I started rolling with this story while I was on my city desk shift, but it took a few days to hammer out. All I knew was that this kid, Curtis Bollinger, won an anvil shooting competition in Farmington the past weekend. After talking to Jonathan about a photo op, he showed me a story we'd done in 1998 of another anvil shooting champ, Mark Bollinger. Could this really be a father-son duo!? I had to find out. So in the hopes that Curtis was an MU student, I looked up his name in the online directory, found a Curtis Bollinger, and shot him an email. I mean, who checks their student email over the summer, right? But as I was leaving the band rehearsal, I got a call from a very nervous sounding kid saying yes, he was the anvil shooting champion and yes, his dad was Mark Bollinger and taught him everything he knows.
I definitely wanted to speak to both of them, but I could also tell that Curtis was a clam and I wasn't going to get much out of him one-on-one. So I set up a time to come to his house and meet with him and his dad at the same time. His mom was there too, which was an added bonus because she's a little firecracker. As I'd expected, Curtis was pretty shy, but his parents helped pull him out of his shell and we all sat around the kitchen table and laughed and talked like old friends. The longest part of the story process was transcribing our longwinded conversation, and the most difficult parts were leaving out all of the funny anecdotes I wanted to use and always coming back to Curtis. But the easy part was actually writing it, because they basically did all the work for me. They were a very quirky, friendly family and I had a great afternoon talking with them.
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