The Digest
What’s Happening at KVCC
What’s below in this edition
Scholarship boost (Page 1-3)Michigan’s history (Page 10)
Derrick Jensen (Pages 3/4)Life as an athlete (Page 11)
A jazz legend (Pages 4/5)‘Water’ talks (Pages 11/12)
Literature showcase (Pages 5/6)Days of yore (Page 12)
A feast festival (Page 6)Are you fit? (Pages 12/13)
Gilmore pianist (Page 6)Family keepsakes (Page 13)
Views from space (Pages 6/7)‘Hot Hot Hot’ (Pages 13/14)
Student art show (Pages7/8) Class signup (Page 14)
RFID dials into M-TEC (Pages 8/9)Relay for Life (Page 14)
Cooper’s history (Pages 9/10)‘Tornado Alley’ (Pages 14/15)
And finally (Page 15)
☻☻☻☻☻☻
NHL’s Hitchcock kicks off scholarship fund-raiser
To help the KVCC Foundation reach its goal of raising money for scholarships, it has booked a keynote speaker who knows about scoring goals in professional hockey, and reaching them in corporate and personal life.
He’s Ken Hitchcock, whose resume as a coach in professional hockey includes a Stanley Cup championship and a perfect record for his teams reaching the playoffs over his 22-year career.
Hitchcock, who coached the Kalamazoo Wings for three seasons before moving on to the Dallas Stars and Philadelphia Flyers in the National Hockey League, will keynote the foundation’s first-ever fund-raising dinner on Thursday, April 14, at 6 p.m. at the Radisson Plaza Hotel & Suites.
Tickets for KVCC’s “Opportunities for Education” are $85 per person and are available by contacting the foundation office at 488-4442. The event is open to KVCC faculty and staff. Hitchcock’s comments will focus on personal responsibility and motivational leadership.
“This will be an evening full of inspiration, laughter and good cheer, excellent dining, and the knowledge that participants will be helping students and the college in producing quality graduates and an effective workforce,” said Steve Doherty, the foundation’s executive director.
“Ken does more than teach the best strategies ‘to get the puck in the net” for the good guys and ‘keep the puck out of the net’ for the other guys,” Doherty said. “He has offered his wisdom about leadership skills, motivation, team building, and sacrificing for success to major corporations and governmental agencies, including the FBI.”
Most recently, he keynoted a seminar for chief executive officers at the University of Pennsylvania. “He’s a coach by profession,” Doherty said, “but what he has to say is not strictly about sports and athletics. He draws parallels to how responsibility and leadership are also essential to how we live our lives and how we run our businesses.”
Hitchcock began his coaching career in 1984 in the Western Hockey League. He called the on-the-rink shots for Kalamazoo’s franchise in the International Hockey League from 1993 through 1996 before jumping to hockey’s major league in Dallas where he coached for seven seasons and won the coveted Stanley Cup in 1999. He joined the Flyers for the 2002 season.
He’s among only 29 NHL coaches to reach the 300-victory plateau and was the fourth fastest in league history to accomplish that, primarily because his Stars teams won five division titles in a row.
Hitchcock coached in the NHL All-Star Game three straight seasons. He was also part of Canada’s hockey teams that competed in three world tournaments, including the 2002 squad that won the gold medal in the Winter Olympics.
The KVCC Foundation was formed in 1980 and has accumulated nearly $8 million in assets. Its mission is to enhance educational opportunities and the learning environment at the college by supporting the academic, literary and scientific activities of KVCC students and faculty. Its assists the college’s Honors Program, minority and non-traditional students through scholarships and awards grants that promote innovative approaches to learning.
“Because KVCC’s tuition is the lowest among the state’s 28 community colleges and fees are practically non-existent,” Doherty said, “scholarship dollars take students a very, very long way toward their goals. We want to help even more in the coming years, now that state and federal sources of scholarships are either drying up or are in jeopardy because of budget cuts.”
In the current academic year, the foundation was able to assist 374 students through scholarships amounting to $180,500 that covered not only tuition, fees, books and supplies, but also child-care and transportation costs that students face in pursuing a degree or a new career.
“That represents a minimal fraction of the dollar value of scholarships that are available through the KVCC Office of Financial Aid,” Doherty said. “That type of assistance has federal and state sources that carry restrictions. So do some of those scholarships established by organizations or individuals. And all of those are very important.
“Ours, however, are more open-ended, less restrictive, and available to a broader representation of students who choose to attend KVCC,” Doherty said. “They are what our ‘Opportunities for Education’ event is all about.”
Joining the Radisson in co-sponsoring the first “Opportunities for Education” is Fairfield Broadcasting and its stations WKZO, WQSN and WKLZ.
President Marilyn Schlack will also have some podium duty as she offers perspectives about how scholarships give students the boost they need to become productive citizens and workers, the kinds that tend to give back later in their lives.
Jensen to lead writing seminar
Derrick Jensen, a “tell-it-like-he-avidly-believes-it-is” writer specializing in environmental and cultural issues, will speak at KVCC on Tuesday, April 12.
Part of the college’s annual Artists Forum series, the presentation by Jensen begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Commons Theater. His commentary on “Endgame: The Collapse of Civilization and the Rebirth of Community” is free and open to the public.
As part of his Kalamazoo visit, Jensen, author of “A Language Older Than Words” and “The Culture of Make Believe,” will lead a writing workshop for KVCC students at 2 p.m. on that Tuesday.
Jensen’s activist nature can best be illustrated by this quote: “We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous and other cultures, on women, on children, on all of us through the possibility of nuclear suicide and other means – all of these are unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity.”
In his first book, “Listening to the Land,” Jensen, who received a bachelor’s in mineral engineering physics from the Colorado School of Mines in 1983, asked: “Why do we act as we do? What are sane and effective responses to outrageously destructive behavior? What will it take for us to stop the horrors that characterize our way of being?”
Jensen has been trying to answer those questions over the last two decades, polishing his verbal skills by earning a master’s in fine arts in creative writing from Eastern Washington University in 1991.
His “The Culture of Make Believe” was assessed as “a passionate and provocative meditation on the nexus of racism, genocide, environmental destruction and corporate malfeasance, where civilization meets its discontents.”
Bracketed around his KVCC appearance will be interviews on California PBS stations, participation in the Global3 Conference, and speaking engagements at West Virginia University, the University of Nevada at Reno, an arts center in California, and the University of Washington.
He is described as an activist, author, philosopher, journalist and teacher who never dodges controversial subjects.
A reviewer of “A Language Older Than Words” said it accomplished “the rare feat of both breaking and mending the reader’s heart, as well as energizing the mind.”
A Jensen presentation “is multidimensional and feels a
bit like traveling beneath the earth among tree roots, as they twist their way into soil, rock, river beds, and accompany fish, insects, discarded tires, cellophane wrappers, animal minds, history, and human instinct on strange and interlocking journeys.”
In an improvisational style, Jensen “explores the nature of injustice, of what civilizations do to the natural world and how, in the face of the resulting horror that is one of the all-too-apparent consequences of grave injustice,civilized human beings create intricate systems of denial, silence, abnegation, deception and self-hatred to keep it at bay.”
Jensen’s personal antidote to cynicism and apocalypse is nature’s ongoing message to humanity. Nature’s language is “much older than the lying language we use daily, without being aware, to dispel the horrors of modern living and dying,” he said. The author of six books firmly believes that humanity is not listening to what nature is communicating.
“A Language Older Than Words” received “Best Book of the Year” honors in 2000 while “Listening to the Land” was ranked in the top 10 books about nature in 1995.
He is an adviser to the Del Norte Association for Cultural Awareness and the Native Forest Network. He co-founded the Railroads and Clearcuts Campaign in 1996.
The Artist Forum series is co-sponsored by KVCC and the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation.
For more information about the Artists Forum series, contact Dave Poster at extension 4476.
Jazz superstar in concert here
She’s been described as a musical montage of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Carmen McRae, Billie Holiday and Ethel Waters.
“She” is Dianne Reeves, who will be performing with her jazz trio on Friday, April 15, in KVCC’s 480-seat Dale V. Lake Auditorium.
Part of the college’s Artists Forum series that is co-sponsored by the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, the Reeves performance begins at 7:30 p.m.
Tickets -- $15 for the public and $10 for students – are available at the KVCC Campus Bookstore and the Kalamazoo Valley Museum.
Reeves will be accompanied by pianist Peter Martin, bassist Reuben Rogers, and drummer Greg Hutchinson.
In winning three consecutive Grammys for “Best Jazz Vocal Performance” this decade, Reeves became the first singer in recording history to accomplish that feat in any category.
As she moves through the genres of jazz, through classic rhythm and blues, swing, and contemporary pop, the Reeves delivery can touch a cappella, inventive scat, and a breathful, slow style that is featured when backed by a drummer’s brushes.
Reeves has performed at the closing ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, sang on the final episode of HBO’s “Sex and the City,” vocalized the works of George Gershwin in Germany with the Berlin Philharmonic, headlined jazz concerts throughout Japan, and, as creative chair for jazz for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, regularly attracts “full houses” to the Hollywood Bowl.
Now, she will be able to add Kalamazoo to her list of destinations and it will be a homecoming of sorts since Reeves was born in Detroit in 1956.
However, she was raised in Denver in a family with musical genes. Reeves’ father died when she was 2 years old from cancer. He had been a singer, her nurse mother played the trumpet, an uncle manned the bass in the Colorado Symphony, and a cousin was a keyboardist and composer. As a result, she studied piano during childhood.
In junior high, Reeves was among the black children in Denver who were involved in one of the nation’s first busing programs to integrate public schools. Taken to hostile white neighborhoods in the late 1960s, she and her African-American schoolmates were subjected to the pressure cooker of racism.
“It dawned on me that this was truly ignorance,” Reeves told an interviewer. “Ignorance is not wanting to understand one another.”
Thirteen at the time, Reeves joined with black, white and Hispanic students in an attempt to enlighten their elders. She took part in sit-ins, spoke at a school assembly, and sang at a concert organized by her young peers to deliver the message of tolerance.
The 16-year-old Reeves was her high school band’s featured soloist at a convention of the National Association of Jazz Educators in Chicago where she caught the attention of Hall of Fame trumpeter Clark Terry. The first of her musical mentors invited her to sing with his group of all-stars and her career was launched.
After attending the University of Colorado, Reeves moved to Los Angeles in 1976 as a full-time musician. She joined a “Latin fusion group” and, later touring with Brazilian composer Sergio Mendes, began impacting on the international scene.
Over the last three decades, her “no boundaries” approach to performances have merited some interesting observations.
The New York Times called her “a big voice with nothing held back.”
Commented The Seattle Times: “Her three-plus, pellucid (perfectly clear) octaves, diva-like delivery and intimate sense of a song have long made her one of the most compelling vocalists in jazz.”
“Most female vocalists,” stated Jazz Times, “find one musical bag and hang on to it. We’re fortunate that Dianne Reeves doesn’t settle for one style fits all.”
Reeves, who performed at the White House as part of a salute to American jazz during the presidency of Bill Clinton, still lives in Denver when she is not on the road.
“I really believe in touring,” said the 11-album singer. “It’s the only way you can get close to your audience.”
While she has felt the stings of some jazz purists for her eclectic approach, she tells her critics: “You have to allow me the opportunity to grow whether you like it or not. It’s part of who I am. It doesn’t mean that I am abandoning jazz. I’ve just found different ways to say what I really feel.”
For more information about the Artists Forum series, contact Dave Poster at extension 4476.
Literature to come alive through student ensembles
KVCC’s annual “Student Showcase of Literature” will be performed at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 21, in the Commons Theater.
Instructor Marion Boyer’s Communications 203 students will perform works of literature in a program that is free and open to the public. Refreshments will also be served.
The literature will span works ranging from the comic to the serious that relate thematically to male/female relationships. Literature in the voices of children will also be presented.
The program will conclude with “Modern Man,” a piece by George Carlin from his latest book, “When Will God Bring the Pork Chops?”
The students scheduled to perform are Jerod Anderson, Michele Conroy, Kelly Fortune, Courtney Glover, Marcy Goretzka, Remi Harrington, Don Hunt, Mandy Kardys, Shelley Kern, Dominique Norris, Cody Pummill, and Jenn Straka.
Sample the world at KVCC April 23
The food, music and culture of a score of countries will be in the spotlight when KVCC hosts its International Festival 2005 on Saturday, April 23, on the Texas Township Campus.
Cuisine from Greece, India, Italy, Russia, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, China, Malaysia, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Brazil, Pakistan, Spain, Swaziland, Latvia, Turkey, Thailand and Guatemala can be sampled at a buffet dinner beginning at 6:30 p.m. in the cafeteria.
Tickets for students and children are $5, and $8 for general admission when purchased in advance. The cost increases to $10 and $13, respectively, the night of the event.
The doors will open at 5 p.m. KVCC students and faculty, as well as some of their peers from Western Michigan University and Kalamazoo College, will man booths. Attired in the traditional garb of their home country, they will showcase artifacts, clothing and cultural objects at the stations that will be set up in the hallways around the campus’ main courtyard.
The entertainment begins at 7:30 p.m. in Dale Lake Auditorium. In addition to a fashion show of ethnic costumes, there will be a Greek dance for children, Indian classical and modern dancing, music played on Malaysian instruments, Scottish bag-pipe music, West African poetry and music, Vietnamese songs, Indonesian music, the music of Australia’s Aborigines, drum music from Zimbabwe, Mexican dancing, and Brazilian music.
The evening is being sponsored and organized by the KVCC International Club. For information about the evening’s program and tickets, contact Theo Sypris, the club’s faculty adviser, at extension 4283.
Discount tickets for Gilmore pianist
The Gilmore International Keyboard Festival is bringing world-renowned pianist Krystian Zimerman to Kalamazoo for an off-year recital on Wednesday, April 13, and KVCC employees can purchase tickets at a 15-percent discount.
The bargain price is the result of the Kalamazoo Valley Museum serving as one of the sponsors and host venues for the 2004 Gilmore Keyboard Festival.
The concert will begin at 8 p.m. in Chenery Auditorium, 714 S. Westnedge Ave.
Visit the Gilmore website to
view information about the concert and the artist.
Contact Dianne Gill at 342-1166 or for questions regarding The Gilmore or the discount-ticket offer.
New Hubble images to be displayed locally
The Kalamazoo Valley Museum will celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope’s 15thbirthday on Monday, April 25, by serving as one of the few national sites for unveiling new, breath-taking mural-sized images of the well-known spiral galaxy M51 and an eerie-looking tower of gas in the Eagle Nebula.