Stapled behind the scholarship was Dannys admission essay, titled The Man They Fired For Saving My Life, and his father told me it would run in the Des Moines Register the next morning.
It did. The whole town read how a bus driver named Hank Lindberg broke a window at eight below zero in 2016 and carried a boy and his mother out of a house full of carbon monoxide, asked the paper to keep his name out of it, and was fired two years later for leaving children unattended on that very same morning.
The somebody in the gym who wanted to talk to Gary Thorne was the superintendent, and she had the whole board behind her. The firing had never sat right with anybody, and now the whole state was watching.
They had taken my pension for the one morning I did the bravest thing I ever did.
It did not take long. The board voted to overturn my termination and restore every dollar of my pension, with back pay. Gary Thorne resigned before they could ask him to. It turned out he had pushed the firing because the lawsuit he was really afraid of was his own, over something else entirely, and I had made an easy thing to throw overboard.
Danny starts pre-med at the University of Iowa this fall. He wrote in that essay that he wanted to be a doctor because a bus driver taught him that you run toward the people who need you, even when nobody is watching and nobody will thank you.
I drove forklifts at Hy-Vee for two years with my head down. I do not drive them anymore. The district asked me back to train the new drivers, and the first thing I teach them is which seat the quiet kid sits in, and why you always, always know his name.