When Jesse was dating Amber last year, we were introduced to her energetic daughter Molly.  Jesse and Amber are now married, Molly turned  five years old, and she started Kindergarten this week.  Diane and Linnea took her shopping for school clothes and supplies last Saturday, and evidently the “girls” had a wonderful time.

But a year ago, the big question for Jesse’s parents was “what will Molly call us?”  Diane likes “Diane” and she stuck with it.  But I chose “Zoomer,” which has also stuck nicely. I know this because for Christmas, Amber and Molly gave me a set of drinking glasses with Zoomer stenciled on the side.

Some have asked where in the world that name came from, so here is the story…

The summer after graduating from high school I worked in a steel shelving warehouse in St Louis, Missouri. The days were spent packaging orders and loading trucks.  I learned how to drive a manual transmission vehicle while working the clutch on a forklift.

Part of processing every order was counting out the nuts and bolts and other pieces that were used to attach the shelves to the frame for the steel shelves. There were huge bins of nuts and bolts, and each order specified numbers of each.  I think the reason there were not more complaints was because we were careful to over-count – customers were unlikely to bark if they ended up with more than they needed. 

One of the regular “games” we played while counting was a result of assisting a fellow worker.  When my friend Rollie would demand, “Hey, pass me a couple of those zoomers,” we would all throw multiples of each at him.  Zoomer could refer to nuts, bolts, brackets or other shelving bits, so we might even throw extra at Rollie if we weren’t sure what he needed.  We all added a new word to our vocabulary.

That fall, I went off to Michigan State University and made friends with Twelfth-Floor Rick.  He was in the northwest penthouse corner room of Hubbard Hall, the tallest dormitory at MSU.  His room was the one whose window had a giant search light that could be seen all over campus. Rick was the latest in a long line of the Fellowship of the Light, who passed along each year the solemn responsibility to protect and defend their prize possession from evil forces and campus administrators (or at least he was living in the room that year.)  His favorite descriptor was “golden,” similar to “awesome” but more profound than “cool.” The phrase Golden Zoomer was born.

For several years afterward, softball and basketball teams in various intramural, YMCA, or city leagues in the Lansing area would be named the Golden Zoomers, mostly made up of University Reformed Church friends and relatives.  I still have a Zoomers t-shirt (gold, of course), a framed Zoomer banner, and a craft bottle of Zoomer wheat ale that Gerry gave me (the label on the bottle is gold).  When emails and aol came along in the 90’s, zoomer was already taken, so I used akzoom.

There’s the story.  It might seem to be an odd name but please remember that Zoomer is golden.