From killer kites to home-sliced cuts of meat, professor Jason McConnell is far from an ordinary professor.
McConnell, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science and his juris doctorate from the University of Wyoming, is a longtime Laramie resident. After following in his parents’ footsteps to attend UW as a transfer student from Texas, McConnell began teaching lower level political science courses as a graduate student.
Since his teaching assistant days, McConnell has grown into a fixture within the political science program and is known among his students for his dynamic, engaging lecture style.
Less well known, however, are his unusual hobbies outside of class. Currently, McConnell says he’s taken to cutting his own meat.
“Since I grew up in the South, I really like barbeque, so I’ve got a smoker and all sorts of things like that … but I got into doing other stuff like making lunch meat,” said McConnell. “It’s fun, and odd. And after that, I got into making sausage. It’s one of those random things that I do that people are like ‘Wait, what are you talking about?’”
McConnell’s more recent hobby of making lunchmeat, sausage and even pastrami is far safer than one of his previous hobbies: flying high-performance kites. He said that he took up the hobby because “the wind blows here most of the time so I might as well make use of it.” Until, that is, kite flying took a dangerous turn.
“I got very very close to getting hurt pretty bad and had to kind of back off of that. And that’s how I got into doing this other stuff. You know your hobby gets kind of bad when a meat slicer is actually safer than flying a kite,” McConnell said.
The incident apparently involved a high-tech kite roughly the side of the hood of a car, which caught a severe gust of wind while McConnell was taking a phone call and dragged him nearly the length of a football field before he was able to tackle it.
“I looked back at where my gear was … it dragged me about 85 yards. So, I had mud and dirt and grass and all kinds of stuff … It was in my pants, it was in my shoes, it was down my shirt, it was in the pockets of my parka. I was a wreck. And I went home and started, like, shopping for protective gear — like a helmet and knee and elbow pads and that kind of stuff — and I’m sitting there about to pull the trigger to order this stuff online, and I had like a moment of clarity.”
Having been inspired to find new hobbies, McConnell put aside the more dangerous aspects of his kite-flying hobby, but still keeps a few smaller ones around. Unfazed by the Laramie wind’s attempts to get rid of him, it sounds like professor McConnell will sticking around Laramie for the time being.
“I like Laramie, I like Wyoming,” McConnell said. “It suits me. It’s fun. It’s fun being here … As an institution UW’s big enough that there are a lot of opportunities for both students and faculty to do all sorts of things, but that being said, our school and our community are small enough that it’s easy to get to know people. I’m sure I’m not the only one who sees people I know nearly every place I go in town. That makes it fun.”
