Another amazing bgsu blog
Posts tagged BGSU
Taking a closer look at a fluid difference
By Max Filby
FROM PLANT TO TAP
For Chad Johnson, water is typically his only company while on the job.
As Johnson makes his hourly rounds, the smell of chlorine and other chemicals is as constant as the sound of rushing water in each sector of the Bowling Green Water Treatment Plant on West River Road.
Johnson, a life-long Bowling Green resident is also the superintendent of the plant where he’s worked for the past 20 years.
During his time at the plant, Johnson has worked to keep up with the “extremely strict” standards of the Environmental Protection Agency, he said. While Johnson is focusing on certain EPA standards, his competitors in the bottled water industry are obeying a different set of standards by the Food and Drug Administration.
“You never know what you’re getting in one of those bottles,” Johnson said. “I don’t really see any sense in it.”
Bowling Green water is free of any contaminant violations in all categories including ones testing for traces of lead and chloroform, according to a 2010 water quality report. The plant has actually been violation free since 2003, Johnson said.
“It’s something we’re really proud of, just to be able to say that,” he said.
After being violation free for so many years, Johnson continues to root for tap water of a bottled alternative. Johnson carries a reusable water bottle as he prepares to start his rounds again.
Instead of not knowing what he’s drinking, Johnson prefers his reusable bottle because he knows what it contains.
“Purity.”
MAKING AN IMPACT
Johnson may work closely with what Bowling Green citizens are drinking, but a student group on campus is working toward a similar goal in a different way.
Every Tuesday night at 9 p.m. Gabriel Morgan leads a meeting for an organization called Net Impact in the creativity lab of the Business Administration Building on the campus of Bowling Green State University.
Net Impact has been around for a little over a year now and focuses on a World Water Week project to educate students on the healthiness of tap water and the wastefulness of bottled water in what Morgan refers to as a “global water crisis.”
“Drinking tap water is all around safer and it reduces waste, which is becoming a big issue,” Morgan said. “It falls into that first category of ‘the three R’s.’
Reduce, reuse and recycle is one aspect Morgan and his group of “social and environmental change-makers” emphasize while educating students with “dirty water bottles.”
In continuing its World Water Week project, group members like Alexandra Ordway are still trying to figure out how to make students understand that the convenience of water bottles doesn’t outweigh its lower standards, she said..
“I think it’s kind of unnecessary,” Ordway said. “I understand the whole convenience thing, but it gives people the false sense that what they’re drinking is sanitary.”
BOTTLING THE “BETTER OPTION”
While Johnson and the members of Net Impact are trying to bottom out the bottled water industry, a group of people in Virginia are trying to do just the opposite.
The International Bottled Water Association promotes itself as the “voice of the bottled water industry,” said Chris Hogan, IBWA vice president of communications.
“Drinking water is an excellent option when you are looking to stay hydrated, but we do promote what we think is the better option out there,” Hogan said, referring to bottled water.
IBWA and Hogan’s beloved bottled water is quickly becoming the second most popular beverage, right after soft drinks, according to the FDA’s website.
Although the tap water Johnson cares for is regulated by the EPA, the FDA regulates bottled water as a food item, putting it in the same category as a soft drink, according to the FDA’s website.
Despite talk of bottled falling short of standards similar to those of tap water, Hogan said that bottled water is held to a different set of standards that are still strict, even though they may not come from the EPA.
“That’s something we hear people talk about a lot,” Hogan said. “But, in some cases some standards for bottled water don’t exist for tap water.”
Hogan is referring to standards including certain traces of elements within bottled water, he said.
“It always seems if someone has a beef with bottled water, they’ll pull out the most inconveniently priced bottle of water from a hotel and compare it to tap water,” Hogan said. “The fact is that they’re two different things, they’re incomparable.”
BATTLING THE BOTTLE
At the water plant where Johnson works, him and his team of operators are working to continue bringing Bowling Green’s water qualities above or at the level of the bottles Hogan and the IBWA boast about.
In its battle against the bottle, the plant utilizes several large tanks of chemicals and machinery to get the city’s water up to one of the highest levels of quality in Ohio, Johnson said.
As Johnson continues on another one of his hourly rounds, he checks the filtration and disinfection systems, some of which date back to when the plant first opened in 1951.
Johnson credit’s Bowling Green’s high water quality to the latest technology installed in the plant in 2009.
“The newest equipment has been a big help,” Johnson said as he pointed to a small monitor attached to a series of tanks. “It’s taken the level of toxins in our water down to less than .03 percent.”
The improved treatment is just something Johnson associates as part of the everyday job of meeting EPA standards before pumping out between 3 million and 7 million gallons a day.
“The EPA is extremely strict, we’ve got all kinds of chemical testing and other requirements we have to meet and we do meet all of them,” Johnson said.
After taking care of Bowling Green’s water supply for 20 years, Johnson believes people just don’t know about the plant’s improvements in quality to what flows from each faucet.
“I don’t think that people understand,” Johnson said. “The water quality is extremely high here. It’s just fine.”
Reduce, Reuse, Rethink
13 years
by Kelsey Klein
in Water
By Kelsey Klein
Quick: what’s the most recent thing you’ve done for the environment? Chances are, you just thought that time two days ago when you tossed a plastic bottle or piece of paper into a recycling bin on your way out of class or after you were done eating. Recycling is incredibly visible at Bowling Green State University, so this isn’t surprising, but is recycling really the best thing BGSU can do to cut down on waste?
Recycling at BGSU started in the 1980s with a push from a few students in the environmental studies department, according to Gary Silverman, chair of the Department of the Environment and Sustainability at BGSU. These students recognized that recycling programs on BGSU’s campus could not only help the environment, but they could also save the university money.
Institutions must pay to leave waste at landfills. BGSU’s relationship with the Wood County Landfill is no exception. When materials are collected for recycling, less waste goes to the landfill, resulting in lower deposit fees for BGSU. As an added bonus, companies who break down and use BGSU’s recycled materials bay the university for its recycling. The university agreed to funnel some saved money from recycling back into the student run operation, and BGSU’s recycling program was born.
Today, BGSU’s recycling program is alive and well, with recycling bins in every campus building, according to Nicholas Hennessy, sustainability coordinator at BGSU. The university receives $100,00-$130,000 annually for recycling, Hennessy said.
Many buildings, such as residence halls, have multiple bins: for paper, plastic, and aluminum. One material is missing, though— glass.
Silverman explained recycling is driven by market factors—what materials are being used at the current time. At this time there is not a market for glass, leading BGSU to abandon glass recycling because the material is heavy and hard to manage, he said.
Hennessy disagreed with Silverman when asked about the recycled glass market. “I think that there is a demand for glass,” he said. “It’s just a matter of financials.”
Those financials include the high cost of transporting the heavy material in relation to the monetary value of the material. Administration at BGSU has not institutionalized glass recycling because the university would lose money, according to Hennessy.
Groups of students, however, are taking matters into their own hands. Volunteer students currently collect and take glass to the Bowling Green City Recycling Center, according to Hennessy, but this situation is not ideal. The volunteer system sometimes results in unfortunate situations, such as a story Hennessy told where he saw a group of students wheeling a recycling bin down the street in the rain. Because the volunteer system is not ideal, there is student movement to re-institute glass recycling at BGSU.
Janelle Horstman, who is leading a glass recycling effort through the BGSU student environmental group Net Impact, says she is working on finding glass recycling options that are cost efficient for the university. While the university is paid for recycled materials, BGSU can lose money from having to transport heavy glass to recycling sites, Horstman said. Institutionalization of glass recycling will require working out financial problems with the potential program.
Brooke Mason discusses glass recycling in the Kreischer-Batchelder lobby. Photo by Kelsey Klein
Brooke Mason, Sustainability Chair for Net Impact, spoke about the importance of options other than recycling. “Recycling is the last R and I would promote reducing what you use and reusing it before recycling,” she said. Recycling a glass bottle is better than throwing it away, she said, but it would be even better to use a reusable container instead of individual bottles or reuse the glass bottle.
Hennessy believes the three “Rs”—reduce, reuse, recycle –are “in order of importance” as well. Reduction of waste is much better than creating waste that is then recycled, although recycling is better than waste ending up in a landfill, he said.
Silverman used a stapler to illustrate the same point. If a stapler breaks, what can be done with the materials? “Where did that metal come from,” Silverman said. “We had to mine it, we had to refine it, we had to use a lot of energy to manufacture it and now all these resources are in the trash. If we should recycle it, that’s better because at least we could recover the metal. If we could fix it and use it again, better yet.”
BGSU’s reStore is aimed at just that—reusing products. At the reStore, students can trade for things they need instead of buying new items. A shirt could be turned into a book. Shoes could become a DVD. A desk lamp could be traded for a backpack.
Hennessy developed the concept for the reStore after he saw the program at a few other universities. He was intrigued by the idea and enlisted the help of two BGSU students to make the reStore a reality. The reStore is located on the Kreischer Compton-Darrow side of the SunDial dining hall on campus.
The current intern with the reStore, Andrew Myers, pointed out how the reStore involves all three “Rs.” It reduces consumption because it encourages students to trade for used goods instead of buying new goods, it helps students reuse products that other students no longer want or need, and it contributes to recycling through students’ donations to the store, Myers said.
While BGSU is making steps in waste reduction like the reStore, Silverman and Hennessy both believe the university should be doing more to reduce its waste footprint.
“An institution has to decide what its role should be as a citizen,” Silverman said. “An institution can be a good citizen or it can be a not-good citizen. A not-good citizen is consumptive.”
Efforts to stem consumption can begin with university programs, or they can begin with students, but Hennessy believes sharing information about reduction is vital.
“It’s little by little,” he said. “One student learns about reuse and starts spreading the concept to a roommate, a friend… it spreads from person to person, one step at a time.”
The future of vehicles has arrived
13 years
by Sarah Bailey
in Water
Electric car charging stations bring a new source of energy to Bowling Green
By Sarah Bailey
Bowling Green residents and BGSU students may notice people plugging their cars into a different source of energy: electric car charging stations.
Three of these small, futuristic-looking stations have been placed in various areas throughout the city. The stations offer a source of power that has been historically controversial and recently debated.
Electric car charging stations like this one, placed in city Lot 2, can be found throughout the city. Three more stations will be installed on BGSU's campus by fall 2012. Photo by Sarah Bailey.
At the turn of the 20th century, the amount of electric vehicles on the road was more than gasoline-powered ones. In the early 1900’s, there were about 50,000 electric vehicles in the United States. Over time, the use of electric vehicles decreased as the development of gasoline became less-expensive and the electric starter took the place of the crank in gasoline-powered cars, according to a report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
While the climate continues to change and the amount of emissions into our atmosphere becomes a growing concern, many have turned back to electric vehicles as an opportunity and an advancing green energy.
While many cars on the road today are primarily gasoline-powered, worldwide adoption of electric vehicles and hybrids are expected to grow quickly within the next couple of years, with sales up to 3.2 million vehicles from 2010 to 2015, according to a report from Pike Research.
Some people have started to charge their electric vehicles at these charging stations. The stations provide a source of electricity that can charge batteries in both electric cars and hybrids, according to Nicholas Hennessy, sustainability coordinator at BGSU.
Three electric car charging stations, located in Lot 1 off of East Court Street, Lot 2 off of South Prospect and Lot 3 off of South Church Street, have been installed and are ready to use, according to Brian O’Connell, utilities director for the city of Bowling Green.
View Electric Car Charging Stations in Bowling Green in a larger map
Three more stations will be placed on BGSU’s campus in the welcome center lot, the lot across from the union, and in Lot 8 by Falcon Heights within the next few months. The grant application to install the charging stations was approved in January. The university is currently waiting for the installation process to begin, and the stations are expected to be in place by the fall 2012 school year, Hennessy said.
When owners of electric vehicles’ batteries run low, they will be able to hook their cars up to these charging stations. The stations are similar to gas pumps. A customer can take the pump and plug it into the side of his or her car and electricity will flow into the car’s batteries, Hennessy said.
A BGSU student shows how the plug is removed from it's position on the charging station. Photo by Sarah Bailey.
“It’s really the same type of concept as you would charge an iPod or a cell phone, except that it’s a car instead,” he said.
The time to charge an electric vehicle can vary depending on the vehicle and how big the battery is. The charging stations on campus and in the city will take a vehicle a couple of hours to be fully charged.
The city and the university will not be charging people to use the stations at first. The only price customers will have to pay is for the meter while their car is charging, Hennessy said.
O’Connell, the city’s utilities director, said he was approached by Anthony Palumbo, head of the university’s Electric Vehicle Institute, who informed him that the grant was available.
From there, the university and the city came together in order to get the charging stations. Each charging station, made by General Electric, cost $2,500, added up to a total of $15,000 for the city and the university combined, said Hennessy, who administered the grant process.
“We applied for the grant because we felt like we had an obligation to make more charging stations available to try and perpetuate the purchase of electric vehicles,” he said.
Clean Fuels Ohio, an organization that distributes money from the U.S. Department of Energy for green projects, funded $7,500: half of the money involved in the project. That left $7,500 for both the city and the university to come up with individually.
For the university, the Student Green Initiative Fund paid for the portion that wasn’t paid for by Clean Fuels Ohio. The fund is a pool of money that students have paid for in their student fees to support many of the university’s green projects. The fee is an optional $5 per semester, and many students agree to pay it, Hennessy said.
The city paid for the other half of their funds through Eco Smart Choice Program, a fund that provides a volunteer rate that customers can pay towards renewable energy or sustainability projects, O’Connell said.
Electric car technology is a cleaner energy than using fossil fuels, yet it all depends on where the source of the energy is coming from, Hennessy said.
“If your electricity is coming from a coal-powered power plant, then fossil fuels are still being used,” Hennessy said. “You are still connected to burning coal because the factory is.”
Hennessy explained that this is different from purely “green” energy that does not harm the atmosphere, such as electricity produced purely from windmills outside of Bowling Green. In reality, most of the energy produced in Bowling Green is connected to coal in some way, he said.
“Even so, it is better than using straight-up gasoline, which is 100 percent from a non-renewable source: oil,” Hennessy said.
Another concern is that even though the cost for electric vehicle technology is going down, it is still enough to remain a major factor in holding back the advancement of this technology, Hennessy said.
“Even though you have these cars on the market, the cost is still considered pretty high,” Hennessy said.
O’Connell and Hennessy both agreed that the price of the electric vehicles will be an issue that car manufacturers will have to face.
Thayer Nissan, part of the Thayer Family Dealerships in Bowling Green, has one of the only mass-produced fully electric vehicles on the market: the Nissan Leaf.
“Once it catches on, I believe people will see this as a good vehicle,” said Eric Walker, sales manager at Thayer Nissan. “It’s a great commuter vehicle.”
The Nissan Leaf is the only fully electric vehicle that Nissan sells currently, according to Walker. Nissan recently came out with this vehicle for mass production and it was initially sold on the east and the west coast before it became available in the Midwest.
“It’s not going to be a vehicle that you can take across the country, but for daily use it’s much more efficient than a gas vehicle,” Walker said.
There have only been a few of the vehicles sold in the Midwest region, and the dealership in Bowling Green has not yet sold any, despite the vehicle being available since January, Walker said.
Even though the vehicles have been on the market, people in the Bowling Green community haven’t had the
Customers can park their cars for up to eight hours in designated parking spots throughout the city. They do not have to pay to charge their vehicles, but they do have to pay the meter. Photo by Sarah Bailey.
opportunity to get into this type of technology yet because of the way the ordering process works, he said.
The ordering process for a Nissan Leaf is done online. Customers can make an account online, send out a quote to dealers, and once their quote is accepted the process is moved forward through the dealership. The process takes about three to four months, he said.
“We have one vehicle here at the dealership that can be used as a demo for customers to come in and see,” Walker said.
The electric car charging stations will help people in the outer areas of the community be attracted to purchase electric cars, he said.
One of the other major concerns surrounding electric vehicles is the distance the car can go on one charge.
Today’s purely battery-powered vehicles don’t provide the same distance as a gasoline-powered vehicle. Currently, an electric vehicle’s driving range is anywhere from 50 to 130 miles, depending on factors such as the vehicle’s weight, type of batteries and design, according to the same report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
“People may want to go further than that and they may become trapped or not able to find a charging station,” Hennessy said.
One of the requirements of getting the grant was the electric vehicle charging stations had to be made available to the entire state, not just the people in Bowling Green or at BGSU, he said.
“If there is someone from Toledo, Findlay or any other city who wants to charge their cars, they can do so here,” O’Connell said.
O’Connell explained that the city plans to monitor the free consumption of the electricity for about a year. The parking meters the city has put in place will allow around an eight-hour parking limit, compared to the other meters that have a two-hour limit. Once the amount of consumption is figured out, plans can be made as to whether a fee will be given to use the stations.
“We computed it out and if a car were to charge for an hour it would consume less than 50 cents worth of energy,” he said.
Another factor the city considered when deciding on the stations was the rising amount of hybrid and electric vehicles on the streets, O’Connell said.
By the year 2017, it is forecasted that more than 1.5 million electric charging locations will be available in the United States. About 7.7 million locations are expected to be available worldwide, according to a report by Pike Research
For every 10,000 drivers who operate gas-powered cars that would switch to electric, CO2 emissions would be decreased by 33,000 metric tons a year. This is the same as the yearly CO2 emissions of 6,500 cars on road in the United States, according to General Electric’s website.
In other words, if this technology replaces gasoline-powered vehicles, General Electric thinks the atmosphere would be thanking us.
“If you want people to use these types of cars in the community, you have to give them a source to plug into,” O’Connell said.
A blooming problem in Lake Erie
13 years
by Stephan Reed
in Water
By Stephan Reed
During summer 2011, Robert Michael McKay, director of Bowling Green State University’s marine program, set sail on a research vessel on Lake Erie. The combination of no air conditioning and the July heat on the lake became unbearable, so McKay and his research team announced a swim call to cool off. Before jumping in, however, McKay noticed they were floating atop a large cloud of algae, full of the cyanobacteria microcystin.
This toxin irritates the skin, damages the liver, reduces oxygen levels in lake water, causes an unpleasant odor in drinking water and kills fish, according to a 2012 report from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.
Clouds of algae are appearing earlier than previous years and in greater abundances. Algae blooms contain the cyanobacteria microcystin which is toxic to humans, livestock and pets. Photo provided.
Officials at the Ohio EPA are pushing for legislation that would advance the filtering systems in water treatment plants, especially when it comes to the harmful algae.
“There is a high concentration [of microcystin] in the water that comes into the plant, but a very low amount that comes out,” said Heather Raymond, the head of the harmful algal bloom task force for the Ohio EPA.
There are no mandated regulations concerning the toxin in drinking water, but the Ohio EPA has set in place unofficial regulations to help keep algae out of it, Raymond said.
“Everything we are doing is considered above and beyond the [federal Safe Drinking Water Act],” Raymond said. “These are unregulated toxins, but there’s enough data out there telling of the risk to human health. California came out with a threshold draft about Microcystin in water and it’s way below what Ohio’s is. We need consistency in our benchmark levels.”
McKay, while on his research expedition, realized these blooms were not only much larger than last year’s blooms, but they also arrived a few months early.
Blooms containing microcystis have always been in Lake Erie, but recently these toxic algae clouds have become more invasive than previous years, McKay said. This poses a potential threat to humans, pets, livestock and the Lake Erie tourism and recreation industry.
Despite the risks, McKay’s group had no choice but to dive into the harmful waters to avoid overheating.
“We eventually went swimming, but had to make sure we didn’t swallow any water,” McKay said. “It was the best of two really bad situations.”
The mass consumption of microcystis at one time can have a serious effect on the human body.
“If you took a big glass of the scum and drank it down,” McKay said, “you would probably have hemorrhaging in your liver. Your liver is basically a mass of cells and you have sinuses that carry blood throughout it. There are tight little tubes, and when exposed to microcystis, the capillaries begin to expand and blood begins to hemorrhage out of the liver.”
If a local community is using the lake for a drinking water supply, members of that community could face chronic effects due to prolonged exposure to the algae.
“Microcystin is a known tumor promoter,” McKay said. “It doesn’t start cancer, but if you have some cancerous cells and they go unregulated, microcystin can spread cancer in the body.”
Humans aren’t the only ones being affected by this toxin.
“This happens to animals, too,” McKay said. “You will sometimes find cattle and dogs drinking from the reservoir that has the bloom. They may take in a high enough dose and they will die due to the acute effects.”
The tourism and recreation industry has been negatively impacted as well.
Captain Joel Byer, of Nacho Fish Fishing Charter in Sandusky, Ohio, has seen deterred business as algae begins to bloom.
“This stuff doesn’t look good and it doesn’t smell good,” Byer said. “People see it on the news and they just don’t come to the lake. It was in the marina, and so thick around my boat, and it looked like a skipping stone could sit on top it. It looked like a can of thick pea soup washing up on the beaches.”
A cloud of invasive algae rests near the shore in Put-in-Bay. The algae deters tourism in the later summer months, Byer said. Photo provided.
One way of approaching the problem is by attacking it at the source. McKay has narrowed down the cause of the large blooms to be the chemical phosphorous, which acts as a catalyst for algae.
“In most freshwater systems, algae are limited, but if you can give them one nutrient that will cause them to explode in growth, that would be phosphorous,” he said. “They seem to have enough of everything else.”
Phosphorous has been pinpointed as a major cause of algal blooms, McKay said. In the past, the government has issued regulation to decrease the amount of phosphorous contaminating the water.
“Sewage treatment plants weren’t effective in removing phosphorus, so phosphate was being loaded into the lakes,” he said. “Secondly, detergents have a lot of phosphorous in them. All that wastewater coming from washing machines was acting as fertilizer for algae.”
A third cause of phosphorous loading comes from large farms that use chemicals to feed crops and aid in the killing of invasive weeds, McKay said. The excess chemicals sink into the soil and are washed away into the water.
Highly agricultural areas contribute to the high amounts of phosphorous that reaches Lake Erie. The white areas in the satellite image are the beginnings of algae blooms as of April 25. Photo illustration by Stephan Reed.
To avoid phosphorous getting to the water, farmers can put in “buffer strips,” or medians of grass between the field and the body of water, he said. The grass will grow rapidly but won’t let the chemical pass.
“A lot of people in Ohio have ponds in their backyards and some of those people use those for their water supply or for recreation,” McKay said. “In either case, people like to keep them clean. They don’t want that scum sitting on top. One approach is to install a strip of unmowed grass or reeds between the pond and the actual grass.”
However, there are some economic drawbacks for farmers when using this technique on a large scale.
“You want to maximize your yield on an acre, but then you have to give up 10 percent of your acre to a buffer strip,” McKay said. “Farmers might not like that, but other countries decided to use that approach because it has been used effectively. It has been used in China as well. Some of their lakes looked like you could walk on them [because of the abundant algae].”
Although the buffer strip method cuts down on the yield of crops for farmers, the United States government refunds farms that use this method.
Kyle Henry’s family farm in Perrysburg, Ohio, currently uses buffer strips.
“These are voluntary programs,” Henry said. “Farmers who use these receive subsidies. They do offset the costs, but with higher crop prices, there are some cases where farmers withdraw their buffers.”
Some farmers use manure as homemade fertilizer, said Andy Hupp, certification materials reviewer of the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association.
“A farmer isn’t going to use more fertilizer than needed, honestly, because it’s too expensive,” he said. “They’re not trying to load the water and soil with phosphorous.”
Farmers are not the only ones being blamed for the rapid growth in these blooms. The residential use of the herbicide Roundup contributes to phosphate loading into bodies of water, according to a 2009 research study published The Ohio State University’s magazine “Twineline.”
The issue of harmful algae blooms is apparent in other parts of the state. Grand Lake St. Marys, near Celina, Ohio, acts as the standing example of the treatment of blooms for the rest of the country. The lake was so bad that the government stepped in and placed great restrictions on the local farmers to help reduce phosphorous loading, Raymond said.
The chemical aluminum sulphate can be used to stop phosphorous from feeding the blooms. It has proven to be effective, yet costly, McKay said.
“They have done trials in 2010 and at the beginning of the last year,” he said. “They spread aluminum sulphate and measure its efficacy. They have found it to be effective so they have applied it over a large area on the lake. It’s a multi-million dollar application, so they have to weigh the return on the lake and the cost.”
This method may be effective in preventing blooms, but it could have harmful effects on wildlife, Byer said.
“Yeah, it’s cutting down on the blooms, but what’s it going to do to the fish?” he said.
Multiple strategies have been used to help Grand Lake St. Marys and have proven to be effective, however, some of the same strategies may not be used on the Great Lakes.
“Some of the protocol used on Grand Lake St. Marys will be used on Lake Erie, however, the politics are different,” McKay said. “With Lake Erie, you have two countries and multiple states dealing with it. Some of the approaches they are using on Grand Lake St. Mary’s probably won’t fly between states or between countries.”
The United States government has enacted laws that regulate phosphorous in household products. Americans currently use buffer strips in their backyards and farms to help keep phosphorous from reaching water.
While the idea of having an international lake with low levels of microcystin may seem to be a difficult task to accomplish, it is not impossible, Raymond said.
“There has been discussion about removing phosphorous from products on a small scale,” she said. “I do think it is possible to solve, but only with good management.”
View Areas with large algae blooms in a larger map
Understanding Jay
To most people, being a twin means everything is the same whether its being dressed the same, playing with the same toys or being interested in the same things.
At first that’s how it was with Jay. I remember the first time I noticed it.
My twin brother, Jay, didn’t talk like me, didn’t draw like me and I was beginning to think he didn’t think like me. At the age of three, I started to realize that Jay was Autistic.
Although we’re twins, always dressed the same way and given the same gifts, our lives started to go in very different directions early on.
When I went to kindergarten, Jay went to a different kindergarten.
When I learned to ride a bike without training wheels, Jay just started using training wheels.
Our father died when we were both eight years old. I was devastated, and it seemed like Jay didn’t know what to think.
After our father died from an aneurism one night, my Mother and I were never sure if Jay fully understood what happened, but we moved on.
Growing up with an autistic twin brother was difficult.
While other people become best friends with their twins, a communication gap prevented us from becoming close.
From kindergarten through eighth grade, Jay and I went to different schools, had different teachers and got to know different people. But, when we got to high school that changed.
Most people met Jay for the first time in high school when we were 14. I chose not to share much of my home life before then because I didn’t understand all of it. I didn’t understand Jay.
To some of my friends Jay wasn’t “normal.” To them he was disabled, special needs or even “retarded,” as some people called him when I wasn’t around.
Even though I didn’t completely understand Jay, there was nothing abnormal about him to me. Jay was the “norm” to me, because he was the only brother I’d ever had.
Instead of going to study hall, I felt more comfortable helping out in my brother’s class. It was then, when I started understanding.
Even though we could only talk a little bit, we bonded and at the end of high school my brother became my best friend. This time, when life started splitting us apart, we still stayed close.
When I graduated from high school, Jay stayed there for two more years.
When I started working at my college paper, Jay started working back home.
This summer I’ll be working in Chicago, while Jay will be back home relaxing.
Things are still changing, but now Jay and I aren’t just brothers, we’re friends.
Thirteen years later, I still take Jay to visit our dad’s grave, but he never wants to get out of the car. Instead he plays with his iPad in the car.
What’s different now is that I understand Jay and I now know that he’s understood everything the whole time.
Our mom thinks Jay still doesn’t fully understand what happened to our dad, but I disagree.
Jay still doesn’t like to think about how our dad is dead . It upsets him.
Jay chooses to act like it didn’t happen. So, he waits in the car.
Jay feels and understands everything. His company and personality allows him to be a good brother and friend, just like anyone else.
To me he’s not just one in 110 because his personality truly makes him one in a million.
I’ll be there to help Jay as much as he’s been there to help me understand everything in his world, because now I understand that he understands too.
I believe that over time, brotherhood can breech any barriers.
I believe in Jay.
Living Independently
13 years
by Ryan Satkowiak
in Air
By Ryan Satkowiak
I believe that growing up on my own has prepared me for real life.
Going to college exactly 2,392 miles away from home has given me a new perspective on things. As cool as it is to have mom and dad around to lean on, they won’t always be there to hold my hand; they won’t always be able to guide me through life.
The author as a small child, along with mother and father. Photo by Carnival Cruise Staff Member.
I hear a lot of kids complain about living at home. They claim they want to be independent. But when they finally get away, they seem to always find their way back home.
And what is that going to teach you? That when times are rough, and you don’t want to face adversity on your own, that mommy and daddy are just a two hour car ride away?
Newsflash. That isn’t how the real world works.
My dad instilled that message in me for as long as I could remember. He would tell me, “Ryan, life isn’t fair. Someday, you’re going to have to figure things out on your own.”
Never did I think I would have to do that as an 18-year old college freshman. In a foreign town. With no friends, no parental security blanket.
It was then that I learned how to be responsible. As much as my parents wanted to be there to guide me, both them and I knew this was a lesson better off learned on my own.
They were always protective of me as a child, sometimes over-protective. I hated it, I wanted to be able to do my own thing without their input.
Little did I know how difficult that would be.
Having to wake myself up in the morning, having to budget every single one of my expenses, it was all new to me.
It should never have been that way. A paperwork screw up prevented me from going to San Jose State, a two-hour drive from my hometown.
I could have been one of those kids, but I’m not. I’ve had to play the cards that were dealt to me.
And I believe having to go through this in college has better prepared me for the real world, for life after college.
Unlike many of my peers, I now understand why parents get pissed when you leave lights on: electricity is not cheap. I understand how to balance my expenses, to make sure I can afford that new CD, but still have enough money to feed myself for the week.
For some kids, they won’t know what that’s like until after college, maybe even later. A recent survey of college students showed that 60 percent of them plan to move back home after graduation.
The author, left, along with his father at AT&T Park in San Francisco in July 2010. Photo by Luke DeBenedetto.
I don’t want that. I love my parents more than anything, but after experiencing living on my own, I could never go back to that.
I know how to live on my own. I know how survive without my parents being just a short drive away.
But I believe that their trust, their faith in me has allowed me to feel this way.
I believe in being independent, and that once you experience it, you will never want to go back.
BGSU rebuilds Falcon Heights for a new generation
By Max Filby
From the front lobby to the office where Jacob Raderer works, everything is new, giving the new Falcon Heights sort of a “hotel-like” feel to it.
“It’s interesting to hear the residents talk about it like it’s more of a hotel,” said Raderer, a hall director who also lives in Falcon Heights. “They seem to really like it.”
The hallways of the new Falcon Heights residence hall are quiet, with just a few students passing through on a Tuesday afternoon. Although the building may seem quiet to the ordinary observer, it’s become a big conversation at Bowling Green State University this past year.
The building’s name, Falcon Heights, marks the second time since 1945 it has been used as a type of housing on campus, but in a different way.
The old Falcon Heights was a temporary trailer park on campus consisting of 40 units. The trailers, located where Jerome Library now stands, housed veterans returning to school on the GI Bill, according to a 1946 Key Yearbook.
Come fall 2012, the lobby will hold a piece of the old Falcon Heights. Raderer and Sarah Waters, director of Residence Life, plan to hang either a large photo or plaque describing the history of Falcon Heights and how the new hall got its old name.
“It’s nice to see the starting point,” Waters said.
Trailers lined the field in rows where the old Falcon Heights was located, from about 1945 through the mid-1960s, said Dave Kielmeyer, BGSU spokesperson.
“I’m fortunate enough to have lived in this Falcon Heights,” Raderer said. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to live in one of those trailers, but I guess it was the best solution at the time.”
The sense of history the name brings to campus is what makes Falcon Heights special, Raderer said.
“There’s sort of a historical tinge to it,” Raderer said about the two Falcon Heights locations. “It’s cool that we’ve been able to maintain that.”
The new Falcon Heights, a residence hall on campus, is a little bit different than the Falcon Heights that once stood where Jerome Library now stands.
While the new residence hall pulls in an income primarily from its student residents, the old trailer park pulled in revenue from a single Coca-Cola vending machine, according to a 1946 BG News article.
Like the new residence hall, the old trailer park was headed by a council of students who helped to manage the revenue and activities within the “community.”
While the old trailer park may have been like its own community, the council in the new residence hall has been trying to keep that sense of community in a hall where some students have the luxury of having their own bedrooms and bathrooms.
“The hall council is very active over there,” Waters said. “Its definitely got a good sense of community.
Despite being named after a former trailer park, the new Falcon Heights has a few more amenities than its trailer predecessors of the 1940s.
Rather than one, the new Falcon Heights has multiple vending machines, as opposed to a single Coca-Cola machine in the former trailer park.
The new building also has more than 300 bathrooms, whereas the original Falcon Heights had no running water. It has multiple rooms, while a Falcon Heights trailer had one main room, Waters said.
Although population didn’t triple at the start of the 2011 school year, it did welcome in one of the largest freshman classes on record and along with it, a new Falcon Heights.
With its “hotel-like” feel, the new Falcon Heights may be a lot different from the old one, but the idea to name it came about when students started pushing for it back in summer 2010, Waters said.
“The difference in complexity of the two is just an interesting juxtaposition,” Waters said. “It was about resurrecting that name and bringing it back.”
When pushing for the name, students also didn’t realize a similarity between the two Falcon Heights. Similar to recent enrollment, in 1945 housing opened up to an increased student population, according to a 1946 Key Yearbook.
Such a similarity is another reason why the University was “reclaiming something from the past” in bringing back the name Falcon Heights, Waters said.
While the old Falcon Heights welcomed students with an open field rather than a new lobby, the new Falcon Heights does so with a fireplace and a balcony area, right outside of Raderer’s office.
“It’s funny, I don’t know if many students know, but this building has something more than just its hotel-like qualities,” Raderer said. “It’s got history.”
Oak Grove Cemetery
13 years
by Ryan Satkowiak
in Earth
The gravestones of Oak Grove Cemetery. Photo by Ryan Satkowiak
By Ryan Satkowiak
Outlined by a blue-gray February sky, Oak Grove Cemetery has a particularly eerie feel to it.
It is quiet, except for the passing traffic on Merry Avenue. Standing at the center of the cemetery, its highest point, gravestones cloud the immediate field of vision in all directions.
Very little goes on at Oak Grove. Rolling hills make the cemetery an inviting place to take an afternoon walk, but the overwhelming sense of death turns off many from entering it.
Only about 40 people are buried here each year, according to an estimate by Tim Dunn, co-owner of Bowling Green’s Dunn Funeral Home. Those people are laid to rest on the northern-most end of the cemetery, the only place in Oak Grove that has empty patches of grass. The headstones in that area are often reserved spaces, ones that feature a name and birth year of a person who’s time to leave earth has not yet come.
Winter merely adds to the atmosphere of the cemetery. Trees that beem with life during the warmer months of the year are naked, as barren as the skeletons that rest peacefully in the ground underneath.
But there is something peculiar about the Oak Grove Cemetery. Something sets it apart. It is smack-dab in the heart of the BGSU campus, wedged between Merry Avenue and Ridge Street, right next to Olscamp Hall.
Many people walk past this place every day. The sight of Oak Grove has become so commonplace for BGSU students that many simply are complacent with its presence so close to their everyday lives.
“It’s something that you eventually get used to,” said Brian Hilliard, a junior international studies major who walks by Oak Grove every day to get to classes in Olscamp Hall and the Business Building. “At first it was sort of weird to have a cemetery so close to campus, but after seeing if for a couple of years, you don’t even think about it being there.”
Many gravestones like these flood the grassy hills of Oak Grove Cemetery. Photo by Ryan Satkowiak.
While Hilliard estimates he has walked past the cemetery at least a hundred times, he has never entered it, or even thought about entering it: “I don’t really have a reason to. I don’t know anyone buried there.”
Many students who have attended BGSU would be familiar with Oak Grove’s existence. The cemetery was founded in 1873, about 37 years before the college was ever built.
While Oak Grove is the only cemetery in the Bowling Green city limits, it is not the only place in where people were buried in town.
There used to be two cemeteries in Bowling Green. One was located on present-day South College Drive on the south side of Wooster Street. The other was on the current site of Ridge Elementary School.
The reason for the incorporation of the land Oak Grove sits on has a political background to it.
Back in the early 1870s, Bowling Green was engaged in a political battle with Perrysburg, with each city fighting to be the county seat. During that time, having a rural cemetery was seen as a strong point of the development in the town, according to a 1996 newspaper article by James Kasser.
So in 1873, the City of Bowling Green paid $950 to John and Robert Eldridge for the nine and a half acres of land that Oak Grove Cemetery sits on.
The stones and bodies were transported from the two graveyards and reinterred in Oak Grove. In April 1873, the city began drawing lines and lots to divide up burial plots.
On August 9, 1873 the city began selling plots to citizens. The money made from those sales went to planting trees and other foliage and putting benches in the cemetery in order to give it a “park-like atmosphere,” according to Kasser’s article.
The trees planted in the cemetery, mostly willow and maple trees, give Oak Grove the standard feel of a horror movie setting. The often vicious winds that sail through Northwest Ohio glide through the tree branches with ease. The sounds of tree’s movements encapsulate visitors from all angles, giving the feeling that someone else is there, even though no one else can be seen on the inside parts of the cemetery’s gates.
Not many of the names on the headstones are recognizable. The deeper one walks into the cemetery, the older the monuments become. One cites a date of death in 1887, another in 1883. As the sun begins the set along the horizon, the few lights that are in Oak Grove turn out. Visiting hours are listed as “dawn ’til dusk,” although the front gates rarely close.
This usual all-hours access has led to some problems at Oak Grove.
Oak Grove's memory wall, which was recently replaced after it was destroyed by vandals. Photo by Ryan Satkowiak.
Vandalism at the cemetery has been an issue, given its proximity to a college campus. Perpetrators have caused damage to gravestones and other nuisances.
Vandals did their most recent damage in October 2010. The memory wall near Oak Grove’s entrance was destroyed, knocked out of the ground and broken into four pieces. Cost of replacing it was between $6,000 and $8,000, according to an article in the Toledo Blade.
However, those instances are becoming less frequent.
“I think since I’ve worked here, I can’t remember more than three or four instances in a year for the past 20 years,” said Tim Hammer, the cemetery’s sexton for the past 12 years.
Hammer handles the everyday care of the cemetery, including selling graves and preparing them for burial. He estimates that there are around 700 burial plots remaining in Oak Grove, leaving it at about 93 percent capacity.
BGSU expansion negatively impacted Oak Grove because as the university got bigger, it land-locked Oak Grove. Buildings surround Oak Grove’s east, west and south sides, while parking lots are on its north side. This prevents Oak Grove from ever expanding.
Additionally, the city of Bowling Green granted BGSU land that had at one point belonged to the cemetery, including the area now occupied by Overman Hall.
“There used to be a mausoleum on the southwest corner of the cemetery that the city had to tear down,” Dunn said. “We removed 332 deceased from that mausoleum and moved them to other areas of the cemetery that the city donated properties for or other cemeteries that the families paid of have them moved to.”
Plots of land at the cemetery cost $325 per grave, according to the Bowling Green finance department. Because of space in the cemetery running low, people are only allowed to buy two plots in the cemetery, Dunn said.
Dunn added that his funeral home has had preliminary talks with the city to find new burial grounds ince there is simply no room for Oak Grove to expand. This is to accommodate the citizens of Bowling Green when Oak Grove eventually reaches capacity.
“We’ve had some light discussions with the city to where they would develop new land and they’re thinking west of Bowling Green,” Dunn said. “Everyone needs to be assured that Oak Grove will not be disturbed; that cemetery will always be an ongoing cemetery that the city will maintain.”
While students rarely enter Oak Grove just to observe, the mere presence of it still induces spine-chilling sensations. Walking along the outside of Oak Grove’s gate, along Merry Avenue, the atmosphere of the cemetery still lurks. The unseasonably mild weather has created a thick layer of fog descending on Bowling Green. Visibility decreases, and the inner-most parts of Oak Grove can no longer be seen. The sound of the breeze echoes out from the cemetery, almost as if the deceased are calling out for living company.
View Oak Grove Cemetery in a larger map
The Islamic Center of Greater Toledo shines as a place for faith and education
13 years
by Sarah Bailey
in Earth
By Sarah Bailey
Draped in colorful head scarves and covering clothing in respect for their religion, Muslim women gather with their children for a Friday afternoon service,
The Islamic Center of Greater Toledo. Photo taken by Sarah Bailey.
listening like attentive students as the words of their spiritual leader echo throughout the circular room.
Men assemble on the other side of a wooden fence-like structure. Farooq Aboelzahab faces them capturing their attention with his words. Aboelzahab is their imam, the head of their Muslim community who leads them in their practice of Islam.
“We need brothers and sisters,” he says. “Civilization means humanness.”
While many local residents pass the mosque on their daily commute to or from Perrysburg, they may not know the history and meaning behind the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo. Located right off Interstate 75, the mosque is home to 500 families from more than 23 different nationalities.
Members come to worship Allah, or God, most popularly on Friday afternoon “Jumaa,” or “gathering” prayer services. Muslims believe in Islam, an Arabic word meaning “surrender.” They believe someone can find peace with God, one’s self and with humanity by “surrendering to the will of God,” according to the center’s website. Muslim belief is based off the six primary principles: God, the prophets, angels, holy books, the day of judgment and fate and predestination, according to the website.
Approximately 0.6 percent of the U.S. population, or 1.8 million people, are Muslims, according to the CIA World Factbook 2011. Toledo and its surrounding region represent a place where about 7,000 Islamic men and women live and practice their faith daily, said Aboelzahab.
Dressed in black and gold robes, Aboelzahab leads the service with his words and quick hand gestures. He projects his voice periodically. People bow, sit and stand before him, listening to his prayers and lessons. Behind him a large bookcase with a temple-like structure holds a small library of red, green and gold Islamic texts. Stained-glass windows draw in sunshine and cast a warm glow on his face, placing a spark in his eyes.
View Islamic Center of Greater Toledo in a larger map
The center is the third Mosque to ever be built in America, according to toledomuslims.com, a Northwest Ohio Muslim information providing website. The first Muslim immigrants came to Toledo from Syria and Lebanon in the late 1930s, according to the center’s website. They established the Syrian American Muslim Society, and in 1954 Toledo’s first Islamic Center was built on East Bancroft Street. There was a need for a larger building as the community grew in the 1970s and 1980s. The new center, now located in Perrysburg, was opened in October of 1983. The center now has a full-time school with about 100 students, according to the website.
When the current imam and director Aboelzahab came from Egypt to work at the center in 1989, he was planning on staying only a few years.
Quickly, he became very close to members of the community, Aboelzahab said. He decided to stay longer and had his family back in Egypt join him in Toledo.
“It has been a very rich experience here,” he said. “I have learned more than I’ve taught.”
Since then he has enjoyed working, preaching and exchanging ideas on a daily basis with members of the center and outside community.
“I love communicating with people and talking about issues of mutual concern,” he said.
Imam Aboelzahab holds and explains the Quran. Photo taken by Sarah Bailey.
Aboelzahab leads weekly Friday services and Sunday sermons for about 500 people. He also gives tours to surrounding schools and people of different faiths, he said. From time to time, speakers from outside the community also come to the center. Recently a nutritionist talked about how to use food as medicine. In March, a visitor from Canada will focus on misconceptions about Islam, he said.
“This place is a center of learning. It is not just a mosque,” he said. “The mission is to talk about our differences, to celebrate our community and to learn from one another.”
As Aboelzahab leads this Friday service, he looks directly into the eyes of the members. A metallic clock hangs high above him, reflecting the stained-glass window colors and highlighting the tapestries on the walls. Five chandeliers hang from a piece in the center of the ceiling, reflecting the natural light from outside onto each person’s face. Each crystal shines like ice on a bright winter day. Some stand in worship. Others kneel or sit. An occasional child cries but is quickly held and hushed by its mother.
Aboelzahab also participates in Interfaith, a religious group consisted of Muslims, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists, which meets at least two to three times a year to talk about civilization and differences between faiths.
“If we have faith, we should acknowledge that religion has the utmost respect for all mankind, regardless of your religion,” he said.
Aneesa Shaheen, secretary of the center and a Toledo native, has been working and a member of the mosque for over 20 years.
“This is a part of my whole life,” she said.
As a girl, Shaheen grew up going to the old mosque and then started working there. She has known Aboelzahab during his entire time as the imam, and knew the previous imam before he died. She used to teach Sunday school and has seen her students grow up before her eyes, she said.
“I love being with my religion, people and culture here,” she said. “I’ve seen people grow from children to adults.”
Inside the main service area of the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo. Photo taken by Sarah Bailey.
In order to experience the community for what it is, she welcomes people to visit.
“Come here and understand the religion and culture for what it is, not from the examples of what other people have said,” Shaheen said.
Tabassum Ruby, a Muslim and professor from the women’s studies program at Bowling Green State University, said she is happy knowing there is a place like the
Islamic Center of Greater Toledo.
“To see such a big area dedicated to that place is something I am definitely very pleased with,” Ruby said.
Ruby, who has visited the center but is not a member, said the mosque showcases Islamic architecture and design.The calligraphy on the stained-glass windows and verses of the Quran written in Arabic on the carpet pieces are details she appreciates.
Ruby said that when general discussions on discrimination come up in her classroom at BGSU, she tries to educate her students on the stereotypes associated with Islam.
Muslim communities’ histories go far back in the historical make-up of this society, she said.
“Why do Muslims constantly have to justify their religion?” she said. “It’s a part of the stereotypical environment that we live in. We keep telling particular people and communities that they need to justify their actions.”
While facing Islamic stereotypes can be difficult, Imam Aboelzahab still has hope.
“Islam has a lot to offer,” he said. “We have to start talking about it in a positive and realistic way.”
The entrance to the main service area of the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo. Photo taken by Sarah Bailey.
As the imam ends his service, members respond promptly in unison, their Arabic prayers blending into a soft humming sound. Each person repeats specific physical praying positions:standing, bowing, and leaning into a deep bow on the floor. When they finish their prayers and bowing motions, they head towards Aboelzahab to hug him and shake his hands. A young girl, covered from head to toe in a bright floral pattern, runs to him and he picks her up. She giggles with delight.
Members exit slowly, lingering with one another. They put their shoes back on, get in their cars, and return to their daily Friday work schedules. Light continues to drift through the stained-glass windows and illuminate the empty room.
Bowling Green hot spots
By Max Filby
The new location of Mister Spots at 206 N. Main Street, in downtown Bowling Green, Ohio. Photo by Max Filby
Hot wings weren’t hot when Jim Gavarone opened his store in 1985.
Gavarone is a local businessman whose restaurant, Mister Spots, has heated up enough to boost his business into new locations and through an early rivalry with a big wig in the wing industry.
Gavarone developed the idea to open his original shops, and now his new one, after moving from Philadelphia to Bowling Green for college. Even after years of business, Gavarone says he “accidentally backed into,” his business.
“A few friends just double-dog dared me into it,” he says.
When Gavarone opened his store on Court Street on Feb. 17, 1985, his chicken wings quickly became one of a kind in the fast food market.
“We’ve done wings from day one,” Gavarone says. “We were kind of pioneers in that industry.”
Trying to wing it as a pioneer in the industry during the‘80s meant Gavarone was going up against another restaurant in Columbus, Ohio —Buffalo Wild Wings. At the time, Mister Spots and Buffalo Wild Wings were two of the only places in the area that regularly sold wings, Gavarone says.
“It really became an intense rivalry,” Gavarone says.
The rivalry heated up even more when Gavarone later opened another Mister Spots in Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan, Ohio State’s biggest rival. The move made Mister Spots and Buffalo Wild Wings even bigger rivals, Gavarone says.
After opening his second Mister Spots in Ann Arbor in 1986, Gavarome also catered at University of Michigan athletics events until about 2009.
“It gets to be too expensive after a while, they just keep wanting more and more of your profit,” Gavarone says. “It’s even harder to do when the teams aren’t winning anymore, too.”
Eventually, wings became more mainstream as Buffalo Wild Wings started to expand its franchise, Gavarone says.
Although he is still thinking about further expanding with the help of some Michigan alumni, Gavarone is just focusing on the new store in Bowling Green, for now. Gavarone still maintains Mister Spots’ Ann Arbor location by checking in with store employees at least once a week.
While hot wings may have been a rarity during Gavarone’s rivalry, about 33 percent of all wings are now ordered at “casual dining restaurants” such as Mister Spots, according to the National Chicken Council’s 2012 Chicken Wing Report.
“Wings used to be sort of disposable,” Gavarone says. “They used to cost 30 cents a pound, you know, and now they cost something like $3.30. They’ve just gotten so big.”
Although Gavarone may not be the man of a million locations or menu items, for the past 26 years, his sauce has been “spot on.”
“We make our own sauce,” Gavarone says. “It’s no garden secret though. We don’t have 82 flavors or any sort of nuclear sauce, but it’s pretty good. It’s basic.”
When Gavarone bites into a wing or sandwich at his shop, he’s so satisfied that the only word he can find to describe it is as basic as his sauce recipe.
“Deliciousness,” he says. “I truly eat this crap all the time.”
Although Gavarone’s sauce is “basic,” he won’t give away ingredients other than some peppers, pepper seeds and margarine.
At the original location, currently in operation, Gavarone tells his general manager not to give anything away, but he’s not talking about free food.
“Don’t give away any secrets,” Gavarone says as he laughs with Mark Koldan.
Gavarone nods and walks to the back of the restaurant.
“It’s great not just working with my best friend, but working for my best friend,” Koldan says. “My kids call him ‘Uncle Jim’.”
Koldan first met Gavarone when they played together on the club lacrosse team at Bowling Green State University back in the early ‘80s. When Gavarone played, Koldan was his backup goalie.
“Essentially, he’s my backup at Mister Spots, too,” Gavarone says.
Since being put in charge in 1986, Koldan has been “steering the ship” at Mister Spots, Gavarone says.
Although Gavarone is now more of a “behind the scenes kind of guy,” he sometimes still makes his own sandwiches and wings.
“Sometimes I’ll climb right behind the counter,” Gavarone says.
While Gavarone may not always be behind the store counter, customers such as five-year patron Michelle Crook still love his products.
“It’s on par,” Crook says as she finishes her dinner. “It’s local, casual and is pretty reasonably priced.”
As customers like Crook leave Gavarone’s old restaurant location, something similar will ‘mark the spot’ at 206 N. Main Street, his new location.
The doodle of Gavarone’s cat, Spot, wearing sunglasses, hangs on a sign above the doorway at each location. Gavarone did the doodle on the back of a textbook while sitting in a class at BGSU in the ‘80s.
“I caught a lot of flack for naming the business after him,” Gavarone says. “My land lord called it Mister Flops … he thought we wouldn’t last six months there.”
Beneath the sign at the new Main Street location, people peek in to ask if the new Mister Spots is open for business. They thank Gavarone as he sends them down to the Court Street location.
Gavarone nods
“Welcome,” Gavarone says as they walk away.
Inside his new restaurant in downtown Bowling Green, Gavarone plays around with Netflix on a newly installed TV as his electrician watches. With a few wires hanging below the screen there’s still some work to be done before Mister Spots officially moves to Main Street.
Gavarone nods as he talks with the electrician.
Everything inside the restaurant is new, from the pictures on the wall to the black table where Gavarone sits. Different from its Court Street location, the new Mister Spots is still “spotless.”
Although Gavarone never planned to settle down in Bowling Green, he’s glad his customers will continue to have the opportunity to taste something “authentic” at Mister Spots. Gavarone and his friends weren’t impressed with the edible options the city had to offer back in the ‘80s, a tradition he tried to break by opening his stores.
“I thought the food here was garbage for the most part,” Gavarone says. “If you want to eat pizza, then you want to eat pizza, but we were looking to offer customers something a little different and a little better.”
Gavarone sends another potential customer down to his Court Street location.
“The best part of all of this is the people,” he says. “At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about.”
A promise to study abroad
13 years
by Tia Woodel
in Fire
Danielle Alviani. Photo by Tia Woodel
By Tia Woodel
Hit with nerves, Danielle Alviani boards the airplane. She sits down in her seat without a family member or friend in sight. She is alone and traveling overseas for the first time in her life but is still excited for the road ahead. Being shy and quiet may have worked for her in the past, but Alviani will soon partake in a positively life-changing experience.
Alviani was in high school when her two cousins, Emily and Sarah Wichryk, studied abroad in college. With an interest in Renaissance art, Alviani made a promise to herself that she would study abroad somewhere she could experience art and fashion in new ways. Less than 10 percent of undergraduate students from Bowling Green State University study abroad according to BGSU’s Education Abroad website, and because Alviani was so shy, family and friends were skeptical.
Alviani grew up in a household with her parents, older sister, and younger brother in the small town of Beaver, Pa. Alviani, very close to her mother and family, said traveling when she was younger always included the entire family, and going outside of the country was never their desire.
Alviani, on the other hand, had other ideas about traveling.
“All through high school I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t graduate college until I studied abroad,” she said.
Alviani said her parents were supportive but didn’t actually think she would stick to it. Alviani’s best friend, Abby Perza, said she remembers Alviani talking about studying abroad, but like Alviani’s parents, she didn’t take it seriously.
“In high school, she was so shy,” Perza said. “I didn’t picture her doing something that big.”
Alviani was so close to her family that when she chose to attend BGSU, she was going to be leaving home alone for the first time. After two years as a fashion merchandising major, Alviani realized if she really wanted to keep this promise to herself, she was going to need to start taking some action. She went to the study abroad office, where she was given her many booklets on places to go.
BGSU offers students the option to study abroad in 20 cities, in 16 different countries on five continents, according to the University’s official study abroad video. With this many options, Alviani used her passion for art and fashion to help make her final decision.
“I learned a ton about the Renaissance and fell in love with the art from that period. Florence is known as the Renaissance city, so it just seemed meant to be for me to go there,” she said.
Alviani finished the application process and was finally on her way to studying abroad. Now she would be able to prove she was serious and tell her friends the news.
“When I told my friends that I was studying abroad, they all were very excited for me and I think a little shocked at the same time,” Alviani said.
Her best friend, Perza, was thrilled for Alviani but was troubled that she wasn’t going to see her for four months. Alviani did admit that leaving for four months, not knowing how much she would be able to talk to friends and family, made her sad. Perza remembered times when Alviani was homesick just being at BGSU and worried about her being gone for so long. Alviani said she went into the trip with an open mind, though, and was excited for the semester abroad.
The start of her trip helped Alviani recognize this was going to be something completely different from what she was used to. When first arriving in Florence, she remembers the chaos of the airport and getting to the apartment. As she stepped away from the group, Alviani called her mother.
“When I called her, I realized I was actually gone,” she said. “My mom wasn’t there to do anything for me; I was on my own.”
Danielle Alviani's study abroad group in Florence, Italy. Photo provided by Danielle Alviani
Alviani said it was great how quickly everyone got along the first night there, and even referred to the new group of roommates and other students in the apartment as “friends who became a family.” Alviani also remembers how intrigued she was exploring the city for the first time.
“I instantly saw how different everything was,” she said. “The buildings were so incredible. We would stop to look at one building for 10 minutes before staring at the next. Over here, everything is so modern, but the buildings there have been there for hundreds and hundreds of years. …the art and architecture all throughout the city of Florence… I was blown away every day that I stepped out of my apartment. It was a dream living in such a beautiful, ancient city.”
Alviani did miss her family and friends at home, but was able to keep in contact with them through Skype, Facebook and cell phones provided by StudentCell, which made it easier to be so far away.
“I talked to family and friends more than I expected,” she said. “I missed my mom; I’m definitely a momma’s girl.”
Alviani’s mother, Susan Alviani, said her daughter was always excited when she called home, talking about how much she loved the European way of life and the group of friends she had made.
“The trip was life-changing for her,” her mother said. “She gained an independence knowing she can do her own thing.”
Because of her daughter’s courage, Alviani’s mother even took a trip overseas for the first time to visit.
When Alviani wasn’t catching up quick with family and friends, she was absorbing as much art and culture as she could during her trip. This included visiting the statue of David six times and observing other countries’ fashions. She visited Germany, Scotland, England, Switzerland, Spain and Ireland.
Alviani said she thinks her trip will help her career one day now that she has a better knowledge of fashion outside the U.S. Her classes taught her the designing aspect of the fashion industry. She even said this experience made her think about possibly moving to Florence for a few years in the future, just to get a better glimpse of the industry there.
Danielle Alviani in Florence, Italy where she studied abroad Fall 2011. Photo provided by Danielle Alviani
Alviani explained her study abroad experience was like visiting a completely different world. She found it interesting to see how other people live and what they’re passionate about. It made her appreciate how Americans live and the experience changed her for the better.
“I came home with a different mindset,” she said.
Perza said she thinks studying abroad helped Alviani get over some of her shyness after being thrown into an environment where she was constantly meeting new people and making new friends. Perza also said Alviani was less reserved after her trip.
“She’s definitely a different person in a better way,” Perza said.
Regardless of being a shy momma’s girl, Alviani never let the doubt of friends and family get in her way of experiencing another culture’s art while studying abroad. She said she made the best decision of her life to study in Florence.
“It gave me a whole new outlook on life,” Alviani said. “I don’t think anything in my life will ever be comparable.”
Passion for Potter
By Erin Cox
Alexis Moody grips the broom handle. A drip of sweat rolls down her forehead before she catches it with the back of her hand. She looks down the field at her six teammates as they all begin to mount their brooms. She listens as the commentator begins to count from 10.
“Ten…nine…eight…seven.”
Her breathing quickens.
“Six…five…four.”
She feels a rush of excitement.
“Three…two…one…Brooms up!”
Off she goes, broom in hand, running down the field.
Moody is playing the game she loves – quidditch.
Moody is not just another “Harry Potter” fan. She has made “Harry Potter” a part of her everyday life.
Alexis Moody reads a trivia question during a BG Marauders sponsored event. Photo by Erin Cox.
Moody’s fandom didn’t stop with reading the books, watching the movies and discussing the differences between the two like many “Harry Potter” fans. Now that Moody is at Bowling Green State University, she has turned her fandom into a way to make friends by starting a “Harry Potter” club and a quidditch team.
“I wanted to be able to meet other ‘Harry Potter’ fans and create a place for people who in high school may have been ostracized for it,” Moody says.
Quidditch is the game played by witches and wizards in the “Harry Potter” series by J.K. Rowling. The books, which were also made into movies, broke records in sales with the final book selling 8.3 million copies in 24 hours making it the fastest selling book in history, according to Scholastic.com.
Quidditch has transitioned from the beloved sport of the magical world to a beloved sport of Potter fans across the non-magical world, or muggle world as the series refers to it.
Moody made that transition for fans at BGSU and is helping others in the state make quidditch teams of their own too.
Moody started the BG Marauders, a “Harry Potter” fan club, in September 2010, and the quidditch team developed at the same time.
The BG Marauders meet once a week to discuss different topics, play games and watch videos relating to “Harry Potter.”
The BG Quidditch team plays quidditch. A team consists of seven players who hold broomsticks while they try to score points through one of the three goals. They usually practice twice a week and play against other college quidditch teams in Ohio and the surrounding states throughout the year.
Moody says she knows 40 people on campus just because of their shared love of “Harry Potter.”
Along with all this, Moody works on campus with classroom technology services. She also plans to graduate with a major in theater specializing in design technology in December 2012, so she has to leave her “Harry Potter” club and quidditch team in the hands of others.
“It’s been a struggle getting things situated and going well, but I feel confident that when I graduate, it will continue and do well,” Moody says.
Heath Diehl, the faculty adviser for the BG Marauders, credits Moody’s passion as instrumental for making the club and quidditch team possible.
“Her passion is rare,” Diehl, an instructor in the honors program where he teaches a class about “Harry Potter,” says. “She’s a bit fanatical, which is a good thing. She knows the series really well, inside and out, particularly in regards to quidditch.”
Moody loves the game and plans to keep playing as long as possible, but injuries happen on the quidditch pitch far too often, and Moody has suffered a few herself. It’s a rough contact sport.
“You don’t have to like ‘Harry Potter’ to love this game,” Moody says. “I want to keep it in my life as long as I can.”
Moody didn’t jump on the “Harry Potter” broom right away.
“I started hearing about it from all my friends in elementary school. I hated it. I didn’t want to conform,” Moody says.
Moody’s aunt, Barb Loehr, however, bought her the third book as a gift.
“Someone had loaned me the books on CD and I thought when I listened to them that Alexis might like it,” Loehr says. “We had always exchanged passions of books and games back and forth, and she was the right age for ‘Harry Potter.’”
Moody’s boredom led her to pick up the book in the summer of 2001 when she was 11.
Moody says she instantly became a fan. She had started reading the books near the time the movies came out, so all the hype thrust her into fandom and she wanted to learn all she could.
Moody’s dad, Darryl Moody, says her love for “Harry Potter” was obvious as soon as she picked up the books.
“Her passion and knowledge is far superior to any other ‘Harry Potter’ fan I know. It’s almost like she lives a ‘Harry Potter’ lifestyle and she truly understands and lives it,” Darryl Moody says.
Moody says when she read the books she felt she could really connect with the main characters Harry Potter and Hermione Granger. Their stories were relatable for Moody because she is biracial and comes from a divorced family.
Moody felt different, and Hermione and Harry were different than other students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
“I thought, ‘This is my life,’” Moody says.
Moody has used her love for “Harry Potter” to connect and build relationships with many of her friends.
Amanda Godfrey met Moody at her first quidditch practice last year and is now co-captain of the team.
“You could definitely tell Alexis was passionate about it. The way she talked about it, she had a twinkle in her eye,” Godfrey says.
Moody went with Godfrey to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando, a theme park that embodies the magical world of the books by having all the famous establishments of the series for people to explore. Some of the popular places the park includes are Ollivanders, the wand shop; The Three Broomsticks, the home of Butterbeer and Hogwarts the School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Moody had already been to the park when it first opened. That summer she was working at Disney’s Epcot through the BGSU Disney College Program, and although she was scheduled to work, Moody went to the opening day of The Wizarding World anyway. She stood in line for six hours starting at 5 a.m. to get into the park that day. She visited The Wizarding World a couple more times during that summer.
“Each time I went, it was still exciting, and I was still entranced by it,” Moody says.
The “Harry Potter” franchise has millions of fans around the world who live, breathe and dream about “Harry Potter,” and Moody’s passion for Potter has put her in contention with some of the biggest Potter fans around the world – literally.
According to the International Quidditch Association’s website, nearly 300 Quidditch teams exist worldwide, and all can participate in the Quidditch World Cup.
As captain of the BGSU quidditch team, Moody led her team onto the pitch to compete against teams from all across the United States and Canada at the World Cup in November 2011 in New York.
Moody also holds the position as the Ohio state representative of the International Quidditch Association, which means if anyone in the state wants to make a team, he or she should contact her.
“I’m actively looking for teams, and I’d say I’ve been pretty successful,” Moody says. “Since I’ve been working in this position, Ohio went from having four teams to 14 in a year.”
Moody was also recently chosen for the organizing team of the Quidditch World Cup. The organizing team has 12 positions and she is the Team Communications Director, which means she will work with all the teams planning to come to the World Cup.
Even though the book series has ended and the final movie has been released, Moody knows her passion for Potter will not stop anytime soon.
Moody says some states have an adult “Harry Potter” fan club and she hopes to find a similar one in whichever state she lives in. Moody plans to work as a lighting designer for a theater in Chicago when she graduates.
She also thinks one day she might be able to apply her major to her passion for Potter.
“Maybe I’ll be the designer for a Harry Potter musical. Who knows?” Moody says.
Moody does know her love for “Harry Potter” will not end.
“The reason I am so passionate and involved with ‘Harry Potter’ is because I need it,” Moody says. “I need the people, I need the love and maybe the attention a little too. I literally can’t imagine my life without ‘Harry Potter.’”
Moody wrote all the trivia questions for the Harry Potter Trivia Night sponsored by the BG Marauders. Photo by Erin Cox.
Occupy: The fire of peaceful protest
Gilbert Bentley waited patiently in the first row of Bowling Green Municipal court amid half a courtroom of supporters. They wore orange armbands with the word Occupy on them in protest of Bentley’s trial.
Within a few minutes, it was over. Bentley and his friend Taylor Johnson both pled no contest to charges of obstruction of justice and were sentenced to 15 hours of community service.
Bentley has had a long history of political activism.
At an age when most are uninvolved and disinterested in politics, Bentley attended a Farm Labor Organizing Committee rally in Toledo at age 14.
Six years later, he joined over 200,000 others to Washington D.C.’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, a satirical protest headed by comedians Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart.
Now, Bentley sees his sentencing as the easy part.
“It was a lot harder being out there than it was dealing with court stuff,” he said.
For him, “out there” meant a small alleyway on East Wooster Street in Bowling Green, Ohio, where he and countless others camped out for six weeks in peaceful protest.
When his trial ended, Bentley knew this part of Occupy Bowling Green was over, but his fight was only beginning.
* * *
Bentley says it’s always hard to pay attention to politics and not get involved. He credits a love for politics to an early “obsession with history and literature.”
His influences, political and literary, range from authors Oscar Wilde and Jack Kerouac to philosopher Noam Chomsky, and leave Bentley with a rich blend of social skepticism and desire for direct democracy.
His interests in Egyptians and Mayans may have been out of his reach, but the Toledo streets were much more physically and ideologically accessible.
The creation of Occupy Toledo satisfied both his political philosophy and his need for democratic activism.
The Occupy movement began in September of 2011 in New York City as Occupy Wall Street, a non-violent, civil disobedient protest. Angry over wealth inequality and corporatism, protesters took over Zuccotti Park, a plaza near Manhattan’s Financial District, according to Occupy Wall Street’s website.
Many other concerned activists realized these themes elsewhere. Inspired by Occupy Wall Street, protesters in cities around the globe set up tents and created their own Occupy movements.
Traveling to and from Toledo to participate, it wasn’t long before he said he wanted to “bring that sound home.”
“We have a responsibility to our home town,” he said.
He and others assembled a march at Bowling Green State University’s Student Union to the Happy Badger, a local business. It was there, he said, that the protestors decided to create Occupy BG.
The idea was simple. No one person spoke for or led the group. From the very first decision to form Occupy BG, every idea has been discussed and decided upon by the entire group.
They chose to set up camp in an alleyway in downtown Bowling Green known colloquially as “Fight Alley” due to its proximity to bars where some customers settle their differences outside. Violence at Occupy BG, however, was never an option.
“We needed to display that we’re not a violent group,” Bentley said.
Public perception of the group became as important as their message itself. Bentley and others knew that if the media and public could not respect those protesting, they would in turn shy away from the message Occupy BG protested for.
While Occupy protesters welcomed a variety of perspectives and opinions, its goals were to provide factual information and spread awareness of social issues.
Scott Hevner, a BGSU Firelands teacher who frequents the Bowling Green coffee shop where Occupy BG holds its meetings, said that while different ideologies are acceptable, it doesn’t make them more correct.
“People have this twisted sense of what constitutes equality,” Hevner said. “Democracy doesn’t mean everyone’s voice and speech is equal and ‘right’…people unfortunately interpret democracy this way.”
Day and night, there were usually at least one or two protesters camped out in the narrow alleyway, stopping any passersby to raise awareness of wealth inequality or to simply have a civil conversation of politics.
“It’s not a case of getting the message out, but getting more people to admit how they already feel or live,” Bentley said.
Bentley likes telling people about the approximately one in three children who are raised in low-income families, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty.
Or perhaps he will remind them that 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined, a fact corroborated by PolitiFact, a non-partisan fact checking website.
For six weeks, Bentley repeated these arguments and many others to the hundreds of people who walked by, with mixed results of support and disapproval.
He worked to get his messages through to everyone who walked by in the hopes that awareness and knowledge of political and social issues would rally support in the fight against what the Occupy movement stood for.
Many at first were not receptive, shouting to him “This isn’t Wall Street” or “Why are you here?” he said.
Taylor Johnson, another protester, remembers an early encounter when a person driving by told the occupiers to get a job like the “successful businessmen” who pay for the sidewalks they stand on.
“I thought to myself, I have a good opportunity and duty to pass onto these ignorant people who don’t know their taxes pay for these sidewalks,” Johnson said. “It’s sad when victims don’t even know they’re victims.”
Bentley believes all Occupy movements, no matter how small, have their place in civic discourse, because the issues they fight for exist everywhere.
“You have to have Occupy in every small town, every nook and cranny, every dive bar, everything all around the country at once,” he said. “You infuse people into a movement where they’re actively talking one on one.”
That’s why he was there, through rain-soaked nights and sunless days: for the ability each day to stop a person on their way to work in the morning or to the bars at night. All the devotion, the weeks of time spent on the streets, all to make a person think, maybe even care if just for a moment, about wealth inequality or corporate greed.
Support and assistance came in ideological agreement, but also in tangible donations. From financial contributions to donated food and supplies, Occupy BG continued to grow, its message of social equality beginning to take shape.
Then came the eviction notice.
Dated Nov. 29, 2011, the city of Bowling Green sent a notice to Occupy BG, giving protesters until noon, Dec. 1, to remove their tents, tables, chairs and other personal belongings.
“The First Amendment protections of freedom of assembly and freedom of speech do not include a right to use public property as a storage area,” the eviction notice said.
While city police ordered their belongings and materials to be removed, the protestors themselves were allowed to stay.
On Thursday, Dec. 1, the nearby city clock tower struck noon as over a dozen reporters waited for a potential confrontation, but the police never showed up. It was a small victory for Occupy BG, but Bentley knew what was coming.
Choosing to stay in the tents after the eviction deadline, Bentley went to sleep every night with a mass text to dozens of protesters and other supporters upon a police raid already typed out. The police waited, and when the cameras weren’t running and no one else was watching, they moved in.
Bentley was ready.
* * *
Four days after their ordered eviction date, Bentley and Johnson awoke suddenly to the sound of steel pans hitting one another. The pans were tied to the tent’s opening as a makeshift alarm.
As one police officer ripped the tent down, another poked his head inside and read the city’s eviction notice.
“When I saw him, I clicked send,” Bentley said.
Before the officer could finish the notice, other officers began cutting the tents with shears, he said.
Bentley and Johnson were given two minutes to leave the premises or be arrested. Days before, the two had already made their decision to stay.
Amidst police shouting and threatening them, Bentley says that when their time was up, the police gave them one last chance to leave.
Johnson stepped back inside the tent. Bentley stood his ground.
They were soon handcuffed and walked down the alley where they had lived in peaceful protest for a month and a half.
According to BGPD’s police report, 27 officers were involved in the raid that resulted in the arrests of Bentley and Johnson for obstruction of justice, who were “taken into custody without any issues.”
When he thinks about his decision to stand up peacefully to the officers, Bentley says he’s never been more proud of himself.
In all, Bowling Green spent two weekends and almost $10,000 training police for the Occupy BG raid, according to the Sentinel Tribune.
Public reaction, Bentley said, has only driven more support for Occupy BG.
“I’ve gotten a lot of free drinks.”
Ultimately, Occupy BG carries on, finding new ways to bring awareness to its fight for social equality.
“It’s surreal how much we accomplished,” Johnson said.
For six weeks in downtown Bowling Green, Bentley and others challenged citizens on the issues. The alleyway now sits empty, as it did before their occupation.
While their camp is gone, their spirit and drive for working for a better, fairer America continues on.
“When the people are informed, they will make the better choice.”
Dreams of Jewelry
13 years
by Kelsey Klein
in Fire
By Kelsey Klein
The silence of the art gallery was interrupted when a woman, rushing, bounced into the room. Spotting an acquaintance sketching, she called cheerily across the empty space between them. Her black and white polka dot jacket, blue and green checkered shirt, bright green bag, and heavy boots contrasted sharply with the polished floor and sparkling glass walls surrounding her. She sat down and began to spread her work on the table in front of her. She picked up a necklace and laid it on a display. Another necklace was carefully placed on the table beside the first one. The woman unwrapped a ring from a soft cloth, placing both the ring and cloth down. Soon came several more necklaces, two bracelets, and a curved vessel depicting a shark-mouth silhouette. The woman smiled at the things she had made and began explaining their meanings.
Jessica Baker, a 19-year-old sophomore at Bowling Green State University, has known her career path since she was a small child. Many people’s dreams shift as they grow. Instead of astronauts, they become bankers. Instead of dancers, they become teachers. Some swear they will be artists and become baristas at coffee shops. Baker, however, has not let go of her dreams.
Baker began making jewelry on a road trip in fourth grade. She and her cousin made bracelets in the
Baker explains a concept for a new piece of jewelry she is working on. Photo by Kelsey Klein.
car and Baker, hooked, asked her mom for more beads. Soon, Baker was hooked on working with wire as well, making and selling bracelets on her Minister, Ohio, elementary school playground. Her playground business continued, even during the winter months, until Baker was making custom bracelets for peers—an elementary school version of artistic commissions.
Baker continued to make jewelry throughout high school. Her free time was a process of discovery, vision and new ideas for her work. When it was time for college, Baker knew she wanted to attend BGSU.
“This was… the only destination I had in mind,” she said. “It was the only place I applied to. I didn’t do any tour here. I just knew I was coming here.”
Kim Zeigler, Baker’s cousin from the fourth-grade trip, was instrumental in Baker’s assurance that she was attending BGSU. Zeigler graduated from BGSU in 2008 with a Bachelor’s degree in art education and is currently a full-time jewelry artist. Baker and Zeigler have always had a strong relationship centered around art, Zeigler said in an email.
Baker was equally certain about her degree path: 3D fine art with a focus in jewelry and metalwork.
“I didn’t really think of anything else. I was just like, oh, I’m in college, I like making things, so I’ll major in making jewelry,” she said, shaking her long, dark hair. “It was that thing that I was destined, I guess you could say. The thing that I would always go back to.”
Baker was not sure, however, about how she would work with metal. Since materials and machinery for metalwork are extremely expensive, Baker did not have an opportunity to try making art with metal before she came to college.
Baker explains the process of working metal into a vessel shape. Photo by Kelsey Klein.
Last semester was a process of figuring out how to work with metal, according to Baker. Now that, as she puts it, she is friends with metal, she is more focused on using metal.
Baker’s relationship with metal is more than a friendship, according to Tom Muir, head of the Jewelry and Metalsmithing Department at BGSU and a mentor of Baker.
“She has a real sensitivity for the material,” Muir said. “You can see if someone really cares and nurtures something, and I think that was really evident in her work, too.”
Baker, according to Muir, respects the metal to the point of reverence for what it can become under an artist’s hand. She treats the material with love. Baker finishes her work properly, fixing errors she makes until her work is perfect.
Working to finish her art properly, however, involves much trial and error for Baker. Her first idea, she said, isn’t always her best idea. She experiments, changes her work and starts over in her quest to translate her artistic vision.
“When I decide I’m going to make something, I put my heart into it and I set my mind.” she reflected. “It becomes almost like a puzzle that I have to break and solve… I can’t stop until I figure it out.”
Life is art for Baker. She finds inspiration in the details of life.
“Jessica is constantly abstracting the everyday real world and turning it into jewelry,” Zeigler wrote in an email.
Baker once saw a brick wall that inspired some necklaces. She also finds inspiration in colors and in trees she sees.
One of Baker’s necklaces depicts brightly colored hand shapes laced with chain. The necklace, she says, was inspired by her feeling that time sometimes chokes her.
Techno-whale-shark. Photo by Kelsey Klein.
Another of Baker’s necklaces, one she refers to as techno-whale-shark, was inspired by techno music and the patterns on whale sharks‘ skin.
A necklace of Baker's, inspired by the way she occasionally feels choked by time constraints. Photo by Kelsey Klein.
Baker’s biggest dream is to open her own jewelry and metal business, much like Zeigler, though the two have distinctly different styles.
“Her jewelry reflects her positive attitude because it is very bright and funky,” Zeigler wrote. “Jessica’s jewelry is jewelry you would want to wear to fun events and around happy people.”
On fire for Christ
13 years
by Sarah Bailey
in Fire
Development director exemplifies alternative lifestyle and passion for his work
Rob Hohler sits in his office at St. Thomas More University Parish. Photo by Sarah Bailey
By Sarah Bailey
When Rob Hohler first came to Bowling Green State University as an undergraduate student, he wasn’t sure about his faith.
In fact, he even said his path was a bit crooked.
“I kind of came to college with the hopes and aspirations of becoming a millionaire,” he said.
In a world and culture where many businessmen, political candidates and entrepreneurs may center their idea of success on wealth, Hohler’s journey reflects his alternative lifestyle. As an undergraduate student, Hohler started at BGSU as a business major hoping to obtain a degree that he could make as much money as possible with. Now, he is a church employee who lives a life concentrated on praying, working and living his faith.
In his office, decorated with Christian quotes and crosses, many wouldn’t assume the Catholic-raised 24-year-old had swayed from his faith at some point in his life. While he currently works as the development director at St.Thomas More University Parish, when Hohler first came to BGSU he said he was “spotty” even going to Mass.
As an undergraduate, Hohler considered himself isolated. He had friends, but not true companionship, he said. He spent his time playing video games, sleeping too much and feeling introverted.
“Though I had direction in life, I didn’t know why I was going there,” he said.
In the first semester of his sophomore year, Hohler found his way. He attended a semi-annual retreat at St. Thomas More after being repeatedly invited by the Rev. Michael Danduarand, he said. At the retreat he made friends and deepened his desire to be a part of the parish’s community.
“It was pretty easy for me to see that this is the life I wanted to live, and this is what my life would be about,” he said. “It’s a focal point, the purpose of life.”
He then went away for a semester to California in order to grow as a person. In searching for himself, he discovered that there was more in the world beyond him. During his journey, he said there were times where he simply couldn’t be on his own. That’s when he realized God, who was greater than himself, was with him. When he came back, he moved straight into the Newman center, a housing option available for BGSU students who want to share a prayer-based schedule. During the next two years, he became very involved at the parish, grew in his faith and continues to live at the Newman center.
This is a photo of Rob Hohler with Ryan Moninger, Kyle Moninger, Martha Gutierrez and Brittany Smith on an alternative spring break trip in 2011. Photo provided by Kyle Moninger.
“When I moved in here, I just encountered an incredible community,” he said.
Ryan Moninger, a junior who currently lives with Hohler in the Newman center and has known him since the fall of 2010, said he valued his friendship with Hohler.
“Next to my twin brother, Kyle, he’s my best friend here in college,” said Moninger, a junior majoring in architecture.
Moninger bonded with Hohler over “Halo,” a popular Xbox video game, when they began living together. He said Hohler has faced past issues, but has since risen above them.
“He’s always a source of encouragement for me and an example that I can look up to,” he said.
Along with encountering a new community came adjustments also, Hohler said. While he now lives a life focused on morning, evening prayer, mass and planning retreats, when he first moved into the Newman center it was a transition, he said.
“I was redefining what I thought about life and how I approached things,” he said. “It was like a new discovery.”
While other development directors at different churches may focus their jobs solely on raising money, a sign on Hohler’s wall in his office shows his approach is a different one.
On his bulletin board hangs a quote by Mother Theresa with a dollar bill that says,
“God does not call us to be successful. He calls us to be faithful.”
Hohler received the dollar from a friend. Before the quote was on the board, he had posted a “million dollar goal” with the dollar, he said.
“It was a bit of a sarcastic goal,” he said. Anytime someone would see it, the sign would seem very far from achieving the goal. It’s a joke that shows how someone just has to be faithful to God to find true success, he said.
Hohler graduated with a degree in business administration in 2010. Now, while he could be making more money than he is, Hohler looks at his degree as a way to serve the Lord, he said.
While simplyhired.com lists the highest annual salary of a church development director as $73,000, according to allbusinessschools.com, annual salaries in marketing and sales management can climb up to $151,260.
“I certainly could’ve made a lot more money than what I’m making now, so it definitely wasn’t the money,” he said.
Now Hohler organizes retreats twice a year, arranges the development efforts of the parish, does marketing and has various other responsibilities. One of the most fulfilling aspects of working with the retreat program is seeing the mission of the church, which is to bring people in, come alive, he said.
“The sort of life I’ve been blessed to live became really natural to me. It’s what I wanted to do. I don’t feel like I’m making a great sacrifice to be here. I feel like this is a gift to me,” Hohler said.
Tegan Gahan, a junior who has known Rob for four years, has seen him develop over the years.
“His role for me was a spiritual leader and showing me what the Catholic faith was about,” said Gahan, an exercise science major.
Hohler has always been very passionate about his Catholicism and his personality makes him an interesting person to get to know, she said.
“As you get to know him, you realize he will go out of his way for anyone,” she said. One time Gahan said she lost her car keys on a retreat and Hohler had her car towed to her apartment so that it wouldn’t get taken away.
“You couldn’t count the things that he’s done over the years to help other people,” she said.
When it comes to Hohler’s faith and how he sees himself now compared to four years ago, one aspect has changed, he said.
“I have always been a child of God,” he said. “God has always been there. The difference between now and then is that I know that.”