MANSFIELD — Reed Richmond initially wanted to work in wildlife management. He then considered a career in paleontology.
But once he demonstrated in college the unique ability to write, he chose a lifetime career as a communicator — from the dusty baseball fields of Texas to the gentle hills of Richland County. It’s the field from which he will retire Dec. 30.
As he prepares to exit after two decades as a Richland Public Health educator and communications specialist, the 66-year-old Richmond knows it has been quite a ride, especially since March 2020.
“I have been telling people I spent 21 years working in public health … with 20 of those years coming in the last 18 months,” Richmond said during a wide-ranging interview at Richland Source.
As perhaps the most local public voice since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, Richmond has endured the slings and arrows associated with an agency devoted to helping people survive the infectious disease.
“Most people in public health will tell you they hope they can get through their career without having to deal with a pandemic. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime kind of event, the first real pandemic since the Spanish Flu of 1918.
“I had hoped to retire without having to go through this.”
UNLIKELY PATH
Protecting public health during a pandemic was certainly not the career path Richmond would have predicted for himself when he graduated from Ashland High School.
The son of college educators, he planned to avoid academia. He enrolled at Hocking Technical College in Nelsonville, Ohio, seeking a two-year associate degree and planning a future in the outdoors.
“It was one of those things where I just wanted to get through school as quickly as possible and get a job,” he said. “I was there for a year and it was really nice. But I found out (wildlife management) wasn’t for me.
“I really enjoyed that kind of stuff, but I found out there were two things about it I didn’t enjoy: poison ivy and snow,” Richmond said with a chuckle.
In 1976, Richmond enrolled at then-Findlay (Ohio) College as a science major, landing at an institution of higher learning where his father was employed as vice president of institutional advancement — and thus receiving free tuition.
“It wouldn’t surprise anyone who knows me,” he said. “I really wanted to be a paleontologist.”
He also went because his father told him the college needed assistance in the sports information department (SID).
“He knew I could handle it. He knew I was pretty good in English and math.”
A love for fossils and dinosaurs not withstanding, the avid, lifelong reader also found himself leaning more on his ability and desire to write.
“I ended up getting a lot of coursework in English and history. I would write papers for history class and the history teacher would say, ‘Wow.’
“I am not sure my information was always spot on, but I think I got great grades because my papers were legible and I used the proper (word) tenses,” he said with a smile.
Richmond also found success working and writing in the sports information office for the college, then a national NAIA athletic powerhouse.
Call it luck. Call it fortuitous. Call it karma. But one of Findlay’s football games came against Tarleton State, another powerhouse from Texas. The SID for the Texans took a liking to him and told Richmond during the game he was retiring and that the young Ohio man should apply for the gig.
So the English classes and the knowledge gained in sports information led to Richmond’s first career — spending the next 21 years as the sports information director at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas, southwest of Dallas/Fort Worth.
ON-THE-JOB TRAINING
The two decades spent as the SID for the Texans was unknowingly training Richmond for his next job.
He learned to build relationships across many miles of trips to sporting events. As a one-man gang, there were literally thousands of hours spent on the job, much of it on the road in a state roughly six times larger than Ohio.
He learned how to do things he had never done before, including the intricate world of baseball statistics. He learned he didn’t always know the answer to a question — but he knew where (and to who) he could go to get it.
He honed his writing skills in the creative world of sports writing, conducting interviews, crafting news and feature stories. He learned to be a professional communicator.
Richmond also gained a wife, Joan, though that relationship came during a trip back to Ohio for Christmas. His father, a regular Santa Claus performer — “He didn’t need to wear a pillow under his suit” — was performing at the Richland Mall.
The mall hired local female college students as Santa’s helpers, dressed as elves in green leotards.
“I went there to see my dad with my brother and nephew, who was about 4 at the time. He didn’t know Santa was grandpa. My dad sees me looking at this one elf and he gets me her phone number and told her I was going to call her that night.
“Our first date was on Dec. 20 and we were married the next year on Dec. 28,” Richmond said.
Joan moved to Texas and got a job teaching English at Tarleton State. They had a daughter, Catherine, and life — and work — rolled along.
Before Catherine entered high school and with their parents experiencing health issues, the couple felt they could indeed go home again, Thomas Wolfe notwithstanding.
THERE AND BACK AGAIN
The family moved back to Ohio and ultimately built a house on six acres outside Bellville. Joan quickly got a position teaching at OSU-Mansfield. Reed applied at the then Mansfield-Richland County Health Department.
“I wish I could tell you I said something in the interview that just absolutely clinched it for me, but the fact is they were hesitant to hire me because I had so much experience and they didn’t think I would stay long,” he said.
“It came down to me or a young woman just out of college. I think they made the right decision.”
Lessons learned in Texas helped Richmond adapt to the new role.
“They asked me, ‘You have a sports background. What if someone in the media calls and asks you a question about cardiovascular health? How would you answer the question?’
“I said I would tell them I don’t know the answer yet, but I will find the person who does and I will get back to you. I would then make sure I found the right person and got the information … and then called (the reporter) back with the answer.
“I am still not the expert of a lot of subjects, but I know who to go to to get the answers. I spend a lot of my time trying to make sure people have what we think is the best information,” Richmond said.
He spent two decades promoting public health through a myriad of methods, including participating in numerous public events, health fairs and county fairs. Like others at Richland Public Health, Richmond trained for public health disasters, hoping against hope those skills would never be needed.
Along the way, Richmond used his own personal experiences, along with Joan, to lovingly tell the educational story of their own family’s experience with Alzheimer’s Disease, participating in a video story with Richland Source in 2018.
THE UNTHINKABLE HAPPENS
Then came COVID-19 in early 2020. A global disease outbreak that changed the landscape of public health — and public health information — forever.
Richmond said an early mistake by global, national and local health experts made things more difficult from the start.
“The big mistake we made in public information officers, local health departments and even the CDC … the biggest mistake they made was not telling people at the very start that things will change.
“What we tell you today is likely to change. One of the first things they said was you don’t need to wear a mask. Rather than saying, right now you don’t need to wear a mask … we should have said right now you don’t need to, but that information may change as we get more evidence,” Richmond said.
“That would have helped a ton.”
Richmond also chides national officials for saying masks weren’t needed — because they wanted to ensure the PPE would be available for medical professionals.
“Then you try to come back and tell people we’re telling you the best advice we can give you is wear a mask. They responded, ‘You told us we didn’t have to wear a mask.’
“That was a bad start. We didn’t prepare the public for this piece of information — in a pandemic things change. And you have to be able to adjust as things change. To me, that’s the big mistake we made,” Richmond said.
He said the resistance to the COVID-19 vaccine in some segments of the population also caught health experts off guard.
“Our messaging about vaccines may have been a little wrong. The presumption was people would rush out to get their vaccine. We thought there would be a steady flow. But after the initial rush, it just kind of dropped off the map,” Richmond said.
It’s become a war waged often in the less-than-professional world of social media.
“We were always behind the game. In other words, we wait for the misinformation to come out before and then we develop the messaging to tell you why that’s not true, rather than saying, ‘Here is the information you need to know.’
“We just had the vaccine. We didn’t develop messaging to explain the mRNA vaccine has been in development and testing for the last 10 years,” Richmond said.
He said lessons have been learned along the way.
“That’s why with this new Omicron variant, I got a call from the radio station the other day. I said I will tell you what we know, but I will tell you more about what we don’t know. And we don’t know a whole lot.
“The whole thing about telling people is, ‘This is what we know and this is what we don’t know.’ And we won’t know a whole lot until we have a slew of evidence to back up all that,” Richmond said. “It’s going to take several weeks.
“If we had developed some of that messaging at the very start of this thing, if we had admitted to people, unlike public health tends to do, we’re so sure this is the best advice, we’re so sure this is what you need to do.
“We weren’t prepared message-wise to say we don’t know yet. This is our best advice, but we don’t know yet. If you look at crisis management, that is one of things they will tell you — don’t say anything you don’t know.
“Tell them what you know, tell them everything you know, tell them the truth, don’t hold anything back. That was a failure on our part … there wasn’t a point where we said, ‘We don’t know yet.’
“The health field follows the science. And we didn’t have the science yet.” he said.
RETIREMENT PLANS
Richmond plans to continue writing after he exits RPH, though on a more personal scale, including work on a fiction novel about a man from southeast Ohio, living in Montana, who discovers a time portal in his backyard.
“He has no idea why, but when he sits in his living room and looks out the picture window, he can see dinosaurs where there should be buffalo,” Richmond said.
“I’ve got it pretty well fleshed out. I have got all the action scenes in my head. The only thing I haven’t figured out, and there is a part of me that wants to avoid this, is it all just a dream he is having?” he said. “Is it all really happening?”
He also plans to spend time with the love of his life — and also his first love of reading.
“I’m a big historian. I just picked up a new book I hadn’t seen before about Theodore Roosevelt, who is my hero,” he said.
And if he could step through that time portal to four-plus decades ago, what advice would he give to a young Reed Richmond just starting his career?
“I think it would be good advice for anyone who is tied up in their career. Spend more time with family. Don’t get so involved in your business you forget about your wife.
“I really enjoy my time with the grandkids. (But) I was gone a lot when my daughter was growing up. When you get on a bus with a college football team on a Friday afternoon to drive to an away game, your daughter hasn’t even gotten home from school yet.
“The next day you work at the game and you don’t get home until three o’clock in the morning on Sunday and you sleep in until 10. That’s a whole weekend without seeing your wife and kids.
“I missed a lot of concerts and other events my daughter was involved in. She didn’t hold it against me, but I am really proud of all she has accomplished,” he said.
After Dec. 30, Richmond can be found on his six acres of peace with his three dogs, two cats and wife, who is still teaching English at OSU-Mansfield.
“Hey, someone has to make sure I get to maintain the lavish lifestyle I have become accustomed to,” he said. “I will be spending my days golfing, reading, writing, spending time with family and searching for a good bottle of eggnog.”
