The man wearing a “Made in Akron” T-shirt didn’t know where he was.
Three engineers from the Bridgestone Americas Technical Center campus found him sprawled across the devil strip near the entrance to Firestone Park during their daily lunchtime walk Oct. 17.
Did a car hit him? They didn’t see any blood.
The man’s eyes were silver-looking and rolled back into his head. Maybe he was having a seizure or overdosing on drugs.
A bright blue car was parked haphazardly on the side of South Firestone Boulevard and the driver, a woman, called 911.
“Please, just stay with me,” the disoriented man on the sidewalk told the strangers hovering over him.
At home in Firestone Park
Some say retired schoolteacher June Rietz has the prettiest garden in Firestone Park.
The tulips in her front yard pop pink, yellow, red in spring, with other flowers carefully orchestrated to blossom so her beds are always filled with color until winter approaches.
But during an October dry spell, Rietz, 88, was wrestling with a garden hose in her front yard, tripped and fell head first to the ground, breaking her arm.
Her children — five of six are still living, along with a foster daughter — took turns staying with her while she healed. John Rietz, her second youngest, drove in from Ann Arbor, Mich, five weeks ago.
He didn’t mind. John Rietz, 56, still pines for his hometown.
After graduating from Archbishop Hoban High School, he stayed close to Akron, earning both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Kent State University before venturing north in 1987 to the University of Michigan, where he earned a Ph.D.., married a Michigander and landed a job teaching English at Henry Ford College.
Even now, he tells people he has two homes — one in Ann Arbor and a second in Akron.
On Oct. 17, after a couple of days with his mom, John Rietz decided go for a run through his old Firestone Park neighborhood. He had been trying to build up his stamina since May.
Up and running
John Rietz stopped running a couple of years before after having chest pain. A doctor in Michigan gave him a stress test at the time and Rietz said he failed. But a second test was ambiguous and Rietz left that doctor thinking he had nothing but a painful rib.
When he started running again in May, the pain returned, but he figured he was just out of shape.
He wasn’t worried about his health, but sometimes he did wonder what would happen if he was hit by a car. He didn’t carry ID on his runs, so how would anyone know who he was?
In late September, Rietz ordered dog tags — personalized with his name and wife’s mobile phone number — to wear when he ran.
Just after 11:30 a.m. Oct. 17, Rietz slipped on the dog tags and left his mom’s house, which sits along a part of South Firestone Boulevard that, when seen from the air, makes up the shape of the shield that once represented Firestone Tire& Rubber Co.
Harvey Firestone created the neighborhood of tree-lined streets for his employees in 1916 during Akron’s rubber boom.
Rietz ran about two blocks before feeling lightheaded.
Much of what happened next is a blur.
A hub of activity
Employees began moving into Bridgestone Americas Technical Center — part of the Japanese company that now owns the Firestone brand — during the coldest months of 2012. But the Firestone Park neighborhood didn’t see them much until the weather started to warm.
At lunchtime, scores of Bridgestone employees emerge onto the surrounding streets to walk, their identification tags swaying from lanyards around their necks.
On Oct. 17, engineers Paul Zakelj, Anoop Varghese and Karl Neimes left the Bridgestone campus about 11:30 walking east along South Firestone Boulevard where they found a disoriented man flat on his back.
A woman in a blue car had seen the man first, stopped and called 911. But she refused to get out of her vehicle because she had no idea what was going on.
So it was up to the three engineers to figure out what happened.
At first, the man didn’t know where he was or how he got there. But within minutes, he started remembering.
He had been running. His was from Michigan. His name was John Rietz.
Rietz tugged at the dog tags around his neck to show the engineers the information he wore. He was also able to tell them his mother’s address.
As Rietz shared information, Zakelj and Varghese worked with the woman in her car to relay information to a 911 dispatcher.
Neimes, meanwhile, went to June Rietz’s door and told her that her son had collapsed.
“Oh, my gosh,” June Rietz responded.
At 88, she was preparing for her own death.
She still hosts weekly Bible study and volunteers another day each week at the Peter Maurin Center on South Main — which provides meals, services and necessities to the homeless and poor around Summit Lake — but life is slowing down.
On the corner of a desk, she keeps a list of things her children need to do after she dies, along with a stack of papers they’ll be looking for. She also, at her daughter’s request, made a list of 21 organizations she had been involved with over her life in Akron, including Solace, a grief counseling group she and her late husband, Leslie, ran for 27 years at St. Paul Catholic Church after one of their sons took his own life.
June Rietz was ready to leave this world, but she hadn’t considered the possibility of losing another child.
Emergency room
Within minutes of the call to 911, an ambulance arrived on South Firestone Boulevard and took John Rietz to Summa Akron City Hospital.
An EKG and blood tests in the emergency room quickly revealed he was having heart trouble, but it would take a cardiac catheterization to find out what was wrong.
Until about four or five years ago, doctors would have gone through the femoral artery in Rietz’s groin, a procedure that requires patients to lay flat for 24 hours afterward and, even then, carries a risk of bleeding complications.
But technology has advanced. Dr. William B. Bauman, who has been with City Hospital since 1979, and a team in the cath lab turned instead to Rietz’s wrist.
They inserted a tiny catheter through the radial artery in Rietz’s wrist, threading it through his arm and into his heart and its chambers.
There, Bauman discovered a major blockage in the main artery running down the front of Rietz’s heart called the left anterior descending artery, commonly referred to as “the widow maker.” A heart attack caused by a blockage in this artery often causes irreparable damage to the heart or sudden death.
Rietz was lucky.
An arrhythmia caused him to collapse on the sidewalk, Bauman said, and then Rietz’s heart spontaneously went back to normal.
But his widow maker loomed.
If strangers wouldn’t have helped Rietz get medical help, Bauman said he could have died.
During the catheterization, Bauman inserted two stents to reopen blood flow. The next day, he inserted a third stent into a different cardiac artery.
Rietz and his wife, Rachel — who rushed to Ohio with the couple’s two children, Sam, 9, and Charlie, 13 — were amazed.
Two days after he collapsed, Rietz was released from the hospital.
Many thanks
Paul Zakelj, Anoop Varghese and two other engineers from the Bridgestone campus were out for their daily walk on Thursday, Oct. 20, in Firestone Park when they saw a couple and a boy coming toward them.
“Were you guys out here walking Monday?” the woman asked.
Zakelj’s face lit up and he pointed. It was the man they found laying on the sidewalk three days earlier.
Zakelj usually had trouble remembering names, but this man’s name seemed to be emblazoned in his memory from looking at the dog tag he wore around his neck: John Rietz.
The engineers had wondered what happened to Rietz and were stunned to find him walking on the same sidewalk where he collapsed three days earlier.
John Rietz told them about the widow maker and the stents. When he was released from the hospital, he, his wife and one of his sons decided to go looking for the strangers who helped him, guessing correctly that they walked the neighborhood daily.
“We wanted to say thank you,” John Rietz said through tears.
Later that day, Zakelj, Varghese and Karl Neimes — who hadn’t taken a walk that day — gathered at June Rietz’s house.
They told the 88-year-old widow they always notice her home when they walked because of its colorful gardens.
June Rietz told them she always noticed the Bridgestone workers passing by her front windows and never expected they would one day help save her son, who, at 56, shouldn’t die before his mother.
The engineers, with their work badges hanging from lanyards, smiled and posed for pictures with John Rietz.
They insisted they did nothing special. But the Rietz family disagrees.
On Thanksgiving eve, John Rietz’s family and friends in Michigan hosted a party to give thanks for his survival.
There will be a second Thanksgiving party Saturday at June Rietz’s house. All the engineers are invited.
“It’s going to be the mirror image of a funeral for the guy found on the sidewalk,” John Rietz said.
Some people may get depressed after a major medical crisis, he said.
“But not me,” he said. “It turns out I’m alive and I’m standing here and I have something to be very thankful for on this Thanksgiving.”
Amanda Garrett can be reached at 330-996-3725 or agarrett@thebeaconjournal.com.