Archive for January, 2010

Cindy Landrum

Winter

by Cindy Landrum

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Jan
27
To put it bluntly, I hate winter.
The short days, biting winds and more-often-than-not gloomy skies just make me want to hibernate.
My first inclination is to grab a blanket and a book, and pass the time on my couch until the first wild flower blooms.
Instead, I grab my camera instead. OK, sometimes I have to force myself to grab my camera and head out in the very weather I tried to escape 25 years ago when I moved to South Carolina.
Why? Because I have found winter a wondrous season for photography.
It’s the one season color takes a back seat.
Instead, shape, texture and tones go to the forefront.
Winter is a season that promotes seeing because its natural color range is so limited.
I have found it to be a perfect time to go black and white. It may take a little practice to get it just right because the camera’s meter will naturally underexpose snow. Filters can help. Polarizers can deepen skies and add pop and contrast to clouds, while graduated neutral density filters can help images with large tonal ranges.
It’s amazing how winter changes the landscape.
It’s enough to get me, a winter hater, out of the house.

webtree

The short days, biting winds and more-often-than-not gloomy skies just make me want to hibernate.

My first inclination is to grab a blanket and a book, and pass the time on my couch until the first wildflower blooms.

Instead, I grab my camera. OK, sometimes I have to force myself to grab my camera and head out in the very weather I tried to escape 25 years ago when I moved to South Carolina from Wisconsin.

Why? Because I have found winter a wondrous season for photography.

It’s the one season color takes a back seat.

Instead, shape, texture and tones go to the forefront.

Winter is a season that promotes seeing because its natural color range is so limited.

I have found it to be a perfect time to go black and white. It may take a little practice to get it just right because the camera’s meter will naturally underexpose snow. Filters can help. Polarizers can deepen skies and add pop and contrast to clouds, while graduated neutral density filters can help images with large tonal ranges.

It’s amazing how winter changes the landscape.

It’s enough to get me, a winter hater, out of the house.

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Lyn Riddle

On paying it forward

by Lyn Riddle

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Jan
23

As the members of the Flock Sunday school class at First Presbyterian Church of Greenville left class they were given an envelope that said simply Merry Christmas.

Inside was a letter that began, “Please accept this gift from my wife and me as a dedication of love and duty to our Lord Jesus Christ.”

It went on to talk about hard times and how much they wanted others to share the blessings God had given them. The author, who did not reveal his name, hoped class members would use the gift themselves if needed, help another family, grant an impoverished child’s Christmas wish or support a missionary.

The envelope contained five $100 bills so crisp one member said they looked like they had just been printed. There were 50 envelopes, one for each couple. That amounted to $25,000 from someone who did not want to be thanked, did not want publicity. Just wanted to sit back and watch the magic unfold.

Denton Burnette, as coordinator of the gift giving, is one of the few people who knows the donor’s identity.

“They could have easily written a check for $25,000, but they wanted to get other people involved, to make it more personal,” he said.

And personal it has been. Some in the class, facing their own misery with lost jobs or other problems, paid bills or bought Christmas for their children. One woman took her child out for a Mexican dinner, the first time in a year they’d been able to eat out. And they even ordered queso sauce.

One gave money for dishes and clothes to a woman whose mobile home had burned down. Another gave the $500 to Safe Harbor, the shelter for abused women, and was able to get his company to not only match the amount but also to double it – $1,500 for a more than worthy organization.

An 11-year-old boy got a bicycle, helmet and Pittsburgh Steelers gym bag. An unemployed father was able to buy presents for his children.

Fifty times over and more. A gift. More often than not, parents said the exercise had a profound impact on their children, who played a big role in deciding where the money should go and in giving it out when the time came.

“We’re always telling children to do things,” said John Stelling. “I’m glad my children saw me doing something.”

Stelling’s wife Robin and daughter Carlisle bought $130 in groceries for a classmate’s family. Then he took $300 to Triune Mercy Center for three homeless families. He also gave up all the jackets and sweatshirts he had in his trunk from this promotional products company.

He put some money in the collection plate at church. And the last $10 he used to buy McDonald’s hamburgers for the people who live under the Pete Hollis Highway bridge. He and his daughter as well as a friend and his daughter went down there with a truckload of firewood they had cut and the bag of burgers.

There were four or five tents, a makeshift stand and a handful of people. One guy approached Stelling. They talked about their lives.

“He revealed his situation to me and that hit home,” Stelling said.

The man had been a classmate more than two decades before at Wade Hampton High School. They had algebra together.

“He was ahead of me intellectually and from an academic standpoint,” Stelling said.

On that December day, the economic divide could not have been greater. But as men, they met as equals beside that railroad bed, one reaching out to the other because someone else had reached out first.

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Cindy Landrum

The world of photography uncovered

by Cindy Landrum

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Jan
21
blog riverplace

RiverPlace in downtown Greenville


I was looking for something to fill the void left after my kids had grown and left home.

I bought a digital camera so I could rediscover photography, an interest I had ignored for the better part of two decades save the predictable snapshots from a point-and-shoot camera documenting birthday parties, youth soccer games and the Christmas gift-opening frenzy.

During the past three years or so, photography has occupied my time and money. But photography has done so much more.

Ironically, after I started looking through the small rectangular viewfinder of my Nikon D300, I actually began noticing so much more of the world around me and seeing its beauty.

Sometimes, beauty is presented in an obvious and awe-inspiring way. Who can deny the beauty of a fog-filled valley, the view from the overlook at Caesar’s Head or even a precious baby?

Other times, we have to search for it in items often we otherwise overlook as we hurry from one meeting to the next, or running from one kid’s soccer game to the other’s dance class.

Although it can be way beneath the surface, there is beauty somewhere in that decaying building, that reflection, that aged face.

Looking through the viewfinder has forced me to slow down and really see. It’s something I do now even without a camera in my hands.

And I like what I see.

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Charles Sowell

Still saving the Saluda

by Charles Sowell

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Jan
13

Two years ago Save Our Saluda was just a group of angry people crowded into a back room at the Marietta firehouse to gripe about development along the North Saluda River.

Today SOS is a legitimate river advocacy organization with a regular program of service work cleaning up the headwaters of all three branches of the Saluda River in Greenville County as well as an expanding role downstream and a budding program of water quality testing.

The organization celebrated their second birthday just after the rest of the country rang in 2010.

Founders Nick and Dianne Anastos and the group’s first board knew that a transition from “anger to advocacy” would be vital for SOS to become a viable and sustainable organization.

Early on that core group was encouraged and supported by Frank Holleman, long-time environmental activist and Greenville attorney, who came to those early meetings and encouraged the nascent river advocates to realize that 90 percent of any battle is just showing up.

SOS also came under the wing of Upstate Forever’s Mountain Streams and Rural Waters program and were pushed to establish a goal of watershed advocacy in northern Greenville County.

Those first few meetings in 2008 were not pretty, however, beer flowed freely, either just before or out in the parking lot, and it showed in the rhetoric.

Mostly, residents of the Dark Corner were angry about development and more than a bit jealous about the perceived takeover of “their” rivers and mountains by rich outsiders.

The now-defunct plan to discharge treated effluent into the North Saluda River by the Cliffs at Mountain Park was simply the primer on a powder keg of resentment and fear.

But it did galvanize support among the population in a part of the county not known for environmental activism of any sort.

To comprehend how unusual SOS is for Northern Greenville County it is necessary to understand something of the history of the region that comprises the three forks of the Saluda.

The northern parts of Greenville County were once collectively known as the Dark Corner – a land of moonshiners and snake-handling churches; a place where corn that could have productively gone to feed the hogs very often went into a mash vat instead.

It was a place where the people didn’t just feel isolated, they were.

The North Saluda prior to any of the development that now cloaks the mountains like high-priced rhinestones had historically been one of the most abused streams along the Blue Ridge Escarpment.

The floodplain of the North Saluda has been a focus for farming and manufacturing for decades. Were it not for the Greenville Water System’s block of protected land around Poinsett Reservoir it probably would have degenerated years ago into something more closely resembling a hog trough than a mountain stream.

Much of the once hotly disputed Cliffs at Mountain Park development was a truck farm and a drag strip in the not too distant past.

Golf course and rich man’s playground could be called a step up, were it not for an envy factor and the idea that traditional uses should be protected for future generations without large checkbook balances.

SOS built much of their early success around a traditional uses argument.

As time passed and the battles over Mountain Park twisted their way through the state’s regulatory maze many of the hotheads from those early SOS meetings faded away.

The plans to dump treated effluent into the North Saluda died away, too, and was replaced by a ground discharge plan that added an extra layer of protection for the much abused river.

Today, SOS is a welcome participant at discussion tables with state regulatory agencies and with a growing Upstate environmental movement.

Alliances have been struck with neighboring counties and towns up and down the Saluda far removed from the mountains of the Dark Corner. Out of a time of fear and anger something of enduring value may have been born.

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Lyn Riddle

On the ups and downs of 2009

by Lyn Riddle

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Jan
13

Best and worst.
A columnist’s delight.
This rich panoply of stuff unfolding over a year, all ripe for a columnist to opine.
Especially in South Carolina.
We can be proud that so many of the top 10 worst lists from national news organizations have included someone from our state: our governor, a congressman. It is all so, well, tacky.
I offer three best, two worst. Worst first so we can end on a positive note.
The worst simply has to be Gov. Mark Sanford and his inability to keep his mouth shut. Bad enough he misled his staff and wife and traipsed off to Argentina to see the woman he eventually described as his soul mate. But then to come back and ramble on about this woman, with every word grinding salt into wounds he inflicted on his wife of 20 years, simply amazing.
Jenny Sanford gets street cred for not standing by her man but then does a cheeky photo shoot for Vogue and gets caught in the clutches of Barbara Walters, who should be on everyone’s worst list herself for her inability to move her face while talking and her unfortunate segue ways on her Ten Most Fascinating People show.
So Walters asks her, “Do you think you were his soul mate.”
And Mrs. Sanford says, raising her eyebrows, “Well, clearly not.”
Dumb question, Barbara.
Next, our illustrious judicial system. The public was divided over Judge James Williams’ decision to put John Ludwig on probation after he pleaded guilty to reckless homicide in the death of Bill Bardsley. Some said too lenient, others it was an accident, even though it was a Maserati flying into the Bardsley home.
Some claimed this rich businessman bought his way out of jail by hiring a superpower attorney in former federal Judge Billy Wilkins.
All points well taken. Here’s the thing that captures my attention. Former Greenville County Councilman Tony Trout is in prison because he snooped into County Administrator Joe Kernel’s work computer and when he found risqué e-mails broadcast them on the Internet. No one died.
Also, there’s a guy with bipolar disorder, a former deacon and family man who wigged out and held some folks hostage in a bank at gunpoint. I am not downplaying the seriousness of this crime in any way. He deserved a 10 year prison sentence. But again no one died.
What happened to justice?
On the good side South Carolina trumped Washington state for the new Boeing plant, where the fuselage of the Dreamliner will be assembled. This plane got rave reviews from the pilots who made the first flights recently. The fact it will be made here instead of Washington, where Boeing has two major plants, further adds to the prestige BMW brought to the state 15 years ago.
It also shows that when our leaders want to work together they can. Politics set aside for economic development: always a good thing. And even though it is to be located in North Charleston, the plant brings rewards to the Upstate in the form of suppliers, jobs and taxes (some day).
Greenville County moved ahead on the recreation front this year. The Swamp Rabbit Trail is nearing completion and will connect downtown Greenville with Travelers Rest. It will offer a great place to bike, walk or run and some views of the community not seen from any road. It snakes beside the Reedy and abuts Furman’s beautiful campus. Also, the Conestee Nature Park, a 400-acre park operated by a foundation, opened a new entrance and a $650,000 bridge over the Reedy River linking key areas.
And downtown Greenville received some very good news in the decision by Clemson University to locate its graduate business school in the space vacated by Bowater, a paper company that had its corporate headquarters there.
The loss of Bowater was a big one for Greenville, which has pegged its industrial recruitment in large measure on corporate headquarters. When Bowater left, in a snap, a lot of high-paying jobs went, too. And 100,000 square feet of empty space in a building overlooking Greenville’s famed Liberty Bridge doesn’t looks so good.
But now Clemson will occupy about 33,000 square feet for its MBA program, Small Business Center, Professional Advancement and Continuing Education operations. And it was made possible by a $1 million gift from a local company, ScanSource Inc.
The deal was announced on Nov. 13. Nothing unlucky about that Friday.

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Lyn Riddle

On a family’s love, a son’s mission

by Lyn Riddle

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Jan
6

Published: Sept. 18, 2009, 1:57 p.m.

A soldier’s story is most often written when he dies. We see in the clearest of terms the loss, the young life not lived fully, the sorrowful family.

But what of the soldier whose family simply worries?

The nights when sleep comes fitfully thinking of a son in Afghanistan, the call that comes long before sunup in which he describes seeing two children killed by a suicide bomber.

He says in a voice that sounds like he is right around the corner, “Afghans love their children just like we do.”

That is the world of the Penkert family of Greenville.

Their second son, Alex, an infantryman in the U.S. Army, has been in Afghanistan for two months. His older brother Eric is a third-year law student at Vanderbilt University. His younger sisters – Kaitlyn, 17, and Laura Paige, 14 – attend Greenville High.

Mom Evelyn works at First Presbyterian Church of Greenville and dad Rip is in business development with AMEC, an engineering firm.

Alex Penkert was a 20-year-old student at Greenville Technical College when he come home one day two years ago and told his mother he had decided to join the Army.

Rip Penkert was out of town on a business trip and remembers his wife, upset and crying, called with the news.

“I didn’t want to dissuade him from going in,” Penkert said. “We just thought he’d go as an officer.”

Father and son sat down in their Chanticleer home to talk. When it was over, it was the father who stood back in awe of the son who had volunteered to serve his country.

“I was convinced he was doing it for the right reason,” Penkert said. “He really wanted to serve.”

Alex Penkert completed basic training at Fort Benning and then received orders to go to Fort Lewis near Tacoma, Wash. The Army needed him to be a mortarman, 5th Stryker Brigade Combat Team 2nd Infantry Division.

The family knew he would go to war. Eventually. But when eventually came it was stunning nonetheless.

“It’s here.”

“It’s really happening.”

“His orders have been cut.”

Before deploying, he was given leave for his grandfather’s funeral and then in May and June, the standard two-week pre-deployment visit.

Life seemed so normal. All the children were home. Most nights Mrs. Penkert cooked supper and the six of them gathered around the kitchen table, its natural wood a reminder of the Sharpies used on so many school projects.

Sometimes he’d show Kaitlyn films of war – the real thing – the stuff he was headed for, soldiers pleading “Dear Jesus please keep me safe.”

She said, “Alex how can you watch this. Isn’t it scary?”

He said it helped him prepare.

“I can feel what he’s feeling,” Kaitlyn said. “It helps to understand.”

He and his dad talked about what would happen if the worst happened. They reviewed his will. They went over all the things the Army wanted them to consider.

On June 6, Rip and Kaitlyn Penkert took SPC Alex Penkert to Charlotte for the flight back to Washington State.

“I took one big breath of him and then he left,” Kaitlyn said.

First Presbyterian members sent 14 boxes of goodies ahead of the team and Kaitlyn has been packing a box and sending it over every week since – beef jerky and Pringles, trail mix and Gatorade powder – items she calls comfort food. Her brother had lost 15 pounds already.

“The food is gross,” Kaitlyn said.

She would like to send more and would accept donations from the community so her brother can be Santa Claus to the soldiers without family or without family who can send them packages.

Penkert was stationed first at Kandahar, then a more remote location and now an even more remote firebase in a high elevation. He is on his feet all day.

“We want him to have plenty of calories,” his dad said.

Alex calls home about once a week, usually between 1:30 a.m. and 4:30 a.m., which is late morning there. The Penkerts don’t mind. It means everyone is home when he calls.

He has told them he’s been shot at. Almost two weeks ago he told about a cleancut teen on a scooter at a bazaar. The teen pushed something on his wrist, detonating a bomb that ripped his body apart and killed the translator for Alex’s unit and two Afghan children. The lieutenant was hit in the chest and some soldiers were wounded but none died.

Alex was about 25 feet away when he saw a grief-stricken Afghan kick the terrorist’s severed head like a football.

It was tough to hear, but Rip Penkert said he’s glad his son can talk about it. Perhaps the non-physical wounds he brings back will heal or at least not be so deep.

“I am really proud of him,” Penkert said. “I believe in his mission.”

Contact Lyn Riddle at lriddle@greenvillejournal.com or 679-1250.


To donate items for the members of Alex’s unit, call 235-5940.

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Susan Simmons

My sister’s calling

by Susan Simmons

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Jan
6

Printed: 2/20/09

When I read the other day about people going into teaching as an easy backup plan in a bad economy, I could just hear my art-teacher sister’s comeback: Try a week at the local high school first and see if you last.

An artist who wandered the globe in her youth and chose Peru for her honeymoon, she would tell anyone who asked that teaching’s her first and best work. A calling, not a backup plan.

I understand the attraction of certain jobs in bad economic times. You know the ones: health care, police work, education, anything that speaks of durability. A steady paycheck is a real gift in a down market.

Even so, I was struck by the attitude I saw in reporter Anna Mitchell’s recent story about a fast-track way to become a high school teacher.

The people she interviewed at an introductory seminar said teaching had always appealed to them – as a profession, and a stable job with good benefits.

“As long as kids are being born, we’re going to need teachers,” one man said. You can just hear the unspoken rest: How hard can it be, right?

I remember Cathy telling me once that her favorite classroom moment was when a student suddenly blurted out, “Wow!” over a picture he or she just finished. She said what almost always followed was, “I didn’t know I could do that.”

And he wants to try again.

An interesting thing about siblings, especially younger siblings, is how hard it is to imagine them in their professional capacities. The image of Cathy as high school teacher has always competed with memories of her eavesdropping behind the couch when I had friends over.

There’s also the fact that I left Savannah and she stayed. Siblings who see each other at Rotary are better able to grasp the transition.

But I’ve had a couple of chances, over the years, to visit her on the job. I recommend it, if you have a sibling. It’s quite enlightening.

I knew she was a creative artist. What amazed me was how creative her students were, and how confidently they worked at their assignments. No hesitant efforts anywhere. They listened when she talked and lingered when the bell rang. Several usually stopped by after school to talk more, and not just about art. It was obvious some of those conversations had been going for a while.

Cathy and I have had many debates about education, but those insights into her teaching life are what I remember more.

Think, for a minute, what teachers do. Their students come from all economic, ethnic and social backgrounds. Some can’t speak English. Some arrive hungry, poorly clothed, or lacking basic supplies. All have different learning styles, which a good teacher is expected to understand and address in his or her lesson plans.

The quality teacher also must teach creatively, discipline wisely, react to all comers – parent, student or superior – patiently, and ensure that every child performs at the highest possible level on the avalanche of standardized tests every state requires.

Yes, some burn out and skate through the day. Some skate from the start. But far more see teaching as a calling they strive to answer every day.

My sister was one of them for 20 years. When she lost her life to breast cancer last January, well over half the 600 people who visited us at the funeral home were her students and their parents.

Her art classes created a joyous collage of 50 customized squares celebrating all she taught them, and presented it to her husband that night. I still remember what one girl said: “I didn’t know I could do the things I can do, but she knew. She taught me how to see. We are her art.”

Only a calling can deliver that.

 

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John Lane

Making a list

by John Lane

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Jan
5

Last week the Journal did what good journalism should do. It got me thinking about who the real leaders of Spartanburg might be. The newspaper’s cover story highlighted a list of young–mostly business–people with deep Spartanburg roots poised to move into important roles of community leadership.

Lists by their nature are selective. It’s hard to go deep with a list and capture anything of substance about something as complex as leadership or community, but still we try.

Compiling a list is like dipping a cup of water from a moving stream. Lists focus on the taste and opinions of the list-makers at the moment they compile them. They often leave off the true diversity of opinions and attitudes that make up any real cultural landscape at any given historic moment. A list is more like reading a field guide than actually walking through a forest.

I write this column from Austin, Texas, a city created by counterculture, art and ideas. It’s the type of city that almost all cities aspire to now—a Richard Florida wonderland of downtown condos, hip vegan neighborhoods reclaimed from seediness, a modern city bursting at the seams with alt-everything.

All that said, I want to offer an alternative list of young creative Spartanburg leaders to contrast to this newspaper’s list last week. Looking through my cultural field glasses these are some of the people I’d watch if I wanted to understand what the future landscape might look like in our community.

On my list I’d include young people like Allyn Steele (Wofford’s director of community sustainability), Matthew Knights Williams (the emerging focal point of local music), and bloggers Tammy Stokes (organizer of “Show Up for Spartanburg”) and Chris George.

I’d also add Steve Shanafelt (new media entrepreneur), Will Rothschild (ad man and against-the-grain campaigner), Jay Coffman (dynamic and creative director of the Little Theatre), Stephen Long and Alix Refshauge (Hub-Bub’s central nervous system), Jerome Rice (new city council member and educator), brothers Carroll and Josh Foster (photographer and banker/aspiring filmmaker), and Andrew Blanchard (the Pied Piper of the artistic edge).

I’d include planner and city council member-elect Cate Ryba (also on the other list) and her husband, architect Aaron Ryba.

Since I’m making a list, I’d also throw in Kristi Webb and Rebecca Parrish at Preservation Trust (responsible for boosting the city’s tax base by bringing back one of its historic neighborhoods), Ned Barrett and Shelley Robbins at Upstate Forever (sustainable development and carbon neutrality mavens), Laura Ringo (engineer behind local biking initiatives), and Curt McPhail (community activist).

In city government, I’d toss in Chris Story, new assistant city manager, and Mitch Kennedy, community relations director.

With the public schools, I’d want to include Russell Booker, the superintendent-elect of District Seven, and newly elected council member Julie Lonon.

Some might say that the people on my list aren’t powerful in the old-time sense. “Great ideas,” someone might say. “But show me the money.”

If Richard Florida is to be believed, then power is in change, not status quo. Ideas are the new community currency, and the free and fast flow of information and opinions may be the new community “coin of the realm.”

Hence the power of blogs like Chris George’s FLYING OSCAR and Tammy Stokes’ SEEDING SPARTANBURG. It used to be in the old days that the local daily paper could “control” politics and opinion from above with old-time “booster” journalism.

Today weekly papers add to the cultural fire because they don’t always speak with one editorial voice. There can be an article like the “New Leaders” one week and the next week I present an alternative list.

Make your own list. I know mine is full of blind spots. My binoculars are trained on the arts, nonprofits, and government, the most important players in the human drama I’m most interested in. Layer these two lists together and you may begin to get a clear map of the territory.

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