Construction worker honors mom at Crew Stadium
Dennis Herman found himself in a similar place nearly a decade earlier and felt the same conviction.
A loved one had died and needed a special memorial.
This time, it was his mom, Paula Marks, who passed away this month at age 67 while he was working as a crane operator for Maxim Crane Works. Herman, of Heath, was in the middle of a two-week stretch working on the new Crew Stadium Downtown – installing exterior panels and laying steel for a scoreboard – when he got the news.
Before he raised the final exterior panel on the north end of the stadium, Herman wanted to give her the same honor that he had for his father back in 2013 when he was working on the James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute at Ohio State University: to be remembered somewhere permanently.
So he took a Sharpie and wrote his own name and his mother’s on the inside of the panel: “Dennis Herman / Paula Marks, RIP.”
“Both my parents loved me, supported me and all that stuff, and it’s a lasting point of me saying I’ll never forget,” Herman said.
When Herman was working on the hospital at Ohio State, his father was dying of lung cancer. As a tribute, the younger Herman – who was affectionately called “Little D” while his father, who had the same name, went by “Big D” – wrote his dad’s name on a steel beam before it went into place.
It’s not uncommon for construction workers to write messages on the ceremonial final steel beam of a project, but Herman made these decisions on a whim. He decided he wasn’t going to leave these projects without his parents being a part of them somehow.
“You’re never forgotten,” he said. “Her name will always be there at the Crew stadium. My dad’s name will always be at the (hospital).”
David Brown, project executive for Turner Construction, the company leading the stadium project, was moved by the act.
“I think it’s pretty empowering,” he said. “When you leave a memory like that, it’s going to bring great memories back to you right away.”
Herman, a former Marine, began operating cranes in 2003. His attraction to big projects like the cancer hospital and the new stadium comes from a sense of pride in his work that he learned from his mother, he said.
Marks spent most of her life training caseworkers for the state in Stark County, where most of Herman’s family lives. She found it gratifying to help others, which is exactly what Herman remembers his mother doing when he spent nearly three years in Iraq off and on as a military contractor beginning in 2008.
“My mom ... was a very large presence, a very outspoken person,” Herman said. “When I went to Iraq, all my kids were young, and she stepped in.”
Mark’s health worsened two years ago due to a complication from a hernia surgery that occurred more than 10 years ago, Herman said. In and out of the hospital several times over the past two years, Marks lived with her daughter. Herman continued to see her during the pandemic and noticed her mental acuity slipping.
A month before her death on March 3, Marks moved into a Pataskala nursing home before eventually making her way to Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center, where she died.
“She was a hell of a force, hell of a woman,” Herman said.
Herman isn’t sure the next time he’ll make it down to the new stadium where he memorialized his mother. His kids are more interested in soccer than he is, but he has considered buying season tickets for them or going to a couple of games each year once the new stadium opens in July.
He knows his mother will be there, too.
“I’m glad I didn’t second guess doing what I do because, like I said, it’s letting them know from me that there’s nothing I could ever do to repay what they have done and sacrificed for me,” Herman said. jmyers@dispatch.com @_jcmyers