What do you consider one of your greatest achievements in life?

Completing the 1985 Nationwide/Bank One Marathon in Columbus, Ohio stands above the rest.  While my time of three hours, fifty minutes, and 22 seconds is nowhere close to being great, it put me at 177th place in the group of 509 men in the 30-34 age group, almost to the top third in the field.  

The marathon is the only running event where I would stand at the starting line and wonder if I would complete the race today.  The question at the beginning of half-marathons or shorter races was how long would it take me to finish.  I attempted three marathons in my early thirties and only completed the 1985 start.  The other two I stopped around seventeen miles due to physical problems.  The first “failure” was due to improper running shorts causing a chafing issue.  The other one was knee pain that was bad enough to make me worry if continuing to run would cause permanent damage.  But in all three races, I was in great physical condition and had the super-low body-mass index of a marathoner.  But a marathon, as I learned the tough way, is just as much a test of mental toughness as it is being in shape.

The 1985 race was ideal for me.  The temperature began in the upper 60s and rose steadily to the upper 70s.  While most people would like it at least ten degrees cooler, I’ve always liked the warmer weather.  I think my muscles like being warm and staying loose.  The race started out in the usual fashion, the singing of the national anthem, the single gunshot, and waiting until the pack in front started to move.  First a walk, then a slow jog, and as the pack spread apart, into race pace.  Like me, the other middle-of-the-pack runners knew we needed to “take it easy” for the first half of the race, and on this day, that was a pace of around 7:15 per mile, which at the halfway mark I knew was a mistake and that’s when the mental toughness had to take over.  For the next seven miles, I had to run at a much-reduced pace, walk and drink a full cup of water at every opportunity.  When I hit the 17-mile mark and the course turned east away from downtown Columbus, I had to push through the desire to call it quits.  But at the 20-mile sign, when I realized that I had “only” 6.2 miles to go, the length of a 10K race, I knew I could make it and the doubts were lifted.  While I continued to run cautiously, noting multiple runners pulling up with leg cramps from dehydration, I didn’t walk the rest of the way.  Each mile crept by as I tried to run as smoothly as possible.  Finally, the finish line was in sight.  Unlike the shorter races, I had no final kick at the end.  More than just wanting not to cramp up, I was out of gas.  But as I crossed the finish line, and out of nowhere, I jumped as high as I could and pumped my fist in victory.  As I was suspended in the air, I realized that this was probably the dumbest thing I could have done and prayed that my legs wouldn’t buckle or a hamstring pop on landing.  As my feet made contact with the ground I felt muscles on the edge of failure, but they held.  I felt like I had run my entire life and this was the first time I ever stopped.  I also realized that “I did it” and that could never be taken away from me.  

This achievement took it all.  Many months of training, usually alone, with many runs of sixteen or more miles, in the cold of winter and the heat of summer.  Overcoming the doubts, pushing through the countless exhausting training runs, and getting back out there the next day to do it again.  That just gets you to the starting line.  The battle has just begun.  You have to give it everything, head to toe, to claim victory.  I did that once.  Can’t take it from me.

Do you have any notable ancestors?

To the world at large, none of my ancestors have done anything that I’m aware of that would be notable in any famous sense.  However, to me personally, a few stand out for their bravery, skills, and traits that ended up being very much a part of me and who I became.  

The two that were most impactful were my great-great-grandfather Franz Heinrich Moorman and my great-grandfather Eugene Adelbert Otto.  Both immigrated to the United States from Germany in the 1800s and I admire that they, like many other European immigrants, decided to leave their parents, siblings, and homeland, most likely never to see them again, and make the dangerous 4,000+ mile trip to the United States.  People often say that I’m lucky to live in the United States, but the reality is that these two Germans are the reason I live here.  Their dream became my reality and the reason I speak English instead of German.

The majority of my Moorman side were farmers.  They settled and many continue to live in Mercer County cities such as Coldwater, Maria Stein, and St. Henry located about eighty miles north of Dayton.  I might have been a country boy if not for my grandfather Leo Albinus Moorman, who came to Dayton for a job working in the management dining room of John H. Patterson, the founder of NCR.  He moved just before the Great Flood of 1913 and my Uncle Ray recalls that he always talked about how NCR built boats to rescue people from the flood.  Sadly, the only memory I have of Grandpa Leo was as a five-year-old watching him laying on a bed in the living room of his west Dayton house on Lookout Avenue during the last months of his life.

When I was a little boy I had a passion for baking which my mother was very nice to let me explore.  What I would not find out until much later in life is that my Otto ancestors, back to the mid-1500s, were bakers, so perhaps I am genetically inclined to get out the flour from time to time.  Among the favorites I make are homemade pie dough, bread dough, pizza dough, and challah bread.  One of my cousins, Gene Otto, opened a bakery/coffee shop in Olympia, Washington, making our ancestor’s passion his everyday work.

One of the break-the-ice lines I use when starting a speech is “I’m the son of two actors, an engineer, and a cheerleader.  Obviously, both my parents were actors and that’s how they met, but if you think my Dad was the engineer and my mother the cheerleader, you’re wrong.  My Dad was both.”  My Dad was a cheerleader at The University of Dayton where he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering.  Mom was an accountant and aspiring actress.  They met at The Dayton Blackfriars’ Guild, married in 1950, and continued their acting passion for about another ten years, even including me for a potential part as a ring bearer in one of the plays.  It was many, many years later that I realized that they were the reason I like to talk in front of an audience.  I am an actor at heart.  Only my brother Martin took acting to the same level as our parents, performing in local theatre groups.  But our other brothers, Greg and Dave, don’t shy away from public speaking or performing.  It’s in our blood.

 

What is one of the most beautiful places you've ever been?

I’ve often said that the three most beautiful places are mountains, beaches, and golf courses, with the most beautiful place I’ve ever been capturing all three. The runner-ups, just the most notable of a very long list, include golfing at Pebble Beach, sailing in St. Marteen’s Great Bay, dinner at the Flagstaff restaurant in the mountains overlooking Boulder, Colorado at dusk, and standing at the highest point of the Alta ski resort, southeast of Salt Lake City, Utah, gazing at the slopes below. In each case, I had to pause, take in the scenery and commit it to memory. The place that takes the top spot is playing golf at the Wailea Golf Club on Maui. The course is built on the side of a mountain with majestic views of a deep blue Pacific Ocean. It boasts beautifully manicured fairways and greens and a layout that demands you concentrate fully to play a good round. I remember how hard it was to focus, the vistas compelling me to gaze upon them and ignore the golf. I don’t remember what my score ended up being, but the views will last forever.

What have been some of your life's greatest surprises?

My earliest memory of a great surprise was my grandfather Maurice Otto taking me to Arby’s on Salem Avenue.  There may have been my Mom or another sibling or two there, but all I remember was the gigantic Arby’s sign shaped like a cowboy hat and how amazingly delicious the roast beef sandwich tasted.  Not that my family ate out a lot or favored fast food, but I knew enough to be shocked at the taste.  It’s still my favorite fast food sandwich to this day.

My first trip to the Hawaiian island of Maui was full of the beautiful ocean and mountain scenery I was expecting, but the shocker was the awesome aromas of the resort.  I remember walking out of the hotel room the first morning and experiencing the fragrance of bananas wafting through the air.  Everywhere I went whatever tropical fruit trees were planted imparted their essences into the air.  Nowhere else I’ve ever been has matched that aromatic scenery. 

I walked into yet another Information Technology Leadership Team meeting in the summer of 2001 and I was the last one to join.  The buzz in the room was unusually busy and my colleagues began asking me what I thought.  “Thought of what?”, I replied.  “The merger, of course”, they explained, not really explaining anything.  I was the last one on the team to learn that Mead and Westvaco were merging and I was dumbfounded, my safe little world all of the sudden filled with questions and unknowns.  That began a crazy seventeen-year stretch of changing companies and managers that, in the end, worked out very well for me.  

The Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany was a bucket list item we knocked off the list in 2011.  We did the usual combination of a two-hour nap after arriving at the hotel after the overnight flight, followed by a walk, dinner, and back to bed for a long night’s sleep at 8 pm.  Waking up refreshed and settled into the GMT+2 hour time zone, we headed to the train station to take the short trip to Oktoberfest.  We knew we needed to exit at “Theresienwiese", but did not have further directions.  We just figured we follow the crowd, many dressed in traditional lederhosen or dirndl dresses, but as we exited the escalator we were shocked to see we were already inside Oktoberfest, the beer tents, rides, food vendors, and shops right in front of us.  It took a few minutes to soak it in before we set off exploring.

When I retired in August of 2018, the folks in the office gave me a nice send-off and I was focused on my life’s next journey, one not filled with alarm clocks and deadlines.  My wife scheduled a little retirement party a few weeks later and drove me blindfolded to the destination, which turned out to be Jimmy’s Ladder 11.  Maybe that should have tipped me off that something was going on, but when they walked me up to the second-floor party room, I was truly shocked, to the point of tears, to see so many of the people I worked with over the years there to greet me and wish me a happy retirement.

We hold an annual summer party, inviting around two dozen people for a late afternoon cookout, their favorite beverages, and conversation well into the darkness.  I was deep in conversation with friends during the 2021 party when my daughter Laurie and her husband Rodney, now residents of Charlotte, North Carolina, walked over to me.  I looked up, and while I certainly recognized them, my brain initially rejected what I was obviously seeing, seizing up for a couple of seconds before realizing they had made the seven-hour trip to surprise me.  And an absolutely wonderful surprise it was!