Don’t Rush It
“Stupid clown!” my eight-year-old mind raged. “Why don’t you ‘rush’ on over there?!”
I returned, red-faced, to my seat in the studio audience of kids watching a live broadcast of Happy’s Place, an after-school staple of local TV viewing on WFFT-TV in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Clearly, a memory that left a mark.
My school friend had won tickets to sit in the audience of the show and invited me to join him. We got to leave second grade early that day, and his parents drove us to the station.
Happy’s Place was an afternoon cartoon show hosted by the aforementioned stupid clown, Happy the Hobo. A highlight of each broadcast—at least for the 20 kids sitting on the carpeted bleachers in the studio—was the segment where each kid got three seconds on air to smile, tell Happy their name, and have him make a little joke.
“What’s your name?” Happy asked.
“Matthew Resch,” I said, just as I had practiced in my mind for weeks.
“Well,” (har har har) Happy laughed, “why don’t you just rush on over there!”
Really? Rush? I said Resch. My last name is Resch, stupid clown.
As a seasoned second grader, this was not the first time my last name had been butchered—although it was the first time on live TV and by our community’s most famous clown.
Even as a young boy, I was getting used to it, but Happy’s little joke still stung. As a kid, almost everywhere I went where a public roll call was required, someone mispronounced Resch. It flipped pretty evenly between “Rush” and “Reesch,” but almost never landed on the correct short e version of Resch – rhymes with fresh.
A side note: “Resch – rhymes with fresh” comes from a surprisingly effective pronunciation tutorial my Resch Strategies colleagues sent to a clearly inebriated Tom Arnold, the actor and comedian, as he was about to record a Cameo message to hype our company podcast, Cold Oatmeal. It was a wonderfully creative idea for their Christmas gift to me that year—and clear proof that if a blotto Tom Arnold can correctly pronounce Resch, anyone can.
Now, back to our story.
In some ways, as I grew up, I understood why people got my last name wrong. We were the only Reschs in the greater Fort Wayne metropolitan area. In fact, I always took pride as a kid flipping to the “Re–” page of each new phone book to confirm that, yep, we were still it—the only Reschs in the book. Given that most people had never met any members of my family, they would have no way of knowing how to pronounce our name—other than the fact that one must assume they were basically literate or, in Happy’s case, able to hear.
Even today, I still get the occasional Rush. Not as much as when I was a kid, but it still happens.
I had a good client for a long time who called me “Matt Rush” on a weekly basis. My wife—who is locally quite famous for her crusade to bring a Trader Joe’s to Lansing—was interviewed on the local news when the grocer finally broke ground and was identified on air as the local Trader Joe’s enthusiast “Brenda Reesch.”
So why do I vent these grievances now, some four decades after Happy dismissively rushed me to my seat?
Because I’ve noticed that the same mispronunciation phenomenon is not happening to my own children—and I’m kinda ticked about it.
All of this hit me this fall as both my boys played through their respective soccer seasons, one in high school and one in college. Night after night, game after game, PA announcer after PA announcer—Resch was perfectly pronounced, as if each announcer had received a personal tutorial from Tom Arnold himself. And wasn’t that nice for my boys.
Had I been fortunate enough growing up to play in a single game meriting anyone announcing what was happening on the field, I’m sure I would have been “rushing” all over the place. Not these kids. They’ve got it easy.
I’ve recently asked them both to confirm my observation. Do they have people mispronounce their last name? No, not really, they both report. They don’t.
They’ve got it good.
The closest my younger son has come was actually vicariously through an experience of mine, when I was once asked a few year ago if I was the father of Cooper Rush—the now backup quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens and local Lansing high school football standout.
Cooper, the pro, also has a brother with the same first name as Cooper, my son—so naturally, it would make sense that I was the father of a 31-year-old NFL player, seeing that my last name is Rush!
I’m not bitter.
As parents, we often say that we suffer, work, and persevere in order to give our kids a better life than we had growing up—or something like that.
And I’m generally down with all that when it comes to things like moving from a cabin with dirt floors to a house with running water and electricity, or working long hours in a factory so your child can be the first in the family to go to college, or building a successful small business so your children can come home from school and stream videos on YouTube rather than being subjected to shows like Happy’s Place on one of five available TV channels.
Still, I feel my boys are missing out on some of the essential character building and spine stiffening that comes with having their names publicly butchered on the regular in front of their peers—or live television audiences.
I’m guessing they’ll be fine. The Wi-Fi is bound to run slow here at some point soon, or we’ll run out of protein shakes. That will test them.
In the meantime, I’ll sleep comfortably knowing that my personal character and resilience were, in part, chiseled by great men like Happy the Hobo.