WELLS CROSSING, Ohio — The treasurer of the Wells Crossing High School Booster Club said Monday that he is “an equal opportunity auditor” after completing a 31-day examination of the marching band, the garden club, and the senior choir, and then declined to examine the only account he controls, citing a conflict of interest.
“I’m an equal opportunity auditor. I audit everyone I don’t trust, and I trust myself,” said Ron Tisdale, 63, a retired parts counter manager, standing in the school gym with a clipboard and a lanyard he had laminated himself. “I’d audit myself, but that would be a conflict of interest. I can’t be objective about me. I’ve tried.”
The audit, which began Sept. 12, was commissioned after Tisdale noticed that the band’s uniform fund held $212, which he described as “a number that doesn’t look right.” He said he did not know what the right number was. “I just know that when a number is that small, somebody has been taking money out of it.”
Investigators, a team made up of Tisdale and his cousin Lyle, a self-described forensic accountant who sells insurance, interviewed 14 volunteers and one 10-year-old. The 10-year-old, Maddie Fowler, was asked at a bake sale to itemize the brownies. “I told him they were brownies,” said Maddie. “He said, ‘That’s what they all say.’”
The investigators examined the garden club’s mulch purchases, which Tisdale said “show a pattern.” He declined to say what the pattern was. “I don’t trust a bake sale,” he said. “Nobody sells that many brownies honestly.” The choir’s robes were inspected for “irregularities,” and 11 of them were taken into evidence for three weeks.
The audit found nothing missing. The band’s uniform fund held exactly what its records said it held. The garden club’s mulch was in the garden. Tisdale said the findings were “what you’d expect from people who know they’re being watched.”
He said the audit’s one major discovery was a folding table. “The Booster Club has 14 folding tables. We were supposed to have 15. I found number 15 in the basement of the Lutherans,” Tisdale said. “Do you know how it got there? Nobody does. I asked. Nobody knew. That’s how you know.”
A church volunteer said the table had been lent to the Lutherans for a funeral luncheon in 2022 and was returned twice, each time to the wrong door. Tisdale said that explanation “sounds exactly like what someone would say.”
The audit has cost the club $1,940, including $800 for Lyle’s consulting, $640 for a laminator, and $500 for what the invoice lists as “supplies.” The club’s total annual budget is $3,300. Tisdale said the expense was “an investment in accountability,” adding that it would “pay for itself over time, through deterrence.”
The club’s books, obtained by the Reporter, include a line on page 6 labeled “Misc. (Ron),” totaling $4,100 over three years. Asked what it covered, Tisdale said it was “miscellaneous.” Asked whether he would audit it, he said he could not, because he is the signatory, the preparer, and the “beneficiary of the miscellany.”
“A line like that is exactly why we need an audit,” Tisdale said. “Of whoever wrote it. I’d look into it myself, but it’s a conflict. So I’m going to wait until spring, when I’m no longer the treasurer, and then I’ll look into it as a private citizen with a lot of questions.”
Tisdale’s term as treasurer runs through 2031.
Tisdale’s strongest objections were reserved for a $1,500 loan the club made in March to the Lutheran youth group, which is led by Kevin “Sparkles” Dunmore, 44, a former children’s birthday clown. “That money is gone. You give a clown $1,500 and you’ll never see a dime of it,” Tisdale said. “Look at him. He’s a performer. Performers can’t be trusted with money. They’re not in it for the money. They’re in it for the balloons.”
Tisdale said the loan had been made “against my wishes,” though the minutes show he moved it, seconded it, and described it as “the best idea since the tables.”
The club’s own president, Rex Grumpf, 79, is a former mall magician whose act, “Grumpf’s Grand Illusions,” closed in 2009 after 11 performances. Records show the club has paid Grumpf $2,300 since 2023 for “stage presence consultation,” $640 for capes, and $310 for a “rope, 40 ft.” Tisdale has not audited these items. Asked why, he said Grumpf “is different.”
“Rex is a businessman,” Tisdale said, adjusting a red cap that read “MAKE THE BOOSTERS GREAT AGAIN.” “He’s a showman, yes, but he’s a businessman. When Rex vanishes something, it’s an investment. When the clown does it, it’s theft.” Asked what Grumpf had vanished, Tisdale said “the building fund,” then added, “Temporarily. For the club.”
Grumpf first became club president in 2017. He was replaced in 2021 by a retired dentist, and returned to the office last year after what he describes as “the greatest comeback in the history of boosters, maybe ever.” He refers to his predecessor only as “the dentist.”
Since returning, Grumpf has renamed the concession stand the Grumpf Grill, the scoreboard the Grumpf Board, and the visitors’ bleachers the Grumpf Annex. The club van now reads GRUMPF in gold vinyl letters 14 inches tall, above the much smaller words “Wells Crossing Boosters.” When the school board declined his request to rename the school, he had a decal applied to the parking lot sign anyway. The board has asked him to remove it. He said the board “has been very unfair to me, more unfair than any booster president in history.”
He has also undertaken two building projects. The first is a “ballroom,” a heated tent attached to the Grumpf Grill, with a $4,000 chandelier he said was “donated by friends,” whom club records identify as the three vendors who hold the stadium’s nacho, pretzel, and foam-finger contracts. The second is an arch over the parking lot entrance. It is 25 feet tall, which Grumpf noted is “taller than the school, which nobody thought was possible.”
Grumpf says his 2009 magic show “sold out every performance.” The mall’s records show an average attendance of nine. He said the club’s spring fish fry drew “the biggest crowd in the history of fish.” The fire marshal counted 140.
In 2017, Grumpf told members he would be “far too busy for mini golf.” Club records show 61 visits since then to Grumpf Putt, an 18-hole miniature golf course he owns behind the Dairy Barn on Route 9. The club has been billed $35 per visit for “security,” which a parent volunteer said consists of two dads standing near the windmill.
This summer, Grumpf imposed a 25 percent “visitor fee” on casseroles brought to the joint potluck by the Lutherans, which he said would “make them pay.” Club treasury records show the fee was paid by Wells Crossing families, who bought the Lutherans’ casseroles at the door. He has nominated himself for the Wells Crossing Rotary’s Good Neighbor Award for “ending seven feuds.” The Rotary said four of the seven feuds never took place.
Last month, every club member received a $9 “concession rebate” check, drawn from the concession fund, along with a two-page letter signed in gold marker. The letter thanked members for “your tremendous support” and closed, “Many people are saying this is the best booster club in the country. I say that too.”
Grumpf calls the clown “Low-Balloon Kevin.” Asked about the “stage presence” payments, he said he would “love to show the receipts, and I will, beautiful receipts,” but that he could not do so at present “because I am under audit.” Asked by whom, he said, “By Ron. And Ron is very thorough. Ron may never finish.”
Asked to explain the difference between the two entertainers, Tisdale said that Dunmore “wears a big nose” and Grumpf “wears a cape,” and that “it’s a different kind of person.”
Dr. Marjorie Teller, director of the Center for Measured Outcomes, said she had reviewed 90 audits of volunteer organizations. “In 88, the person who called for the audit was found to have the largest unexplained line,” she said. “In the other two, he had also called for an audit of the audit.” Dr. Chad Brickhouse of the Institute for Common Sense said the Institute “supports transparency in every account except the one in question,” and then asked the Reporter not to follow up.
Supporters of Tisdale, who wear shirts reading “AUDIT EVERYONE,” said they were satisfied. “Ron is only auditing the guilty,” said Joanne Pike, 71. “That’s why he starts with the band.”
At press time, Tisdale was en route to the middle school’s lost-and-found, which he said “has never once been audited.”