Hurdles need not get in the way

When I read Bob Hambrock’s obituary a few weeks back, my first reaction was regret.

Not just regret that he’d lost what had been an apparently painful battle with cancer, but mostly regret that I didn’t really know him the way I should have.

I’d let those conventions and assumptions that so often get in the way of knowing one another create hurdles, hurdles that shouldn’t exist but are very real just the same.

Bob — or Robert as it was in his obit — was about a year and a half younger than I. He had retired from the City of Portland Street Department.

If you knew him at all, it was probably as a guy driving a garbage truck.

(There’s one of those hurdles I’m talking about.)

Like it or not, we make assumptions about people. We make judgments — usually stupid and petty ones — and we pigeonhole folks accordingly.

So the guy driving the garbage truck gets categorized, dismissed, and judged in terms of social status. As I said, it’s stupid; but it’s also real.

Another thing about Bob is that he was a big guy.

He’d probably agree that it would be charitable to describe him as “heavyset.”

He was a big dude, bordering on enormous.

(There’s another one of those hurdles I’m talking about.)

No matter what label you want to use — big, heavy, obese, overweight, fat, tubby — a judgment is made, one that diminishes an individual’s unique qualities and allows something as trivial and inconsequential as body mass to allow for another dismissal.

I’m as guilty as the next person about making those judgments.

Garbage truck driver? Not my cup of tea.

Big guy carrying too many pounds? Not somebody I’m going to hang out with.

But Bob Hambrock challenged all those assumptions. He not only challenged them, he demolished them.

It was about 25 years ago, sometime in the 1990s.

As part of its promotion of literacy, the Altrusa Club of Portland — which no longer exists — sponsored an adult spelling bee.

My colleague and great friend the late Tom Casey had been tapped to be the pronouncer for the occasion. I was tapped — probably because my wife was an Altrusan — to be the judge, the guy who rings the bell when a word is spelled incorrectly.

The teams that assembled for that just-for-fun event were pretty predictable. There were more than a few retired teachers involved.

And there was Bob.

I can’t remember who his teammates might have been, but it was clear that Bob Hambrock was the anchor. He was the big guy, and boy could he spell.

Any assumptions and pre-judgments about the guy who drove a garbage truck competing in an adult spelling bee disappeared within minutes, maybe within seconds.

Bob knew his stuff. His vocabulary and his knowledge of spelling were equal to a college English professor’s.

I couldn’t tell you today who won the spelling bee.

I do remember that when I rang the “wrong” bell on one strong-willed retired teacher, there were sparks flying. She and her team hadn’t heard the word correctly and hadn’t asked to have it used in a sentence. So they spelled the wrong word.

And what I remember for sure was the grin on Bob’s face as he spelled word after word — tough word after word — correctly. With each correct answer, lighting a charge of dynamite to the stereotypes we all too often adopt rather than seeing people as the individuals they are.

He knew what he was doing.

He was saying: Do not judge me because I drive a garbage truck now and then. I work hard, and it is honest work. Do not judge me because of my weight. That’s just simply part of who I am. And it’s only a small part. It doesn’t reflect my intellect, my inner self or who I really am.

I guess I got the message.

But not as well as I should have.

Bob and I waved and said hi after that.

He knew that I knew he was so much more than just a guy driving a city garbage truck.

But if I’d really gotten the message back then, I wouldn’t be feeling such regret today about not getting to know him better.

Those darned hurdles still get in the way, it seems.