It was a few days before Christmas, and Paul Goetchius looked like a dad picking up his daughter from college — greeting the smiling young woman outside the dorm, tossing her backpack into his SUV, then easing out from the line of parked cars onto the snow-covered interstate.
The next day, he did the same thing at a different college — and he did it again the next day, and the next day, and the next. By the time the holiday arrived, he’d put more than 1,000 miles on his bronze Chevy Tahoe, just bringing kids home from college.
They weren’t even his kids.
In the past eight years, Goetchius, 76, a retired environmental toxicologist from Syracuse, N.Y., has logged a jaw-dropping 64,368 miles driving low-income college students to and from universities all around his state for holidays, spring break, summer break and more.
That’s equivalent to driving around the globe about two and a half times.
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