Emily Orsini, Managing Editor
Campus security is vital on any college campus, and Denison is no exception. Their duty is to serve, protect, and…grill hot dogs?
Officer Joseph Hegenderfer (commonly referred to as “Campo Joe,”), a 71-year-old from Lancaster, is known not only for his ability to forge relationships with students, but is also commonly seen around campus with a spatula in hand.
“We found that it was a good way to interact with students. And in a positive way, rather than a negative way,” said Joe. “So we just built on that. Maybe it got too big, a couple of years ago. We were getting so many requests to grill hot dogs. It’s not real expensive to grill hot dogs, but there is a budget.”
Joe means this, literally. For the 2024-25 academic year, Denison’s campus security department grilled a shocking number of hot dogs.
“We cooked 2,993 hot dogs last year. I know, it was just short of 3,000.”
To grill numbers like these, going above and beyond isn’t a choice, it’s a requirement. For Joe, that extra effort isn’t just about serving food. It’s about creating moments that bring people together.
“I really like [grilling] at Trunk or Treat. I really like that event. It brings [the Granville] community and Denison together, but it also brings all the [campus] groups together. The sports teams are usually there, the fraternities, sororities… it’s a great event.”
But when the grill cools down and the uniform comes off, “Campo Joe” is simply Joe.
One of the people who knows that side of him best is his son, Bryce Hegenderfer, 40, from Urbana. He now works alongside him in campus security as a dispatcher.
“I know there’s one person that I can always count on to get the job done,” said Bryce. “I’m a dispatcher, so I’m sending people out on calls. He’s always quick to take the call and he’s enthusiastic about serving the students. It makes my job a lot easier.”
Outside of the job, Joe is a husband, a father and a grandfather- something he is very proud of.
“I have three grandkids. Maggie is 6 years old, Isaac is 3. Those are both my daughters’ kids. [Bryce’s] son, Arthur, is 9 months old.”
“Arthur loves him,” said Bryce. “We’ve noticed that if we’re out and Arthur sees someone with a mustache he’ll be like, ‘is that Grandpa?’”
Joe started working as a campus security officer in 2018, following up a 33 year career as a firefighter and deputy chief in Summit County, Colorado.
“My daughter and her husband moved here to Columbus, and then my son was going to move here also. So my wife and I followed,” said Joe. “I retired in 2018 from the fire department and was retired for three months before my wife and I decided I needed to go out and do something…I was on LinkedIn and saw that Denison was looking for a campus safety officer.”
Bryce remembers growing up in Colorado, where his father’s work as a firefighter shaped many of his earliest memories.
“I spent a lot of time at the fire department,” said Bryce. “It was really cool to be able to grow up around the fire trucks and interacting with the firefighters. We’d hang out in their basement where they had their breakroom. It was a lot of fun.”
When asked to share a story about Joe, Bryce’s face lit up.
“The highways going up through the mountains can be pretty dangerous. So a lot of times more so than fire they were dealing with car wrecks. Helping people out with the ice, that kind of thing,” Hegenderfer said.
“And one time, there were a lot of cars sliding around because [of the ice], and a runaway semi is just barreling at him. He can’t jump to either side, so he just ducked down and laid on the street as it went over him. It knocked his glasses off, and he was okay after that. That’s the coolest story I know.”
For Joe, his fondest memories of their time in Colorado are a little less life threatening, and more family-oriented.
“I grew up playing baseball. So when I got older and I wasn’t playing baseball, I played softball. I had a team in Colorado. One of the things I miss most from Colorado is the softball team.”
“We’d play a couple nights a week. My family was on the team, our friends were on the team. When we first started, we made other teams feel good about themselves,” said Joe with a laugh. “But as we got more people that enjoyed it we won a championship. We were first or second a couple of times.”
Those experiences reinforced something Joe still believes today: relationships matter.
“The safety officers need to have good relationships with the students,” said Joe. “The better relationships they have, the easier it makes their job. So I really enjoy [my] relationships with the students. There’s a couple of students I met my first year working here, and I still text them.”
According to Denison’s Campus Safety website, officers are responsible for maintaining safety while also building relationships with students and the surrounding community.
That balance is something Joe embodies, both behind the grill or behind the wheel of a campus safety car.
When asked about how he hopes to be perceived after he retires from Denison, a smile crept onto his face.
“My fondest memory [at Denison] will be the relationships with the people. Then I just hope that they’ll remember me the same.”