An active smart phone fills his pocket.
And his clothing, while informal, is neat and fresh.
All say the same thing the 73-year-old Sonny Young says about himself:
“I’m trying to live up to my last name.”
I’m not one to argue. But, to my way of thinking, Young’s ability to do that is inseparable from a personality that radiates like his first name.
That nickname is compliments of an old-school uncle in Cincinnati who considered Sonny’s given name (Leslie) too girlish.
He was 6 in 1952 when his mother, Margaret, returned from Cincinnati to fix up the by then rundown house on Clark Street where she grew up. The house was half a block from a brand new Fulton School Young wrongly assumed he would attend.
“She got me involved in the Catholic faith, and we met some wonderful people named Belva and Lonnie Bell,” Young said. “They were my godparents, so to speak.”
After his baptism, the Bells followed Young’s progress from St. Raphael School through Catholic Central. During the same years, his mother, who served as a domestic in homes on North Fountain Blvd., taught him her work ethic.
From ages 11 to 17, he rode his bike daily on a paper route with 130 customers, braving the wrath unleashed when the cost of the paper went from 45 cents a week to 57.
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“She never let me quit,” he said.
And she always saved his money.
That included the $15,000 she fished out of a savings account years later when a married Sonny Young wanted to redo the basement in his Portage Path home and thought he lacked the money.
Graduating from Central in 1964, he spent the next four years on active duty in the U.S. Air Force.
“I’m kind of a rare military person,” Young said. “When I got back home, I wanted to stay with the Air Force, but there was no money (in it).”
He did, though join the Air Force Reserve, in which he spent two stints adding up to 24 years.
His mother’s work at the Dan Shouvlin home led to Young’s first job at Bauer Brothers in Springfield - a job that lasted “a few minutes.”
It took him that long to learn that lab technician’s job, which sounded like a white-coat affair, involved wallowing in a pit filled with the various things that were ground up to make paper from pulp.
The highlight of his next year’s work at Ohio Bell was installing 52-pair cable to a place called the Upper Valley Mall. He remembers the project stalling for a time when Smilin’ Bob Yontz frowned on plans to have his back yard torn up in the name of progress.
The Ohio Bell job seemed fine, Young said, “but then winter came.”
Hours spent aloft in the years before they called it wind chill motivated Young to return eight consecutive days in January of 1969 to a waiting line at International Harvester Co.
And that might have been that for his career were it not for two things: the influence of the Air Force, which constantly encouraged reservists to continue their education and a personality that made others want to help him.
“I’ve run into some people that just latch on to me,” Young said. “I don’t know what I do.”
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Margaret Riley - “a wonderful lady,” he says - that told him that the absence of ACT or SAT test scores wouldn’t stand in his way from getting an associate’s degree in business at then Clark County Technical Institute
When he finished there Jerry Simonton, a former Cub Scout pal, told Young that Simonton’s brother, the superintendent of the Navistar plant, was looking to up the number of African-American supervisors in the plant.
While working that job, Young earned his bachelor’s degree at Central State University in 1977 and took a supervisory job with Procter & Gamble, whose offer to pay his moving expenses to Cincinnati made it better than IBM’s.
A year later, he was moving back to Springfield. Wife Beverly - they spent 38 years together - was expecting the first of their two daughters, and she wanted to be close to their Springfield families.
A scratchy period ensued. Young worked selling fire alarms and resumed a briefly interrupted military career by going to the 178th Fighter Wing at the Springfield-Beckley Airport.
There a subordinate who sensed Young’s struggles offered a tip: Piedmont Airlines would be building a hub in Dayton and hiring 600 people.
“I always keep a neat, up-to-date resume,” Young said. But he didn’t expect on question during his employment interview: What kind of car he owned.
Toyota, he said, “because they don’t break down.”
Satisfied that Young had good wheels that would get him to work, the supervisor hired him. In June of 1982 - when flowers were decorating an almost finished concourse - Piedmont put him in an area that was a natural fit: customer relations. He was there until 2006 when heightened airport security and a series of mergers had taken the fun out of the work.
Young’s airline time included a stretch spent living with a nephew in Maryland on weekdays, while Young worked at Washington National Airport, then flew home to be with his wife and two daughters on weekends.
The most memorable return was on Sept. 10, 2001, the day before the terrorist attacks closed the airport. It would be months before he returned to Washington to claim his soot- and dust-covered Toyota from the airport’s parking lot, within sight of a still damaged Pentagon building.
Young landed his final full time job because of a conversation he struck up with an airline passenger who regularly flew to Washington and ran the Airstream plant in Jackson Center, Ohio.
Retirement from there a year later dovetailed with retirement from the Air National Guard base, which his superiors helped the well-loved long-timer celebrate by providing a flight in an F-16.
Young calls it a thrill “no amusement ride could match.” It also ended better than the simulator flight he piloted and crash-landed.
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Young has a long line of people he thanks for his good fortunes.
- A Home City Federal manager who provide a loan to Jalaur Enterprises, the company Young and Beverly founded after they bought the building in which she operated a beauty business for years and, during the Obama years, became their campaign center.
- Cong. Dave Hobson, who, though a Republican, arranged for security clearances that would have allowed the Youngs to visit the Obama White House at Christmas time had not bad weather nixed the plans.
- Bill Schwartz - a friend from school days - who involved Young in marketing for the Heritage Center in his early retirement years.
It’s no fault of any of them that they can’t compete for his affections with daughter Lauren, who moved back to Springfield when she learned her father had been diagnosed with cancer in August.
“There was no decision for me,” she told me. “My father has taken care of me his whole life. He’s a wonderful father. And we have the most fun ever, don’t we Dad?”
The trouble surfaced Aug. 10, a date Young remembers because it’s the day each year he calls his friend, Jim Cobb, in Detroit to wish him a happy birthday.
He was diagnosed after Cobb insisted that Young, who suddenly was in great pain, go to the emergency room, where cancer was found in a vertebra and later at points in his pelvis.
But, as Young told me the week before last when he was at the wheel of the Jeff Wyler courtesy van (a Toyota, like the ones Young prefers), “Tell all my friends I’m doing well. I can walk now and I couldn’t walk.”
I decided to interview Young because he is one of the happiest people with or without cancer I have ever met.
As Springfield native Gina Holland put it when she stopped for a word with him: “Sonny, you are the North Star of sparkle.”
Other friends from over the years will have the chance to add a little sparkle to Young’s life and wish him a happy 74th birthday on the 25th of this month.
But in two ways that won’t be necessary that day.
For one, he’ll still be Young.
For another, he’s a lock to be as Sonny as ever.
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