middle son has a teaching degree also, but works full time at Cedar Point, mostly in foods but also with the foreign students who work here summers. As a social studies teacher, he makes sure the kids go back to Eastern Europe with a knowledge of what America is all about. The father of our granddaughter just finished his masters in furniture design at SCAD in Savannah GA. (Anyone know who is hiring a rather creative furniture designer of one-of-a-kind pieces?) His wife was a radio producer, until they moved south, and looks to get back into it once they are settled again. Tali summers with us a good part of the time, and we look forward to taking some of our trips with her tagging along and learning about the world first hand. Our theory – if we help educate her, maybe she will help choose a better grade of nursing home for us some day.

Life after St. Paul has been good. The nuns started us off well. I can only say that if Sr. Laurenta knew how her favorite student turned out, she would probably be glad that I gave up the cloth, choosing instead to clothe a family, help stomp out ignorance, charm the good looking, and remain with my best friend, my first wife. We still remain two drifters, off to see the world, and with still such a lot of it to see yet. We chase the same rainbows still, leaning more on each other today, a little less stylishly, always looking around the next bend. And neither of us has the faintest idea of what the hell a huckleberry looks like!

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See more photos of the Mike Heydinger family by clicking here.