Category: Features

Categories
Features

Mending Marriages

Kimberly and Joe Beam of Marriage Helper. (Nikayla Skolits)

Joe Beam gave a talk recently in Texas; afterward, a family came up to greet him, their young daughter shyly offering up her comments as well. Partially hard of hearing, Beam crouched down and asked her to repeat herself.

“Thank you for saving my family,” she told Beam.

Since 1999, Beam has hosted marriage crisis workshops, which couples sometimes tell him are “the best-kept secret in America.” But the path to saving marriages—which takes him all around the world, nowadays—began with his own divorce.

Twice Married

Before Beam founded various organizations including Marriage Helper, he was working in corporate America and running workshops on relationship-related topics. His own marriage was in rocky waters, having reached a point where he was vilifying his wife, he said, and the relationship was cold. When the couple divorced, Beam thought he would end up living happily ever after and marrying another woman with whom he’d fallen in love—that didn’t pan out.

But after three years of Beam visiting every weekend to see their two daughters, Beam and his wife Alice became friends again. They were able to spend time together without arguing, and they rebuilt their relationship.

“I came back and asked my wife if she would be willing to take me back and marry me again,” Beam said. Of course, she had to think about it. She also asked everyone around her for their advice.

“And everybody, everybody she talked to told her not to marry me again, that she can never trust me again,” Beam said.

“Contrary to their advice, she decided that she would marry me a second time,” he said. “That was 1987.”

It wasn’t smooth sailing just because they had made up. They argued a lot, having not yet worked on the issues that festered in their first marriage, and both were in need of healing. Alice sought out a counselor, and Beam says he healed through helping others.

“We began to have heartfelt, open and transparent, honest conversations,” Beam said.  “Eventually, Alice became my best friend, and to this day she is my best friend.”

And through that union, they had their daughter Kimberly.

Hope’s Not Lost

Kimberly Holmes has never known her parents to be apart.

“I owe my life to two people who decided to do the right thing, who decided to put their marriage back together and to make it work. Otherwise, I would not exist,” Holmes said. She knows this not least of all because her experience of having always known loving parents is a departure from the experience, and trauma, that her two older sisters had growing up through their parents’ divorce, which remarriage doesn’t just erase.

“I’ve seen them [my parents] fight, but I’ve seen them work it out. I’ve watched them live and model a great marriage. And it has affected me in amazingly positive ways in my life,” said Holmes, who is now CEO of Marriage Helper. In her five-year tenure, she has greatly expanded the organization’s reach, helping couples in crisis as well as couples who just want to learn. It’s work she describes as “purpose-filled,” because she has seen that the workshops don’t just provide effective education—they give people hope.

Marriage Helper has received countless relationship questions from all around the world: My spouse says terrible things about me, will he or she ever see me in a positive light? How do I forgive my spouse for cheating on me? Can I ever trust my spouse again?

But the most common question is simple: Is there hope for me and my situation?

“And our answer to that is yes,” Holmes said.

She answers confidently because she’s seen the amazing transformations that happen. People are reminded up front that there’s no guarantee any given marriage will be saved (about three of every four couples attending the workshops see success), but the tools and ideas learned in the workshops do promise to change and improve personal relationships regardless.

Three-Day Workshops

After completing a bachelor’s degree in psychology, Holmes had neither a specific career in mind nor a thought of joining the “family business,” but continued graduate studies in marriage and family therapy with the heart to help people.

In her schooling, she experienced firsthand what working with couples one-on-one is like, how slow the progress is, and how frustrating it can be.

But at the same time, Holmes started working part-time for Marriage Helper on the side, and once a month she would help out with the workshops.

“And I would see amazing progress that would happen in these couples, in only three days,” Holmes said. “It was during that time that I realized this is what I want to do. I want to help marriages be saved, families be strong.”

The workshops are unique in the relationship counseling world. For one thing, dozens of people gather in each session (through video conferences as well). Days before holding a pair of weekend workshops for 45 couples from across the globe, Beam elaborated further.

Based on his experience in the corporate world, Beam took the “three-day workshop” and applied it to marriage counseling. In his quest to repair his own marriage and then help others, Beam had read countless books and earned a doctorate. Now an expert at taking complex psychological principles and simplifying them, making them easy to understand at a deep level, he’s often invited to counseling centers to teach their counselors to do the same.

He helps people to understand how their behavior affects others, how to recognize their own unacknowledged harmful actions, how to deal with anger, and how to forgive (including a how-to-reconcile process). He also walks people through the process of what happens when we fall in love, and decodes other deep insights in a simple but enlightening manner.

Over the years, Beam has worked with a diverse range of couples and seen a wide variety of problems. When he talks to people, none of it is theory. He can talk about real experiences and real marriages that fell apart or were salvaged. Experience means Beam has seen it all, and he doesn’t judge. Everyone is treated with respect and dignity regardless of individual situations, and the workshops, like Beam, are very positive.

The vast majority of couples attending the workshops include one spouse who wants out, and is only present because of the promise that divorce papers will be signed afterward.

“Basically, on the first day, they’re not talking to each other. They’re kind of pushing their chairs apart. Some of them are scowling,” Beam said. “By the end of the first day, at least they’ve calmed down.

“Then the second day, they actually start talking to people and start loosening up.

“And then the third day—it’s amazing to see the transformation—on the third day, we have trouble keeping them quiet so we can actually teach! Because they’re all interacting with each other, encouraging each other.”

Not everyone, of course. Not all the couples stay together, but around seven out of ten do.

(Nikayla Skolits)

Best Kept Secret

That 70-some-percent success rate raises some eyebrows, so Beam says that over the years Marriage Helper has invited many psychiatrists, counselors, and therapists to join the three-day workshops and see for themselves. They join thinking, “This is crazy,” but leave saying that the methods and results are valid.

“This is the 22nd year so far,” Beam said. “Every one of them sends couples to us now.”

Leaving inspired on the third day isn’t enough; couples have to be willing to put into practice all they have learned, for there to be real and lasting change. Marriage Helper isn’t there to twist people’s arms and convince them to stay married; instead, couples are given the tools needed to make their relationships work. Even couples who don’t stay together recommend the workshops—the principles can apply to any relationship.

As a teacher who intervenes in the middle of things, Beam doesn’t always know the outcomes. But sometimes couples find him—even years later, even couples from 1999—and share incredible stories.

A minister acquaintance of Beam’s recently remarried a couple that had divorced five years prior and made up after attending one of the workshops.

Another couple attended one of the workshops about 10 years ago, but ended up divorcing later on. The woman recently contacted Marriage Helper to say that she and her ex-husband started dating again after six years of divorce, and were contemplating marriage. They wanted to attend another workshop, to see if they could really make things work.

Many couples that finish the workshops say their children should, once engaged, also attend, so they can build strong relationships from the start. The workshops fill up weeks in advance.

“We love to have engaged couples,” Beam said. “We figure it’s the best premarital education in America, or the world, because not only do they learn all these fascinating, very powerful principles about relationships, but they’re in a room full of people who’ve messed it up. So we’re not giving you theory, we’re showing you real-world stuff.”

Holmes hears many people call it a last resort, saying if anything works, this will. And she believes it does work, wholeheartedly. The Marriage Helper team believes strongly in the mission to create strong marriages, she said, and that drives everything they do. “We never stop being passionate about doing this,” Holmes said.

“I give God credit for all of that, because I’m just not that smart,” Beam said. “It’s just absolutely exhilarating to hear how it worked. But when you’re working with them and they’re in pain, it’s absolutely painful. We hurt when we heal these couples. We feel their pain and it gets to us. But then we hear the stories afterward, of how they got through this and got through that, and it’s just amazing and unbelievable—I can’t believe God chose us to do this.”

Categories
Features

Retired Prison Doctor Saves Lives Mentoring Children of the Incarcerated

Dr. Gedney with Dante and Jalyssa whom Dr. Gedney mentors today. (Courtesy of Karen Gedney)

When Dr. Karen Gedney started mentoring the children of incarcerated parents ten years ago, she was surprised at how chaotic their lives were.

“They were bouncing from one place to another,” Gedney said. “Their breakfast was soda and a Cheeto-like substance. They were sleeping in other people’s apartments under the kitchen table and they were surrounded by members of their family who were violent and involved in criminal activity.”

Gedney was introduced to the task of mentoring these children while treating inmates at the Northern Nevada Correctional Center, a men’s prison, from 1987 to 2016. She also treated inmates at the nearby Stewart Conservation Camp, a minimum-security facility. Together with her husband, Clifton Maclin, who is now deceased, they mentored five children through the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization.

“The three oldest have completed college and I continue to mentor the two youngest who are siblings, Jalyssa and Dante,” Gedney said in an interview. “We realized that to make a significant difference we had to mentor children at risk, especially the ones who had no father, or a father in prison.”

Dr. Gedney with Dante and Jalyssa whom Dr. Gedney mentors today. (Courtesy of Karen Gedney)

At the end of 2020, some 1,249,300 people were incarcerated in state and federal prisons, according to data from the Vera Institute for Justice.

“Just like medicine, we need a society that helps prevent people from spinning into the criminal justice system, and one of the biggest bang for the buck is the youth because you still have a lot of leverage in the direction they’re going,” Gedney said.

Today, Jalyssa is 17 years old and Dante is 13 years old. While their father has been incarcerated most of their lives, their mother was reportedly having a hard time providing housing and food for them.

“She was going from one bad housing situation to another and the little kids were suffering from the consequences of being exposed to poverty, violence, and drugs,” Gedney said. “Jalyssa and Dante were exceptionally bright and talented, like flowers but planted in the wrong environment.”

When Gedney picks them up on a Saturday or Sunday every week, she said the siblings don’t want to go home at the end of the day.

“If people really want to do something in terms of helping society be safer and more equitable, then they definitely should consider mentoring children of the incarcerated,” she said. “It will enrich their lives.”

Gedney authored a book about her years treating inmates as an internal medicine specialist called “30 Years Behind Bars: Trials of a Prison Doctor” (2018).

(Courtesy of Karen Gedney)

“I wrote it to increase awareness and broaden the hearts and minds of the public when it comes to the incarcerated and prison reform,” Gedney said.

One of the most harrowing experiences happened during her second year when Gedney was held hostage, assaulted and raped by one of her Northern Nevada Correctional Center patients.

“I was rescued 10 hours later by a SWAT team that threw in a concussion grenade after they sledge hammered a hole through a kick out panel in the wall,” she said. “Seeing the inmate be killed by the SWAT team affected me emotionally, and made me doubt myself. I had to deal with shock, anger and then find forgiveness.”

Ultimately, the experience increased Gedney’s resolve to help and make a difference.

Dr. Gedney’s husband, Clifton Maclin, with the 5 children they mentored together before Clifton Maclin died. (Courtesy of Karen Gedney)

“The reason I decided to stay was because I knew there were workers in the system who didn’t want me to help the inmates or to be a voice against abuse,” she said. “To this day, I believe there were some correction officers in there who allowed me to be taken hostage because they wanted me dead.”

Although now she is retired, Gedney continues her efforts to assist the prison population by sitting on various boards, such as Ridge House, which facilitates transitional housing in Reno, and the Nevada Prison Education Program.

“I donate $500 to the Western Nevada College every year, which is the institution in my city that is responsible for providing higher education in the prison system,” she said. “I designate that the funds be used for someone who is incarcerated or formerly incarcerated as a scholarship.”

Deb Conrad is director of the Higher Education in Prison Program (HEPP) at Western Nevada College (WNC) where 150 incarcerated or formerly incarcerated individuals are enrolled at any given time.

“Many people who are incarcerated go in with less than a high school education and if they do not receive any education or other kinds of skill development while they are incarcerated, when they come out, the recidivism rate is very high,” Conrad said.

According to data from the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, some 7.6 million people are released yearly nationwide but 2 out of 3 are arrested again within 3 years and more than 50 percent are incarcerated again.

“If incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people don’t have a way to become productive citizens in their communities, good neighbors and to reconnect positively with their families, that makes the communities less safe,” Conrad said in an interview.

One of the obstacles WNC faces when fundraising for HEPP is the stigma that the incarcerated shouldn’t be gifted with a free education because of past offenses for which they are serving or have served time to society.

“When incarcerated people come out and have an education coupled with a true desire to change their lives, do better and not go back to their former lives, they are a great source of untapped talent,” Conrad added. “We also serve people who have life without parole sentences because they deserve an education, too.”

Donations can be made payable to the Higher Education in Prison Program at Western Nevada College, Bristlecone Building, 2201 West College Parkway, Room 140 in Carson City, Nevada, 89703.

“About 97 percent of our incarcerated students get a C-minus or above but I can tell you that most of them are getting a B-plus or above and that outperforms their peers at WNC where only 80% of students on the outside are getting a C-minus or above,” Conrad said.

Juliette Fairley is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Born in Chateauroux, France, and raised outside of Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, Juliette is a well-adjusted military brat who now lives in Manhattan. She has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, TheStreet, Time magazine, the Chicago City Wire, the Austin-American Statesman, and many other publications across the country.

Categories
Features Giving Back

An Orphan-Turned-Accountant Gives Back to Undervalued Communities

Andre with a financial literacy student. (Courtesy of Andre Henry)

When he was 8 years old, Andre Henry became an orphan after losing his parents. At the time, he had been living in the projects in Chester, Pennsylvania.

“Having to deal with that type of environment and living there on a daily basis was hard,” said Henry, 29, in an interview. The loss of his parents took him out of the projects and landed him in Section 8 housing with his grandmother where there was a silver lining.

“She lived in the predominantly white neighborhood of Upper Darby,” he said. “My professors, the friends I met, and the students in the school I attended were from a higher economic setup. They influenced me to become a better person and to learn and grow.” After attending Wilmington University, Henry became a corporate accountant and decided he would find ways to create change in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

“Some individuals are still stuck in the projects today,” he said. “I’ve got family and friends who deal with that environment on a daily basis. It hit me hard and, as I grew older, I felt like I had to find a way to give back and help those individuals in need.”

Henry’s fiancée, Ce’Aira Brown, 27, is a U.S. track athlete who has personally benefited from his accounting expertise.

“Being a professional athlete, I didn’t know a lot about taxes until I met my fiancé and he actually helped me get my finances together, which is something I wish I had learned when I was younger,” she said.

Ce’Aira (C) with student athletes. (Courtesy of Andre Henry)

Brown was raised without a mother as a teenager and credits running track in high school for saving her from the pitfalls of young adulthood.

“After my mother emancipated me at 14 years old, I moved in with my dad, my grandfather, and my older brother,” she said. “It wasn’t Section 8 housing but we all had to sleep in the same room. It was crowded.”

Henry met Brown while participating in interstate track meets. “I ran for Upper Darby and she ran for Overbrook,” he said. “I was semi-pro and running at meets unattached. I saw Ce’Aira running track.” Eventually, they became a couple and now Henry and Brown lecture together to teens at public schools about financial literacy and mental health. Henry also maintains a 600-member chatroom online called The Wolf Pack teaching people about investing.

“I offer financial literacy advice on a daily basis,” he said. “I teach people how to invest in vehicles like 529 Plans, Health Savings Accounts (HAS) and self-directed IRAs. I try to help them understand finances overall.”

Ce’Aira (C) with student athletes. (Courtesy of Andre Henry)

The couple’s chat groups take place on the Telegram mobile app.

“We make it all available there while we’re working on getting a platform up on our own social media prototype that we are now creating with a designer,” he said.

A former trader at JP Morgan in Newark, Delaware, Henry also created his own algorithm that identifies trades before they are posted.
“I do high frequency trading while some people do option or swing trading,” he said. “It’s all about what risk you are comfortable with.”
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) claims that anxiety around money is connected to financial illiteracy, destructive financial conduct, and lack of financial security, with the greatest stress about money expressed by single women and young adults.

About 53 percent said thinking about their finances makes them anxious and 44 percent said discussing their finances is stressful, according to a Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center study.

“Even prior to the pandemic, more than half of American adults were experiencing financial anxiety,” Annamaria Lusardi, Ph.D., academic director of the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center and University Professor of Economics and Accountancy at GW, said. “A multifaceted approach will be needed to address this problem; including a systematic increase in financial knowledge, which can happen through policy and programs.”

Brown, an 800-meter runner, separately manages an empowerment group made up of some 50 women nationwide between the ages of 22 and 35 years old called Buildup Women Group (BWG).

Her goal is to improve their self-esteem.

“I graduated with a psychology degree from Hampton University in Virginia so I teach them confidence, not to give up and not to compare themselves with others,” she said. “I mentor them daily and send affirmations. On Fridays, we meditate for 30 minutes.”

Because the duo have both overcome adversity, Brown suggested they write a book together. “From Orphan to Self-made Millionaire: The 10 Irrefutable Laws of Purpose” was independently published in May and has led to a chatroom of followers who aspire to write their stories and publish a book, too.

“We’ve both been through a lot and felt like we could help others,” Brown said in an interview. “Once we started writing, Andre expressed himself more than I did and other people are inspired by our success with publishing the book.”

The pair is now turning to what may be their greatest work of all.

“We’re getting married next April,” Brown said.

Ce’Aira and Andre. (Courtesy of Andre Henry)

Juliette Fairley has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, TheStreet, Time magazine, the Chicago City Wire, the Austin-American Statesman, and many other publications across the country.

Categories
Features

Cooking up a Taste of American History With Frank Clark

Frank Clark, master of Historic Foodways at Colonial Williamsburg, brewing beer the Palace Kitchen. (Courtesy of Colonial Williamsburg)

In the kitchens of Colonial Williamsburg, Clark and his dedicated staff are keeping our young nation’s culinary history alive

As a young kitchen apprentice at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, Frank Clark faced a challenging task. To demonstrate his skills, he had to prepare a three-course meal for eight guests at the Governor’s Palace.

On the menu: onion soup, roasted leg of lamb, house-salted and -smoked Virginia ham, salmon with shrimp sauce, savory cheesecake, battered and fried cauliflower, and French-style chicken—all for the first course. For the second course, there were fried crab cakes, Italian-style asparagus, carrot pudding, eggs a la crème, fried beefsteaks in ale sauce, potato balls, and apples in surprise (custard-filled, meringue-coated baked apples). A third course of candied almonds and ginger, strawberry fritters, a marzipan hedgehog, and chocolate and lemon creams finished the meal.

The guests enjoyed the feast, and Clark passed the test.

A native of Williamsburg, Clark has been working full-time at Colonial Williamsburg—a historic, 301-acre living history museum—since 1988. His mother had worked as a trainer there for 30 years, and he started when he was a college student. By chance, when he was leading school tours one summer, management moved him to the kitchen to help out.

“After working there for two summers, a full-time job came up, and I became an Historic Foodways apprentice,” he said.

Today, as the site’s master of Historic Foodways, he researches, cooks, and displays colonial recipes to keep our nation’s culinary history alive.

A recreation of the first course of an 18th-century meal at Colonial Williamsburg. (Courtesy of Colonial Williamsburg)

Early American Life

When Clark started his kitchen work, the cookbooks of the 18th century were his primary resource. “I read them and was fascinated by them,” he said. He started researching all that existed in printed cookbooks from the period, often going to all the local libraries to find them. “Now the internet has helped me and other food historians. I can just look online,” he said.

“The key to reading the 18th-century text is knowing that it is all set out in paragraphs,” he said. Reading a recipe was like reading a story, not just a list of ingredients and instructions. He learned to follow the language of the time. For example, a piece of butter might be measured as “the size of a hen’s egg, or a walnut, or a nutmeg.” Some writers were better than others, he noted. Sometimes crucial details were left out, and he and his staff would have four different interpretations of the same recipe.

A stuffed—called “forced” at the time—pumpkin. (Courtesy of Colonial Williamsburg)
This is a stuffed (or forced) pumpkin.

Despite the challenges of interpretation, the cookbooks provided valuable insights into how early Virginians cooked, ate, and lived. “Learning how people eat tells about their religion, society, and quirks of life,” Clark said. “Primarily, pork and corn were the markers of early American diets.”

Clark noted that Virginians are known even today for their salted pork. They also ate different animal parts, including offal, for which many recipes existed—such as one for a whole barrel of pickled beef tongues. He described another recipe for pickled asparagus, which called for dipping bundled asparagus held by their roots into boiling water, then placing the bundle into a mix of basically vinegar and salt. “These are recipes you don’t see in a Betty Crocker cookbook,” he said.

He considers the recipes to be a way to teach today’s people about how much healthier the 18th-century traditional diet was, because there were no modern-day processed foods.

“We were governed by seasonality in this period, and most of our food came from a 20-mile radius around town,” Clark said. In Williamsburg, few—if any—households were self-sufficient, so people relied on the market. “The supplies in the market were provided by the many small farmers and households that surrounded the town. There is also lots of evidence that free and enslaved African Americans provided much of the seafood and poultry [there].”

Salamagundy, a cold chicken salad. (Courtesy of Colonial Williamsburg)

Clark also noted that the area was “part of one of the largest trade empires the world had ever seen.” Imported goods from other British colonies, from Indian spices to Jamaican sugar and rum, were “available to all who could afford them.”

Meals weren’t comparable between people of differing economic status. For the wealthy, it was all about offering as many choices as possible, and they would employ several skilled cooks who could prepare decorative foods and table settings. Meals at the Governor’s Palace were lengthy, bountiful feasts, with multiple dishes at each course.

When the middle class entertained, “they would try to offer choices like the wealthy, but they would not have as much food nor as many choices, and would probably not have much in the way of decorations,” Clark said. Families in poorer households might have used salted pork to flavor other ingredients.

A “Turk’s cap with ice-cream”—a pound cake hollowed out and filled with ice cream. (Courtesy of Colonial Williamsburg)

Living History

Of course, times have changed. But to keep the culinary history alive, Colonial Williamsburg maintains two still-operating kitchens: at the Governor’s Palace for formal meals and at the James Anderson Armory for more casual meals.

Dressed in colonial garb, Clark and his staff prepare meals in these kitchens at least four days per week, setting out four or five different dishes using 18th-century recipes. “The cookbooks are a wonderful resource. We cannot dig up a 200-year-old pie, but [we] can make it again by using the recipes in the cookbooks,” he said.

While visitors aren’t able to taste the displayed dishes, they can dine at several onsite taverns and other eateries. Clark consults with the chefs there, especially with the goal of getting 18th-century foods into the taverns. He’s pleased that they’ve captured the essence of early American cooking.

Although he’s not a trained chef, Clark treasures his cooking life: “This is the best cooking job on earth. I get the joy of cooking without the stress of a restaurant grind. … I can take my time and enjoy talking to our guests as I go.”

He has also embraced what he learned on the job. “It has given me skill sets I never thought I would have—I can butcher a cow, salt meat, and bake bread,” he said. “It has built up my understanding of where we are from, and what is the process to go through before we can cook and eat.”

Alexandra Greeley is a writer and editor with more than 20 years of experience. Her work has appeared in the National Catholic Register, the Vegetarian Times, and others. She has written 36 cookbooks.

Categories
Features Giving Back

Locker Room Contest Leads Texas CEO to Help Michigan High School Students

(Courtesy of Hollman Helps)

When Travis Hollman launched the Locker Room Contest, inviting students to send videos of their outdated locker rooms, he had planned to gift the winning school only with new lockers. But when he saw the video tour of Beecher High School in Flint, Michigan, he was motivated to do much more.

“They had no plumbing, no doors on the bathroom stalls, no place to study, no recreation room, and no internet access,” Hollman said in an interview. “The school is so nice now. We’ve got heating, plumbing, doors on the bathroom stalls, and we’re finishing the rec room floor and putting in basketball nets.”

Hollman is the founder and CEO of Hollman in Irving, Texas, the leading manufacturer of team sports, fitness workspace, and custom lockers. Together with his colleague Daniel Gilbert, co-founder of Quicken Loans and owner of the National Basketball Association’s Cleveland Cavaliers, he spent $1.5 million on renovating the Flint, Michigan, school.

(Courtesy of Hollman Helps)

“I’ve always been pretty good about giving back, and when you meet these kids, you just get more motivated,” Hollman said. “If Beecher High School had been a public building, it would have been condemned, but because it was a school, it stayed open.”

Up until the 1960s, Flint, Michigan, had been one of the wealthiest cities in America, but the end of the industrial era and the automotive boom ended in urban decay, urban flight, and water contamination. “Flint has one of the highest crime rates because they’ve got no police funding,” Hollman said. “Property valuations have come down so much.”

“There is supposedly this racial divide in America, and Beecher High School is 100 percent African American,” Hollman said. “I wanted to prove to those kids that there is no divide. It’s the media making that up. We still love everybody. We saw on the video that the school was in bad shape. There was no heating, and the showers didn’t work. What mattered was that they were students at a school in need.”

(Courtesy of Hollman Helps)

The Locker Room Contest is part of Hollman’s Higher Education and Learning Program (HELP), which is a division of the Hollman Family Foundation.

Although COVID-19 made it a challenge to travel to the school and oversee progress, Hollman said he’s proud that the commitment was maintained. “The cost of wood increased, and the price of gasoline has almost doubled,” he said. “All that stuff impacts our business, and it also impacts our giving. If it costs 20 percent more to build in raw materials and it costs 30 percent to 40 percent more to ship the product, it gives us less that we can do.”

Hollman sits on the executive boards of a domestic violence charity as well as Big Brothers Big Sisters, and his wife, Stephanie Hollman, is the star of the Bravo TV reality episodic “The Real Housewives of Dallas.”

“My wife and I decided we had to help,” Hollman said. “We just want the students to have a little bit better life and to keep those kids off the street.” Because of the renovations, Hollman said the school has become a favorite place for Beecher students, who are staying at school until 10 o’clock at night. “If just one doesn’t die from a gunshot wound because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, then it’s a win.”

(Courtesy of Hollman Helps)

Juliette Fairley is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Born in Chateauroux, France, and raised outside of Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, Juliette is a well-adjusted military brat who now lives in Manhattan. She has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, TheStreet, Time magazine, the Chicago City Wire, the Austin-American Statesman, and many other publications across the country.

Categories
Features Giving Back

30 Day Fund Small Business Assistance Continues Despite COVID’s End

Pete Snyder with Tina Miller. (Courtesy of Pete Snyder)

When Virginia-based tech entrepreneur and angel investor Pete Snyder realized COVID-19 had created an economic crisis for small businesses, his wife Burson Snyder and he began calling friends in the philanthropic community to raise funds.

“Small businesses are the backbone of our country,” said Snyder, who serves as CEO of Disruptor Capital. A former candidate for the governorship of Virginia, Snyder founded the 30 Day Fund in April 2020 as a 501(3)c to distribute forgivable loans to small businesses.

One entrepreneur who benefitted from the 30 Day Fund is Tina Miller, who owns Walkabout Outfitter, a local outdoor supply store in six locations across Virginia. “In our case, we were decimated, just decimated,” Miller told NBC News. “It was also important that somebody cared about our small business.”

The Walkabout Outfitter is among the more than 2,500 small businesses that the 30 Day Fund has assisted. “Trying to keep up with the need was a constant challenge, but thanks to the good hearts of people all across the country, we were able to raise significant funds to bolster small businesses and help them survive another day,” said 30 Day Fund board member Generra Peck.

The Snyders called it the 30 Day Fund because they thought 30 days would be the life of the fund, but more than a year has passed since the pandemic emerged and businesses are just beginning to return to normal operating policies. “Businesses have had to endure more than a year of closures and restrictions, decreased sales, staff reductions, and uncertainty after uncertainty, but The 30 Day Fund is still focused on helping small businesses in the short term and has plans to continue its tradition of entrepreneurs ‘paying it forward’ to help those in need,” Peck told the Epoch Times.

As previously reported, paying it forward implies businesses that receive funds will, in the future, reinvest money back into the fund, which will then be allocated to another needy small business owner. “We are overwhelmed with the number of people who want to help,” Snyder told Virginia Business Daily.

Pete Snyder (Pete Snyder/Facebook)

The Snyders financed the 30 Day Fund with an initial $100,000 in capital. “It has raised more than $45 million through all of its efforts in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Georgia, New Jersey, and Arkansas,” Peck said in an interview. The fund provides up to $3,000 to selected small businesses that apply for financing. Beneficiaries are chosen based on a three-minute video and a one-page written application, and once selected, the business owner receives the money within three days.

“We don’t have time for red-tape,” Snyder said in a statement online. “We don’t have time for delays. The VA 30 Day Fund is designed to be quick and easy. … We will provide small business owners with both funding and hope so they can keep their employees on payroll and keep working to lift our communities through this crisis.”

30 Day Fund partners include United Way, the Kimsey Foundation, and Maltese Capital. Virginia State Senator Mark Obenshain (R-Rockingham) and his wife Suzanne are on the fund’s advisory board.

“The 30 Day Fund has assisted other leaders to replicate its model with efforts in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Mississippi, and New Jersey,” Peck said. For example, in December 2020, Dave Portnoy, founder of media company Barstool Sports, created The Barstool Fund – an affiliate of the 30 Day Fund.

“There’s no right or wrong reason why we’re choosing one business versus the other,” Portnoy said of The Barstool Fund. “They speak to us for whatever reason. I wish we could help them all. We’re going to help as many as we humanly can and try to keep these small businesses alive. So, that’s the plan. Is it perfect? Probably not, but it’s better than nothing.”

Portnoy has stayed true to his word, raising nearly $40 million for 391 small businesses through The Barstool Fund. Businesses that have received financial assistance through The Barstool Fund include Iconic Fitness in Escondido, California, The Donut Experiment in St. Charles, Missouri, Flame Nightclub in Duluth, Minnesota, and Social House of Soulard in St. Louis, Missouri.

Roughly 43 percent of Americans have been inoculated against COVID-19, and most states have rescinded government-mandated shutdown orders. And while those changes are helping businesses return to normal operating procedures, Peck said many are still reeling from a year of hardship and uncertainty. Others are struggling with a worker shortage in states where employees can earn more collecting unemployment benefits with additional federal pandemic assistance than reporting to a job, according to media reports.

“While the challenges these businesses face today are not the same ones they faced in the beginning of the pandemic, many are still struggling to fully recover, and the 30 Day Fund continues to be here to help,” Peck said.

In January, the Snyders announced they were stepping down from the day-to-day operations of the fund. Since then, former Virginia Secretary of Commerce and Trade Jim Cheng has assumed a senior leadership position.

“Even though we’ve been at this for nearly a year, we are just getting started,” Cheng said in a statement online. “The ‘pay it forward’ movement the Snyders started is catching fire all around the nation and will be helping thousands and thousands more struggling small businesses in the weeks and months to come. I look forward to ensuring the continued success of the Virginia 30 Day Fund.”

Jim Cheng (30 Day Fund/Facebook)

Juliette Fairley is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Born in Chateauroux, France, and raised outside of Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, Juliette is a well-adjusted military brat who now lives in Manhattan. She has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, TheStreet, Time magazine, the Chicago City Wire, the Austin-American Statesman, and many other publications across the country.

Categories
Features Your Stories

Creativity Is Survival!

Suzy Farrow among her Kona coffee trees . (Courtesy of Suzanne J. Farrow)

My story is set in an imperfect world where it seems like everything can be bought with money. This is in stark contrast to my childhood growing up in Hollywood Beach, California, where life was more about outdoor adventures with my horse. At a young age, the values of truth, trust, honor, and faith were taught to me by my parents. I carried these values into adulthood, believing in them as a foundation of character-building and integrity. To me, this was what built America—freedom, honor, self-respect, and responsibility.

After 14 years of marriage, supporting my husband’s career in the high-end resort field, I asked for a divorce after learning he had a different lifestyle on the side. I moved to the big island of Hawaii. Instead of buying a home, a parcel of incredible beauty called to me. When I bought it, I stood there saying to God, “This is the most beautiful land I’ve ever seen, Lord.”

I prepared the land and planted a Kona coffee orchard of 2,000 trees. I planted grass down the rows to hold the top-soil, with the trees situated further apart allowing the breeze to bring moisture and nutrients to my trees twice a day. This had never been done before, and I was laughed at by many local farmers. I fogged my orchard with an organic seaweed mixture that attracted ladybugs to eat the unwanted scale. As my orchard grew vibrantly, I would drive the tractor through the rows singing and talking to my trees, not knowing this land had been King Kamehameha Royal Gardens back around the year 1824.

Coffee cherries. (Courtesy of Suzanne J. Farrow)

Within five years, my trees tripled the average crop per tree on the Kona Coast, registering at the North Coast Coffee Mill with 95 percent Fancy-Extra Fancy grade! Prior to my coffee tote packaging design that took national packaging awards, all Kona coffee was presented in brown paper bags with peel stick labels. In 1993, after winning 1st place at the Kona Coffee Festival Cupping Event against many large farms, The Chef de Cuisine of the Kona-Kohala Coast five-star resorts adopted my Keopu Mauka Lani Plantation Coffee (the Heavenly Belly of The Mountain) as their representative of Kona coffee. I designed the dessert coffee for the Ritz Carlson Resort Hotel, and I was asked by our state representative to represent the Kona Coffee Industry for several years at the opening of the State Legislature. All this stimulated the Komo brothers, long-time coffee farmers, to want to sell their 228-acre parcel next to my plantation to me at a very low price of $1 million to honor the land their father had left them. They said they had watched me work as hard as they did for years, and couldn’t believe a woman from the high-end five-star resorts world could become so involved with making Kona coffee beautiful.

Kona Coffee at Kailua Bay. (Courtesy of Suzanne J. Farrow)

Their proposal was overwhelming to me. I was still building my coffee business, but I agreed. Later, when I had the land appraised, I was shocked at its $8.2 million appraisal!

The formal business plan I created for this organic, undeveloped land was to set aside ten acres for a Hawaiian Cultural Center so the Hawaiian Historic Society would have a central place to teach its language, arts, crafts, and dance, and 14 acres were set aside at the top for youth outdoor education and school camping since there were no camps for children on the islands at the time.

I interviewed enthusiastic developers including Lucky Bennett, architect of The Mauna Kea Resort, and Adrian Zecha, developer of The Bora Bora Resort Hotel. The plan was for the purchasers of the five-acre parcels to develop Polynesian-style homes to be leased back to the private resort. My coffee company, Keopu Mauka Lani, would install and manage three of their five acres in orchards, giving back a crop share percentage with low agriculture state tax. A real win-win-win!

I interviewed numbers of potential finance partners and because of time restrictions, I decided to take a man who presented himself as being a single investor from Honolulu. I had my attorney check out his credentials. However, as legal partnership documents were created and signed, I learned the man was just “the frontman” for two very powerful “silent partner investors.” They didn’t want me, they wanted all I had pulled together over the years of planning, labor, and investment. I had been duped. I quickly shifted from managing my coffee company to defending against a barrage of hostile legal “takeover” attempts. The silent partners were high-profile agricultural businessmen with mainland markets, Harvard attorneys, a former governor backing them, and connections to investors “with deep pockets.”

The corruption my attorneys and I witnessed over the many years as I struggled to defend what was rightfully mine was overwhelming, to say the least. It involved corruption of controls in the banks, the law firms, courts, and certain politicians. What did I learn from this? Not all human souls upon this earth are honest, caring, and come from an integral foundation—money and power drive many of them. I had trusted these men and the advice of my attorney.

From 1991–2012 (21 years), I fought like a mother tiger trying to protect her cubs. During intense legalities, my attorneys and I had our phones tapped and our lives threatened. Throughout those years, I spent about $1.2 million striving to get justice in the courts. Finally, I won a $2.2 million settlement … only to have the settlement challenged.

I had to leave Hawaii. In 2010, I moved back to Hollywood Beach. I had no alternative but to file for bankruptcy, which took another two years for the court to sort out.

The hard pill to swallow was that the Bankruptcy Trustee didn’t want to investigate the accounting that I requested. Without any investigation of the changed illegal document of a loan agreement from a straight percentage rate into a percent being compounded monthly, the Bankruptcy Trustee agreed with the opposition to grant all my land, development plans, and home, destroying my award-winning Kona Coffee Company and handing over the $2.2 million settlement to the corrupt side. The judge shook her head that the document presented was not researched, but said she would have to grant everything to the corrupt challenging side. I walked out of the courtroom with my family as we dragged our mouths on the floor in disbelief.

During these years, I watched as “white envelopes” of cash bought attorneys and even judges to rule against Hawaii state statutes. Thus, “he who has the most money wins.” I flew back to the Keopu Mauka Lani Plantation to retrieve my belongings and say goodbye.

At 72 years of age, I walked off my land after standing on the old ancient Hawaiian stone wall, overlooking my orchard and 14 miles of Kona Coastline, saying to God, “I never owned this land. I only owned the privilege to direct and protect it … now Lord, I give it back to you. May I learn my lessons of soul … and may those who took it … learn their lessons. Amen.”

These past ten years, in an effort to keep my innate “positive outlook of life,” I have written and illustrated 16 life-value children’s books, through my Lollipop Media Productions, LP. Ten of these books have won national and international awards in book festivals, from Paris, London, and Amsterdam to Chicago, Los Angeles, Hollywood, and the Greater Southwest.

In the Abraham Lincoln book, he shares with the child reader: “Of all the countries in the world, America is the only Country with a Birthday! So why do we celebrate your birthday, my birthday, and America’s birthday?” Questions stimulate curiosity. Curiosity drives passion to know. Life becomes fun and exciting. Using this thread of creativity in learning about life, I’ve just completed 90 “Homeschooling PuPus” (in Hawaii, pupus are delicious appetizers).

Also, I’ve dedicated myself to a visionary project to build The Pavilion and Chapel of Nature to educate children and visitors to the importance nature plays in our everyday lives. We have explored various potential sites in California and Arizona. When I was a student at Arizona State University in the early 1960s, I fell in love with the “organic” architectural designs and creations of Frank Lloyd Wright through Taliesin West. He designed The Trinity Chapel of Nature in 1958 that was never built. I’ve always admired this idea, so going forward we’re hoping to secure necessary financial support for our project to really educate people of nature’s exquisite importance in sustaining life here on planet Earth!

Integrity, honor, faith, love, giving from our soul … these are the real gifts of life … the real happiness that many souls never discover, and that money alone cannot buy.

Walt Disney’s last words to me in the summer of 1964 were: “Suzy, never give up your dreams no matter what anyone says. And always remember, failures are stepping stones to success.”

Love life, be available to life, learn your lessons with the joy of wisdom, and the rewards will come within your heart and soul.

With gratitude, Suzy

Suzy with her rescue dog, Muffin, and two rabbits. (Courtesy of Suzanne J. Farrow)

From Levi jeans with a plaid shirt and blonde pigtails flying, riding her horse Paint as a child, Suzanne Farrow became a polished, knowledgeable young lady at Colorado Women’s College and Arizona State University. Her life over the years expanded into many incredible and creative experiences as an entrepreneur.

Categories
Features

Investing in the American Dream

Charles Mizrahi is an investing expert and editor of the Alpha Investor stock newsletter. (Courtesy of Charles Mizrahi)

Growing up, the only person Charles Mizrahi knew on Wall Street was an uncle who waited tables in the New York Stock Exchange dining room.

“My father was a warehouse manager, and the block I lived on in Brooklyn was as working-class as you can get,” he said. “Three cab drivers on the block, security guards, sanitation workers, school teachers.”

Investing expert Mizrahi today is known for having an impeccable record in money management, and it has a lot to do with his working-class roots.

“My parents couldn’t afford to send my brother and I to camp,” he said. “That’s a big thing in Brooklyn—all the kids go to summer camp.”

Instead, Mizrahi spent his time in the library, and remains a voracious reader today. He’d read everything from comics to businessmen’s biographies, but it was in the back of comic books that he found his first opportunity.

An advertisement said that readers could sign up to sell greeting cards, then submit earnings in exchange for one of several prizes. So Mizrahi sent his name and address by mail, and a few weeks later a big box showed up at his house, alarming his mother.

“I told her what I wanted to do, and she said, ‘Okay, stay on this block, don’t go into anybody’s house, and take your brother with you,’” Mizrahi said. They left at noon, went door to door, and sold out by 1 p.m. He sent in the money and soon received a microscope.

Mizrahi at age 8. (Courtesy of Charles Mizrahi)

“I always had the bug to find a way to make money,” Mizrahi said. That greeting card event set off an entrepreneurial streak; he’d write to sports teams, ask for stickers, then sell the decals to classmates for a dime or two each. Soon he was reading books about business, Solomon Guggenheim, Andrew Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan. It became clear that all these successful businessmen had one thing in common: They made their money on Wall Street.

A 40-Minute Ride Away

Wall Street was 40 minutes away by subway, but it felt worlds away from where Mizrahi grew up.

“I always primed myself to one day go down and make money there, because I read so many great stories about people who were smart, and hustled, and who were able to make money on Wall Street,” he said. In fact, he’d tried to get a job as a busboy there, to no avail. But at the age of 20, he left college for a job at the New York Futures Exchange. He would regularly disembark the subway at Rector Street and marvel at the reality of the opportunity.

“I was walking into the New York Futures Exchange, right next to the New York Stock Exchange, with computer screens all around. I wasn’t lifting heavy boxes like I was working in the warehouse, which I did every summer, I wasn’t doing jobs like my friends who were lifeguards. I was actually in the center of capitalism, and I used to just wake up every morning excited to go to Wall Street,” he said.

Excitement and optimism alone didn’t translate into success. Mizrahi found he wasn’t any good at what he was doing, at least in the beginning. There was much he couldn’t make heads or tails of.

But he experienced a spirit of generosity that has continued throughout his career.

Wisdom, Experience, and the Spirit of Generosity

“I always had a good way, throughout my life, of finding people who were older and much smarter than me, and just attaching myself to them and asking them for advice,” Mizrahi said. He also said he’s been lucky: never too shy, nor too proud, to ask for help, he’s made a lifelong habit of reaching out to those he admires.

When Mizrahi started trading in 1983, most everyone was using technical models.

“They looked at the stock price and they built all these models based on moving averages and things like that,” Mizrahi said. One mentor, a former engineer, took the time to explain it all to Mizrahi, taking out graph paper and charting the details. Mizrahi was amazed. He took to the technical models and soon was managing money for his father, brother, and grandparents. After two years, he left the Exchange to start his own business.

“We had an office on 8th Avenue,” Mizrahi said with a laugh. “It was the slums then, it was terrible. We were just so happy to have an office.”

Charles Mizrahi in his office in 1985. (Courtesy of Charles Mizrahi)

The business he began in that terrible office ended up managing money for some of Wall Street’s biggest investment banks, sidestepping the 1987 crash, and being named top trader in the country by Barron’s. For Mizrahi however, the accolades don’t leave as lasting an impression as the lives he’s seen changed.

“It was so great because my first clients were people that I knew. To make someone who was a cab driver or a family member 20 or 30 percent a year when they were making 3 or 5 percent in the bank, it was like ‘Wow, I really changed their lives,'” Mizrahi said.

Then in 1999, Mizrahi looked at the dot-com bubble and knew something was wrong.

“I had a look at my models and I said, this is really unprecedented and something is really disconnected,” he said. “Interest rates are going one way, and the stock markets are going the other way … and it’s just absolutely astounding what’s going on. People were quitting their jobs and day trading—it was 1929 all over again.”

Two of Mizrahi’s longtime mentors-from-afar were Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.

Munger said to take your best idea and try to destroy it; if you can’t, it’s still your best idea, but if you can, then move on to something better—Mizrahi took out all his technical models, and realized he didn’t have the same faith in them that he had the year before.

Buffett, whose reports Mizrahi had always followed (though they were more relevant to a different kind of business than his), subscribed to a method called value investing, which is based on evaluating businesses directly rather than by developing models from stock prices—this approach resonated with Mizrahi, but just to be sure, he went and bought 50-some books about investing, from Amazon, and read them over the next three months.

“It just confirmed what I was thinking, that this makes much more sense,” Mizrahi said. He changed the way he looked at stocks. “Investing into a stock was like buying into a business, and that changed everything.”

Mizrahi looked at Buffet and thought: “Here’s the richest, most successful trade investor of all time. If he’s doing it this way, why shouldn’t I?”

Back when Mizrahi was looking at technical models, it was an hour-to-hour affair. “It’s insane, absolutely insane,” he said in retrospect. After he changed his strategy, he said with a laugh that he could sleep again. “Forget about the stock market. Because over time, the stock market follows the worth of a business, not the other way around.”

Buffet started as a technical trader too, Mizrahi added, remembering a speech Buffett gave where he talked about how value investing wasn’t for everyone, and perhaps only 10 percent of traders subscribed to the strategy.

“Which is great because that creates market opportunity for us,” Mizrahi said. It’s the philosophy behind Alpha Investor, Mizrahi’s current newsletter and mission to help 1 million Americans evaluate stocks and invest smarter. “Why would I want to follow the fifth guy, or the twentieth guy? Don’t you want to follow the top guy?”

Make the World a Better Place

These days, it’s not about the money.

In 2001 Mizrahi got into financial publishing along with money management, and then a few years later started writing a newsletter about investing. It’s what he still does now, with the newsletter Alpha Investor, and every week he gets dozens of detailed and personal thank you notes.

“They run the gamut,” Mizrahi said. A professional banker wrote in, saying, “I’m living the American Dream due in large part to you,” then signing off with a thanks and a “God bless you.” A retired police officer said that he and his wife had lost everything in the 2008 crash but have since achieved financial security thanks to Mizrahi’s advice, writing “Thank you very much for your selfless and noble mission; you’re helping Americans from all walks of life secure a safer financial future.”

“Where else can you get a job where people write ‘God bless you?'” Mizrahi said as he scanned through emails. “Every day I look forward to getting emails from people who are—it’s, this is not about making money anymore.” More recently, Mizrahi has started a podcast (The Charles Mizrahi Show), which has also shot up in popularity.

Success, for Mizrahi, means doing his part every day to make the world a better place—even the tiny contributions, because over time everything adds up. We live in a time where plenty of Americans are frightened for their financial futures, and Mizrahi’s mission in sharing his knowledge freely is to show people that it doesn’t have to be that way.

“Nobody ever got rich shorting America,” Mizrahi said. “There is nothing to be disillusioned about. Any morning you can wake up and be partners with anybody: with Jeff Bezos of Amazon, by buying a share; with Warren Buffett, buying a share of Berkshire [Hathaway Inc.]. I could be partners with these people, passive partners, investing in their business for any price I want.”

“Nothing’s preventing you from buying a share—you buy a share, be partners with them, sit back, and admire their genius,” Mizrahi said.

“This is fertile ground for anyone who wants opportunity, who’s willing to work hard, and serve the American consumer, and come up with another mousetrap,” Mizrahi said. From patent work to bankruptcy laws, there is a whole system in place that protects the individual, unlike in any other country. “The smartest, greatest, most adventurous entrepreneurial minds in the world, they come here and start businesses,” he said. And the average American can partner with every one of them.

“You have every advantage,” Mizrahi said. He knows that he and his children certainly have, over his parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Most of those working-class neighbors on the block where Mizrahi grew up were first-generation Americans who sought opportunity in the land of liberty and worked harder than anyone he knew, with never a thought of throwing in the towel. In fact, their mindsets were always that tomorrow would be better than today, and Mizrahi adopted that mentality too.

The cab driver’s child went off to college and became a professor. Mizrahi’s friend from across the street, whose father was a high school shop teacher, became head of currency trade for a major bank. And his friend from down the block, whose father was a truck driver, became a lawyer.

“That’s what was so amazing to me. It could not have happened if they didn’t believe and live every day of their life believing they have an opportunity,” he said. “If not for them, their family, their children wouldn’t have a better life. How many countries can you say that about?”

But it wasn’t sacrifice that stuck with Mizrahi, it was the importance of family.

His parents passed this down to him and his brother along with Jewish education, so as to ensure that their traditions and culture would continue, and he’s made sure to pass these things down to his children as well.

“Family is the only thing that’s important,” Mizrahi said. “Everything else takes a back seat.”

(Courtesy of Charles Mizrahi)
Categories
Features

Believing in America

(L to R) Marcelo Bavaro, Sara Fattori, and Paul Fattori at Bavaro's frame-making workshop in Brooklyn, on June 10, 2021. (Lux Aeterna Photography)

The stars aligned for a group of artists and artisans to pay proper homage to the Declaration of Independence

Back in 1992, artist José-María Cundín, originally from the Basque Country, Spain, released a hand-engraved facsimile of the United States Declaration of Independence, after three years of hard work and collaboration with craftsmen from his homeland—a papermaker and a renowned metal engraver. But the project didn’t draw broader interest from the American public.

Sara Fattori, who owned a fine art gallery in Palm Beach, Florida, before starting her interior design business, knew of Cundín’s work, but it wasn’t until her father’s passing, around 2007, that she pondered more deeply the meaning of the country’s founding document and the possibility of promoting Cundín’s hand-engraved version. Her father had fought in World War II and was part of an aviation force in the Normandy invasion. “The reality of war,” she said, and the sacrifices made by previous generations to preserve freedom, moved her.

The Perfect Frame

Around 2014, when an opportunity arose to donate a Cundín engraving for an auction event benefiting the Carson Scholars Fund’s initiative to promote literacy in low-income neighborhoods, Fattori began searching for a frame worthy of encasing the document. While researching online, she discovered Marcelo Bavaro, a fourth-generation historical frame maker based in New York, whose Italian family inherited a century of craftsmanship in carpentry and gilding. Fattori instinctively knew he was the right fit.

Paul and Sara Fattori at the 2015 auction event, pictured here with Dr. Ben Carson (leftmost). (Courtesy of Fattori Fine Frames)

When they met, Bavaro said the Declaration should be encased in a Federal-style frame befitting the time period when the original document was drafted—the newly formed country wanted to distinguish itself from its former ruler, so a style emphasizing simple, clean lines was popularized, contrasting sharply with ornate British detailing. “I knew I was with the right person when Marcelo said, ‘Oh, it should be in a Federal-style frame,’” Fattori said during a recent interview at Bavaro’s Brooklyn firm Quebracho Inc., which restores and makes frames for top museums, art galleries, and auction houses.

Bavaro was intrigued by the project: “I always wondered how this country was guided by this piece of paper for centuries. And everybody respects it. I come from a country where nobody respects anything.” He was referring to Argentina—his family emigrated there in the early 20th century. In the early 1980s, when Argentina was under military rule, Bavaro himself was caught in the political turmoil and jailed for writing articles that criticized the government. Due to his family’s influence, he managed to escape and was on the run for five days before crossing the Brazilian border and taking a plane to the United States, where he met up with his father, the first of his family to settle here.

Federal-style frames require incredible carpentry skills; an artisan must shape the wood into a narrow concave shape. There are few workshops left in the world that are still engaged in this artwork. “Craftsmanship is something that is dying out,” Bavaro said. “It’s so simple to make money sitting in front of a computer; why are you going to break your hands doing what we do?”

A craftsperson working on gilding a frame, at the Quebracho studio in Brooklyn, New York City. (Lux Aeterna Photography)
A craftsperson works on etching a pattern on a frame. (Lux Aeterna Photography)

While working on the Declaration project in 2014, Bavaro, together with Fattori and her husband, Paul, joined forces to launch a new company, Fattori Fine Frames, that would provide custom-made, handcrafted frames for people looking to frame artwork and mirrors in their homes.

The auction event that took place the following year was a success, with a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution buying the framed document.

A selection of frames made by the Quebracho workshop in Brooklyn. (Lux Aeterna Photography)

History

Cundín’s facsimile is a copy of William J. Stone’s engraving—the latter was commissioned by then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams during the 1820s as an official government copy, because Adams had grown concerned over the fragile condition of the original Declaration. In Stone’s tradition, Cundín set out to make a hand-engraved brass plate—it would be the first such engraving since Stone’s time.

Cundín always had a personal connection to America, even before becoming a citizen in 1971. His father was born on July 4 and frequently joked about how his birthday coincided with that of America’s. Cundín was moved by the content of the Declaration upon reading it in its entirety. “The demand for freedom—that is the connection that I found most touching in my heart,” he said in a recent phone interview.

The brass plate etched with the Declaration of Independence. (Courtesy of José-María Cundín)

When he began the engraving project in 1989, out of curiosity he started researching the founding fathers who signed the document. Cundín found out that John Adams had visited the Basque Country in 1780, and had been so inspired by the local governance system that he kept it in mind while drafting the United States Constitution years later. Adams also wrote about the “Biscay” government in his treatise, “A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America,” stating, “While their neighbors have long since resigned all their pretensions into the hands of kings and priests, this extraordinary people have preserved their ancient language, genius, laws, government, and manners … their love of liberty, and unconquerable aversion to a foreign servitude.”

Engraver Pedro Aspiazu (L) and artist José-María Cundín studying a proof of the printed Declaration. (Courtesy of José-María Cundín)

The connection with Cundín’s homeland convinced him to look for artisans there for the engraving project. Pedro Aspiazu, who was born into a multi-generational family of engravers, hand-chiseled the plate, while a Basque company handmade the paper from pure cotton, and a Madrid company did the printing.

Cundín retained the same paper size as the original, but reduced the text size so there would be empty space—“a visual environment, to make it … a document that everybody could receive in the mail, but in a magnificent size,” he said. The framed engraving resembles a painting, yet is humble in its quiet dignity. Cundín’s team made 1,200 copies—the first few were gifted to George H.W. Bush during his presidency, the king of Spain, and the United States Congress. Today, there are about 1,000 copies still available for purchase.

Independence Day

Paul Fattori hopes that younger generations can truly appreciate what this document means and the extent to which the signees risked their lives to publicly protest the British monarchy. “It symbolizes all that freedom, that liberty—and it’s about the people, … consent of the people,” he said.

Sara Fattori hopes Americans neither take their freedoms for granted nor forget about the balance of powers in government. “I’m looking at a country like a family unit; like, if someone is too powerful and controlling, then the other people are not going to thrive … and be able to flourish as a human being,” she said.

Categories
Entrepreneurs Features

Gemstone Dreams

Dorian and Alexandrina Filip, the couple behind DSF Antique Jewelry, at their apartment in New York City. (Sam)

How a Romanian immigrant discovered a new path in America

Dorian Filip was a massage therapist in 2009, working aboard the Seabourn Odyssey on its maiden voyage around the Mediterranean. After some years in the industry, he had developed aches in his neck, shoulder, and hands that were increasingly painful, and thoughts of quitting were on his mind.

“I said, ‘If nothing works, I’ll go to the army—I’ll go spend five years there, and they’ll give me a pension after.’”

One fateful day, Filip was assigned to take care of one of the cruise passengers, Brian Albert, who had booked a spa appointment. The two struck up a conversation about life plans. Albert is a wholesale jewelry dealer, with an eye for spotting beautiful things from a young age; when he was 16, he started buying up trinkets at junk shops and selling them to family and friends.

Albert invited Filip to come to New York and learn the trade. Filip was unsure if this was his path, but Albert encouraged him.

“He asked me, ‘What do you like in life?’ And I said a few things that I liked,” such as cars and watches, Filip said. “He said, ‘If you like and understand those things, you’ll understand jewelry too.’”

American Dream

Filip took a leap of faith; about three months after that cruise, he flew to New York from his home country of Romania.

“In the beginning, I couldn’t really tell what was costume jewelry or what was really fine jewelry,” he said, referring to jewelry made with imitation gems or inexpensive materials, versus pieces crafted with precious metals and gemstones. “It was a little confusing.” Albert brought Filip to trade shows, antique shows, and estate sales, showing him the ropes of how to procure exquisite pieces for a bevy of Madison Avenue fine jewelers.

A Tiffany & Co bracelet with rubies and sapphires. (Sam)
Vintage Chanel earrings. (Sam)

Albert tends to buy from estates and other dealers, so as to procure for his clients one-of-a-kind items they haven’t seen before. He also taught Filip the importance of maintaining long-term relationships with clients—Albert is the kind of person who would throw cocktail parties for cruise staff, or meet a maitre d’, become fast friends, and sometime later end up on a vacation in Hungary together.

“We have been dealing with the same people … for 30, 40 years, and even longer,” Albert said.

There are plenty of fascinating stories from traveling around the world in search of beautiful jewelry. Albert recounted a time when he was visiting Turkey while on a cruise trip. He walked into a local shop and began chatting with the store operator.

“He pulled the box out of the safe and in the safe were some of the prettiest things you ever saw. There was a sautoir necklace with pearl and diamond tassels,” Albert said, getting excited as he recalled spotting the rare find. At the time, Albert didn’t have any money with him and had to return to the cruise ship soon, but the shop operator let Albert take the piece, telling him to send a check to his sister in the United States.

Sometimes “there’s this feeling you get when you do business with people, there’s a certain comfort level,” Albert said. Filip and Albert both deeply believe it was destiny that led to these seemingly happenstance discoveries—and also brought them together.

“When I met Brian the very first time, I had the feeling I knew Brian a long time already. … I guess people connect at the right time,” Filip said.

A New Venture

In 2010, Filip experienced his next life-changing event. While having dinner at a restaurant with Albert, he met the hostess, Alexandrina, who was working part-time there while pursuing a career in fashion. The two immediately connected, having both come from former Soviet countries—Alexandrina is from Moldova. Although they were good friends from the start, it was a business trip to Australia that made Filip realize how much he missed Alexandrina. The couple grew closer, and in 2015, they were married.

Alexandrina Filip wears a pair of David Webb 18K gold and rock crystal earrings. (Sam)

Around 2013, Filip and Albert opened a retail shop for the first time, DSF Antique Jewelry. With Alexandrina on board, the shop expanded its offerings to vintage designer handbags, costume jewelry, and other accessories. Albert does much of the sourcing, while the couple handles day-to-day operations. Amid the pandemic, they had to close the physical store, but have kept their online shop going.

As believers in traditional craftsmanship, they hope that more ordinary consumers will make wise investments and buy old. Antique pieces don’t have the costs of manufacturing or advertising in their price tags, and thus represent greater value for the money. Alexandrina said that among their clients, “the younger generation are more responsive to this … because they want a part of history, they want something that nobody else has. And it’s fashionable.”

Alexandrina Filip wears a pair of vintage tanzanite 18K white gold earrings; a Bulgari Parentesi diamond necklace; and an estate diamond 18K yellow gold bracelet. (Sam)

Albert said that from his experience, antique pieces tend to exhibit finer workmanship: “They’re made by hand, they’re one of a kind.” People also cared for and maintained their valuables back in the day.

“Years ago, people bought things and they took care of them. That’s why so many of the old pieces that we buy, that come from the original families, are so well-preserved and loved—because they appreciated that.”

Categories
Features

New York’s Classic Sofa Company: Crafting Custom Furniture

An elegant setting for Classic Sofa's custom-made sofa. (Courtesy of Classic Sofa)

Classic Sofa’s in-house craftsmen and interior designers—which includes the company’s own president—customize the furniture-making process every step of the way

The design company Classic Sofa was a family business with over 20 years of experience producing handcrafted bespoke furniture by the time it was handed down to a second generation in 2007. The timing couldn’t have been worse. The United States suffered a subprime mortgage crisis in 2007 that would lead to a global financial crisis the following year. The challenge of a major recession proved too difficult to overcome, and Classic Sofa’s owners had to put the business up for sale in 2012.

One person’s misfortune can become another’s gain. Blake Anding didn’t set out to become a furniture designer. In fact, he studied biomedical engineering and worked in finance for many years—until he decided he needed to make a life change. In 2012, he saw Classic Sofa for sale and, despite having no experience in design, bought it. He had a lot to learn, but he knew what he had to do to revive the company’s roots as a leader in the custom upholstery industry.

“When I took ownership, I called people who worked with Classic Sofa in the past and picked the best upholsterers and the two best framers to come back to work with us,” Anding told American Essence in a phone interview. Besides sofas, the firm also customizes upholstered chairs, pillows, and draperies.

A Chesterfield-style sofa. (Courtesy of Classic Sofa)

Many of the craftsmen started young and learned from family members in the trade. The worker with the least experience at Classic Sofa still has more than ten years’ experience, while the staff with the most has worked for 50 years, with an average of 30 years. “Some of them started very young in a foreign country and migrated to the United States,” he said. There was a Jamaican Jewish artisan, William Jobson, who mentored Anding in how to do framing and tufting, as well as Denise Ramirez, who taught him how to do upholstery. “She first came for a job at this factory when she was 12 years old. She put tons of makeup on to look older, but the owner at the time came up to her and, with just the tip of his finger, swiped it off her cheek and told her to come in a few years when she was older.”

A craftsman working at the Bronx factory of custom furniture maker Classic Sofa, New York City on May 6, 2021. (Sam)
A craftsman making measurements at the Bronx factory of custom furniture maker Classic Sofa, New York City on May 6, 2021. (Sam)

Anding has grown the business over the last ten years and has had the pleasure of watching it flourish. The firm has worked with renowned interior designers on high-profile projects—providing upholstery to the Trump SoHo hotel (now The Dominick hotel); sofas and cushions for the rooms in The London NYC hotel (which has since been rebranded a Conrad hotel); and a sofa and loveseat for talk show host Andy Cohen’s Manhattan apartment.

But what the company is most proud of is its quick lead times. After receiving the fabric, it can produce and deliver completed projects in three to four weeks, compared to the average 12 to 16 weeks for competitors. “It’s unheard of in our industry. It’s a very fine-tuned machine because we have the right people working on the projects: getting materials in, for example, so projects get delivered quickly.”

(Courtesy of Classic Sofa)

He mostly works with clients in the tri-state area as well as Florida and California, as the vast majority of his clients have homes in the United States, but he has also shipped furniture to Paris and London. The firm only does 100 percent custom bespoke, from fabric to wooden pieces, for residential and commercial projects. The furniture is bench-made, meaning produced to requested design specifications, and manufactured locally in the Bronx by master craftsmen. “I work in the factory with them to ensure the quality of our products every step of the way,” Anding said.

Before going to the showroom, clients can submit ideas to the company via its website, so when they arrive at the firm’s Manhattan design center, they’ll only need to work with interior designers to determine specific details such as seating dimensions, cushion densities, and fabric selection. Another major selling point is that the company offers a lifetime guarantee on frames and springing.

Clients can request an in-home consultation with a member of Classic Sofa’s design team and get assistance on style, cushion fill, and fabric choice for a new piece or reupholstery for an existing piece. The company also has a whole host of fabric partners, including Brunschwig & Fils, Coraggio, Designtex, Ralph Lauren, and many more. These brands have their own custom furniture collection with Classic Sofa—for the clients who aren’t looking for a fully unique product.

(Courtesy of Classic Sofa)

Uniqueness, though, is Classic Sofa’s specialty. The more challenging the project, the more fun Anding has when transforming clients’ ideas into products. According to Anding, that’s the best part of the job.

“One of my favorite projects was for actress Mary-Louise Parker’s new Brooklyn residence. She wanted a [Vladimir] Kagan-inspired piece but with loose seat cushions for comfort. Most importantly, the piece was oversized, stretching across her entire living room.” Anding needed to trace out a sectional design with the perfect curvature and proportional size to fit the aesthetic and size of the room. The sofa had to be designed and produced in pieces and upholstered onsite.

“Designing bespoke furniture is about understanding your client so you can distill what they see as beautiful into each piece that you make. Most importantly, this is a labor of love, from drafting the initial design, through framing and upholstery, to seeing smiles on client’s faces on delivery,” he said.

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.

Categories
Features From the Heartland Your Stories

My Mother’s ‘Sisu’

“Sisu” could well be the favorite word of the Finnish people. The term is loosely defined as “the Finnish art of courage.” It refers to a mix of resilience and perseverance that leads to a life of greater purpose and happiness, and Aune Ylitalo, a second-generation Finn, reflected Sisu in all its strength and beauty. This wonderful woman was my mother.

Mom blessed our world with her arrival on January 20, 1914, a frosty winter morning in the tiny Minnesota village of Floodwood. Aune was nicknamed “Cutie.” “I guess I was nice looking at the time,” she told me. But my mom was always beautiful, inside and out, her entire life.

Aune was welcomed by three siblings and her parents, William and Fina (Makitalo) Ylitalo, who emigrated to the United States around the turn of the century. William came first, finding a place to settle before calling for his young bride, who made the treacherous transatlantic journey by steamer … bringing her Sisu with her! They settled on a small farm and worked hard to raise their family. The simple farmhouse had no electricity or indoor plumbing. Kerosene and Aladdin lamps provided lighting, and two wood stoves warmed the house during the long harsh Minnesota winters. A compartment in the “icebox” held huge blocks of ice that my grandpa took from the river, blocks that were kept frozen in sawdust until they were placed inside.

The “outhouse” was dark and cold, but the saving grace was the good old-fashioned Finnish sauna! After enjoying the intense heat and steam that arose from the hot rocks in the corner, mom and her siblings would run out into the snow, rolling around to “cool off.” The basement also housed a washing machine run by a small gas engine and a “storehouse” for canned goods from the vegetable garden and the jams and jellies made from fruit, fresh-picked during the summer months.

Mom was her mother’s helper, and they did everything together. “The house had to be clean at all times,” mom remembered. They used milk to shine the kitchen floor, and on Saturdays, they freshened all the sheets on the clothesline. Grandma taught mom to cook and how to can vegetables and fruits. They often drove 50 miles just to pick blueberries. Mom loved baking cakes and pies and was sometimes called upon to bake for a family whenever their sons came home from college.

But mom’s favorite task was working with her dad and brothers on the farm. She drove horses and the tractor. She helped in the hayfields and in the barn and admitted, “I often wished I was a boy!” Even after suffering a broken leg while playing broom hockey on the frozen river near their home, she didn’t slow down “because there was always work to do.”

Aune Ylitalo. (Courtesy of Karen Brazas)

But life wasn’t all work and no play. A Sunday afternoon would find Aune and her friends making their own ice cream or going to town for a “real cone” for 5 cents … more expensive than the candy that cost only a penny. In the summer, picnics and swimming in the river were favorite pastimes. “My brothers taught me to swim by throwing me off a boat!” mom said. “I had to either swim or wish I had.”

Holidays at the Ylitalo home were simple. The women spent hours cooking and baking while the men chopped down a tree that would be decorated with simple handmade ornaments. Mom sewed and knitted scarves and mittens as gifts for her family. A sleigh ride was the highlight of the season.

Aune enjoyed school, and since the farm was 4 miles from town, transport was a horse-drawn “school bus” carrying 14 children. “Occasionally all 14 of us had to jump off the carriage so the bus could get ‘unstuck’ from a deep mud hole,” mom said with a smile. During those years, her Finnish Sisu played a big part. Her dreams of attending college and becoming a home economics teacher were foiled when her mother suffered several strokes that required Mom to stay home and manage the household. But she never regretted her decision. “I stayed where I was needed. I would never have had the heart to leave.”

But leaving familiar surroundings would become a theme in her life. Only months after she and her new husband set up their first home, Dad was drafted into the Army, and they left their families behind to move to Florida for his training. Months later when Dad was deployed to India, Mom moved back to the farm, 8 months pregnant with their first child. Dad was gone for almost two years. During their 68 years of marriage, because of Dad’s career, they relocated many times. Each departure was very difficult for Mother, not only because she left behind so many friends, but because she understood the toll each move took on us kids. Once again, her courage and resilience showed through her heartache. Years later, she confessed to me that during each move, she shed her tears in private so none of us would see.

Because above all else, my mother was completely devoted to her family. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for us … preparing home-cooked meals, shopping for school clothes and supplies, helping with homework, warmly welcoming our friends, never missing a school concert or ballgame, cheering us on and encouraging us every step of the way, especially when we were sad, worried, or distressed. “Don’t worry, honey,” she’d say to me. “You’re going to be just fine.” Her balm for an aching heart.

Years passed. Dad retired and they resettled in Arizona. Life became more and more simple as they aged and moved from house to condo and finally to assisted living. Downsizing with each move, mom’s belongings became simple … a few matching outfits, simple holiday decorations, a collection of her favorite romance novels, her treasured family photo albums and framed pictures, a box of age-old greeting cards received through the years, and her trademark White Shoulders perfume.

Throughout her life, her amazing warmth and comfort extended to everyone who knew her, and she had a way of making us children feel courageous, strong, and important. She always assured us that “everything will be all right. Everything will work out.” And whether we were playing cards, watching TV, chatting on the porch swing, curled up reading our books, baking cinnamon bread together, or enjoying our morning coffee, even doing nothing in her company was everything.

Mom passed away quietly at the age of 98. She died in the early morning hours of our 9/11 wedding anniversary. Each year we celebrate our marriage and her life. To say I miss her isn’t enough. To say her death left a hole in my heart isn’t accurate either. Because she left it filled with her kindness, her gentleness, her love, and yes … her Sisu! Because on the days when I wonder how I can go on without her, I feel her loving arms around me and I hear her soothing voice … “Oh honey, don’t worry. You’re going to be just fine.”

Karen Brazas is a retired high school English teacher and creative writing instructor who taught in California, China, and Lithuania. She worked and studied in 35 countries with the Semester at Sea program. Karen is a wife, mother, and grandmother, and now lives in Nevada City, California, and Channel Islands, California.