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Feature Story
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Like 63 percent
of Americans,
Bob Burns says
he’s living the
American dream.
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Bob Burns may be the
most ordinary person in America. He’s 54,
married, wears glasses, makes mortgage
payments on a three-bedroom, ranch-style
house, and works 40 hours a week as a main
tenance supervisor at Windham Technical
High School in Willimantit, Ginn. (pop.
15,823).
Burns drinks cotfee each morning, reads
the newspaper each day, walks his dog each
evening and attends church most Sundays.
The 5-foot-8-inch, 190-pound Burns
is such an average Joe that he's the unpre
tentious starol the 2005 b<x>k The Average
American: The Extraordinary Search for the
Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen by Kevin
O'Keefe.
“I'm a little bit of a local celebrity,” says
Burns, who feels honored to be singled out
for being perfectly ordinary. “I’m just the
everyday person who docs his or her job to
the best of his ability.”
On a typical workday, Burns might
deliver a cartload o! textbooks to a class
room, fix a leaky flush valve in the boys'
bathroom or inspect the fire extinguish
ers on the school buses.
“The job can be a handful, like any
job," he says, striding down the hallway at
Windham Tech in size 107) work boots
and Rustler jeans that he bought on sale at
Wal-Mart. "Its a SSO million building and
it's my job to keep it safe. 1 just take it one
day at a time.”
At 3 pm. quitting time, he checks his
e-mail for last-minute work requests, hops
in his 1996 white CMC pickup truck and
drives three miles to his home in Windham,
Conn. (pop. 22,857).
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Bob Burns delivers textbooks at Windham
Technical High School in Willimantic, Conn.
Nationwide search
Finding the most common man among
nearly 300 million people was uncom
monly difficult for O'Keefe. “I thought at
first I could go to the Census Bureau and
someone could hit a few buttons and I'd
have a name," he says.
Instead, O'Keefe’s search turned into a
two-year journey that ttxik him from Keene,
N.H., to the Hawaiian island of Maui. Along
the way, he met dozens of colors ul characters
and distilled a profusion of statistics —from
the average home size to the average com
mute time—into 140 criteria that define the
average American.
“The biggest surprise was—Bob,"
O'Keefe says. The only person O’Keefe
found who matched all 140 criteria hap
pened to be someone that he knew from his
high school days. When O'Keefe attended
Edwin O. Smith l ligh School in Mansfield,
Conn. (pop. 20,720), Burns worked as a
custodian there.
Today, O’Keefe aspires to be like
Burns. “It's important to have balance in
your life, he says. (Continuedon page 13)
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