Stuart Quinn

I'm breaking my new "no family name" rule for reasons that will be revealed later. So here is my post for Stu Quinn. Stu is a pilot in the Royal Air Force... probably a Flight Lt. or beyond by now. I met him back in the summer of '99 when he was peer group counselor for the Summer Institute for the Arts and Sciences which was being held at Western Michigan University.

Stu comes from Northern Ireland. It was confusing for some of us students at first because he originally said that he came from Ireland... yet he proudly hung the Union Jack in our group room (as you can see in the first photo.) I remember asking if he was a Protestant or a Catholic. Oooh, wrong question, I think. He got a little uncomfortable and asked me, "why?" Almost the same as "is it any of your business?" Maybe not, but here in the States, a question like that is far from being considered personal. The conflict between Protestants and Catholics will always be something of a mystery to me. I guess it's just a touchy subject.

On the first day, I was unsure that I wanted him as our leader. But in the end, I knew that we ended up with the best one. The best parts were actually trading cultural barbs with each other as the result of some incidents. So I'll share two with you.

When Stu arrived here in the States, he was at a store and asked the lady at the counter "Do you have any rubbers?" At this point, you can imagine an uncomfortable exchange with the lady saying, "Excuse me?" "Rubbers." Instead of the eraser that he was asking for, a pack of trojans gets rung up.

Then there was the time that he was driving us around Kalamazoo when he forgot that Americans drive on the right side of the road and we ended up going the wrong way on a one way street.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Stu went with us to see the movie "South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut." The youngest member of our group had her 17th birthday. To celebrate, we took her to the R-rated movie. Apparently, Stu had not seen the show South Park before so the movie was naturally even more raunchy than the show. We got a big kick out of Stu just burying his face into his hands not believing that he had just taken a group of teens to see such filth. It's okay Stu, we've seen much worse.

One of the most unexpected things to happen was him running into some of his old friends from Ireland. He had wanted to be a pilot for quite a while and Western has the second best flight school on this side of the Mississippi. It turns out that Aerlingus sends their pilots over here for training. On one of our modules, Stu took us to the flight line where he just ran into his buddies. While the rest of us looked on, the three of them were doing the non-stop yap. Kind of interesting to hear actually. They were speaking English and yet, we could barely understand any of it.

I made an attempt to keep in contact with him but after two years our emails stopped. I tried once last year but I got a bounce back saying that the address was no longer valid. So now, I wonder what he is doing. Is he still in the RAF? Did he go to Iraq? Did he get married to that girlfriend of his? Does he still drink that much beer? If so, how does his liver stand it? j/k But Stu, if you ever google search your name and you get this... email me! Oh, and you forgot to mail back our letters that we wrote to our future selves. You're a year late, dude!