Eugene Weekly

 With a degree in marketing from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, Deron Fort returned to his hometown of West Chester, Pennsylvania, for a sales job at a titanium manufacturing plant. “It was not inspiring work,” he says. “We wore badges to measure radiation from the electron beam furnaces.” Fort quit two years later to study for a master’s in education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, then taught middle school for two years.  Continue reading →

“I started my study of anthropology at home,” says Stephen Wooten, the youngest of nine children in an Irish Catholic family in Weymouth, Massachusetts. “My dad was on the police force. He was a beat cop, on his feet, building relationships with people.” Wooten continued his study at UMass Amherst and got his masters and Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Illinois. He’s been a professor at the UO since 2001.  Continue reading →

“Someone told me Oregon was beautiful,” says Chris Veloon, who grew up in Grafton, Wisconsin, and studied occupational therapy (OT) at the University of Wisconsin, “and that Eugene was a lot like Madison.” Since she arrived at age 27, Veloon has worked for PeaceHealth and McKenzie-Willamette hospitals, and, for the past 10 years, for Cascade Health Solutions, a nonprofit community health agency. “I’m an OT in home health,” she says. “Two of us cover the county. We mostly see elderly people with health issues. Continue reading →

After college at Jacksonville University in Florida and a four-year enlistment in the Air Force, Kathy Ford headed west in 1976 to Los Angeles where she worked for AT&T, the phone company, and where she met her partner, Jill Winans. The pair escaped the Southern California heat in 1985 when Ford took a job with US West in Seattle, and left the big-city rat race in 1992, when she transferred to US West Wireless in Eugene. Two years later, Winans opened the CatSpa, a boarding kennel for cats. In 10 years of operation, the CatSpa became increasingly involved in animal rescue. Continue reading →

A native of Rockville, Maryland, with a degree in music education from George Mason University, Anya Dobrowolski came to Eugene in 2006 for grad school in landscape architecture. She finished a master’s degree in 2011 and was hired as assistant director of the school’s newly minted one-year graduate certificate program, Oregon Leadership in Sustainability (OLIS). That’s where she met Beth Sweeney, an OLIS student who had worked six years for the EPA in Dallas, Texas, and in her hometown of Seattle. Continue reading →

“I have worked as a caregiver, a CNA or home health aide since age 18,” says Troi, who grew up in Issaquah, Washington, and moved to Seattle in her early 20s. “I’ve specialized in hospice and developmental disabilities.” When her brother committed suicide early in 2004, Troi, who goes only by the one name, took a year off from work to intern at the Lost Valley Educational Center near Dexter, Oregon. “I was an entrenched urbanite, transplanted to a rustic rural environment,” she says. “It was lifesaving. I realized how much tension I was carrying, living in the city. Continue reading →

The daughter of an Alaskan Native airline pilot, who flew back and forth to Alaska, and a Norwegian mother from Minnesota, Sigvanna Topkok endured family fights at home and racist comments at school, as she grew up in several towns across Oregon, from Baker City to the coast. She spent childhood summers in her grandparents’ home village of Ambler, Alaska, where tribal traditions were suppressed in previous generations. “My grandmother was adopted out of the tribe,” she notes. “My dad passed away in a car crash when I was 11. Continue reading →

The son of an active-duty Marine, Jon Labrousse grew up in several West Coast cities, then went to high school in Hawaii. “Most of the kids were Asians and Pacific Islanders,” he says. “It was a huge growth experience.” He enrolled at Oregon State University to study engineering, but after a required reading class with John Campbell he began writing poetry and changed his major to English. He spent two years teaching in Japan and South Korea before settling in Eugene in 1996 with his wife, Tasha Katsuda. “We met at OSU,” he says. Continue reading →

Back in the 1980s, University of Florida student Jim Evangelista and his roommates had a sign that read “Welcome to Reality Kitchen.” Later, when he started painting murals, Evangelista adopted the name for his Gainesville storefront studio, and Reality Kitchen evolved into a 24/7 coffee house and community center. “We had music every night,” he says. After three years, he got back to murals and began building scenery for film and TV. He got married, had a son, Diego, and, in 1992, took a cross-country trip in a converted school bus. Continue reading →

“The prison experience was a blessing for me,” says Garvar Brummett, who left his San Fernando Valley home at age 17 to escape an abusive stepdad and an alcoholic mother. He fell into a cycle of addiction, alcoholism, homelessness, bank robbery and incarceration that lasted 20 years. He served five years in prison, part of it in Illinois, the rest at the Sheridan federal prison in Oregon. “I read a lot of self-help books and religious texts,” he says. “I started going to AA meetings. Continue reading →