The Day the Hammer Dropped
By William Downer
Ballard High School, Louisville

“MC Hammer,” “Ubah Slayer,” “Butterfingers,” “Thor.”
Aren’t nicknames fun?
Not for Max McGehee, they aren’t. Not for the Governor’s Scholar who dropped a hammer on the face of Ubah Adan, the mother of the family for whom Habitat was building a house on the West Side of Louisville.
For Max McGehee, those nicknames evoke memories of a brief but painfully embarrassing moment in his young life.
“I was hammering some vertical planks and I was on the last board, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I’m tired,’ and then the hammer slipped out of my hand and the flat end hit Ubah in the nose,” Max said.
Very few people actually witnessed the hammer falling and striking Ubah. But some remember the blood, and there was apparently enough of it to warrant a call to the Emergency Medical Service. Of course the rumors, rumors flew around campus faster than a falling hammer. Talk of a cracked skull, a broken nose, a black eye, and an emergency room run as well as other, equally misleading rumors were waiting for Max when he arrived at Bellarmine University, the host campus for this year’s Governor’s Scholars Program.
“It wasn’t as bad as people thought,” Max said, but that didn’t make him feel much better about it.
Max, a rising senior at Dixie Heights High School in Kenton County, is one of 360 scholars at Bellarmine for a five-week residency program to engage them in academic, leadership and public service activities. This year’s public service, building a Habitat for Humanity house, was the biggest ever, and scholars set about the task with feverish dedication, despite the manual labor and record-breaking heat wave.

Max McGehee poses with Ubah Adan

GSP officials experienced some temporary shock, at first hearing rumors that a scholar had been hurt, and then getting the more accurate but equally dismaying news that Ubah had been injured. They breathed a sigh of relief when they learned that the injury amounted to a bloody nose.
Max too, felt relief. Relief that Ubah had no hard feelings and held no grudge over the accident, because she knew that it was just that. An accident.
“She was back the very next day,” said Chuck Sgro, Habitat’s team leader at the worksite, although Ubah was sporting a black eye. “She kept saying she was okay, and she came back to work hoping to see Max.”
“It definitely gave me some comfort, knowing the she forgave me immediately,” Max said. “It made it much easier to forgive myself.”