Eugene Weekly

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 →

February 2008: After graduating from the University of Michigan in economics, Jennifer Frenzer-Knowlton spent three years on Wall Street. “I saw the avarice of capitalism,” she says, so she returned to her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, for a law degree. “I felt that a woman needed teeth in her credentials.” She also got married, and when her physician husband took a job on the Makah Reservation in Neah Bay, Washington, she was hired by the tribe. “I worked on economic development,” she says. Continue reading →

“I grew up playing in the woods and creeks,” says Laurie Trieger, who lived in Philadelphia with her mom, but attended the Miquon School out in the country, where her mother worked in administration. “It was very ’70s, a radical creative education. I learned critical thinking and never had a letter grade.” After high school, Trieger waited tables and also volunteered at the Elizabeth Blackwell Health Center for Women, then was hired there full-time. In 1982, she met Larry Coxe in Philly. Two years later, they sold everything and departed. Continue reading →

“I can go to places where trees are still standing because I was there to make it happen,” Shannon Wilson says. “I’ve been involved in stopping 20 to 30 timber sales, mostly in western Oregon.” When he was 8, Wilson’s parents moved from Santa Rosa, California, where his three older brothers were getting into parties and fights, to rural southern Oregon, four miles from Selma in the Siskiyou Mountains. He learned to identify birds and trees. At 14, he joined an environmental group fighting a proposed nickel strip mine on nearby Eight Dollar Mountain. Continue reading →

Raised on a farm outside Cincinnati, Ohio, Rose Elder rode public school buses to Guardian Angel Catholic Grammar School, 3 miles away, and to high school at St. Joseph’s Academy in the city. Later the family moved to Phoenix, Arizona, for her father’s health. “He died when I was 20,” says Elder, who had six months of college in Phoenix before she began working for California Water and Telephone. “We called it California Drip and Tinkle. Continue reading →

“My inspiration is my parents,” says Ruth Weinberg, who grew up in London, the daughter of German-Jewish refugees who felt welcome in England. “They created a nonprofit to provide affordable housing for international grad students and their families.” After graduating from the Dorset House School of Occupational Therapy, Weinberg got her first job at an old Victorian psychiatric hospital. When it shut down, she spent a year on an organic farm in New Zealand and two years with a group home for adults with developmental disabilities in Alaska.  Continue reading →

“I always knew, implicitly, that I was a musician,” says Scotty Perey, who took classical piano lessons from age 5 through high school in Billings, Montana. He sang in the school choir and taught himself guitar. He studied engineering for a year in Boulder before leaving that career path to study music at Montana State in Bozeman. He moved to Eugene in 1988 and finished a bachelor’s in music composition in 1994. He started giving music lessons at home in 1990, the same year he joined a new band, The Sugar Beets. “We met at the UO,” he says. Continue reading →