(Editor's Note: I softened the ending a bit.)
I was reading my local paper yesterday, which I rarely do anymore, as nothing has changed here since the end of the Nixon Administration. Perhaps I should pick it up more often, because I saw something in there that I would have missed had I not been turning the pages and getting ink on my fingers like in the old days, when I had a Kalamazoo Gazette paper route.
Hal Jenson is retiring, after ten years as...
What do you mean, "Who?" Hal Jenson. The Dean of WMed.
What do you mean you've never heard of WMed? Come on. In 2018, it was ranked as the 383rd-best medical school in the whole country. They just enrolled, what - 72 new students for 2020.
Hal is the only Dean they've ever had. And it's the only Dean he's ever been. He's walking away from a top-five salary as administrators go in the whole state of Michigan. Next year. That gives the University ample time to find a suitable replacement, whatever that might look like, however much it might cost.
I've seen some of Hal's emails. I know his mindset. Hopefully, WMed will use a little more discernment in choosing their next figurehead.
Like the Green Day song goes, I hope he had the time of his life. I hope he enjoyed ignoring my sister's desperate pleas for help as his employee, Joyce deJong, pinned back her ears and dug in her heels against our family's desire for the truth to be told about the circumstances surrounding my nephew's death. (Not the official pack of lies that they fought to keep Holy all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court.)
I hope he had a good time watching his dunce-cap underling send an email, which was meant for him, to me instead asking him to consider some kind of legal action or notice against me for blogging about this.
I hope it tickled his fancy, if he ever even knew, to find out that Joyce's shoppe had faxed key information to a certain funeral home owner who DID sue me (unsuccessfully) for defamation.
Primum non nocere; that is the oath they both swore, the oath they both violated when they trashed little Charlie Wolf's good name. So some of us will not miss Hal here in Kalamazoo County should his porters pack him up and carry him back to Utah, as they did at Mount Kilimanjaro a few years ago... See how much fun you can have on $400,000 a year?
Despite the fame and the money, though, he has apparently had enough. Hal's Grand Resume identifies him as an infectious diseases expert. As our tight-knit little community (where the fire hydrants sometimes don't work) grimly faces down COVID-19, he may well be looking to bag up his carpet and leave Kalamazoo.
And, frankly, who could blame him.
pH 7.o3.2o
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