​Like a Hollywood stuntman, Fred Gissendaner planted a metal pole in the corner of the old Buchtel High School gymnasium, grabbed a rafter as he ascended and then pulled himself up onto a balcony.Walt Balteric, Buchtel’s track and field coach at the time, watched the scene unfold in the spring of 1960 and immediately declared Gissendaner would be a pole vaulter.Gissendaner may have been even more impressive on the football field. He starred for Buchtel in both sports, parlaying his versatility into a track and football scholarship at Kent State University, where he still holds records as a punt returner.Watch Ohio High School Football Live on NFHS Network all yearThe 83-year-old Gissendaner later became a notable KSU assistant football coach and a high school principal. He also overcame tragedy to raise two children, daughter Lorrie Flowers, a registered nurse in Cincinnati, and son Lee Gissendaner, the Green Bay Packers’ senior player personnel executive and director of pro scouting.Fred Gissendaner will be inducted into the Akron Public Schools Athletics Hall of Fame during a banquet on Oct. 19 at Guy’s Party Center in Akron.With Gissendaner’s Buchtel glory days returning to the forefront, he said he has rediscovered feats he accomplished six decades ago and finds himself awestruck by the “tremendous honor” of entering the APS Athletics HOF in its fifth year of existence.“It just set off a lot of memories that I had forgotten,” Gissendaner said, “and it was a good feeling.”Fred Gissendaner’s Akron Buchtel High School and Kent State University sports legacyBorn in Ozark, Alabama, Gissendaner arrived in Northeast Ohio when he was roughly 2 years old and grew up in Barberton. In 1959, his family moved to Akron toward the end of his ninth-grade year at U.L. Light Junior High School in Barberton. Back then, high school spanned 10th through 12th grade, and Gissendaner spent those years at Buchtel.Gissendaner was a three-time City Series champion, a two-time district champ and a two-time state meet qualifier in pole vault. He also ran relays and sprints and competed in high jump. He helped Buchtel win two City Series (1960-61) and two district (1961-62) team titles. He was a member of Buchtel’s 880-yard district champion relay team in 1962.Pole vault is a dangerous event. It was even more treacherous in Gissendaner’s heyday.A 1962 Buchtel graduate, Gissendaner used a 14-foot metal pole, nothing like modern equipment made of fiberglass or carbon fiber. The metal pole didn’t help propel Gissendaner over the bar the way a flexible fiberglass pole would have. He recalls some of his opponents at state meets using fiberglass poles. When Gissendaner competed at Kent State, he finally used a fiberglass pole and learned the extent of the disadvantage he had encountered with a metal pole at Buchtel.“It was a whole different technique that you used,” he said.Another difference between then and now: Gissendaner would land on a pile