Encore December 2014

Helping in Haiti: International Child Care

December 2014

Weird & wonderful food gifts

Vocal jazz ensemble Four Corners

‘The Kalamazoo Lady’ Patricia Fenn

Southwest Michigan’s Magazine

Timber Ridge

Ski Patrol They’re dedicated, well-trained and all-volunteer

“Four months ago, I had anterior hip replacement surgery at Bronson Methodist Hospital. And it was the best thing I ever did. I put off the surgery for three years — until I could hardly walk at all.

Thanks to Bronson, I started feeling better before anything was even scheduled. My doctor did a great job of explaining what to expect and what would be done. My pain was minimal and I could move around better than I ever expected. In just four weeks, I was back doing the things I used to do — camping, walking the dog, golfing with my buddies and so on. The best testament to my outcome: forgetting that I ever had a hip problem. And for that, I’m so thankful.”

Don Osterhout, Portage, Michigan, May 17, 2014

When one person shares their positivity, we all share in it.

To share how Bronson Positivity has impacted your life, or to watch a video of Don’s story, visit bronsonpositivity.com.

share

bronsonpositivity.com

We believe in the

Helping in Haiti: International Child Care

power of play

Weird & wonderful food gifts

Vocal jazz ensemble Four Corners

December 2014

‘The Kalamazoo Lady’ Patricia Fenn

Southwest Michigan’s Magazine

Helping children and families with life’s challenges

• Play Therapy • Neurofeedback • Parenting and School Issue Consultations

Center for Change & Growth, PLC 3315 Greenleaf Blvd Kalamazoo • (269) 657-5800

www.playtherapytoday.com

Timber Ridge

Ski Patrol

Dr. Susan M. Carter

They’re dedicated, well-trained and all-volunteer

Child & Family Psychologist

Dr. Watson, CCG

Canine Play Therapy Assistant

Publisher

encore publications, inc.

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Designer

Reservations Appreciated 375-3650

Fresh Fish Slow Roasted Prime Rib

Editor

marie lee

alexis stubelt

Staff Writer

tiffany fitzgerald

Photographers

Dinner from 5:00pm daily

erik holladay, derek ketchum, john lacko, brian powers, kurt todas

RESTAURANT & TAVERN

Copy Editor/Poetry Editor

Visit our website at www.greatlakesshippingco.com

margaret deritter

Conveniently located at 4525 West KL Ave, east of Drake Road

Contributing Writers

kit almy, margaret deritter, robert m. weir

Contributing Poets

bonnie jo campbell, danna ephland

Advertising Sales krieg lee celeste statler kurt todas

Encore Magazine is published 12 times yearly. Copyright 2014, Encore Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Editorial, circulation and advertising correspondence should be sent to:

www.encorekalamazoo.com 117 W. Cedar St. Suite A Kalamazoo, MI 49007 Telephone: (269) 383-4433 Fax: (269) 383-9767 Email: Publisher@encorekalamazoo.com

Great flavor comes from deep roots.

The staff at Encore welcomes written comment from readers, and articles and poems for submission with no obligation to print or return them. To learn more about us or to comment, you may visit www.encorekalamazoo. com. Encore subscription rates: one year $36, two years $70. Current single issue and newsstand $4, $10 by mail.

Back issues $6, $12 by mail. Advertising rates on request.

Closing date for space is 28 days prior to publication date.

Final date for print-ready copy is 21 days prior to publication date.

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4 | Encore DECEMBER 2014

© Bell's Brewery, Inc., Comstock, MI

since 1985

CONTENTS

December

2014

FEATURES Timber Ridge Ski Patrol

24

New Views of Haiti

20

The all-volunteer corps trains hard to keep slopes safe

Keith Mumma and the ICC help others see Haiti through the lens of compassion

Four Corners

Vocal jazz quartet is making itself heard

34

DEPARTMENTS 6 Contributors

Up Front 8 First Things — What’s hip and happening in SW 10

Michigan Light ‘Em Up — Kalamazoo Candle Co.’s wares are both historic and handmade

12

Good Works

Resounding Success — Borgess staffers make beautiful music in hospital-based choir

14 Enterprise

Wonder Makers — Firm develops tools and methods to clean up contaminants

19 Savor

Gotta Go Weird — When only the exotic and extreme is good enough for the foodie on your list

46 The Last Word

A 4-Wheeled Love Affair — Cars and the woman who loved them

ARTS

30 Patricia Fenn

’The Kalamazoo Lady’ is still creating at 83 32 Suzanne Siegel

Painter finds intersection of reality and imagination 38 Events of Note 41 Poetry

On the cover: Timber Ridge Ski Patrol members, from left, Karen Hunter, Marc Verkaik, Dave Shires and Jim Smith, tend to an injured skier on the slopes. Photo by Erik Holladay.

w w w.encorekalamazoo.com | 5

CONTRIBUTORS ENCORE

Kit Almy

When not writing poetry, creative nonfiction or articles for Encore, Kit works part-time at the Kalamazoo Public Library. “What I like best about writing for Encore is getting to meet so many of my Kalamazoo-area ‘neighbors’ and learning about their passions. The subjects of this month’s stories show that talent and accomplishment know no age limits. I was very impressed by the self-possession and insights of the young members of Four Corners, as well by Pat Fenn’s lifelong productivity and vitality.”

Margaret DeRitter

Margaret has been downhill skiing since she was 7 years old, starting out on wooden skis with cable bindings, wearing laceup boots and safety straps. “Wow, that makes me sound old,” she says. Now, 50 years later, she loves just stepping into her bindings and carving a turn almost effortlessly on shaped polyethylene skis. Margaret put her skiing skills to good use for our cover story, spending a day with the Timber Ridge Ski Patrol to get an inside look at the training, emergency care and camaraderie that are all part of the job. One of the people she met that day, supervisor Ken Young, is now her inspiration — he’s still skiing in his mid-80s.

Robert M. Weir

Robert is a writer, author, speaker, book editor and authors’ coach.

He is an advocate of world travel as a means to enmesh ourselves in diverse cultures and thus attain “peace through understanding.”

This concept is apropos for his article on Keith Mumma who, through his work with International Child Care and photography in Haiti, is helping others better understand and thus provide humanitarian aid to the people who live in that Caribbean nation. You can see more of Robert’s writing at www.robertmweir.com.

Employee engagement doesn’t come from a store… maybe, just maybe, it means something more…

Call us for your employee engagement and recruiting solutions 229 E. Michigan Ave, Suite 345 Kalamazoo 269.459.6060 www.HRMInnovationsllc.com 6 | Encore DECEMBER 2014

Marilyn and Clifford Pulley

Marilyn Pulley spent her whole life caring for others. But it was her husband, Clifford, who helped her realize she also needed to take care of herself. Marilyn was hesitant. She didn’t like going to the doctor. That’s where listening and compassion made all the difference.

At Borgess, she connected with a doctor she can trust. Now she can’t imagine going anywhere else.

Watch their incredible story and share your own at ThatsWhere.com

ThatsWhere.com A member of Ascension Health® w w w.encorekalamazoo.com | 7

up front encore

First Things Something Happy New Year’s Fest

Ring in 2015 with your friends and family at New Year’s Fest, an allages showcase of performing arts hosted by downtown Kalamazoo businesses and organizations.

The Kalamazoo Public Library, First United Methodist Church, the Radisson Plaza Hotel & Suites, the Epic Theatre, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts and many more organizations near Bronson Park open their doors to the public during New Year’s Fest to serve as venues for more than 70 family entertainment options.

This year, expect to see the Simon & Garfunkel tribute duo Old Friends, the country and Southern rock band North Country Flyers, the soul and R&B band Yolonda Lavender and Bedrock, and aerialist Laura Ernst among the many acts. And yes, Elvis and Frank Sinatra will be there, too (or at least facsimiles of them).

Festivities kick off at 5:30 p.m. Dec. 31 and end with a fireworks show at midnight.

Admission buttons are $5, if purchased before Dec. 31 at any Harding’s Marketplace, the Kalamazoo Public Library or other admission locations. Buttons are $10 if purchased the day of the festival. Children under 3 get free admission. For more information, including a complete list of the scheduled entertainment, visit NewYearsFest.com.

Something Delicious Grab-and-go Asian cuisine

Fans of Chinn Chinn, rejoice! You won’t have to wait in Mattawan anymore to enjoy the delicious Asian bistro cuisine the family-owned restaurant is famous for.

That’s because John Tsui, Chinn Chinn’s owner, opened Ziingo at 3830 W. Centre Ave. in Portage last month, and the new restaurant is focused specifically on getting delicious food to customers more quickly.

That’s great, since the only complaint many Chinn Chinn loyalists seem to have, at least in its more than 50 favorable Google reviews, is that the wait for a table or takeout at Chinn Chinn during peak hours is daunting.

As a small but popular restaurant, Chinn Chinn operates at full capacity, complete with long waits (sometimes hours) during dinner. In comparison, Ziingo operates as a build-it-yourself dining experience, like Chipotle or Qdoba, promising a much shorter wait for busy diners.

For more information, call (269) 459-1090.

8 | Encore DECEMBER 2014

Something Beautiful Life is a cabaret

What’s better on a chilly winter’s eve than

settling into a theater seat with coffee and desserts and taking in a cabaret?

This month Farmers Alley Theatre is staging And the World Goes ’Round, the second production in their cabaret series. An awardwinning production that has been an offBroadway hit since 1991, this musical revue features music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb. The show offers comic numbers, love songs and torch songs, including such hit tunes such as “All That Jazz,” “Maybe this Time” and “New York, New York.”

With the coffee and desserts and a traditional cabaret atmosphere to boot, it doesn’t get any sweeter than this.

And the World Goes ‘Round runs from Dec. 5—28; tickets are $34 to $36. To purchase tickets, visit FarmersAlleyTheatre.com/boxoffice.

Something Good Giving to those in need

’Tis the season to give – and give back. This December the Salvation Army of Kalamazoo offers its annual holiday assistance programs, including the Christmas Toy Shop, which allows locals the opportunity to offer time, goods and donations to support area families in need.

The Christmas Toy Shop, a free toy shop for parents unable to afford presents during the holiday season, serves more than 4,000 children a year. The shop is stocked by donations received during the Angel Tree Toy Drive. Volunteers collect toys and prep the shop for its three-day run, from 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m Dec. 17-19.

Qualifying families can select gifts for children under 16.

Want to help? You can assist the Toy Shop by placing a donation box in your business, donating toys to the drive or lending your strength to set up or break down the event.

For more information about the Christmas Toy Shop, the Angel Tree Toy Drive, visit TSAKalamazoo.org/kalamazoo/2014-holidayvolunteering.

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up front encore

Making Memories

Historic images fuel popularity of Kalamazoo Candle Co. I

f you ask Adam McFarlin which came first — the historic images on the lids of his handcrafted candles or the custom aromas of the candles inside — he’ll tell you it’s a symbiotic relationship.

Sometimes the aroma of the candle inspires the search for the perfect image, and sometimes the image inspires a search for the perfect smell.

“I found an image of brick layers on Edwards Street in 1884,” says the Kalamazoo Candle Co. owner. “I knew then I wanted to use the image on a candle and call it Men at Work. I couldn’t exactly have a candle that smelled like sweat so I came up with a musky cologne scent. It’s one of our best-sellers.”

McFarlin, who started the Kalamazoo Candle Co. a little more than a year ago, now sells his candles in more than 25 locations in the

greater Kalamazoo area. It’s a hobby that has become a permanent and important creative outlet for McFarlin, who works by day at the American Cancer Society as the senior manager of Relay for Life.

Interestingly, it was his former day job that provided the inspiration for his unique candle design: McFarlin, who used to work at ONEplace@KPL, a nonprofit support organization based at the Kalamazoo Public Library, would walk through the library’s Local History Room on his way to and from the office every day.

“As you can imagine, there were many horrible versions of the candle labels and packaging when I was trying to come up with a label,” he says. “But then, almost out of nowhere, when I was walking through the room in the library, I got the idea to use these old images of Kalamazoo on the labels of the candle.”

Brian Powers

Historic images of Kalamazoo adorn the lids of the handmade candles of the Kalamazoo Candle Co.

10 | Encore DECEMBER 2014

Brian Powers

McFarlin knew that Kalamazoo residents tend to be interested in their historical roots and that using historical images might be an approach that would work with his customers. As a result, his candles have a vintage look. Their silver tins are wrapped in burlap-colored paper with brown lettering and are topped with lids that feature the historic images.

“So far it’s been really fun,” McFarlin says, “especially at the farmers’ markets when people will stop, look at the images and tell me their memories of the different places.”

His products have become so popular that McFarlin has hired someone to help make the candles, which are crafted in small batches using natural soy wax. Each candle is hand-poured, and the candles burn cleaner than petroleum-based candles. McFarlin tries to buy materials and ingredients from local farmers and vendors as much as possible, including the soybeans he uses to make the wax and the stamps that adorn the gift bags.

The look and appeal of the candles have made them a popular gift option for those who want to give something uniquely Kalamazoo, McFarlin says. The most desired candle scent (rising above the popular Men at Work and White Tea and Ginger) is the sweet, citrusy I’ve Got a Gal. Apparently, having a Kalamazoo connection in the name helps too.

“It used to only be the second most popular candle when it was called Love Potion No. 9,” says McFarlin.

As his company grows, McFarlin hopes to start making larger candles than his current 8-ounce stock and to expand his market throughout Michigan. Right now he is focused on the holiday season, producing candles for retail partners such as the Kalamazoo Nature Center and The Gift Loft.

Adam McFarlin prepares a batch of candles in his workspace at the Park Trades Center.

He also will be on hand to sell the candles Dec. 6 at the Natural Health Center and Dec. 12 and 13 at the Kalamazoo Nature Center’s Local Art & Gift Fair.

To find a list of local distributors of Kalamazoo Candle Co. products or to buy the candles online, visit KalamazooCandle.com.

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good works ENCORE

Resounding Success

Borgess choir a melodic gift for members, audiences T

The Resounding Spirit Choir, made up of 40 Borgess employees, practices every week, gives public performances and visits various departments to sing to staff and patients. Members of the choir will also visit specific patients on request. This month the choir has two public performances planned — the Tree of Love Kickoff at 5:30 p.m. Dec. 4 and the Borgess Health 125th Anniversary Mass at 10:30 a.m. Dec. 8. Both will be held at Borgess’ Lawrence Education Center Auditorium, 1521 Gull Road.

Even with their former director having left, the choir hasn’t missed a note. Its new director is Sister Sue McCrery, who is also the spiritual care specialist for Mission Integration at Borgess Health. She is now shepherding the choir through its third year of performing and says she’s focused on continuing to develop concerts, health ministry events, singing for patients and visitors and more.

The Borgess Resounding Spirit Choir poses during a performance supporting Ministry With Community at Nazareth Center’s Holy Family Chapel in April 2014.

Courtesy

here isn’t a lot of wiggle room in the schedule of a typical hospital staff member — long weeks, odd hours and stressful work situations can make it impossible to break away, even for basic necessities like lunch and rest.

With the demands of such a schedule, it might be hard to find time for volunteering, self-care or even a hobby. But that’s not true for the members of the Resounding Spirit Choir at Borgess Medical Center, who manage to make time for all three when they participate in the choir.

“In fact, when one of the altos changed over to the night shift and she was pulling three days of 12-hour shifts a week, she still made sure to schedule herself so she could come to choir,” recalls Jeffrey Spenner, the choir’s former director, who left in September to enter the U.S. Army officer candidate school in Georgia. “She gets off work, goes and grabs coffee, comes to choir and then goes home and crashes.”

12 | Encore DECEMBER 2014

“It’s an exciting piece of my job to be able to work in music,” says McCrery, who has a background in music education, with a degree from Nazareth College in music and education, and has served as the music director for the St. Thomas More Catholic Parish in Kalamazoo. “It’s been great to help these medical professionals keep their spirits up.”

Many choir members who don’t already sing to patients and visitors on the floor of the hospital told McCrery that they would like to gain the confidence to do so more spontaneously, as an act of service and support. McCrery plans to focus on helping them do just that. The choir put together its first flash mob performance in October, and McCrery is looking to expand the choir practice times so more Borgess employees can participate — a central purpose of the choir since the beginning.

“Our members are doctors and nurses who have very difficult jobs, and they come

in week in and week out to rehearse. I can see it on their faces when they sing — they are rejuvenated through the process of learning music,” says Spenner, the former director.

When the choir started, it had fewer than a dozen members and the music was centered

Resounding Spirit Choir Take in the choir at two public performances this month: • Tree of Love Kickoff, 5:30 p.m. Dec. 4 • Borgess Health 125th Anniversary Mass, 10:30 a.m. Dec. 8 Both performances will be held at Borgess’ Lawrence Education Center Auditorium, 1521 Gull Road. on holiday carols sung in unison. Now the choir is working on five-part madrigals and pieces by Mozart and Bach, and McCrery says she plans to add more musical styles to the

repertoire and to ask instrumental musicians to join the group as well.

“I think it’s unique that a workplace like this would have a choir,” she says. “It really speaks to the fact that Borgess knows music heals.”

The popularity of the choir, both among the professionals who work at Borgess and with the public, is evidence of the very healing power of music that McCrery’s talking about. It’s why, even with busy schedules and stressful jobs, Borgess employees keep coming back.

“Dr. Robert Hill, the founder of this choir and the vice president of medical affairs at Borgess, not to mention one our finest tenors, pulled me aside one day last year and said, ‘You know, it amazes me that people keep showing up for this,’” says Spenner.

“And I told him that, in and of itself, speaks to how dedicated these people are and how important the choir really is.”

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Enterprise ENCORE

Born of Necessity

Wonder Makers has tools, methods to clean up contaminants

Derek Ketchum

T

he environmental health sector had just turned its attention to the dangers of asbestos when Kalamazoo-based environmental health company Wonder Makers was established in 1988.

Asbestos, a mix of six naturally occurring fibers combined with building materials like cement and fiber for use as a fire and heat retardant, was used for the better part of the 20th century in electrical and building insulation.

That was until the Environmental Protection Agency and other government agencies started taking the damaging health effects of asbestos seriously — regular exposure to asbestos causes the insidious lung disease mesothelioma. Asbestos’ use was limited in schools and home environments, and the EPA launched inspections to monitor levels of asbestos and instigate removal if necessary.

Michael Pinto, who owns Wonder Makers with his wife, Susan, worked with the

14 | Encore DECEMBER 2014

Michael Pinto shows one of the tools he helped to develop to extract asbestos samples.

Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration at that time and was one of the first EPA-approved asbestos testing instructors in the Midwest. Pinto was training inspectors how to test for asbestos levels in buildings and began to question the sample extraction method used at the time, which was to cut a small triangle-shaped piece out of insulation and scrape the piece into a film canister. It seemed wrong, Pinto says, because the asbestos would be going right into the face of the inspector as he or she scraped off the insulation.

The EPA soon thought so too and required samples to be taken at the end of an inspection, after the inspector had changed into a hazardous-materials suit. The solution worked for the EPA, but it didn’t satisfy Pinto.

“The EPA never seemed to think about the next step,” he says. “If the inspectors were contaminating themselves before, aren’t they

leaving behind a little trail of contaminating asbestos fibers throughout the whole building now?”

Each inspection might require 70 to 100 different samples, which is a lot of loose asbestos and a lot of chances to spread the asbestos around the buildings being inspected, ultimately affecting the people who live and work there, says Pinto. He wanted to find a better way — to take a sample without the need for a respirator and suit while allowing the environment to remain as clean as possible.

He decided he needed a core borer that could core a sample, keep the sample in the borer’s tube and, after insertion of the tube into a closed sleeve, allow the removal of the sample, eliminating human contact with the sample and the potential spread of asbestos. He called a lot of manufacturing and distributing companies and described what he was looking for, but to no avail.

“If I was a real entrepreneur, then I would have stopped calling after the fourth or fifth person told me, ‘No, we don’t have anything like that, but if you find it, let us know and we’d be happy to carry it,’” says Pinto. “But, no, I think I called 25 or 30 different people before it dawned on me that it wasn’t out there and it should be.”

That’s when the Pintos started Wonder Makers. Susan, a schoolteacher, had just quit her job to take care of the couple’s newborn, a boy with Down syndrome. The Pintos also had a toddler son as well and were living on a tight budget. Yet they took the plunge.

“With all those pressures?” jokes Michael.

“Perfect time to start a business.”

Turned out, it was. Michael had been writing for a trade publication and bargained for a full-page ad in return for staying on and writing six more articles. The ad hit while Susan reached out to lawyers, bankers and distributors. The phone started ringing off the hook. The Pintos began selling the core

borers out of their basement and continued until they purchased a facility on Lane Boulevard to house their company 25 years ago.

“Hundreds of thousands of those core borers ship out of this facility every year,” Michael says. “It literally revolutionized the industry, and it happened right here in Kalamazoo.”

Since that time, Wonder Makers has grown into a full-service environmental company that sells and rents testing equipment, analyzes test samples, provides training for using the equipment and taking samples, does product testing and conducts fieldwork and inspections.

Wonder Makers’ products and services are used for all types of environmental contaminants, including mold, lead, bacteria, asbestos and methamphetamine. Michael has written more than 200 articles and three textbooks on the field. And every day, Wonder Makers’ 15-member staff answers phone calls from desperate people looking for answers about their illnesses and indoor environments. It’s what keeps the Pintos’ passion for their work stoked, says Susan.

“A lot of times it’s been years for the people I talk to, years of suffering and talking to doctors,” she says. “Sometimes people are very emotional because they’ve just been through so much, and a lot of them have moved from one place to the next and gotten rid of all of their belongings because they know they’re contaminated but don’t know how to clean them.”

Wonder Makers has answers, says Susan, and the company continues researching, manufacturing, training and testing to make those answers more readily available.

“Sometimes I get frustrated because so much of what a person has gone through is unnecessary. They don’t always have to move or throw away everything they own,” says Susan. “We really need to get the word out, be able to market more efficiently and let people know that there are better solutions.”

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WINTER HOLIDAY BREAK

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Get out of the house and visit the Museum to partake of planetarium shows, demonstrations, and special Challenger Learning Center missions throughout the week.

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Musical Revue

Planetariums shows $3: The Little Star That Could (younger audiences) Daily at 1 p.m.

Space Park 360 (all ages) Daily at 2 p.m.

Special Challenger Learning Center Programs $3: Challenger Experience (all ages, but children under 12 must be accompanied by an adult) Daily at 1:30 p.m.

Mars Mini-Mission (ages 8 & up; children under 12 must be accompanied by an adult) Daily at 3 p.m.

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encore Savor

Weird and Wonderful

Fascinating food gifts that chefs and foodies will adore A

nyone with a chef or foodie on their holiday gift list knows they’re hard to shop for.

The poor souls who share a kitchen with a food connoisseur are used to cabinets chockfull of appliances for every purpose from coring a pineapple to milking an almond, and drawers stuffed with knifes, peelers, grinders and sharp things with seemingly no name or purpose.

While there may be no cure for the overloaded kitchen of a food snob (even giving away kitchen gadgets on the sly seems to backfire once a Thomas Keller recipe calls for it again), there is hope.

If you are going to outdo rival gifters (who will probably dolefully present something the cook already has) and ease the worries of the foodie’s cohabitants, you’ve got to give the gift of really weird food this holiday season. Not gross weird, like grub or sheep brain (not judging here, just clarifying), but obscure, hard-to-find and unusual food — the kind foodies love. Since part of the mystique of these culinary treasures is their origin, you’ll have to look beyond your usual shopping haunts to find them.

Xocopili spicy chocolate What would the world be without chocolate? Terribly sad. For the foodie or chef, the world of chocolate is so much broader than Cadbury versus Lindt. Fine chocolate classifications include cocoa solid content, cocoa butter quality, conching and more.

A chocolate certain to satisfy any foodie is the Xocopili 72 percent cocoa spicy dark chocolate pearls. This chocolate is from an original recipe created by Frédéric Bau, executive pastry chef at L’Ecole du Grand Chocolat Valrhona. We’re not sure what all that means since we eat Cadbury chocolate (if it’s good enough for the queen, it’s good enough for us), but we’re pretty sure it’s something impressive, especially when pronounced correctly.

The chocolate includes curry and chili pepper spices, and Valrhona, the chocolate’s manufacturer, says it’s the “perfect complement for a dessert wine or cognac.”

Xocopili costs $37.90 for 35.2 ounces and can be found at Valrhona-Chocolate.com

True wild rice Foodies abhor processed food, so finding whole foods from small farms with no

additives is no easy task when it comes to grains.

Grains, which are hard to digest in their pure form, must be processed in order to be digestible.

In fact, the most popular white rice sold in the U.S. is highly processed, enriched and bleached.

Foodies and chefs know that this type of rice lacks the nutritional qualities of other long-grain brown and wild rice varieties. But even in the selection of alternatives, most varieties of so-called “wild rice” are actually hybrids of white rice, not wild rice itself, which is actually an aquatic grass seed.

Enter Northern Lakes Wild Rice Co.’s “true wild rice.” Unlike 95 percent of what is labeled “wild rice,” says one of the distributors of the rice, Market Hall Foods, this rice is an aquatic cereal grain hand-harvested in Minnesota the traditional way (by two people in a canoe)

before being dried, roasted, hulled and stored.

The result is a rich nutty-flavored nutritional rice that serves as a dish on its own.

It’s $9 for 8 ounces or $18 for 16 ounces and available at MarketHallFoods.com and NorthernLakesWildRice.net.

Jamón Ibérico de Bellota High on the mountains of southwest Spain lives the black Iberian pig, a free-range beast allowed to roam the oak groves of the Iberian Peninsula, feeding on natural grasses, herbs,

roots and acorns. After this pig is slaughtered, the meat is dry-aged in the mountain air of Spain, a curing process that takes 12 to 48 months.

That’s what makes Jamón Ibérico de Bellota one of the finest hams in the world, one of the most expensive dry-aged meats on the market and the perfect gift to give a foodie.

An entire 9-pound section of this ham costs about $800 to $900, but for only $47.50, a 3-ounce shaved portion can be sent from Spain. It arrives in a cold-packed shipping container, making it probably the most exotic food gift your food lover will ever receive. One reviewer even called it “gentle perfection.”

Find Jamón Ibérico at Tienda.com/jamon.

w w w.encorekalamazoo.com | 19

New Views of by

Robert M. Weir

“An

Haiti Keith Mumma is opening

eye-opening experience” is how Kalamazoo photographer Keith Mumma describes his first trip to Haiti in 1989. Prior to that trip, which was arranged through his church, Stockbridge Avenue United Methodist, Mumma wasn’t sure he had much to bring to the povertystricken people of the island nation.

But the answer came quickly: “I can tell a story with my pictures,” thought Mumma, a corporate photographer for The Upjohn Co. for eight years and a freelance editorial photographer.

That trip was “a great experience, but I didn’t think I would go back,” recalls Mumma. But his photos foretold a different outcome.

“International Child Care (the agency that hosted the church’s trip) liked the way I saw Haiti. They asked if I would return and capture images for their publications,” Mumma says.

That second trip occurred in 1990.

Again Mumma thought, “I probably won’t be going back.” Yet each time he focused his lens, his eyes opened that much more. “It’s a beautiful country,” he says. “Beautiful people.”

But that’s not always how Haiti or Haitians have been represented.

Mumma saw a book by another photographer about Haitians in the capital city, Port-au-Prince, and was dismayed. “His photos were dark, noir,” he says. “That’s not what I saw. I saw kids playing, parents and kids together, families.” Mumma says he was “a little upset” about this other perspective, “this sensationalism.” So he returned to Haiti in 1991 with friend and writer Kaye Bennett to capture “a day in the life of a Haitian.” International Child Care helped with logistics and, in exchange, Mumma donated his photos to the organization.

20 | Encore DECEMBER 2014

eyes, minds and hearts

encore up front

John Lacko

Keith Mumma stands in front of a painting brought from Haiti to the downtown Kalamazoo headquarters of International Child Care.

w w w.encorekalamazoo.com | 21

That was the beginning of a long-term relationship between Mumma and ICC, one that continues 25 years later. At first Mumma’s involvement included leading groups to Haiti. He ultimately joined ICC’s board of directors, serving as chair and vice chair. Finally, in 2005, he became ICC’s national director.

ICC, a nonprofit dedicated to health development in Third World countries, was started in the mid-1960s by Indiana residents Jim and Virginia Snavely. The couple visited Haiti and, while wandering away from souvenir shops and onto side streets, saw many children with tuberculosis, a major cause of death in the island nation at that time.

“This bothered them,” Mumma says. “When they returned to Indiana, they literally sold their farm and packed up their family, which included three young children, moved to a slum in Port-auPrince, and started a clinic.” The Snavelys were farmers and had no medical training but were skilled at organizing supportive friends, some of whom “thought they were nuts,” Mumma says, Thanks to shipments of food and medicine, administered by medical personnel the Snavelys enlisted, the health of children in the Haitian slum started to improve. Word spread. Demands grew.

According to one of the Snavely children, “We had kids all over the place. Babies in the bathtub. We had to expand.”

ICC purchased a former ambassadorial residence in Port-au-Prince and transformed it into Grace Children’s Hospital, following the wisdom of the Haitian Creole proverb Degaje pa peche, which means “Making do with what you have is not bad.”

ICC made do with the ambassador’s residence-turned-hospital for nearly 50 years, enlarging it, adding equipment and treating about 400 patients each day. The hospital operated pediatric and adult clinics, including one of the best eye clinics in the Caribbean, conducted health checks and administered vaccinations at 125 satellite clinics outside Port-au-Prince.

But a catastrophic earthquake in 2010 turned Grace Children’s Hospital into a vacant lot. “The building didn’t collapse, but it was too structurally damaged to be safe (and had to be torn down),” explains Mumma, who also lost a good friend, Claudy, in the quake. “One little girl was killed when a wall fell on her. The rest of the children ran out.

A girl about age 13, with epileptic seizures, saved another child. She was quite the hero. We’re in the process of rebuilding.”

At the time of the earthquake, Mumma had been ICC’s national director for five years. He had moved the organization’s headquarters Opposite page, photos taken by Keith Mumma in Haiti show the people he encounters in his work for ICC. At the bottom left is what is left of a church after the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti. Above, Mumma walks hand-in-hand with Haitian children.

to Kalamazoo and hired local staff members. He also began creating alliances with other organizations, including Kalamazoo College, the Steven M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, and Rotary International and WMU Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine. These alliances have been critical as ICC has picked up the pieces and carried on its mission in Haiti.

“We continue to look after the health of the children in Haiti as well as neighboring Dominican Republic,” says Mumma, “not only if the child is malnourished or has TB or other diseases, but we holistically ask, ‘Why is the child malnourished? Is the family not generating enough money to feed the children?’”

International Child Care also provides microloans to women, helping them increase their income to raise their standard of living. Through social service programs, ICC educates about disease to reduce the stigma of TB and AIDS. “Haitians are very proud people,” Mumma says. “Theirs is the first independent black nation, founded in 1804. They’re not like we see on the news, refugees on boats trying to reach Florida. The majority love their island and don’t want to leave. They want their children to be healthy and have a good education, just like anybody else. They’re proud that the rate of AIDS is declining in their country.”

ICC is sensitive to this Haitian pride, aiming to empower and ensure sustainability per the maxim “to work with but not to do for.”

For example, to construct a new clinic, ICC raised money and assembled an advisory team. They hired at least three Haitian locals for every American, coaching them in doing ongoing maintenance.

“When people ask, ‘What are you building in Haiti?’ I reply, ‘We’re building relationships,’” Mumma says. “The main focus is not to build a fence or paint a wall — although we do some of that — but to know people and why their situation is the way it is. We want to counterbalance harsh stories in the news. We want Americans to be able to say, ‘I have friends in Haiti, and I know the way it really is.’”

When someone volunteers to travel with an ICC group to Haiti, they become part of a Mission Education Encounter Team (MEET).

“Going to Haiti with ICC isn’t a vacation; it’s a journey, a mission,” Mumma says. “We’re there to encounter and learn about the people.

The education is for us. It’s an education that’s humbling.” And it’s consistent with another Haitian Creole proverb: Fok ou aprann pou w konprann — “You must learn in order to understand.”

Mumma relates a story from a daily MEET debriefing session in Haiti in which a distraught American said, “Everywhere I go, people want to kill us.” Discussion revealed that the person had seen some Haitians passing their hand in front of their neck in a slashing gesture.

Mumma quickly explained that the gesture meant something else.

“They don’t want to cut your throat. That’s a sign of distress,” he says.

“They’re saying ‘I’m hungry. Help me.’”

w w w.encorekalamazoo.com | 23

Patroller Jason Kovacs, center, radios the Patrol Lodge as other patrol members tend to an injured snowboarder. The injured boy’s mother (in plaid jacket) looks on.

24 | Encore DECEMBER 2014

Saviors on the Slopes

Timber Ridge patrollers train hard, bond tightly by

Margaret DeRitter

photograpy by

Erik Holladay

S

even Ski Patrol members gather around a 13-year-old boy on a Timber Ridge slope. The snowboarder has taken a hard fall, hitting his head, and even though he’s wearing a helmet, he lost consciousness for a few seconds.

A few moments earlier, Ski Patrol supervisor Ken Young saw the fall and radioed for assistance. Young arrives on the scene first, with other patrollers quickly following. Jason Kovacs drives up on a snowmobile, pulling a rescue toboggan behind him.

w w w.encorekalamazoo.com | 25

Ski patrollers like Kathy Hunter, center photo, not only have to be good skiers but have to know emergency care techniques. Above, supervisor Ken Young, at the far right, stabilizes a snowboarder’s head as other patrollers help put the boy on a backboard. At right, patroller Chris Hopper transports a rescue toboggan across a ridge.

“Thirteen-year-old male ... hard fall ... compromised consciousness ... strong vitals,” one of the patrollers radios to someone in the Patrol lodge who will call an ambulance dispatcher.

The patrollers strap the boy to a backboard and stabilize his head and neck. They want to make sure he’s not injured any further during the ride down the hill. Five of them lift him onto the toboggan, placing a first-aid supply bag over him as a blanket.

As all of this is happening, the boy’s mother walks up. She seems calm and, as her son is transported to the Ski Patrol lodge, walks down to the lodge to help Young fill out paperwork on her son’s fall.

It turns out she’s a nurse in Bronson Methodist Hospital’s outpatient surgery department, which might explain her demeanor. She also happens to know one of the patrollers. She calls him “Dr. Smith,” but he responds, “Who’s that?’”

Young explains that patrollers who have medical training — like Jim Smith, a hand surgeon — never use their titles when volunteering.

They just go by their first names, helping to build “a sense of equality among patrollers,” Young says.

A Life EMS ambulance stationed near Gobles is already at the Ski Patrol lodge when the boy arrives. Once the patient is handed off to the ambulance crew, Young finishes his paperwork. But before Young can head out to the slopes again, another injured child is brought in — a girl with a cut on her forehead. She’s alert and looks to be about 10 or 11 years old, and her injury isn’t serious.

Seeing kids will be a repeated occurrence on this Friday. Three school groups with a total of about 120 kids are visiting the familyowned ski area, and two more injured youth will be brought to the Ski Patrol lodge before the day is over.

It’s not uncommon to see injuries when school groups visit because half the kids have never skied before — they take lessons in the morning, have lunch, and then “think they’re ready for the big hills,” explains Young.

26 | Encore DECEMBER 2014

In class, online, on snow Young is one of nearly 90 volunteers who serve on the Timber Ridge Ski Patrol. Unlike patrols at some bigger resorts, Timber Ridge’s is made up entirely of volunteers, about 60 men and 30 women. Some patrollers have skied for only a few years, others for decades. They come from varied occupations and range from late teens to mid-80s — Young is 84 and a stronger skier than many who are a quarter of his age. (“I’d trust him to take me off the hill just as I’d trust any other patroller,” says Doug Mesara, 44, and the director of the Timber Ridge Ski Patrol.

“I hope I can ski that well at 84.”)

Having a love for the slopes and good skiing ability are important qualifications for someone to become a ski patroller, explains Mesara, but the role also requires a significant time commitment and intensive training in emergency care.

“The average patroller will work about 10 to 16 hours during a week,” Mesara says. “There’s weeks for me when it’s 20 hours or more.

From Dec. 1 to mid-March, most patrollers average around 100 hours on the hill.”

The training to become a patroller also takes time — about 150 hours of classroom and online learning, plus instruction on the slopes and additional study hours.

“But it all depends on your skills coming in,” Mesara says. “For me, it was 150 to 200 hours of studying time outside of class.

We tell people it’s like a college-level course. We teach ours over about four months of time, and typically it’s evenings. We’ve been pushing it to about one night a week, and we are starting to use some online instruction that the National Ski Patrol has created

for us. We tell people the first year is the hardest year timewise. We call that your candidate year.”

Patrol candidates receive what’s called outdoor emergency care (OEC) training. It’s “roughly equivalent to an EMT basic course,” Mesara says. “It’s first-responder training — everything from medical anatomy to medical emergencies, diabetic shock, anaphylactic shock from allergies, broken bones, twisted knees, scrapes. It gets into water emergencies, poisonous plants, CPR and how to use an automatic external defibrillator. It’s a wideranging course.”

The basic-certification evaluation at the end of training involves a 100-question written test and a staged accident. “The candidate is given very little information about it and has to stabilize the patient and prepare them for transport,” Mesara says. “It’s a very stressful situation for the person taking the test.”

After they’re certified, patrollers must undergo recertification training each year before the new season begins. Many of the Timber Ridge patrollers also get additional certification. About 35 of them are Alpine patrollers who can haul toboggans, and roughly 40 are senior Alpine patrollers trained to manage others at the scene of an accident and to deal with multiple patients at once. About 35 Timber Ridge patrollers are certified to teach the OEC course, and 10 offer ski and toboggan instruction, Mesara says.

Bad falls, good catches All of this training comes into play when a skier or snowboarder goes down hard. Patrollers grab a toboggan from the Ski Patrol lodge or one of the huts at the top of the slopes and head to the scene, where other patrollers join them (on a weeknight or weekend at least eight are on duty and on weekdays at least three). Loaded on the toboggan are a backboard and two big bags of first-aid supplies.

A yellow bag — “we call it the trauma bag,” Young says — holds a traction device, blocks for holding the head still, adult- and child-sized C-collars to stabilize the neck, and straps for securing people on the toboggan. A red bag includes two types of splints and carpet padding to make splints more comfortable or to put behind people’s knees for comfort during transport. In the case of a leg injury, a cardboard splint can be sized on the good leg, cut to the right length, and then secured on the injured leg with duct tape, Young explains. Cardboard splints are inexpensive and allow for a leg or arm to be X-rayed in the splint, he says.

“We see a lot of (injuries to) upper extremities,” Mesara says, “forearms and wrists, actual fractures. People will put a hand out as they’re falling. That’s extremely common in snowboarders. They will fall forward, and their instinct is to put an arm out.

“Depending on conditions, we also will see a fair number of knee injuries where the skier gets caught up in slushy snow and pulls ligaments or tears things. The fall might not involve enough force to get the ski binding to release but enough force to tear up a knee. We see that as conditions get warmer and we get more of what we call the mashed potatoes, the slushier snow.” Last season,

w w w.encorekalamazoo.com | 27

when the weather stayed consistently cold and snowy, there was “almost none of that,” Mesara adds.

Head injuries are usually the most serious, although sometimes the outcome is better than feared. “I recall an individual out of our terrain park (where skiers can do those wild twists and flips) who hit hard enough that she cracked her helmet,” Mesara says. “She was unconscious and unresponsive when we got there. We placed her on a backboard and gave her to the ambulance crew.

“She walked into the patrol room four or five hours later to show us the helmet. She probably had concussion symptoms, but there was no internal bleeding in the skull and no permanent damage. To break a helmet takes a significant amount of force. Without the helmet, she would have had very different injuries.”

When the terrain park first opened in the late ’90s and again when it moved to its current location about 10 years ago, “we saw more injuries and more specific injuries,” Mesara says. “We’d see a lot more of the closed-head injuries, and then we were seeing the kids falling off the rails or the jumps and putting their arm out — forearm injuries or dislocated shoulders.

“I think it has stabilized now. It may be declining. The ski area has learned how to build the parks safely. If we have a feature that’s problematic any one day — a second or third accident off the same jump or rail — we’ll call management and they’ll come out and tear it down or maybe reset it. They pay a lot of attention to where the kids are jumping from and where they’re landing.”

But serious situations for the Ski Patrol can go beyond skiers on the slopes or in the terrain park. Although there have been no fatal accidents on the slopes in Young’s 35 years there, in the late ’90s a man suffered a cardiac arrest in the lift line for the double chair that

was fatal, Young says. CPR was started almost immediately in that incident, Mesara adds, but the Ski Patrol and EMS were not successful in restoring the man’s heartbeat. “He was in his late 80s or early 90s and died on his birthday, enjoying the sport he loved,” Mesara says.

In another instance, patrollers last winter had to deal with anaphylactic shock when a chairlift operator took an over-the counter product for a headache, not realizing it contained a medication he was allergic to.

“Patrollers were able to get him off the hill and into our building,” Mesara says. “That’s very much a life-and-death situation. Because we’re only equipped so far, we got him prepared for paramedics to start treating him. He was breathing when we pushed him into the ambulance. He was taken to a local hospital for treatment and returned to work the next day.”

One of the most dramatic situations for a Ski Patrol member occurred during the 2012-13 season. An 8-year-old girl at the highest point on the triple chairlift was starting to fall. Patroller Paul Carlson saw what was happening and positioned himself underneath the chair to catch her — skis and all.

“Neither were injured,” Mesara says. “We still don’t know how.

Everything in that one came together perfectly. It’s one of those freak situations. The mom lost her grip at exactly the right point, and the patroller happened to notice the girl.”

Last year another child fell from the triple chairlift. A lift manager and several bystanders caught the boy using one of the thick pads wrapped around the chairlift tower, Mesara says.

Mesara advises parents to do a few “real simple things” to prevent these situations, which he notes are not unique to Timber Ridge. (continued on page 42)

(continued on page 43)

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Arts ENCORE

‘The Kalamazoo Lady’

Patricia Fenn ‘will never retire’ from her paintbrush Kit Almy

John Lacko

by

A

t age 83, Kalamazoo artist Patricia Fenn has been painting full time for more than 35 years and has no intention of stopping.

Fenn has been making art since she was a child growing up in Vicksburg. She won a national art award by the age of 7 and first earned money as a painter through a parttime job at Woolworth’s during high school.

She demonstrated how to paint plaster figurines to look like china, and the manager gave her the run of the store. “He said, ‘You can go to the soda fountain anytime,’” she says. “He treated me differently than he did anyone else, and it did not dawn on me till

30 | Encore DECEMBER 2014

years later he was selling my stuff for three times the cost, so I was a free employee.”

She no doubt came to this realization because art is her bread and butter. “I’m a good businessperson because I make the paintings make money for me in different ways,” she says. She reproduces each painting as prints, cards and puzzles at prices “for everybody’s pocketbook,” from $10 for the smallest prints up to $5,000 for large paintings.

Fenn currently sells her work — appropriately enough, considering her name — at a Fennville gallery, Fernwood 1891. She

Above, Patricia Fenn paints a commissioned work in her home studio. Opposite page, a close-up shows a detail of her “Kalamazoo – My Home Town” painting.

also exhibits it at several summer art shows, including the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts Art Fair in Bronson Park, where she’s known as “The Kalamazoo Lady” for her painting of downtown Kalamazoo. “Even though I’ve been there for three years, they come looking for it again,” she says.

“Kalamazoo – My Home Town” depicts Bronson Park as seen from the north, as well as the facades of nearby churches and civic buildings on Michigan Avenue, South

Street and Lovell Street. The buildings are detailed and accurately proportioned, but the perspective is odd — each street is completely visible above the one in front of it. Fenn calls this and other paintings like it “stack paintings.”

Although she also paints still lifes and portraits, buildings and streetscapes are her common subjects. She wanted to be an architect when she was in college, but it was such an uncommon profession for a woman then that she was the only female in her college class. “The boys in the class made me cry,” and the male instructor looked the other way, she says. “He didn’t want me in the class either.”

Fenn gave up architecture, but she applies the same attention to detail it requires to her paintings of buildings, taking hundreds of photos of each subject to get the scale right. It’s painstaking work. “They take me a whole year, but they are moneymakers forever,” she says. She still owns the original Kalamazoo painting, but sales of reproductions have already earned her $4,000.

Fenn didn’t become a full-time artist until she had raised her four children. Her husband’s career with the Federal Aviation Administration took the family to Florida, California, Texas and Washington, D.C., as well as the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. As they moved around, she held various art-related jobs, including teaching, graphic design and gallery management. She owned her own gallery in the heart of old

San Juan, Puerto Rico, for five years.

Many of her paintings reflect her travels as well as a lifelong love of the water and boating. When she was a child, her family spent a lot of time on West Lake in Portage, and they later had a vacation home in Saugatuck, which is one of her favorite subjects.

Her paintings are also whimsically populated with her family members, friends and colleagues, as well as celebrities like Geraldo Rivera and Bill O’Reilly. She says she uses real people because if she didn’t, “they would look all the same.”

Fenn returned to Kalamazoo about 11 years ago to care for her aging mother, and she is now at a point where she would like to live nearer to at least one of her children, who are dispersed from Germany to Puerto Rico to California.

She misses the Caribbean, she says.

“I’m going back for a whole month in December. I was thinking of trying to get back there because living is so much easier.” However, after 9/11, tourism to San Juan dropped dramatically and with it the economy.

“I think it’s still in bad shape, but I’m going to go down and look the situation over.”

If not in San Juan, Fenn may open a gallery in Saugatuck, where her daughters plan to retire soon. But, as for herself, she says, “I will never retire.”

w w w.encorekalamazoo.com | 31

Arts ENCORE

Suzanne Siegel

Painter finds intersection of reality and imagination

K

Courtesy

alamazoo painter Suzanne Siegel is striding past a retrospective of her work hanging on the walls in a hall that leads to Friendship Village’s Kiva Auditorium. Looking at the breadth of the paintings, one might be tempted to think the artist, who turns 70 this month, has reached a point of comfort with her craft, that’s she’s settled in or is on autopilot.

That assumption would be wrong.

“This year, 2014, has been the most productive and creative year of my life actually,” she says. “It’s been kind of the zenith of my career.”

Siegel is probably best known for her interpretive realist urban landscape paintings with their multi-layered images depicting silent urban scenes set against glowing twilight blue backgrounds. They look real, but Siegel warns viewers not to trust their eyes.

“People always tell me my paintings look ‘just like’ the buildings or landscapes they’re of, but I change a lot actually, based on aesthetic,” she explains.

One of the paintings featured in Siegel’s 2015 calendar, which features 12 of her luminous images, depicts a pristine, placid landscape portrait of Portage Creek. And while it is as luminous as her urban nightscapes, the painting is representative of a new direction 32 | Encore DECEMBER 2014

This painting of Kalamazoo’s Civic Auditorium by interpretive realist painter Suzanne Siegel is featured in the artist’s 2015 calendar.

for Siegel, a series of paintings in which she takes liberties with the “reality” of the image.

Her new “Images for Contemplation” series offers natural landscapes represented in daylight in which Siegel uses opacity in the place of transparency for a softer, layered effect. In Siegel’s Portage Creek painting, light plays off water and sky, illuminating the trees and bushes surrounding the scene. Siegel says someone told her, “Wow! That looks just like that area — I walk past it every day.” But Siegel told her to look again on her next walk.

“Right next to the trees are some ugly warehouses,” says Siegel.

“I’m not painting any old, ugly warehouses, thank you very much, so I just moved the trees over to complete a natural look.”

The next time Siegel ran into that person, she said she was amazed that it looked so different because her mind accepted the painting as reality. That’s exactly the type of effect — joining memory and imagination — for which Siegel has been striving.

“I pull together elements from sometimes over 100 different photos to make a painting,” she says. “The end result has a look of

credibility, but it’s an eidetic image, which in visual art means that it combines what we see and what we see in our memory.”

Capturing that area between reality and imagination intrigues Siegel because she’s fascinated with how a certain natural or urban landscape feature might be changed by memory, camera lens or paintbrush.

“Think about even eyewitness accounts,” she says as she runs her finger over a line in her painting of the Fifth Third Bank in downtown Kalamazoo to show how she’s straightened it to compensate for the curve of camera distortion. “For every 10 people who witness an event, there are 10 different accounts as each person pieces together their memory.”

For every 10 people who look at one of Siegel’s paintings, there will likely be as many different interactions and memories as well, something Siegel welcomes.

“I’m inviting people to have their own experience,” she says. “These paintings aren’t really about my experience, and that’s the fun of it. These are cheerful, serene spaces that seem safe and inviting — someplace you would want to visit.”

The interaction between painting and viewer drives Siegel’s process. When viewers connect with her art, it’s magic, she says. To illustrate the point, she tells about the time when she hung her graduate exhibition at Western Michigan University and a WMU parking enforcement officer would come in every day at lunch and eat his sandwich in front one of her paintings, a scene in India.

“One day I couldn’t stand it anymore,” she says. “I asked him, ‘What do you like about that painting so much?’ He said, ‘It’s a place I’ve never been to but a place I’ve never left.’

That’s the best way to put it and exactly what I wanted to do for someone. I guess parkingmeter guys aren’t that bad.”

Suzanne Siegel’s paintings are on exhibit this month at the Michigan News Agency, with an opening event set for 5-9 p.m. Dec. 4, during Art Hop. Siegel’s 2015 Kalamazoo and Southwest Michigan Luminous Region Calendar will be available there and at other locations. For more information, visit SuzanneSiegel.net.

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FOUR CORNERS

Young vocal jazz artists encourage others to follow their passions by

Kit Almy

Cathy Picking

W

hen you talk to the members of the vocal jazz quartet Four Corners, they tend to finish each others’ sentences, their voices overlapping in conversation just as they do when singing harmonies.

It would be easy to believe that the four are siblings, and they would almost agree.

The quartet — soprano Chelsea Helm, alto Brooke Lauritzen, tenor (and Portage native) Nich Mueller and bass Jack Shales — describe themselves as a family. The group formed when the four were freshmen at Western Michigan University, and now, five years later, they are producing and performing their own music from Southwest Michigan to Chicago and beyond.

At the same time, they are committed to helping other young musicians pursue their passions, the way others have helped them.

Lauritzen and Shales, childhood friends from St. Charles, Ill., say they knew since high school that singing in a vocal jazz group was their destiny. Fortunate to attend a high school with a strong vocal jazz program, they came as students to Western Michigan University ready to make good on their ambitions. As members of GCII, the sister ensemble of WMU’s internationally known vocal jazz ensemble Gold Company, they met Helm and Mueller, who were similarly inclined. As the last four people left in the room after a GCII rehearsal one day, they wanted to keep singing, and, conveniently, could cover the four vocal parts. “It just sort of happened,” says Lauritzen. They cemented their friendship at a GCII retreat later that fall, and they haven’t looked back.

In the beginning, the foursome sang together for fun, using their favorite arrangements by groups like New York Voices and The Manhattan Transfer. But over time, Four Corners developed its own sound.

“Initially, our musical goals were pretty much to replicate these groups that had already been out there, but you do that for so long and you start getting your own sensibility,” says Shales. “It’s just really getting comfortable in your own skin and realizing your own strengths, and as much as we don’t like to admit it, our weaknesses and limitations too.”

Mueller and Shales are the quartet’s primary arrangers, but the whole group works together at fine-tuning each piece. This collaborative process produces music that is uniquely theirs, they say, as is evidenced on the group’s self-titled CD, which was released in 2013 and includes some of their earliest arrangements.

Jazz vocal quartet Four Corners is, from left, Nich Mueller, Chelsea Helm, Brooke Lauritzen and Jack Shales. w w w.encorekalamazoo.com | 35

“It’s really us,” says Lauritzen. “We’re a group that really prides itself on being individual. I think we’re all sort of goofy and weird in our own ways, and that’s totally reflected on the album, whether it’s in our solos or our harmonies or the way we portray a lyric.”

Despite their goofy moments, the singers have always taken their music seriously. They credit WMU music faculty, including Duane Davis and Steve Zegree, with encouraging their progress by holding them to high standards. When Zegree left for Indiana University in 2012, the group found new mentors and inspiration. “Then Jeremy Siskind and Andrew Rathbun, the new jazz faculty, came in and it was a whole different kind of support and a whole different kind of creativity,” recalls Lauritzen.

36 | Encore DECEMBER 2014

In 2010, as the group was preparing for its first public performance as a quartet, which would be at a Gold Company concert in Miller Auditorium, they decided to advertise in the concert program in hopes of being hired to sing as a group. The problem? They didn’t have a name. After an unsuccessful latenight brainstorming session on the eve of the advertising deadline, Mueller showed the ad he had designed to Lauritzen, explaining that he had put each of their faces in the four corners. Struck by desperation more than inspiration, she asked, “What about Four Corners?”

“We were all pretty underwhelmed, I think,” says Shales. But the moniker caught on, and soon classmates were identifying them as Four Corners. “Now, looking back, it kind of stuck really fast.”

After their first appearance, the quartet got its first professional gig — performing at South Haven United Methodist Church.

During the next four years through networking and word-of-mouth, one gig has led to another, and they’ve performed in a number of venues around Southwest Michigan, including at the Union Cabaret & Grille and the Wellspring Theatre, in Kalamazoo, and as far away as suburban Chicago.

From that very first gig in South Haven, the quartet’s members have been working on another ambition: to encourage younger musicians to pursue their dreams. At the South Haven concert, Four Corners performed a song with the South Haven High School choir, inspiring some of the choir members to follow the quartet to WMU.

Erik Holladay From left, Lauritzen, Mueller, Helm and Shales perform as Four Corners at a gig at Western Michigan University in September.

Individually, the members have taught and still do teach music lessons, but as a group their aim is to make their outreach efforts more inspirational. Four Corners will visit schools to give concerts and present intensive workshops to music classes on topics ranging from musical techniques to life as professional musicians.

“By the time we were together for about three years, we started really being able to say, ‘We have a really valid opinion on these subjects,’” says Shales.

They also want to encourage those who are like the students they once were, who discovered a love of music but thought, “I

have no idea what’s coming next, I have no Academy of Music and performs both as idea where to go, have no idea what the next a musician and an actor. He recently costep is. I hope that it can be doing something founded the Kalamazoo Jazz & Creative that I love,” says Helm.

Institute, whose “mission is to cultivate jazz “We can tell them, ‘This is something musicianship, creative development and that you could do. This is something that entrepreneurial skills” for everyone from we are doing, and (it’s) not that we’re on the schoolchildren to budding professionals. other side of it like the New York Voices, this Helm is teaching music to grades K-7 in unattainable, professional, internationally an urban school in Grand Rapids. She’s also renowned group. We’re transitional, we are a professional opera singer who made her performing around the community, we’re concert debut in “The World of Schubert” making connections, we’re figuring out how with the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra to do it.’” last spring. She has had two main-stage Mueller chimes in. “We’re all very professional opera roles this year, in Opera passionate about the education part of Grand Rapids’ Madame Butterfly and the Soo it because that’s what got us into it,” he Theatre Project’s Carmen, in Sault Ste. Marie. says. “I think it’s Lauritzen and important for kids “We want this music to be Shales have returned to know that they to Illinois, where the best it can be. And so can pursue what they run their own they want. You what better way to do that business, Cornerstone really do have the than to have people that Conservatory of power to make a Music, in Glen Ellyn. career what you inspire us play with us?”

They teach voice, want it to be.

— Nich Mueller piano and guitar You have to be and are planning committed and have a vision of how to do programs to acquaint younger children with that. That’s what we’re trying to do.” music. Shales also is completing a master’s The biggest milestone so far in Four Corners’ degree in music research at WMU this fall. career was the release of the band’s CD last Despite their physical separation, there’s year. In addition to their own arrangements, no sign of Four Corners breaking up as a the album features collaborations from group. They are working on new music and many others. Accompanying the singers on planning a Midwest tour to promote their the album are Siskind on piano and Rathbun album. on tenor saxophone, as well as other WMU Rehearsing together is more of challenge, faculty and alumni. but they have grown enough as musicians “People who have been our mentors and professionals that they trust each other and our teachers were able to be a part of to know their parts. the process too, either playing on the CD “We can hold each other accountable,” … or arranging something for the group Lauritzen says. “We might not see each other specifically for the album project,” says Helm. for a month or two, but if we have a gig, we Mueller adds, “We want this music to be know that we’re going to come prepared. the best it can be. And so what better way to That’s a given. do that than to have people that inspire us “We made a pact long ago that this is play with us?” important. We value each other, we value No longer undergraduates at WMU this relationship, and we’re very aware that (Mueller, Shales and Helm all graduated in this is a gift. This is not just something that 2013, and Lauritzen is on hiatus from school), happens every day. There’s too much to not the members of Four Corners are now more keep going.” spread out geographically, giving a little more For more information about Four Corners, credence to their name. All are continuing including upcoming concerts, go to www. to pursue performing, as well as their own fourcornersjazz.com. education and outreach projects.

Mueller is still based in Kalamazoo, where he directs GCII, teaches at the Crescendo w w w.encorekalamazoo.com | 37

PERFORMING ARTS – THEATER

Chamber, Jazz & Concert

Plays

BachFest Christmas! — Kalamazoo Bach Festival Chorus’ annual celebration, 4 p.m. Dance Dec. 4, Stetson Chapel, Kalamazoo College, Moscow Ballet’s Great Russian Nutcracker — 337-7407.

A unique Russian telling of the classic holiday The Jubilee Christmas Tour — Featuring three tale, 7 p.m. Dec. 2, Miller Auditorium, WMU. of gospel music’s most popular groups: The 387-2300.

Booth Brothers, Greater Vision and Legacy Five, 7 p.m. Dec. 4, Chenery Auditorium, 337- VISUAL ARTS 0440.

A Christmas Carol — 35th annual production of Ted Kistler’s acclaimed adaptation of the Charles Dickens holiday classic, 7:30 p.m.

Dec. 4, 9, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18 & 22; 8 p.m.

Dec. 5, 6, 12, 13, 19, 20 & 27; 2 p.m. Dec. 6, 7, 13, 14, 20, 21 & 28; New Vic Theatre, 134 E. Vine St., 381-3328.

Musicals Shrek the Musical — Musical adaptation of the animated movie, 7:30 p.m. Dec. 4, 5, 6, 12 & 13; 2 p.m. Dec. 14, Civic Auditorium, 329 S. Park St., 343-1313.

Late Night Broadway: Featuring Jeff Blumenkrantz — WMU’s Music Theatre Performance class of 2015 shares the stage with this acclaimed Broadway actor and composer, 7:30 p.m. Dec. 4, 5 & 6; 2 p.m. Dec. 6, Williams Theatre, WMU, 387-5801.

And The World Goes ‘Round — Kander & Ebb musical revue, 8 p.m. Dec. 5 & 6, 12 & 13, 19 & 20, 26 & 27; 2 p.m. Dec. 7, 14, 21 & 28; 7:30 p.m. Dec. 11, 18, Farmers Alley Theatre, 221 Farmers Alley, 343-2727.

PERFORMING ARTS – MUSIC Bands & Solo Artists Styx — The classic rockers perform their greatest hits, 7:30 p.m. Dec. 4, State Theatre, 404 S. Burdick St., 345-6500.

The Beach Boys — Members Mike Love and Bruce Johnston play the band’s classics, 7:30 p.m. Dec. 17, State Theatre, 345-6500.

Wynonna & The Big Noise: A Simpler Christmas — Five-time Grammy winner performs her holiday favorites and greatest hits, 7:30 p.m. Dec. 18, Miller Auditorium, WMU, 387-2300.

Frankie Ballard’s Country Christmas — Ballard performs his holiday favorites, 8 p.m. Dec. 20, State Theatre, 345-6500.

38 | Encore DECEMBER 2014

and Tom Show’s favorite comedians, 8 p.m.

Dec. 31, State Theatre, 345-6500.

Kalamazoo Institute of Arts

Kalamazoo Blues Festival Sunday Series — Holiday Art Sale — 4 p.m. Dec. 5, 9 a.m. Dec. 6, Barrelhouse Catts and Kev Nichols and Blue 314 S. Park St., 349-7775.

Tuesday, 3 p.m. Dec. 14, Shakespeare’s Pub, 241 E. Kalamazoo Ave., 488-7782.

Lasting Legacy: A Collection for Kalamazoo — An exhibition celebrating the KIA’s 90th Symphony anniversary, through Dec. 7, 349-7775.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas — Dr. Seuss’ classic adapted for orchestra and stage and performed by the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra, 3 p.m. Dec. 7, Chenery Auditorium, 714 S. Westnedge Ave., 337-0440.

KIA Ugly Sweaters and Holiday Music — Stroll the galleries and enjoy a live performance by a capella group Notified, 6 p.m. Dec. 18, 349-7775.

A Collector’s Eye: Works from the Collection of Sounds of the Season — A KSO holiday James and Sheila Bridenstine — A collection spectacular featuring seasonal and traditional focusing on American and European art, music, 8 p.m. Dec. 20, Miller Auditorium, through Jan. 4, 349-7775.

WMU, 387-2300.

Double Take — Kalamazoo-area artists select Vocal works that inspire them, through Jan. 4, 349At This Special Time — A singing celebration 7775. of the words and music of Christmas, 8 p.m. ARTbreak — Free presentations on art-related Dec. 1-3, New Vic Theatre, 134 E. Vine St. topics: What To Do With Grandma’s Photos, 381-3328.

Dec. 2; Thomas Hart Benton (Part 1), Dec. 9; Thomas Hart Benton (Part 2), Dec. 16; all PERFORMING ARTS – OTHER sessions at noon, KIA Auditorium.

Comedy Trailer Park Boys: The Dear Santa Claus Tour — The cast of the Canadian TV series Trailer Park Boys spreads the true meaning of Christmas, 7 p.m. Dec. 6, State Theatre, 404 S. Burdick St., 345-6500.

Tyler Oakley’s Slumber Party — 7 p.m. Dec. 14, State Theatre, 345-6500.

Friends of the Bob and Tom Comedy Tour — Spend New Year’s Eve with four of The Bob

Richmond Center for Visual Arts, WMU Gwen Frostic School of Art Faculty Exhibition — Frostic Art School faculty members showcase their work, through Dec. 12, Monroe-Brown Gallery, WMU, 387-2436.

encore EVENTS Nichole Maury: Passed On — An exhibition exploring how the stories we tell are purposefully incomplete, through Dec. 12, Kerr Gallery, WMU.

West Michigan Glass Art Center Kalamazoo Holiday Members Show — An exhibition of work by Glass Art Center members, 5 p.m.

Dec. 5, 326 W. Kalamazoo Ave., Suite 100, 552-9802.

First Saturday — Fun, free family activities, 2-3:30 p.m. Dec. 6, Central Library, 315 S. Rose St., 553-7800.

MUSEUMS

Portage District Library

Tiger’s Experience: Tracking a Legend — An immersive journey into the lives of endangered Bengal tigers, through Dec. 31, Air Zoo, 6151 Portage Road, 382-6555.

Holiday Cheese Pairings — Natalie Fuller, owner of The Cheese Lady, will discuss cheeses and pairings for holiday appetizers, 2 p.m. Dec. 4, 300 Library Lane, 329-4544.

Miscellaneous

Local Writers Expo — Published and aspiring local authors share their new books and experiences, 10 a.m. Dec. 13.

Art Hop — Local artists and musicians at various venues in downtown Kalamazoo, 5-9 p.m. Dec. 5.

Weekends Live: Traditional and Celtic Christmas Tunes — Performed by the Crescendo Fiddlers, 10:30 a.m. Dec. 13.

LIBRARY & LITERARY EVENTS

Mother/Daughter Book Club — 10 a.m.

Dec. 20.

Kalamazoo Public Library KPL Concert Series: Jeff Dwarshuis — Classical guitarist, 7 p.m. Dec. 3, Central Library, 315 S. Rose St., 553-7800.

It Happened on Fifth Avenue — Classic holiday film, 2 p.m. Dec. 21.

Air Zoo

Kalamazoo Valley Museum Voices for Social Justice — An audiovisual exhibit featuring community residents who speak about social justice and its future in Kalamazoo, through Jan. 19., 230 N. Rose St., 373-7990.

Art Hop: Kalamazoo Mandolin and Guitar Orchestra — Performing holiday music, old and new, 6 p.m. Dec. 5, Citizen Science: Great Lakes — Find out how you can help collect data for scientific study, 1:30 p.m. Dec. 7.

Duffield-Caron Project — Tom Duffield, a boogie-style pianist, and the soulful, smooth voice of Lorraine Caron, 7 p.m. Dec. 12.

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w w w.encorekalamazoo.com | 39

EVENTS encore Leslie Goddard’s Clara Barton: Civil War Nurse — In this living history program, learn how Clara Barton became the first woman appointed to serve on the front lines of the Civil War, 7 p.m. Dec. 19.

Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon — Crisp laser shown on the Planetarium’s Dome, 8 p.m. Fridays through Dec. 26.

Season of Light — Explore the nature of our holiday traditions, 3 p.m. Sundays, through Dec. 28, Planetarium.

Mystery of the Christmas Star— A scientific explanation for the star the Wise Men followed, 3 p.m. Fridays, through Jan. 2, Planetarium.

NATURE Kalamazoo Nature Center Yoga in the Glen Vista — Practice yoga surrounded by the forest in the Glen Vista Gallery, 6 p.m. Dec. 3 & 17, 7000 N. Westnedge Ave., 381-1574.

ns Ser ving Ka l am eratio n e G az e e oo Thr

Buy Local Art & Gift Fair — Top-quality work from more than 50 local artisans, 9 a.m.

Dec. 13.

Holidays at the Homestead — An 1800s-style celebration at the beautifully decorated DeLano Homestead, 1 p.m. Dec. 14, 357 West E Ave., 381-1574.

Kellogg Biological Station Birds and Coffee Walk — Join an experienced guide for a short birding walk and discuss the morning’s sightings over coffee, 9 a.m.

Dec. 10, Kellogg Bird Sanctuary, 12685 East C Ave., Augusta, 671-2510.

FESTIVALS Winter Holiday Festival — Meet Santa and enjoy holiday-inspired activities with live entertainment, noon-5 p.m. Dec. 6 & 7, The Olde World Village, 13215 W. Augusta Drive, 580-1290.

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New Year’s Fest — Downtown Kalamazoo’s annual New Year’s celebration, featuring 24 entertainment acts, 5 p.m. Dec. 31, Bronson Park, 388-2830.

MISCELLANEOUS Dickens Tea — A holiday event to honor Charles Dickens, with a program and guided tour, 3 p.m. Dec. 2, Kellogg Manor House, 3700 E. Gull Lake Drive, Hickory Corners, 6712400.

Holiday Walk and Market — Explore the decorated rooms of the Manor House, noon5 p.m. Dec. 5, 6, 12,13, 19 & 20, Kellogg Manor House, 671-2400.

Santa’s Village — The Kalamazoo Mall Plaza is decorated as the North Pole and features Santa and his elves, through Dec. 24, Mall Plaza, 157 S. Kalamazoo Mall, 344-0795.

Christmas Eve at the Boatyard — Special holiday beers released only on Christmas Eve, noon-4 p.m. Dec. 24, Boatyard Brewing Co., 432 E. Peterson, 808-3455.

encore POETRY

Donkey Madonna My name is Chrysanthemum, and sand has worn away my teeth. Mange and fleas have ruined my hide.

Remarkable

Children from town whip and tease, while my own

— for Dr. Angela Caffrey

children have been sold into servitude. Once

I carried a woman to Bethlehem. She was heavy

In slices like cold cuts

with child, but I walked lightly, flinching at the man’s

they scan my abdomen

stick, refusing to hurry lest I roughen my lady’s ride.

while I lie still, hold

I took no food the night her son was born.

my breath, then breathe,

My third son was beaten to death by a drunken

repeat. The barium contrast

soldier. He and I were led to Our Lord in Bethpage.

white on the screen same as

I said Jesus, my colt is too young to ride.

the traces of cancer still

If you must upturn the tables in the temple, if you

there after all that chemo,

must wither figs, then let me carry your weight

but not measurable.

and my fine son shall carry your spirit.

The surgeon takes me back

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

and forth between the January scan and this one, showing

Campbell is the author of the bestselling novel Once Upon a River. She was a 2009 finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction for her story collection American Salvage and a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. Her new book of stories, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, is forthcoming in October 2015. She lives just outside of Kalamazoo with her husband and two donkeys.

me where the cancer was and now is not. She is happy scrolling the mouse through slice after slice after slice.

Before surgery I sought out

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wash through my abdominal cavity—a tide pool, the tune and timbre its blues and greens.

Awash, suspended, nestled one against the next, my belly full of organs, now missing some. It’s there on the screen.

Scar tissue has knit raw edges into new boundaries.

— Danna Ephland Ephland is a Kalamazoo poet and Lincoln Center-trained teaching artist in creative writing and dance, offering quarterly workshops called The Left Margin. Her poems have appeared in Rhino, Indiana Review, Folio, Encore and the anthology Villanelles.

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®

Ski Patrol (continued from page 28) First of all, when getting on the chairlift, “put the child on the lift operator side, the left side,” he says. “That gives the lift operator a chance to help the kid into the chair also.”

Second, ask the lift operator to slow down the lift. That gives parent and child more time to get in the right position to get into the chair.

Finally, “if your child does not make it (into the chair properly), let ’em go,” Mesara says. “It’s better to let them drop a few feet. I’ve never seen anybody make it all the way to the top (holding on to a child).”

Bonded ‘like family’ Facing emergency situations together and working to get injured skiers and snowboarders off the slopes safely creates powerful bonds among Ski Patrol volunteers. Those who work the Friday shift say they’ve become like family. They even eat a potluck lunch together each week.

At today’s lunch, Ken Young, tells a visitor that he was an insurance agent for Northwestern Mutual for 58 years. He became a member of the Ski Patrol in 1988 after his son was injured. “A member of the Ski Patrol was very kind to him and me, and it seemed like something I would like to do.”

Young’s wife, Kathy, a neurovascular nurse, has been on the Patrol for 21 years. She often skis on Fridays with Karen Hunter, a retired Wayland school social worker who’s been a patroller for 25 years. “The Timber Ridge Patrol is really a close-knit group,” Kathy Young says.

“It’s a great way to do something we love to do and give something back at the same time.”

Before Kathy and Ken were married, when they were co-workers and she told him she’d like to get back into skiing after a 17-year hiatus. He suggested she join the Patrol.

“Don’t you think I should start skiing first?” she asked.

“No, just join the Patrol,” said Young, who never misses a chance to recruit.

Chris Hopper, who has logged 23 years on the Patrol, was recruited by a friend at his Portage church. “He mentioned he was on the Ski

Clockwise from left, Jim Smith, Jason Kovacs, Dave Shires and Chris Hopper assist an injured skier.

Patrol, and I made the mistake of asking about it,” Hopper jokes. “He asked me to be on the Ski Patrol even though I had very, very limited experience as a skier.”

Because Hopper agreed to join the Patrol, all three of his kids grew up skiing, starting at age 2. One of his sons was on the Timber Ridge Junior Ski Patrol, a group that assists patrollers with radio calls,

Personal Injury Experience In Your Corner.

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Contact Debbie Palmer, Rick Halpert, Bonnie Sawusch, or Steven Weston at 800/400-9115 or www.varnumlaw.com/pi.

■

Kalamazoo

■

Grand Rapids

42 | Encore DECEMBER 2014

■

Metro Detroit

■

Grand Haven

■

Lansing

crowd control and other tasks. This son later moved up to the Ski Patrol and now works at an Upper Peninsula ski area. “He loves it,” Hopper says.

Marc Verkaik, the K-8 principal for Kalamazoo Christian Schools, is in his seventh year as a patroller and volunteers about 100 hours on the Ski Patrol per season. He has brought a group of fifth- and sixth-graders to Timber Ridge today as the culmination of an Olympics unit.

Verkaik’s most memorable patrol experience so far, he says, was when a girl hit a tree and broke her leg. “I had to get her pant leg up and splint it. She was a great patient.

She didn’t scream or yell.”

When he’s not tending to injuries, Verkaik likes to ski with his family. Being on the Patrol makes that more affordable, he says, since patrollers get a free family pass to Timber Ridge. “It’s a cheap way to ski, and I enjoy being outside.”

Of course, it’s not so much fun when it rains. “We have a joke,” Ken Young says. “On rainy days we say, ‘How lucky we are to ski for free!’”

Paul Vellom, an associate professor of education at Western Michigan University, is

one of the newer members of the Ski Patrol, having joined in 2012. “I was lamenting not having enough winter activity in my life” when another professor mentioned the Ski Patrol, he says.

In Vellom’s first and second season of training he spent four hours in class two nights a week. “Some of the younger folks can do the training in one season,” he says.

“I’d done first-aid and water-safety training through Red Cross, but this was a whole new level. You now have to be able to recognize a problem, establish a safe scene and do an initial patient assessment. Those skills are all beyond anything I had before.”

When faced with an injured skier or snowboarder, the most challenging thing is “remembering all the training and making sure you haven’t missed anything,” Vellom says. “The good thing is we always work in teams so we can double check each other.”

Vellom admits the training has been more physically demanding than he expected, “but it’s such a supportive group of people,” he says.

In addition to working as a team on the slopes, patrollers also work together to raise money for their organization. They raised $50,000 toward the cost of their lodge (built in 2000) through cookouts and special events like ski swaps and raffles. One patroller, an electrician, did all the wiring for the lodge; another crafted benches with built-in storage. The lodge is “about 15 times as large” as the previous Ski Patrol space, Young says.

Two more down As lunch wraps up, a radio call comes in.

“We’ve got another wrist,” says one of the patrollers.

A boy from Kalamazoo Christian Middle School is brought into the first-aid room, joining an injured female schoolmate. “It hurts. It hurts,” he moans.

The girl, who has a splint on her right arm, is stoic. Hopper tells her, “This really cool thing (a sling) is going to go under that.

We’re going to put that at a height where you’re super comfortable.”

The children’s principal, Verkaik, walks in.

“How are you doing, young lady?” he asks.

Then he turns to the boy. “How are you?”

The girl answers first. “I fell backwards, I think.”

The boy points out the spot on the slope where he fell.

“When you fell, did your skis come off?”

Vellom asks.

“Yes, and my glasses came off too,” the boy says.

Apparently, one of his skis whacked his wrist. Jim Smith and Ken Young put a splint on his left arm.

“We’re going to be twinsies,” the girl tells the boy. Once her arm is in a sling, Hopper adds ice to prevent swelling and help keep her comfortable.

“Any word from her Mom yet?” Hopper asks, and someone says no.

Then a phone rings, and Hopper tells the girl’s mother that someone from the school is going to drive her daughter home. “We recommend you take her to an immediate care center. She’s sore. She’s upset, of course, but it’s not an emergency. She hurt her wrist.”

The boy is still visibly upset. His face looks like the No. 9 or 10 on the pain chart posted on a file cabinet nearby. “It hurts so much,” he says.

It turned out he had a sprained wrist. The girl’s wrist was broken. Months later, Verkaik reports the two children are “doing great.” In fact, not long after her fall, the girl had a soft cast put on so she could go on a family ski trip, he says.

As for the 13-year-old who lost consciousness, “he made a full recovery within about two weeks” and was eager to get out on the slopes again this season, his mother says.

One of the toughest parts of the work, Mesara says, is when you don’t find out the outcome after a serious injury. “Most times you never find out. That’s one of the things you have to come to expect. You want to know about kids especially, when you know that they’re really hurt.”

But it’s gratifying “being out there with the skiing customers and talking to everybody,” he adds.” Most people know why we are there and are very grateful to see us. That’s really what makes it fun and enjoyable.”

w w w.encorekalamazoo.com | 43

INDEX TO ADVERTISERS

WMUK

102.1

Alfieri Jewelers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Amy Zane Store & Studio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 AVB . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Ayres-Rice Insurance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Bell’s Brewery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Borgess . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Bravo! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Brink, Key and Chludzinski, P.C. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Bronson Health Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 Center for Change and Growth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Confections with Convictions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Constance Brown Hearing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Dave’s Glass Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Dement and Marquardt, PLC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 DeNooyer Chevrolet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

WMUK NEWS airs stories about life in WMUK NEWS

Kalamazoo and SW

Michigan. Stories, headlines and weather are part of daily WMUK/NPR news broadcasts.

DeVisser Landscape Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Derby Financial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Downtown Kalamazoo Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Farm ‘N’ Garden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Farmers Alley Theatre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Fetzer Institute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Flipse, Meyer, Allwardt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Framemaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Gilmore Real Estate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Great Lakes Shipping Co. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Hite House . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 HRM Innovations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Kalamazoo Barre Studio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Kalamazoo Community Foundation . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Kalamazoo Valley Museum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 KNI/Southwest Michigan Imaging . . . . . . . . . . . 48 KRESA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Lewis, Reed & Allen P.C. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Mall Plaza Shops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Masonry Heater Design House . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Mercantile Bank of Michigan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Michigan News Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Millennium Restaurant Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Nature Connection of Kalamazoo . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 New Year’s Fest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Nutrimost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Parkway Plastic Surgery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Portage Printing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Spirit of Kalamazoo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 The Station . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Stewart & Co . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 UniQ Jewelry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 V&A Bootery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Vandersalm’s Flowershop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Varnum Attorneys At Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 WMUK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

44 | Encore DECEMBER 2014

The Last Word (continued from page 46) they were wrong. We did not complain that the driver’s side floorboards had holes that on rainy days would reveal just how wet the streets really were. We named the car Agnes after a great aunt we did not like who always whined when we saw her.

Our secret to success was to pick up our mother for a ride, letting her ride in the back seat with our seven children. We often stopped at the Quality Bakery on Westnedge Avenue so Mother could purchase a loaf of bread, and we’d mention afterward that we were nearly out of gas. Mother would gasp and demand that we pull into the nearest Standard station to fill up. She paid for it.

When we dropped her at her home later, she would thank us for the afternoon and say, “That is the most expensive bread I ever bought.”

Our cousin Gene Palfrey came one summer to visit and asked, “How is Agnes?” I told her that Agnes had died. Later that week, parked in front of Gilmore’s Department Store, I heard Gene gasp, as if having a heart attack, when she looked up and there was Aunt Agnes poking her face into our car and whining, “You girls never come to see me.”

Agnes, the car, had died on Riverview Drive in 1955 of internal problems.

Two years later, Tom made enough money to buy me my own car, and the day he drove into our driveway with an almost new white Mercury station wagon was ecstasy. It had

red leather seats that faced backwards, so the children for years never knew where they were going. It had a chrome roof rack to hold a canoe, if we had one. We drove our boys to prep schools, with no canoe but lots of luggage piled on the rack. The car also had an optional old Ford ooogah …ooogah horn, which I transferred to later cars until the ooogah gave out.

Now I drive a Chrysler Town & Country van. After Tom was forced to give up driving, he enjoyed sitting up high in the van and loading the rear with golf clubs and bags for our cottage on Lake Michigan. After he died, I kept the van. I have been besieged by offers to sell it and buy something else, but I find the van is just fine. The car of the future seems to be the hybrid-electric car, although electric cars are not as new as you might think. I remember as a small child seeing Mrs. Van Duesen driving her quiet electric car down Burdick Street. That was 70 years ago.

I know that sometime – I hope not soon – my children will take away the van keys and tell me I can no longer drive. When this happens, I shall disinherit them and not reveal that I have secreted away three extra sets of keys. I shall put the children back in my will if they find me a nice young student to drive for me. I plan to gently whack him on the shoulder with my cane and say, “Turn, young man, turn west. We are going to the lake.”

Ann Garrett Bennett, pictured here with her late husband, Tom, is a lifelong resident of Kalamazoo. She attended Kalamazoo College and Wells College, in Aurora, N.Y. She and Tom raised four children: Kathryn Bennett Solley and Betsy, Charles and Tim Bennett. Ann, who is 91, has been a member of the Reminiscence Writing Group at the Fountains of Bronson Place for more than a decade.

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w w w.encorekalamazoo.com | 45

THE last word encore

A Four-Wheeled Love Affair by

Ann Garrett Bennett

I

have always loved cars. When I was 7 years old, I built one — a wooden Lincoln Town Car with me as chauffeur and my sister Joyce and her best friend, Joan Gerphreide, pushing me until mother called a halt to enforced slavery. At 11, I was eagerly backing my parents’ cars in and out of the garage.

I come by this love affair with cars naturally, it’s in my DNA. My father used to tell the story of his early Ford cars, each named Myrtle after his mother and often driven by several of his friends because the key to Myrtle always remained in the lock, no matter where she was parked. Mother told of their early courtship days when they would come out of the Chocolate Shop and often find Myrtle gone. But Myrtle was always safely back in her garage by early morning. No questions asked.

During high school days, my brother Chick and I put a glossy brochure of a red Terraplane convertible at Dad’s place at the table each morning until he gave in and bought our first convertible. What joy! The top was not automatic, but we loved to tug it up, snap the three front fasteners securely and drive in the rain. Or occasionally we drove happily in the rain with the top down. In our college years, we

46 | Encore DECEMBER 2014

begged Dad for a Chrysler convertible, and he obliged with a Chrysler Town & Country with brown plaid seats and a horn that played “The Campbells Are Coming.”

The greatest car invention, to my thinking, was the automatic transmission. This Chrysler went one better, with Fluid Drive fixed to the steering column to make shifting easier, an innovation Chrysler gave up in 1940.

My father’s real symbol of success was his new navy blue Cadillac.

The day he drove home in it, my mother, a bit indifferent to cars, asked him, “Is this an Oldsmobile?”

When my husband, Tom, and I were married in 1948, he gave up his old LaSalle touring sedan for a new Pontiac coupe. The LaSalle had a reinforcing wicker seat pad on the driver’s side, and, knowing that Tom was older than I, I thought it meant he had back problems. Not so, just wires that were seeping upwards. I think they kept the driver alert.

In the early 1950s, my sister Joyce and I purchased a 1940 Chrysler sedan for $150. Friends swore it would rupture our friendship, but (continued on page 45)

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