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With Keepers Obsolete, Lighthouse Duties Fall to New Set of Stewards
MaryAnn Moore and Pan Godchaux had eager smiles and the to-do list ready when their guests arrived for a four-day stay. “Sweep sidewalks and dock,” it said. “Wash tower windows. Pump water.”
And for anyone feeling really generous, two big requests were scrawled on a kitchen whiteboard: a boat “that doesn’t leak” and “$1,000,000.”
The women are keepers of a lighthouse, nine miles from the nearest town, on an uninhabited island at the treacherous convergence of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. For more than 10 years, volunteer keepers have worked to restore the 137-year-old station, and in the summer they count on vacationing friends and preservation-minded Michiganders to pitch in.
“We want to build ownership and for people to feel like, ‘This is our lighthouse,’ ” said Ms. Moore, 63, a former teacher and full-time volunteer with the Great Lakes Lighthouse Keepers Association, a nonprofit group. “I want to do what it takes to keep it alive.”
It takes a lot.
As GPS units and the automation of navigational tools have rendered traditional lighthouse keepers obsolete, the government has been decommissioning the properties it owns, nearly 50 over the last 10 years, and transferring ownership to new stewards at no cost, preferably nonprofit groups. When it cannot find a proper caretaker, the properties are auctioned to the highest bidder, which has happened 15 times.
Increasingly, people like Ms. Moore — history buffs and preservationists, youth groups and investors — are stepping up to do what the Coast Guard and old men of the sea have done for ages: tend to the nation’s lighthouses.
Three were declared excess just last month in Michigan. There are seven available in Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Wisconsin, and five more are up for auction.
The catch is that new owners must maintain the properties to historic standards. And during a recession, with grants and donations ever harder to come by, the lighthouses have hit hard times, particularly in Michigan, a struggling state with about 113 lighthouses — more than any other state.
“I’m telling you this, you cannot restore a lighthouse with bake sales,” said Scott L. Hollman, 69, who won the Granite Island Light Station in Lake Superior at public auction for $86,000 about 10 years ago, somewhat unaware of what he was getting into. “I can never get over the fact that they built this whole darn thing in one summer, and it took me two-and-a-half summers to repair it, with all the materials and technology we have today.”
Restoring a lighthouse is not easy. Just after Mr. Hollman installed a custom-designed door, high winds blew through and shredded it. It took months to make a new one. “That little storm cost me 2,500 bucks,” he said. “You want to do these things once and say it is restored and done. In fact, you do things over and over again.”
Lighthouses even have their budding collectors. Michael L. Gabriel, 56, a lawyer in the San Francisco Bay area, bought two deteriorating lighthouses at auction: one, in Chesapeake Bay, for $100,000, the other, in Delaware Bay, for $200,000. “The alternative was doing nothing and losing them to the point where they’re not salvageable,” he said.
Once a lighthouse is rescued from abandonment, the question for owners becomes “Now what?” Mr. Gabriel hopes to use one of the stations as a summer house, with the other, perhaps, catering to tourists.
“I’ve looked into doing a microbrewery, a hamburger joint, just little stuff to bring in enough money to cover the year-to-year maintenance,” he said.
Some of the new keepers are working hard just to keep the lights on. (Or in the case of St. Helena Island, which is not wired for electricity, the volunteers are working to keep the candles lighted and the flashlights on.)
Abandoned in 1922, the St. Helena Island lighthouse has been a $1.3 million job so far, paid for mostly with donations and grants. In addition to the tower, the volunteers have restored the keeper’s and assistant keeper’s quarters, a boathouse and a dock. Materials and transportation to the island are the greatest expenses.
Ms. Moore, Ms. Godchaux and other leaders of the keepers association organize four-night stays at the compound for visitors who want to donate their time while living in the rustic keepers’ quarters. Last week, a quilters’ group from the Grand Rapids area took up residence and made a donation for their meals and transportation, as most visitors do.
Scrubbing pots in an outdoor bucket, one of the quilters, Kathy Cavanaugh, a bank teller, said: “This is a dream come true. My favorite part is treating this just like home. I really want to live the lifestyle.”
That included hauling water from a hand-pump well, using a pit latrine in the woods and trying not to be too concerned about spiders and snakes.
The full-time keepers, Ms. Moore and Ms. Godchaux, have no navigational duties other than pointing out freighters in the Straits of Mackinac, a heavily trafficked shipping lane, to the guests. But they regularly paint, chop wood, clear brush and keep the tower clean. The Coast Guard retains legal access to the light, which still pulses at night, operated by solar power and automatic sensors. But the cast-iron stairs need to be scrubbed and painted, and the keepers’ quarters need a new roof.
“At some point, you could easily ask, ‘What the heck am I doing this for?’ ” said Dick Moehl, 78, president of the Great Lakes Lighthouse Keepers Association. “It is a mental and physical challenge.”
The association took over a second lighthouse from the government in 2004 and is in the process of restoring it, too.
“What we need to do is find a way to make things like this work in modern times,” said Terry Pepper, the group’s executive director. “We still need lighthouses.”
Indeed, many of the decommissioned properties in critical areas have working beacons because boating electronics sometimes fail. But Mr. Pepper was referring to an emotional need as well.
Jennifer Radcliff, president of the Michigan Lighthouse Fund, a nonprofit organization set up to help with restorations, said, “People need to know where their place is, and lighthouses acknowledge a sense of place that resonates in a real primal way.”
The St. Helena Island Light Station will close for the long Upper Midwest winter at the end of the month. The island will be uninhabited until Ms. Moore and Ms. Godchaux return next May to open the shutters and greet volunteers, some of whom have already made up their minds to come back.
“Next year’s a given,” said Ms. Cavanaugh, the bank teller, outfitted, for kicks, in a bonnet and long prairie dress. “Keepers need help. Don’t have to ask me twice.”
Scissors, Glue, Pencils? Check. Cleaning Spray?
When Emily Cooper headed off to first grade in Moody, Ala., last week, she was prepared with all the stuff on her elementary school’s must-bring list: two double rolls of paper towels, three packages of Clorox wipes, three boxes of baby wipes, two boxes of garbage bags, liquid soap, Kleenex and Ziplocs.
“The first time I saw it, my mouth hit the floor,” Emily’s mother, Kristin Cooper, said of the list, which also included perennials like glue sticks, scissors and crayons.
Schools across the country are beginning the new school year with shrinking budgets and outsize demands for basic supplies. And while many parents are wincing at picking up the bill, retailers are rushing to cash in by expanding the back-to-school category like never before.
Now some back-to-school aisles are almost becoming janitorial-supply destinations as multipacks of paper towels, cleaning spray and hand sanitizer are crammed alongside pens, notepads and backpacks.
OfficeMax is featuring items like Clorox wipes in its school displays and is running two-for-one specials on cleaners like gum remover and disinfectant spray. Office Depot has added paper towels and hand sanitizer to its back-to-school aisles. Staples’ school fliers show reams of copy paper on sale, while Walgreens’ fliers are running back-to-school discounts on Kleenex.
State and local school financing, which make up almost all of public schools’ money, is falling because of budget-balancing efforts and lower property- and sales-tax revenue.
“Some of the things that have been historically provided by schools, we’re not able to provide at this point,” said Barbara A. Chester, president of the National Association of Elementary School Principals.
On the list for pre-kindergartners at McClendon Elementary in Nevada, Tex.: a package of cotton balls, two containers of facial tissue, rolls of paper towels, sheaves of manila and construction paper, and a package of paper sandwich bags.
Pre-kindergartners in the Joshua school district in Texas have to track down Dixie cups and paper plates, while students at New Central Elementary in Havana, Ill., and Mesa Middle School in Castle Rock, Colo., must come to class with a pack of printer paper. Wet Swiffer refills and plastic cutlery are among the requests from St. Joseph School in Seattle. And at Pauoa Elementary School in Honolulu, every student must show up with a four-pack of toilet paper.
For the retailers, back-to-school season is second only to the holidays, and parents’ longer school-supply lists are a bonus — especially at a time when shoppers are reluctant to spend. While the impact is not enormous, retailers are looking for anything to lift sales.
“It’s newfound business that the retailers didn’t have a year or two ago,” said Steve Mahurin, executive vice president of merchandising for Office Depot.
The shift is notable even at stores that sell much more than office supplies.
“When I walk through the back rooms of our stores where the layaway orders are stored, not only are you seeing things you expect to see — computers, apparel,” said Mark Snyder, chief marketing officer of Kmart, “you’re seeing these sort of household supplies that teachers are asking, school systems are asking, kids to now bring.”
For several years, the lists have been getting lengthier, but in many parts of the country, educators and retailers say, the economic downturn has also pushed them into uncharted territory. “It’s definitely spiked this year,” said Bob Thacker, senior vice president of marketing and advertising at OfficeMax.
Many stores have tailored their offerings to reflect the demands of local schools, collecting the back-to-school supply lists and stocking inventory accordingly.
Mr. Thacker said the change had meant bigger orders this summer of things like cleaning supplies and paper towels. “It’s just changed the way our merchants buy things for their different areas,” he said.
In some places, though, parents being asked to make up depleted school budgets are under budget pressure, too, which has left schools without a clear solution.
Malcolm Thomas, the superintendent of the Escambia County school district on Florida’s Gulf Coast, has put supplies like plastic bags, Kleenex and soap under an “optional” category because “we know that people in our community are hurting,” he said. He also seeks donations from local businesses.
If those efforts don’t bring in enough supplies, it means either his teachers — who start at a salary of $32,500 — usually pay for the supplies themselves, or the district “would probably have to get into cutting personnel if we had to supply absolutely everything,” he said.
In Noblesville, Ind., Kristi Smith, 41, a teacher’s aide, said she was sympathetic to the cost pressures at her daughters’ elementary school, but she also thought the supply list was a little extreme.
“Sometimes I think it’s too much,” she said. “Is my fourth grader really going to use 50 pencils herself?”
Ms. Cooper, the Alabama mother, spent her summer making the most of the school-supply stores’ new interest in classroom supplies. “Each week I go to the stores’ Web sites — Staples, OfficeMax, Office Depot,” she said, and posts the deals on a blog for fellow bargain hunters. “All three of these major stores are offering jaw-dropping deals every week,” she said.
And as overwhelming as it might seem to some parents, she would rather buy the goods than expect Emily’s teacher to do so, she said.
“We don’t expect Wal-Mart cashiers to buy the plastic bags for our groceries, or the mailman to pay for the gas to deliver our mail,” Ms. Cooper said.
Eat an Apple (Doctor’s Orders)
The farm stand is becoming the new apothecary, dispensing apples — not to mention artichokes, asparagus and arugula — to fill a novel kind of prescription.
Doctors at three health centers in Massachusetts have begun advising patients to eat “prescription produce” from local farmers’ markets, in an effort to fight obesity in children of low-income families. Now they will give coupons amounting to $1 a day for each member of a patient’s family to promote healthy meals.
“A lot of these kids have a very limited range of fruits and vegetables that are acceptable and familiar to them. Potentially, they will try more,” said Dr. Suki Tepperberg, a family physician at Codman Square Health Center in Dorchester, one of the program sites. “The goal is to get them to increase their consumption of fruit and vegetables by one serving a day.”
The effort may also help farmers’ markets compete with fast-food restaurants selling dollar value meals. Farmers’ markets do more than $1 billion in annual sales in the United States, according to the Agriculture Department.
Massachusetts was one of the first states to promote these markets as hubs of preventive health. In the 1980s, for example, the state began issuing coupons for farmers’ markets to low-income women who were pregnant or breast-feeding or for young children at risk for malnourishment. Thirty-six states now have such farmers’ market nutrition programs aimed at women and young children.
Thomas M. Menino, the mayor of Boston, said he believed the new children’s program, in which doctors write vegetable “prescriptions” to be filled at farmers’ markets, was the first of its kind. Doctors will track participants to determine how the program affects their eating patterns and to monitor health indicators like weight and body mass index, he said.
“When I go to work in the morning, I see kids standing at the bus stop eating chips and drinking a soda,” Mr. Menino said in a phone interview earlier this week. “I hope this will help them change their eating habits and lead to a healthier lifestyle.”
The mayor’s attention to healthy eating dates to his days as a city councilman. Most recently he has appointed a well-known chef as a food policy director to promote local foods in public schools and to foster market gardens in the city.
Although obesity is a complex problem unlikely to be solved just by eating more vegetables, supporters of the veggie voucher program hope that physician intervention will spur young people to adopt the kind of behavioral changes that can help forestall lifelong obesity.
Childhood obesity in the United States costs $14.1 billion annually in direct health expenses like prescription drugs and visits to doctors and emergency rooms, according to a recent article on the economics of childhood obesity published in the journal Health Affairs. Treating obesity-related illness in adults costs an estimated $147 billion annually, the article said.
Although the vegetable prescription pilot project is small, its supporters see it as a model for encouraging obese children and their families to increase the volume and variety of fresh produce they eat.
“Can we help people in low-income areas, who shop in the center of supermarkets for low-cost empty-calorie food, to shop at farmers’ markets by making fruit and vegetables more affordable?” said Gus Schumacher, the chairman of Wholesome Wave, a nonprofit group in Bridgeport, Conn., that supports family farmers and community access to locally grown produce.
If the pilot project is successful, Mr. Schumacher said, “farmers’ markets would become like a fruit and vegetable pharmacy for at-risk families.”
The pilot project plans to enroll up to 50 families of four at three health centers in Massachusetts that already have specialized children’s programs called healthy weight clinics.
A foundation called CAVU, for Ceiling and Visibility Unlimited, sponsors the clinics that are administering the veggie project. The Massachusetts Department of Agriculture and Wholesome Wave each contributed $10,000 in seed money. (Another arm of the program, at several health centers in Maine, is giving fresh produce vouchers to pregnant mothers.) The program is to run until the end of the farmers’ market season in late fall.
One month after Leslie-Ann Ogiste, a certified nursing assistant in Boston, and her 9-year-old son, Makael Constance, received their first vegetable prescription vouchers at the Codman Center, they have lost a combined four pounds, she said. A staff member at the center told Ms. Ogiste about a farmers’ market that is five minutes from her apartment, she said.
“It worked wonders,” said Ms. Ogiste, who bought and prepared eggplant, cucumbers, tomatoes, summer squash, corn, bok choy, parsley, carrots and red onions. “Just the variety, it did help.”
Ms. Ogiste said she had minced some vegetables and used them in soup, pasta sauce and rice dishes — the better to disguise the new good-for-you foods that she served her son.
Makael said he did not mind. “It’s really good,” he said.
Some nutrition researchers said that the Massachusetts project had a good chance of improving eating habits in the short term. But, they added, a vegetable prescription program in isolation may not have a long-term influence on reducing obesity. Families may revert to their former habits in the winter when the farmers’ markets are closed, these researchers said, or they may not be able to afford fresh produce after the voucher program ends.
Dr. Shikha Anand, the medical director of CAVU’s healthy weight initiative, said the group hoped to make the veggie prescription project a year-round program through partnerships with grocery stores.
But people tend to overeat junk food in higher proportion than they undereat vegetables, said Dr. Deborah A. Cohen, a senior natural scientist at the RAND Corporation. So, unless people curtail excessive consumption of salty and sugary snacks, she said, behavioral changes like eating more fruit and vegetables will have limited effect on obesity.
In a recent study led by Dr. Cohen, for example, people in southern Louisiana typically exceeded guidelines for eating salty and sugary foods by 120 percent in the course of a day while falling short of vegetable and fruit consumption by 20 percent.
The weight clinics in Massachusetts chosen for the vegetable prescription test project already encourage families to cut down on unhealthy snacks.
Even as Ms. Ogiste and her son started shopping at the farmers’ market and eating more fresh produce, for example, they also cut back on junk food, she said.
“We have stopped the snacks. We are drinking more water and less soda and less juice too,” Ms. Ogiste said. “All of that helped.”
Farmers Lean to Truce on Animals’ Close Quarters
Concessions by farmers in this state to sharply restrict the close confinement of hens, hogs and veal calves are the latest sign that so-called factory farming — a staple of modern agriculture that is seen by critics as inhumane and a threat to the environment and health — is on the verge of significant change.
A recent agreement between farmers and animal rights activists here is a rare compromise in the bitter and growing debate over large-scale, intensive methods of producing eggs and meat, and may well push farmers in other states to give ground, experts say. The rising consumer preference for more “natural” and local products and concerns about pollution and antibiotic use in giant livestock operations are also driving change.
The surprise truce in Ohio follows stronger limits imposed by California voters in 2008; there, extreme caging methods will be banned altogether by 2015. In another sign of the growing clout of the animal welfare movement, a law passed in California this year will also ban imports from other states of eggs produced in crowded cages. Similar limits were approved last year in Michigan and less sweeping restrictions have been adopted in Florida, Arizona and other states.
Hoping to avoid a divisive November referendum that some farmers feared they would lose, Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio urged farm leaders to negotiate with opponents, led by the Humane Society of the United States. After secret negotiations, the sides agreed to bar new construction of egg farms that pack birds in cages, and to phase out the tight caging of pregnant sows within 15 years and of veal calves by 2017.
Farmers in Ohio have accepted the agreement with chagrin, saying they sense that they must bend with the political and cultural winds. Tim Weaver, whose grandparents started selling eggs in the early 20th century, is proud of his state-of-the art facilities, where four million birds produce more than three million eggs a day. In just one typical barn here at his Heartland Quality Egg Farm, 268,000 small white hens live in cages about the size of an open newspaper, six or seven to a cage.
Mr. Weaver said that after his initial shock at the agreement, he has accepted it as necessary. He will not be immediately affected since it allows existing egg farms to continue but bars new ones with similar cages. He defends his methods, saying, “My own belief is that I’m doing the right thing.”
Egg production is at the center of the debate because more than 90 percent of the country’s eggs are now produced in the stacked rows of cages that critics call inhumane.
Ohio is the country’s second-largest egg producer, after Iowa. In the modern version of an egg barn, hordes of hens live with computer-controlled air circulation, lighting and feeding, their droppings whisked away by conveyor belt for recycling as fertilizer. As the hens jostle one other, their eggs roll onto a belt to be washed, graded and packed without ever being touched by human hands.
Mr. Weaver insists that his chickens are content and less prone to disease than those in barnyard flocks, saying, “If our chickens aren’t healthy and happy, they won’t be as productive.”
Keeping chickens in cages is cruel and unnecessary, counter advocates like Wayne Pacelle, chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, which has played a central role in the state-by-state battles. “Animals that are built to move should be allowed to move,” he said in an interview, and for chickens that means space for dust-bathing, perching and nesting.
The assertion that animals must be “happy” to be productive is not accurate, Mr. Pacelle added, pointing to abnormal behaviors like head waving or bar-biting and to a loss of bone density in confined animals.
In the mid-20th century, developments in animal nutrition and farm technologies as well as economic competition spurred the emergence of large-scale farms, often driving out small farmers who could not afford the large capital investments or survive the lower prices.
Now, the United Egg Producers, a national trade group, says that egg prices would rise by 25 percent if all eggs were produced by uncaged hens, putting stress on consumers and school lunch programs. Animal proponents say that better noncage methods could be developed and that price is not the ultimate issue anyway.
The American Veal Association, under pressure from consumers, agreed in 2007 to phase out the close confinement of calves by 2017. The requirement in the California law and the Ohio agreement to phase out the use of “gestation crates” on hog farms will have much wider effects.
The family of Irv Bell, 64, has been growing hogs in Zanesville, Ohio, since the 19th century. Where males and females were once put into a pen to mate, sows are now inseminated artificially and most are kept through their pregnancy in a 2-by-7-foot crate, in which they can lie down but not turn.
“I work with the hogs every day, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with gestation crates,” he said. “But I have to be aware of things on the horizon, the bigger things at work.”
Formally, the new Ohio agreement only makes recommendations to a state livestock standards board, and getting opponents to recognize the authority of that board was an important achievement, said Keith Stimpert, a senior vice president of the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation. “We all know change is coming,” Mr. Stimpert said, adding that farmers would also respond to demands by consumers and restaurants for free-range products.
“But is this how we’re going to deal with these issues, on a state-by-state basis?” he asked. That timetables and rules differ among states is going to cause economic harm, he said.
The Humane Society of the United States, for its part, is already picking new targets. The advocates have the most leverage, Mr. Pacelle said, in the states that permit referendums. He said that the issues were likely to be pressed in Washington and Oregon. Winning concessions may be harder, he acknowledged, in states without referendums, including Iowa and the South.
Meanwhile, a new dispute over chicken cages is already brewing in California. The breakthrough 2008 law said that animals could be confined only in ways that allowed them “to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely.” Egg producers and even some animal advocates say this may permit housing hens in larger “enriched cages,” with perches and nesting spots.
Mr. Pacelle asserts that no form of caging can meet a chicken’s needs for “running, flying and wing flapping” and that denying these impulses can cause a rise in stress hormones.
“There’s going to be a legal wrangle over this,” Mr. Pacelle predicted.
MaryAnn Moore and Pan Godchaux had eager smiles and the to-do list ready when their guests arrived for a four-day stay. “Sweep sidewalks and dock,” it said. “Wash tower windows. Pump water.”
And for anyone feeling really generous, two big requests were scrawled on a kitchen whiteboard: a boat “that doesn’t leak” and “$1,000,000.”
The women are keepers of a lighthouse, nine miles from the nearest town, on an uninhabited island at the treacherous convergence of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. For more than 10 years, volunteer keepers have worked to restore the 137-year-old station, and in the summer they count on vacationing friends and preservation-minded Michiganders to pitch in.
“We want to build ownership and for people to feel like, ‘This is our lighthouse,’ ” said Ms. Moore, 63, a former teacher and full-time volunteer with the Great Lakes Lighthouse Keepers Association, a nonprofit group. “I want to do what it takes to keep it alive.”
It takes a lot.
As GPS units and the automation of navigational tools have rendered traditional lighthouse keepers obsolete, the government has been decommissioning the properties it owns, nearly 50 over the last 10 years, and transferring ownership to new stewards at no cost, preferably nonprofit groups. When it cannot find a proper caretaker, the properties are auctioned to the highest bidder, which has happened 15 times.
Increasingly, people like Ms. Moore — history buffs and preservationists, youth groups and investors — are stepping up to do what the Coast Guard and old men of the sea have done for ages: tend to the nation’s lighthouses.
Three were declared excess just last month in Michigan. There are seven available in Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Wisconsin, and five more are up for auction.
The catch is that new owners must maintain the properties to historic standards. And during a recession, with grants and donations ever harder to come by, the lighthouses have hit hard times, particularly in Michigan, a struggling state with about 113 lighthouses — more than any other state.
“I’m telling you this, you cannot restore a lighthouse with bake sales,” said Scott L. Hollman, 69, who won the Granite Island Light Station in Lake Superior at public auction for $86,000 about 10 years ago, somewhat unaware of what he was getting into. “I can never get over the fact that they built this whole darn thing in one summer, and it took me two-and-a-half summers to repair it, with all the materials and technology we have today.”
Restoring a lighthouse is not easy. Just after Mr. Hollman installed a custom-designed door, high winds blew through and shredded it. It took months to make a new one. “That little storm cost me 2,500 bucks,” he said. “You want to do these things once and say it is restored and done. In fact, you do things over and over again.”
Lighthouses even have their budding collectors. Michael L. Gabriel, 56, a lawyer in the San Francisco Bay area, bought two deteriorating lighthouses at auction: one, in Chesapeake Bay, for $100,000, the other, in Delaware Bay, for $200,000. “The alternative was doing nothing and losing them to the point where they’re not salvageable,” he said.
Once a lighthouse is rescued from abandonment, the question for owners becomes “Now what?” Mr. Gabriel hopes to use one of the stations as a summer house, with the other, perhaps, catering to tourists.
“I’ve looked into doing a microbrewery, a hamburger joint, just little stuff to bring in enough money to cover the year-to-year maintenance,” he said.
Some of the new keepers are working hard just to keep the lights on. (Or in the case of St. Helena Island, which is not wired for electricity, the volunteers are working to keep the candles lighted and the flashlights on.)
Abandoned in 1922, the St. Helena Island lighthouse has been a $1.3 million job so far, paid for mostly with donations and grants. In addition to the tower, the volunteers have restored the keeper’s and assistant keeper’s quarters, a boathouse and a dock. Materials and transportation to the island are the greatest expenses.
Ms. Moore, Ms. Godchaux and other leaders of the keepers association organize four-night stays at the compound for visitors who want to donate their time while living in the rustic keepers’ quarters. Last week, a quilters’ group from the Grand Rapids area took up residence and made a donation for their meals and transportation, as most visitors do.
Scrubbing pots in an outdoor bucket, one of the quilters, Kathy Cavanaugh, a bank teller, said: “This is a dream come true. My favorite part is treating this just like home. I really want to live the lifestyle.”
That included hauling water from a hand-pump well, using a pit latrine in the woods and trying not to be too concerned about spiders and snakes.
The full-time keepers, Ms. Moore and Ms. Godchaux, have no navigational duties other than pointing out freighters in the Straits of Mackinac, a heavily trafficked shipping lane, to the guests. But they regularly paint, chop wood, clear brush and keep the tower clean. The Coast Guard retains legal access to the light, which still pulses at night, operated by solar power and automatic sensors. But the cast-iron stairs need to be scrubbed and painted, and the keepers’ quarters need a new roof.
“At some point, you could easily ask, ‘What the heck am I doing this for?’ ” said Dick Moehl, 78, president of the Great Lakes Lighthouse Keepers Association. “It is a mental and physical challenge.”
The association took over a second lighthouse from the government in 2004 and is in the process of restoring it, too.
“What we need to do is find a way to make things like this work in modern times,” said Terry Pepper, the group’s executive director. “We still need lighthouses.”
Indeed, many of the decommissioned properties in critical areas have working beacons because boating electronics sometimes fail. But Mr. Pepper was referring to an emotional need as well.
Jennifer Radcliff, president of the Michigan Lighthouse Fund, a nonprofit organization set up to help with restorations, said, “People need to know where their place is, and lighthouses acknowledge a sense of place that resonates in a real primal way.”
The St. Helena Island Light Station will close for the long Upper Midwest winter at the end of the month. The island will be uninhabited until Ms. Moore and Ms. Godchaux return next May to open the shutters and greet volunteers, some of whom have already made up their minds to come back.
“Next year’s a given,” said Ms. Cavanaugh, the bank teller, outfitted, for kicks, in a bonnet and long prairie dress. “Keepers need help. Don’t have to ask me twice.”
Scissors, Glue, Pencils? Check. Cleaning Spray?
When Emily Cooper headed off to first grade in Moody, Ala., last week, she was prepared with all the stuff on her elementary school’s must-bring list: two double rolls of paper towels, three packages of Clorox wipes, three boxes of baby wipes, two boxes of garbage bags, liquid soap, Kleenex and Ziplocs.
“The first time I saw it, my mouth hit the floor,” Emily’s mother, Kristin Cooper, said of the list, which also included perennials like glue sticks, scissors and crayons.
Schools across the country are beginning the new school year with shrinking budgets and outsize demands for basic supplies. And while many parents are wincing at picking up the bill, retailers are rushing to cash in by expanding the back-to-school category like never before.
Now some back-to-school aisles are almost becoming janitorial-supply destinations as multipacks of paper towels, cleaning spray and hand sanitizer are crammed alongside pens, notepads and backpacks.
OfficeMax is featuring items like Clorox wipes in its school displays and is running two-for-one specials on cleaners like gum remover and disinfectant spray. Office Depot has added paper towels and hand sanitizer to its back-to-school aisles. Staples’ school fliers show reams of copy paper on sale, while Walgreens’ fliers are running back-to-school discounts on Kleenex.
State and local school financing, which make up almost all of public schools’ money, is falling because of budget-balancing efforts and lower property- and sales-tax revenue.
“Some of the things that have been historically provided by schools, we’re not able to provide at this point,” said Barbara A. Chester, president of the National Association of Elementary School Principals.
On the list for pre-kindergartners at McClendon Elementary in Nevada, Tex.: a package of cotton balls, two containers of facial tissue, rolls of paper towels, sheaves of manila and construction paper, and a package of paper sandwich bags.
Pre-kindergartners in the Joshua school district in Texas have to track down Dixie cups and paper plates, while students at New Central Elementary in Havana, Ill., and Mesa Middle School in Castle Rock, Colo., must come to class with a pack of printer paper. Wet Swiffer refills and plastic cutlery are among the requests from St. Joseph School in Seattle. And at Pauoa Elementary School in Honolulu, every student must show up with a four-pack of toilet paper.
For the retailers, back-to-school season is second only to the holidays, and parents’ longer school-supply lists are a bonus — especially at a time when shoppers are reluctant to spend. While the impact is not enormous, retailers are looking for anything to lift sales.
“It’s newfound business that the retailers didn’t have a year or two ago,” said Steve Mahurin, executive vice president of merchandising for Office Depot.
The shift is notable even at stores that sell much more than office supplies.
“When I walk through the back rooms of our stores where the layaway orders are stored, not only are you seeing things you expect to see — computers, apparel,” said Mark Snyder, chief marketing officer of Kmart, “you’re seeing these sort of household supplies that teachers are asking, school systems are asking, kids to now bring.”
For several years, the lists have been getting lengthier, but in many parts of the country, educators and retailers say, the economic downturn has also pushed them into uncharted territory. “It’s definitely spiked this year,” said Bob Thacker, senior vice president of marketing and advertising at OfficeMax.
Many stores have tailored their offerings to reflect the demands of local schools, collecting the back-to-school supply lists and stocking inventory accordingly.
Mr. Thacker said the change had meant bigger orders this summer of things like cleaning supplies and paper towels. “It’s just changed the way our merchants buy things for their different areas,” he said.
In some places, though, parents being asked to make up depleted school budgets are under budget pressure, too, which has left schools without a clear solution.
Malcolm Thomas, the superintendent of the Escambia County school district on Florida’s Gulf Coast, has put supplies like plastic bags, Kleenex and soap under an “optional” category because “we know that people in our community are hurting,” he said. He also seeks donations from local businesses.
If those efforts don’t bring in enough supplies, it means either his teachers — who start at a salary of $32,500 — usually pay for the supplies themselves, or the district “would probably have to get into cutting personnel if we had to supply absolutely everything,” he said.
In Noblesville, Ind., Kristi Smith, 41, a teacher’s aide, said she was sympathetic to the cost pressures at her daughters’ elementary school, but she also thought the supply list was a little extreme.
“Sometimes I think it’s too much,” she said. “Is my fourth grader really going to use 50 pencils herself?”
Ms. Cooper, the Alabama mother, spent her summer making the most of the school-supply stores’ new interest in classroom supplies. “Each week I go to the stores’ Web sites — Staples, OfficeMax, Office Depot,” she said, and posts the deals on a blog for fellow bargain hunters. “All three of these major stores are offering jaw-dropping deals every week,” she said.
And as overwhelming as it might seem to some parents, she would rather buy the goods than expect Emily’s teacher to do so, she said.
“We don’t expect Wal-Mart cashiers to buy the plastic bags for our groceries, or the mailman to pay for the gas to deliver our mail,” Ms. Cooper said.
Eat an Apple (Doctor’s Orders)
The farm stand is becoming the new apothecary, dispensing apples — not to mention artichokes, asparagus and arugula — to fill a novel kind of prescription.
Doctors at three health centers in Massachusetts have begun advising patients to eat “prescription produce” from local farmers’ markets, in an effort to fight obesity in children of low-income families. Now they will give coupons amounting to $1 a day for each member of a patient’s family to promote healthy meals.
“A lot of these kids have a very limited range of fruits and vegetables that are acceptable and familiar to them. Potentially, they will try more,” said Dr. Suki Tepperberg, a family physician at Codman Square Health Center in Dorchester, one of the program sites. “The goal is to get them to increase their consumption of fruit and vegetables by one serving a day.”
The effort may also help farmers’ markets compete with fast-food restaurants selling dollar value meals. Farmers’ markets do more than $1 billion in annual sales in the United States, according to the Agriculture Department.
Massachusetts was one of the first states to promote these markets as hubs of preventive health. In the 1980s, for example, the state began issuing coupons for farmers’ markets to low-income women who were pregnant or breast-feeding or for young children at risk for malnourishment. Thirty-six states now have such farmers’ market nutrition programs aimed at women and young children.
Thomas M. Menino, the mayor of Boston, said he believed the new children’s program, in which doctors write vegetable “prescriptions” to be filled at farmers’ markets, was the first of its kind. Doctors will track participants to determine how the program affects their eating patterns and to monitor health indicators like weight and body mass index, he said.
“When I go to work in the morning, I see kids standing at the bus stop eating chips and drinking a soda,” Mr. Menino said in a phone interview earlier this week. “I hope this will help them change their eating habits and lead to a healthier lifestyle.”
The mayor’s attention to healthy eating dates to his days as a city councilman. Most recently he has appointed a well-known chef as a food policy director to promote local foods in public schools and to foster market gardens in the city.
Although obesity is a complex problem unlikely to be solved just by eating more vegetables, supporters of the veggie voucher program hope that physician intervention will spur young people to adopt the kind of behavioral changes that can help forestall lifelong obesity.
Childhood obesity in the United States costs $14.1 billion annually in direct health expenses like prescription drugs and visits to doctors and emergency rooms, according to a recent article on the economics of childhood obesity published in the journal Health Affairs. Treating obesity-related illness in adults costs an estimated $147 billion annually, the article said.
Although the vegetable prescription pilot project is small, its supporters see it as a model for encouraging obese children and their families to increase the volume and variety of fresh produce they eat.
“Can we help people in low-income areas, who shop in the center of supermarkets for low-cost empty-calorie food, to shop at farmers’ markets by making fruit and vegetables more affordable?” said Gus Schumacher, the chairman of Wholesome Wave, a nonprofit group in Bridgeport, Conn., that supports family farmers and community access to locally grown produce.
If the pilot project is successful, Mr. Schumacher said, “farmers’ markets would become like a fruit and vegetable pharmacy for at-risk families.”
The pilot project plans to enroll up to 50 families of four at three health centers in Massachusetts that already have specialized children’s programs called healthy weight clinics.
A foundation called CAVU, for Ceiling and Visibility Unlimited, sponsors the clinics that are administering the veggie project. The Massachusetts Department of Agriculture and Wholesome Wave each contributed $10,000 in seed money. (Another arm of the program, at several health centers in Maine, is giving fresh produce vouchers to pregnant mothers.) The program is to run until the end of the farmers’ market season in late fall.
One month after Leslie-Ann Ogiste, a certified nursing assistant in Boston, and her 9-year-old son, Makael Constance, received their first vegetable prescription vouchers at the Codman Center, they have lost a combined four pounds, she said. A staff member at the center told Ms. Ogiste about a farmers’ market that is five minutes from her apartment, she said.
“It worked wonders,” said Ms. Ogiste, who bought and prepared eggplant, cucumbers, tomatoes, summer squash, corn, bok choy, parsley, carrots and red onions. “Just the variety, it did help.”
Ms. Ogiste said she had minced some vegetables and used them in soup, pasta sauce and rice dishes — the better to disguise the new good-for-you foods that she served her son.
Makael said he did not mind. “It’s really good,” he said.
Some nutrition researchers said that the Massachusetts project had a good chance of improving eating habits in the short term. But, they added, a vegetable prescription program in isolation may not have a long-term influence on reducing obesity. Families may revert to their former habits in the winter when the farmers’ markets are closed, these researchers said, or they may not be able to afford fresh produce after the voucher program ends.
Dr. Shikha Anand, the medical director of CAVU’s healthy weight initiative, said the group hoped to make the veggie prescription project a year-round program through partnerships with grocery stores.
But people tend to overeat junk food in higher proportion than they undereat vegetables, said Dr. Deborah A. Cohen, a senior natural scientist at the RAND Corporation. So, unless people curtail excessive consumption of salty and sugary snacks, she said, behavioral changes like eating more fruit and vegetables will have limited effect on obesity.
In a recent study led by Dr. Cohen, for example, people in southern Louisiana typically exceeded guidelines for eating salty and sugary foods by 120 percent in the course of a day while falling short of vegetable and fruit consumption by 20 percent.
The weight clinics in Massachusetts chosen for the vegetable prescription test project already encourage families to cut down on unhealthy snacks.
Even as Ms. Ogiste and her son started shopping at the farmers’ market and eating more fresh produce, for example, they also cut back on junk food, she said.
“We have stopped the snacks. We are drinking more water and less soda and less juice too,” Ms. Ogiste said. “All of that helped.”
Farmers Lean to Truce on Animals’ Close Quarters
Concessions by farmers in this state to sharply restrict the close confinement of hens, hogs and veal calves are the latest sign that so-called factory farming — a staple of modern agriculture that is seen by critics as inhumane and a threat to the environment and health — is on the verge of significant change.
A recent agreement between farmers and animal rights activists here is a rare compromise in the bitter and growing debate over large-scale, intensive methods of producing eggs and meat, and may well push farmers in other states to give ground, experts say. The rising consumer preference for more “natural” and local products and concerns about pollution and antibiotic use in giant livestock operations are also driving change.
The surprise truce in Ohio follows stronger limits imposed by California voters in 2008; there, extreme caging methods will be banned altogether by 2015. In another sign of the growing clout of the animal welfare movement, a law passed in California this year will also ban imports from other states of eggs produced in crowded cages. Similar limits were approved last year in Michigan and less sweeping restrictions have been adopted in Florida, Arizona and other states.
Hoping to avoid a divisive November referendum that some farmers feared they would lose, Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio urged farm leaders to negotiate with opponents, led by the Humane Society of the United States. After secret negotiations, the sides agreed to bar new construction of egg farms that pack birds in cages, and to phase out the tight caging of pregnant sows within 15 years and of veal calves by 2017.
Farmers in Ohio have accepted the agreement with chagrin, saying they sense that they must bend with the political and cultural winds. Tim Weaver, whose grandparents started selling eggs in the early 20th century, is proud of his state-of-the art facilities, where four million birds produce more than three million eggs a day. In just one typical barn here at his Heartland Quality Egg Farm, 268,000 small white hens live in cages about the size of an open newspaper, six or seven to a cage.
Mr. Weaver said that after his initial shock at the agreement, he has accepted it as necessary. He will not be immediately affected since it allows existing egg farms to continue but bars new ones with similar cages. He defends his methods, saying, “My own belief is that I’m doing the right thing.”
Egg production is at the center of the debate because more than 90 percent of the country’s eggs are now produced in the stacked rows of cages that critics call inhumane.
Ohio is the country’s second-largest egg producer, after Iowa. In the modern version of an egg barn, hordes of hens live with computer-controlled air circulation, lighting and feeding, their droppings whisked away by conveyor belt for recycling as fertilizer. As the hens jostle one other, their eggs roll onto a belt to be washed, graded and packed without ever being touched by human hands.
Mr. Weaver insists that his chickens are content and less prone to disease than those in barnyard flocks, saying, “If our chickens aren’t healthy and happy, they won’t be as productive.”
Keeping chickens in cages is cruel and unnecessary, counter advocates like Wayne Pacelle, chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, which has played a central role in the state-by-state battles. “Animals that are built to move should be allowed to move,” he said in an interview, and for chickens that means space for dust-bathing, perching and nesting.
The assertion that animals must be “happy” to be productive is not accurate, Mr. Pacelle added, pointing to abnormal behaviors like head waving or bar-biting and to a loss of bone density in confined animals.
In the mid-20th century, developments in animal nutrition and farm technologies as well as economic competition spurred the emergence of large-scale farms, often driving out small farmers who could not afford the large capital investments or survive the lower prices.
Now, the United Egg Producers, a national trade group, says that egg prices would rise by 25 percent if all eggs were produced by uncaged hens, putting stress on consumers and school lunch programs. Animal proponents say that better noncage methods could be developed and that price is not the ultimate issue anyway.
The American Veal Association, under pressure from consumers, agreed in 2007 to phase out the close confinement of calves by 2017. The requirement in the California law and the Ohio agreement to phase out the use of “gestation crates” on hog farms will have much wider effects.
The family of Irv Bell, 64, has been growing hogs in Zanesville, Ohio, since the 19th century. Where males and females were once put into a pen to mate, sows are now inseminated artificially and most are kept through their pregnancy in a 2-by-7-foot crate, in which they can lie down but not turn.
“I work with the hogs every day, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with gestation crates,” he said. “But I have to be aware of things on the horizon, the bigger things at work.”
Formally, the new Ohio agreement only makes recommendations to a state livestock standards board, and getting opponents to recognize the authority of that board was an important achievement, said Keith Stimpert, a senior vice president of the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation. “We all know change is coming,” Mr. Stimpert said, adding that farmers would also respond to demands by consumers and restaurants for free-range products.
“But is this how we’re going to deal with these issues, on a state-by-state basis?” he asked. That timetables and rules differ among states is going to cause economic harm, he said.
The Humane Society of the United States, for its part, is already picking new targets. The advocates have the most leverage, Mr. Pacelle said, in the states that permit referendums. He said that the issues were likely to be pressed in Washington and Oregon. Winning concessions may be harder, he acknowledged, in states without referendums, including Iowa and the South.
Meanwhile, a new dispute over chicken cages is already brewing in California. The breakthrough 2008 law said that animals could be confined only in ways that allowed them “to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely.” Egg producers and even some animal advocates say this may permit housing hens in larger “enriched cages,” with perches and nesting spots.
Mr. Pacelle asserts that no form of caging can meet a chicken’s needs for “running, flying and wing flapping” and that denying these impulses can cause a rise in stress hormones.
“There’s going to be a legal wrangle over this,” Mr. Pacelle predicted.
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