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Excerpted from
Central PA magazine, March 2003
Artful
Dodger
By Lori
Myers
Life is
never easy for struggling artists. They are usually dismissed by
others, solitary, living out of sync in societies that treasure the
bottom line rather than the delicate sweeps of the
paintbrush.
Just
ask Mechanicsburg artist Dustin Genard. He was never a
paint-by-numbers type of guy, never one to stay within the steadfast
borders of an object. "I flunked art class," recalls Genard, who
signs his paintings "Dusty." "When we were told to draw fruit, I
drew fruit eaten by bats."
The
once shy, still soft-spoken 31-year-old, who changes his look every
month or two, says that when he's "bugged by things" he puts them on
his canvases -- deep blue oils of emaciated women he conjured up
after flipping through Vogue magazine; shifty clowns
representing the upper middle class in his painting titled Le
Carnaval; a man soulfully playing violin music in Lament.
"A painting or sculpture is the trapped energy of that artist," he
says. "I use emotion as the fuel for my creative outlet."
Raised
in the Westmoreland County railroad town of Youngwood -- a place he
calls "stifling and small" -- he always drew despite hardships, lack
of money and the meager surroundings. He struggled with school and
used much of his time there to daydream and look out the window,
until a high-school art teacher saw his potential. "He saw I was
creative and that I was a storyteller," Genard recalls. "He
understood how to teach me. The art room was a safe
place."
So
safe, in fact, that Genard thrived in that classroom with other
young artists. But after graduation, his insecurities came back to
haunt him. Miserable and depressed, he earned money doing survey
work and lived in Pittsburgh in an abandoned trailer with a hole in
the ceiling and vines growing along the inside walls. "I was a
lower-class citizen," he says. He would paint but placed his
canvases promptly into a closet so no one would see them.
Praise
about his art from his girlfriend and her roommates changed his
outlook and his opinion about those closet paintings. He painted
with acrylics, anything he could afford, and then oils when he got
more serious. "I started looking at the masters -- Cézanne, Van
Gogh," he says. "There was a reawakening. I would paint and paint
and paint to escape from the poverty I was in."
Genard
is still painting at what seems a frenetic pace -- two or three
pictures at one time, pacing like a "caged tiger," he says, along
the row of white canvases, letting his paintbrush express what's
going on in his head.
Genard
moved to Central PA more than two years ago, and his art continues
to be his obsession as well as his salvation. By day he supports
himself working at a Lemoyne art shop, where he says he has inspired
his fellow employees to free up their creative energies and take
chances. But at home, Genard paints through the night and into the
morning. His present interest is painting isolated Gettysburg
landscapes. "I can't walk away from a painting," he remarks with a
slight smile. "A white canvas drives me crazy."
His
paintings have been shown in area coffeehouses, at Hershey Philbin
Associates' Suite 3 Gallery in Camp Hill
and at Harrisburg's Whitaker Center, and he has sold more than a
dozen paintings. Though the struggling artist in him dreams of one
day seeing his work hanging in a museum, "one room over from
Picasso," success and money are not his goals. For Genard, the
meaning behind his art and his creative output is mortality. "What a
way to capture the way you lived," he says wistfully. "I want my
family to find my hundreds of paintings, to leave them for someone
else to look at. That is how I want to make my mark."
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Marking
Time
By Steve
Kennedy
If
you're a typical resident or tourist in Pennsylvania, sometime or
other, you've passed one of those blue signs with gold lettering
along the side of the road and had time enough to just read the
title. Something about a canal?A fort? The Underground
Railroad?
A new
initiative by WITF and the
Pennsylvania
Historical and Museum Commission, in partnership
with the Pennsylvania Public Television Network, is designed to make
the state's history come alive in a deeper way than a quick read
from a passing car can provide.
Now
online, ExplorePAhistory.com uses 300 of the state's 1,900
historical markers as a basis to examine 11 themes in Pennsylvania
history, ranging from William Penn, religious communities and the
environment to the Underground Railroad, the Civil War and jazz. The
site explains the themes -- more of which will be added as the
project unfolds -- through expert historical interpretation,
archival images and original documents. There are additional
resources for teachers as well as for travelers desiring to visit
historical sites.
WITF
President and CEO Kathleen Pavelko says her interest in the subject
stems from a historical marker she passed in Fulton County with the
intriguing title, "Burnt Cabins." She recalls wishing she had
instant access to details, context and the ability to ask questions,
and points out that not only travelers but also teachers often have
difficulty locating such resources.
"ExplorePAHistory.com was created to address these needs
through digital technologies, starting with a website, but through
other media, too," she explains. "In later phases, you'll be able to
download parts of ExplorePAhistory to your PalmPilot to travel with
you around the state."
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Think Outside
the Pot
By Stephanie
Anderson
Most
people would call Mike Theuer an entrepreneur, an inventor. Theuer,
however, refers to himself a "schemer." After stints as a
coffeehouse owner, counselor to troubled kids and advertising-agency
artist, Theuer's proclivity for "scheming" has led him down the most
unusual (and, he's hoping, most lucrative) career path yet -- the
garden path.
Three
years ago, Theuer created Grow Joe
plant food -- an organic fertilizer made from coffee grounds. He
got the idea when he owned Cool Beans Coffee & Tea in Bellefonte
and was troubled by the amount of coffee grounds he was throwing
away. Theuer, 41, remembered his grandmother saving coffee grounds
and eggshells and sprinkling them on her rose bushes when he was a
kid. He did some research, and found that neutralized coffee grounds
are an effective fertilizer. Recent studies show that caffeine kills
certain garden pests, including snails and slugs. He concocted a
recipe for Grow Joe, then made starter pots out of the plant food
and biodegradable plastic.
If it
sounds like a common-sense idea, it is. Except that no one had ever
thought of it before. "People were freaking out," Theuer says,
standing in the frigid barn in Bellefonte where he makes Grow Joe.
"I'm kind of new to this and kind of dumb about it, so I guess I
thought outside of the box."
Since
Theuer started manufacturing Grow Joe three years ago, he's been
written about in the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street
Journal. The National Public Radio program Living on Earth
did a radio
segment about him. Smith & Hawken purchased 6,000 of his starter
pots to sell in their catalog. Both Folgers and Starbucks donate
tons of coffee grounds to Theuer. He's hoping to secure a $250,000
grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, and he has a patent
pending for his starter pots. Despite the attention, the
stay-at-home dad to three young sons hasn't exactly turned a
substantial profit yet.
Why? He
believes the answer is simple. "I think people think it's too good
to be true."
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International
House of Flowers
By Pamela
Rohland
Even if
you have never heard of Reading-based Floral
Concepts International -- America's
largest importer of dried flowers -- chances are good you have seen
or purchased some of their imports at Pier One, Target, IKEA,
Bloomingdale's, Saks, the Guggenheim Museum or Longwood
Gardens.
Celebrities such as England's Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Noor
of Jordan, best-selling author John Grisham, home-décor diva Martha
Stewart and temperamental songbird Mariah Carey also know where to
shop for flower power.
The
second floor of a renovated warehouse is the headquarters and retail
showroom of Floral Concepts. The bare hardwood floor and plain walls
provide the backdrop for thousands of dried flowers of every hue
displayed in baskets and cases and shelves and hanging from the
ceiling.
Co-owner Lynn Mugno and husband Jim, who serves as accountant
and general manager, monitor events that could affect their supply
of lavender from France, baobab from Kenya, or curly tine from the
Philippines. "Because of the fighting in Israel, we've had trouble
getting product," she says. "When you deal with South Africa, there
are political power struggles over who will do the shipping. And an
earthquake in California or Asia can affect our sales."
But
even international disasters can't spoil the joy Lynn gets from
flowers. "My life will always be a never-ending search for the most
beautiful flowers in the world," she vows.
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Notebook: April in
Persia
By Steve
Kennedy
 In Germany in the late 1970s, a friend inspired me with
slides and stories of his overland trip to Katmandu, and I decided
that before I returned home I would take that journey of a lifetime,
too.
It was
April when I took the express train to Istanbul, spent more than a
week crossing Turkey on a series of local trains, and rode buses
across Iran. Before crossing into Pakistan just ahead of the
Ayatollah's wrath, I met a friendly group of people on the bus
somewhere in the Dasht-i-Lut desert. "Get off with us at the next
stop and ride to our village," they said. "It's just half a day's
journey by camel."
It was
one of those moments you know will change your life, one way or the
other. Were they bandits, and would I never see Central PA again? Or
if I gave in to distrust, would I miss the chance to experience a
culture that few outsiders had ever seen? I went with my gut and got
off the bus.
When we
arrived in their village shortly before sunset, I was told there
would be a village feast for their guest from Pennsylvania, which
they pronounced "Penn-seel-wa-NEE-yah." We sat on the ground outside
the village elder's house -- a stone, beehive-shaped hut -- and a
heaping tray of food soon appeared. At first I thought it was a pile
of meatballs, but it was something stuffed. I asked what, half
afraid to find out. "It is goat stomachs," said one of my friends
from the bus.
I took
one and hesitated. As the others began eating their entrees, I saw
they were filled with a kind of sausage -- goat, I assumed -- some
sort of shredded cabbage, and a starchy vegetable reminiscent of
potatoes. It reminded me of the pig stomachs my mother served on New
Year's Day. "What do you call this dish?" I asked after taking a
bite. "It is known as khaq m'aa," my friend said. The village
elder, a man with a thin beard and no mustache, told me the dish,
and the name, had been brought to the village by a foreigner, Ishaq
Zhdofouz, who spoke a bit like me and had lived among them a
generation ago. He made this food for himself, and it had caught on
among the villagers.
We
talked and feasted late into the night, making many
fermented-camel's-milk toasts to eternal friendship between the
village and Penn-seel-wa-NEE-yah.
Years
after my return to Central PA, I remarked to an Amish carpenter who
was building me a storage shed that I had seen a man in a remote
Iranian village who had a beard just like his. He raised his
eyebrows. "And it was odd," I continued, "in that same village they
served a dish that was almost like hog maw, except it was made from
a goat stomach." He shrugged and went back to work, but as he was
about to leave, he told me almost conspiratorially, "I think you
mighta seen the work of old Isaac Stoltzfus. Back in the '40s he
thought we oughta send out missionaries to tell the world about the
Amish way of life. We called him 'Ferrickta Isaac' -- Crazy Isaac.
But he went over to Persia or someplace for a couple years." I asked
what ever happened to Isaac. "He came back and started his own
group. If you ever see a black buggy with yellow wheels, that's one
of his."
I
suspected he was joking. Then, last spring, on a back road in the
Kishacoquillas Valley, for the first time I saw such a buggy. It was
turning onto a dirt road beside a mailbox that said "I. Stoltzfus."
I couldn't resist following the buggy down the lane to an isolated
farm. "Does Isaac Stoltzfus live here?" I asked. "Well, he did,"
said the buggy driver. "Isaac was my grandfather. He died last
year."
My
heart sank. "Can I ask you a couple of questions about him?" I said
cautiously, still not quite daring to believe there had been an
Amish missionary to Persia, whose only legacy was faux hog maw and a
village elder's beard. "Well, come on inside once and have supper,"
the grandson said. "Have you ever tasted goat sausage?"
I
looked at the calendar on my watch. It was April 1.
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