Eugene Weekly

“I was a troublemaker as a kid,” says Kemy Joseph, the seventh of 10 children of divorced parents in Miami. “I was kicked out of school in fourth grade.” He got arrested twice in eighth grade, but turned things around in high school, where he captained the cross-country team and produced videos that helped him win a scholarship to study film arts at the University of Miami. There, he joined a campus club called Random Acts of Kindness. “It was a big turning point,” says Joseph, who became club president in his senior year. Continue reading →

“Our family hobby was rock hunting,” says Ron Wold, who grew up in Beaverton and majored in geology at Amherst. He got a master’s degree at the University of Montana, then came to Eugene to pursue a Ph.D. “After two years, I got a job as a geologist with the Bureau of Land Management,” says Wold, who eventually became a realty specialist in the agency’s Eugene office. “I managed right-of-way agreements on 320,000 acres.” After 30 years of service, he retired in 2004 at age 56. Continue reading →

Shortly after graduating from University of California, Berkeley in 1963 with a bachelor’s in journalism, Bay Area native David Kayfes joined the Army National Guard. He had the good fortune to be stationed for two years in Italy, where he met Anneke, a young woman from Holland. “I got out in October of ’66,” he says, “and got married in December.” Back in the U.S., he worked for the Associated Press in Salt Lake City, then found a job back at Cal, in the Sports Information Department. Continue reading →

“I could see Manhattan from my roof,” says Alley Valkyrie, who grew up in suburban New Jersey. One of six girls in her class at school with the same trendy first name, she ran away from home at 17, changed her name, took up painting and sold art on the streets in New York. “I learned more about people than about artwork. It moved me to activism.” She protested globalization and the Iraq War, and she met a few Cascadia Forest Defenders from Oregon. On a visit to Eugene in 2004, she spent two weeks in the woods and then discovered Eugene’s Saturday Market. Continue reading →

Scott Burgwin and a small crew of volunteers set up the Coast Fork Farm Stand in Cottage Grove’s Coiner Park by 2 pm on Wednesdays. Burgwin volunteers as coordinator of the Cottage Grove Growers’ Market during its summer season, when it shares Wednesday evenings with a series of concerts in the park. “The music has given us a lift,” says Burgwin, who moved the market from Saturdays downtown to Wednesdays in the park six years ago. Continue reading →

On the afternoon of April 22, 2011, as LCC media arts student Sakti Sarfati was walking home from class, she stopped at a railroad crossing. “I was filming to illustrate a song,” says Sarfati, who was so focused on a westbound freight train that she didn’t hear the horn of the approaching Amtrak passenger train. “She flew like a rag doll into the gravel,” a witness reported. Sarfati spent five days in the hospital, had 12 staples in her head and nine months of vertigo, but recovered and won a scholarship to continue her studies.  Continue reading →

Avid cyclists and year-round bike commuters Ellen Singer and Gary Rondeau will pedal in style at Burning Man on their wood-frame DateTrike, a side-by-side two-seater, built for romance. “Ellen came up with the idea,” says Rondeau. “I did the design and construction.” Brooklyn native Singer studied and practiced law in the Bay Area before moving her practice to Eugene in 1992. Rondeau studied engineering until a research job at Cornell turned into a Ph.D. in physics. He moved to Eugene and co-founded the firm Applied Scientific Instrumentation. Continue reading →

September 2003: On a hot August afternoon, master gardener Maggie Matoba shares a patch of shade with Willamette Oaks Retirement Center residents who raise veggies and flowers in the therapeutic garden Matoba maintains as part of her Healing Harvest program. “Maggie’s been such a blessing,” Evelyn Higgins says. “She put in new soil and a watering system.” Matoba witnessed the healing potential of gardening when her father came to stay after a stroke. “Gardening added 15 years to his life,” she says. Continue reading →

December 1997: “I’m the brokest famous man in town,” says veteran musician Eagle Park Slim, talking his blues. “I’ve had trials and tribulations.” As a kid, Slim learned Chicago and Delta blues from artists who played his parents’ roadhouse in Eagle Park, Ill. “Harmonica Sam could blow out a brand-new harmonica on the first song,” says Slim, who started blowing Sam’s castoffs at age 9, learned guitar from Johnny Wright at 11 and fronted his own band at 13. In the 1960s and ’70s he had bands in East St. Continue reading →