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Alone or together, Omaha power couple Vic Gutman and Roberta Wilhelm give back to the community
Vic Gutman and Roberta Wilhelm have individually and collectively made a positive impact on Omaha and together they form one of the most influential power couples in Omaha. Read about them in my New Horizons cover story.
Now appearing in the New Horizons (http://www.database.to/assoc_admin/assocviewfile2.asp?53V9875VT96=1969&AP3126=9&C885I0=536&pagecase=2)
Vic Gutman and Roberta Wilhelm each own such strong public identities for their individual professional pursuits that not everyone may know they comprise one of Omaha's most dynamic couples.
Married since 1998, they were colleagues before tying the knot. After both went through a divorce they became friends, then began dating and now they're entrenched as a metro power duo for their high profile work with organizations and events that command respect. Between them they have five children and one grandchild.
He's founder-manager of the Omaha Summer Arts Festival, which celebrates 40 years in 2015, and of the popular Old Market and Ak-Sar-Ben Village farmer's markets. He has deep event planning roots here. He also heads his own nonprofit management and consulting firm, Vic Gutman and Associates.
She's past executive director of The Rose Theater and the longtime executive director of Girls Inc. of Omaha.
Their work usually happens separately but when they collaborate they have a greater collective impact.
Even though they're from different backgrounds – he's Jewish and she's Christian, he trained as an attorney and she trained as an actress – they share a passion for serving youth, fostering community and welcoming diversity.
He's involved in the Tri-Faith Initiative that seeks to build an interfaith campus in Omaha. She's always worked for nonprofits. "Neither of us has been particularly motivated by money," Gutman says.
Their paths originally crossed through consulting he did for the theater.
For transplants, they've heavily invested themselves in Omaha. He moved here in 1974 from Oak Park, Mich., a suburb of Detroit. She came in the early '80s after graduating from the University of Kansas. Kansas was the end of a long line of places she grew up as the daughter of a career Army father.
Vic Gutman
Idealist, Go-getter
Like many young men in the early '60s Gutman heeded the call to serve issued by President John F. Kennedy. JFK signed into existence the Peace Corps as a program for Americans to perform international service. Kennedy's envisioned domestic equivalent formed after his death as VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America). Gutman was an idealistic University of Michigan undergrad when he signed up to be a VISTA volunteer. A year passed before he got assigned to Boys Town, whose first off-campus programs – three group homes – he managed.
"I really only planned on staying one year and 40 years later I'm still here," he says.
He gained valuable experience as student organizations director on the massive Ann Arbor campus and as an arts festival organizer. He flourished in college, where he found free expression for his entrepreneurial and social progressive interests.
"I was at the university from '69 to '74. Ann Arbor was a hotbed for anti-war protests. SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) started there. Its founder, activist Tom Hayden, went to school there. I would go to these demonstrations," recalls Gutman,
At 19, he'd impressed university officials enough that they asked him to organize a campus arts festival. Little did he know it was the beginning of a four-decade run, and counting, of being Mr. Festival.
"We called it the Free Fair. We charged next to nothing to get in. It was very idealistic. We ended up having 400 artists from all over. Then we expanded from the campus to the main street downtown six blocks away. We had 700 artists my last year and 1,500 people belonging to the guild we started. The fair and guild are still going strong today."
He started other arts festivals, including one in Detroit, as well as a crafts fair in Ann Arbor. The success of that first arts festival so impressed him that it changed his life.
"Before my eyes a community of 400 artists in a period of several hours just blossomed in front of me, and then all these people came over a four-day period to enjoy the art. It was like, Wow, this is really cool, I have to do this the rest of my life. It just touched something in me that I could create a community that would bring people together. That's what really interested me."
Only a year after moving here he launched the Summer Arts Festival because he saw a void for events like it going unfilled. However, he found local power-brokers skeptical about his plans even though the city was starving for new entertainment options.
"All there really was was the Old Market, at least from a young person's perspective. There wasn't much here. At that time this community did not embrace creativity and young people doing things. There was no young professionals association."
The then-22-year-old was treated like a brash upstart. Nearly everywhere he went he got a cold shoulder. "It was like, 'Who are you? What right do you have to do this?' That was the mindset."
Complicating matters, he says, "the city didn't really have an ordinance to allow these events to go on downtown." He had to get permits.
He moved the event to where the Gene Leahy Mall was being developed and the public came out in "huge numbers." He saw the potential for Omaha adding similar events and branding itself the City of Festivals. The Chamber of Commerce rejected the notion.
In 1978 the fest moved to what's been its home ever since – alongside the Civic Center and Douglas County Courthouse. He says Mayor Al Veys and City Attorney Herb Fitle threatened closing it after it'd already started. That's when Gutman suggested he'd go to the media with a story putting Omaha's elected leadership in a bad light.
"I said, 'How would it look that we have artists from all over the country and tens of thousands of festival-goers having to go home because the mayor shut us down?' Ultimately they let us stay open."
Visionary, Dreamer
If Gutman were less sure or headstrong there might not be the tradition of Omaha festivals and markets there is today. He also originated the Winter Art Fair and was asked to do the Holiday Lights Festival, Omaha 150, the Greek Festival and many more. He's retained close ties to his native Detroit, where in 2001 he organized that city's tricentennial celebration, Detroit 300. Two-years in the making, with a $4 million production budget, the grand event took place on the riverfront, in Hart Plaza, with a cast of thousands.
"We brought in for one free, outdoor concert all these Detroit performers – Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, Take Six, The Spinners. Stevie Wonder did two hours. Unbelievable. People did The Hustle in the streets. A 900-member gospel choir performed with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra on a stage 30-feet off the ground. We had historic sailboats on the river. Fireworks. Food. It was incredible. "
Planning it, he wondered if he'd taken on more than he could handle.
"It was so hard to put that together I told Roberta, 'I'm going to regret this, it's not going to work, it's not going to come together,' and it ended up coming together and it was so great."
She jokes that Vic neurotically worries his events will fall flat, even though they always turn out.
In the '90s Omaha stakeholders listened after surveys and media reports revealed young folks couldn't wait to leave a city they viewed as boring, hidebound and unsupportive of fresh, new ideas.
|Some of the events Vic Gutman and Associates organizes
"What started the change in the city is when the Omaha Community Foundation's Del Weber hired this consultant. She did a report that talked about Omaha needing sparkle and the creative spark and that it should accentuate fun. That's what Omaha by Design came out of. That's when the city started embracing young professionals."
Gutman, whose youthful enthusiasm belies his age, 62, likes the vibrant creative class and entertainment scene that's emerged. This new Omaha's made the timing right for a long-held dream of his: a year-round indoor public market. He's secured the site, an abandoned postal annex building on South 10th Street, that will take $10 million to create. He's raised part of the money.
The market will feature local food businesses and the building will house other activities to help make it "a destination" and "anchor." He's banking it will catch-on the way his farmer's markets have.
"The farmer's markets have been hugely successful and they've been a huge boon for local growers. We hope this becomes the same thing – a place people want to come to in order to socialize, support local businesses and add to the vitality of the community."
"The thing about Vic is he always has multiple dreams on the horizon and he gets them done and they're all things that make the community better and stronger," says Roberta.
Serving Youth
Creating-managing events is not the only way he engages community. There's the work he does with nonprofits. Then there's the work he does with youth. Following his Boys Town stint he earned a law degree at Creighton University. After passing the bar he was a public defender in the juvenile court system, where he represented troubled teens.
"It's not supposed to be but it's a bit of social work and a bit of law. I think it has to be almost."
He despaired at what he found in that arena.
"Everything wrong with the juvenile justice system now was wrong then. It's been broken forever. We were putting kids in 30-day psychiatric evaluations because it was better than having them sit in the youth center, which was even a worse place than it is now. Kids who committed no crime – status offenders – would be in the youth center longer because there were even fewer places to put them. I had one kid who committed no crime in the youth center for almost a year.
"They were placing kids in boys ranches out west where they were being abused."
He encountered countless youth from broken families where alcohol and drugs, physical-sexual abuse and parental neglect were present.
"Some of their stories broke my heart."
The gang problem was just emerging when he left in 1986.
"My biggest regret is I was so aware of how dysfunctional the juvenile court system was and no one was advocating for change, If I thought law was going to be my career – and I never thought it would – that's what I would have done. I would have put my energy into advocacy. I made a lot of noise but I was never working to change the system."
Gutman's also done mentoring, as Roberta has, and now they're doing it together.
"I have mentored Arturo, age 14, for four years, first through Teammates and then through Big Brothers/BigSisters. I have mentored Elijah, age 12, for two years through Teammates. Roberta and I have become legal guardians of Arturo and his two brothers and they have lived with us since June 2nd."
All the while Gutman's served youth he's continued doing festivals and consulting nonprofits. As his business and roster of clients have grown, so has his company, which employs 12 people.
He says early on he concluded "I never want to work for a corporation," adding, "I wanted what I do in the community with projects and with my own company to be a reflection of what I feel the world should be."
Finding a Home in the Theater and Omaha
His vision of a just world is similar to Roberta's, whose work at The Rose and Girls Inc. has been community-based. Her many dislocations as an Army brat made settling down in one place an attractive notion.
"I moved almost every year of my life – I lived in Kentucky, Virginia, New Jersey (when her father was in Vietnam), New York – until high school, when I was in Iran three years. I went to the American School in Tehran."
This was before the Shah's fall and the Aaytollah Khamenei's rise .
"When I was there it was relatively tame and calm. There were occasional incidents and American kids were told to keep a low profile,
but for the most part we went everywhere we wanted in the city, in the country with no problems. It was a really great experience. I loved being there."
At the American School she did plays at the urging of her mother, a drama teacher who took Roberta to Broadway shows back home.
After her father was posted to Fort Leavenworth (Kansas), Wilhelm finished high school and majored in theater at KU in Lawrence. It's where she met her first husband, playwright-director James Larson. When Larson came to Omaha to research his Ph.D. dissertation on the Omaha Magic Theatre's Megan Terry, Wilhelm followed, working there a few months. She was not a happy camper.
"I told James, "We're going to get the hell out of here.' That was the plan. But then I ended up working at the children's theater under Nancy Duncan and Bill Kirk and that really changed everything. I loved it. I changed my tune – I really liked Omaha, I wanted to stay."
She enjoyed a classic rise through the ranks at the theater.
"I was hired as the assistant to the receptionist and the assistant to the bookkeeper. They fired the receptionist, so then I was the receptionist and the assistant to the bookkeeper. I was a very bad receptionist."
She wasn't much better at bookkeeping.
Wilhelm proved a quick read though. "I learned a lot. I loved being in the theater, even when I was the receptionist. I had a degree in theater but it was all very academic, so to be in a place actually producing theater was great. When I started, I didn't know what a nonprofit was. I remember asking Nancy (Duncan), 'Can I sit in on a board meeting?' I wanted to know who were these people and what was it they do, I learned a lot about marketing, computers, mailing lists,"
From the start, she acted in plays there, too. She soon joined the artistic staff as a teacher and actor. "Being on the artistic staff was really great," she says. "That was a lot of fun."
Larson wound up being the artistic director. When Nancy Duncan left Mark Hoeger came in as executive director. In that transition, Wilhelm says, "Mark asked me to be the managing director and I said, 'No, I really don't want to do that.' He said, 'Well, just give me two years because I need you to help me through this transition.' I accepted. It ended up a lot longer than two years. That took us into the renovation of the old Astro-Paramount into The Rose and our moving there."
The former Emmy Gifford Children's Theater had long outgrown its space at 35th and Center. When the Astro, a former movie house, was floated as an option, the theater's leadership expressed interest. But Wilhelm and Co. needed the OK of Nebraska Furniture Mart founder Rose Blumkin, who owned it. Decades earlier her daughter Frances Batt won a talent show there singing "Am I Blue?" and so, Wilhelm says, "the building held a special place in her heart."
Mark Hoeger and Susie Buffett, a good friend of Wilhelm's, sought Mrs. B's approval. She granted it and her family donated a million dollars.
"Mrs. B put her blessing on the project," Wilhelm says.
Susie Buffett's investor legend father, Warren Buffett, who by then owned the Mart, matched the gift.
Wilhelm will never forget moving to the new digs in 1995. The night before the theater held a rally at the new space to enlist volunteers for the pre-dawn move.
"One of our resident actors, Kevin Erhrhart, leapt up on a mantel at The Rose and recited the "St. Crispin's Day" speech from Henry V," she recalls. "He whipped everybody into a frenzy with, 'You're going to be there and you're going to be glad you were there to do it.'"
The requisite 100 or so volunteers were there the next morning.
Wilhelm says Frances Batt had promised that if the theater "got this done" then she'd sing "Am I Blue?" at the opening gala. Hearing this, Warren Buffett promised to accompany her on the ukulele.
"So at the gala he strummed and she sang and it was like a Fellini movie," Wilhelm says. "It was so other-worldly. Just an odd little moment. But very cool. That was one of those peak nights. It was a stunning transformation (the restoration). We worked so hard for this."
"It was great," says Vic, who was there because he'd already been advising the theater.
Roberta admits she was less than thrilled when Vic began working with the theater. She says she actually tried talking Mark Hoeger out of hiring him even though she'd never met him at that point.
"I said, 'I've seen his name on things around town. I have a bad feeling about him, I think he's a slimy, not-to-be trusted guy. You can hire him but I'm just telling you I'm going to tell you I told you so.'"
She and Vic smile about it now. He says he was oblivious to her suspicions then. Her perception changed when she saw how good his ideas were and how much he cared. There was an event he tried talking the theater out of doing but they went ahead and it was a bust.
"He was so pained by it. He was more pained than I was, and I was pained. He takes things so personally. He was a consultant but he didn't have that distance. It was his event, his failure."
Another time, Gutman, who's known to be intense on the job, was doing a work performance review with a female staff member when she broke down crying. Wilhelm chastised him for upsetting her.
"I remember he felt really bad. He didn't mean to make her cry and he sent her flowers."
"She now works for me," Gutman says of that former theater staffer.
Roberta says he was so intense she couldn't imagine being romantically involved with him at the time. That changed as she got to know him and as he mellowed. He still has high expectations and standards he holds people accountable for. Roberta acknowledges the theater lacked a certain professionalism he instilled.
"We were ragtag," she says.
"It had transitioned from almost all volunteer. They didn't have an experienced marketing and development staff and they were just resource poor," he says. "They worked on a very small budget."
"Mark Hoeger used to say we were like a bumble bee that scientifically shouldn't be able to fly, but flew," she says.
As his changes took root, Vic became part of the theater family, though staff were not above teasing him as "our highly paid consultant."
"They trusted me, they were extremely supportive. I never felt like I was a consultant and I don't feel that way with most of the clients now,
but especially the theater," says Gutman, whose association has continued long after Roberta's leaving.
When they were together at the theater, the couple made a formidable team, along with James Larson.
"When Mark left I really wasn't that hot to be the executive director but I also wasn't really that hot to be the right-hand person to someone new. I enjoyed working with Mark very much and really was sad to see him go. I wasn't sure I wanted to do this for someone else, I had to think about moving up or moving on. I finally put my hat in the ring for the position and I got the job," she says.
By then, she was divorced from Larson. The two continued working together without problems, she says. The situation mirrored that of Carl Beck and Susan Baer Collins at the Omaha Community Playhouse, who were married, then divorced, but successfully worked as co-artistic directors. When Roberta and Vic married and Larson stayed on, the trio made what could have been an awkward situation comfortable. Vic says, "We still got along just fine."
Realizing its potential
The little-theater-that-could became a major arts organization locally and a big deal among children's theaters nationally. Its budget and membership expanded with its reputation.
"It grew so fast. It was sort of explosive," Wilhelm says. "There were a lot of planets that aligned. Mark was really good for the theater. He networked really well. James had a lot of educational vision for the organization and was very good packaging programs for schools."
The theater attracted big name guest playwrights (James Still, Mark Medoff, Joe Sutton, Robert Bly) and produced world-premiere shows (Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters, Where the Red Fern Grows). It developed a national touring program and cultivated a diverse pool of youth participants. The theater was recognized with a national achievement award from its peer professional alliance.
Not to be forgotten, Wilhelm says, was the "really great ensemble of performers there" who formed a tight-knit cadre. "It was kind of a cult," she adds. "You don't need sleep, you don't need money, you don't need worldly goods – you live off the passion. It was very fun, intense, A lot of hard work. The people were dramatic, melodramatic, storming in-and-out of offices, spilling their guts out."
Vic got swept up in it, too, even relaxing his buttoned-down demeanor.
"The theater's just an amazing place and honestly it's the people who make it. The people were so interesting and passionate. I just loved being there. To this day I love the theater."
He even found himself on stage, in costume and makeup, in a singing and dancing pirate role in Peter Pan. He was in some good company. His director, Tim Carroll, is now a Broadway director. His then-child co-stars included Andrew Rannells, who's gone on to be a Tony nominee and Grammy winner, and Conor Oberst, now an indie music star.
Both Vic and Roberta say it was exciting being part of the theater's transformation.
Moving on, Serving girls
Roberta wasn't necessarily looking to exit the theater when an opportunity she decided she couldn't pass up suddenly came open.
"A good friend suggested the position at Girls Inc. She said she thought I would be good at it and that I should give it strong consideration. She then told me they were closing the application process 'tomorrow at noon,' so I didn't have very long to think about it. I think I was ready for a life change.
"One of the things I enjoyed most about the theater was the accessibility of the programming to children regardless of their ability to pay and partnering with community agencies to help make that happen. Through that work, I grew to know about Girls Inc. I had been directing the all-girl production Broken Mirror at The Rose for several years. I liked working with girls. It seemed like a logical progression."
When she left the theater and her replacement didn't work out, Vic assumed the E.D. role himself. He stepped down after three years having built its community outreach and membership-donor base. He's continued consulting ever since. He says it's a different organization today "but the most important thing about The Rose is the continued emphasis to make the theater accessible to everyone, whether you can afford to pay or not. That started under James, Mark and Roberta. Not all children's theaters are. But that is in the DNA of this theater."
Leaving The Rose wasn't easy for Wilhelm.
"I do miss the camaraderie of theater and the family that is created through the production process. I made great friends there and I had amazing experiences. I feel very lucky to have had the chance to do what I did at the theater."
She's found a new family at Girls Inc., where she's been since 2003. Some of the girls come from situations like the ones Vic experienced as a public defender.
"We have girls who have a lot of serious challenges, who have behaviors that might get them expelled from school. Twenty-two percent are in the foster care system. Some are involved in the juvenile justice system. We also have girls who don't have any of that – they're honors students. But its a place where all girls can go and find support.
"There are a lot of heartbreaking stories, but there's also a lot of success stories and good things that happen."
When Roberta started only three alumnae were in college. Today, there are dozens as well as several college graduates.
Girls Inc. Omaha won the outstanding affiliate award from its national parent body and thanks to Roberta's connections, she's brought in a who's-who of guest speakers for its Lunch with the Girls gala: Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Madeleine Albright, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Warren Buffett, President Clinton, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton. This year's event, on October 29th, features sisters Barbara Bush and Jenna Bush Hager.
Just as her hubby has a dream project in the works with his public market. Wilhelm's overseeing construction of a $15 million addition to the Girls Inc. north center. It will feature a wellness focus with a gym, clinic, yoga-palates fitness room, elevated track and kitchens for health cooking-culinary arts training. She says it fits the organization's holistic approach to produce girls who are, as its motto reads – "strong, smart and bold" – or as she puts it, "healthy educated and independent."
Her husband led the fund drive for the addition. "It was an easy sell because the funders in this community have such high regard for Girls Inc. and what they do and for what Roberta does," he says.
Another dream project of Gutman's, the Tri-Faith campus, is one he's been reticent about until recently he says because "I absolutely can feel for the first time it will be a reality."
"It's one of the more complex things I've ever been involved with because we have three faiths – Jewish, Muslin, Christian – and very idealistic people. The odds of it succeeding are hard. The politics are hard. You have to build relationships and trust. You really want every one moving together along the same path. It's never happened before where there's been an intentional co-locating. We're building a campus together and we have to overcome prejudices and cultural differences."
Gutman, a self-described "practical, by-the-numbers guy," says the project's "actually a spiritual thing for me – it comes from the heart or else I wouldn't put this much effort in. For me, idealism is not passe."
Temple Israel Synagogue, which he belongs to, has already built its new home at the proposed campus in the Sterling Ridge Development. The American Institute for Islamic Studies and Culture is next in line. Gutman, a Jew, heads up fund-raising for the mosque.
"We have $6 million raised and of that $5.2 million came from Christians in this community," he says. "What other city in the country could say that? That's special about this community."
Roberta agrees Omaha's "very generous" and gives to things it believes in.
Countryside Community Church is weighing being the Christian partner in the interfaith troika.
"I do believe it will be built but the story is yet to be told because it's what happens afterwards. That's going to be the interesting thing," Gutman says.
"It will be like a blended family," Wilhelm observes. "We've been there – it's hard."
The couple's tackled many hard things in realizing legacy projects that have their imprint all over them. Their ratio of success to failure is high.
How are they able to get things done?
"Passion, persistence and some luck," Gutman says. "We're very fortunate. In the years we've been here we've developed a lot of relationships. If we weren't committed to what we were doing and we didn't have the skills to do it then there are certain people who would never have believed in us and it would never have been possible. If you take some people out of our lives we couldn't do everything we want to do, that's just the truth."
JOURNEYS: Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo calls African Grasslands Project the Metro's Next Big Thing
Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo is a big deal. We're talking one of America's Top 100 attractions with annual attendance near two million and a large gallery of state of the art indoor exhibits to complement its outdoor viewing areas. In the next year the zoo will introduce a huge new outdoor African Grasslands exhibit that should boost attendance to a whole new level. As my new story for thr Metro Magazine describes, the grasslands project's natural habitats, diverse species, intimate observation points, and built-in education components will give visitors an upclose experience with and appreciation for an African wilderness environment that comes as close as possible to the real thing.
JOURNEYS: African Safari
JOURNEYS: Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo calls African Grasslands Project The Next Big Thing
Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium calls its coming African Grasslands project the next big thing for Omaha. It's certainly that and then some in terms of the $70 million it will cost to transform 28 acres into an equatorial savannah experience in the Midwest.
The exhibit will open in two phases in 2016. Omaha-based Kiewit Construction, which realized the Zoo's existing big ticket immersive exhibits, will lead construction. Work begins in earnest this fall.
The project's the next big step for the Zoo in educating visitors about the conservation research work it does here and around the world. Ongoing education efforts include classes for youth ages 3 to 18, day camps, interpretive tours and safari-eco adventure trips.
The Zoo's Jungle, Desert Dome and Aquarium exhibits are indoor immersive experiences that recreate ecosystems within four walls. The Grasslands will be a sprawling natural mosaic that puts you in an open-air expanse where elephants – slated to return after a long absence – rhinos, impalas, giraffe and other iconic African animals roam.
"For the first time we're going to transport you outdoors to another world," executive director and CEO Dennis Pate says. "What you're going to see and feel is going to come closer to understanding what the savannah is like without us saying a word."
Pate says the Grasslands will come as close as an urban zoo can get to replicating the experience of exotic mixed species inhabiting the wild.
A group from Omaha recently returned from a two-week Zoo-organized safari to Botswana and Zambia, one way the institution tries building awareness and appreciation of endangered habitats and species.
Participants of the May safari, which featured former Zoo director Lee Simmons and his wife Marie as escorts, won't soon forget the breathtaking scenes they witnessed.
"What I brought home is the sacred peace of sounds that come only from the inhabitants of Africa, the interconnectedness of all creatures for survival and seeing the variety of animals," Ann Pape says.
The trip satisfied a Bucket List wish for Jean Bell, who says the experience impressed upon her "how very important" it is these wild environments and species "be preserved and that humans "are really the only ones who can make that happen."
Ellen Wright says, "People often take for granted these majestic and remarkable creatures will always be with us but when you are exposed to the devastating toll of poaching and to the human effect on the land you realize all this beauty could disappear unless we act now."
As most folks will never go on an actual African safari, the Zoo tries giving visitors increasingly authentic, intimate experiences in their own backyard. The goal is to display how these animals function in the wild as well as how they are cared for and protected. Interactive demonstration areas in the Grasslands exhibit will allow the public for the first time to observe staff conducting animal welfare maintenance, such as checking the condition of teeth and feet.
Interpreting the natural world indoors is one challenge but doing it outdoors, at scale, is a whole other challenge.
"It's harder to do because you can't control everything," says Pate.
Construction will move many tons of dirt to reconfigure hilly old grounds and contour them into the gradually sloped savannah. Buildings will be recessed behind trees and landforms to obscure them, with the exception of a new African game lodge-inspired structure. Overlooks will provide visitors with panoramic views.
It's all part of the evolution of zoos.
"For the past 25 years what we've been doing as opposed to simply displaying animals in cages or pens is to try to present animals in their ecosystems and give people a chance to actually experience that ecosystem," says Simmons, now chairman of the Zoo Foundation. During his long tenure as Zoo director he initiated the institution's staggering growth that shows no signs of stopping. "Anytime you get people in the same environment with the animals it does make a difference. To see an animal from a distance through bars, a fence or glass is a lot different than being able to get up close and personal.
"What we're really interested in is the experience and what people come away with."
Omaha Zoo Foundation director Tina Cherica says, "We're trying to create an experience that will make people actually care about the realties these animals face in their natural habitats."
"Zoos have become kind of giant classrooms," Simmons says, "but we preach this two dollar Sunday sermon by osmosis. We want people to come in and have a really good experience, realize they suddenly know something more than they did, and come away feeling they need to support conservation of habitat."
Simmons says the state of wildlife conservation is a mixed bag.
"The good thing about a lot of places in the world is that the locals on the ground have realized eco tourism has a very important economic and political impact. There are areas we go back to that are being managed significantly better than they were when we first started leading safaris 30 years ago. There are some that are not and we don't go to those anymore."
He says in addition to the destruction of habit by human encroachment, poaching of elephants and rhinos is "rampant."
Pate says zoos like Omaha's are perhaps best positioned to educate the public about these challenges.
"On average 96 elephants a day are killed in Africa and one really large bull was just poached in a national park, and so it's a huge problem. The decline in elephants has been pretty radical. Rhinos are in even worse shape. If we as zoos don't bring this to the public then there's very little likelihood they're going to appreciate the diversity of species alive in the world today.
"I think these problems are being day-lighted through what zoos are doing. People learn that the zoo they support is playing a role in trying to stem some of those problems."
Cherica says, "I think it brings it home to people. When you see a news story, you're so far removed from that reality. When you come to your zoo and see these animals and learn about the work we're doing, then all of a sudden there's more of a personal connection. This is an opportunity to take a venue with 1.7 million visitors a year and use it as a learning experience to create that personal connection."
"The new move is to not only show people these animals but to talk about their plight and what the local zoo is doing to assist them," Pate says. "That makes us really unique. There's a lot of conservation organizations but very few have a place to be able to talk about it with the public. We have a place where we educate millions of people."
Pate says the Omaha Zoo "has a strong record of conservation and we're going to begin talking a lot more about what we do in the wild." He adds, "A modern zoo does more than just take care of its own animals, it takes care of animals wherever they are in the world. That's evolving and we're going to be at the point of that sphere. It's part of feeling a greater responsibility toward animals in general, whether they're in zoos or in the wild."
Simmons says, "We've been doing our bit, not just in Omaha. We've had a very active conservation program going for the last 30 years."
The Center for Conservation Research based in Omaha employs several PhD scientists who spend months at a time in the field.
"We've had people actively in the field doing conservation in South Africa and East Africa and particularly in Madagascar," he says. "We've got permanent and temporary establishments in Madagascar all focused on conservation, lemurs primarily, but also habitat, reforestation, turtles, frogs, bats and a whole lot of other things. We send people to many places. We've contributed a lot to the conservation of Siberian tigers and Amur leopards in far Eastern Russia, both by sending people to do training there and bringing Russian biologists to do training here. We've also brought Chinese and Vietnamese here. We have also trained scientists, researchers and interns from over 40 countries here."
Pate says tying all the threads of this story together "starts with not necessarily the science or the slaughter, it starts with an emotional attachment to a living being – not ones you see on television or read about in a newspaper." "That's why it's important for us to have kindergarten kids through here. It's why we do day camps. It's why we have a high school," he says. "That emotional connection starts early. Then we can build on it with the science. It's nice to go a little deeper with these animals and talk about what's affecting them in the wild and how our zoo is helping them and their counterparts in the wild. That's the exciting part – the whole interpretive story."
A quarter million youth annually participate in Zoo education programs.
Ellen Wright, a longtime donor and Zoofari volunteer, says the need for conservation education cuts across all ages. "The African Grasslands project is crucial for engaging the widest possible audience and building awareness of the conservation challenges here and around the world."
Her passion's shared by many. Much of the work Cherica and Simmons do through the Omaha Zoo Foundation is to cultivate donors to make a wish-list of major projects possible. When pitching projects Simmons knows he's struck a chord when "the donor's eyes light up" and that's happened enough to realize a string of multimillion dollar undertakings.
Another indicator of people's embrace of the Zoo is the mass of humanity that streams through its gates – enough to make it the top tourist destination in the region. It also boasts a membership of 72,000 households, which translates to about a third of the metro's population.
"We've got way, way more zoo than you would remotely expect in a community this size," Simmons says. "It's because the community has been supportive. We have had the highest attendance and membership in North America (among zoos) as a percentage of our metro population base."
Cherica says that same loyalty is born of trust.
"The community has a lot of confidence in us because we deliver on what we say we're going to deliver, so over time that's instilled not only community pride but donor confidence to continue reinvesting in what we're doing here."
Being a well-run venue helps.
"Since 1970 we've never run an operating deficit," Simmons says. "We had our first positive year in 1970 and we've been positive ever since.
And we've brought every project in on time and on budget."
No endeavor has been as big as the Grasslands project.
"We knew it was going to be a challenge," Cherica says. "It's twice as much as any project we've done to date but we're confident in the donor community and in their ability to push this forward. We fully expect the project will be funded by the end of the year."
"The community support here is unusual and it makes it a highly attractive place to work," says Pate, who came to Omaha five years ago from the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens. "The opportunity to affect that many millions of people is pretty incredible. There's space, there's money, there's its place in the community, there's the conservation research and welfare of animals. It all comes together."
Follow Grasslands progress at http://www.omahazoo.com.
"A modern zoo does more than just take care of its own animals, it takes care of animals wherever they are in the world. That's evolving and we're going to be at the point of that sphere. It's part of feeling a greater responsibility toward animals in general, whether they're in zoos or in the wild."
Change Agent: Mark Evans leads OPS on bold new course full of changes in his first year as Omaha Public Schools' superintendent
The Omaha Public Schools District deals with the diversity, needs, and challenges that any large urban school distrect does but it has had more than its share of infighting, controversy, and push back in recent years, much of it revolving around an administration deemed distant and unresponsive. As the following profile of new OPS Superintendnet Mark Evans indicates, there's a new approach at the top, starting with him, as he has ushered in sweeping changes, much of them having to do with the district being more transparent and inclusive. This change agent has led the development of a new strategic plan among many other transformative actions. My piece is now appearing in The Reader (www.thereader.com).
Mark Evans, ©ketv.com
Change Agent: Mark Evans leads OPS on bold new course full of changes in his first year as Omaha Public Schools' superintendent
©by Leo Adam Biga
Now appearing in The Reader (www.thereader.com)
When Mark Evans accepted the job of Omaha Public Schools superintendent in December 2012, he knew the mission would be immense in this sprawling urban district facing myriad challenges.
With 51,000 students spread out over 86 schools located in divergent environments ranging from inner city poverty to suburban affluence, the district responds to a wide spectrum of needs and issues. In his due diligence before starting the job he found the district's good work often overshadowed by controversy and conflict due to an embattled school board and an aloof administration and no clear, unified vision.
Besides struggling to close the achievement gap of its majority minority student population, many of whom attend overcrowded, poorly resourced schools, the district reeled from internal rancor and scandal. Longtime district head John Mackiel exited with a $1 million retirement payout many viewed as excessive. His replacement, Nancy Sebring, quit when it came to light she'd exchanged sexually explicit emails with her lover during office hours at her previous employer. The often divisive OPS Board of Education and its handling of the matter drew sharp criticism that resulted in its president's resignation. The perception was of deep rifts among OPS leaders who spent more time putting out fires than making systemic changes,
District elections turned over an almost entirely new board when Evans, who came to OPS from Kan,, officially started in 2013. The board has navigated a flood of changes that Evans has introduced in fulfilling a promise to shake things up and to address identified weaknesses in Neb.'s largest school district.
One of his first orders of business was conducting a needs assessment that sought broad community input. Feedback from parents, teachers, administrators and stakeholders shaped a new strategic plan for the district. The plan outlines strategies for better communication, more transparency and accountability, closer alignment of goals and greater classroom rigor. He reorganized district staff and created new positions in response to an expressed need for better support of schools. He's overseen a new student assignment plan, a new hiring policy and a facilities wish-list for $630 million in upgrades.
Evans wants to stem the tide of students OPS loses to other districts, saying that's difficult "if you don't have room for them and many of our schools are just packed to the gills." He adds, "You can't compete with other districts unless you have facilities of similar caliber and we're a real inequitable district today. About half our schools are beautiful facilities. The other half there's a whole list of things that need to be worked on." The facilities plan may go before voters as a bond issue.
He compares the task of changing the district's direction to turning around an aircraft carrier at sea. As captain, he plots the course but he relies on a vast team to implement the necessary maneuvers. Evans began the turnaround even before he started.
"I didn't start officially until July 1 but once I accepted the job I started visiting, collecting information, studying, so that when I did walk in the door I didn't walk in cold. I walked in running because I'd already met staff and community. I'd purposely reached out. I had a very clearly laid out entry plan that described the things we were going to do.
"You have to have a real clear plan of how you're going to implement this kind of stuff or you're going to get lost and lose the prioritization. You've still got to do what you've been doing but do it better while doing these major lifts. So a lot of it has to do with prioritization and focus. A lot of it has to do with 60-plus hour work weeks."
Evans likes what he sees on the horizon now that OPS has aligned goals at every level.
"We've not had a clearly defined destination until today. What you had was some schools saying, 'This is my destination, this is what I think is most urgent,' and they just kind of did it on their own. The difference today is we've got clear alignment and we're creating a system that creates support and accountability throughout. Everyone's success is contingent upon someone else's success.
"Accountability is now built in because it's on paper, it's in writing:
Here's your goal for graduation rate, here's your goal for NESA scores, here's your goal for the achievement gap…"
He says strategies are being honed "to create that same level of accountability" at all 86 schools and in every classroom.
"That's the whole restructure piece we created. Principals told us, 'We want more help in our schools,' so we shut down a department in the district office and put 30 people out in schools. Then we created four executive directors of school support positions. Each is directly responsible for 21 schools. We spent all summer training them. They're former star principals who serve at the cabinet level with me and top level staff. They look at the alignment of the big picture goals to the school improvement plan and help principals improve that. Everyone is working towards the same goals."
He says until the strategic plan there wasn't a coherent, clearly expressed vision "of where we're at, where we're going and how we're trying to get there," adding, "I think what I feel best about is we've created more transparency and communication from the get go because we asked people what are the strengths and needs of our district. We did forums, we did surveys, we used different tools on our website. That was the start of our saying, 'We're going to ask you first and then we're going to use what you tell us to help us see our critical needs.' To be honest, I already knew we had critical needs but it can't be my plan, it's gotta be our plan, it can't be my thoughts, it has to be our thoughts, and the truth is most of where we ended up at I would have ended up at, too."
Engaging people in the process, he says, "is much more powerful" and staff take more ownership for "achieving specific targets." The changes have been welcomed by some and met with push-back by others. He jokingly says response is "somewhere between embrace and fisticuffs."
He's well aware steering this unwieldy district in a new direction will take time given its sheer size.
"You just have to know it's a big journey."
He left a good thing at the Andover (Kan.) school district to make this journey.
"I had a great job, we were making progress and nationally recognized. I'd been there eight years and I could have finished my career there fairly easily."
He declined OPS overtures before throwing his hat in the ring.
"I knew what it was going to take to do something like this, so I said no twice. The third time they asked me to call some people I knew up here and I did and I heard positive things from them. They said to look beyond the headlines because the headlines had been pretty devastating. In my initial research I saw a mess beyond repair but the further I looked, and I still feel this way a year later, the mess has been at the 10,000 foot level – with the superintendent and the board. It's about getting rid of the noise and distraction and chaos there.
"It wasn't easy moving but at the end of the day I thought I could make a difference here. I know how to systemically build schools. Everywhere I've gone we've been able to have progress with kids because I understand how to bring a system together and to build teams and create collaborative decision makers."
Making it easier for him to take the plunge was the community support he found here he didn't find in Wichita, Kan., where he spent 20 years working in that city's largest public school district.
"I'd spent most of my career in Wichita in a very similar setting – from the size of the schools to the number of employees to the demographics of the kids. But there is one significant difference and this is part of the reason I said yes – the community here is more supportive than Wichita is. This community still cares. People want OPS to be successful. There's philanthropic support. There's several foundations and individuals that care about OPS."
Along with the deep pockets of the Sherwood and Lozier Foundations, OPS has relationships with mentoring initiatives like Building Bright Futures, Partnership 4 Kids and Teammates. Recognizing that many of its students live in poverty and test below grade level, the district partners with organizations on pre-K programs in an effort to get more at-risk children ready for school. New early childhood centers modeled after Educare are in the works with the Buffett Early Childhood Fund and the Buffett Early Childhood Institute.
Evans champions community-driven endeavors aimed at improving student achievement and supporting schools because no district can do it alone, especially one as large and diverse as OPS.
"Not only is it a big district, which creates some challenges, we have more and more free and reduced (lunch) students who qualify for the federal poverty line and we know that brings with it some extra challenges which is why we need community support. We have an increasing number of English as Second Language learners because we have a growing number of refugee families. These young people not only have language barriers but huge cultural barriers.
"We also have more young people coming to us with life challenges and neighborhood issues. Partnering with community groups makes a big difference with those extra challenges. What we're trying to do in many situations is fill in gaps. Organizations are critical because we're filling in more gaps than we have before."
Those gaps extend to resources, such as high speed Internet access. Some kids have it at home and school, others don't because their parents and schools can't afford it.
He says the efficiencies possible in a corporate, cookie-cutter world don't fit public schools because no two suppliers, i.e. parents, and no two products, i.e. students, present the same specs.
"We take whoever walks in the door and wherever they're at is where we take them, whether they have special needs, language arts deficiencies or advanced skill sets. So school A and school B might look different, in fact they'll inherently look different even though the summative assessments are still going to look the same with standardized testing and those kinds of things. We do have these summative tools that tell us something about whether a school is progressing or not.
"On the other hand, school A may be quite a bit different than school B because school A has 20 percent refugees with some very specific skill gaps and so how we support them and the grade level assessments tied to that curriculum are going to be a little different than school B which has no refugees, no ELA-ELL (English Language Acquisition-English Language Learner) students. Students in school B are prepared and ready for something much different than what students at school A are prepared and ready for. And so we demand that each school and each staff differentiates based on the needs of the young people. You do formative tests to get those early indicators of where are the skill gaps and how are we going to bridge those skill gaps."
Differences aside, the same overarching goal apply to all schools.
"No matter where they're at, what you're looking for is progress in both groups. It's gotta be about growth and progress, wherever they came from, whether from a refugee camp or a single-parent family or a household where both parents are college graduates. The day they walk out they've gotta be better than the day they walked in."
Closing the achievement gap, he says, "is not just resources," adding, "There's a lot of things we can do with existing resources – that's what we're trying to do with alignment. For example, if we know of a specific strategy to improve math or language arts skills for kids below level why wouldn't we train all our staff in that methodology for all our schools? We'd never done that. Instead, school A and school B would pick out whatever strategy they wanted. Some would buy a compute-based piece and some would do a tutorial piece at the Teacher Administration Center.
"There was no collaborative where educators said, 'Which one has the highest return on impacting those skills?' That just doesn't make any sense. So now we're attempting to scale those things. Part of it is getting out of our silos and scaling the quality and part of it is helping people develop the skill sets to know how to implement that, because not everybody knows."
Pam Cohn (Secondary)
Melissa Comine (Elementary)
Dwayne Chism (Elementary) Lisa Utterback, Elementary
His executive directors of school support, including Lisa Uttterback, were principals at high performing schools. Evans has charged them with helping principals adopt best practices at their own schools.
"Lisa had great success in a high needs school (Miller Park). The test scores look good, there's community partnerships and parent involvement. Kids are walking out the door with pride, ready for middle school. I took grief for taking her out of there but my thinking is she can have more impact by scaling her capacities to 21 schools. I need her to develop her skill sets to these principals she supports and I need the other EDs to do that with the leaders they support.
"The whole concept is to find where it's working and make decisions collaboratively on best practices and then support the implementation. It doesn't happen overnight. It didn't happen overnight at Miller Park, but it did happen. So what happened? Well, you had good leadership. She (Utterback) figured out strategies that work."
Other principals have done the same thing.
"We've got islands of excellence, we've got schools doing wonderful things, but then you've got other schools that for whatever reasons need more supports and until now there really wasn't a methodology to try to recognize it and to provide that support."
To achieve the greater classroom rigor district-wide the strategic plan calls for he says OPS is enhancing efforts started before he came to "retrain teachers on baseline skill sets for instructional practice." He acknowledges "these are things they should have probably had in college but for whatever reason didn't."
In addition to raising performance, there's a push to keep kids in school.
"In our district right now were at 77.8 percent graduation rate, which by the way is pretty high for an urban setting. But the truth is we've got to be higher than that, we've got to be over 80 and be moving toward 90, because if they don't have a high school diploma today the research abundantly shows the opportunities in life are slim.
"Were trying to move 13 percentage points over the next five years,
which doesn't sound like a big deal but it kind of is a big deal."
Moving forward, he feels good about the school board he answers to.
"I would say our relationship's good. They've had an enormous learning curve. I think their hearts are really good. I think they're still struggling with the learning curve – heck, I am. They're trying to wrap their arms around big stuff, I mean, we're talking big numbers here – a $600 million facilities plan. We're talking big information – a strategic plan, a student assignment plan, a new hiring policy. I think they've done amazing for the amount of time they've had to try to capture this."
He says minus drama and acrimony at the top, OPS can thrive.
"We have great schools doing really good things. I thought and I still think if we could get rid of that noise and distraction and have an aligned, coherent system we may have one of the only opportunities in America where a community still values urban education, and they do here. There are very few communities like this."
He feels good, too, about he and the board having come in together to provide a restart for the district.
"I think this community wanted and desired a feeling of a fresh start. I think people feel like they are seeing something different today than what they saw the last five years. I know we are doing things different because OPS hadn't done a strategic plan in 10 years, they hadn't done a bond issue in 15 years, they haven't done a student assignment plan in many years, they hadn't done a reorganization with a focus of supporting schools."
Evans likes where his ship of a district is headed.
"We've got the pieces in place to get it lined up. We're already doing partnerships, we're developing better classroom practices, we're developing leadership for the schools and aligning them to very specific, collaboratively agreed upon goals. If we can pass this facilities plan we can give kids high speed internet access and safer, more secure environments.
"Without those kinds of pieces the ship's going to go on the wrong course."
Linda Meigs Brings Agriculture, History and Art Together at Florence Mill
If you ever doubt what difference an artist can make in a community, consider Linda Meigs. The Omaha native has found a way to connect her love of history, art, and preservation in a labor of love project and site, the Historic Florence Mill in North Omaha, that is equal parts museum, gallery, installation, and gathering spot. In so doing , she has gifted one of Omaha's oldest neighborhoods with an attraction and resource that, were it not for her, would probably have never happened. She saved the Mill, which has a rich history closely related to the Great Western Mormon Migration, from almost certain demolition and she's lovingly preserved it as a landmark and transformed the site into a communal space that connects agriculture, history, and art. It is a story of one woman's passion and magnificent obsession, which if you read this blog you know by now is the kind of story I love to sink my teeth into. You can find this story in the August 2014 New Horizons.
Linda Meigs, ©Allen Irwin blog
Linda Meigs Brings Agriculture, History and Art Together at Florence Mill
©by Leo Adam Biga
Now appearing in the New Horizons
Artist, history buff, preservationist Linda Meigs didn't set out to be the Mill Lady but that's what she's known as at the Historic Florence Mill, 9012 North 30th Street. It's appropriate, too, because ever since saving this landmark from likely demolition it's been her baby.
The wood structure dates back to the 1840s and boasts direct ties to the Great Mormon westward migration and to Church of Latter Day Saints leader Brigham Young. After near continuous use as a flour and lumber mill it was abandoned in the 1970s-1980s. Sitting vacant, the interior was exposed to the elements from a damaged roof and broken windows. Vandals released stored grain from the chutes. Heaps of matted oats and dried pigeon-rodent droppings covered the floors.
Meigs acquired the Mill in 1998 when no one else wanted it. She purchased the-then wreck for $63,000 and much more than that has gone Into its cleanup, repair and restoration. The Mill's become her magnificent obsession and all-consuming art project.
Today, Meigs, 64, operates the site as a historical museum. Photographs, interpretive text panels, tools, implements, letters and posters tell the story of the Mill and the people behind it. Because she's retained the historical character of the building, including original timber, the Mill also speaks for itself. The ArtLoft Gallery she created on the second floor is dedicated to her late son Connor Meigs, who followed her path to become an artist. He was a sophomore at her alma mater, the University of Kansas, when killed in a 2004 automobile accident. She was already six years into the project when he died and since then she's only thrown herself more into it.
An outdoor farmer's market happens Sundays on the grounds, which she leases from the Nebraska Department of Roads. She also hosts special events at the Mill. This full-fledged cultural attraction began as a cockeyed dream that nearly everyone but her architect husband John Meigs tried talking her out of. It's turned into a life's work endeavor that's preserved history, created a new community space and spurred tourism in one of Omaha's oldest sections. Her efforts have earned recognition from several quarters.
She's owner, caretaker, curator and everything else there.
"I'm doing everything here the executive director of any historical society does, only they have paid staff," she says. "I'm the executive director, docent, historian, janitor, public relations person, events programmer, grant writer, and it just goes on and on."
She could have added market master. She "runs the show" at the Florence Farmers Market on Sundays in her gaudy market hat.
Those roles are in addition to being a wife, mother and rental property owner-manager. The Mill though requires most of her attention.
"I'm the unpaid slave of the Mill."
She's glad to be in service to it, saying, "This is my gift to the city – to keep it open to the public." She adds, "I've always been interested in preservation. My husband John, too. He worked on the restoration of the Orpheum Theatre and Union Station. We have a hundred year-old apartment building, the West Farnam, at 3817 Dewey Avenue.
"I was an officer with Landmarks Inc.. It makes me sick when we tear our history down and go to Europe for history. The Mill is wonderful history. The building is really an encyclopedia of the grain industry. It has a unique niche as the only building in this region that bridges the eras of the overland pioneer trails and territorial settlement. I get a lot of visitors from outside Omaha, really from all across the country, who retrace the Mormon and Gold Rush trails."
The Mill today
This intersection with history would probably have been razed if not for her passion and perseverance.
The Mill's been endangered several times, first by the people who built it, the Mormon pioneers, when they left their winter quarters settlement to journey west to Utah. Brigham Young himself supervised the Mill's construction. But after serving its purpose for that caravan of faithful it was left to the Indians and nature. Scottish emigre Alexander Hunter was on his way to the California Gold Rush when he saw an opportunity to rescue the Mill. He rebuilt it. An employee, Jacob Weber, later bought it. The Mill remained in the Weber family for more than a century, thus it's often called the Weber Mill and Elevator.
A 1930s flood nearly claimed it. The threat of future floods motivated Jacob's grandson, Lyman Weber, to move the building, intact, to higher ground. In 1964 the Webers sold out to Ernie and Ruthie Harpster. Interstate 680 construction in the 1970s was slated to run right through the property before Ernie Harpster secured historic status for the site, which necessitated the Interstate being re-routed around it.
Meigs first learned of the Mill when Haprster put it up for sale in 1997. Despite its awful condition Meigs saw potential where others saw ruin.
"My role was to have it make a career change from an obsolete mill and grain elevator into a cultural site. And it took me years to figure out what its theme was, and it was just in the last year or two I recognized the obvious – it connects agriculture, history and art. I never would have thought I'd be able to choreograph my life so that those very separate things would come together in anything as good as this building. It's like they all tied together in this serendipity project.
"I feel I was the right person at the right time for this to steer it in a different direction – in an attraction direction."
Indeed, it's unlikely anyone else possessed the necessary skills and interests, plus will and vision, to take on the Mill and repurpose it.
The oldest of three siblings, Meigs is the only daughter of Francis and Pauline Sorensen. Her parents grew up on north-central Neb farms. Linda spent her early childhood in the Dundee neighborhood, where she and John have resided since 1975, before her family moved to southwest Omaha's Sunset Hills.
Though she grew up in the city, Meigs gained an appreciation for agriculture visiting her maternal grandparents' farm.
"My mother's family farm was my second home. We went out there weekends and holidays. In fact. I've used it for my artwork quite a bit," says the veteran visual artist who's shown at the Artists Cooperative and Anderson O'Brien galleries.
In contrast to this bucolic idyll was her "Edgar Allan Poe childhood." Her mother sang at funerals and Linda accompanied her to the dark Victorian gothic mansions where these somber services were held.
She'd sit on a red velvet settee outside the viewing room and wait for mom to finish "Danny Boy," "In the Garden" and "The Lord's Prayer."
Meigs traces her love of old buildings to those times.
Linda's talent for art asserted itself early. As a girl she drew and colored on any paper she could lay her hands on, filling reams of notebooks with her Childcraft book-inspired designs,
"i won a Walt Disney coloring contest before kindergarten. I got free tickets to Westward Ho the Wagons at the Dundee Theater. That was the payoff. In grade school I got a scholarship to an art class at Joslyn Art Museum. The teachers were always reinforcing about my artwork."
Westside High School art teachers Ken Heimbuch and Diane (Hansen) Murphy were particularly "encouraging."
"I still keep in touch with them and they come to my art shows here at the mill. We have a nice relationship."
Her talent netted a scholarship to the University of Kansas art camp, but her parents couldn't afford to send her. Heartbroken though she was she still fixed her sights on studying art in college. She started at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln before switching to KU.
"I went to UNL my first year but I wasn't very happy there. The art department wasn't as large then as it is now. (Landscape painter) Keith Jacobshagen was a graduate student at the time and he encouraged me to check out KU, where he'd gotten his bachelor's degree."
The state university in Lawrence proved a good fit.
"It turned out my current husband was down there. It all came together. I loved the campus – you're on a hill and you can see the horizon from three directions. Aesthetically, it's very beautiful."
Her insurance adjustor father and homemaker mother never opposed her pursuing art.
"My parents were very accepting, they knew I had a gift in that area and we're encouraging. They were proud of me – even to the day I graduated with a totally useless BFA in printmaking. My folks never pressured me about how I was going to make a living. I never worried about it because I always felt, and I raised my kids this way, that if you're a creative person you could figure out what to do."
She and John made a go of it after marrying in 1975. He worked as an architect for Leo A. Daly before going into the building supplies business. She worked in a design studio before going off on her own as a freelance illustrator. She's taught art at Joslyn and Metropolitan Community College and more recently with Why Arts?
She kept her hand in art in other ways, too.
"I was the cultural arts chair of Washington Elementary School for nine years. I invented a theme every year. The first one was Artists in Our Midst and every month I brought in a different artist. Whether they did pottery or silkscreen or painting, there was an artist in residence in the hallway demonstrating their work. I leaned on my artist friends for that to make this program for the school.
"One year we did a history theme and we had an all-school quilting bee. Each class designed a different block for this school quilt that won two blue ribbons at the Douglas County Fair. All of that was practice for events at the Mill. I learned how to be an event producer."
Her and John's appreciation for history developed into a hobby of driving around to admire houses and buildings in the old parts of town.
When they had four kids in six years, including twins, they developed an extra income stream by buying older residential properties and renting them out. That led to her day job as "a landlady."
Then in 1997 she saw an Omaha World-Herald article that changed her life. Headlined "History for Sale," it detailed the Mill's colorful past. Having come to the end of its commercial life, the Mill was for sale.
"When I read the article I had a sinking premonition it (the Mill) would be my job," she says with a laugh.
When she and John toured the Mill for the first time it marked her first visit to Florence. The building was a mess.
"It was boarded up and pitch black inside. We used flashlights to see. It had 2,000 pounds of fermented grain in a bin. Another 12,000 pounds were on the floor. We shuffled through piles of grain, dirt, dead animals and pigeon poop. It was stinky, dark, scary and unhealthy in there.
"Another couple went through it. The woman was Mormon and wanted to do a restaurant there. She asked me, 'Are you interested in it?' and I said, 'Oh, I don't know, it's pretty rough,' and I said, 'Are you interested in it?' and she said, 'Oh, no, it's too far gone for me."
It wasn't too far gone for Linda, though. Not by a long shot.
"I thought, I can do this. It was a commitment, sure, but I thought this was a gem. I wasn't afraid of it. I was used to working with old buildings. I didn't know why there weren't hundreds of people that wanted to buy an 1800s building."
Still, it was a huge decision. After weeks hemming and hawing about its potential she recalls, "On Valentine's Day my husband came home with a loaf of my favorite bread, I set it out on the counter, and he said, 'Well, aren't you going to open it?' So I opened it and underneath the bread was a purchase agreement that if I wanted to do this he would stand with me. That was lovely."
If she hadn't gone through with it, she says, "the Mill probably would have been bulldozed. It was falling on its own. There were letters to the editor asking why doesn't somebody tear that ruin of a building down and others saying it needed to be fixed up. So there were two sides – there always is in preservation. There are those who think it's served its purpose, and so let it go. Then there's those who say it's a link to our past and heritage that should be salvaged, and I'm in that camp."
"The writer David Bristow may have best captured its magic when he said, 'I feel like I'm standing inside of a tree with the rings of history around me.' I love that – I think it's such a perfect metaphor for this building. From the outside you don't know what to expect from this industrial-looking building but the inside is very lovely and soulful."
For Meigs, the Mill is a living history lesson.
"The wood in here tells a story if you know where to look."
She says the original hand-hewn timbers felled and erected by the Mormons are intact, as are the timbers Alexander Hunter used in rebuilding it. The circular marks from Hunter's saw are visible in the timbers. There are vintage signs, pay stubs and time cards about.
Getting things up to code meant addressing myriad problems, from fixing huge holes in the roof to replacing rotted windows to draining fetid water in the basement she called "a stinky swimming pool" to removing seven tons of gunk.
"It was a big project."
Her first order of business was cleaning all the walls and floors and open surfaces – "I scrubbed the entire building with trisodium phosphate and a brush" – and repairing the leaking roof.
She got a pleasant surprise when she discovered all those strewn oats acted as a sealant that protected the wood floors. "So the bane of the building was its blessing," she says.
The building today "is a lot more solid than it was," she says thanks to the new roof, siding, windows and insulation. "We did the restoration on the outside to preserve the inside because it's the inside of this building that's historical. It's just the opposite of most restoration projects, where they'll keep the facade and gut the inside. We didn't want to do that because it would ruin the building."
It wasn't long before she got a sense the Mill just might be the attraction she thought it could be.
"That first summer I was in here cleaning I had a thousand visitors and it wasn't even open. Actually the Mill told me through all those visitors that it needed to be open as a historical site. I had very vague ideas what to do with it. It's an odd building functionally. As an artist I thought there would be a good gallery space here.
"I decided to open it up to the public as a museum."
Meigs may have come to Florence as an outsider but she soon established herself as a good neighbor dedicated to building community and boosting economic development.
"It bothered me the historic sites of Florence were closed most of the summer, the Mill included, except for the Mormon Trails Center," she says. "Kiwanis was keeping the historic depot and bank open on summer Sundays. I got a grant from the Mammel Foundation to staff those sites every day during the summer. It was a three-year grant and we kept them open with paid staff from Kiwanis clubs. It was a lovely relationship of improving Omaha."
When the grant ended the depot and bank went back to being open a few select days but she decided to keep the Mill open on a regular basis, she says, "because I could do it – I'm donating my time."
The Mill's open seasonally, May through October. It goes in hibernation for the winter as it's without heat and indoor restrooms.
Although still a newcomer to Florence, she's become one of its biggest champions and feels it's often overlooked considering its rich history.
"This is an unknown part of town. I call it the forgotten fringe. When i got the Mill and I started doing the research I realized the depth of the history here and I got involved in the neighborhood."
She chaired the group Florence Futures that developed the master redevelopment plan for the Florence neighborhood.
When the Mormon Winter Quarters Temple opened she organized a Lunch in Historic Florence event that gave visitors to the Temple a button for a discounted lunch at area restaurants.
"It was the first time the community had done a project with the Temple," she says, adding the promotion won a state tourism award.
Much sweat equity and money went into getting the Mill into its present restored state.
"It's taken 17 years to do what we've done. It's not been overnight."
With no paid admission, the trickle of income from vendor rentals and gift shop sales isn't nearly enough to keep the Mill open and maintained. She depends on grants and donations. She and John also "pitch in money to keep this afloat." She estimates more than $300,000 has been invested in the building thus far from various sources.
"I have a Friends of the Mill group and people kindly donate to that. It fluctuates from year to year but the funds from that do not cover the operating costs."
Some major donors have come through for pricy projects, such as automatic barn doors. The Peter Kiewit Foundation and the Lozier Corporation helped fund their purchase and installation.
"A Questers group won a grant from the statewide Questers to replace the basement windows. It's not like that happens all the time but there's enough that it helps. When the need arises, good things happen, angels appear."
She's proud of how she converted the mill's loft into a rustic art gallery bathed in natural light.
"I put some things up there early on. The first show was a show of my farm photographs with fiber art by Dorothy Tuma."
The space didn't become a full-fledged gallery though until her son Connor's death.
"Loss is hard. Losing a child is pretty unacceptable because it's out of the order of things. He died from injuries in a car accident on Christmas Eve of 2004. He was 19."
Two images above are of the ArtLoft Gallery
Connor was an award-winning editorial cartoonist with the Omaha Central High Register and the Daily Kansan. He was home for the holidays, driving with his twin brother Doug, when the collision happened near the south side of Elmwood Park.
"We were over at John's parents' house waiting for Doug and Connor to come over to play board games with us," says Linda. "The roads turned to black ice. Both boys suffered injuries and lost consciousness.
"Doug came out of it and Connor did not."
There was a huge outpouring of support, including $10,000 in memorial gifts to the Mill.
She also wanted to do something to commemorate his love for art.
"It was actually in the wilderness of British Columbia that the idea came to me to give an art award in his memory," Meigs explains. "I had promised Connor a show at the gallery when he graduated. I decided to give one young person a year what I promised to give Connor."
The Connor Meigs Art Award is a merit award to help launch a young artist's career. It includes a month-long solo exhibit, mentoring, artist's reception, lodging and $1,000 honorarium.
Because Connor was an organ donor his mother knew he helped give life to others and would live on through the recipients.
"I wrote a letter to the families of the transplant patients who received his organs about what kind of a young man he was. I wrote that he was a hockey player and an award-winning artist. It had been six months since his passing and I had not heard any response."
Linda had been waiting for a letter but she got a personal visit instead.
"We were here working at the Mill on a Sunday cleaning pigeon poop when a couple drove up in a car with outstate license plates. The woman got out and said, 'We'd like to see Connor's work.' I said, 'How did you know there was an exhibit?' She looked down and after a pause she looked up to say, 'I have Connor's liver.'"
There had been a recent article about the Mill's renovation and Connor's show. Maggie Steele of Norfolk, Neb. contacted the Nebraska Organ Donors Society saying she wanted to meet Connor's family. She was told protocol requires a recipient correspond a year with the family before a meeting is set. Meigs says Steele persisted until the organization finally gave in and said, "follow your heart."
"Maggie and her husband Phil stop by to visit the Mill nearly every summer," Meigs says. "Though I wrote a letter to all the organ recipients, Maggie was the only one we heard from. We are grateful to have heard from her."
Plaque commemorating Linda's late son Connor
Maggie Steele with Connor's work in background, ©Dennis Meyer/Norfolk Daily News
Historically, the Mill's always been a landmark for travelers. whether on foot, by wagon or motor vehicle, and it remains a magnet for all kinds of visitors and events.
"Its still a natural meeting place," Meigs says. "It's right next to the Interstate, it's very easy access, it's on the way to the airport."
Warren Buffett's been there. The grounds have accommodated campers following the Mormon Trail. it hosted a Great Plains Theatre Conference program in May that drew hundreds. Each fall it's a site on the North Omaha Pottery Tour. The gallery hosts several exhibits annually. The farmers market features dozens of vendors on Sundays from June through September.
Meigs says the Mill gets 8,000 to 10,000 visitors each summer and the farmer's market, begun in 2009, is a major draw. It's an eclectic scene where you can listen to live bluegrass music and get a massage. Children can ride ponies and pet alpacas. Linda sometimes joins the circle jam of fiddle and dulcimer musicians to play the washboard.
The laid-back vibe is largely attributed to Meigs.
"I get a lot of thank yous and gratitude from some people for saving this building but it's blessed me back. I've met so many wonderful friends in this part of town. It's enriched my life."
Two measures of how much her efforts are appreciated happened this summer. She went with her family on a Bucket List trip to British Columbia and artist friends ran the Mill in her absence. "I almost wept when people stepped forward to say, 'I'll help.'" Folks in Florence organized a Thank You for the Mill party. "What a nice thing for people to do," she says. "It's nice to be appreciated."
She says fellow creatives "always understand the building itself is my art project – it is the creation, it is an art and history installation."
She feels she's part of a long lineage of people who have been entrusted with the Mill.
"All of the owners of the building have honored that pioneer heritage and have had a role to play in the building's preservation"
Meigs doesn't have a succession plan for handing-off the Mill when she retires or dies. She says the Douglas County Historical Society or the Nebraska State Historical Society may be possibilities. She even thinks there's a chance the Mormon Church might have interest in it.
She's not giving it up anytime soon, though. Besides, she's become so identified with it that she and the Mill are synonymous.
"People want me to be here. When they come here and I'm not here they're disappointed. I guess my personality's ingrained in this thing. I'm the Mill lady."
It may not be exactly what she she had in mind as a young artist. Nevertheless, she says, "it's my dream."
For Mill hours and activities visit http://www.theflorencemill.org.
North Omaha Summer Arts Presents: Gospel in the Park
My beloved, Pamela Jo Berry, has a big heart for her community. It's what led her to found North Omaha Summer Arts, an annual festival that infuses different art forms into the underserved North Omaha community she grew up in and still resides in. This is the festival's fourth year. Saturday, June 21 NOSA presents a gospel concert at Miller Park. Like all NOSA events, it's free and open to the public. Details below. Before Pam and I became a couple, I profiled her and her passion behind the festival for The Reader. You can find that story, Matter of the Heart: Pamela Jo Berry's Love for Her Community Brings Art Fest to North Omaha, on this blog. The link to it is: http://leoadambiga.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/pamela-jo-berry-brings-art-fest-to-north-omaha-artist-and-friends-engage-community-in-diverse-work/
In addition to the concert, there is a women's writing workshop in progress. On Friday, August 8 from 6 to 9 p.m. there will be an Arts Crawl up and down a swath of the North 30th Street Corridor featuring works by some of Omaha's leading artists. Venues to be announced.
Gospel Concert 4
Saturday, June 21
5:30-7:30 pm
24th and Kansas Ave. (next to the old ballfield)
Free and open to the public
Bring a picnic dinner and blanket or enjoy free grilled hot dogs and cool refeshing lemonade courtesy of Trinity Lutheran Church for this family-friendly concert featuring some of Omaha's most gifted performers.
Eric and Doriette Jordan
Trinity Lutheran Choir
Sudanese Worship Band
New Bethel Church of God Choir
and more…
"…for the Lord is great and greatly to be praised." Psalm 96:4
For more info, call NOSA founder Pamela Jo Berry at 402-502-4669.


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Tower Club - Dallas
Main Number: 214.220.0403
My Community
Membership Questions?
Christine Foppiano
Membership Director
Contact Us
Sarah Stewart
Sarah Stewart
Membership Director
My Community
When you're out and about, My Community gives you access to the ClubCorp family of clubs in the DFW area and more. You'll have access to local private clubs, great tickets to your favorite venues, special events and more. Through a variety of locations and amenities, your private club desires are expanded throughout the region.
What are the benefits?
- Cart fee-only golf rounds each month and tee times with preferred rates at premier public and private golf courses
- Social and dining privileges at some of the best local private clubs and restaurants, including two-for-one entrées each month
- Access to indoor and outdoor tennis courts and state-of-the-art fitness facilities
- A social calendar of events designed for Members' interests
- Luxury spa services at high-end spa facilities and access to swimming pools around town
- My TicketLine – your access to great tickets at your favorite venues: sports, theater, concerts and more
- Invitations to Members-only events at clubs around town – wine tastings, networking forums, golf events and more
- ClubLine – information and reservations with one phone call
How do I sign up?
Simply contact our membership director. It's that easy.

subset: commoncrawl


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|SUMMARY: In this classic viral marketing Case Study, hear how Honda popped a video online, sent 500 (yes only 500) people emails about it, and then sat back and watched tens of thousands visit its site. (Warning kids: do not try this at home without adult supervision.)
|Enter your email below to join thousands of marketers and get FREE newsletters with practical Case Studies, research and training on email, demand gen, SEO, social media and more, as well as MarketingSherpa updates and promotions.


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Just in time for today's election (ya heard?), Sweet Apple release their righteous cover of Alice Cooper's 1972 classic, "Elected." Sweet Apple's Cleveland-based vocalist/guitarist John Petkovic says that the song is "a tribute to cheapjack political ads. It might not be cinema, but neither is the election—or the ads (especially for us being bombarded by them in Ohio)..." By the way, fuck Jon Husted.
[Alice Cooper plays Emerald Queen Casino Nov. 18.]


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World's most gigantic pump to protect New Orleans in 2011
The world's largest water pump is now under construction in New Orleans, and when it's finished in 2011, it'll blast 150,000 gallons of floodwater per second. This should be a welcome sight for those who stood helpless four years ago while the city flooded from the waters of Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico during Hurricane Katrina.
We've seen some crazy schemes for impregnable triangular-shaped utopias in New Orleans, but this is getting practical. That is, unless you think $500 million is too much to spend on a water pump. That's not all. As part of a $14 billion project to keep New Orleans above water when another hurricane hits, also under construction are 32-foot tall steel gates that reach to the river bottom, capable of holding back a 16-foot storm surge.
This mother of all pumps harnesses a gigantic 5,000-horsepower diesel engine to power its awesome propeller, sucking those hurricane floodwaters through a special grate that filters out such detritus as cars, trees, and other hurricane flotsam and jetsam. The Army Corps of Engineers says the station will be able to "withstand almost everything." Let's hope those Category 5 hurricanes can hold off until construction is complete.


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Why, so many years after the world-changing ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, does the world seem so unchanged? To note only the extremely obvious, schools across the country are more segregated than ever. Has the ruling's original promise been unfulfilled? Martha Minow, the Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and the school's dean (she succeeded Elena Kagan) grapples with the long-term consequences of Brown, and in particular with some of its unexpected, and salutary consequences, in her book "In Brown's Wake: Legacies of America's Educational Landmark." It is a fascinating book, even for laymen, in part because Minow explains clearly and cogently how the Brown decision has radiated out in surprising ways. I recently had an e-mail conversation with Minow about Brown, its disappointments, and successes. (Full disclosure: Minow and I both sit on the board of the Charles H. Revson Foundation; Minow chairs the board; I kibitz at meetings.)
Jeffrey Goldberg: It seems to me, and probably other people, that Brown changed
everything and nothing at the same time. In other words, the Supreme
Court could ultimately not mandate true racial integration. Much of
your book is about the non-race consequences of Brown; did you focus on
this because Brown's impact on integration has been so disappointing?
Or am I wrong in my assumptions?
Martha Minow: I wrote the book in the context of so many public discussions about disappointments around Brown v. Board of Education--and I share the disappointment that public K-12 schools today are in most parts of the country racially imbalanced in their enrollments. I did want to give Brown its due for shattering the racial apartheid of Jim Crow laws, where statutes and ordinances mandated segregation by race not only of school children, but also their textbooks in summer storage; and where racial hierarchy enforced by vigilante justice and lynching deprived African-Americans of access to public accommodations, good jobs, political participation, and more. That era is over, and the social movement surrounding Brown generating the 1964 Civil Rights Act and political and economic changes that at least in some measure contributed to the successes of people like Oprah Winfrey, Ken Chennault, and Barack Obama.
Even racial desegregation of schools--for a time--made real progress; the most racially mixed schools in 1971 were those in the South because of federal court and administrative enforcement of desegregation orders. Yet political backlash and the backing off of federal enforcement by courts and agencies followed; the 1974 Supreme Court decision drawing a line at the suburbs for any remedy for segregated and failing schools in Detroit was one indication of this change. And white families that wanted to avoid desegregation and failing schools moved to the suburbs or private schools. The disappointing status of school desegregation reflects both the loss of public enforcement and patterns of private residential and schooling choices; most white children in American now attend schools with predominantly children and most African-American and Hispanic students attend schools with few white children. Equal opportunity remains the residual goal--with bi-partisan support for investing in schools and working to reduce the racial gap in achievement scores, but racial integration has largely receded from public priorities when it comes to K-12 public schools.
Yet the impact of Brown spreads way beyond that context. In colleges and universities, workplaces, and media depictions, racial integration remains a significant goal. And beyond the context of race, Brown inspired social movements and advocacy efforts on behalf of immigrants, students learning English, girls, and persons with disabilities--with court cases and legislation renovating public schools to promote equality across these lines and often, though not always, integration, too. Equality as framed by Brown became a framework for some advocates addressing poverty and others working on behalf of gay, lesbian, bi- and transgendered youth. Brown and the litigation strategy and rhetorical around it guided others interested in opening up public support for religious schools. I wanted to highlight these huge influences while also exploring in all these contexts, when and how equality has come to signal a demand for integration, and when instead "separate but equal" seems a sensible result. Even where "separate but equal" seems permitted--as with single-sex education, for example--there's a big change in the law and in public demand for real and comparable opportunities, regardless of a person's gender, disability, or other identity. I wanted to focus on these other realms to do justice to Brown to reclaim the path it represents: people can work together, using law and organizing socially and politically, to change the opportunities and practices for all kinds of people.
JG: Apart from desegregating (as opposed to truly integrating) public schools, what in your opinion has been the greatest unintended consequence of Brown? Which is to say, which group, or class, did it wind up helping, even inadvertently?
MM: Among the unintended or unexpected consequences of Brown v. Board of Education; four vie for position of "most surprising":
1) the advocacy for gender equality in public school that first took the form of seeking co-education but over time has taken the shape of policies supporting single-sex public education;
2) the push to "mainstream" students with disabilities--including students with mental disabilities so that they may attend part or all of the school day with other students;
3) the emergence of school choice, first as a device for avoiding court-ordered desegregation, then as a technique for encouraging racial desegregation, and then as a technique intended to promote competition and school improvement;
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New precision from Trimble
By: Laurie Bedord
Get connected with the latest precision ag tools from Trimble.
MORE FROM LAURIE BEDORD more +
Seven Farm Robotic Concepts By: Laurie Bedord10/30/2014 @ 5:45pm From planting to harvest, there is a revolution coming in the way we grow food.
China: A Challenge and an Opportunity By: Laurie Bedord01/10/2014 @ 2:24pm Take a tour of China's farm fields and cities, and learn about how changes underway there…
All around Agritechnica: Day 2 By: Laurie Bedord11/11/2013 @ 11:24am See what the Agriculture.com team's seeing at the largest farm show in Europe.


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Combine sugars and spices in large pot. Add cider and heat until everything is dissolved. Bring to a boil and simmer 5 minutes. Add orange juice; heat thoroughly.
Server with a cinnamon stick
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SMTP auth.
I have installed ISPConfig 3.0.4 and Debian by following the tutorial "The Perfect Server Debian Squeeze (Debian 6.0) With BIND & Dovecot [ISPConfig 3]"
I have to tell that i completely love it. There haven't been any big problems with the installation, everything works fine.
But there is one problem. As i have read, smtp auth is on by default, but the thing is - i can receive e-mails from outside sources, but when i send them from server's squirrelmail, i get this error back to my inbox:
This is the mail system at host srv.site.net.
As far as i undestood from the spamhaus.org link, my ip adress is in a spammers list, and im unfortunately unable to send the mails until ill enable smtp auth.(that's what the suggest in the link) But here's the dilemma, as i mentioned earlier, all the sources say that smtp auth is on by default. So what should i do now? How i fix this problem?
You should check your config file from your webmail
This is in rouncubed
/ / SMTP username (if required) if you use% u as the username Roundcube
/ / Will use the current username for login
$ rcmail_config ['smtp_user'] = '% u';
/ / SMTP password (if required) if you use% p as the password Roundcube
/ / Will use the current user's password for login
$ rcmail_config ['smtp_pass'] = '% p';
in your webmail you have to look
maybe this helped you
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text:
NCUA Board's lone Republican member continues on job after his term ended officially on Friday.
Nearly half the brokers in Aflac survey said they're considering leaving the business.
Ways and Means subcomittee hearing focuses on new delays in PPACA requirements.
For a year, consumers will be on the honor system for subsidies under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup among those accused of notification failures, sending inaccurate information.
Researchers claim 30 million Americans will still be uninsured come 2016.
A new Obama administration initiative designed to make frivolous patent protection lawsuits more difficult to bring may end up protecting credit unions.
Rick Metsger, a former Oregon state senator who has sponsored credit union legislation and once served on a credit union board, was nominated by President Barack Obama May 15 to serve on the NCUA Board.
GOP-powered panel says enough to build Mount Rushmore more than 1,500 times.
North Carolina congressman's nomination to FHFA top spot prompts careful comments from trades.