Calling All Robert Mentzers

(or: Robert Mentzers around the World)

An Essay by Robert Mentzer

(Click, please)

 

The Wrong Guy

A young man named Ross Mentzer was recently accepted to the Virginia Military Institute and plans to start there in the summer. In the meantime, he is playing on a club soccer team that is competing in the National Indoor Soccer Championships.

I know this because he sent me these pictures of himself in action.

He wears number 12. "If you can attend any of my games to observe," he wrote me, "I would appreciate it."

The email wasn't meant for me. He was writing to "Coach Rose." But he accidentally sent the email to someone he didn't know, whose name was nearly his. To me.

I already knew of Ross Mentzer a little bit. I even knew about his plans to attend VMI. Back in October, I got an email from Geof Schelhorn, a business development manager with InterAct Public Safety Systems in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Schelhorn wrote to me that he had been glad to meet me and that he'd written a letter of recommendation on my behalf to VMI director of admissions Col. Beitzel.

At the time, I sent a note back to Schelhorn explaining that he had the wrong "rmentzer" email address and wishing Ross the best of luck with his admission.

I guess somehow, through my interaction with Schelhorn, Ross got my email address mixed up in his inbox. This time, too, I sent Ross a note so that he would know he had the wrong guy. He did not write back.

But I sort of hope this keeps happening. I would like to know if the military life turns out to suit him or not.

Too Few Names

The Internet is too big and people have too few names.

My father is named Robert Mentzer, and his father. We three are all Robert Mentzers. But we are not the only ones.

I once got a Facebook friend request from a man named John Penn who wrote me "It's really awesome to find a cardiac surgeon who loves hip-hop/R&B and God knows whatever." He wrote that he had been a medical student at the school where I was dean, but that he'd left "to sign a major deal with Warner Brothers moonlighting as a record producer with the #1 Billboard-charting 3rd release on my label 'Something's Goin' On' with artist U.N.V."

That is these guys.

Their songs include "UNV Thang" and "2 B or Not 2 B." The group has a certain early-'90s R&B corniness that seems, in a word, hilarious.

John Penn was not writing to me. He was writing to a Dr. Robert Mentzer who is a cardiothoracic surgeon and former dean of Wayne State University Medical School. This guy.

I wrote back to John Penn and told him I was sorry to disappoint. No response.

 

Fathers & Sons

I emailed Dr. Robert Mentzer to see if I could talk to him for this story. He wrote, reasonably, that my request for an interview seemed to him to come out of left field. "Also," he wrote, "might I check your status as a reporter? I do have a 'funny' story to tell." (His scare quotes.)

Unfortunately I never learned his "funny" story, because he did not respond to subsequent emails. Possibly he didn't like the clips I sent him.

I learn from this article that he left his job as dean in 2009 to go to Germany to care for his mother. What began as a two-week leave of absence turned into a full resignation. It must have been a hard time for Robert Mentzer. I feel sorry for him, and I respect what he chose to do.

I think of my own father, Robert Mentzer, caring for his father, Robert Mentzer, at the end of his life. My grandfather died in 2009. I wish Dr. Robert Mentzer well.

The Happiest

The happiest person on the Internet named Robert Mentzer is definitely this guy, the keyboard player for the Lenny Kay Revue. He's on the left.

He goes by Bob. I follow him on Twitter. (He does not follow me.) I like him. But I don't think this Robert Mentzer likes me. He didn't respond to my email messages, nor to my tweets.

Mason Dixon

I had a telephone conversation with a terrifically interesting Robert Mentzer who lives in Connecticut. He is 74 years old. He was born in Toledo, Ohio and studied and worked in chemistry before retiring about 11 years ago. In retirement, he got interested in Mason and Dixon.

"Mason and Dixon actually ran the line between Maryland and Delaware, the north-south line," he said. "Where they started was only about 10 miles from my house."

Robert Mentzer studied the movements of Mason and Dixon as the ran the line. He learned about a modern surveyor, Todd Babcock, who had used GPS technology to map the course the explorers had taken. And it turned out, Babcock found, that their course wasn't straight. It had a series of jerky angles, like checkmarks across the southeastern United States.

And Robert Mentzer thought it over. He knew about the instruments Mason and Dixon used. Their compasses were not like our compasses. They were susceptible to a misleading gravitational pull that would cause them to drift.

"I got their journal and I realized what they had done," Robert Mentzer said. "They'd run 12 miles and then check (their course) and correct back to it. But the instrument was lying to them." Robert Mentzer published a paper about this, "How Mason and Dixon Ran the Line." You can read it. It's interesting.

I asked Robert Mentzer about whether he's ever seen other Robert Mentzers on the Internet. "I remember there is some doctor in Kentucky," he says. I corrected him: Detroit. But then when I Googled it I learned that Dr. Robert Mentzer did, for a time, practice in Lexington, KY.

The Saddest

The Saddest is Pi Lambda Phi fraternity member Robert Mentzer, a 1990 graduate of somewhere who lived in Ephrata, Penn., with his wife, Becca, and his young son, Ian. About 10 years older than me.

Here is a link to something about a 2009 Cancer Benefit Golf Tournament for Robert Mentzer. To read it today is to notice the way its forced, self-consciously jocular ribbing cannot quite conceal the gravity of Robert Mentzer's prognosis.

Here is a link to donate to the "Ian Robert Mentzer Fund for the Future," a memorial scholarship fund established in 2010 by friends of the Mentzer family after his death. I gave $20, without giving my name.

Working Things Out

There seem to be a lot of Robert Mentzers in Pennsylvania. I found two who are apparently a father and son — like my father and his father; like my father and me. This Robert Mentzer is married to Becky Mentzer, which is my mother's name. This Robert Mentzer has the middle initial 'D,' which is also my middle initial.

This Robert Mentzer just got out of prison. He lives in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. He's 21 years old and did four years, beginning when he was 16. He finally got out last fall, having never driven a car and never finished high school.

"It was Halloween night of 2006," he tells me about the night of his crime. "I had a gun. Me and a group of five or six people went around robbing different people. It was a stupid thing to do and it was very juvenile."

He was acting the part of a gangster, he says. He'd fallen in with a gang and was all about playing tough.

"Lebanon, it's not really—" he says. "It wasn't a real bad place when I was young, like 10 or 11. But after 9/11, a lot of people from New York came down here and it got a lot rougher. It got a lot rougher here and I dealt with it as it came."

 

In Robert Mentzer's Facebook photo, he wears a red Yankees cap pulled low over his eyes, with a red button-down shirt and a red undershirt. He lists his employer as "No where :)" and his college as "I wish." His favorite quotation is "A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words." Robert Mentzer has a son, who is not named Robert Mentzer.

"I'm in the process of working things out with my son's mother," he tells me. "I was going with her for a year and a half until she got pregnant. But I didn't know she was pregnant, and we ended up breaking up. Then right before I got locked up, she told me. It was like, wow.

"She was writing me for a little bit. You know, I just, I just let her go. When I came home, we talked. It's going. I don't know where it's going to go, but I still have love there for her."

When I talk to Robert Mentzer he is on his best behavior — soft-spoken, articulate, cautious. Prison was "a very good experience for me." "I learned a lot of lessons through this." There is kindness in his voice. We speak on a Wednesday and he tells me he has a job interview on Thursday at the steel foundry where he father has worked for 16 years. I wish him good luck. I still do.

Epilogue

My father is named Robert Mentzer, and his father. My son, due in June, will have a different name. Nothing against the name; it is a fine name to have. The world is vast and there are billions of people in it. From now on we will all always know the people whose names are the same as ours.

Robert Mentzer
Wausau, Wisconsin

Robert Mentzer is a journalist
& writer who is in a lot of places:

robertmentzer@gmail.com