My (failed) trip to the Frankfort YMCA (part one)

I wasted today. I had such big plans and they all fell through.

I have been waiting all weekend to go to Frankfort with my father and join the YMCA. I worked at the YMCA since college, both in Frankfort and Lexington. I was put on the "do not rehire" list twice in Lexington, which is not an easy feat.

I trained as a lifeguard because my good friend Amy Farmer was teaching the class. Well, Amy and her mother were teaching the class. Her mother, Sueanne Armistead, was the main swim instructor for Frankfort. She took her job seriously.

She was a Lifeguard Instructor Trainer which means she could certify people to teach Lifeguard classes. She certified me as a Lifeguard Instructor, which meant I could certify other Lifeguards. She was the queen bee trainer for the region and years later, when we found out my friend Rob Rowe had never been certified as a Lifeguard Instructor, she called me on the phone and told me that he wasn't allowed to teach a class without me.

I managed never to tell him that, and this could be the first he hears of it.

Rob's boss had been a man called Mike Hagy who lied on his resume when they hired him as Aquatics Director. He said he was a Lifeguard Instructor Trainer when he was only a Lifeguard Instructor and he had trained Rob and another lifeguard to be Lifeguard Instructors but then he was submitting the paperwork under his name.

When Rob went to be recertified, he found out he had never been an instructor at all. He was devastated.

The Instructor Trainer for the Dayton area was angry at him. She made him come up and do remedial classes.

And she notified the national YMCA office and they contacted Sueanne and Sueanne contacted me.

Or she might have had Amy contact me, I don't remember.

Anyway, the point is, Rob thought he was doing me a favor by letting me help teach his classes when I had been ordered to help him by the regional trainer.

Rob was my roommate at the time so it all worked out.

Mike Hagy went to the Chicago area where he was eventually found out and charged with something. The last we saw of his wife she was working at a low end strip club in Lexington.

I moved back to Frankfort and worked at the Frankfort YMCA teaching swim lessons. Sueanne volunteered at the Y and was in charge of swim lessons. She had always been in charge of swim lessons. Amy told me one time  that she had to call her mother Sueanne because she wouldn't answer to any variation on the word, mom, because she had heard it too much.

The director at the Frankfort YMCA was a man named Mike Kennedy. He seemed dedicated - he was a father and a soccer coach. I used to brag to Rob that he always seemed to be in the building in the middle of the night.

He was arrested for taking young teenage boys to hotels and exchanging sex for jobs at the Y. He's in prison now, and I used to check on him to make sure he was still in prison.

He tried to appeal once by saying they mislead him about his chances of being found guilty. The prosecution released some more of the evidence, including that he had a locked cabinet in the basement where he kept naked photos of his victims.

That bothered me, because I had seen that cabinet. I had stopped one of the other guards from busting the lock on it. When I saw what had been in it, I internalized the guilt. I had to write a paper for one of my Journalism classes about why I wanted to be a journalist.

Because, I opted to show restraint instead of being nosy, and people got hurt because of it.

So now, as a rule, I am as nosy as possible.