“The warming center began pretty haphazardly,” Vicky remembered. “In the winter of 2010, I looked out my window at our sandwich giveaway station across the street and noticed a crowd on the tiny porch despite the bitter temperature. They were not leaving with their sandwiches, but instead were choosing to eat them right there!” Concerned for the safety of these vulnerable people, Vicky remembered the old cafeteria in the basement of the Center for Hope. “I called our facilities manager and asked him to move the sandwich program down there so that people could eat inside. I had no intention of creating a 24-hour warming center.” But that’s just what she’d done. Vicky says that the staff was soon calling her to say that people didn’t want to leave. “We extended our hours until, about two weeks after I’d made this change, the basement was open all day and night with an hour hiatus for cleaning.”
Peering into the kettle with a practiced eye, Cory Fernelius appraises the mixture of water and grains boiling inside. With hands that once worked his family’s farm, the 29-year-old Fenton resident expertly adds more hops to the concoction. Now near the end of the process, he seeks to transfer the liquid containing sugars and grain mash – known as wort – into a fermentation vessel to cool as quickly as possible. Pitching yeast into the mix is the last step; from here, it’s all about remaining patient during the final phase of brewing his beer…
Gloria MacArthur met Frederick VanDuyne on a blind date in 1954. “I was attending Connecticut College for Women, and a friend of mine was headed to New York City one night to meet her boyfriend from Cornell Medical School, which is located there,” Gloria explained, “so I went with her.” For his part, Erick remembers a friend of his calling down the dormitory hall, asking who wanted to go on a blind date that night. “I popped my head out of my room and said ‘I do,’” he smiled. The college was holding a dance on the roof of the dorm that evening, and the foursome attended together. “I remember I called my mother that night and told her I’d found the boy I was going to marry,” Gloria reminisced. A year later, Erick proposed and Gloria accepted.
Although she was born in Arkansas, Willa moved with her family to Flint as a child. She graduated from Northern High School and obtained degrees from Michigan State University and Eastern Michigan University. She married Elmer Hawkins, who worked for General Motors, and they raised two children, a son and a daughter, while she worked for the Flint schools as an educator and as the principal of Bunche Elementary School for 17 years, retiring in 1990. Willa had always been a staunch supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, but a fire was lit in her in 1963 when she traveled by bus to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to participate in the March on Washington. There, she heard Martin Luther King Jr. give his famous I Have a Dream speech. “It fueled me to become a warrior of sorts,” she said. “I worked my way through a sea of people right to the front of the crowd.”
“My coach told us and I was pretty excited,” the soft-spoken Gloster said. “I’m so excited about maybe winning a trophy and medal. I’m a little nervous, but want to help my team do their best.” Some of Gloster’s teammates, like 19-year-old Drew Callahan, are more vocal when it comes to expressing their thoughts, and while he’s excited too, he’s not looking forward to every part of the experience. “I won’t like the airplane ride,” Callahan admitted, “but I am excited about helping the team and trying to take the trophy home. I love spiking the ball and having fun out there. We do need to improve stuff like calling for the ball when it comes by us and staying in our own areas, but we’re really excited about competing.”
Free weights, barbells, body weights and cables are a few of the machines used for strength training.
When Jennifer Barkey was appointed probate judge in 2006, she received a shock. “I’d been a judge for, I don’t know, fifteen minutes,” she said, “and I had over 50 cases wherein I had to order an involuntary pick-up of someone with a mental illness who was off their medication.” Frustrated by the vicious cycle of mental illness and insufficient treatment – a cycle that often ended in a jail sentence – Barkey heard about a mental health court in Ohio and went there to observe. Determined to institute the same court in Genesee County, she began by assembling a team, which included a clinical liaison from Genesee Health System and two attorneys willing to volunteer their time to represent defendants. “When we first started,” Barkey remembered, “our clinical liaison would cross-check a list of all the inmates in the jail every morning against a list of GHS clients. When we found a match, we would look into their charges, and if they met the requirements, we would have our attorney meet with the defendant and ask if they would like to try the Mental Health Court program. If they agreed, we’d talk to the judge on the case about a transfer.” This labor-intensive process is somewhat eased nowadays, says Judge Barkey, since other Genesee County judges now know about and believe in the program and refer appropriate cases to her.
Bob also played briefly in the National Hockey League for the Los Angeles Kings and for the American Hockey League’s Springfield Kings in Springfield, MA, then on the International Hockey League team in Muskegon. He and his wife, Kris, moved to Flint on New Year’s Day in 1969 when Bob became the goalie for the Flint Generals. The couple had two children, Robert and Lahna. While playing for the Generals in 1974, Bob pursued his first business venture, Perani’s Pizza. Four years later, he opened Bob Perani’s Sport Shop, which was located on Davison Road. Initially a general sporting goods store, its focus was on hockey equipment, explained Robert. But it quickly transformed into a specialty store. “Hockey was beginning to grow,” says Kevin Ward, Robert’s brother-in-law and Perani’s president/COO. The store moved to Dort Highway in 1989 and then to the Dort Mall in 1997 after Bob purchased the building.
Judy began working at King Arthur’s 30 years ago as a cake decorator. She had taken cake-decorating classes and was working at an Owosso bakery when Arthur hired her. “I’ve always loved to bake!” she exclaimed. Judy was a good employee, and remembers the owner telling her, “Stick around and this place will be yours.” “And that’s what happened,” she laughed. When Judy and Randy bought the place, Arthur’s pasty recipe came with the deal. The recipe originated in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a place famous for pasties. In the U.P., pasties were an ideal food for immigrants working in the mines because they could tuck them into their pockets to keep warm until lunchtime. According to legend, King Arthur served pasties to the Knights of the Round Table, hence the whimsical name of the eatery.
Lewis was born in Georgia and raised in Washington D.C. He attended a black college in Alabama – the Tuskegee Institute as it was then known. Upon graduation, Lewis was hired by the Institute as a printer in the school’s graphic arts department. It was during this time that he met MLK, who lived in Montgomery, Alabama (about 40 miles away). Back before he got his doctorate and became the leader of the civil rights movement, MLK was a preacher. He used to come to Tuskegee every Tuesday evening to speak at different churches. Lewis printed the literature needed for his speaking engagements, and the men shared the common bond of being Alpha Phi fraternity brothers. “Being a fraternity brother, I got to know him pretty good,” Lewis remembers, “and I remember his energy. People were just energized by him.” As the head of the printing department at the time, Lewis made copies of MLK’s speeches for his Tuesday night visits. “At that time, MLK was not the icon he is today; he was just a preacher,” Lewis remembers. But even then, Lewis says he knew this man was something special.
