Christina Rutland in front of her home in Hendersonville, North Carolina. (Courtesy of Christina Rutland)
Imagine allowing someone you hardly know into your home. Now imagine that stranger eating your food, sleeping in your bed, tugging on you for help, and distracting you from chores, day after day.
That’s exactly what happened when Christina Rutland of Hendersonville, North Carolina, invited a brother and sister from a dysfunctional family to be raised alongside her own kids amid a global pandemic.
As a biological mother of three—Elliot, 9; Emmalynn, 7; and Abigail, 5—Christina is one of many foster parents who believe that doubling down on sacrifice is a necessary virtue if the fabric of family life in America is to be strengthened.
In July 2020, Christina and her husband, Stephen, welcomed a 3-year-old girl and her 4-year-old brother into a safe haven filled with order, love, and laughter. “The Littles,” as Christina calls them, are among an estimated 419,000 youth in foster care nationally, separated from their biological families largely due to domestic violence or substance abuse—a population of vulnerable young people that is almost the size of Spokane and Baton Rouge combined.
But last year, during the pandemic, 20 states witnessed a total drop of 5 percent or more in licensed foster homes, according to figures gathered from child welfare agencies, widening the cracks in the system’s safety net.
“We always need more foster parents,” said Kym Rhodes, a social work liaison for Henderson County, North Carolina, who works with the Rutlands and other households. While most foster kids are age 5 and under at the time they are separated, “we need foster parents who are willing to take older kids. We need foster parents who are willing to take sibling groups, […] newborns that come straight from the hospital.”
Rhodes approached Christina at the church where the two worship and asked her if she would consider taking in siblings who’d been exposed to narcotics within their birth family and whose father was homeless.
Called to “serve for the fatherless,” Christina didn’t flinch. “We’re going to go where the need is,” she remembered thinking. By that time, she and Stephen were well along in the foster licensing process, which included 30 hours of training, a criminal record check, physical exams, and a fire safety inspection.
The Value of Stability
Sitting at the kitchen table of her home as her birth children folded laundry in a bedroom, Christina said that she shared a “very stable, normal upbringing” with one older sister and a mom and dad who are still together. She met her future husband in high school and they ended up working together at a summer camp during college. They’ve been married for 12 years.
When her sister and brother-in-law began foster parenting, “I was able to see what they were doing,” Christina said. Through several church friends in nearby Greenville, South Carolina, she was also able to learn about the role foster parents play.
Given her upbringing, the exposure to her sister’s fostering, and an unbreakable faith, “it never dawned on us to say, ‘Oh, we should probably pump the brakes,’” as the pandemic upended daily living, Christina said. Instead, she pushed forward, displaying the energy and positivity that friends and associates describe as her hallmark traits.
For others, however, the upheaval of the ongoing health crisis took its toll. A January 2021 survey of about 300 foster parents, conducted by Fostering Families Today, found that emotional and psychological problems created a collective dent in these parents’ well-being. Loss of income, deteriorating physical health, fear of family exposure and illness, and on-again-off-again schooling also posed challenges.
Yet, like Christina, these foster parents kept up the pace, maintaining a spirit of sacrifice while aided by strong governmental and community support in the form of daycare vouchers, Medicaid eligibility, and donations of meals and clothing.
Children First
In the end, fostering is not about the difficulties caregivers face, but about the potential for children in these temporarily blended families—foster and biological alike—to learn, grow, and love one another.
Christina recalled how her kids were a bit wary at first when “the Littles” arrived, wondering which beds they would sleep in that night.
“We’re going to have to be really patient,” was what Emmalynn told her mother. “And I said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to have to be really patient,’” Christina remembered. “But by the end of the next day, they’re all outside playing together.”
Christina believes her own kids now have more empathy toward others who don’t live in safe households. They also understand better why she and Stephen have always set down rules and boundaries. “They’re seeing how difficult it is for these little ones to adapt and, especially initially, to understand why are rules given in the first place.”
The two foster kids have been with the Rutlands for more than a year. While the foster kids and Christina visit the birth mother regularly, “the Littles” may be able to reunite permanently if the conditions that led to their removal improve, lessening the trauma of forced separation.
“One time, I found my oldest boy in tears, and I thought it was because something had been hard for him that day,” Christina related. “And he said, ‘I just know that they really want to go home, and I want them to be happy, but I also don’t want them to leave.’”
Foster care is by no means a guaranteed road to success. Foster children are more likely than non-fostered children to commit suicide. Many do not graduate from high school on time. Others become pregnant or homeless.
But in every foster family created, love and hope abound.
“We ask them to take them in, treat them like they’re your children, love them, be willing to let them go when it’s time to let them go,” said Lorie Horne, Henderson County’s social work program administrator.
“I mean, it’s a difficult job. It really is.”
Neil Cotiaux is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in newspapers, magazines, and business journals, mostly in the Southeast and Midwest. His work has largely focused on community and economic development, immigration, and health care. He works out of Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Decades before Johnny Appleseed started planting apple trees in Pennsylvania and Ohio, two brothers created an apple orchard in Limington, Maine, that has endured for 238 years. It was 1783, and the Treaty of Paris had officially ended the American Revolution and ratified the independence of the thirteen American states.
Joshua Brackett and his elder brother Abraham had traveled the 30 miles from Portland, known then as Falmouth, Massachusetts. It was a journey of about a day by horseback. But on their way to the newly settled area of Little Ossipee Plantation, their horses were spooked by an unexpected encounter with a bear. They shot the bear with their Brown Bess musket and considered the fact that the horse had warned them about the animal a sign of good fortune.
Both brothers had followed the example of their father, Lieutenant Joshua Brackett, Sr., and had joined the Continental Army: Abraham in 1778 and Joshua, Jr. in 1780. War in the New World was not new to the Bracketts. Their second great-grandfather, Anthony Bracket, had immigrated from England to New Hampshire around 1623 and was killed by Indians in 1691 at the age of 78. Conflicts with local Indian tribes and the French and Indian War in 1754 brought numerous tragedies to their family.
But when Independence from Britain was declared, the Bracketts joined the American cause, as did many of the citizens of the District of Maine. Joshua, Sr., was a captain of a company of minutemen who marched to Cambridge in 1775. He then became a Second Lieutenant in Captain Joshua Wentworth’s company, while both of his sons served in Captain Joseph Pride’s company, with Abraham discharged in 1779 and Joshua, Jr. discharged in December of 1780.
Joshua, Jr., had the colorful distinction of serving in a detachment of men deployed on boats that warned fishermen about the incursions of the British Naval Captain Henry Mowat, who had burned Falmouth in 1775.
The brothers had received a grant of land as recompense for their military service. Discharged, with the war winding down in 1781, they journeyed to their new holdings at Little Ossipee Plantation, later incorporated as Limington. They found that the hilly country was ideal for apple trees, so the brothers formally established a farm and orchard in 1783.
Joshua didn’t know that 238 years later, a ninth-generation Brackett, his sixth-great-grandson Manley Brackett, would still be running the orchard at the age of 99.
The brothers could not have imagined the future threat to their family farm posed by modern technology or an apple called “Honeycrisp.”
The 99 years of their descendent’s life were, except for a few brief interludes, resonant with the fragrance of apples. Manley Russell Brackett was born on the farm in 1922 and was wheeled in a baby carriage by his mother as his parents planted rows of McIntosh apples.
His parents were Guy Bracket, born in 1884, and May Russell, born in 1881. “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” must have worked quite well for the Bracketts—Guy and May were 78 and 89 when they passed away in 1963 and 1971.
Guy and May had decided to stop raising cattle and had converted the farm to only grow apple trees, even though at that time it was still a small farm of about 10 acres. Manley joined the Merchant Marine in World War II and served for two years on a Liberty Ship as the ship’s purser and quasi-pharmacist. After the war, he came back to the farm and helped his father slowly expand the orchard until, in the ’70s, the apple trees covered 120 acres.
The Manley Expansion
Manley married Marion Virginia Sawyer right after the war when Manley was 25. “Ginnie” was a graduate of the Concord School of Business and served as Manley’s business partner, balancing the books “down to the last penny.” They had two daughters, Diane and Debra. Diane told me that Manley had once remarked that “asking Ginnie Sawyer to marry me was the best decision I ever made.”
Manley and Ginnie grew the business until it was a substantial success, shipping 30 to 40,000 bushels of apples a year, many of them out of state and as far away as Europe. In 1964, Manley was featured in The Portland Press Herald as one of the “Faces of Maine.” The farm is a member of the Maine Pomological Society, an organization founded in 1873 that includes apple orchards all over the state and deals with the science of fruits and fruit growing.
Manley developed the orchard even more when he installed a cold storage facility and took on the task of packing the apples in-house. Both decisions increased profits by cutting out two levels of middlemen.
When Manley was 57 in 1979, he was chosen as the York County Farmer of the Year by the Soil and Water Conservation District. The former Journal Tribune newspaper from Biddeford, Maine wrote on November 8, 1979:
“It is because of Manley’s efforts to conserve soil, his progressive and sometimes aggressive efforts in growing apples, in putting up wind fences, pruning trees, and turning apple-raising into an art that won him the award.”
“Operating an orchard is a year-round business, and the way Manley Brackett operates it is not so much a fight against the elements of time and weather, but rather a combination of agricultural technology with an understanding and appreciation of nature. It is learning to work with the weather, soils, trees, and the experience of apple-raising, handed down from generation to generation.”
Planes, Packing Houses, and Big Farms
In 1972, Manley’s daughter Debra married a young man named Guy Paulin. A year later, Guy started working for Manley in the orchard and has worked there ever since. Debra became a school teacher, and Guy and Debra had two boys who were “mirror twins”—identical twins except that one was left-handed and the other right-handed. Both boys graduated from Bentley College.
For the last 12 years, Guy has been the manager of the orchard and has witnessed seismic changes in the apple-growing business. After years of growth, Brackett’s has been confronted with the stresses of foreign competition and the implementation of modern but extremely expensive packing machines. Many other orchards have gone out of business, but Brackett’s has survived due to the commitment to the orchard by Guy and his wife, Debra, who is the farm’s bookkeeper and full-fledged partner.
Apple brokers are the key to success for a large-scale orchard since it’s an apple broker that arranges contracts with a variety of grocery stores across the country. Manley used a broker to get his apples in stores in Florida, where they were purchased by snowbirds from New England. But he eventually stopped using brokers because their increase in packing requirements was not cost effective.
Prior to the delivery of food items by aircraft, customers didn’t expect fresh apples to be available at every grocery store, 12 months a year. Now, with apples flown in from countries like Chile, one can buy a crispy, delicious apple at any time. Although that’s been great for consumers, smaller orchards have struggled to compete.
Brokers now go with the large orchards that can meet a continuous demand, whether foreign or American, and their requirements for packing and delivery have increased. Instead of apples being shipped loose in a box, many brokers want them packed in individual compartments as they are done with eggs. Additionally, supermarkets want a sticker on each apple, which is too labor-intensive for smaller orchards.
The year-round demand has made it tough for farms like Brackett’s, especially with apples like the Honeycrisp, which have stringent requirements for storage and a high percentage rate of failure.
The Rise of the Honeycrisp
Guy told me that Honeycrisp apples are extremely profitable and popular but require expensive equipment to ship year-round. To preserve them, farms need packing facilities that include controlled-atmosphere storage, which regulates the levels of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen, as well as temperature and humidity. Many big packing houses have specialized x-ray machines that scan the inside of the apples for defects. But those machines are far above the budget of many growers.
Developed at the University of Minnesota and released in 1991, the Honeycrisp apple is a hybrid of the Keepsake variety and an unreleased apple labeled the MN1627, a grandchild of the Duchess of Oldenburg and the Golden Delicious apples.
Its crispness and sweet taste have made it a must-have apple at grocery stores, and it sells at a high price. Customers want Honeycrisp apples, so stores and growers have to respond.
Yet for growers, the Honeycrisp is not all joy. In the article “The Dark Side Of Honeycrisp,” by Christina Herrick, published on the Growing Produce website on January 27, 2015, Herrick writes:
“Ask any grower whether they enjoy the experience of growing Honeycrisp year in and year out and they’ll likely tell you no. But it’s a necessary evil. Without Honeycrisp—one of the most profitable varieties to have in an orchard—many growers believe they can’t stay competitive. …”
“It is by far and away the most difficult variety I’ve ever grown,” says Bruce Allen, president of Columbia Reach Pack in Yakima, WA.1
In spite of the problematic side of the new Honeycrisp apple, Guy has planted over 3,000 Honeycrisp trees at Brackett’s. Because of changes within the industry and the consolidation of many smaller farms into larger ones, Guy also had to cut costs to stay competitive.
Downsizing and Fine Tuning
After years of expansion of their farmland, Guy has trimmed the land down to 55 acres. The orchard grows McIntosh, Cortland, Honeycrisp, Spencer, Macoun, Yellow Delicious, Red Delicious, and Northern Spy apples. He’s also added blueberry bushes and peach trees. The Brackett farm stand sells its own apple cider as well as a variety of other local products.
The farm has no broker, due to its size, so Brackett’s has been shut out of the supermarket routes of sale. To compensate, Guy supplies apples to 10 school districts within a 50-mile radius. The farm also has a very popular pick-your-own apple program at their high-ground orchard, which has a 180-degree view of the mountains of New Hampshire.
Brackett’s has also struggled with labor, as many companies have. Guy is fortunate that he’s been working with some excellent apple pickers from Jamaica that come every year for 10 weeks, from September to November. One of them has been working for Brackett’s for 10 years. But local help is much harder to find.
I asked Guy about his work schedule, and I was surprised, even though I shouldn’t have been. I’ve known for a long time that farmers are a special breed of human, far too often unappreciated by their customers who enjoy—in this case literally—the fruits of their labor.
Guy’s day goes from around 4:30 in the morning to 7:30 at night—a 15-hour day—seven days a week. One hundred hours of work a week is something that mere mortals don’t normally wish to contemplate. But that’s what farmers do, and that’s what Guy has been doing for the more than 40 years that he’s worked at Brackett’s. He has been fortunate that, as he stated, Manley was “an easy boss.” And, of course, Guy is now part of the Brackett family, and he loves his work.
Guy and Debra are both taking care of Manley as he approaches his 100th birthday. They’ve helped Manley fulfill his pledge to his father “to keep the orchard going.” Manley often told customers as they left the orchard with bags of apples: “We’ll see you down the road.”
Debra’s sister, Diane, has performed the invaluable service of keeping track of the history of the orchard and the Brackett family.
Guy Paulin of Brackett’s Orchard. (Peter Falkenberg Brown)(Peter Falkenberg Brown)Guy and Manley. (Peter Falkenberg Brown)
The Future of Brackett’s
We concluded our conversation by looking at the future. It would be easy to sell their orchard, but they don’t want to. They want to continue and make it work. Guy is 68, and he’s hoping that one or both of his sons might manage the farm. The farm is still profitable, although it’s always on the edge, as many small farms are. Crises are always waiting in the wings, in the form of bad weather or crops that fail.
When I looked at Guy, sitting in the small visitor’s cabin on the top of their beautiful hill facing the western mountains in New Hampshire, I was reminded of Rocky Balboa. The Bracketts have been fighting to survive, to grow, and to bring value to their neighbors for 238 years.
The Brackett’s Orchards farm most certainly qualifies, at least in my mind, as a Historical Landmark. It is indeed a historical treasure. In addition, when I drove through Brackett’s apple trees and came back to their farm stand to shake Manley’s 99-year-old hand and wave goodbye, I felt that this was one farm that must not be subsumed by the bean-counters of Big Agra. The orchard has too much soul and too much history. Brackett’s Orchards must continue.
Jamie and Brandon Ashby, a Marine veteran, chat as they prepare to open Sugar's for the lunch rush. (David Dudley)
Brandon and Jamie Ashby were married just shy of one year, when the latter decided that it was time to make her dream of opening a restaurant a reality. Jamie said that she’d wanted to open a restaurant since she was 15, when she worked at a small cafe in Nevada. “They did everything wrong,” Jamie said, “and I used to imagine how I’d do it differently.”
But due to her strict Mormon upbringing, she wasn’t encouraged to pursue such dreams. As she was preparing to graduate, she asked her parents if they’d set aside any money to help her pay for college. “My mom said, ‘Why would we do that? You’re just going to get married and have children,'” Jamie said.
So, she spent much of her adult life working for other people. “I felt like I was helping their businesses succeed, through management,” she said, “but not being brave enough to follow my dream.”
But when she met Brandon four years ago, she finally found the courage to pursue her dream. They were living in Boulder City, Nevada. Brandon, a 45-year-old veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and a career policeman, agreed to help fund Jamie’s dream.
They opened a bakery in Boulder City in June 2020. Jamie made spudnuts—essentially donuts, but with mashed potatoes folded into the dough—according to her grandmother’s recipe. “She was small-town famous for that recipe,” Jamie said. The bakery was a small family business; Jamie only worked with one other person. Then, when Brandon retired from the Boulder City Police Department later that month, he joined Jamie at the bakery.
Jamie keeps this picture at the restaurant to honor her grandparents, Enid and Dan Stewart. (David Dudley)
“He started by washing dishes,” Jamie said. “Then he began helping me with baking. I thought it might take him a while, because he’d never really done this kind of thing before. But he took to it almost immediately.”
The bakery was becoming self-sufficient, until October rolled around. Due to pandemic-related shutdowns and limited-capacity dining, the bakery quickly went from a successful small business to being on the verge of failure. “We had to change our whole business model,” Jamie said. “When the state dropped dining capacity from 50 to 25 percent, we had to find another way to survive.”
They had to close the bakery’s doors because they weren’t making enough money. Jamie had already begun to accept the looming reality of abandoning her dream, but Brandon had acquired a never-say-die approach to work and life, from his time in the U.S. Marine Corps. “He told me that this was good,” she said. “He said that we’ll come out the other end stronger.”
From the Military Police to Restaurateur
Brandon attended high school in Anchorage, Alaska. He joined the Marines after graduating in 1994, when he was 19. His older brother, who had joined the Army, tried to convince Brandon to join the Air Force. “According to my brother, they had it easier,” Brandon said. “They had the best barracks, the best food, the best training.”
Brandon’s brother thought he wouldn’t make it in the Marines. “So, I enlisted in the Marines,” Brandon said, smiling. Brandon knew he wanted to join the military police, but his recruiter said there were no openings at the time. Brandon accepted that he’d be an infantryman, but then he was assigned to the military police force. “It was the luck of the draw, I guess,” Brandon said.
He was sent to Ft. McClellan, in Anniston, Alabama, for recruit training. He did seven weeks of infantry training, then three more weeks training with weapons and land navigation. “Then, I learned military law, and how to enforce it. The last month was like a police academy.” After completing his training, he was sent to Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps base in San Diego, California. He was eventually invited to join the Special Reaction Team, the military police equivalent of SWAT.
Brandon, who spent his career as a military and civilian policeman, skillfully cuts spudnuts from a disk of kneaded dough. (David Dudley)
Brandon said he feels lucky to have received the training he did. “It was the perfect path to a career in law enforcement.” He left the Marines after four years, then worked in construction and security. Then, Brandon was invited to join the Hoover Dam Federal Police. “This was just after 9/11,” Brandon said. “Hoover Dam was thought to be a terrorist target.”
After working there for two years, Brandon joined the Boulder City Police Department, where he worked for 12 years before retiring. “Then, I joined Jamie in the bakery. It was the best thing that could’ve happened to me then.”
Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire
After the bakery failed in Nevada, the Ashbys decided to move to St. George, Utah, because Utah took a much more lax approach to COVID restrictions. They packed their belongings into a moving truck, and headed for St. George in November 2020. As they crossed the Nevada-Utah border, Jamie Ashby’s phone buzzed.
“It was an automated message from the governor of Utah,” she said. “He’d passed a mask mandate. I looked at Brandon and said: ‘We almost made it. We almost escaped.’”
Again, Jamie felt her dream slipping through her fingers. Moving to St. George and opening a full-service restaurant was her last shot. The couple had to jump through a series of costly hurdles in order to get their restaurant, Sugar’s, up to code before opening its doors to the public on February 11, 2021.
A platter of fried chicken tenders, parmesan-dusted French fries, and cheesy mashed potatoes at Sugar’s. (David Dudley)
“When we opened, we were broke,” Jamie said. “We had to borrow money to stay open long enough to start earning money.” After a turbulent period, the Ashbys are finally making a name for themselves, and earning enough to keep their doors open.
“We came to St. George on a wing and a prayer,” Jamie said. “Throughout this emotional rollercoaster ride, Brandon has supported me in every way imaginable.”
“During my time in the Marines,” Brandon said, “I learned that you never give up. You fight until you can’t fight anymore.”
Watching Brandon knead dough, it’s apparent that he puts a great deal of care into what he’s doing. One may also get the sense that, as he and Jamie move through the kitchen, they’re fighting for their livelihood. That fighting spirit is the reason Sugar’s is open for business, and Jamie’s dream—which is a version of the American dream—is still alive.
Children play outside their house in Colonia de Carton in Piedras Negras, Mexico, on July 8, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Sky Cross is a nonprofit, strictly volunteer-led charity organization that operates along the Texas–Mexico border. Its mission is to provide food, clothing, medicine, and first-aid supplies to impoverished children, families, and orphanages. The organization works closely with missionaries of various denominations who offer education to the poor, primarily in Mexico, in substandard villages called colonias, which lack basic living conditions such as running water, sewers, and electricity.
The organization was founded in 1995 by retired U.S. Air Force Col. Terry Bliquez and his wife, Kathy. David Young serves as the current president, having been a board member and mission pilot since 1998. Before that, Young worked for the Civil Air Patrol (part of the U.S. Air Force), another nonprofit organization, which performs search-and-rescue missions.
When Bliquez first discussed Sky Cross’s mission with Young, it sparked a keen interest. Young would often accompany Bliquez on aid missions to the U.S.–Mexico border to deliver clothing, medicine, and nonperishable food to the needy. Together, they flew multiple times to migrant centers and orphanages, such as those in Nuevo Progreso, Mexico, and Matamoros, which is across the river from Brownsville, Texas.
Young said Sky Cross used to dispense secondhand clothing as well, but those deliveries have slowed down exponentially due to the pandemic. The organization has, however, distributed about 15,000 masks and more than 600 gallons of hand sanitizer across the migrant communities it serves.
The Importance of Helping the Needy
David Young, president of Sky Cross, unloads boxes of masks from his aircraft in Eagle Pass, Texas, on July 8, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
“The primary purpose of Sky Cross is to help provide food for the needy people, the poor on the other side of the border—they’re very, very poor. Many of them come up to the border hoping to be able to come across, and they end up being in the colonias on the border, such as the one in Matamoros,” Young said.
Years ago, people in colonias such as Matamoros would dig holes in the ground, scavenge coverings for the holes, and live in the burrows. Young remembers “being over there one time and looking at what they had on a grill that they were cooking outside—it was fish heads that they had scrounged for,” he said. “I was amazed that people could even survive with that type of food.”
Sky Cross delivers nonperishable food in the form of beans, rice, cornflour, noodles, and more. “I feel like God has placed in my heart a love for the poor and for their plight,” Young said, after being asked why the mission at Sky Cross resonated with him so deeply. “It’s such a blessing to me personally to go out and be amongst these people and, with my resources, be able to help them live a better life.”
Young said that when he was growing up, his parents instilled in him a deep desire to dedicate time and effort to helping those in need. “My dad was a homebuilder, and he would donate his time to work around the church. He had me help paint the back end of a church building one time—it demanded stacking scaffolding because it was so tall. He and I donated our time and efforts to that when I was just a 14- or 15-year-old boy. My father enjoyed giving himself to the community, and that carried over to me.”
Making a Difference in the Lives of the Poor
Children play outside their home in Colonia de Carton in Piedras Negras, Mexico, on July 8, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Through donations, Sky Cross also helped the Matamoros colonia develop to a point when residents could build a school. To support efforts like this, the Mexican government will provide water and electricity once a school is built, in turn helping the colonia become a sustainable community.
Many children in poverty-stricken communities such as Matamoros suffer from malnutrition. According to Young, children’s hair will often show signs of this. “Normally it would be black, but they would have red streaks in their hair, which was showing that they were not getting good nutrition. With time, those red streaks went away,” he said. “It’s a blessing to be able to do that and witness that as time goes on.” For Young, results like these are important, highlighting the difference Sky Cross makes in the lives of needy children.
Young said that his time at the organization is completely voluntary. Nobody who works there is a paid staff member, and 100 percent of the donations go straight to helping the poor. Young’s personal assets, including airplanes, fuel, and other equipment, are also put to charitable use for the organization, transporting volunteers to the border.
Aside from filling his role as president at Sky Cross, Young serves as a board member for a school in northwestern Peru that has 200 students. Together with his wife and family, he also helps more than a dozen children at any given time along the Texas–Mexico border. The Youngs provide money each month to keep those children in school rather than out scavenging the dangerous fields in search of food and money.
“We sent a couple on to the university; one of them became a dentist and came back. They are now practicing within one of the colonias there in Mexico,” Young said.
Sky Cross helps upwards of 30,000 people each year. It has supported six orphanages and helped build clinics in several Mexican colonias along the Texas border, providing quick access to medical care for families in need. “We’ve built a school in Nuevo Progreso where they would train the women to sew and work on computers. We have seen the results of that, to where the people will get out of the cycle of poverty and actually begin to have the skills to go out and earn a living,” Young said.
Physically Poor but Spiritually Rich
Through his time volunteering for Sky Cross, Young has learned many important life lessons—especially about how the needy can find happiness in the midst of their poverty. “The children are especially amazing to me. They can take a simple ball and have fun with that and laugh and enjoy life because they don’t want anything else. And what spoke to me is that some of the things we take for granted in our own society are more precious to them,” Young said.
“What I have learned in doing what I do is that the poor will find joy, and have more faith in their poverty than a lot of people that have all the things they would want in life. We in America need to understand that even the poorest of us are probably richer than 95 percent of the world. We place too much emphasis on the material things in life and not enough on the spiritual.”
Wrongly convicted and incarcerated at the age of 14, John Bunn has endured many struggles from a young age. Born and raised in Brownsville, New York City, to a single mother of three, Bunn had to learn to fend for himself without much guidance. Having lost his father before he was born, he spent the majority of his teenage life without the support of any male figures.
“In the environment I grew up in, the males would come around to exploit, not to come around with love and affection,” he said.
‘I Grew Up in Prison’
Bunn was forced to spend 17 years of his life behind bars, in an environment devoid of sympathy.
“It was predator-prey. If they [prisoners] felt you got a weakness, they took advantage of you,” he said.
He spent a further 10 years on parole, fighting for his innocence.
Before he was arrested and taken into prison, Bunn struggled with illiteracy; which only escalated while he was incarcerated.
“When they had me on trial, they told me to write down any questions I had. I couldn’t write down anything. I didn’t know how to express myself. That was the most trapped and embarrassing feeling you can ever imagine,” he said, breaking into a sob.
With the help of teachers, he finally learned how to read and write by the age of 16. It changed the course of his life.
“It made me stronger. It made me feel like I could fight for my life,” he said. Learning how to read and write is what drove Bunn to later go on to become a facilitator of an anger management program while in prison. From there, he met many other young men struggling with the challenges of illiteracy. “And I would talk to them about my illiteracy issues. And I told them that this was not something to be ashamed of,” he said.
The Unheard
Today, Bunn is the founder of AVoice4TheUnheard.org and helps bring positivity into communities, schools, houses, and prisons of New York City.
Meeting other young men struggling with illiteracy was the driving point that led him to found his literacy program after being exonerated.
In 2017, it initially started as a book drive aimed at refurbishing the libraries at Rikers Island and providing under-resourced communities with educational literature, according to the program website.
Today, the program also offers roleplaying activities to at-risk youth where they’re tasked with group interactions. “We put individuals in real-life scenarios and give them the option to put themselves in other people’s shoes. We try to make them think before making decisions. This is what we call consequential thinking,” Bunn said.
Finding His Passion
The program began during Bunn’s nearly 12 years on parole.
“It [parole] put my life in a limbo state. I knew I was innocent. Everybody knew I was innocent. And that’s what I was fighting for,” he said. While still waiting for a final decision to be made on his conviction, Bunn channeled that restlessness into something positive.
“I needed to put my energy into something more progressive,” he said. “A voice for the unheard—I don’t even know when it became the whole phrase, but it always represented me and what I felt inside my spirit.”
After suffering many setbacks and losing out on the prime years of his life while stuck in prison, Bunn refocused his attention on helping others who may be at risk of getting ensnared in the prison system.
“Where I come from,” Bunn said, “we don’t have too many role models. So my message is, if you don’t have anybody to show you the way, you make your own way. Don’t let that be the reason to discourage you from going forward. And that’s what I stand for. And that’s what we stand for.”
John Bunn visiting a school in NYC. (Samira Bouaou)
Making Positivity Cool for Kids
Part of Bunn’s mission is passing his positivity on to others. “The greatest champions have to go through adversities for them to have the empathy to deal with the world from a different perspective,” Bunn said.
“Our main message is about making positivity cool,” he tells me about his organization. He said that in today’s world, children are vulnerable to absorbing harmful messages from the media they consume. A lot of music nowadays romanticizes being tough, drugs, skipping school, and gang culture. But “that’s not real life,” Bunn says. His organization advocates for changing this narrative so that kids begin associating positivity with coolness.
A Voice 4 the Unheard not only provides prisons and schools with an abundance of literature but also offers numerous resources and networking opportunities to young people and children from underprivileged backgrounds.
“There’s a lack of resources in these communities, and we want to open them up to other resources that they may not know we have available today,” Bunn said. One of the ways the organization is working to bring resources closer to disadvantaged students is by building a network with other nonprofits and educational groups.
George Garber, who works alongside Bunn as one of the core members of the organization, says, “We’re working on creating a student portal on our website where kids could go and connect with other local nonprofits to fulfill their passions, whether that would be music, poetry, art, or the environment.”
The team has many future projects in mind, such as building a kids’ center to provide students with a safe physical location to study and access certain educational materials that may not be readily available in their immediate communities.
“A safe place where they can feel like it’s cool to learn at,” Bunn said.
Uriel Gurgov works on repairing a shoe in his workshop. (Lux Aeterna Photography for American Essence)
Shoemaker Uriel Gurgov immigrated to the United States on Jan. 21, 1993. He was born in 1962 in Bukhara, Uzbekistan—once an ancient trading city situated along the Silk Road in Central Asia. Uriel embarked on a grueling journey out of his hometown in the late 1990s, during the time that former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev was in power, and emigration among Bukharan Jews was prevalent.
Historically, Jews in Uzbekistan have always been religiously targeted. First, by the Sunni Muslims of the Bukhara Emirate during the late 16th century when they were forbidden from buying horses and forced to wear special clothing to distinguish themselves from Sunni Muslims. The religious persecution continued throughout Russian and Soviet rule. Finally, in the late 1920s, synagogues were permanently shut down and Jews were denied work in their traditional trades. Emigration was thus seen as a last attempt to flee persecution and discrimination in their homeland.
Having no relatives in the United States to support an affidavit application on his behalf, Gurgov was forced to cross over through Moscow. However, his journey was anything but simple and he met with several setbacks. Before his journey even began, he was apprehended in his hometown of Bukhara, Uzbekistan. Gurgov was falsely accused of buying a stolen television.
“I said, first of all, I don’t buy stuff from thieves. Also, from January to March, I was in Israel. How can I buy this?” Gurgov said. The crime allegedly occurred in February, when he was out of the country.
Searching for a Way Out
He was taken to jail and beaten in an attempt to make him confess to the alleged crime. When that proved useless, Gurgov was put on trial in front of one of the biggest judges in Bukhara. He went on to explain in the interview that the country’s government was very corrupt. His only way out of being condemned to a life in jail was to offer monetary payment to the judges and police.
“If you just bribe one, they will tell—so you have to have so much money to give each one now,” Gurgov said.
Many people encouraged him to escape Uzbekistan with his family. The government was well known for using Jews as a scapegoat for other people’s crimes. “Somebody stole this? They put it on you. Somebody hit somebody? They blame you. What kind of life is that?” he said.
This experience drove Gurgov to save money and prepare his family’s paperwork to flee Bukhara together. “But I didn’t tell anybody because everybody, everywhere, you have rats,” Gurgov said.
Before the family departed Bukhara, they paid a short visit to the cemetery to say farewell to their forefathers. Along the way, they paid out a lot of money to border police, guards, and airport security. Eventually, they arrived in Moscow, and from there, they flew to America in search of a new life.
New Shop, New Direction
(Lux Aeterna Photography for American Essence)
For three centuries, highly skilled craftsmen called “ustad” practiced traditional crafts in Central Asia and beyond. Some of this included jewelry-making, armory, carpet weaving, and shoemaking. Bukhara, Uzbekistan, was considered one of the major handicraft centers, often visited by wealthy merchants along the Silk Road. Skilled craftsmen would often take in apprentices who would learn their trade. This is also how Gurgov learned the craft of shoemaking. He explained that his father would often take him to many crafting hubs where he would be taught various skills in exchange for free work. These skills helped Gurgov kickstart his shoemaking business after moving to the United States.
Gurgov purchased his shoe shop in 1994, less than a year after arriving in the United States. With the help of generous friends and a bank loan of $15,000, he started a shoemaking business and has since been working there. His apartment is on the next block. “And what else do you need? I have a family, a wife, children, and grandchildren. I appreciate it, I’m satisfied.”
Shoemaker Gurgov considers shoemaking a real craft, one that requires the craftsman to really know his customer’s problem in order to help them accordingly. He places great importance on wearing the right shoes. “You can have a hundred shoes but none of them feel right. If you wear one shoe and you’re not tired of it, then that’s a good shoe.” He said many people wear the wrong types of shoes. They develop pain and fatigue, leading to serious health problems resulting in thousands of dollars in medical bills. He believes that making even a simple change in your footwear is enough to make a significant difference to your health. For instance, slightly changing the shoe size or purchasing one with good arch support can make a difference.
Today, he crafts sturdy, custom shoes for regular people and celebrities alike. Some of his past customers include Britney Spears and Patrick Dempsey. TV shows such as Boardwalk Empire and Gossip Girl have also commissioned Gurgov to design the cast’s shoes. He also carries out shoe, watch, and jewelry repairs.
Despite encountering many setbacks and enduring much suffering, Gurgov remains grateful and satisfied with life. He believes you can’t always be a winner and that sometimes losing is better as it helps one grow and appreciate things more. As Gurgov would say, “Today you give up, tomorrow you gain.”
Interior design featuring Ethan Allen furniture. (Courtesy of Dina Dotsikas)
At a time in history when certain international governments are creating incentives for reshoring, the American company Ethan Allen can hold its head high because throughout its 89 years of operations, it never fell into the trap of offshoring the majority, or the totality, of its production for low-labor costs.
Contrary to what may have been common belief, remaining rooted in its home country did not hinder an innovative evolution or business growth. Instead, the choice to keep production in the United States seemed to strengthen the brand’s position in the market.
Within a matter of three years, the company went from initially selling gnomes, trellises, and garden swings produced by other companies to kickstarting its own production of colonial-style home furnishings. It fully established its style by rebranding, becoming officially known as Ethan Allen in 1969. Ethan Allen’s reputation flourished to the point where it opened its own storefronts and began selling directly to consumers.
Five years later, the company opened the Ethan Allen Hotel in Danbury, Connecticut. Since 1974, the hotel has received a number of awards and over 100 five-star ratings on the online forum Wedding Wire. In 2019, the hotel accepted two awards: The Knot’s Best of Weddings, for a second consecutive year; and the Couples’ Choice Award from Wedding Wire, for an eighth consecutive year.
Staying True
Throughout its rich history of constant innovation, the company transformed its colonial style into a modern-day classic style fitting for the ‘90s. Today, the company continues to reinvent its pieces in classic, country and coastal, and modern styles.
During the offshoring boom of the 2000s, Ethan Allen stayed home and invested in new technology and state-of-the-art equipment for its manufacturing facilities. Now, the company boasts of using less electricity, water, and other resources, as well as ways to reduce the amount of waste we, as consumers, put into landfills. Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation named Ethan Allen a Vermont Business Partner from 2013 to 2018. Ethan Allen also cleaned up pollution in the Connecticut River, which runs near one of its workshops dating back to the 1830s.
The company’s prospects were not always a ray of sunshine, though.
Since the recession, and following the plummet of U.S. manufacturer Furniture Brands International in 2013, a number of legacy American furniture brands got pulled into the wave of disaster. Ethan Allen struggled greatly to stay afloat. By 2019, however, the company had made a major comeback.
In fact, after discarding a short-lived, discount-drive methodology and returning to its original emphasis on in-house interior design services and the promise of best prices, the company has been on the rise.
A Go-To Brand
Now fully rekindled with interior design at the forefront, the company opened a new format design studio in The Westchester shopping center in White Plains, New York, in 2019. The studio integrates the latest technologies, such as a 3D room planner, to enhance the company’s complimentary interior design service.
Television host and lifestyle maven Parker Kelley (writer, producer,
Ethan Allen’s designs have a classic look. (Courtesy of Dina Dotsikas)
and award-winning host of “Home, Life & Style,” a program that airs in New England) loved learning about Ethan Allen’s American heritage and tech toolsduring her recent partnership with the company to produce “Design Tips” segments on her show.
While the company’s constant innovation is good news for Ethan Allen’s in-house, world-class designers and consumers, the brand has been a long-lasting go-to for individual interior designers and the average American.
“Growing up, I’ve always known it to be a mainstay in the history of home furnishings. I’d love to see them last forever,” interior designer and home renovator Dina Dotsikas said in an interview for American Essence.
Ethan Allen has 1,000 in-house interior designers, but it openly suggests customers contact local interior designers and offers a useful site to guide clients. The team at Ethan Allen designs, develops—from cushions adjusted by hand for perfect shape and positioning, to upholstery in fabric or leather that is cut, sized and customized for a flawless fit—and delivers everything it makes.
Today, the company owns and operates nine manufacturing facilities, including six plants in the United States, two plants in Mexico, and one plant in Honduras.
Dotsikas said that “Ethan Allen has managed to shift with the times while maintaining the classic style appeal,” her personal preference. “Tradition will always be in style. We invest in more traditional pieces, the ones we know will last the longest; and we invest less in the more trendy, shorter-lived ones.”
“My personal style is classic, timeless, traditional with a touch of trend. I’ll stick with the basics that stand the test of time with a bit of today’s,” she added.
Dotsikas with her husband. (Courtesy of Dina Dotsikas)
Dotsikas has known the Ethan Allen name since she was a child, considering it a brand that provides long-lasting furnishings you can pass down to future generations. It has been a go-to brand for decorating her own home.
“They have people that you can work with to make them more to your style. It’s not cookie-cutter. There are a million different options. That’s always a great feature,” she said.
Dotsikas often integrates pieces from Ethan Allen when she is “flipping homes”—by renovating homes that have been unloved, as she explained it. After seeing through the mess and reorganizing it for today’s families, ensuring form and function, she gets to the fun part of designing the interiors. She called it “staging.”
“It’s different when you’re staging the house instead of furnishing the house. You want them to walk in and see themselves sitting there. Having quality pieces and accessories are important because visitors can visualize themselves living in the homes. When in a bind, I’ll pull furniture from our own home to stage the flip homes.”
Since she has quite a few Ethan Allen pieces in her own home, she uses them to stage homes set for sale—to give them that high-quality, luxury aesthetic she desires.
Erin Tallman is the editor-in-chief of ArchiExpo e-Magazine, an online news source for architecture and design professionals. She is based in Marseille, France, and enjoys cycling around Europe as a way to soak up the culture, discovering hotel gems along the way.
Paul Dong (R) with his son Harvey, at a backyard award ceremony for the Congressional Gold Medal held on May 15, 2021. (Courtesy of Harvey Dong)
Growing up in a Chinese-American community in downtown Sacramento, California, Paul C. Dong rose above adversity. He was the eldest child in a single-mother household and bore adult responsibilities as a youth growing up during the Depression. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he inspired Harvey, his eldest son, to believe and achieve no matter the odds.
Currently a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, who has won teaching awards, Harvey faced discrimination when his father bought a home in a predominantly white Sacramento neighborhood during the 1950s. Some neighborhood kids hurled racial slurs at Harvey. He had never before experienced such verbal aggression, and he struggled to figure out that animosity, he said.
It was difficult to process the experience of discriminatory insults from peers, who added the injury of often misidentifying his ethnic background. This experience occurred during the United States’ wars, cold and hot, with China and Korea, and previously with Japan. The elder Dong was there for Harvey in deed and word as he faced adverse social relations.
“My dad urged me to not do anything about it,” Harvey said. “He encouraged me to study harder. His generation had gone through the experience of Chinese Exclusion and segregation,” referring to the law that prohibited all immigration from China until it was repealed in 1943. Despite his dad’s emphasis on pursuing a formal education, Harvey took a rebellious turn, common among youth finding their way in the world. He hung out with peers who lacked a school focus.
Eventually, though, he enrolled at UC Berkeley during the turbulent 1960s. Harvey even joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program there briefly, following the example of his father and uncles. Their active duty had taken them to the Philippines as the United States fought Japan during World War II. Paul, who turns 100 this year, recently received a Congressional Gold Medal, awarded in recognition of his dedicated service during World War II.
“Dad, after he retired,” Harvey said, “provided his engineering expertise to my construction crew and me. He was super excited about that, helping us to draw up plans to use a pulley system to install heavy beams. He even helped design heat and ventilating systems.”
Harvey drew on his father’s construction expertise in a personal way, too. “I was interested in remodeling our apartment into a handicapped-accessible place for my wife, who uses a wheelchair,” Harvey said. “And he lent his construction design know-how. Later, when I took on a bigger task of building our own house, he enthusiastically helped. So when I went on into construction general contractor work, he was all for it.”
The elder Dong had worked as a mechanical engineer for the state of California for decades before retiring. “As kids, we never really knew what he did as an engineer—just that he was the breadwinner,” Harvey said. His dad’s example of working day in and day out impressed Harvey. “The idea of being a self-made person rubbed off on me,” he said.
World War II-era photo with Paul (bottom left) and his three brothers. (Courtesy of Harvey Dong)
The elder Dong took advantage of the GI housing bill to purchase a home directly from a builder; at the time, there were restrictive racial covenants that discriminated against Chinese-Americans and other minorities who sought to buy real estate. “No Realtor would show him properties for sale,” Harvey said, “so Dad bought directly from a fellow veteran and home-builder.”
Harvey took a midlife interest in education, a pursuit that his dad had long supported. To this end, Harvey earned a doctorate at UC Berkeley in 2002, and he began a new career as a lecturer in the school’s Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Program. His father helped in that undertaking, inspiring Harvey to dig ever deeper into his research and teaching of Asian-American history and issues that concern the Chinese-American community today.
“Dad helped me to translate old Chinese-language newspapers,” Harvey said. “We communicated very well on that.”
The elder Dong had a lifelong love of learning that rubbed off on Harvey. “As a young person, he had secured a study place in the family’s one-bedroom apartment,” Harvey said. “Dad carved a small piece out of a wall to find a quiet spot for his studies. My aunt got a kick out of that, as she thought that Dad had broken the law.”
One thing is certain: Paul was there for Harvey, his country, and his family when it mattered.
“Dad struggled and succeeded,” Harvey said. “He had the idea that his kids could do the same thing, which we did growing up.”
The apples do not fall far from the tree. Like dad, like son.
Seth Sandronsky is a freelance journalist based in Sacramento, California, married to a wonderful woman for the past 37 years. In a previous lifetime, he was a Division II college football player and competitive powerlifter.
John Truex and Liz Seru converted an old turbine blade factory in Upstate New York into a cast iron foundry. (Photo Courtesy of Borough Furnace)
For a growing number of American households, Teflon-coated pans, copper pots, or anything else for that matter other than a handcrafted cast iron skillet, would be, well, an outcast in the kitchen.
Crazy as it seems, the people who make this heavily weighted and highly popular custom-made cookware are willing to face furnaces burning at 2300 degrees Fahrenheit on a hot summer’s day, inside an old mill building they bought with their life savings, just to put one in your kitchen.
“It can be a little miserable at times,” said Liz Seru, who owns Borough Furnace with her husband, John Truex. About 10 years ago, they converted an old turbine blade factory in Upstate New York into a foundry to pursue their love for cast iron cookware. At the start, Seru, an artist, and Truex, who holds a degree in metal casting, bought vegetable oil off Craigslist to run their blast furnace, before switching to an electric induction oven.
And they’re not alone. Cast iron foundries, once as American as blue jeans and apple pie, have resurfaced all over the United States.
Aficionados say the taste of food cooked on the same cast iron pan gets better with time.
The Cast Iron Collector, a website dedicated to cast-iron-cooking enthusiasts, lists more than 300 cast iron foundries in the country, with a heavy concentration in the Midwest and down south where Lodge, the oldest maker of cast iron cookware in the United States, hosts popular cook-offs and a national cornbread festival in celebration of cast-iron cooking.
What’s driving this trendy revival in cookware all boils down to the simplicities of a highly sought-after taste, unparalleled durability, and old-fashioned made-in-America craftsmanship. Some foodies have quite literally lost their taste for modern lightweight stick-free cookware, which, besides, being short-lived, doesn’t quite offer the same flavorful results of cast iron.
Like a fine wine, the taste of food cooked on the same cast iron pan gets better with time. It’s called seasoning, a somewhat scientific phenomenon that naturally improves the surface of your skillet as you use your skillet more and more.
“Basically, the fat and oils in the food adhere to the pan and polymerize to form a new, smoother cook surface,” Seru said. “It’s better than when it was brand new.”
Forged cast iron cookware is also made out of hot iron poured into a mold and then cooled, meaning it’s all crafted in one piece, with no separate handles or bottoms that may eventually come apart.
Borough Furnace’s cookware is crafted in one piece, with no separate handles or bottoms. (Courtesy of Borough Furnace)
In addition to skillets, cast iron foundries like Golden’s Cast Iron in Columbus, Georgia, have revived an authentic cast iron cauldron-like cooker—yep, the kind that brings to mind a steamy, bubbling witch’s brew.
Cast iron skillets are also popular among campers who want a little more than hot dogs and beans over an open fire. A skillet made by Finex, an Oregon-based foundry that prides itself on being “100 percent American-made,” appears on multiple published lists for must-have camping gear.
“We make our cast iron a little bit thicker than most,” said Michael Griffin, Finex’s brand director. “When you cook over a grill and open fire, you’re going to have hot and cool spots. That thicker cast iron helps even out the cold and hot spots.”
Finex’s other big attraction is its patented stainless steel spiral handles that stay cool longer and cool down faster. Even in the old days, cast iron skillets didn’t have such a feature. Griffin said the company got the idea from old-fashioned wood stoves that had similar handles on their doors.
“We wanted to reinvent the cast iron skillet,” said Griffin. ” It’s a very classic, time-honored American piece of cookware, but it hadn’t changed in design for a couple of hundred years.”
Cast iron cookware is now even topping wedding registries over coffee machines and vacuum cleaners.
(Courtesy of Borough Furnace)
The revival of the beefy, indestructible kitchenware is so trendy that it has inspired blogs with such titles as “Why I’m Replacing My Skillets With Cast Iron” and articles on how to spot an authentic vintage cast iron skillet at a roadside antique shop.
Wagner and Griswold cookware are like the Ming Dynasty vases of antique cast iron skillets. One piece can fetch up to $1,500. An authentic “spider skillet” originally designed by Paul Revere and made up until the 1890s can be worth up to $8,000.
There are, of course, varying tiers of cast iron skillets, depending on the level of hands-on craftsmanship. Borough Furnace is probably one of the most handcrafted foundries in the country: they do only about 15 iron pours per day.
The Finger Lakes-based company is working to catch up on orders for its 10.5-inch frying skillet, which sells for $300. The company also custom-forges porcelain-enameled dutch ovens and something called cazuelas, ramekin-like cookware made out of recycled cast iron—part of Seru and Truex’s ironclad commitment to keeping their foundry as environmentally friendly as possible. They are even voluntarily carbon emissions-certified.
“We do our best to reduce our footprint,” said Seru. “We want to preserve American tradition as much as America itself.”
Alice Giordano is a former news correspondent for The Boston Globe, Associated Press, and New England bureau of The New York Times. Alice loves to cook her vegetarian cuisine on the vintage cast iron skillet she inherited from her mom.
The 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air, which debuted with an innovative V-8 engine. (Courtesy of GM)
The hourlong flight across lower Michigan was nearing completion when Ed Cole found himself in fog on his approach to Kalamazoo. It was May 2, 1977—an otherwise routine Monday morning. Before takeoff from Pontiac, the suburban airfield north of Detroit, Cole had chatted in a “jolly” mood with a hangar employee and mentioned seeing purple martins at home. After nursing a cup of coffee, he defied the weather warnings, choosing to rely on the instruments in his twin-engine Beagle S.206.
Lee Huff and her dog witnessed Cole’s last moments.
“The plane circled my house three or four times, and the dog put up such a racket that I ran outside in the backyard to see what was going on,” she told a correspondent. Cole’s plane crashed, causing a “terrible boom.” He was 67 years old.
Shock prevailed among the 400 mourners leaving the funeral service that week. The faces of Henry Ford II, Lee Iacocca, George Romney, and Roger Smith reflected incomprehension, as if the premature death of such a towering figure was impossible.
Weeks before his death, Cole had signed up to run Checker Motors Corp. in Kalamazoo, located about 60 miles from his own native village of Marne (formerly Berlin), Michigan. Founded in 1922, Checker made about 5,000 cars per year of the Marathon. This sturdy, dowdy sedan, introduced two decades earlier, was popular with taxicab services. In other words, after General Motors (GM), Ford, Chrysler, and American Motors, Checker was the fifth-largest automaker. “I’m number one at number five,” joked Cole, who liked to gab with reporters.
Edward Cole, GM’s pioneering engineer. (Courtesy of GM)
He had retired as GM president 3 1/2 years earlier. His career started in 1930 with a 45-cent-per-hour job in the corporation’s Cadillac Division. Until the 1950s, the divisions within GM were self-governing; Cadillac had its own suppliers and plants for cars, but also manufactured battle tanks for the military. Besides working on GM’s first automatic transmission, Cole straightened out issues in tank performance. He became chief of tank design in 1943. When World War II ended, he worked on Cadillac’s new V-8 engine. Then, as the Korean conflict broke out, he was put in charge of the Walker Bulldog tank.
Flying his own Beechcraft Bonanza, he searched around for a factory and found a building in Cleveland, but had to remove 39 million pounds of beans. A staff of 7,000 people was hired to assemble the tanks. Cole told a newspaper that his team of 14 managers and he worked so hard to get the operation up and running that they were “eating four meals a day and getting skinny.”
The late automotive editor David E. Davis Jr. knew Cole. “There was nothing he couldn’t accomplish, no problem that couldn’t be solved,” Davis once said.
Cole would have been happy to stay put, but the Chevrolet Division called in 1952. “I was doing my own thing and designing engines in my department,” he said. His talents were needed elsewhere. “At that time, Chevrolet was making a little six, a grandmother-type car. Nobody had ever built an enthusiast-type of car around Chevrolet.” Ford had featured its V-8 engine since 1932. Chrysler had just introduced its Hemi V-8, which would become legendary. Cole and the boys got together in a room at Cleveland’s Lakeshore Hotel and drew up plans for the new Chevy V-8 “as a form of entertainment.”
Being appointed as Chevy’s chief engineer and returning to Detroit, Cole led the development of the compact lightweight power plant with four cylinders banked to one side, four more to the other, and a 90-degree “V” angle between them. It incorporated all of the latest internal design features and some breakthrough manufacturing techniques. The V-8 would make its debut in the 1955 Chevy. GM’s top boss, Harlow “Red” Curtice,” stepped into the picture and said he wanted the car to have a “hound dog” look. Cole stopped by the design studio almost every day to see it take shape.
Designer Clare MacKichan was used to old-style, bullying managers, but Cole was different. Besides having good taste, he could handle people. “If he didn’t know what he wanted, he would wait until you produced something he did want,” MacKichan told interviewer Michael Lamm. “And if he didn’t like something, he was pretty nice about it. He wouldn’t get all excited and make a big fuss.”
The ’55 Chevy was a smash, selling 1.7 million cars. The Chevy V-8 went into the Corvette next and suited it like honey on a biscuit. Cole rose to division manager and had a free hand to create another car, the 1960 Chevrolet Corvair. And that car would put him on the cover of Time magazine. “If I felt any better about our Chevy Corvair, I think I’d blow up,” he said. It was an unintentionally portentous remark. The compact had an unusual layout, with the small engine placed in the rear—like the Volkswagen. Although initial sales were strong, problems crept in. Micromanaging and cost-cutting by GM’s executive committee had contributed to the Corvair’s tendency to spin out.
An advertisement for the 1960 Chevrolet Corvair four-door sedan. (Courtesy of GM)
As Cole became GM president in 1967, he faced even more controversy and scandals. An engine-mounting problem in other Chevy models resulted in the unprecedented recall of 6.7 million cars. Beyond this, safety, fuel economy, and emissions controls were emerging as top priorities. Some fun went out of the business, and Cole was concerned about the effect on engineers and innovation: “They will be afraid to death to do anything out of fear it might be wrong.”
A month after retiring from GM, Cole appeared on The Phil Donahue Show to debate Ralph Nader, whose exposé, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” was the Corvair’s undoing. When the two-hour broadcast wrapped, Cole shook Nader’s hand, saying, “Give me a little credit from now on. I showed up.”
Nader taunted back, “You got the lead out of gasoline. Now how about getting the lead out of GM?” It was a little rude, but Cole was out of the game by then anyway. Decades later, we remember him for his 18 patents, dynamic leadership, gregarious personality, and the motto: “Kick the hell out of the status quo.”
Ronald Ahrens’s first magazine article was 40 years ago for Soap Opera Digest. His contributions to the much-lamented Automobile Magazine spanned a 32-year period. Nowadays, he’s on a 15-year run with DBusiness (“Detroit’s Premier Business Journal”). Ronald lives near Palm Springs, Calif., where he struggles to understand desert gardening.
Johanna Schwaiger met Celine Ma, an instructor of classical Chinese dance, who became her model for a sculpture. (Lux Aeterna Photography)
Growing up in Salzburg, Austria, Johanna Schwaiger was constantly surrounded by beautiful art—from the city’s Baroque architecture to majestic fountains and public gardens. “I always thought the masters of these works were of a distant past, … had magical skills, and I thought if I could only learn a little bit of what they knew, I would be so happy,” she said.
Her father, an art teacher, taught her basic drawing and sculpting techniques. Working in clay gave her true joy. “It became my world to retreat to, whenever I felt I needed to escape somewhere, like Alice entering her wonderland,” she said. Today, Schwaiger has not only achieved her childhood dream of becoming a sculptor but also seeks to inspire the next generation of artists to create the kind of art that so moved her.
She came to the United States in 2017 to work with New Masters Academy, a subscription-based online tutorial platform for people to learn fine arts techniques. To begin with, she was invited to teach a sculpture tutorial on video. Today, she is the academy’s program director. Similar to Netflix, people can stream videos of creative artists teaching their crafts from around the world. Even top art schools and entertainment studios, including the Walt Disney Animation Studios, Ringling College of Art and Design, and the National Sculpture Society, have signed up for courses.
A Journey
It would take some time before Schwaiger could fulfill her passion for arts education. At age 15, she enrolled in a local school for sculptors. But while the school taught wood and stone carving, she wanted to learn traditional figurative sculpture, like that of the Renaissance masters, together with training in ink drawing, clay sculpting, and bronze casting. After graduating from high school, Schwaiger searched ateliers and schools in Salzburg, Vienna, and other nearby European cities, but none taught these techniques.
Some in the arts world told Schwaiger that realism had become a thing of the past, so she decided to train herself by studying the works of old masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Schwaiger also majored in art history at the University of Salzburg, and soon picked up commissions to paint portraits and sculpt figures for churches and graveyards, but she still felt a need for more schooling. At age 26, she discovered that the Florence Academy of Art in Italy taught the traditional curriculum. After completing her training there, she returned to her high school alma mater and began teaching a course in traditional figurative art.
Schwaiger was inspired by the grace and strength exhibited by artists of classical Chinese dance. (Lux Aeterna Photography)
Schwaiger has since made it her mission to continue the lineage of the classical art tradition, through New Masters Academy, education initiatives, and her private art studio. “I try to inspire the younger generation to hone their craft and really focus on the craft as much as possible—and make them understand that if you get strong in your craft, that’s how you become free in your expression,” she said in a recent interview held at Fei Tian College in Middletown, New York, where she taught a four-week summer sculpting class.
Now 38, Schwaiger taught her Fei Tian College students human anatomy and how to draw from a live model. To her, it’s about respecting the process pioneered by the great classical artists of the Western tradition. “You need to honor the past, what the ancestors learned and what they brought out. It’s basically taking the torch and bringing the torch further. That’s what I believe in,” said Schwaiger.
Inspired by the East
In her latest project, Schwaiger took inspiration from a different culture. Several years ago, she and her husband attended a performance by Shen Yun Performing Arts, the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company. Based in New York, the company seeks to revive the 5,000 years of Chinese civilization through dance and music. Classical Chinese dance, in particular, has a lineage tracing back to imperial courts and ancient plays. Schwaiger was touched not only by the storytelling but also by the technical prowess of the dancers. “I could see that this is the kind of excellence … that artists in the past were aiming for. And it’s really moving people’s hearts with beauty, and with excellent techniques,” she said.
Schwaiger thought of capturing through sculpture the grace and strength of the dancers she saw on stage. “What amazed me so much was the variety of dance poses that the dancers can do in sync, and so the whole choreography seems to be a language that is told on stage,” she said.
Through a mutual artist friend, Schwaiger recently met Celine Ma, a 22-year-old instructor of classical Chinese dance at Northern Academy of the Arts, a private middle and high school in Middletown, New York. Together, they thought of possible poses that the figure could take on, with Ma occasionally modeling the movements. At first, Schwaiger found it challenging to translate dance, a moving art form, into the still form of sculpture—especially conveying the light, airy movements of classical Chinese dancers. “It’s a moment in time that you’re capturing, and so the pose I picked is not a resting pose. It’s more like she’s like a flower blossoming into her pose,” said Schwaiger.
The Sculpture
One of the dancer’s legs is grounded, but the rest of her body is twisted toward the viewer. Meanwhile, her extended arm is gesturing toward the sky. “I was trying to think of how plants grow. That helped me to bring that grace into the piece … like how a flower opens its petals. That’s the image I tried to keep in mind as I was sculpting this,” said Schwaiger.
Schwaiger said that she envisioned a flower blossoming while making the sculpture. (Lux Aeterna Photography)
Ma said of the hand gesture: “It’s reaching high, like giving people hope and aiming for something brighter and higher.” She was not only impressed by Schwaiger’s dedication to artistry but also thrilled to see classical Chinese dance represented in another art form. “Dancers in the past—we don’t have a lot of documented footage, and a lot of techniques are lost because there’s no way that someone is passing [them] down through thousands of years,” Ma said, noting that it was thrilling to see “a sculpture that can be everlasting.”
Through working on the sculpture project, Ma also gained a newfound understanding of how Western and Eastern arts can complement each other. And through discussing the posture of the sculpture, she became more aware of the muscles she was using while dancing, and “the beauty of the human form.”
The Role of Art in Society
Ma trained in classical Chinese dance for seven years, learning the inner meanings behind the art form. She said that the training helped her to embody values that were appreciated in ancient Chinese culture, such as self-discipline, being willing to endure hardships, and having an optimistic outlook. To master the art form, “you really have to build these values within you, and it’s something that comes with your heart,” said Ma.
Schwaiger similarly believes that artists must cultivate good values in order to create something beautiful. “The artist very much has to immerse themself with the idea of beauty to communicate it to somebody else. And if the artist is thinking of the audience, wanting the audience to connect with that beauty, the person who is looking at the art is going to feel that. So that’s why I think art has such importance for society,” she said.
She also firmly believes that art has the power to elevate people. “If you’re looking at graceful things, powerful things, it’s naturally helping you to connect with these virtues. … It’s reminding people of these qualities that you should have in yourself,” she said. That’s why she hopes to one day create public art that can inspire through beauty—whether it’s sculpture in schools, hospitals, or public squares.
Schwaiger plans to cast her dancer sculpture in bronze next, using an ancient technique known as lost-wax casting, and she hopes the sculpture can be placed in a public setting one day. With art beautifying its surrounding environment, “you like to spend time there, you’d like to sit down and be there together with others, and you feel the other people that are present—and that’s very essential for our civilization,” she said.
As seen on HGTV's Cheap Old Houses, host Elizabeth Finkelstein poses for a portrait at a historical bungalow in Rochester, NY. (Courtesy of HGTV)
HGTV’s latest offering is not your typical flipping or renovation show. Cheap Old Houses follows the Finkelsteins as they visit old properties across the country—well-preserved treasures that have been neglected or laid vacant, but can be restored to their former glory by homeowners eager for a DIY project. Each house costs less than $100,000.
Cheap Old Houses started as a social media account (now with a following 1.7 million strong), where Ethan and Elizabeth Finkelstein listed historical homes up for sale across the country. Elizabeth, who earned a master’s in historical preservation, created it as a passion project in 2016, hoping to educate people on the value and beauty of old houses.
Ethan, who worked in digital marketing before running Cheap Old Houses full-time, noted that restoring an old house is not only important for preserving history and an emotionally rewarding experience to accomplish something creative with one’s bare hands—it is also a more financially viable option. Restoring a historic home isn’t as daunting as it may seem, he said. “I think the real horror story is having …a million-dollar mortgage and having $200,000 worth of interest that you have to pay off. Imagine … if you could buy a cheap house for $50,000.”
Throughout the 10-episode series, the Finkelsteins show their pure-joy enthusiasm for discovering bites of history through architecture, while offering practical ideas for restoring the homes they visit, via 3D renderings of design possibilities. Even if history is not your forte, their excitement will rub off and make you curious about the architectural features that tell a story about a certain time in America’s history.
American Essence recently caught up with the couple to discuss the show and their journey so far.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
American Essence: how has the audience reaction been like so far?
Elizabeth: First of all, it’s a complete dream come true. I think the thing with old houses is that you can see photos of them as much as you want, but being inside them, I mean, they really engage all of your senses. At the same time, when you walk into an old building, you feel a real soul about it. And so getting to road-trip around the country, and visit these places that we’ve been looking at for so long on our Instagram feed, was just incredible. And being able to bring our audience along with us on that ride was, honestly, something probably even if we didn’t have a production company and a network to back us up, we would have figured out a way to do it.
Our community is the bread and butter of this whole thing and are the people that are truly making this happen. I think the response has been overwhelmingly positive. I mean, people just love it. I think people are excited to see a show that celebrates history and what is here and what you have, and celebrates people who are really devoting their lives to these homes. It’s been really, really exciting.
Ethan: As Elizabeth had mentioned, I think after many, many years of running [the Cheap Old Houses social media account]—we’re now five years [into running it]—we were just planning, how do we road-trip, get in the RV, stick our kid in the RV with us, and just road-trip around the country anyway, and meet these people who are buying these houses, and visit them and just see how they’re doing on their projects, and just be inspired on our own. And somehow it transferred into us dreaming that dream into a TV show. And now we’re doing it—instead of in an RV, we’re doing it in my 1977 Ford. It’s totally a dream come true.
AE: How did you become interested in restoring old houses?
Ethan: How we became interested was really through my family. They had a property that was from the 1700s, my grandmother and grandfather. And we would every summer, go there and ride the tractor and do big fires and ride down a sledding hill. There was this 150-acre farm, where my mom grew up with her eight brothers and sisters. And when I became a young adult, in my early 20s, this house was up for sale. To me, that was an extremely devastating moment. I don’t even know how to explain the emotion, but it was sort of like, how can we let this family treasure go? At the time, Elizabeth and I were just starting to date. We were maybe four or five weeks into dating and I was like, do you want to buy this farm with me? And it was $600,000. We totally couldn’t afford it at the time. Then, Elizabeth and I really just took on a ton of different adventures in exploring. We didn’t buy that house.
We just started exploring all of New York City. And we did open houses in New York, and we would go to the Ellis Island secret areas, and we would go underneath the MTA subway and we would go look at hidden places in New York. And I think beyond the experiential—being Elizabeth and her passion for this over the years, I’ve always tried to figure out, well, how do we make this like a digital thing? Because I’m a digital marketing person and a digital nerd. So we just kind of put our brains together and Cheap Old Houses was born.
I’ve been behind the computer for maybe 20-plus years. I think everyone can associate with being super burnt-out right now. We’re all digital nomads, living in our own different spaces. And right now, at this very moment, I’m sitting on our 10-and-half-acre property and I’m fixing up our house. It’s the most enjoyable moment of my last few years —to not be behind the computer and to be doing something that really needs me.
(Courtesy of HGTV)
AE: Why do you guys feel it’s important for people hold onto these bits of history that present themselves within these houses?
Elizabeth: When we think of houses that typically get landmarked, these are houses that very important people lived in, or the sort of preemptive example of some specific style of architecture. They don’t tend to be the houses that the everyday Americans who made this country run, lived in. Nobody is preserving your great-aunt’s kitchen, right? You don’t get to go on a tour of that. In a sense, the interiors of these particular houses are more significant to the history of this country, because they were ubiquitous everywhere at a certain time. And I don’t think that people necessarily have an appreciation of them. I think that these homes are highly vulnerable to being flipped, being gutted. A house lasting 150 years could be stripped of all of its character, for some investor who doesn’t even live there to make a quick buck. And to me, that is the absolute saddest thing in the world. Because I think that the history of these communities and the pride of these communities is reflected in the community’s architecture.
And producing new materials—look at the cost of plywood now. I could go on and on about the reasons why we should preserve what you have. I think that we’re in an environmental crisis right now, and people think of things as being disposable. And that includes kitchens. And you don’t have to gut and throw out everything in your house every 10 years because of a new trend. And I just hope that our show allows people and gives people a certain appreciation for [history] and a feeling of safety—and maybe just thinking that what they have is good enough for now.
AE: How do you think this ‘old house’ trend will evolve in the future?
Elizabeth: Our Instagram feed was wildly popular before COVID, was wildly popular during COVID, and continues to be wildly popular. It doesn’t seem like there’s any time where living within your means and preserving history is a bad idea. It’s always a good idea to do the things that we are telling people that they should do on this show, which is, take your time, save your money, and respect your home. And try to learn a little something along the way.
In a world where we push pixels around all day, we don’t often get that feeling of intense satisfaction that we’ve accomplished something. The quickest way to get that is by using your hands and working on your house.
The more we show people that it’s a good thing to do, and that they can do it too—hopefully, more and more people will start doing it.
AE: Tell us more about the memorable houses you encountered that were amazingly well-preserved.
Elizabeth: We feature a house called Duncan Manor. This couple, Randy and Dave, are fixing up this house that was once on the list of top 10 most endangered buildings within Illinois. Tons of people have seen it, tried to restore it, and had not been able to do it. They were living in a tiny apartment in Denver, they saw it on Cheap Old Houses, they went to a wedding in the area. And a month later, they were camping out on the porch while they restored a room inside to live in. This house is like rising out of the field. It’s completely of another world. It is the most spectacular place ever.
We showed a $42,500 schoolhouse in Paxton, Illinois. The chalkboards are still there, the tin ceilings are still there, the schoolhouse lights are still there. It feels like it closed yesterday, and it’s still a schoolhouse. It’s really amazing.
The Finkelsteins at a schoolhouse in Illinois. (Courtesy of HGTV)
In episode one, we go into a house that looks like a time capsule from 1950. It has the original pink bathroom and the steel kitchen from the 1950s that everyone’s grandmother had. We don’t go in any houses that aren’t really well-preserved, because we want to look at places that are little time capsules. We want to bring you back. We want you to feel a sense of nostalgia in these houses.
AE: What’s your favorite architectural element?
Elizabeth: We have so many. It is honestly like picking a favorite child. I mean, I think keeping old windows is a really big thing for me, because it’s really misunderstood. A lot of people are sold by the vinyl window industry that you should throw out your old windows and get vinyl windows. I’m always ready to preach why that’s a total fallacy, but I love the wavy glass that you see in old windows. I think the reason I love wavy glass so much is because it’s so imperfect. It has bubbles and waves, and so many things in these old homes—it’s the imperfections about them that show that they were made in small batches, and were handcrafted and have texture. That’s what we love so much about these old homes, these imperfections.
Ethan: I think I love very, very early 1700s buildings, mostly because of my grandmother.
What I also love is really quirky fun buildings that aren’t really supposed to be lived in. So there was a bank that we once posted about that someone saved. There’s a library. There have been schoolhouses, there have been lighthouses. Just the thought of living in a quirky building from whatever era excites me so much—to have a really fun, completely individual, one-of-a-kind house that’s old, that’s quirky, and also historically just amazing.
“Cheap Old Houses” is available to stream on discovery+. All episodes are also available on the HGTV streaming platform.
