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Features

A Champion Wins Alaska’s Toughest Dog Sled Race By Communing with Nature and His Furry Companions

Sass and his team at the 2022 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. (Courtesy of Brent Sass)

Attitude is everything for Brent Sass, winner of the 2022 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Always a challenging event, it was particularly harrowing this year.

Sass said he went through what he describes as “mental warfare” to bring his team across the finish line first in 2022, triumphing despite being blown off-course by a mammoth blizzard on the last leg. He credits his passion for the sport, a close relationship with his dogs, leadership skills, and an unwavering positive attitude—but most of all, he credits his dogs with keeping him honest.

“You can’t really fake attitude with them,” he said. “The dogs can see right through most anything. So you truly have to be excited and happy about what you’re doing. If you’re in a bad mood, they are, too. When you’re happy, the dogs are happy, and when the dogs are happy, you can pretty much get through any conditions.”

Brent Sass raised the dogs on his sled team from puppies and has formed a special bond with them. (Courtesy of Brent Sass)
The strong bond between Sass and his dogs allowed them to triumph over seemingly insurmountable challenges. (Courtesy of Brent Sass)

Established in 1973, the Iditarod winds through roughly 1,000 miles of wilderness from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska. Teams of up to 14 dogs pull sleds for 8 to 15 days—it actually took up to 20 days in the early years—through blizzards, white-outs, and the generally rough terrain of wild Alaska with possible wind chills of minus 100°F—in a good year. The weather for the 50th anniversary 2022 race was so fierce that three mushers (drivers of a dogsled) were forced to take shelter, despite resulting penalties.

Into the Wild

Sass experienced a crash that could have ended the race for him during a harrowing blizzard. “We were having a blast, until we were on a side-hill and the wind gusted up real high and it caught me,” he said. “I got top-heavy and we just tumbled down off the trail into the abyss.” The dogs were dragged down with him. “Finally, everything stopped and the dogs immediately hunkered down. Drifts are already coming over the top of them and I knew they’d be wondering what to do.”

He looked up and realized he had lost sight of the trail. “At that point, I turned on the sled’s handlebar headlight so I could see the sled, because if you walked away 10 feet, the sled was gone.” With the light on, he walked farther and spotted a reflector on a trail marker. “The sled was pretty far off the trail, but I had been pounding my foot into the hardpack [compacted snow] so that I had some bit of trail that I could follow.”

Pink and Slater take a rest during the race. (Courtesy of Brent Sass)

With the trail found, his next focus was to tend to the dogs, calming them while cleaning their eyes and muzzles of snow and ice buildup. “Through the chaos, I was talking to the dogs to reassure them. I got them all stood up, dragged the gangline [a central line that connects the sled to the dogs’ tuglines] around, and got the sled turned around so we were pointed towards where I had found the trail, and we resumed the race.”

While 2022 was his first Iditarod win, he is a three-time champion of the Yukon Quest, a 1,000-mile dogsled race, and placed third and fourth in the 2021 and 2020 Iditarod races, respectively. With this year’s Iditarod title, that makes him one of only six people to win both 1,000-mile races. Over 21 years of mushing, Sass said he has learned the importance of maintaining a positive attitude, no matter what, as his bad mood can cause the dogs to “sour.” After experiencing a breakdown in the 2016 race, he developed a new mantra—“Run your own race”—which he had tattooed on his body, along with “Attitude is everything,” “Pain is inevitable—suffering is optional,” “Livin’ on the edge,” and “Believe.”

When not racing, he owns and operates Wild and Free Mushing, which breeds, raises, and trains Alaskan huskies for long-distance races. He also guides expeditions into the Arctic wilderness. He described himself as “professional dog musher/dog dad/wilderness guide/gold miner/equipment operator/cabin builder/landlord.”

Sass with his lead dogs, Slater (L) and Morello, at the completion of the 2022 Iditarod race. (Courtesy of Brent Sass)

A Real Connection

When he was 8 years old, his grandparents visited Alaska, bringing back photos of mountains and rivers that greatly inspired Sass. He told his parents he would go to Alaska when he grew up. After graduating from high school, he attended the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he skied on the cross-country ski team his first year.

In 2001, he purchased land in Goldstream Valley, just outside of Fairbanks, and started building rental cabins. After two summers, he had six cabins. One day, as he was working on the cabins, he saw a dog team go by. “A light went off in my head, and I knew I wanted to do that,” he said. “I’ve never let that dream get away.”

He followed the dog team to talk to the musher, who told him to come back in a week. “When I did, he handed me a 5-week-old puppy that I named Silver,” he recalled. “Little did I know, that dog would change my life. Over the next several years, I built more cabins and collected more dogs from the newspaper’s ‘free items’ ad section,” which advertised dogs for adoption.

(Courtesy of Brent Sass)

His goal was to assemble a team of dogs that could pull him through the wilderness. It was a motley crew led by Silver, an old Alaskan husky named Brent, a Mackenzie River husky, a Saint Bernard/husky mix, and another big husky named Leer.

Around this time, he applied for a job at a kennel, having no idea it was owned by five-time Iditarod winner Susan Butcher and Yukon Quest champion David Monson. The job turned into an amazing mentorship for Sass. In addition to learning from Butcher and Monson how to raise and train dogs, Sass began studying other racers, their moves, and their dogs, eventually opening his own breeding operation. Though Silver was bigger than the standard race dog, he was extremely smart and mentally strong; he became Sass’s main breeding stud. Sass ran tours by giving sled rides to paying visitors in order to fund his races.

“I named the kennel Wild and Free Mushing after a song by Hobo Jim, the Alaska state balladeer,” Sass said. “‘Wild and Free’ is a song about a guy who follows his own path, making it the perfect name for my kennel.”

Silver, who passed away at the age of 18 three years ago, was the foundation of Sass’s breeding program. The canine is the father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather of 80 percent of the kennel’s pups. “The dogs are everything,” he said. Sass has raised all 50 dogs that he currently has in his kennel. “I bond with each dog, and the relationships that I build with these dogs is what makes it possible for us to compete at the high level required by these races.” Sass is a great example of what can be accomplished by an individual who seizes upon a dream and seizes upon his every waking hour to make it come true.

Sass behind an “IditaRider,” the winner of the annual bid for a short sled ride at the ceremonial start of the race. (Courtesy of Brent Sass)

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine. 

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History Features

The Story of Nellie Bly, the Brave 19th-Century Journalist Who Went Undercover to Expose Abuses at an Insane Asylum

Illustration of the Blackwell Island insane asylum in New York. (Public domain)

In 1887, Nellie Bly boarded the boat with the other patients bound for Blackwell’s Island, now known as Roosevelt Island. Their stay in the filthy cabin was mercifully short, and soon they crossed the East River and disembarked. After an ambulance ride, Bly and the others found themselves ushered into the stone buildings of the insane asylum. Unlike the others interned at the asylum, however, Bly came by choice. As an undercover reporter, she planned to witness the rumored abuses at the asylum firsthand and expose them.

“I had some faith in my own ability as an actress,” Bly later wrote. “Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell’s Island? I said I could and I would. And I did.”

The Reporter’s Beginnings

Nellie Bly was the pen name of Elizabeth Jane Cochran, born May 5, 1864, in Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania. When her father died young and his estate was split among his many children and second wife (Bly’s mother), the family fell on hard times. From a young age, Bly worked many jobs to help support her mother and family but struggled to find work that paid well.

In 1880, the family moved to Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, (the city was annexed by Pittsburgh in 1907). One day, Bly read an article in the Pittsburgh Dispatch opposing women in the workplace. She wrote a letter to the editor offering an opposing view on the subject. Managing editor George Madden was impressed, and in the next edition of the paper, he asked the author of the letter to come forward.

Photograph of Nellie Bly in 1890 from the Museum of the City of New York. (Public domain)

“She isn’t much for style,” Madden said, “but what she has to say she says right out.”

Bly went to the Dispatch’s office and soon had a job and a pen name—Nellie Bly, after the popular song “Nelly Bly” by Stephen Foster. One of her first series for the Dispatch covered the conditions of poor working girls in Pittsburgh. At 21 years of age, she went to Mexico and wrote articles for the Dispatch until her criticism of the country’s censorship almost resulted in her arrest.

The majority of the articles the Dispatch assigned her, however, were simple, women’s interest pieces on entertainment, arts, or fashion. Bly wasn’t satisfied writing these pieces, so in 1887 she packed her bags and headed to New York.

A Secret Assignment

Bly tried to find a job at a New York newspaper for a few months to no avail, but she wasn’t about to return to Pittsburgh in defeat. Giving up wasn’t an option. “Indeed, I cannot say the thought ever presented itself to me, for I never in my life turned back from a course I had started upon,” she wrote.

One night, Bly realized her purse was missing and with it the rest of her money. She went to the offices of The New York World and demanded to see the editor in chief. When Bly finally spoke to managing editor John Cockerill, she pitched the idea of riding in the steerage of a ship to Europe and back, reporting on the condition that passengers, primarily immigrants, endured. The World wasn’t interested in that idea, but Cockerill proposed a different idea instead. The 23-year-old Bly would get herself sent to Blackwell’s Island and experience the rumored abuses firsthand. Bly agreed to take the assignment.

“How will you get me out?” she asked.
“I do not know,” Cockerill replied. “Only get in.”

Illustration of Bly practicing feigning insanity from her 1887 book “Ten Days in a Madhouse.” (Public domain)
Illustrative plate of an insanity expert at work, from Bly’s 1887 book. (Public domain)

The Asylum on Blackwell’s Island

Bly rented a room at a boardinghouse called the Temporary Home for Females. Her theatrics there and at Bellevue Hospital soon earned her a place at the asylum. Once there, Bly quickly found the rumored abuses to be true. The food and overall conditions were horrendous. Many people at the asylum were wrongly interned, including some immigrants who didn’t get a chance to plead their cases because they couldn’t speak English.

The nurses and caretakers at the asylum treated all patients with contempt and cruelty. Bly gathered testimony from patients in addition to the experiences she herself endured. After arriving, she acted completely normal and explained to the doctors that she should be examined and let go. She quickly learned that her only way of escape would be when someone from the World came to get her.

“The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out,” she wrote.

After 10 days in the asylum, an attorney from the New York World came and obtained her release. Bly found herself strangely conflicted upon her departure. “I had looked forward so eagerly to leaving that horrible place yet when my release came … there was a certain pain in leaving,” she wrote. “For ten days I had been one of them. Foolishly enough, it seemed intensely selfish to leave them to their sufferings.”

A journalist on the go, Bly poses with her carpetbag, 1890. (Public domain)

Bly wrote a series of articles exposing the asylum, which were then compiled into a book, “Ten Days in a Madhouse.” Later, she testified to a grand jury about her experiences. This led to an increase in funding for Blackwell’s and institutions like it to provide adequate care for patients. “I have one consolation for my work—on the strength of my story the committee of appropriation provides $1,000,000 more than was ever before given, for the benefit of the insane,” she wrote.

Honor and Truth

Bly’s career was never smooth sailing, but she continued to write the rest of her life. “Energy rightly applied and directed will accomplish anything,” she said.

Though plagued with writing filler pieces, she also wrote articles that exposed an employment agency, a company supposedly “selling” unwanted babies, another factory where girls worked in horrible conditions, a corrupt lobbyist, and more. She was in Europe when World War I broke out, so she served as a war correspondent, braving the front lines. All in all, Bly worked to report what she saw regardless of what subject she was assigned.

“Write up things as you find them, good or bad,” she said. “Give praise or blame as you think best, and the truth all the time.”

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine. 

Categories
Features

World-Class Performer Steven Wang on Discovering the Power of Dance in America

Wang performs the Tibetan dance piece “Khata for the Gods,” from Shen Yun’s 2012 program. (Courtesy of Shen Yun Performing Arts)

It had been a few months since Steven Wang last spoke to his parents, located halfway across the world in China. He knew that every time he phoned, the Chinese authorities would be listening in via wiretapping, so he avoided calling too often.

He started by asking simple questions, the way he always did. In these conversations, Wang couldn’t really share with his parents about his new life in America or about his recent experiences performing as a principal dancer at world-renowned theaters. The information could become ammunition for the Chinese regime, which keeps a watchful eye on those like Wang and his family who have been labeled enemies of the state because of their faith.

Wang’s mother and father have been repeatedly arrested and have spent intermittent time in jail because of their belief in a meditation practice called Falun Dafa, a self-cultivation discipline with meditative exercises and moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. In 1999, the Chinese communist regime outlawed the practice amid the movement’s rapidly growing popularity. Across the country, hundreds of thousands were rounded up and detained, often tortured while imprisoned.

On a fateful day in November 2009, Wang’s mother told him that his father had passed away. After his last imprisonment in 2003, his health drastically deteriorated—no doubt due to torture. He died of kidney failure in September 2009. “That day, I hid inside an empty warehouse and cried by myself for a long time,” Wang said. He regretted not being able to see his father one last time.

Wang began dance training at 9 years old. (Courtesy of Steven Wang)

But Wang knew he had a greater mission at stake: In the land of freedom, he would tell the stories of millions like his parents who still face persecutionand possibly mortal danger because of their refusal to give up their faith. Through the language of dance, Wang would convey the resilience and courage that many Falun Dafa adherents embody.

“I would think, when my father was in prison, did he experience similar torture? I imagined how a practitioner, or my father, would endure such suffering.” He would then try to display that suffering onstage.

Most recently, Wang learned that his mother was detained on July 7, 2022, at the Changsha No. 4 Women’s Detention Center, likely for distributing pamphlets about Falun Dafa, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center, which tracks persecution cases.

Wang is pictured with his mother and two sisters. (Courtesy of Steven Wang)

Wang later came to the realization that he also faced a form of persecution: the burden of uncertainty, invisible pressure, and the suffering of his loved ones. He would try to channel the emotions he felt via dance. “I hope people will understand the truth,” he said.

A Deeper Meaning Behind Dance

Wang was intrigued by dance at a young age. He grew up in Hunan Province, a place known for producing top-level gymnastics athletes. But training in gymnastics was grueling, and somehow, young Wang had a gut feeling that the sport was not for him. In 1996, when he was about 9 years old, Wang told his parents he wanted to give dance a try. His father brought him to a local arts center. When he saw the group of young classmates in their dance outfits, he felt it was the right place. Wang excelled in his class and eventually got accepted into a professional dance academy in Chongqing City—hundreds of miles away—for secondary school.

Shortly after he started dancing, Wang’s parents began practicing Falun Dafa. The practice had spread quickly across the country, with nearly 100 million adherents by the late 1990s. Wang noticed a change in his parents: They were no longer arguing the way they used to, and his father’s diabetes symptoms had disappeared.

In July 1999, the communist regime initiated its persecution campaign against Falun Dafa. Wang was too young to fully comprehend it and was far away from home. But he knew that people like his parents were being arrested and jailed because of their faith. During the  2001 Lunar New Year holiday, Wang’s parents were both arrested. He and his three elder sisters were left at home alone. “We were like orphans,” he recalled.

Seeing that the children had no one to take care of them, Wang’s aunt and uncle stayed with them for the holiday. “They pitied us and decided not to go back to their hometowns for [Lunar] New Year and stayed with us. It left a deep impression on me. I felt for the first time that our family wasn’t whole,” Wang said.

Later that year, Wang and his sisters visited their father in prison. The elder Wang was seated behind a clear barricade as guards watched intently behind him. Detainees were not allowed to talk; they could only write down messages to their visitors on a chalkboard. “He looked like skin covering bones. He looked very weak.” It was a memory Wang would never forget.

At boarding school, he was shielded from the realities of the Chinese regime’s persecution. Meanwhile, his mother and father tried to evade being arrested again. In 2008, while Wang was enrolled at a dance college in Chongqing, his mother found out about Shen Yun Performing Arts, a burgeoning performing arts company centered on an ancient art form called classical Chinese dance. Classical Chinese dance—with its unique gestures, postures, and movements—has been passed down through the ages. Its roots trace back to the imperial courts and theatrical performances of ancient China. Shen Yun, based in upstate New York, seeks to revive traditional Chinese culture through dance and music. Wang had already been learning similar dance techniques in China, and his mother encouraged him to apply for an opportunity to train and study abroad with Shen Yun.

Wang competes inthe 2010 NTD International Classical Chinese Dance Competition, portraying a knight who must decide how to use his sword skills nobly. (Courtesy of Shen Yun Performing Arts)

Wang was accepted. Everything went smoothly for his trip to America. It was here that he understood the true meaning of his craft. In China, nearly everyone kept their minds focused on getting ahead. “In that society, you’re thinking about how to get a good job after graduating, to find a good job and a good salary,” Wang said. He didn’t think beyond graduating from college, getting a steady salary as a dance instructor at a school, and then making extra money by offering private lessons.

He hadn’t considered the greater significance of what dance could be. “I didn’t have a concept about what classical Chinese dance really is until I entered Shen Yun,” he said. Through the stories of legendary heroes and men of great virtue from Chinese history, Wang learned what true kindness, humility, and trustworthiness mean. He learned that personal cultivation is critical to improving one’s technical skill: “I had to be very humble. I had to be able to accept criticism, no matter where it came from.”

In China, where the communist regime has instilled atheism throughout society, “when they teach you history, they talk about how each dynasty did things incorrectly, what mistakes they made.” “They wouldn’t tell you about the good things,” Wang said. That affected the dance training. “The more negative things you learn, the dancing also becomes more negative, dark.”

Shen Yun artists have the creative freedom to explore the beauty of age-old traditions, the positive moral lessons passed down through generations, Wang said. “I realized that the traditional things are cleaner, more beautiful, and have more flavor. My attitude was full of diligence and positivity.”

There were long days and nights spent rehearsing and refining his skills. He also sustained a knee injury. But he knew that self-discipline was the key to improvement. “I only had the thought of changing myself. I didn’t feel tired. I felt my life was very enriching every day.”

Portraying the Truth

Since the winter of 2008, Wang has toured around the world with Shen Yun in more than 1,000 performances. As principal dancer, he has portrayed the main character in several pieces that depict the modern-day plight of Falun Dafa practitioners in China.

During the 2010–2011 season, in a number called “The Opening of Heaven’s Gates,” Wang portrayed a practitioner who goes to Tiananmen Square in Beijing to let the public know that Falun Dafa is an upright practice. Police officers quickly charge in and tear away the banner he holds (it reads “Falun Dafa is Good”), beating him unconscious. The adherent’s steadfast faith moves celestial beings who use their powers to revive him. Those who witness the miracle praise the immense compassion displayed by the celestial beings. Inspired by divine blessings, Wang’s character expresses courage and elation.

In 2017, Wang portrayed a father who tries to protect his young infant from the Chinese policemen’s angry blows. “At the time, I tried to think from my father’s perspective: To protect my family, what would he do?”

(Daniel Ulrich for American Essence)

Wang is grateful that his new home country cherishes the freedom that is so wantonly trampled on in China. “Here in the U.S., I can choose my belief and follow any spiritual practice without having to fear that I might be persecuted,” he said.

He also feels honored that through playing historical Chinese figures, he can exhibit virtuous qualities that people can learn from today. “These are universally recognized. Respect and believe in the divine. Be sincere toward people. Be humble. Practice kindness and love. Be passionate in your work, and be bright and optimistic.” Such values have been eroded in China by the communist regime, but Wang hopes to have the chance to change that: “As a proud American citizen, I hope that one day, when the Chinese Communist Party falls, we can perform in China and bring back all the traditional values that used to be part of the Chinese people.”

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine. 

Categories
Features

The Salmon Sisters: Meet Alaska’s Sibling Duo Dedicated to Supplying America with Fresh Sustainable Seafood

Sisters Claire Neaton (L) and Emma Teal Privat are Alaskan fishermen and co-founders of Salmon Sisters, an Alaskan fish and nautical apparel company. (Camrin Dengel)

There were more fish than people.

Sisters Claire Neaton and Emma Teal Privat were raised on a remote Alaskaisland in a region where salmon outnumbered humans exponentially—10 billion salmon, a few hundred people. Privat and Neaton, whose family ran a commercial fishing operation, lived on a homestead near False Pass, in the Aleutian Islands. They grew up living, breathing, and eating salmon, and absorbing the values a pioneer subsistence lifestyle creates.

“We learned resourcefulness, determination—growing up in such a remote area meant that we relied on ourselves to overcome obstacles,” recalled Privat. “This taught us that nothing was impossible, and we could get through most challenges if we just worked at it for long enough.

A meal of freshly caught and grilled salmon, prepared and enjoyed at sea. (Camrin Dengel)

“We also learned the value of family and good food—we were a family of four, and we all played a role in the success of our livelihood. As kids, we helped our parents plant the garden, pull fish from the net, pick berries, dig clams, harvest kelp, cook, build, clean, mend, fix. We still work together on the fishing boat today, and it’s great to have that close relationship.”

Fishing was, and is, the foundation of their lives. So why not build a business based on marine everything, just like their own lives? Not only would it provide something to keep them busy in the winter, but it would also offer an outlet for what they learned in college: Neaton studied business and marketing, and Privat English, art, and design.

Thus was born Salmon Sisters, the now 10-year-old, wildly popular retail venture based in Homer that ships salmon, salmon-stuff, and marine-themed apparel to customers elsewhere in Alaska, in the lower 48, and around the world. From this famous little hamlet at the end of the road, customers can order salmon, halibut, and cod, frozen, canned, and “jarred,” to use an Alaskan term referring to salmon that is first smoked, then canned—a deliriously delicious, savory treat.

Neaton and Privat learned to process and cook fish at a young age. (Courtesy of Emma Teal Privat and Claire Neaton)
Young Neaton and Privat with their parents. (Courtesy of Emma Teal Privat and Claire Neaton)

There are also hoodies, fleece jackets, and pullovers; scarves, headbands, and gaiters; sweatpants and leggings; and the all-important Xtratuf boots, an icon of life in Alaska without which civilization might cease. “These are still our most popular products since we started designing them for women with Xtratuf,” Privat reported. “That first octopus design we created remains our best-seller today.” Having discovered a successful theme, almost all their items are emblazoned with marine-life designs ranging from sand dollars to mermaids to puffins to, of course, salmon.

Call of the Sea

It’s impossible to exaggerate the importance of salmon in Alaska. These anadromous fish are born in almost every stream and river in the state, from the nearly 2,000-mile Yukon River to tiny creeks in Southeast Alaska measured in hundreds of yards. Ten billion salmon grow fat every summer in the food-rich ocean waters of the North Pacific; when they return to fresh water after four years, they are the foundation of Alaska food. Every Alaskan is entitled to harvest about three dozen fish a year for subsistence; most Alaska households have a freezer dedicated just to that. Salmon are celebrated in art, music, language, religion, and literature—and in debates over which kind is best, a topic on which every Alaskan has a fiercely held opinion.

The salmon migratory cycle exerts its force on people, too, Privat explained about the two sisters’ return to Alaska following college studies on the East Coast.

“The seasonal pull of the sea always brought us back for the summer salmon season. It was a constant in an unknown time of life right after college. It made sense to come back for a job we knew how to do, a semi-reliable paycheck, and spending time with our family, but also it was a part of our identity we didn’t know how to live without. It was, and is, deeply ingrained in our family and upbringing,” she recounted, expressing a sentiment shared by hundreds of thousands of Alaskans, whether they fish commercially or just recreationally.

Both sisters still work during Alaska’s commercial fishing seasons, applying the skills and knowledge ingrained in them since a young age. (Sashwa Burrous)
During fishing season, which means long stretches of time out at sea, the sisters cook on their boat with freshly caught fish. ( Brian Grobleski)

Sustainability and Respect

The two siblings, just a year apart, are both now married and fishing with their respective husbands during all or most of the various commercial seasons in Alaska, and on the boat of their still-active father, Buck. Lean and hale outdoorswomen, their angular bone structure reflects their Lithuanian heritage and resembles the dynamic wild fish they harvest. Both express pride that their state manages its fish stocks rigorously to ensure they are not depleted, and they vow that if Alaska’s sustainable fisheries survive our challenging times, their family legacy can continue for decades.

“Sustainable fishing is written into Alaska’s state constitution, and protecting Alaska’s fisheries with sustainable practices helps address hunger and food insecurity,” Privat pointed out. “In Alaska, seafood is responsibly managed, utilizing a world-leading, science-based approach to help fish stocks, communities, and entire ecosystems thrive for generations to come.”

One of the Salmon Sisters’ fishing boats, the Stanley K. (Camrin Dengel)

This issue is directly addressed in the sisters’ recent cookbook, “The Salmon Sisters: Feasting, Fishing, and Living in Alaska” (Sasquatch Press, 2020). Lavishly illustrated by Privat, it contains 50 recipes reflecting their homestead heritage, stories about life growing up in one of Earth’s most remote locales, and pleas for readers to respect the land and seas that feed us. A new book expanding on this theme is scheduled for publication in the fall of 2023.

“As fishermen, we’re lucky to work in incredibly wild places and witness such natural abundance and vitality in them,” Privat said. They also do their part in preserving them.

Salmon Sisters actively opposed the Pebble Mine proposal, for instance, which threatened to place cyanide leach from the world’s largest gold mine in the headwaters of the Bristol Bay fishery. The world’s largest single salmon fishery, Bristol draws 50 to 75 million sockeyes and other salmon every year; record numbers in recent years signify the health of the runs.

Deeply Anchored

The two sisters’ earliest memories are of helping their mother, Shelly, pick salmon from the net in front of their homestead, Stonewall Place.

The sisters published a cookbook, “The Salmon Sisters: Feasting, Fishing, and Living in Alaska,” in 2020. (Camrin Dengel)

“Our childhood was rich and remarkable,” the sisters write in their cookbook, “though its reality was challengingly remote as well as extremely dependent on the seasons and the bounty of the sea. Fresh fish was the king of our wild foods, demanding the most work and the most reward.”

Hence their deep dedication to fishing and outdoor life, no matter how successful their retail business may be.

“This is our identity,” Neaton declared. “It’s our source of pride. I am not going to give up fishing for this business.”

“At this point, our Salmon Sisters and fishing businesses have both grown so well it doesn’t make sense to be anywhere else,” Privat added. “We have a team and shops and we’re deeply rooted in the North now, and it feels good to be living seasonally and in connection with our community and nature.

“Our primary value is feeding the world healthy, sustainably harvested wild fish while stewarding the marine ecosystem and celebrating the wild places where we live and work,” she added. “Mother Nature’s gifts leave us with a healthy respect for living things beyond ourselves.”

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine. 

Categories
House of Beauty Features History

The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island: A Grand Tour of the Vanderbilts’ Italianate Summer Home

Located at 44 Ochre Point Avenue in Newport, R.I., this 70-room mansion sits beside oceanside cliffs, overlooking Easton Bay. (Courtesy of The Preservation Society of Newport County)

In the autumn of 1885, Cornelius Vanderbilt II paid a little over $400,000 for a summer cottage in Newport, Rhode Island. The Queen Anne style house, built in 1878, was considered the “crown jewel” of Newport. It had been designed by the architectural firm of Peabody and Stearns for Pierre Lorillard IV, whose fortune came from the Lorillard Tobacco Company. He bred thoroughbred race horses and financed archaeological expeditions to South and Central America. He helped to make Rhode Island a yachting center as well. The house was situated along Cliff Walk in Newport, with an amazing view of the ocean.

When Cornelius Vanderbilt II acquired the “cottage,” he hired Peabody and Stearns to oversee $500,000 in renovations to it, but in 1892 a fire that started in the kitchen largely destroyed the house. Vanderbilt decided to demolish the ruined house, right down to its foundations, and build anew. He brought in architect Richard Morris Hunt, who had worked for the Vanderbilt family in New York, and expressed to him his great concern about the new house being fireproof. Hunt responded by creating a design that would cost $7 million to build—even in 1893.

The entrance gates, manufactured by the William H. Jackson Company of New York, rise 30 feet above the driveway and feature a monogram of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s initials as well as acorns and oak leaves— symbolic of the Vanderbilt family. (Courtesy of The Preservation Society of Newport County)
Designed by Richard Morris in the style of ancient Rome, the walls of the Billiard Room are constructed from slabs of Italian cippolino marble with rose alabaster arches. Semi-precious stones create mosaics. The Billiard Room was featured in the second episode of “The Gilded Age” series on HBO. (Courtesy of The Preservation Society of Newport County)

The bones of the estate would be steel, brick, and Indiana limestone. Rather than using wood framing, the architect created masonry arches on steel beams. The boiler room was in a detached building and connected to the main house by an underground steam tunnel. What rose from the original foundations was not simply a reconstruction of the old house, but a grand edifice in the style of the Italian Renaissance. It would be the grandest Gilded Age mansion of Newport. In fact, the new Breakers is much larger than the original house, of which the remaining foundations made up only part of the base of Hunt’s grand masterpiece. Hunt took his inspiration for The Breakers from Peter Paul Rubens’s book “Palazzi di Genova,” written in 1622. He acquired the book on a trip to Genoa and referred to its detailed illustrations as he created a Renaissance villa for the Vanderbilts.

Approaching the mansion from the street, it appears to be three stories high (it is actually five). As you enter the foyer, there is a gentleman’s reception room to the right and a ladies’ reception room to the left. Continuing straight, you step into the immense Great Hall. Rising 50 feet above with its great balconies, the Great Hall creates the illusion of an Italian open courtyard, or cortile. Hunt organized the rooms of the mansion around this central space, in the manner of the villas depicted in “Palazzi di Genova.” The firm of Allard and Sons of Paris created the interiors, importing the finest materials for its work. Austrian sculptor Karl Bitter created the relief sculpture in the estate. Ogden Codman, a Boston architect, oversaw the design of the family quarters.

Portrait hanging inside the Morning Room at The Breakers of Countess Laszlo Szechenyi (Gladys Moore Vanderbilt), the youngest child and daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt II, by Philip de Laszlo, 1921. (Public Domain)
The Music Room showcases a gilt-coffered ceiling lined with silver and gold. This room was featured in the season finale of the HBO series “The Gilded Age.” (Courtesy of The Preservation Society of Newport County)

For the grand view of the ocean, Hunt created the double loggia (covered exterior galleries, one above the other, created primarily as a place for sitting). The lower loggia has a vaulted ceiling covered in mosaic, and the upper loggia is painted to resemble canopies against the sky. The spandrels (panels) of the loggia arches feature figures representing the four seasons of the year. The materials and the artisans were imported from overseas. Inspired by the palaces and villas of 16th-century Genoa, Hunt drew from classical Greek and Roman motifs to create the splendor of The Breakers. While the exterior is constructed of Indiana limestone, the walls of the Great Hall are made of carved Caen limestone imported from the coast of France. The walls are inset with plaques of rare marbles such as pink marble from Africa and green marble from Italy.

The Great Hall’s pilasters (embedded columns) and medallions (circular decorations) are decorated with acorns and oak leaves, representing strength and longevity, symbols of the Vanderbilt family. On top sits a massive cornice that frames a ceiling mural of a windswept sky. Hunt enclosed the space in consideration of Rhode Island’s New England climate, but he quite successfully retained the illusion of an open courtyard. The contrast of the elaborately detailed cornice against the painted sky reinforces that feeling, as does the large glass wall between the hall and the loggias.

Portrait of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt II by Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta, 1880. (Public Domain)
The Dining Room is the most lavish room inside The Breakers, featuring 12 rose alabaster Corinthian columns, a ceiling mural of the goddess Aurora bringing in the dawn on a four-horse chariot, and two Baccarat crystal chandeliers. (Courtesy of The Preservation Society of Newport County)

Projecting from the estate’s south wing is the oval Music Room. Richard Van der Boyen designed the intricate woodwork and furnishings. Jules Allard and Sons built all the woodwork in their shops in Paris and shipped it to America for installation. Used originally for recitals and dances, the Music Room was featured in an episode of Julian Fellowes’s HBO series “The Gilded Age.”

The gardens of the 70-room estate were designed by Boston engineer Ernest W. Bowdtich, who was a student of Frederick Law Olmsted. Trees were carefully placed to increase the sense of distance between The Breakers and the neighboring houses. The enormous gate of the property and the wrought iron fence are flanked with rhododendron, mountain laurel, and other flowering shrubs to create a secluded place. Footpaths wind around the tree-shaded grounds, all of which provide a very natural backdrop for the more formal terrace gardens.

Facing east to welcome the rising sun, the Morning Room is a communal sitting room designed by Allard & Sons in France, featuring platinum-leaf wall panels adorned with muses from Greek mythology. (Courtesy of The Preservation Society of Newport County)

Paying homage to the original Breakers, Robert Swain Peabody and John Goddard Stearns, who designed the original house, were commissioned to create The Playhouse in the garden. It was a small, Queen Anne Revival style cottage, reminiscent of their original design, which was used as a children’s playhouse.

Cornelius Vanderbilt II died in 1899. He was 56. Alice, his wife, outlived him by 35 years. Not unlike the fictional Crawley family of “Downton Abbey,” the Vanderbilts faced the reality that such an estate, with its army of servants, was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Alice gave the mansion to her youngest daughter Gladys (Countess Széchenyi), who was an active supporter of the Preservation Society of Newport County. She opened the house for visitors in 1948, leasing it to the society for a dollar a year. The society eventually purchased The Breakers in 1972 for $365,000—slightly less than what Mr. Vanderbilt paid for the property almost a century before.

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine. 

Categories
Features Food Lifestyle

Jacques Pépin Didn’t Mean to Stay in America—But He’s Become the ‘Quintessential American Chef’

Jacques Pépin, 86, calls himself a “quintessential American chef.” (Courtesy of Jacques Pépin)

If you’re inviting Jacques Pépin to Thanksgiving dinner, you’d better have turkey on the table.

How about something else this year, you might venture—a nice roast chicken, or a glazed ham?

“I don’t want to do something else,” the chef would kindly, but firmly, inform you. “I want to have a turkey for Thanksgiving; I want to do Brussels sprouts and sweet potato and an apple tart.” The bird has been a non-negotiable since Pépin’s first Thanksgiving in 1959, two months after he arrived in America as an eager young chef with experience working in Paris’s most prestigious kitchens. He fell in love with the spirit of the holiday—“There is no political affiliation, no religious affiliation; it’s just people getting together, enjoying food, wine, and company,” he said—and with America itself.

“I only came to stay a year, maybe two years, to learn the language, and go back to France. I loved it and never went back—except for vacation.” Since then, the transplanted Frenchman has taught millions of Americans how to cook.

He’s the author of 32 cookbooks, the most recent being “Art of the Chicken,” published in September 2022, and a longtime host of PBS cooking shows—including one with his dear friend and fellow pioneering TV chef, Julia Child. Since the beginning of the pandemic, he’s continued to offer confidence and comfort to anxious, sheltering-at-home viewers with the award-winning “Jacques Pépin: Cooking at Home” web series, in 280-and-counting 2- to 6-minute videos posted to Instagram and Facebook with the help of his daughter, Claudine.

Pépin with his daughter, Claudine, who often appeared in his cooking shows and now works with him on various projects for the Jacques Pépin Foundation. (Courtesy of Jacques Pépin)

At nearly 87, Pépin still chops and sautés ​​with an efficient, effortless fluency honed over decades of experience. His narration is just as easy and precise, deftly doling out instruction as he breaks down a whole chicken or shimmies a perfectly fluffed French omelet onto a plate.

And after all these years, he still cooks with an unmistakable French accent—though he’d argue that it doesn’t extend so much to the food. “Very often, people consider me the quintessential French chef,” Pépin said from his home in Madison, Connecticut, where he’s lived since 1975.

“And then you open one of my books, and there on page 32, you have a black bean soup with banana and cilantro on top.” Pépin’s late wife, Gloria, was half Puerto Rican and half Cuban. “Then you have a Kentucky fried chicken from Howard Johnson. Then you have a lobster roll from Connecticut. So I mean,” he said, smiling, “I’m probably the quintessential American chef now, after all these years.”

Dreaming of America

Born in Bourg-en-Bresse, France, a small town northwest of Lyon, Pépin grew up helping out in his parents’ restaurant, Le Pélican. At age 13, he left school to begin a culinary apprenticeship at the Grand Hôtel de L’Europe. By his early 20s, he’d worked his way up Paris’s culinary ladder, and, during his military service, he served as personal chef to three French heads of state, including Charles de Gaulle.

But he set his sights on farther shores.

“America was always kind of the Golden Fleece for me,” Pépin said. “Most people who come to America come here for economic reasons, to have a better life maybe, or political reasons, or religious reasons. I didn’t really have any of that. I had a very good job in Paris. My parents had a restaurant. I was fine. But I wanted to come to America.”

At the age of 23, he made good on his wish. He arrived in New York in September 1959. He didn’t mean to stay for long, but life changed his plans.

Within 48 hours of arrival, he landed a job cooking under Pierre Franey at Le Pavillon, the pinnacle of haute cuisine in America at the time, and he soon befriended the “who’s who” of the burgeoning food world—chef James Beard, New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne, and, of course, Julia Child.

“People were extremely welcoming,” Pépin recalled, and he saw “the possibility of doing basically anything” in his adopted country.

Pépin teaches a cooking class at the Billings Forge Community Works in Hartford, Conn., in 2019, as part of the Jacques Pépin Foundation’s work with culinary training programs across the country. (Courtesy of Jacques Pépin)

Spreading His Wings

Pépin took that possibility and ran with it. After less than a year of cooking at Le Pavillon, he was courted by the Kennedy family—regulars at the restaurant—to become the White House chef. He turned down the offer—he’d already cooked for presidents, after all—to instead take a job in a wholly new world: as director of research and development at Howard Johnson, then the country’s most successful restaurant chain, developing new recipes and pioneering high-quality frozen foods.

“That was a totally American environment, working only with American chefs and American eating habits,” he said. “I learned about marketing, mass production, the chemistry of food, all kinds of things I didn’t really know as a French chef.” When he wasn’t in the kitchen, ever the eager student, he continued his studies at Columbia University—eventually earning a master’s degree in French literature.

It was during his time at Howard Johnson that Pépin started writing down recipes, unwittingly setting a foundation for his future ventures. “At a regular restaurant, you learn by osmosis … and you duplicate what you do,” he said. “That was the way I worked in France for over 10 years; I never wrote a recipe, I didn’t have a cookbook. At Howard Johnson, of course, it had to be organized.”

Developing a chicken pot pie, for instance, started with a recipe using 3 chickens in the test kitchen, then scaled up to 20 chickens. “​​Eventually, we did 3,000 pounds of chicken in a thousand-gallon kettle pot. All of that has to be organized exactly in a recipe.” That experience with high-volume production proved crucial, he said, when he left Howard Johnson in 1970 and opened his own restaurant, La Potagerie, serving soups to the busy Manhattan working crowd, and later managed ​​food operations for the newly opened World Trade Center.

Sharing His Knowledge

In 1974, Pépin suffered a serious car accident. After a long recovery, he left the restaurant kitchen world to turn his focus to writing and teaching. He taught at Boston University, where he and Child founded the culinary arts certificate program, and he later became Dean of Special Programs at the French Culinary Institute in New York (since renamed the International Culinary Center).

Pépin further extended his teaching legacy through the Jacques Pépin Foundation (JPF), the nonprofit he launched with his daughter, Claudine, and her husband, Rollie Wesen, in 2016.

As Wesen was assembling Pépin’s lifetime of books, videos, and other materials, Wesen asked, “‘Who do you think we should teach with these things now?’” Pépin recalled. “And I thought, maybe we should teach people who have been a bit disenfranchised by life—people who’ve come out of jail or former drug addicts or homeless people or veterans.”

(Courtesy of Jacques Pépin)

Now, the foundation supports culinary training programs for adults with high barriers to employment across the country, through offering books, videos, and grants. In 2021, its grant awards totaled $167,500.

These programs take students who might be 40, 50 years old, Pépin said, “and we want to teach them the basics of cooking.” With that foundation set, “you can join a kitchen, start doing basic work, start going up by yourself, and get to redo your life and be proud of what you do and make a living out of it.”

When JPF’s fundraising decreased during the pandemic, Wesen asked acclaimed chefs from across the country to film cooking videos in their own homes, as Pépin was doing. “He asked like 50 chefs, from Daniel Boulud, to Jose Andrés, to Martha Stewart—no one said no,” Pépin said. “Then he asked 50 more, and then he asked 50 more.” The resulting video recipe series, ​​“Cook With Jacques Pépin and Friends,” is available to JPF donors. “Chefs are very generous,” Pépin said. “It’s part of who we are, to give away.”

Just the Essentials

Despite his age—“I am not a young man anymore,” he said with a laugh—the chef has hardly slowed down. “The secret is to keep busy and do things,” Pépin said. “If I don’t have anything to do, I kind of feel depressed.”

Of course, some things have changed with age. “I certainly don’t cook the way now as I did when I was 25 years old. When you’re younger, you tend to add to the dish, add more, make it fancier. At my age, you kind of take away, take away, take away from the plate, to be left with something more essential, something without too much embellishment.

“If I have a great tomato from the garden, have great olive oil and a bit of salt over the top, I don’t want more embellishment. This is it.”

What else has remained essential? The techniques, Pépin said, the foundational skills behind everything he cooks and teaches—and, certainly, the Thanksgiving turkey. He still insists on it every year, whether he cooks it himself or with his daughter at her Rhode Island home where he often goes for the holiday dinner. And then, more importantly, there are the people—the heart of every meal, the reason for cooking. “Being with your family and your friends together, you remember that more than the food itself,” Pépin said.

As a chef, he said, “What you do is, you feed people. You give pleasure to people by doing what you do. Even if you don’t become famous and all that, it’s a great way of spending your life.”

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine. 

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Features

Hunewill Ranch in California is One of the Rare Places in America Where the Cowboy Life Persists—And You Can Go Experience It

The article’s author rides on a bay mare named Suede, amid a lush meadow and the snow-clad peaks bordering Yosemite. (Maria Coulson for American Essence)

While a journalism professor at the University of Wyoming when I wore a younger man’s clothes, I became close friends with a bowlegged, hardheaded cowboy. Seeing us together on the streets of Laramie, folks would holler, “Here comes the cowboy and the professor.” My city slicker self had never ridden a horse, much less herded a cow, before meeting the legendary cowboy. Since then, I have saddled many a cow pony and earned my spurs in spirited roundups across five states with him.

My first wrangling match was on a blustery, bitterly cold, snow-spitting day in early June on the Laramie high plateau. Astride a high-octane mustang, I stared out at the swarm of horns, pounding hooves, and hind ends of rust-colored cattle ramrodded by the legend. When the lead cow abruptly bolted toward open range, the champion pro rodeo bronc rider, anticipating the move, intercepted her with the aptitude of an NFL defensive back.

Whereas I had a cowpoke compadre to make me muscle sore and saddle savvy, the best path for most greenhorns hell bent for leather to rope and ride like a true buckaroo is to bunk at a dude ranch. Through the years the dude ranch concept has evolved into more types of guest ranches than wrinkles on a Brahman bull. There are working ranches, resort ranches, executive-retreat ranches, and those with scarcely a horse, a cow, or a goat to their name. Ranches for hardheaded and weak-minded wannabe cowpunchers where every waking moment is spent wrestling a steer or guzzling a beer.

Ranch for the Ages

Western cities are a short drive and a century removed from dude ranches with herds of cows instead of maddening crowds. Evoking images of the vast expanses of Wyoming and Montana, often overlooked is the rich, guest ranch tradition in California, exemplified by the Hunewill Ranch. Nestled in a cleft on the eastern slope of the Sierras at 6,500 feet in the Bridgeport Valley, its open meadow spreads out like a green mantle below snow-crusted crags bordering Yosemite.

Four generations of the Hunewill family at their California guest ranch. Maria Coulson for American Essence)

The family-owned and -operated 4,500-acre ranch has run cattle since the Civil War and hosted guests since the Great Depression. It boasts a string of 160 horses you can ride at a lope and 1,000 head of cattle you can herd on horseback—unlike most of today’s dude ranches that are more resort than rawhide. At the Circle H, the cowboy life is for real. Guests are treated with courtesy, not coddled like delicate porcelain.

Riding alongside affable and self-assured members of the ranch’s fifth and sixth generations, one can almost visualize their ancestors reflected in their faces. Ancestry and legacy are foremost in their minds. “What makes all the effort worthwhile is the family,” said 86-year-old matriarch Jan Hunewill. “Why else do it? You want to pass it on to the next generation.” And generations of guests returning year after year develop a kinship with the deeply rooted family.

“The older generation appreciates the energy, new ideas, and tech savvy-ness of the younger generation,” daughter Betsy said. “I like to think the younger generation is not afraid to ask questions of the older generation and is able to appreciate the wisdom of experience.” She runs the office; her brother, Jeff, is ranch CEO and oversees the cattle operation; her sister, Megan, heads the riding program.

The Hunewill Ranch offers four- to seven-day vacations ranging from family gatherings to ladies or adults only, for a maximum of 60 guests in 24 comfortable cabins. Stays include food and lodging, horseback riding, and evening activities such as hayrides, cookouts, and square dancing. A former Chart House seafood restaurants chef, Richard Leonin, prepares appetizing meals.

The guest ranch’s six-month season consumes the Hunewills’ lives. They all have sweat equity in taking care of the guests or the horses and cattle, according to Megan’s son, Dalton, who, like the others, often endures 16-hour days. They don’t tell the staff what to do, he maintains, but lead by example and treat them as family. With youthful enthusiasm, Seth Digman said, “I didn’t come from much and love working here. I’ll do anything they throw at me from mending fences to fixing toilets as long as they keep me around.”

Horsing Around

As a rose-tinged, ethereal dawn caresses the mountain crests, an artist’s palate of paints, bays, buckskins, and palominos with thundering hooves and steaming nostrils cascades into the corral from their overnight pasture. Rides on these hale, handsomely sculptured horses are scheduled twice a day unless an all-day excursion is planned. Guests self-select their ability level: beginner, intermediate, or advanced. “The first day of riding, there is a lot of anticipation waiting for your horse to be called—super excited, a little nervous, not sure what to expect; then, when you finally get on your horse, everything falls into place,” counseled Megan’s 18-year-old daughter Aspen, who’s been a wrangler for four years.

Children afraid of horses build their confidence and riding skills in the barnyard and then on the meadow. By the end of their visit, many can ride at a lope. They write Christmas cards to their horses and inquire on Facebook about them. When they become more accomplished riders, their siblings may inherit their horses.

Wranglers work together to guide wayward calves back to their herd. Maria Coulson for American Essence)

“It’s cool to see our son grow up with children who return with their families each year,” Ashley said about her and Dalton’s seventh-generation toddler, Leland. “It’s an avenue to expose a little ranch kid who doesn’t see much of the outside world to people from different backgrounds.”

The Circle H is not limited to nose-to-tail trail riding. It is high-country, boundless riding at its best: the exhilaration of loping across a 4,000-acre meadow in the shadow of the Sierras, saddled on an exuberant quarter horse, churning up sod and splashing through springs with no fence in sight. Demands of everyday life are as far off as the Milky Way.

Horse-walking in the midst of the meadow casts a magical spell as waves of wild irises shimmy in the afternoon breeze and bright clouds of butterflies flit in a winged waltz. An inner peace spreads like a comforting blanket in the zen-like stillness, broken only by the sweet song of a warbling wren.

“One of the best things about riding through the meadow is it’s always different,” Jeff’s daughter, Leslie, mused. “The light is different, the cattle are in a different place, the grass is in a different stage, the horse is different—a colt or your old faithful.”

Charismatic ranch celebrity Benny Romero, who has lived in the hearts of the Hunewills for a quarter century, entertains guests on his popular horse walks. The 78-year-old Basque from New Mexico rides with the ease of a lifetime in the saddle and spins tales with the humor of a seasoned storyteller. He recollects crossing a creek on his gelding, Delta, when two cows butted heads and started a ruckus: “One turned suddenly and struck Delta in the chest, making him swing around real hard.” He quoted Megan saying, “Benny, anybody else would have come off the horse, but you stuck on like a tick.”

Guests herd easy-to-handle Red Angus cattle under the pretense of helping out. “Women just love horses,” Megan contended, “but men like to have a job. Moving cows gives them a purpose on a horse.” Pushing them through pastures and across streams is routine, but not so through open gates where they congregate. Patient prodding and wrangler finesse breaks the impasse.

Canyon Connection

On an all-day horseback ride into Buckeye Canyon, golden shafts of sunlight filter through the tree branches, dappling the trail and underbrush, partially concealing a herd of mule deer. Stands of aspen with slender white trunks and glossy green leaves tremble in the gentle breeze, cooling the sweat on your brow. Unexpectedly, the canyon opens onto a cinematic alpine meadow and a soaring sculpted granite cathedral, cradling glistening glaciers against a cerulean sky.

Amid the majesty, guests picnic on a grassy knoll beside a stony creek. Laze in the noonday sun or under a sheltering fir as blue jays lurk overhead and chipmunks gambol about. A pair of red-tailed hawks soars above the precipitous canyon walls, and a golden eagle perched on the topmost branch of a lone pine emits piercing cries.

In 1861, Napoleon Bonaparte Hunewill established a sawmill in Buckeye Canyon to supply lumber hauled by teams of oxen to mining boomtowns and built a house for his young Maine bride. Esther likely found life difficult in the Sierra wilderness and may have screamed back at the wind howling down the canyon. She may have pined for female companionship, melodic music, and gay laughter when starlit nights fell silent. But standing shoulder to shoulder with her husband, she faced the frontier challenges head on. The ancestral fortitude survives in the strong work ethic of their college-educated progeny, illustrated by the self-reliant women in the forefront of the guest ranch and by the able-bodied men behind the scenes of the cattle operation.

The nucleus of the Hunewill Ranch is the barn raised two decades later in the Bridgeport Valley. Built with pegs, not nails, it is a fine example of late-19th-century craftsmanship. The pungent smell of horse sweat, aged leather, and stacked saddle blankets permeates the dim interior. A family of great horned owls roosts in the cool recesses of the high, shadowy beams.

Eighteen-year-old Aspen Wright guides her little nephew Leland on a horse. Maria Coulson for American Essence)

The graceful, white Victorian ranch house was constructed in 1880 with timber from the canyon. The furniture in the parlor was shipped from San Francisco, including the heirloom Steinway that rounded Cape Horn and was played by daughter-in-law Alice, who graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music. A remodeled portion of the house serves as the family and guest kitchen and dining room.

The Hunewills retain memories of a carefree childhood playing in the hayloft of the barn and the currant patch near the house, swimming in the creek, and riding across the meadow. “My sister, Rhiannon, and I would ride our horses to our favorite fishing hole and ride back with fish flopping on the side of our saddles,” Aspen recalled. “It was kind of gross. We cleaned them and gave them to the cook, who I think threw them away.”

Land Stewards and Cattle Connoisseurs

The cash flow from the guest side makes it possible for family members to stay on the ranch. They directly communicate with each other in a weekly meeting. “We have to work together, talk things out in a civilized manner,” Megan said. “It makes it easier that we like each other and what we do.”

Jeff recently secured a conservation easement, safeguarding the ranch from development. “There’s a lot of habitat that’s being protected,” said Eastern Sierra Land Trust Executive Director Kay Ogden in late 2020. “That land is in their DNA. They’ve owned it so long—they are incredible stewards of the land.” Jeff recognizes that balancing the intricacies of livestock, wildlife, and natural resources is integral to such stewardship.

Leslie’s niche is keeping records of the cattle. “I can talk about cows all day long,” she said with a twinkle. “If you ask me about number 99 with a red ear tag, I can tell you how she performs and give you her entire history. My brain is a mental filing system.”

During the traditional cattle drive complete with chuck wagon in early November, stalwart guests act as drovers accompanying the Hunewills for five days to move 600 cattle over the same route followed for more than a century—60 miles from the Bridgeport ranch to the lower Nevada range. “We cannot stay at Bridgeport in the winter as there is a lot of snow and the temperature drops to minus 34 degrees like in Montana,” Jeff said. The drive’s bone-chilling temperatures and high gusty winds induce the wranglers to doff their Stetsons for warm and snug headdress. Everyone returns to the cozy comfort of the ranch at day’s end.

Horses gather in front of an old barn that has been on the ranch since 1880. Maria Coulson for American Essence)

Reality and Romance

Planning for posterity, the Hunewills have investments outside the ranch. “There was a time when I was young that we sold all the cows to get out of a financial hole,” Megan said. “Cows are liquid assets; we did not have to sell the land.” This reminded me of my first roundup on that bleak, Wyoming day. My first was the fifth generation ranch family’s last. I’ll never forget the heartbreak and the dread in their eyes, wondering what they’d do with their lives.

The reality and romance of the Hunewill Ranch are intertwined. Cowboys hurtle across creek beds without breaking stride and communicate to each other without speaking a word as they ride. Guests straddle a saddle for a week, making a lifetime memory and a mental snapshot of the serenity and natural splendor. “Many of our older ladies like to get out to enjoy the sounds of the creek and the birds and to look at the mountains in the background,” teenage Aspen said, smiling. Years from now, if the offspring play their cards right, her great-grandchildren will take the matriarch for creek-side rides on the ninth-generation Hunewill Ranch.

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine. 

Categories
Features Entrepreneurs

17-Year-Old Entrepreneur Turns Mission of Improving Children’s Oral Health into Reality with Million-Dollar Sugar-Free Candy Company

It has been said that the world always looks brighter from behind a smile.

And that adage has been shaping Alina Morse’s thriving business decisions since she invented Zolli Candy at the age of 9 years old. Now, at 17, Morse not only creates new products for her extensive line of alternative candies, available through various retailers throughout the country, but gives back through the Million Smiles Initiative, the nonprofit arm of Morse’s candy empire.

“From the start, it was important to find a cause,” said Morse. “In running a business, there are rough days, so finding that aspect that drives you and makes you feel good about why you put in all the hours for the business is important.”

Healthy Smiles

Tooth decay is the biggest epidemic facing kids in America, according to the United States Surgeon General. This gave Morse a shock. “It is a preventable disease. … Why wouldn’t there be other initiatives to combat this problem?” she said. “This fact drove me to create not only a delicious healthy candy alternative, but to find a way to give back and educate people.” What makes Zolli Candy a healthy alternative? According to the company website, a proprietary blend of naturally-sourced sugar replacements—such as isomalt, which is derived from sugar beets—makes it 100 percent sugar-free. The company’s non-GMO blend is not only tooth-friendly but also food-allergy-friendly and vegan.

Morse spent hours upon hours working through sugar-free recipes to come up with just the right concoction. Although a messy process, Morse eventually worked out the recipe that millions have since been introduced to through the Million Smiles Initiative. By giving away free candy all across America, it was an opportunity to talk about the root problems of oral hygiene. Over 250,000 lollipops have been donated since the company’s inception.

Zolli Candy’s retail sales in 2021 totaled over $10 million. (Adhiraj Chakrabarti for American Essence)

She believes that while her products are great, an education can fuel generations of change. A determined Morse now translates this passion and leads others her age—in schools—to rally around the importance of oral health care. Her business has led to important discussions on the topic, garnering extensive speaking engagements including a TED Talk, “Why I Eat Candy To Avoid Cavities”; appearing on various shows and venues like South by Southwest; and making the cover of Entrepreneur magazine.

“I do virtual public speaking with organizations to inspire kids and give them resources to start their own company. I’m a huge advocate for kids but specifically young girls and women. So few women are in the candy business. It’s been tough to pave that road and find the mentors so I try to act as an advocate,” she said. She has shared sage advice with experienced entrepreneurs and those new to their craft. Seasoned entrepreneurs who have been around the block should take the time to listen to those with more youthful perspectives. “The thing that makes young entrepreneurs a commodity is that they are curious and tenacious. Find opportunities to connect so as to never lose that childlike curiosity.”

A Young CEO

Young inventors, Morse claims, will experience success if the company is built on the merits of a fantastic team.

“The CEO title does not mean you can do every job. And you’re never going to grow and reach success unless you find people to delegate to—people you can trust. Always look for people who you can learn from, trust, delegate—and, in turn, you can form a great team of people with a mutual understanding of goals.”

As Morse understands from her own million-dollar venture, start-up businesses require considerable work and time. However, finding dedicated people who believe in the company’s mission is the first key ingredient to success. As she reiterates, “Business is a team sport!”

Today, ZolliCandy encompasses many trademarked candies including Zollipops®, Zolli® Drops, and Zaffi® Taffy. But what started it all was a delicious formula—a vegan, all-natural, sugar-free lollipop. She learned important lessons by purchasing ingredients, melting and cooling the non-sugary confection, and making a huge mess.

Alina Morse wanted to create sugar-free candy that children could eat without worrying about cavities. (Adhiraj Chakrabarti for American Essence)

“Initially, I tried to make it at home in our kitchen. I learned not to melt sugar substitutes like Stevia and other funky stuff that couldn’t make the cut to our finalized Zolli products,” she recalled. Trial after trial led to a tweaked basic formula that led to the best possible product. In the beginning, it was tricky because no one had ever done this before. With such an expansive line, Morse was always inventing, creating something new that adhered to her standards. Any product she made had to be allergy-, keto-, and diabetic-friendly.

People don’t have to worry about it being harmful. According to the teen inventor, the company’s unique selling points are that it must be able to help clean your teeth or it meets the standards for those who suffer from allergies or eat from restrictive diets. “It is important to have variety. Not everyone will be in a lollipop mood,” she added.

Keep Smiling

Looking back upon her success, this regular high school student appears well adjusted despite her fame as one of America’s youngest CEOs. In fact, Morse admitted that although she is tenacious, she is a normal, healthy teen just like her peers at school. An extremely supportive set of friends over the years, as well as a strong family support system, has bolstered her aspirations.

“I am lucky to have supportive parents who believe in me and trust in me. They were willing to invest in me to make this idea a reality. And, I’ve been fortunate with supportive friends who encourage and treat me like nothing is different.”

What Morse finds most rewarding in her day-to-day management duties is the messages from those who have tasted her treats and are, in turn, grateful. Some have told her that her candy line has saved their lives or that they couldn’t enjoy candy until now—and these messages make it a very impactful experience for the teen.

So impactful, in fact, that Morse has been known to use an effective catch phrase, “Keep smiling!” to inspire others through her videos, social media, emails, and appearances. She tries to work positivity and goodness into conversations even if it makes just a little difference. She says it is a good reminder to stay positive and enjoy life.

“So just keep smiling!”

After all, smiling has amazing powers. And her cause with Zolli Candy is not only delicious, but positively contagious for consumers and her business.

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine. 

Categories
Features American Success Generation to Generation Small Farms

Historian Victor Davis Hanson on the Farmer’s Virtues

Davis Hanson in his study room. (Samira Bouaou)

It’s nearly a 200-mile commute home for historian Victor Davis Hanson from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he travels once a week, to his quiet family farm in the fertile Central Valley of California.

As a classicist, he’s at ease with the ancient world but often brings a historian’s insightful perspective to current events. And he’s also a fifth-generation farmer.

His house, surrounded by almond orchards, holds many stories—from the generations who sacrificed all of their soul, sweat, and hard-earned money trying to save the farm, to later generations who decided this wasn’t the life for them and moved away with no intention of ever returning. Of the original 180 acres that were passed down through the years, only 42 remain—rented out to a farmer who owns 12,000 acres in the surrounding region. This is California, where agriculture has gone almost all corporate, leaving farming families with few choices: mainly to scale up vertically and jump into agribusiness, or to sell and move away.

The America where 40 acres per family was the norm is now long gone. But its personality, the strength of its communities, and its work ethic were all deeply shaped by family farming. In this conversation, Hanson talks about this important aspect of our nation’s heritage.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

American Essence: Looking back at America, and its early days as a nation, what was interesting to Europeans about what American farmers were doing?

Victor Davis Hanson: The history of Europe was always too many people, and too little land. When the American nation was founded, 95 percent of the people were homestead citizens, and they had their own land. They were completely independent and autonomous; they raised their own food. They were outspoken, and they were economically viable.

Observers who came from Europe, [for example] Alexis de Tocqueville, noticed that the American citizen was not a peasant. He was not indentured, he was not attached to a manor, or he wasn’t like an English subordinate. He wasn’t a Russian serf. He was an independent person because he had all of this land. And until the mid- or early 20th century, that was a peculiar characteristic of America—there was so much farmland, and there were so many people from all over the world that wanted to be independent farmers. That had been impossible in their own land.

And even today, when we have people from Asia, or India, or Mexico, it’s astounding how many of them want to buy land, because that was an unavailable, yet they have it deeply ingrained in their psyches: If you have land, you’re going to be protected, you’re independent, you can raise your own food.

Victor Davis Hanson walks among the almond orchards surrounding his home in Selma, Calif., with two of his beloved dogs. (Samira Bouaou)

American Essence: You mentioned a quote in an opinion article you penned in 2015. Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1787, “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries, as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become as corrupt as in Europe.” What is the connection between farming and preserving a virtuous society?

Mr. Hanson: That’s an old idea that farming serves two purposes. It’s not like agribusiness. It doesn’t just produce food, but it [also] produces citizens. The idea behind it goes back to Greece, if you read Xenophon’s “Oeconomicus” or Varro the Latin agronomist, the message that comes out of that is that farming requires your brain and your brawn. So you plan an orchard, but then you physically have to enact that, so if you’re a farmer who can only think, you’re not going to succeed in a pre-industrial society, but if you’re just a brute, you’ll make mistakes. So they felt that farming gave a person the perfect balance between the head and the body. And then it allows them to connect in a realistic fashion with nature. People in town … were either afraid of it or they romanticized it. But the farmer was a partner with nature. He knew that he had to kill bad bugs to produce wheat. But he also understood there were good bugs that ate the bad bugs. So he tried to find a balance.

In classical agronomy, the idea was that that process created a different type of citizen. In other modalities, people either didn’t own the land that they worked, or they were indentured—in other words, they had small plots, but they didn’t have a title to it. So if you give a man a title, and they own it, they improve it, and you have inheritance laws that allow them to pass it on, then you create an involved citizen. If the citizen is a serf, or peasant, or renter, then you cannot have a constitutional government because they’re restless, they’re envious, they’re angry, and they don’t improve the property when they rent something.

American Essence: Thomas Jefferson saw the yeoman farmer as key to the preservation of a good government. Yet over the centuries, that ideal has been displaced. A smaller and smaller chunk of the population farms the land, pushed out by agribusiness and government.

What then is there to conserve when we speak of conserving the farm and traditional food production?

Mr. Hanson: When the Founders ratified the Constitution, 95 percent of the constituency was farming. … By the end of the Depression, World War II, we’re down to 20 percent. It’s now down to 1 percent of the population is involved directly, or maybe 2 percent. So it’s maybe 4 or 5 million people out of 330 million.

The Founders were worried about a number of things. People wouldn’t know where their food came from. They wouldn’t have that experience of working physically, with nature, to grow something. They wouldn’t have a compound rather than just a house. The farmhouses, when I grew up, in the last vestiges of farming, were multi-generational.

So this house, I was told, in 1935, had 28 people living in it, and the other buildings around had another 30 during the Depression. When I grew up, this house was full: My grandparents lived here, they had a daughter who was crippled, we lived down the road, the kids free-ranged, cousins were here, neighbors dropped in. It was just booming. And that was what farmhouses were. So my grandmother had the Wednesday Walnut Club [consisting] of all the people who had walnut groves, and they tried to do self-improvement. Or they had the Eastern Star or they had the Masonic Lodge or the Elks Club. And when you look at them, they were all about self-improvement.

Davis Hanson contemplates the future of family farms in America. (Samira Bouaou)

So it was the type of sinews and community that encouraged Little Leagues, hospitals, PTAs, community schools, but it’s wiped out now. All the houses around 40 acres, they’re wiped out. The person that I rent 42 acres to, he owns 12,000 acres. And the houses that he rents from used to be homesteads. They’re now usually inhabited by people from Mexico, many of them here illegally. There is an MS-13 group down here, there’s a gangbanger there. There’s prostitution there. There’s dogfighting. Because people are renting the home, and the land has been farmed by a corporation. So there’s no community. It’s rich and poor. And so that’s what Jefferson and other people were worried about. [Family farming] was a way of maintaining a middle class.

The $64,000 question is, can that ideology be transferred to a modern industrial society? So if you have an independent trucker—to take just one example—he owns his own rig, he’s a mechanic. He is an expert in refrigeration, and he’s responsible for his own load. He’s very different than a teamster that works for Walmart. In other words, he goes to a trucking dispatcher, and they say, “Mr. Smith, you’ve got to take 20 tons of steel to Dallas,” and he figures out the route, he works on his own truck, and he does it. And that creates an independent-minded person. And you can see that when parents run into a school board and say, “You can’t teach my child this,” or “We’re not going to take this.” Often, they tend to be small business people. You have to have people like that in our society. You can’t have everybody working for the government or corporation.

American Essence: How can we maintain the values without that farming family backbone?

Mr. Hanson: It’s very hard because their values are based on shame in traditional societies, and we have transmogrified that into guilt. So if I was in this house 60 years ago, and my grandmother said to me, “You said the word ‘darn.’” She just wouldn’t have said, “You said the word ‘darn.’” She said, “Are you gonna go out there and say that word in front of everybody? What are they gonna think of us? They’re gonna think we taught you that. You don’t say that or you’re going to shame the entire family.” Whereas today, it’s maybe at most private guilt, “Oh, I feel so bad I said it,” but there’s no mechanism to enforce behavior.

I remember my grandfather would say, “Now you’re driving to high school. So I know what you boys do. You all go have a beer on Friday night, but you’re under 21. You want your parents to wake up on Saturday morning and it [a newspaper headline] says, ‘Hanson boy caught with Coors beer in his car’? They will do that, and then what are we going to do?” So that was the emphasis. That’s what the modern therapeutic society rebelled against and said, “That’s judgmental,” but they didn’t replace it with anything other than, “Oh, it wasn’t my fault,” or “I had a bad childhood,” or “I was offended,” or “It was unfair,” or “They did this to me because of my race or sex or gender.” That was a very different method of maintaining a more collective morality.

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine. 

Categories
Features Lifestyle

James Beard Award-Winning Chef Chris Hastings on the Loving Family That’s Got His Back

Braised short rib with root vegetables, brussels sprouts, and jus. (Karim Shamsi-Basha for American Essence)

Chris Hastings is comfortable in his own skin. Trim with short hair and glasses, he tucks his shirt in and speaks with the authority of someone on a mission—one of providing mouth-watering cuisine to his customers and fans.

Hastings has been around the culinary block a few times. In 2012, he beat Food Network star-chef Bobby Flay on Iron Chef, and in 2013, Hastings received the top culinary prize in America: a James Beard Award. His Hot & Hot Fish Club has dazzled Birmingham’s sophisticated clientele using a modern approach to blend Southern food with French and Californian styles and techniques.

Hastings works with his family. His wife Idie runs the business side of the restaurant, and his son Zeb is a sous-chef. Their daughter-in-law Molly helps Idie with marketing and public relations.

Chef Chris Hastings in the kitchen of the Hot & Hot Fish Club in Birmingham, Ala. (Karim Shamsi-Basha for American Essence)

“We opened the original location of the Hot & Hot Fish Club in 1995. When we opened, everyone thought we were crazy because the location was questionable,” Chris said. Then, with a mischievous smirk, he continued, “We have made it work, though. And now, in this new location at Pepper Place, we are really cooking.”

The new Hot & Hot Fish Club is in the Pepper Place district of Birmingham, filled with artisans, galleries, and other creative ventures. The Hastings family opened the restaurant six weeks before the pandemic hit.

“When we opened here in Pepper Place, everyone was so excited, the staff, our loyal guests. Then, the pandemic hit,” Idie said. “We had no idea how long we would be closed, but it dragged on. We finally opened in October of 2020, and it’s been terrific.”

Chris and Idie have been married for 34 years and have worked together for 27 years. The couple enjoys being with each other despite having different management styles.

Bone marrow with short rib and mushroom risotto. (Karim Shamsi-Basha for American Essence)
Roasted beet salad with pecan granola, sheep’s milk cheese mousse, arugula, and blood orange gastrique. (Karim Shamsi-Basha for American Essence)

“The two of us working together is like the yin and yang. I may not agree with everything Chris does, but at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself if it’s worth it,” Idie said. Chris laughed, winking at his wife, “Exactly. But believe me, everyone knows who the real boss is.”

Chris studied as a chef at Johnson & Wales Culinary School in Providence, Rhode Island. He then moved to Birmingham and worked for legendary chef Frank Stitt as chef de cuisine of Highlands Bar & Grill. After a stint in California, the Hastings family returned to Birmingham and opened the Hot & Hot Fish Club, followed by Ovenbird, another restaurant in the same district.

The Hastings family loves the farm-to-table process. “We have the best food artisans and purveyors here in Alabama,” Chris said. “I truly love what I do; it’s what wakes me up in the morning. And I adore working with my wife and my family. I can’t do much of anything else, but I love being a chef. I love the tasting and handling of food and the creation of the dishes. To this day, it’s exciting every day. I live for that feeling I get when I know the dish is right.”

Hastings’s son Zeb, who is also the sous chef at the restaurant. (Karim Shamsi-Basha for American Essence)
Prime New York strip with roasted potatoes and grilled rapin. (Karim Shamsi-Basha for American Essence)

Chris has had his share of high-profile accomplishments. He has appeared on the Martha Stewart Show and the Today Show. He has impacted the culinary scene in Birmingham and the South at large. His two restaurants, Hot & Hot Fish Club and Ovenbird, continue to receive rave reviews. But one honor rises to the top.

“Beating Bobby Flay on Iron Chef was just … sweet!” Chris said. “We practiced for two months. Then we competed and created five dishes around sausage. When they announced that we won, it was surreal. That moment will probably live forever.”

Idie peered at her husband, nodding. “When they said, ‘And the Iron Chef winner by one point is—’ there was this silence for what seemed like forever. Then they said Chris’s name. I let out a scream so loud you could hear it on television. I was going crazy. I couldn’t believe it, and then, I could believe it. I definitely could believe it. Chris is extremely talented.”

Chef Hastings takes orders on a busy day at the restaurant. (Karim Shamsi-Basha for American Essence)
The Hastings family (L to R): Zeb and his wife, Molly, with baby Fraser, Chris, young Hubbell, and Idie. (Karim Shamsi-Basha for American Essence)

Zeb and Molly joined in the conversation while carrying their two little ones, Fraser and Hubbell. “We loved it that my dad won. Working together can be challenging, but for the most part, it works. Sometimes we have really tense moments; other times it’s a lot of fun,” Zeb added. “We cover a wide range of emotions, believe me.”

Molly nodded at her husband while squeezing little Fraser in her arms. “I love the fact all of us work here, and even though it’s not that easy sometimes, we know we’re very fortunate.”

Summing up the Hastings family’s journey to success, Idie took a long breath, then peered at her husband, her children, and the two little ones. “When I look at my family, the restaurant, and all that we have accomplished, I am seriously blown away. … I never set out to accomplish all of this. Our journey has evolved,” she said. Her dream was to be happily married, work with her husband, and raise a family—and it came true, in a way she didn’t expect. “I am very grateful and proud.” Idie was silent for a few seconds. She closed her eyes and made a tiny and content grin, one of assurance that all was good in the world. “I couldn’t ask for anything more in my entire life.”

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine. 

Categories
Features American Success Entrepreneurs Generation to Generation Giving Back

Remembering Henry Villard, the Renowned 19th-Century Railway Financier, Through the Eyes of His Great-Granddaughter

Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave, photographed at her Washington, D.C., home in 2001. (Photo credit: Philip Bermingham)

Her name alone is nearly poetic, but it is history and grandeur that give Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave her befitting nomenclature.

She is the great-granddaughter of Henry Villard, a Bavarian native who came to America with only 20 borrowed dollars in his pocket—only to make groundbreaking financial ventures and become president of the Northern Pacific Railroad and owner of the New York Evening Post. He also built what has become one of Manhattan’s most recognizable architectural landmarks: the Villard Houses, a Gilded Age mansion that today houses the luxurious Lotte New York Palace hotel.

He believed so much in the greatness of America that he put his whole soul into the railway company—allowing it to complete the country’s second transcontinental railroad—and funded Thomas Edison’s early experiments in electricity, Alexandra reflected. Meanwhile, the Villard Houses remain one of the few surviving examples of stunning design by the acclaimed architectural firm McKim, Mead, and White.

Villard de Borchgrave attends the American Ballet Theater Gala in Washington, D.C., circa 1985, when she served as the chairwoman. (Photo credit: Joan Marcus)

The American Story

Villard immigrated to the United States in 1853 from Germany at the age of 18. Within five years of arriving in America, he mastered the English language and began working for leading daily newspapers at the time. Villard covered the famous presidential debates between Abraham Lincoln and Democratic Illinois senator Stephen Douglas over the issue of slavery. Lincoln took a shine to him, and included him in his entourage. Villard was the only correspondent, then working for the Associated Press, to accompany the president-elect on his inaugural train from Springfield, Illinois to the nation’s capital. Then, during the Civil War, he was a war correspondent for The New York Herald and later for the New-York Tribune. In his coverage, he made sure black soldiers were properly commemorated for their service.

Henry Villard was a man of grit and determination. Portrait taken circa 1881. (Photo credit: Corbis Images/ Courtesy of Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave)
Henry Villard (R) with his wife, Fanny Garrison Villard, and daughter, Helen, at their Dobbs Ferry estate in New York state, circa 1898. (Photo credit: Courtesy of Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave)

He was there when Thomas Edison famously lit up the first incandescent light bulb at Menlo Park, New Jersey in 1879. Villard would later hire Edison to install lighting aboard his new steamship, the S.S. Columbia. That was the first commercial installation of Edison’s invented light bulb. The installation was successful as the ship made its trip around South America. “Of all of my patrons,” Edison said, “Henry Villard believed in the light with all his heart.”

In 1881, Villard secured control of the Northern Pacific Railroad company through what modern-day finance would call a leveraged buyout. At the time, Villard was the president of major railway companies operating in the Pacific Northwest. But one major competitor, Northern Pacific Railroad, stood in the way. He started buying shares of the company quietly. But it was not enough to gain control. He came up with the idea, known as the ”blind pool,” of raising money for the venture by asking his friends to invest in a secret opportunity. By not revealing the plan, the investors became eager to get in on the novelty. Meanwhile, his intentions would be hidden from the competitor company. The tactic worked, and he became president of the Northern Pacific Railroad.

Later, he bought two of Edison’s electric utility companies, Edison Lamp Company and Edison Machine Works, and formed them into the Edison General Electric Company in 1889. He served as president until its reorganization in 1893 into the General Electric Company.

A horde of visitors attends the “last spike” ceremony announcing the opening of the Northern Pacific Railroad, September 1883. (Photo credit: Courtesy of Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave)

Villard built his wealth from the ground up and was generous with it, paying off debts for universities and financing some of America’s most iconic colleges and architectural preserves, including Harvard University, the University of Oregon, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He was so inspiring to his great-granddaughter, Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave, that she honored his legacy in a 2001 biography co-authored with John Cullen called “VILLARD: The Life and Times of an American Titan.” The book tells of his remarkable rise from humble beginnings, eventually becoming a powerful financier and befriending luminaries like then-general Ulysses S. Grant (while covering the Civil War), and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, among many others.

The Descendant

As a photojournalist, Villard de Borchgrave built a reputation on the merits of her own talents, with her work appearing on the covers of international magazines such as Newsweek and Paris Match. The late president of Egypt Anwar Sadat, Henry Kissinger, and the late U.S. president George H.W. Bush are among the many world leaders she photographed, and her portraits hang in government offices around the world.

Villard de Borchgrave covers the October War in Egypt as a photojournalist, 1973. (Photo credit: J.R. Bonnotte)
Villard de Borchgrave greets Anwar Sadat, the third president of Egypt. (Photo credit: Courtesy of Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave)

She went on to establish a charitable organization called the Light of Healing Hope Foundation, which gifted books of hope to comfort patients receiving treatment at hospitals and hospices. With an eye toward helping those in the military, her foundation donated thousands of gifts to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Navy Seal Foundation, Wounded Warrior Project, and American Gold Star Mothers. During its 12 years of activities, her organization also provided uplifting books and journals to several children’s facilities, including St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, the Ronald McDonald House Charities, and the Wendt Center for Loss and Healing. Villard de Borchgrave donated over 70,000 gifts which included her books of poetry and musical DVDs, for those who could not read, to over 100 medical centers nationwide. She developed and shared a total of eight inspirational publications including her first book, “Healing Light: Thirty Messages of Love, Hope, & Courage.”

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, United Nations secretary-general during the 1990s, wrote the foreword for “Healing Light.” Villard de Borchgrave and her husband Arnaud, who enjoyed a long career as chief foreign correspondent for Newsweek, had become friends with Boutros and his wife Leia while in Cairo in the 1960s. The couples were having dinner together in Paris when Villard de Borchgrave asked him to write the foreword, and so he did. “He just took a paper napkin on the table,” she recalled, and “penned it.”

Villard (R) holds his first grandson, Henry Serrano, with his son Harold beside them. (Photo credit: Courtesy of Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave)

Despite her many accomplishments, Villard de Borchgrave is most proud of her long marriage. She and her husband Arnaud, who passed away in 2015, were bonded for more than 45 years by their love of adventure and for each other. “In the 47 years since the first moment we met, Arnaud never failed to inspire me with his courage and determination,” Villard de Borchgrave passionately professed.

She also humbly pays homage to her parents, describing her mother as “a warm and giving person” and her father as someone who instilled a good work ethic in her, having worked on the U.S. Marshall Plan that helped rebuild European countries after World War II. Most of all, Villard de Borchgrave said, she draws inspirational humility from those who have been forced to overcome unspeakable tragedies. “I’m most inspired by the ability of those who are suffering,” she said, “to find a way to express gratitude despite the pain and hardship they are experiencing.”

Alexandra at the launch party for her book of poetry “Love & Wisdom,” at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., 2018. (Photo credit: Colleen Dugan)

Not only has Villard de Borchgrave honored her great-grandfather’s legacy through her biography about him, but has also, through her own work, continued to carry forth the same message of hope, courage, and resilience that he displayed throughout his life. “Henry Villard believed in America,” she said. “To this day, our country offers unique opportunities to anyone with the courage and determination to realize a dream, just as he did.”

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine. 

Categories
House of Beauty Arts & Letters Features

Touring Annandale: Former White House Social Secretary Linda Faulkner Reveals the Artistic Wonders Inside Her Texas Home

(Imaginary Lines, Mary Brandt Photography)

Our house has brought together two people—my husband and myself—along with 17th-, 18th-, and early 19th-century hand-water-colored prints of flora and fauna from around the world, which decorate our walls today. They speak of the glory of God’s creation.

Gilbert and I met in Washington, D.C., during the Ronald Reagan administration. He was working on Capitol Hill as a legal aide to a friend elected to Congress, then later to an Alabama senator. I was working as deputy social secretary to the White House, where I would eventually become the social secretary during the final three-and-a-half years of Reagan’s administration.

Gilbert’s milieu, Capitol Hill, or “The Hill,” as it is called, will always hold a fascination for me because I never worked within those hallowed halls. What I knew was the White House. As Social Secretary, I was responsible for producing all events hosted by President Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan—usually in the White House, but one was in New York, and one at the American embassy in Moscow. One fun memory was during a 1985 White House dinner to host Prince Charles and Princess Diana: I tapped John Travolta on the shoulder to ask him to cut in on the President and dance with the princess. An iconic photo ensued.

Faulkner Johnston (L) with First Lady Nancy Reagan. (White House staff photo)

Working in the White House

I greatly enjoyed working with Mrs. Reagan. She was the consummate hostess and a gift to our country. What fun we had deciding not only who would be invited to sumptuous state dinners, but who would sit next to whom. One of my favorite duties was advising Mrs. Reagan about entertainers at the White House, from the brilliant pianist Van Cliburn, who performed at a state dinner in honor of then-Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, which performed at a Congressional picnic in 1986.

After the administration, Gilbert and I lost touch, he returning to Alabama and I to Texas. But years later, we eventually, and thankfully, reconnected—neither of us having married. When he began to talk about marriage, Gilbert secretly planned a destination event six months thence, at which he was planning to pop the question. He asked me, pre-proposal, where I would most like to live someday (he was still in Birmingham but liked smaller towns, and I was in Dallas), and the words “Terrell” flew out of my mouth.

“The Iceland Falcon,” a chromolithograph by John James Audubon, is displayed in the elegant dining room. (Imaginary Lines, Mary Brandt Photography)

Annandale: Home Sweet Home

Terrell, Texas, is within commuting distance to Dallas, where I am vice president of communications and public relations for The Tradition, which develops and manages luxury rental retirement communities in Texas. I knew that this small town had a beautiful historic district with homes originally built with wealth from the cotton and cattle industries. The first automobile to be purchased in Texas was by a resident of Terrell.

Gilbert went online and found this exquisite Georgian revival home with a carriage entrance for sale in Terrell. The home had, however, a potential buyer on the brink of commitment. So, he quickly proposed over the telephone (who wanted to wait six months for a proposal, anyway?)—and we bought the house!

The displayed artwork is an ode to divine creation, including “The Philosopher’s Wood,” painted after Salvator Rosa. (Imaginary Lines, Mary Brandt Photography)
Gilbert Johnston and Linda Faulkner Johnston at the entry hall of their home, in front of decorative prints from “The Aurelian” by Moses Harris. ( Imaginary Lines, Mary Brandt Photography)

Our house was built in 1917. It was historically a focus of entertainment, with its annual “silver charity teas”—where people would bring silver coins to donate to charity—and its third-floor ballroom, which hosted dances for Terrell young ladies and British cadets from the No. 1 British Flying Training School during World War II. The famous Texan and 20th-century speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Sam Rayburn had been a guest here.

We call our stately home “Annandale,” for the Scottish location of Gilbert’s ancestors (who are related to Samuel Johnston, an 18th-century statesman who was a delegate to the U.S. Continental Congress). We love history and have honored it by highlighting the work of scientific artists who lived during the golden age of natural history and exploration. It was a time when educated, cultured Europeans and Americans—undergirded by the findings of early scientists such as Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, and John Ray—became consumed by the desire to discern the world around them. They were driven by a missionary zeal to understand God’s creation as completely as they could and spread that knowledge to others. They felt compelled to read “the unwritten book of nature,” i.e. the created world. The written Bible and the “book of nature,” a term used by Saint Augustine and early Christian theologians, were understood as the two ways to learn about the Creator.

A hand-colored etching of artichokes, from the work “Hortus Eystettensis” by Basilus Besler, published 1613. The work detailed the plants in the Prince Bishop of Eichstatt’s garden. (Imaginary Lines, Mary Brandt Photography)
“The Tropic Bird,” a hand- colored etching from John James Audubon’s “The Birds of America,” 1835, is mounted above the living room mantlepiece. (Imaginary Lines, Mary Brandt Photography)

These natural history scientists and artists enjoyed a lifelong appreciation for God’s creation, which generated wonder, praise, and joy. As the great musical composers Bach and Handel dedicated their talents to God’s glory (soli Deo gloria), so did these men and women. In notable entomologist Maria Merian’s (1647–1717) first book on caterpillars and butterflies, she made beautiful drawings of plants and insects. She wrote: “Seek not in this to honor me but God alone, to praise him as the Creator of even the smallest and least of worms.” Beautiful, hand-painted prints by these artists were ultimately gathered in leather-bound books. In addition to Maria Merian, others such as Basilius Besler (1561–1629), Mark Catesby (1683–1749), George Edwards (1694–1773), Moses Harris (1730–1788), John James Audubon (1785–1851), and Sir William Jardine (1800–1874) are just a few of these important natural history artists and scientists.

The scientific art now hanging on our walls is set among the beauties of natural objects—minerals, shells, and butterflies—as well as among period English, American, and French furniture, some of which was passed down through our families. The art, furniture, and architecture recreate a Georgian period interior on a smaller scale, not unlike homes of earlier centuries that exhibited this “passion for natural history.” These iconic houses were filled with cabinets of curiosities—collections of striking birds, insects, minerals, and more—along with libraries stocked with exquisitely tooled, leather-bound, natural history color-plate books. The grounds and spectacular gardens of their homes were planted with the most recent botanical discoveries of the day.

Annandale’s second- floor gallery is filled with 18th- and 19th-century hand- colored etchings and lithographs of flora and fauna. (Imaginary Lines, Mary Brandt Photography)
George Edwards’s book “Natural History of Uncommon Birds,” 1743–1751. (J. Gilbert Johnston)

Gilbert has nurtured a love of nature throughout his life, and he has witnessed great nature sites on six continents. He has backpacked, canoed, and kayaked throughout North America.

He subsequently transformed our lot into a nature-friendly haven by planting flowers and shrubs that provide food for butterflies and birds, with many bird baths and feeders. We look forward to seasonal changes because of the different migratory birds that visit our yard. Gilbert has identified over 100 different bird species here over the years. And I can now identify a downy woodpecker!

(Imaginary Lines, Mary Brandt Photography)

The Interiors

Today, almost eight years after our wedding, I walk through the rooms of our house and am grateful for our life together. When I was working in the White House, I was constantly surrounded by the beauty of Federal-style decor, very similar to its Georgian counterpart in England. And now, the beauty of the same period surrounds me. Natural light pours in from Palladian windows, filling the ground-floor rooms and illuminating our art.

Nothing is fully appreciated unless it is understood, and for that purpose, Gilbert has placed “museum-like” cards alongside each work of art in our home, explaining something about the artist and how the work was produced. We regularly open our house to others to share beauty and historical information.

However, do not let the word “museum” deceive—our home is anything but. Vibrantly colored walls, true to Georgian decor, warm up the rooms with rich yellow, apricot, and blue hues—which leads me to a word about the decorator. Having known my husband since the 1980s as a master of conservative public policy, an adventurer in the wilds, an art collector, a print dealer and owner of Antique Nature Prints, and a lecturer on the art of natural history (my Renaissance man), I had never known him as an interior decorator! And yet, he set about decorating our home with a sure hand—just as he landscaped our land—suggesting paint colors, purchasing furnishings at auction, and placing the art and furniture so happily together that they seemed made for each other.

Which is just what I feel about us—made for each other. And any beauty in our home is dedicated to the glory of the Author of beauty—the Lord of Creation.

A Georgian-style library cabinet. (Imaginary Lines, Mary Brandt Photography)

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.