15 Minutes with Levi Klingler, 2013 AHS Graduate- Part One
By Bailey Bowers
What have you been up to since your graduation from Ada High School last May?
I'm home for the summer working at Honda Transmission in Russells Point as a co-op. In the fall, I'll return to The Ohio State University in Columbus where I'm studying mechanical engineering.
What drew you to Ohio State?
I remember narrowing my choices down to Ohio Northern and Ohio State. It was a big toss-up between both schools for various reasons, but for me, it ultimately came down to wanting to see what was beyond the only horizons I've ever known since I’ve lived in Ada all my life. I wanted to travel, meet new people, and step outside of my comfort zone. I chose Ohio State because I wanted a new experience.
What have been the adjustments you’ve made to transition to life in Columbus?
There’s lots of little things to get used to. I'll buy stuff every once in a while from this store called United Dairy Farmers (UDF), which is very similar to something like 302 Carryout in Ada, same products and stuff, but everything's so much more expensive. Then there's living on campus and how very different it is from living in Ada.
I still don’t think I’ve wrapped my head around how big it is. I pass more people on a 15 minute walk to class than I would during an entire weekend walking around my hometown. One of the most surprising adjustments was realizing just how badly I would miss Ada and learning to cope with it. I had some lonely nights lying awake in bed and just reliving childhood and high school memories and missing everybody and everything back home.
What has helped you adjust?
I remember the Kansas song "Dust in the Wind" really resonating with me towards the beginning of the year. (laughs) You have to make an effort to find your place. You have to find something you identify with. I'm in the honors program, which helped create a smaller community out of an otherwise massive school, but it didn't completely take away from the fact that most people had no idea I even existed.
I was no longer able to call everybody I saw by name. That's a strange adjustment when you come from a small town like Ada. My first year was very intimidating and eye opening and humbling. You just learn to adjust, I guess. You take the bad with the good. It’s easy to say that the grass is always greener on the other side, but there’s always good and bad.
Tell me about your fondest high school memory.
That's a tough one. I'm gonna have to go with when we set up prom in the high school gym as a class. It was junior year. The week-long process was its own saga. The climax of it all came on Friday. After a long week of overcoming challenges and wondering “how is this going to work” more times than I can count, we had this great idea to install a smoke machine in the hallway.
We made sure to clear it with the administration first, who then prompted us to clear it with the owner of the smoke machine (the music department), and after jumping through the necessary hoops, we got our hands on the smoke machine and started setting it up. I remember it was me, Jacob Ansley, and Chris James setting it up in the hallway. Maybe Brenden Szippl, too. In the background all the guys and girls were arguing in the gym over the aesthetic quality of the stars that the guys were spray-painting onto makeshift construction paper walls -- the guys saying the stars looked just fine, the girls saying that their attempts at drawing shapes learned in preschool were lackluster at best and awful enough to singlehandedly tarnish the entire week's decorative effort . . . yeah, things got pretty catty the last day (laughs).
Anyway, us guys in the hallway were sure that this smoke machine was going to restore balance to the universe just as soon as we got it to work, so we blocked out the quarrelsome scene in the gym and plugged it in and turned it on and held our breaths.
And then nothing happened. It didn’t work. Jacob starting pacing around (he was especially anxious for prom to look awesome, I remember) and I just kept pushing the button, desperately trying to get it to spew puffs of smoke with no luck. Eventually we just slumped to the hallway floor, defeated.
Then the machine started hissing, and out rolled the smoke. We were jumping up and down in our moment of triumph like six year olds at Trampoline World. I remember saying “Finally something went right!” and at that exact moment, literally that exact moment, the fire alarm went off. It was a painfully short-lived moment of triumph.
So the entire class filed out of the gym, and then I'm back to thinking nothing could go right, and then the fire department was on its way. Meanwhile, Chris James was taking matters into his own hands and setting up a huge fan in the hallway that he dug out of the janitor’s closet to help clear out the smoke. What happened next could only be described as utter chaos. Chris flipped the switch on the fan, which began to blow all of the paper and decorations off the wall and all the streamers off the ceiling.
The school administration came out to see what was going on, and marched past us all into the smoke filled gym while we're all sitting outside on the ground, shaking their heads in apparent disappointment at our shenanigans. As we all watched our masterpiece crumble to shambles, I realized that I couldn't even help address the problem because I had to leave to make it to a post-secondary class I was taking at ONU. As I was leaving, I remember thinking how in the world were we going to pull this off with less than a day to fix everything.
But when I came back from my class, everything was fixed. I mean everything. The place looked brand new, all the paper was back on the walls, the fire department was nowhere to be found, nobody was fighting, everyone was all smiles and high fives.
Somehow it all came together. It was heart-warming. The finished product ended up looking really nice. I mean, it wasn't perfect, but we all came together to pull it off and nobody died or anything. In hindsight, maybe we were a little too engrossed in it being so perfect. The spectacle of it all ended up not mattering as much as us coming together as a class.
Lots of good memories from that week.
