Tracking down a specific issue of TAOT is difficult. There are no archives and there is no website to access. The issue about the incident at Kid Zone was a tangent that I was willing to take because I wanted to know how trustworthy Mr. Baucom really was. Of course he would defend his program against slander, but I had come to trust VIV in her assessment of the Ladoga community. There was definitely exploitation of athletic children in the town, one need only check the bank account of booster clubs across the state to see that someone other than the players was making a lot of money from Friday night football games, but I wondered if a man like Mr Baucom, who seemed to care very much about the fate of his players, had been implicated in the story.
My first stop was Mr. Smith who had become a collector of the newsletter since he’d found out about it.
“This publication is a wonder of local news.” He said when we talked. “In a time when local news is undervalued and ignored, this paper is like a beacon of accountability. It’s such a shame that people decry the media for giving them exactly what they ask for. We wanted news from people who agreed with all of our insane theories. We wanted soft news because reality is too depressing. We wanted sensationalized stories of kidnapped blondes and pretty, twenty something mothers who killed their children. We told the media that we wanted garbage, reality drama because we couldn’t help but tune into it. And we stopped buying local papers so now they’re filled with ads and AP stories. This,” he said passionately and held up an issue of the paper, “this is what the world’s been missing. Someone who knows their town and cares what happens to the people in it.”
I shared Mr. Smith’s enthusiasm for the work but I found out that day that he had a different opinion about my pursuit of the source.
“There is something to say for VIVs anonymity. Do you think that it would be hard for someone if they told the truth about their community? They are likely to face a backlash for their willingness to expose the things that VIV has. Maybe the identity behind it all is irrelevant and we should help protect that anonymity to ensure that this source of truth is never threatened.”
“I don’t want to make a billboard with her face on it.” I said jokingly.
“No, you just want the satisfaction of knowing something that someone else doesn’t know.” Mr. Smith said. “We know the downside of knowing, can you tell me the upside of solving this mystery?”
I thought about it. It meant more to me than just knowing more than the next guy. I had a deep respect for VIV’s project and I wanted to be apart of it. Or I wanted some piece of it. If VIV wanted me to write for her, she would have reached out to me when I tried. I didn’t have illusions of becoming part of VIV’s organization, but I’d figured that knowing her would give me a real life hero, someone that I could use to motivate me to achieve my own goals in local reporting. Because her whole deal, VIV and This and Other Things (TAOT), was a real statement that spoke to me. It all showed me that the only thing we can do is follow our instincts and do what we think is right, regardless of the audience, and those true pursuits will eventually find an audience to inspire. But did I really need to find VIV for all of that to be true?
“I wanna find VIV because I think it’s the missing piece to something that I honestly am still figuring out.” I tried to explain. “My gut is telling me that there is gold at the end of this rainbow and I want to find it.”
Mr. Smith left it at that. “So what can I do for you?”
“I was wondering if you’ve come across an issue from some years back about an incident at the west side afterschool program, Kid Zone.”
Mr. Smith was digging through boxes before I was completely done with my sentence. He had mined nearly every corner of the city to dig up recent and relatively ancient issues of the newsletter and he planned to start an archive at Edwards Library.
After a couple minutes digging, Mr. Smith produced the issue.
“I came across a treasure trove at that old convenience store. That store is gross, but it worked out in our favor. For some reason the owner hardly ever threw any of them away. He said they just always showed up on his counter and when a new one came out, someone stacked the old ones next to his freezer. They go back years. He was using the stack to keep the wall from collapsing. I had to pay for the repair so I could take them.”
I looked through the newsletter that was all about the various ways that children are exploited in the city and there was more than one story about sports. There was a story about the children of illegal immigrants who dropped out of high school to help financially support their families. There was a story about the children of single parents who were forced to grow up way too soon; the twelve year old daughter of a single mother who prepared meals for her siblings and was the only child care that the mother could afford.
The story about the incident at Kid Zone covered many of the details that I had heard from the staff and Mr. Baucom, but there were new things as well. The story was actually credited to a man named Charles Tibbet and he told the story through the lens of having survived the brutal training that he had endured when he was in high school. He recounted personal experiences and tied it to the story that was new at the time. Charles had been a noteworthy member of the Ladoga High School cross country team and he had hoped that his talents could get him scholarship money for college. His parents were proud of his successes on the field of play, but they wanted to be sure that they did everything to give him the edge over other students and they invested a lot of money in his athletic training at Kid Zone.
“I was a fish out of water there,” Charles explained of his experience. “I loved to run and I didn’t mind working hard, but the staff there put all of their dreams of training a world class athlete into the kids and they could care less if the kids just want to have fun. As coach or a trainer, the only real measure of success is results. They all want to say that their kid is playing division one at some university or in professional sports.”
Everyone has professional aspirations, Charles acknowledged, “but at Kid Zone there was a slimy feeling of false advertisement. The owner of Kid Zone smiles at parents to encourage trust in the stated mission of shaping physically fit and well balanced student athletes, but as soon as the parents leave, the place turned into a sweat shop. There was a lot of withholding of water and running until we dropped. We definitely understood that there was a price to pay for failure.”
Charles’s account of his time at Kid Zone was harrowing and he explained that he endured it because it made his parents happy when they heard from the trainers that he had potential. “I was exhausted by the time I made it to my senior year, they had pushed me so hard. Needless to say, I burnt out and there were no scholarships for me when I went to college. No athletic scholarships anyway. I never let my grades slip even when they ran me into the ground.”
I borrowed the issue from Mr. Smith and confronted Mr. Baucom with it.
“This doesn’t look good, sir.” I said respectfully.
“Of course not.” He said. “What would you expect from an unhappy kid who couldn’t live up to his potential?”
“Is that what happened? Or did your program beat the good out of him?”
Mr. Baucom shrugged and sighed loudly. “We don’t run kids to death at Kid Zone. We are paid to train student athletes and we are the best at it in this city.”
He wasn’t angry with me, but I could tell that he had this discussion before because his answers sounded canned and rehearsed.
“Do you know anything about Charles Tibbet? Is he still in Ladoga?” I asked.
“Last I heard about him he was coaching at a school in the mountains. One of the universities up there.”
I thanked Mr. Baucom for his time and took the issue back to Mr. Smith.
“I’m gonna find this Tibbet guy, see if he knows anything.”
“You ever wonder why some people say it’s a bad idea to meet your heroes?” Mr. Smith asked as I left his house.
“Because they usually disappoint.”
“Because they disappoint. What if you’ve already received all of the inspiration that you need from this VIV character and pursuing the mystery will just leave a bad taste in your mouth in the end?”
I smiled at Mr. Smith. “Then it was meant to be. But at this point, if it’s a question I can answer, I just have to.”
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