Below is the OCR text representation for this newspapers page.

pan Feature Story *&&&** - msi - , , ; : */ *f TBBHHBHMHBg '*' If , ..• HTH •>, >■ rwl r IBLi 1 m : W k Like 63 percent of Americans, Bob Burns says he’s living the American dream. HP nil nary ■ ITr m » Imß 1 M ■ i®w=! “ H H H H / j / /^ 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). W - HuNfe. ■ 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) Page 10 • w w w.a mericanprofile.com