Learning how to apply the Pythagorean theorem while on a construction site, earning competitive wages per hour, all while working toward a matching scholarship that can be used for future tuition or employment needs—this is the model by which unCommon Construction hopes to encourage youth to explore a career in the trades, and break stereotypes about the industry.
Aaron Frumin, founder of the New Orleans-based after-school program for high school students, unexpectedly found his way into the construction industry. He went to a standard, four-year college after graduating high school, but he dropped out in his third year when he was unsatisfied with the education he was getting. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Frumin traveled there to help out as a Red Cross volunteer. He ended up working as a day laborer on a construction site, and he stayed in the city. “I was using my brain and I was using math skills and engineering principles and social skills. I was making good money. … No one would have ever thought of that career path for me,” Frumin said. He later went into teaching, and while working as a reading and social studies teacher in middle school, he realized the traditional classroom experience was not for him.
Aaron Frumin, founder of unCommon Construction, hopes the program can help dispel stereotypes about the construction industry and allow high schoolers to see it as a viable career. (Courtesy of unCommon Construction)(Courtesy of unCommon Construction)
That’s when Frumin thought about a program that could make education more relevant to developing students’ real-life skills. “How can we have a real return on investment for them so that they have a little more skin in the game?” So in 2015, Frumin started unCommon Construction as a nonprofit that would hire students to build houses, with the employees being selected from partnering schools that would recommend highly motivated students to apply for the after-school program, while earning school credit and wages.
Students work 10 to 12 hours a week, with 6 to 8 hours on a job site and 2 to 4 hours in the classroom on “framing character”: learning career building and professional development skills, as well as receiving technical training. They spend most of their time in the field because “we want to treat young people like they have value, and that their time is valuable, and we’re not just doing worksheets that are easy for them to dismiss,” Frumin said.
At the same time, Frumin wants the program to develop skills in the students that will be helpful no matter what career they pursue in the future. “We put a very intentional emphasis in our alternative learning environment on the development and demonstration of soft skills,” Frumin said. That includes learning teamwork, ethics, problem-solving, communication, and professional attitudes.
(Courtesy of unCommon Construction)(Courtesy of unCommon Construction)
The program operates much like a real-life construction company, with students completing the building of a house in a school year. The house is then sold on the market. When the house is purchased, the company matches their paycheck with a scholarship, which can be used during their first year after graduating high school—whether for tuition, school supplies, or paying expenses related to their future job, should they pursue a career right after graduating.
Frumin hopes the program can help eliminate the stigmas associated with the construction industry, such as that it’s a dirty job primarily for men or “the non-college material,” as Frumin put it. “Some young people who may be seen as college-bound, like I was, may never be presented with opportunities that help them become self-actualized members [of society],” Frumin said. “They’re held up or put down by a society that does or doesn’t value blue-collar jobs.”
Students earn wages, and when a house is sold on the market, the company puts “equity” toward their scholarships. (Courtesy of unCommon Construction)
But the fact of the matter is that the industry employs a great variety of professions. “Big construction companies still need lawyers, and they still need an accountant. They rely on emergency medical services, they have security positions, and they require insurance,” Frumin said.
It is time to value the construction industry, he added. “There’s a whole economy that surrounds our industry, and in fact, our industry makes up the backbone of the American economy. … We have to be part of changing the narrative for all the different people who are involved.”
It was mainly for the well-being of their 10 children that Carolyn and Josh Thomas struck out to start their own family homestead 1,000 miles from their home.
Their life in Southern California had been all about chasing a check, climbing the ladder, and getting ahead. They were used to following the crowd.
It was when their first son was born and it came time for his first round of vaccines that the parents became concerned about their lifestyle.
(Courtesy of Carolyn Thomas)
“The doctor had told me that the nurse was going to come in and give the baby two shots,” Carolyn told The Epoch Times. “Well, when the nurse came in, she gave the baby three shots. And both Josh and I have this very clear memory of these three different shots.”
They didn’t think much of it at the time; they were just so used to deferring to what the authorities said.
“When we went home that night, he had a reaction to the vaccines,” Carolyn added. “It made us really wake up and start paying attention and decide that we needed to be in the driver’s seat of our life, and we needed to be making active decisions.”
(Courtesy of Carolyn Thomas)
So the family grew … and grew, and grew. In 2007, Josh and Carolyn made up their mind to purchase a tiny plot of land where they grew their own food; and they awakened to the wonders of what the earth can provide their family. It wasn’t much, but the learning process was essential for what came next.
“We started really learning about the skills of cooking from scratch, making our own bread at home, canning, dehydrating, and different types of preserving,” the mom said. “We wanted to give our children the gift of health and very robust, healthy bodies, and also have the skills of producing our own food and growing our own food. Because at that point, it just started to be way too expensive to buy the amount of food that we needed at the quality we wanted.”
In order to feed their family well, they eventually scaled up to a 20-acre property in Tennessee where they raised their own beef.
They finally bought their 40-acre plot in northern Idaho in 2018.
(Courtesy of Carolyn Thomas)
“The reality is, if you go right to a lot of acres, you won’t have the skills you need in order to actually use them properly or well,” Carolyn said. “You’ll probably get overwhelmed by the experience.”
Yet tough times were right around the corner. In their local area in 2014, employment was scarce, and Josh found himself without the income they needed to sustain their expanding family. Little did they realize that their sustenance lay right beneath their feet.
“We still wanted to eat high quality, nutrient dense, and organic food, but there was just no money to buy groceries at all,” Carolyn said. “And so we really took it to the next level and started growing a huge amount of our own produce, and all of our own meat and dairy, and the fruit for preserving it.
“It really was an important moment for us, as we learned how to do this on a scale that could actually take care of our family and feed ourselves and be self-sufficient if we needed to.”
(Courtesy of Carolyn Thomas)
By now, they knew what to do with the land and how to make the best use of it: The family established one large, main garden for growing their staple crops—such as potatoes, beets, carrots, onions, and garlic, as well as big rows of broccoli and cauliflower. Then there were the perennials—grapes and raspberries.
Adjacent to the house, there is the “cottage garden,” as Carolyn calls it, which is right outside the kitchen. Here, she grows her herbs for seasoning, lettuce and cherry tomatoes for a quick salad, and a few flowers.
Then there is an area out front they call “the forest garden” where they have their fruit trees and some wild edibles tucked here and there.
But beyond mere sustenance, life on the homestead has helped the children bloom—not just in terms of developing good health and natural immunity, but also in their character and confidence.
“It allows each member of our family to know that they’re valued and a valuable part of the family,” Carolyn said. “We all have what we call ‘morning chores’ and ‘evening chores,’ and everybody knows what they need to do in order to get all the basics done.”
(Courtesy of Carolyn Thomas)
Some will be out feeding the animals or rotating the livestock; others will milk the cows, bring in firewood in the winter, or work around the house.
“We find that the kids, when they’re very young, they want to help,” the mom said. “They want to be involved and they ask to be involved. So when we start giving them chores, when they’re two and three years old, they really want to do it because everyone around them is doing it too.”
There’s nothing more natural for a family than life on a homestead. It’s how people have been living for thousands of years.
It may seem novel to some city folk, but the Thomases are just getting reacquainted with what comes naturally. Far from being hooked up to their devices 24/7, or becoming lazy teenagers, all these young ones are early risers. In fact, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas have to tell their kids to stay in bed until 6 a.m. They homeschool their kids, and they are happy.
Getting off the grid (they’re not totally there yet; commodities like coffee, etc. are store-bought) was mainly a family lifestyle choice for the Thomases. But in the chaos of the world today—with inflation, looming food shortages, and other uncertainties—the family believes it’s the responsible thing to do. By learning how to be self-sufficient, Carolyn says, we become less dependent on the government and thus more free.
Homesteading might be a check against government overreach.
(Courtesy of Carolyn Thomas)
Besides chores, Josh and Carolyn are now sharing their journey and skills with others. Having started their own YouTube channel and family brand called Homesteading Family, they teach their skills by posting multiple videos per week.
In these, Carolyn has gotten into old-fashioned, traditional cooking. Having dusted off a classic 1700s recipe book, she has unearthed some hearty, wholesome treats like a wonderfully robust pumpkin pie as well as deliciously simple bread pudding, and much more.
Yet she knows not everyone has access to a 40-acre farm. Many of her viewers live in the big city, but there are still things they can do to be more self-sufficient.
“Learn how to cook from scratch, learn how to make better buying decisions, learn how to bulk buy food and store it, even if storing it means you’re putting it under a bed or in a closet somewhere,” she said. “A lot of people think of living a lifestyle that is prepared and more self-sufficient as something they should do in case the world falls apart, some big event, or something major that happens on a large scale.”
The reality is that our great grandmothers and grandfathers always lived a more prepared lifestyle.
“Historically, it’s the normal, wise thing to do, like the parable of the Ant and the Grasshopper,” she added. “Work when it’s work season and put up your food, and have what you need for the off seasons.”
The first federal Congress of 1789, where the first 10 amendments to the Constitution were passed, becoming known as the Bill of Rights. Shown in the central mural (L to R): James Madison (standing), speaker Frederick Muhlenberg (seated), Elbridge Gerry (standing, foreground), and Fisher Ames (standing, rear). “The First Federal Congress, 1789” by Allyn Cox, 1973–1974. Oil on canvas. Great Experiment Hall at the United States Capitol, Washington, D.C. (Public domain)
Among the constitutional amendments, the First is the most sacred. Its guarantees of the freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly, and the right to petition have made American shores a beacon for the world. The quiet and bookish man who first proposed it spent many years reflecting on its related issues in solitude—an uncommon pastime for a politician. The First Amendment has become so fundamental to the way Americans think about themselves as social creatures that it is easy to forget the skepticism, and even outrage, that it caused in its day.
A Scholar Enters Politics
James Madison was a shrewd student of political history. Of his many thoughts on government, though, one concern was foremost. In “The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President,” Noah Feldman observes: “The subject that most animated James Madison was the freedom of religion and the question of its official establishment.” He developed an academic interest in the topic at Princeton under the Rev. John Witherspoon, who filled him with ideas of religious liberty inspired by the Scottish Enlightenment.
After graduating, Madison witnessed the persecution of religious dissenters in his native Virginia, where the Anglican Church was the established religion. In a letter to a friend dated January 24, 1774, Madison described traveling to a nearby county and encountering imprisoned Baptist ministers, “5 or 6 well-meaning men” who did nothing more than publish their orthodox views. That April, he wrote: “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.”
“James Madison” by John Vanderlyn, 1816. Oil on canvas. The White House, Washington, D.C. (Public domain)
Madison entered local politics and attended Virginia’s constitutional convention in 1776. There, George Mason submitted his draft for a Declaration of Rights, which included a clause stating that “all Men should enjoy the fullest Toleration in the Exercise of Religion, according to the Dictates of Conscience.” Madison was not satisfied. He understood that a majority, in granting a minority permission to practice religion, could take it away as well. Going beyond John Locke’s idea of toleration, Madison successfully proposed changing the wording to reflect the right of “free exercise of religion.”
This guarantee ended the Anglican Church’s spiritual monopoly in Virginia. Eight years later, though, Patrick Henry spearheaded legislation to levy religious taxes. Madison opposed Henry but knew he was too soft-spoken to match the eloquent orator. He responded by writing a petition, “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments.” Religious belief, he argued, “must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.” Belief could not be coerced and must exist in a separate sphere from civil government. Even a small tax could become oppressive.
Madison’s essay became foundational for the idea of the separation of church and state. The petition garnered enough signatures to defeat the proposed bill, and in 1786 the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was passed.
The Bill of Rights
By 1789, Madison had designed the Constitution and convinced most of the states to ratify it by authoring 29 of the articles that comprised “The Federalist Papers.” But the groundbreaking document was not safe. North Carolina and Rhode Island still had not ratified it. Opponents who favored states’ rights over federal power wanted to hold a second constitutional convention to undo the new government.
To prevent this, Madison drafted amendments that would address the Constitution’s flaws. He submitted his draft to Congress on June 8, proposing protections of individual liberties without changing the government’s structure. He sought to encapsulate, among these, his years of religious reflections. The clause of the proposed amendment—originally the fourth rather than the first—was more descriptive than its final version:
“The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext infringed.”
This proposal had three aspects: guaranteeing equal treatment of minority views, barring Congress from establishing a national church, and establishing conscience as a right free from coercion.
The Bill of Rights includes the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution. (Jack R Perry Photography)
Madison struggled to get his amendments passed. Federalists ridiculed them as useless “milk and water.” Anti-Federalists unanimously opposed him. His old nemesis Patrick Henry called for a total revision of the Constitution, claiming a national bill of rights did not sufficiently guard them for individuals or states. An anonymous author, writing under the pen name “Pacificus,” asserted in a New York newspaper that Madison’s “paper declarations” were “trifling things and no real security to liberty.”
Madison defended his bill, arguing it would limit the tyranny of the majority and “establish the public opinion” in favor of rights. Federalist support began to trickle in. Madison wanted to fold the amendments into the Constitution itself, but he settled for appending them at the end. Representatives eliminated some of his proposals and altered others.
The final version of the First Amendment’s clause on religious liberty came to read: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This slightly more restrictive version omitted Madison’s phrasing on the “rights of conscience,” but it is otherwise consistent with his intentions. Madison’s achievement made him the world’s foremost champion of religious liberty. His recognition of free exercise, rather than mere toleration, has been a model for other governments around the globe.
What does it take to forgive someone who tried to kill you?
To Virginia Prodan, it was simple. Being a woman of Christian faith, she lived her life by the principles expounded in the Bible. What she wasn’t prepared for was how the assassin sent to kill her reacted to her plea. Not only did he put down his gun, but he ended up changing his entire course of life afterward.
Prodan met her killer’s eyes and asked, “Have you ever asked yourself, ‘Why do I exist?’ or ‘Why am I here?’ or ‘What is the meaning of my life?’ I once asked myself those questions,” as she recounts in her memoir, “Saving My Assassin.”
He slid the gun back into the holster. Prodan proceeded to describe God’s capacity to forgive all who have sinned. The man softened, and eventually inquired about the faith that gave her the power to face him so bravely. “I will come to your church as a secret brother in Christ. I will worship your powerful God,” Prodan recalls him saying.
Prodan’s supposed offense, which led to her inclusion on the hit list of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, was defending Christians who were not allowed to exercise their freedom of belief. As a Romanian lawyer, she took on dozens of cases involving Christians who faced persecution for their faith during Ceausescu’s regime of the 1970s and 1980s. Some had their work licenses revoked or were charged with crimes because they had a Bible in their possession. Others turned to Prodan when the land that churches sat on was in danger of getting confiscated by authorities. During a time when Ceausescu only allowed citizens to worship himself, Prodan’s courageous defense of citizens with faith brought the attention of international reporters and U.S. officials monitoring the situation in Romania. Her court cases showed the world that religious freedom was absent in Romania. It angered the dictator so much that he hired a hitman to finish her.
Prodan with her son Emanuel and daughters Anca and Andreea, at a private ceremony for Prodan’s gaining U.S. citizenship, held at her law school in February 1994. (Courtesy of Virginia Prodan)
Years later, after Prodan made a daring escape to freedom in America, she would meet him again in the most unexpected of circumstances. “We are not enemies to each other,” she said in a recent interview. “God changed my assassin; God can change everyone. … God changed Romania through me.”
Seeking the Truth
Prodan grew up in an abusive household that did not cherish her. Prodan’s book describes a childhood in which her mother constantly reminded her that her freckles and red hair meant that she did not belong. She was often left at home to do chores while the rest of her family was gone on vacation. If she did not do them correctly, she would be punished with beatings. “As a child, in order to avoid punishment—for every single situation, I learned to find solutions,” Prodan said. She reflects that this was perhaps her training ground to learn how to rise above the circumstances and gain the resolve to overcome anything. “In life, sometimes we don’t understand why we go through tough times and why we have to endure those things. But those hard times will prepare us for something really, really wonderful that otherwise we will not be prepared for,” she said.
Books were her escape from reality. She excelled at school. After witnessing how the Romanian regime persecuted her uncle and her next door neighbor, Prodan became determined to study law. Her uncle was forcibly taken to the psychiatric hospital three times for daring to speak up against the regime—though the family never spoke about what exactly he did that made him a target for the Romanian Communist Party. “A fire started to build in me to find and understand the truth and understand why adults will know the truth but be too fearful to speak the truth, and also how to be strong and courageous and speak the truth. … That became my mission in life,” Prodan said.
Discovering Her Mission
Prodan applied successfully to law school and passed the bar exam for working in Bucharest, the capital of Romania. Her first solo case was a pro bono case to defend a university student accused of burning his Communist Party ID card. He faced a 10-year prison sentence. Prodan found out that her client was coerced into confessing to committing the offense. She persuaded the client and his parents to testify and admit that he was forced to confess. In the end, the judge sentenced him to two years of community service. His family continued to be harassed and interrogated by police after the trial. His father suffered a heart attack during an intense interrogation session and died. Soon after, the client hanged himself, and the rest of the family disappeared out of sight. Prodan felt lost.
Virginia Prodan at her law office in Dallas, Texas. (Alexender Simoes)
One day, a church goer asked her to represent him. The communist regime had confiscated his family’s land. While assisting him with the process to get the property back, Prodan was introduced to Christianity. The regime considered the Bible’s teachings as running counter to Communist Party doctrine, but in an attempt to appear like the country respects freedom of belief, the government still allowed churches to operate. However, Christians were routinely persecuted and could be arrested for having the Bible in their possession. Prodan soon found herself defending church organizations and believers in court. Her courageous defense, accusing Ceausescu of human rights violations, garnered the attention of observers in the American embassy and international media. “People all over the world found out that a young attorney in Romania, a woman under 5 feet tall, 82 pounds, is taking the dictator to court,” she said.
Danger Ahead
Prodan soon found herself directly targeted by Ceausescu’s government. One day, as she was leaving her office and getting ready to go to the courthouse, a homeless man followed her and pushed her into oncoming traffic. She was constantly followed by Securitate, or secret police. One day, several officers forced her into an unmarked black car and took her to the Securitate headquarters. They hit her and threatened to put her in prison for life. Though they released her that evening, the scare tactics continued. Officers would ransack her home and her office. She faced more interrogations in which she was beaten by Securitate officers. On some occasions, “they will come inside of my home, eat the food, and leave the dirty dishes, or move the furniture around, because they wanted to play a psychological game,” Prodan recalled.
There were days when she would let the tears run down her face. But she refused to cower before authoritarianism. She believed that it was her mission to defend religious believers. “You have to just trust God, when you know that he is the one who gave you that mission … if you look back, that he will give you tools and open doors for you to accomplish that mission.” She recalled moments when she would be searching for provisions in the arcane Romanian code of law that, at least on paper, guaranteed a Romanian citizen’s freedom of belief. She would flip open the book—and it would miraculously land on the page that contained the information she needed.
Prodan graduated from Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law in May 1997. (Courtesy of Virginia Prodan)
Assassination Attempt, Escape to Freedom
One day, after Securitate officers slammed her head against the desk repeatedly during an interrogation and threatened to harm her children, she returned to her office, shaken but pretending as if all was OK. Her legal assistant told her a man was waiting for her to discuss a case. When the man entered her office and closed the door, he drew a gun. “I believed that I would be dead the next moment,” Prodan recalled. “My knees were shaking. I heard my stomach. I heard my heart in my ears. I was shaking. I even thought that my kids will live without a mother. But in all this, I heard also the whisper of God saying, ‘Share the gospel,’” she said.
Prodan describes the next few moments in her book, as she calmly spoke to him. “‘You are here because God put you here, and he has put you to a test. Will you abide in God or in the will of a man—your ultimate boss, President Ceausescu, who requires you to worship him? God has given you free will to choose.’”
Moved by her words, the assassin quietly listened as Prodan recited passages from the Bible about the power of forgiveness. By the end, he told Prodan that he would start to explore Christianity, and walked away.
But this was not the end. The next morning, two armed police officers blocked Prodan and her daughters as they left their house. They informed her she was being placed under house arrest. For four weeks, Prodan was stuck inside, with food supplies dwindling. When all hope seemed to be lost, the American ambassador’s wife managed to sneak to Prodan’s house, letting her know that the American embassy knew of her situation and was finding ways to help her.
Prodan with her children during her private U.S. citizenship ceremony. Her daughters are now a counselor and an attorney, while her son is a rescue pilot for the U.S. Air Force. (Courtesy of Virginia Prodan)
U.S. President Ronald Reagan authorized Prodan and her family to move to America as political refugees. Prodan was released from house arrest and allowed to go to the local passport office to get her paperwork. After transiting through Rome, Prodan and her family arrived in Dallas, Texas, in fall 1988.
Life in America
Upon settling in Dallas, Prodan went back to school to receive a law degree from Southern Methodist University’s law school, then opened her own practice. To this day, she continues to take on clients who feel their freedom of belief and freedom of expression have been infringed upon. She feels blessed to be in America. “American people are like no one else. They will open their hearts, they will open their houses [to you]. They encouraged me to go on and rebuild my life,” she said.
One day in 2010, she received an unexpected visit. A man came to her office and explained that the church where his son was pastor had encountered some legal trouble while seeking to construct a building. Suddenly, he asked, “Virginia, do you remember me?”
It was the assassin. After stepping out of Prodan’s office in the 1980s, he’d studied theology and became a pastor in Bucharest following the collapse of the Romanian communist regime. Now, he pulled out his phone to show Prodan a photo of his newborn granddaughter, who was named Virginia in Prodan’s honor. It was an emotional reunion. Michael—the name he adopted in America—was eager to share with Prodan the impact that faith had in his life. They caught up over lunch, but when Prodan asked to keep in touch with him, he explained that he was worried about repercussions in Romania. There was a growing wave of people calling for former participants in Ceausescu’s regime to be brought to justice. “Lots of Romanians asked the government to punish those people,” Prodan recalled Michael explaining to her. He told her that “it’s better for me not to know about his whereabouts. Because the government might come against [him].”
(Alexender Simoes)
Have No Fear
Throughout the years, Prodan has received anonymous letters and emails about former Securitate officers being jailed in Romania. She also receives a Christmas card from time to time, with the name “Michael” signed. She suspects these were all from her former assassin, quietly signaling to her.
Prodan said her experience not only allowed her to see how faith can transform even a cold-blooded assassin, but that there is nothing to fear in life. “Fear will just make you a slave. Fear will destroy your enthusiasm. But in order to conquer that fear, you have to confront that fear,” she said. She frequently recounts her story as part of motivational speaking engagements.
More importantly, she said, our actions are greater than ourselves—just like how she unexpectedly helped to change the course of Romania’s future. “My life and your life, it’s not only for us. What we do, what we accomplish, what we influence—sometimes we know, sometimes we don’t know. But we’ll reach beyond our imagination, [for] people, countries, generations to come,” she said.
Art Thompson is the founder of Sage
Cheshire Aerospace, as well as A2ZFX, based
in Lancaster, Calif. Here he is seated inside
the Red Bull Stratos space capsule, which he
designed, produced, and tested. Its outwardly
simple design belies the sophisticated
systems in place. (Samira Bouaou)
Babies’ chew toys, Batmobiles, rocket engines—Art Thompson makes them all.
Thompson is a modern-day da Vinci, the rare sort of individual these days who is equally comfortable in the worlds of arts and technology, and more often than not bringing the two together. One of his earliest jobs involved running a sign shop—the owner handed it over to him a day after he’d started. He was still a teenager. Later, his art background came in handy at the aerospace company Northrop, where he made architectural models and was pulled into working on the B2 stealth bomber for over 10 years.
Thompson’s own companies, Sage Cheshire Aerospace and A2ZFX, share a workshop space in Lancaster, California, devoted todesign, engineering, prototyping, fabrication, and testing.
This Jeep Grand Cherokee was transformed into a commuter’s dream for a viral Verizon ad. (Courtesy of Art Thompson)
Sage Cheshire regularly makes parts for government agencies or aerospace companies—from aircraft fairings and components to antennae for the U.S. Navy—much faster and cheaper than they could do themselves.
“We’re a super small organization and highly efficient,” Thompson said. “So while a company like Northrop or Lockheed or Boeing spends a lot of time in bureaucracy trying to figure out what they want to do, we’re already finished with the project. And so they realize that and use that to their advantage by contracting work.”
The company can take on larger projects, too, such as scanning and reverse-engineering an airplane that an aerospace company bought from a foreign provider, who wouldn’t give them the plans.
Thompson also has his own projects. Working with a space plane, he started to think about how he could develop the technology for a better defense system. Instead of using a hypersonic weapon against a hypersonic missile—the equivalent of launching a bullet to hit a bullet—he envisions launching a space plane at 250,000 or 350,000 feet in altitude, firing pulses of laser, which would have a better chance of hitting the target, since the speed of light is faster than the speed of a hypersonic missile. With its small footprint, the plane could also be used for reconnaissance and be transported easily anywhere around the world and launched from a regular runway, unlike a rocket.
In 2012, Thompson built a giant, 45-foot-long, 800-pound paper airplane that took to the Arizona skies for six seconds. It was part of the Pima Air & Space Museum’s Great Paper Airplane Fly-Off competition, to spark interest in aviation and engineering. The plane was based on a model by 12-year-old Arturo Valderamo. (Flight Test Museum)
While Sage Cheshire handles some serious business, A2ZFXfocuses on product development and special effects—from the mundane to the spectacular. For example, the blister-like yellow bumps on sidewalks? Thompson’s team made the original version of these “truncated domes,” as they’re formally known. “And I cursed myself every time going over them with a shopping cart—along with millions of other people,” he said good-naturedly. A more dramatic, and flammable, example involved recreating a flying object zooming around in the air, to mimic the Human Torch for the promotion of a “Fantastic Four” movie.
Some of his projects not only have an undeniable flair for fun but also are marketing gold—like the Hum Rider, engineered to show off a marvelous solution to traffic jams. Envision a Jeep Grand Cherokee, with a wheelbase that widens and a body that elevates several feet above traffic, leaving stunned commuters below in the dust. Conceived to promote Verizon’s Hum dongle and smart app, the video made ripples through the internet, receiving a billion views.
The energy drink company Red Bull, with its marketing strategy embracing extreme sports and jaw-dropping stunts, was another client that was a natural fit.
When Red Bull was in its early stages of entering the U.S. market, it hired Thompson to make its eye-catching “can cars”—Mini Coopers outfitted with giant Red Bull cans on top, deployed with reps all over the country to offer samples of its product. Thompson built over 1,000 of these vehicles, although he jokes he had to build 3,000 cans to replace the ones that got destroyed. He said, “We would always tell [the drivers], ‘Don’t drive into the parking structure,’” which they invariably would.
(Samira Bouaou)
Mission to the Edge of Space
In 2005, Thompson got a call from Felix Baumgartner, an Austrian friend whom he’d met at a Red Bull go-kart race in Austria. A daredevil and base jumper, Baumgartner was best known for his unpowered winged flight across the English Channel from 30,000-foot altitude in 2003 and jumping off the world’s tallest buildings, such as the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.
He asked Thompson if he knew Joe Kittinger, who had jumped from a balloon at 102,800 feet in 1960 and reached a speed of 614 miles per hour, sustaining freefall for 4 minutes, 36 seconds. It was a record that stood unbroken.
Then he asked Thompson: If you were to break Kittinger’s record, how would you do it? Baumgartner wanted to know if it was possible to jump from space or the stratosphere and fall at supersonic speed.
“You know,” Thompson recalls telling him, “It’s 3:30 in the morning in Austria. Why don’t you go back to sleep, I’ll call you tomorrow and I’ll tell you some ideas.”
He ended up writing an 87-page proposal including how a pressurized capsule could be built, with redundant life support, spacesuits, and stratospheric balloons.
Thompson flew to Austria to present the idea to Dietrich Mateschitz, the late owner of Red Bull, who engaged Thompson as the technical project director for the Stratos project. But Thompson didn’t want it to just be a marketing stunt. It needed to be real science with a purpose.
Art Thompson started making one “can car” for Red Bull and eventually produced over 1,000 of them. (Courtesy of Art Thompson)
Though Kittinger had made his jump over 50 years ago, the protocols around high-altitude freefall were few. Thompson saw a real-world opportunity. For him, it was about developing and researching how a U.S. Air Force or NASA pilot could safely exit a high-altitude craft, as well as medical systems to treat astronauts and pilots in case of ejection and rapid decompression.
“The beauty of it is, the government didn’t pay one dime for it,” he said. “I got an Austrian energy drink company to pay for all of the development. We then shared this knowledge with the government for free.”
“That’s the future of business, because the power of social media is that tool that can be used to fund future research,” he said.
Say you wanted to go to Mars, Thompson offered by way of example. “The government doesn’t want to pay for going to Mars. … But if you could go to a tennis shoe company and say your tennis shoes are going to be the first ones going to Mars, and it’s going to cost this much,” these companies, with their huge marketing budgets, could step in and fund research programs that the government isn’t willing to fund.
Doing the Impossible
During the Stratos project, another project turned up that Thompson couldn’t refuse. The Pima Air and Space Museum asked him: Would he build the world’s largest paper airplane?
When he was young, he would use newspaper and coat hangers and build giant paper airplanes. The largest he got was about 5 feet.
Thompson’s parents were science teachers who imparted to him a love of science. His mother, Alice, is pictured here with George, a pet mountain lion, in 1956. (Courtesy of Art Thompson)
This time, the dimensions were only limited by the need to fit the plane onto a semi truck. Built entirely out of paper, it was 45.5 feet long, with a 24-foot wingspan, and required 20 gallons of wood glue to put it together.
As 300 schoolchildren watched, a Sikorsky S-58T helicopter took the plane up to 1,400 feet in the desert, and it was cut loose. It hit 98 miles per hour and flew just short of a mile. For Thompson, the main goal was achieved: to promote STEM education, and “help kids think outside of the box—that anything’s possible.”
“If I could have $1 for every person who told me the Red Bull Stratos was impossible, I’d be a millionaire,” Thompson said. There were physicists screaming at the end, ‘Don’t do it, his arms and legs will tear off.’”
Kittinger calmly responded, “Thank you for your concern, you may want to recheck your calculations.”
There was certainly a lot at stake, and the project team of fewer than 100 people was working hard to solve problems as they arose. Thompson said, “I was told ‘no’ every time I turned around and just found a way around the issue to make it a ‘yes.’ That is the lesson for the next generation. Never take ‘no’ as a final outcome.”
Then there was the unpredictable human factor.
Thompson (R) served as the technical project director for Red Bull Stratos. Joe Kittinger (C) was the primary point of radio contact with jumper Felix Baumgartner during the ascent. (Courtesy of Art Thompson)
After years of testing and development and only weeks before the first manned flight, Baumgartner got cold feet—he was at the airport in Los Angeles and called up Thompson, who rushed to go see him. Baumgartner, as it turned out, had developed severe claustrophobia inside his pressurized space suit. Human factors specialists Andy Walshe and psychologist Michael Gervais were brought in to help Baumgartner, pushing him into various uncomfortable situations and reminding him that he was a superhero and his pressurized suit was specifically designed for him.
Early on, it was decided that Kittinger, the one mission team adviser who understood firsthand what Baumgartner would experience, would communicate with him throughout his journey and talk him through the 47-point checklist before exiting the capsule.
The Space Capsule
Like Kittinger’s gondola traveling into space, the Stratos capsule was tethered to a helium balloon—but 10 times larger. At the size of 30 million cubic feet, it was the largest manned balloon ever flown. The ascent to an altitude of 127,852 feet took about two and a half hours.
Just as he prepared to jump off the ledge of the capsule, Baumgartner said, “I’m coming home now.”
“I know the whole world is watching and I wish the whole world could see what I see. Sometimes you have to go really high up to understand how small you really are.”
Thirty-four seconds after jumping, he hit Mach 1—just under 700 miles per hour. Fifty seconds after jumping, he reached March 1.25, a record speed of 843.6 miles per hour for a freefall. For 30 seconds, Baumgartner was supersonic.
He also set two other world records: the highest balloon flight (superseded by Alan Eustace in 2014) and the highest unassisted freefall. This Red Bull Stratos record is still a standing record, as Eustace’s jump was assisted with the use of a drogue parachute.
On Oct. 14, 2012, Felix Baumgartner made a freefall jump from space. Thirty-four seconds after jumping, he reached a top speed of 844 miles per hour and achieved his goal of being the first person to break the sound barrier without an aircraft. From a height of 127,852 feet in altitude, it took him nine minutes to get back to Earth, half of that time being in freefall. (Courtesy of Art Thompson)
It was just 65 years before, to the day, that Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier piloting the Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis.
Back on Earth, about 9.5 million concurrent viewers were transfixed watching the feat, as 3.1 million tweets pinged across the globe.
In all, it would be viewed by 3 billion people.
It was an unmitigated success for Red Bull, a marketing coup—delivering a big uptick in sales, by 7 percent to $1.6 billion in the United States, and by 13 percent to $5.2 billion globally.
Igniting people’s imagination was certainly one part of the formula, Thompson said. But he also brought to the table a more intangible ability: an ability to connect with and understand people from different backgrounds—scientific, medical, military, aerospace, and yes, even daredevil mindsets.
The Flight Test Museum and the Future
Stratos also made Thompson proud, partly because many kids told him it inspired them to get into engineering. As chair of the Flight Test Museum Foundation, he sees a unique opportunity.
California’s Antelope Valley, also known as Aerospace Valley, is home to many aviation firsts due to the presence of Edwards Air Force Base, the United States Air Force (USAF) Plant 42, and NASA’s Neil A. Armstrong Flight Research Center, as well as companies such as Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Virgin Galactic, and Scaled Composites.
“Some of the most brilliant minds in the world are located [here],” Thompson noted.
He is now overseeing the move of the museum, currently on-base, to a new home—75,000 square feet of space just outside of the base. It’ll house the museum’s rare aircraft, but it will also be a STEM education center, as well as “neutral ground” for industry players, government, and schools to come together to discuss the future and inspire the next generation to want to be part of something greater.
What concerns him is the phenomenon of students being “plugged into the Internet permanently” and being “spoon-fed” set answers like “a stone wheel is the best thing on a car.”
A rendering of the planned building for the Flight Test Museum outside the gates of Edwards Air Force Base in California’s Antelope Valley. Designed by architecture firm Gensler, it resembles the shape of the Nighthawk, a stealth plane built in the 1980s. The museum will hold more than 80 historic aircraft; completion is due in 2024. (Courtesy of Art Thompson)
People want the answer quickly, Thompson said, but they don’t always know why they’re getting it. “We lose some of the creative aspects of invention and inspiration—because they settle for that answer.”
Thompson’s parents, both science teachers, made it a point to expose him to as many interesting things as possible. “One of my best Christmas presents when I was a kid was when my parents got me a stack of lumber with a saw and hammer and nails. I was five or six years old in the backyard and started building pirate ships and forts.”
His inquisitive nature even became somewhat of a liability for his family. “One of the fears was, if they gave me something that I was going to take apart, and if I understood it really well, often, I didn’t bother putting it back together because—why?—I already knew how it worked.”
When he was 13, he bought his first car, an old Karmann Ghia, for $500. He rebuilt the engine and redid the wiring harness—and drove it around without a license.
“Physics is so fascinating, because you see it in everything. And I remember as a kid, when math became a physical shape, all of a sudden, my mind exploded—because math formulas, you know, create not only two-dimensional shapes, but three-dimensional shapes.”
“If you can expose [children] to all the fascinating things in the world, at a really early age, that develops your synapses. All of that activity is making all those neural connections and mapping that make you want to do more and be more.”
It’s why he’s so passionate about the Flight Test Museum. “This becomes a world now that exposes people to what’s possible,” he said. “This is engineering in motion. It’s physics in motion.”
The sun-filled entry of Cathy Kincaid’s
Dallas cottage, a one-story home built during
the post-World War I era. (Miguel Floes-Vianna)
When historical American homes are in need of preservation and an exquisitely traditional makeover, their homeowners have turned to interior designer Cathy Kincaid for over 40 years. She’s played fairy godmother to dozens of charming houses that are full of character, including a 1750s Connecticut ferryman’s cottage on the water, Manhattan penthouses, and a forested East Texas estate. “I think it’s so important to live in something that has history,” Kincaid said. “I think it inspires us … to be interested in the history of the United States, where we live, our cities. And these older homes, they do have a story to tell.”
Many of the storied residences Kincaid has worked on have been featured in the world’s top home magazines and are compiled in her 2019 book, “The Well Adorned Home,” published by Rizzoli. Originally from Fort Worth, Texas, Kincaid attended Texas Christian University before moving to Dallas in the 1970s. There, she worked with local legendary designers before hanging up her own sign in 1978.
In her sweet but serious Texas drawl, she described two superb renovations that are close to her heart.
The farmhouse’s dining room is richly adorned with Kincaid’s signature choice of patterned upholstery. (Tria Giovan)
Texas Charm
The property Kincaid endearingly calls the “East Texas Farmhouse” is a recreation property on one of the largest remaining private lots close to Dallas, with hundreds of acres of forest, a lake, and a guest house. It was built in the mid-20th century by the famous wrestlers, the Von Erich brothers.
Although they made their living wrestling, the Von Erichs made sophisticated choices for their large farmhouse and were delightfully creative as they went about designing the space. Many of the door and window surrounds are made of half-sawn boards, their shapes, whimsically irregular, retaining the outlines of the local trees they came from. It’s a feature Kincaid said she’d never seen anywhere before.
The current homeowners fell in love with the raw lumber ceilings and exposed beams, the staircase with a balustrade of antler-like branches, and other masculine features. Kincaid preserved everything the Von Erichs did right and remodeled the furnishings, wall coverings, fixtures, and the like, taking the interiors from “kitschy” to perfectly elegant and ready to entertain. ”We wanted to create interiors that were comfortable and relaxed, that also exuded youthful style,” Kincaid said. It’s a house in the countryside, after all, so she didn’t want anything to feel “too precious or fancy. But at the same time, we wanted the interiors to reflect the refined style and taste of the homeowners.”
Kincaid preserved the raw lumber ceiling of the farmhouse and paired it with timeless decor for an elegant yet youthful look. (Tria Giovan)
Kincaid’s signature touch is obvious in the stately yet comfortable custom furniture, with rich, often patterned fabrics that are layered unpredictably, beautifully, and delightfully in each well-considered room. She’s brought in timeless decor that looks effortlessly curated, while evoking a nostalgic atmosphere. The hearth is made to look inviting with a mini collection of model tall ships, a Federalist style mirror, a cabinet painted in the antique Dutch style, and many more careful details that don’t draw attention to themselves but lend a deeply American sense of hospitality.
Home, Sweet Home
The lovingly restored house in Highland Park, Texas, that Kincaid currently lives in is a one-story, shingled cottage built in the post-World War I era, “one of the few houses of this style that’s left in this part of Dallas,” she said. She bought it in 2012 and, after restoring and renovating it, moved in two years later. Kincaid described it as a “very American” home. “It’s kind of a surprise. … And when you’re here, you don’t really feel like you’re in the middle of Dallas.” Its architectural features are more in common with a cottage in rural Connecticut than a Texas abode. In addition, it’s set away from the main road, surrounded by foliage that shields it from other properties. Classic topiary and potted orange trees greet guests outside the front door. Its shingled exterior with white trim and architectural details and its gaslight-like exterior light fixtures give off distinctly New England vibes.
She and fellow amateur historians of her neighborhood say it probably started out as a tiny, three-room caretakers’ cottage attached to the estate of one of Dallas’s most influential families. “[It has] gone through different incarnations to where now it’s a family home, and it’s quite desirable. I guess you could call it kind of a success story,” Kincaid said.
Kincaid’s collection of porcelain accentuates the cottage’s New England design. (Miguel Floes-Vianna)The dining room is fitted with simple linen curtains to maximize its floor-to-ceiling windows. (Miguel Floes-Vianna)
Over the years, there were modern renovations: Plaster went onto the walls; less-than-beautiful features were added in the kitchen. Kincaid was passionate about preserving the historical features. Her restoration took it back a little “to where it would have been,” she said. “It’s more in keeping with the year it’s built and more in keeping with the style of the [original] house.” She also gave it some updates to better suit her tastes, and to match her beautiful personal collection of porcelain and paintings. “The ceilings in the living room are not tall. So to cheat the eye and maximize the floor-to-ceiling windows, we used short valances [decorative drapery] and simple, linen curtains. We also added transom windows [small window features that are placed above doorways] between the entry, living room, and dining room to add light.”
Her collection includes a stunning, hand-painted wall covering whose fairy-tale vistas wrap around the dining room. While not antique, it represents a series of important chapters in Kincaid’s life. Years prior, Kincaid bought a home that once belonged to renowned interior designer Nena Claiborne (before she bought the house, Kincaid once worked at a custom lamp shop and would deliver the goods to Claiborne’s residence). Claiborne had hand-painted this wall covering depicting tall ships and maritime scenes in a style popularized in Normandy, France, during the 1700s. It combines rich jewel tones with strong earthy colors and superbly plays the role these wall coverings were designed for: to wow visitors and be an impressive conversation piece.
A hand-painted wall covering by renowned interior designer Nena Claiborne. (Miguel Floes-Vianna)
The wall covering tells a delicious story, but not in the way one may think. One of the men in the scene originally had no head. According to Kincaid, the story goes that he was Claiborne’s ex-husband who cheated on her. She made him headless as penance. About 15 years after Kincaid moved into the house, a fire tore through the upstairs rooms and damaged the dining room where this canvas hung. But Kincaid salvaged the canvas and employed a team of craftsmen and artists to revive the artwork and rehang it in her new Texas home. During the process, it needed some retouching. One of the artists painted the man’s head back on, not knowing it hadn’t been there to begin with. “I walked in and went, oh my gosh, he’s been redeemed!” Kincaid said.
It’s a story that began generations ago, and it hasn’t reached its end. The day before her American Essence interview, Kincaid was blessed with a new grandchild. Only the heavens would know what new stories will be told in this home that’s celebrating its centennial anniversary (approximately) this year.
(Miguel Floes-Vianna)
Kincaid continues to be drawn to gorgeous restorations with stories behind them. She said working on old homes is “a completely different feel. I love working on new properties, too, but it’s fun to go into an old [home], especially one that hasn’t been changed, and see how you bring it up to speed but at the same time retain all of the charm that it has from the years past. Nothing can quite replace something that was done a long time ago.”
There’s a unique character to them, she said. “I love walking into a house and wondering, ‘What’s happened there? Who’s been [there]? Who’s lived there?’”
Hobel’s Native American
heritage has greatly
influenced him. What most
people view as ‘‘survival
skills’’ are simply ancestral
skills in his eyes. (Samira Bouaou)
When disaster strikes, Shane Hobel is the guy you want by your side—or better yet, the guy you want to have taught you how to deal with it.
A former stuntman, bouncer, and motorcycle instructor, Hobel has carved out an interesting route to running Mountain Scout Survival School in upstate New York. Two influences have shaped him since an early age: nature and martial arts. His reverence for nature was instilled by his family and Native American heritage, as well as many elders along the way. He also holds a fifth-degree black belt in traditional Okinawan karate.
He is one of five elite trackers in a nonprofit national tracking team founded by Tom Brown Jr. to find missing persons, including lost children, disoriented hunters, and fugitives. (Once, he tracked down a black panther on the loose in the Palisades, New York.) With no hesitation to crawl and wade through any environment, he’s also the man people hire to look for breaches in their home security; he has also been called on to consult for the U.S. military.
Hobel started teaching survival skills to children in after-school programs, then expanded to adults. Successive waves of interest came from “macho” types, outdoor enthusiasts, survivalists, and families. But the largest growing demographic over the last four or five years has been women.
Hobel considers it his duty to preserve, protect, and pass on the skills he teaches to the next generation. (Samira Bouaou)
Driven by a mama bear instinct, women have grown unsettled by a world that seems anything but predictable, Hobel says, and are taking the initiative on behalf of friends and family. “One woman said, ‘Can you take my husband for 30 days?’” he remembers.
“There’s a quiet desperation of people wanting these skills. They don’t want to be labeled as doomsday preppers or conspiracy theorists—they just know there’s a simple phrase: ‘Being prepared is being responsible.’ Somewhere deep down, there’s a feeling that ‘you can’t expect anybody to come and save you. You just have to take it upon yourself to do these skills,’” he said.
Don’t Panic
It can be easy to feel panic-stricken at the thought of emergency preparedness. But as Hobel points out, those who have adopted a proactive approach toward preparation are already on the way to a healthier mindset.
“If something goes wrong, it’s not going to be a surprise, it’s an anticipated change. … With people who have skills, it becomes just a nice vacation, something that is not so terrifying. It doesn’t have to be extreme survival,” Hobel said.
When it comes to children, it’s especially important that “if something happens, this is not a crisis. This is an exciting adventure.” Be upbeat and positive, and you’ll see that your child is able to keep up with you. “But the moment the child realizes it’s a disaster, they’re not going to give you that energy.”
If you suspect a disaster is about to take place, “Jump in the car, go to Jersey, go to some Airbnb, go have some strawberry shortcake. If nothing happened, you took a day off, good for you. But if something did happen, you’re at an Airbnb with strawberry shortcake and you’re watching the world burn from a distance, but at least you’re smart enough to get out on the first wave.
“So your approach and how you go about it will be the attitude of success. If I start off as a victim, so I will become.”
Hobel shows how to make cordage using a double reverse wrap from found materials. (Samira Bouaou)
Survival Skills Are Ancestral Skills
Under a fall canopy of beeches and maples, Hobel muses about the current state of the world. His reference points: raccoons and squirrels.
In an era of distraction and modern conveniences, it’s easy to become passive, going about life immersed in technology but not necessarily connected to other people. Like raccoons, we are distracted by the newest and shiniest toys and gadgets.
Squirrels, however, think about the future. In the fall, “they’re making provisions now for something that is about to happen. Quite more often than not, they dig up somebody else’s nuts. It’s a symbiotic relationship, but their medicine is thinking forward. And making these provisions is why people are coming here,” he said.
Hobel is hopeful that people are bringing along friends and family. “It’s great support because you can’t do this by yourself.” Going alone would require a very high-level set of skills, he explained.
Mountain Scout Survival School covers typical survival school topics such as shelter, water, fire, and food, but it also teaches tracking, awareness, and movement. (There are legendary tales of men and women who could survive in the wild and move about undetected.)
The outdoor camp at the school shows some of the students’ work: strong lashings to make fishing spears, and tongs (“fancy chopsticks”) to move coals onto short stumps to form drinking cups. As they burn, they create a hollow that can be polished with a river stone. Scale it up and you can imagine how to make a canoe.
“Nature is the great equalizer—fire, cold, hunger, bears—none of those things [care] what your religious status is, your political status, your job title,” Hobel said.
The skills that Hobel feels are his duty to preserve, protect, and pass on are actually not survival skills at their core, but ancestral skills.
Shane Hobel runs Mountain Scout Survival School in Hopewell Junction, N.Y. (Samira Bouaou)
These skills were “extremely sophisticated,” though coming from “what we deem a very primitive time. We are living in a very sophisticated time but we are in fact quite primitive,” Hobel said.
Some Native American prophecies mention a time of upheaval on Earth, marked by food and water shortages, diseases, natural and man-made disasters, and war. After a period of chaos, humanity will find itself in a primitive place again, left to rely on these ancestral skills.
“I do this because I want people to be closer to the earth and live a beautiful, harmonious life. I don’t do this to prepare them for the Armageddon. But they’re empowered just in the event of.”
At his school, people have “a physical space by which they can come, be around the medicine fires, learn these empowering skills.”
Traditional Knowledge
Ultimately, Hobel wants to pass on the knowledge of these ancestral skills to children, explaining, “I want to put this back in the elementary schools and junior high schools, where it belongs.”
Hobel, who works seven days a week, has no shortage of ideas and projects—though not enough help and funding to make it all happen. He also has a nonprofit, Arrows of Honor, for veterans and first responders, that aims to address PTSD. He envisions them coming around the fire, becoming instructors, and then going back to their hometowns to teach children and adults these skills—and be looked up to.
“They have to be returned to ceremony, back to fire, back to being a warrior again … to realize that all of that trauma is not theirs—it was theirs to experience but it’s not theirs to keep or hold on to.”
In the end, it’s a journey of self-discovery.
People come to Hobel’s school thinking they’ll just learn about shelter, water, and food. “But what they realize is, ‘this is a journey to myself’—because it’s you that has to make that fire and shelter. You have to get out of your own way to be successful.”
A backpack can either be conventional (pictured here) or tactical, though the latter might attract more attention. Another alternative is to wear a photographer-style vest with many mesh pockets for your items and wear a coat over it. (Samira Bouaou)
Getting Out of Dodge
Unusual for a survival school, Mountain Scout Survival School, in Hopewell Junction, New York, two hours from Manhattan, teaches both wilderness survival and urban emergency preparedness—a hot topic, given 70 percent of people currently live in urban areas.
“The subject matter is overwhelming,” admits Hobel, who consults for private groups as well. In quaint gatherings in brownstone apartments, small groups come together around food and wine, focused on developing a solid plan to get out safely should a disaster happen.
The skill set required in the city is different from being out in the wilderness. The bottom line is, there is no sustainability in the city; it is wholly dependent on supplies coming in. In case of danger, Hobel advises city dwellers to get out with the first wave of exodus. Though you can stay for a little while, “eventually you’re going to have to go. My suggestion would be to go with the waves and don’t go alone; if you’re a solo operator, you’re just a target. Remember that the most scary individual in the world is a hungry person.”
The topics include communication options and protocols, plans detailing meeting points and how to get there, resources along the way, safety, and the big subject of go-bags—emergency backpacks to take when you leave home.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Hobel saw many companies sell generic, sub-par go-bags. He still urges consumers to be wary and do their research, since these kits aren’t adapted for your personal circumstances.
Go-bags can range from a 24-hour bag designed to get you by with the bare minimum, to the 36- to 72-hour bag (the most common), to what Hobel calls a “sustainability bag,” which can sustain you indefinitely—as long as you have the skills.
You also need to consider the time of year, and know your plan: where you’re going, who’s going with you, how fast or slow you need to go to accommodate the slowest member of your party, and whether you can replenish items along the way. Make sure to have a couple of exit routes in mind, and know how you’re getting to your destination.
Every member of your group of family or friends should have a go-bag, “packed and identical.” Crucially, get out and practice with it.
And learn the skills: If you lose your go-bag, “your skills don’t go in the bag and they stay with you; for example, first aid and CPR—start with that. You can help yourself and then you can help others,” Hobel said.
Henry
David Thoreau, a
poet, essayist, and
philosopher, is best
known for his book
“Walden,” which is a
reflection on living
simply in nature. (Biba Kayewich for American Essence)
“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree.” This living poetry was what led to Henry David Thoreau’s philosophy for life.
By most, Thoreau is considered one of America’s great 19th-century writers, but it would be nearly impossible to read his work without also thinking of him as one of its great 19th-century philosophers. Of his many works, none captures his philosophy as well as his “Walden; or, Life in the Woods.”
Thoreau didn’t simply espouse his philosophy. He lived it.
‘I Wished to Live Deliberately’
Thoreau lived in the northeast part of the country during the early to middle part of the 1800s. His home was in Concord, Massachusetts, but his abode was of his own making—at least, for a period of time. The writer and naturalist explained: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. … I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
He believed there was only one way to accomplish this, and that was to venture far from the people of his town and live in Walden, among woodland hills that surrounded a large pond. Though beautiful, he noted that the scenery was of “a humble scale.” Interestingly, Walden, with its simultaneous beauty and humility, was a reflection of Thoreau’s philosophy. His idea was to live humbly within the beauty that nature presented: the wildlife, the change of seasons, the hardships, the solitude.
His philosophy was an exercise in self-reliance that focused on the three essential elements of food, water, and shelter. Fresh water was readily available to him with the pond’s deep well, except of course when the pond froze in the winter and required that he use his axe and pail and go in search of water. His food was either provided by nature or by his own efforts—gardening, fishing, picking wild berries, hunting small animals—and, as well, infrequent visits to town.
Interior of the replica of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. (Tom Stohlman (CC BY 2.0, CreativeCommons.org/ licenses/by/2.0))
His shelter took more time, but he was supplied with lumber from the woods. He began chopping down trees at the end of March 1845, and by July 4 he had occupied the “palace of his own”—furnished with table and chairs, flooring, and a fireplace all of his own making, and what he viewed as ever-changing transcendent artwork.
“When I see on the one side the inert bank—for the sun acts on one side first—and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me—had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about.”
Poverty as Wealth
There was little doubt that the naturalist writer was different. His transcendentalist views, a movement that originated in New England, caused him to stand out. More than that, however, Thoreau desired to be a man apart. Despite his beliefs about humanity and nature, he, much like most anyone, had questions that only a trial could answer. What could he endure? What were the necessities of life? What was poverty and what was wealth? What was true philosophy and what was true economy?
Thoreau wanted to live well, although not in an economic sense. His view of wealth was concentrated on necessity and simplicity, and even morality.
“Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth,” he boldly stated. “No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.”
He witnessed anxiety in his neighbor (neighbor being a relative term, as most people lived at least a mile from him) whose desire for luxury items, like butter, coffee, and tea, caused discontentment. To Thoreau, his neighbor’s cycle of work-spend-work was so labor-intensive that the results hardly seemed worth the effort.
“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?” he asked. “We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.”
“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”
The Beat of a Different Drum
Thoreau believed that every man should be able to choose his own path, which was what he viewed as the makings of the “true America.” It bothered Thoreau that his neighbor had so little to show for his labor, while he himself labored little and showed nearly the same result. But it did not matter enough to him to force the issue. “Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made,” he wrote.
Thoreau heard a drummer that many, if not most, could not hear. He noted that the problem was that people were listening to the same drummer, and it was the drummer of “public opinion.” And public opinion was often tied to what is new rather than what is valuable.
Thoreau’s reconstructed cabin in Walden Woods in Concord, Mass. (Alizada Studios/ Shutterstock)
“One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels,” he wrote, and then added, “Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”
For Thoreau, espousing a philosophy meant more than empty words; it should be a guide for living. He was a philosopher who lived his philosophy, while some, he believed, simply philosophized. He felt there was something tragic about that, as it not only caused the philosopher to not truly live, but also caused harm to those who were taught such philosophies.
Leaving Walden, and a Challenge
On September 6, 1847, Thoreau left Walden, having spent more than two years living out his philosophy “to live deliberately.” He endured the harsh New England winters and enjoyed its beautiful springs. He discovered what wealth truly was, at least for him. He realized what he could endure and he embraced the peace of solitude. For a transcendentalist, “Walden” was his magnum opus, connecting his spiritual beliefs, his love of nature, and his personal philosophy. It is hard to miss the connection when he recollects his walks through the “laboratory of the Artist.”
Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples … so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood … where the trees … spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla, … and make the beholder forget his home with their beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste.
The work of “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” calls into question our own philosophies. What are they, and do we believe them? And if we believe them, do we live them? The Roman poet Horace famously wrote, “Carpe diem” (“seize the day”); Thoreau’s call is an echo of that. It is a call “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” no matter the situation.
“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names,” Thoreau wrote in the final pages of his great work. “Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours.”
Clockwise from L: Ella,
Jere, Emilee, Malia, Cyan, and
Sasha Gettle. (Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Co./RareSeeds.com)
The Persian melon, a honey-sweet, orange-fleshed variety dating back to its namesake empire and the progenitor of all American cantaloupes, was a standard in American gardens for two centuries, but it is now virtually unseen and in need of rescue. Montana lavender clay corn, with its striking, deep purple kernels, was blended by a Montanan corn breeder who used a Mandan tribe variety that once passed through the hands of Lewis and Clark and Thomas Jefferson. The buena mulata pepper, a chameleon variety that fruits violet and pink, then ripens through orange and brown to a final red, was extremely rare but rescued from obscurity in the 1940s by Horace Pippen, a black veteran and folk artist who traded his seed collection for therapeutic bee stings.
All of them heirlooms; all of them now safely kept and made available to gardeners around the country to grow for a few dollars. This is the world of Jere Gettle.
Heirlooms: The word itself has an emotive effect, something meaningful, something passed down, something belonging to the family. And indeed, many of these are generational family treasures, fruits and vegetables that have been around and passed down for years. For Gettle, they appeal to his “passion of always finding something new and unique, and telling the story about a family, a region, or country where [it] came from,” he said. In 1998, when he was 17 years old, he founded Baker Creek Seed Company as a tiny, one-man purveyor dedicated to finding and sustaining these myriad varieties. Today, with his wife, Emilee, and a staff of more than 100, Gettle manages the largest catalog of heirloom seeds in North America.
The seed company, named for a creek not 1,000 feet off the back door of its public store, occupies 17 acres 5 miles north of Mansfield, Missouri, a town of about 1,200. Yet this year, Baker Creek is mailing out 1.5 million full-color seed catalogs filled with more than 1,000 heirloom plants.
(Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Co./RareSeeds.com)
Humble Roots
Gettle grew up in the Boise Valley, but on the Oregon side of the border—an area of great soil, he pointed out. “Everyone pretty much farmed or gardened at least on some scale,” he said. His paternal grandmother, born in Mexico, lived on the same property, growing the crops she remembered from her childhood; his other grandmother lived 15 miles down the road and raised many varieties of squash. His parents grew and preserved much of their own food. They’d visit cousins “and everyone was basically talking about what they were growing, what was ripe.”
His earliest memories are of the garden, of spending time there with his grandmother, and of sitting nearby as she cooked tamales and other homegrown foods over an old wood stove, while he, curiously, paged through seed catalogs—the way other kids might flip through comics or story books. “It’s kind of how I almost learned to read,” he said. …
Myka Meier defines etiquette as treating everyone with respect. (Courtesy of Myka Meier)
Myka Meier, founder of Beaumont Etiquette and the Plaza Hotel Finishing Program, knows first-hand that knowledge of the codes of etiquette does not come automatically. “If anyone can learn it, I can!” she laughed. Bright-eyed, lively, and smiling, her exquisite poise is familiar to anyone who has watched her short, fun, and informative YouTube videos. Despite having a natural grace that many might consider unattainable, Meier’s humor and openness gives her warmth and makes her relatable—and makes the rules of etiquette seem easy.
She believes that they are! She offers classes through her New York-based international etiquette school; has a YouTube channel providing tips on how to tie a scarf, how to withdraw from toxic relationships, and how to drink tea properly; and has published two books on etiquette, the first of which sold out in 24 hours. Her business is thriving, and people are hungry for more. So, what is she teaching, and how is she teaching it, that makes something apparently so old-fashioned seem relevant, meaningful, and necessary?
Etiquette is for Everyone
The word “etiquette” can seem intimidating, stuffy, old-fashioned, and overbearing. And yet, in the West, we look to certain figures with pride and perhaps even reverence for their poise, control, and perfect grace. Princess Diana, bending sweetly to take the hand of a child in India; slender Kate Middleton, seated with her legs slanted off to the side. If we love to observe these people, then perhaps we do not find grace, poise, and good manners so stuffy after all. Do we, in fact, wish to be more like them ourselves?
(Courtesy of Myka Meier)
Meier’s approach to etiquette is the opposite of stuffy and overbearing. With her wide smile, she laughed and told anecdotes of social blunders she has made. She referenced pop culture and celebrities to keep her content up-to-date. She gave classes fun names, like “The Duchess Effect.” But more importantly, she has an underlying guiding philosophy that people are keen to hear.
For Meier, at the heart of good manners, poise, and grace is compassion and respect for others. Yes, you might be impressive at your next job interview, but what you’re really signaling with your polish is kindness, care, and consideration for the people around you. She said, “You’re doing what is the most respectful, kind, and considerate thing in that moment—it’s about emotional intelligence.”
It was emotional intelligence that made Meier want to learn more about etiquette. She was living in London, the only American working in a British company, and she realized there was a kind of unspoken code of behavior that was foreign and mysterious to her. In a desire to feel more comfortable and avoid social gaffes that created awkward situations, she took her first etiquette class. “I must have made every mistake in the book,” she laughed.
She was astonished at how much more confident she felt after taking etiquette classes, and she noticed how, once she stopped feeling so shy and anxious in social situations, other people around her seemed more at ease as well. One of her teachers had been Princess Diana’s aide, “and she taught me all the things that she taught Diana, and I thought, wait a second, here I am, just a middle-class American practicing something that I thought you had to be a princess to learn.”
(Courtesy of Myka Meier)
Once she saw that etiquette was something anyone could learn, and that it was fun and transformative, she started holding fun cocktail parties for her girlfriends and teaching them tips. And word spread. “Soon enough,” she recalled, “we would have massive dinner parties where I was teaching everybody over dinner the correct formal etiquette. I thought you had to be born with it. But I realized that etiquette is just about kindness, and showing respect and consideration. Anyone can learn this.”
She started Beaumont Etiquette in London first, and in 2014, she opened an office in New York. In 2016, she partnered with the iconic Plaza Hotel in New York, and the Plaza Hotel Finishing Program was born. “I love doing this,” she said. “I teach confidence through etiquette.”
For etiquette classes to be appealing in America, she said, they have to be relevant, approachable, and relatable. She started her classes by creating a judgment-free zone where people can ask her anything. She told her classes to forget everything they think they know about etiquette: “I want to retrain everyone in here to think about this social skill set in a new way.”
How Etiquette Works
The word “etiquette” comes from the French royal courts of the 17th and 18th centuries. When Louis XIV’s gardener realized that aristocrats were trampling his gardens, he put up signs, “etiquets,” to tell people to keep off the grass. Later, the idea expanded to social events, where the signs told people where they should not stand or what they should not touch. “So,” Meier explained, “historically, it was about showing respect in a social environment. Now, fast forward to today. Really, it’s the same. It’s about showing someone through your actions, and your interactions, and your words, that you are there in a peaceful and friendly spirit, and that you want to do what will make them feel most comfortable.”
Etiquette lessons with Meier’s team are available both in person and online. (Courtesy of Myka Meier)
Meier’s approach teaches people techniques that they can put into practice immediately and use every day. “There’s no point in teaching a skill set that you use once a year,” she said. Her classes offer people real-life tips that can change the way they interact with people and their environment immediately.
For example, she teaches the “WWHC” formula for starting a conversation anywhere with anyone. First, ask a question beginning with “what.” Follow with a question beginning with “why,” and then one starting with “how.” Give the person you are talking to a break from questions by following up with a compliment. This shows how closely you’ve been listening to their answers and how appreciative you are of what they said. By this time, conversation should be flowing nicely, and you’ve put the other person at ease.
Similarly, making an effort to dress nicely when you are meeting someone not only makes you feel good and well put together, but it also shows the other person that you put thought and care into your appearance. Dressing nicely can be as simple as wearing an ironed shirt, tying a bright scarf around your neck, or slipping on high heels.
“Please just relax, have fun,” Meier said. “This is a judgment-free zone, you can ask me anything.” Within the first five minutes of her classes, she takes the intimidation factor out of etiquette lessons by getting people laughing: “I usually crack some kind of joke to make people feel comfortable or give an awkward story or scenario that happened to me, just to make them say, ‘Oh, okay, she’s normal.’” In human interactions, it is normal to want to set others at ease, and following the rules of etiquette is the way to do it.
All of the vegetables
Harris and her family eat
are harvested from their
property’s expansive garden. (James Acomb)
About an hour outside Montgomery, Alabama, there are seven acres of green fields, carefully grafted fruit trees, a garden, and natural woodland. Here, deer, elk, squirrels, rabbits, quail, ducks, wild turkeys, and doves live and forage, eating the acorns dropped by the oaks, grazing freely in the fields, and enjoying the fruit from the trees. This woodland, these fields and trees, are especially for them. The people who own this land deliberately cultivate it so that the wild animals can live healthy lives here, as they firmly believe that “we all can share.”
Stacy Lyn Harris and her family steward this land. They live about 45 minutes away, on an acre of land 10 minutes outside Montgomery, and they visit their wildlife sanctuary every weekend. All the meat they eat comes from their own hunting and fishing on their property, and all their vegetables come from their gardens grown near their house. They also raise chickens, and for a while they kept bees.
For Harris, her husband, Scott, and their seven children, “our sustainable lifestyle is about stewardship,” she said. Guided by her faith, her goal is to live in harmony with nature and without fear, she said, because she knows “we could survive.”
Now, Harris is an expert in her field, speaking about her approach to living off the land at homesteading conferences and on podcasts and interviews, as well as hosting “The Sporting Chef” show on the Sportsman Channel, which she has appeared on for the last 10 years. She’s written best-selling books on sustainable living and cookbooks on how to make venison delicious; her latest is a book about homeschooling, set to be published this year. In all, she estimates she has reached more than half a million people through her books and blog, and more through the show.
At the beginning of her journey, however, “it was kind of an accidental sustainable lifestyle,” Harris recalled. Her husband’s passion for hunting was the unlikely gateway.
Stacy Lyn Harris prepares to carry a rack of ribs from a wild pig into her smokehouse, at her family home outside of Montgomery, Ala.(Graylyn Harris)
An Unexpected Path
Harris grew up in Montgomery with her mom and step-dad, and they “went to the store for everything,” she said. She had something of an antagonistic relationship with hunting when she was younger: “My dad lived in the country and he hunted and fished, but I didn’t spend a ton of time with him. He was never there when I went to visit, and I had this aversion to hunting.”
During college, however, she met Scott. “I married this guy who is the biggest hunter you ever met in your life,” Harris said. “When we were dating, he would go out every single day of the hunting season, and he would do that now if he could.” In their early marriage, they struggled because “I felt in competition with the hunting,” she said. Eventually, “I felt a tug in my heart going, ‘You know what, you can choose to be happy here and get on board, or not.’” So, Harris said, “I did.”
She quickly discovered “why women weren’t involved in this at all.” It was because, she said, “they didn’t like the meat. They didn’t know how to cook it, and there weren’t any beautiful cookbooks.” Overcooked wild game, she noted, tastes horrible.
Harris gave herself three months to learn how to cook the meat well. “If I’m going to eat something, it has to be really good,” she explained. She went to antique cookbooks and recipes from times when people “had to deal with their old roosters, their hens who weren’t laying anymore, tough wild turkeys, grass-fed beef.” She learned the old techniques for handling meat that doesn’t have a lot of fat—such as braising, which cooks tough meat long and slow, allowing the fibers to relax—and marveled at how good it could taste. Eager to share her knowledge, she wrote her first cookbook, “Tracking the Outdoors In,” published in 2012.
From there, their path forward seemed to naturally unfold. “Scott hunted and we had all this great meat. Then we said, ‘Why don’t we start a garden and have vegetables, too?’” Next, they added chickens to the plan. “We didn’t talk about it a whole lot,” she said. “I thought Scott was just doing projects with the kids, building chicken tractors,” perhaps as part of their homeschooling, but one morning at 6 a.m., she got a call from the post office, and “They had chirping birds for me!”
And so it went. They now have about 50 chickens—when they aren’t being raided by coyotes—“and then we started bees, and we made a bigger garden, and we started grafting fruit trees, and we saved our seeds,” Harris said. The family has a well for water, hunts from their land, fishes from their ponds, and gathers vegetables from their gardens.
Educating and Empowering Others
Now very passionate about hunting, Harris explained that “hunters are such conservationists. They’re seeing how to manage the wildlife so they don’t get overpopulated or underpopulated, and they’re out there seeing the diseases so we can keep our wildlife healthy.” Hunting is also economically feasible for a family—“one deer will get you through about 40 meals,” Harris said. As part of the homesteading movement, she occasionally speaks at conferences to educate people about sustainably incorporating hunting and fishing into their lives—“and I teach them how to cook it to make it really good.”
After hunting, gardening was a natural next step in Harris’s journey into a sustainable lifestyle. (Graylyn Harris)
Harris is proudest that she and Scott have “taught our children that they can survive, they can make it, and they are able to do it, all of it—the hunting, the cooking, the gardening,” she said. By homeschooling her children, she’s been able to build education into their way of life, so that they learn for learning’s sake. “They may never need it, they may never have to be self-sustaining, but because they can be, they’re going to take bigger risks in life. They can walk through life without fear.
“That, to me, is the most important thing,” Harris said. “If you think, ‘I’m afraid I will lose everything if I do that,’ you will never live to your fullest potential.”
To others looking to become more self-reliant, Harris’s advice is to gain knowledge and experience in “fun and normal circumstances to see if you can do it—and most people can,” she said. “You need salt for curing, a water source, knowledge to build a fire, and some basic cooking tools,” she said. “That’s a skillet, seasoning, twine, a good knife, and a cooking board. You can feed the world with that.” Her long-term goal is “just to reach as many people as I can,” she said, “and to encourage them in their walks of life.”
Living a Life of Joy
Harris wakes up each day with more tasks on the agenda than she can possibly get done. But by praying every morning, she tries to follow the path that God sets before her.
Over the years, she’s realized that “sometimes you have to do the big stuff and let everything else go,” she said. She keeps a list of her priorities in order: “God, husband, kids, home, extended family, church and community, emails, notes, business.” Every day she considers what needs her attention, and her list helps keep what’s most important at the forefront. Since she keeps family first, even their interruptions come before her other tasks, and she raised her kids to know that they can go to her at any time with anything to say.
She feels grounded by how well they have turned out: “They’re seeking God, they’re doing things together, they’re movers and shakers,” she said. “I think walking in joy every day, choosing to walk in joy, helps that. [It] helps your children to want what you have.
“If I start feeling anxious or short-tempered, then I know I’m not going in the right direction, I’m not doing what I should be doing because I should be able to do it in peace,” she said. “My calm is a peace inside. If I can’t laugh, then something’s wrong.” For Harris, life is a journey that she chooses to walk in joy and in harmony with the world she shares.
In 1962, our young, charismatic president John F. Kennedy was entertaining the year’s Nobel Prize winners at the White House. He said of the group, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” It is a great statement, to be sure.
Feasts of Wisdom
The journals of Margaret Bayard Smith tell us some interesting details about her visits to the “President’s House,” where she and her husband actually dined with Thomas Jefferson, our country’s third president. Margaret Smith came to Washington as a young bride in 1800. Her husband was a newspaperman and a strong supporter of Jefferson’s bid for the presidency. The Smiths and Jefferson frequently entertained each other. Unfortunately, Jefferson’s wife, Martha, had died years earlier in 1782.
The President’s House, far from being the stately edifice we know today, was a work in progress. Jefferson’s personal quarters were furnished as befit a man of his many interests. Smith writes; “The apartment in which he took most interest was his cabinet; this he had arranged according to his own taste and convenience. It was a spacious room. In the centre was a long table, with drawers on each side, in which were deposited not only articles appropriate to the place, but a set of carpenter’s tools in one and small garden implements in another from the use of which he derived much amusement. Around the walls were maps, globes, charts, books, etc.” This collection is reminiscent of Jefferson’s personal effects at Monticello. He placed such importance on reading that he would often greet his guests while putting down a book, both at the President’s House and back home in Monticello.
Jefferson had no long, rectangular tables where guests would sit in long rows, awkwardly conversing with those assigned within earshot. Instead, Jefferson introduced a round table and limited the number of guests to around 14. He preferred to be addressed as “Mr. Jefferson,” not “Mr. President.” The man truly enjoyed lively discussion, and this arrangement assured that no one was left out of it.
Far from reveling in his own words, Jefferson surrounded himself with a rich feast of wisdom, made all the more enjoyable by the implementation of intimacy and courtesy. His guests tended to be interesting people such as Alexander von Humbolt, the great Prussian naturalist and baron. Jefferson loved to mix such intellectuals with the important people of government whom he might have felt compelled to entertain. Smith certainly gives the impression that these were rich events to be savored rather than social obligations to be endured. She notes:
“Guests were generally selected in reference to their tastes, habits and suitability in all respects, which attention had a wonderful effect in making his parties more agreeable, than dinner parties usually are; this limited number prevented the company’s forming little knots and carrying on in undertones separate conversations, a custom so common and almost unavoidable in a large party. At Mr. Jefferson’s table the conversation was general; every guest was entertained and interested in whatever topic was discussed.”
Smith describes the fare as a mixture of “republican simplicity … united to Epicurean delicacy.” His guests loved it. Southern staples such as black-eyed peas and turnip greens shared the stage with delicacies prepared by Honoré Julien, the president’s French chef. We know that Jefferson loved and served fine wine, as well as macaroni and cheese created from his own recipe.
Lively Affairs
Jefferson was a man who never stopped learning, and these dinners were certainly an extension of that fact. His favorite parties were those limited to four. To keep the conversation flowing, Mr. Jefferson brought his inventiveness to the room’s design: He installed dumbwaiters and placed revolving shelves in the walls so that the distraction of serving dishes and clearing the table, typically accompanied by servants and the opening and closing of doors, was minimized.
That’s not to say there were no distractions, however. There was Jefferson’s pet bird, which “would alight on his table and regale him with its sweetest notes, or perch on his shoulder and take its food from his lips. … How he loved this bird!”
After dinner, guests might stretch their legs with a visit to the house gardens. Since Congress refused to appropriate money for improving the grounds, Jefferson did so at his own expense. It, too, was a work in progress. Jefferson, who planted European grapes at Monticello, did not do so at the President’s House. He chose instead to display flora and fauna native to America. For several months, guests could see two live grizzly bear cubsthat Captain Zebulon Pike had acquired during his expedition along the Arkansas River.
Egalitarian dining, surrounded by the wonders that Jefferson collected, inevitably led to a convivial discussion. Here, ideas that shaped the course of a young nation would find lively expression.
