Jordan High mourns the loss of its fixer, Mr. Brooks

I’m sitting at Fred’s Tires on a Saturday morning, waiting for an alignment, and I’m thinking about how important tires are to our lives.

If we didn’t have tires, our lives would fall apart. Amidst the smell of rubber and complementary coffee, my mind then drifts to a place just down the road apiece, my beloved Jordan High.

Nestled in a back hallway is a little office, the hub of keeping Jordan from falling apart. It’s full of tools. Each one with a designated purpose. Each one marred by years of use to mend the broken. Each one arranged in organized chaos to the outsider’s eye, but functional design to the user.

The little office holds almost 30 years of fixing things. There’s an old rolling office chair sitting before a desk covered with little jars of nuts and bolts and scraps of paper with handwritten to-do lists. A lot of know-how is hanging on these walls. There is also an aura of necessity in the room, a feel of needs being met. This is the place where menders of all kinds — carpenters, plumbers, electricians, mechanics — meld together into one man. … Mr. Brooks.

That office became a shrine early last week, a time capsule of a man of necessity. A memento of 30 years of service to the faculty, staff and students of Jordan High.

We lost our fixer.

In a building built in 1936, Mr. Brooks was never at a loss for something to repair. Monday morning I passed him in the hallway hunkered underneath an ailing water fountain. Weeks before, he was atop a ladder, up in the ceiling during an English class to fix the heater. Just days ago he repaired a collapsed ceiling in our auditorium with a simple smile and a gesture of “Just another day at Jordan High.”

Last week I knocked on his office door to borrow a screwdriver. Surrounded by more screwdrivers than I had ever seen, we chatted about his little office of fixing things. I told him how it reminded me of my grandpa’s tool shed. He smiled.

Mr. Brooks always smiled. Non-stop, I do believe. A smile beneath a Jordan ball cap and above a Jordan T-shirt. Working at Jordan wasn’t just a job to the smiley, mender-of-all-that’s-broken. He was passionately devoted to our school and to our building. Imagine what Mr. Brooks saw during his span of keeping Jordan running. These walls hold some of the most impressive traditions of our city, encase some of the most historical nostalgia of our community, and house some of the most diverse of student bodies than any other school in Columbus. And Mr. Brooks has seen it all.

My tires don’t seem important anymore. When something like losing a Mr. Brooks happens, you can’t help but think about your own impact in your own “building.”

Mr. Brooks wasn’t a Martin Luther King Jr. He didn’t impact the world. He won’t be read about in history books. But for almost 30 years, he impacted the lives and hearts of thousands of students, faculty and staff at Jordan High, and that’s impressive.

Every nut and bolt, every tool, every scrap of paper in his little office in the back hallway bears witness to his impact. We already miss you, Mr. Brooks. Not sure how we’ll keep things working properly without you.

This story was originally published December 6, 2016 at 2:55 PM with the headline "Jordan High mourns the loss of its fixer, Mr. Brooks."