I learned that doing extensive research way beforehand on a topic not only makes you an expert on what you want to write about, but it makes it easier for you to find what you’re looking for out of a story. For example, my profile is on someone who works for the Eugene Mission. This is a pretty well-known homeless shelter in the community, but with a little research, I found out about several incredibly successful rehabilitation programs the mission offers and from there, I was able to find my profile subject. One of the first things I learned in Gateway was to research the research, but it wasn’t until I got to this class that I actually applied that technique.

Another really important thing I learned in this class is that when you go out to report a story, look at everything with newborn eyes. Look at something that you may have seen on over a hundred occasions as if you’re seeing it for the first time. It makes you more observant and it makes you pay attention to the tiniest details. Some of my favorite exercises we did in this class were when we were asked to go out and observe something or someone and then come back and write about it. It exercised my creative writing skills and taught me how to look at things differently.

The last thing that I will take away from this class is the importance of staying up to date on current issues. As much as we all whined about having to read The Register Guard and The New York Times every day, I think I speak for everyone when I say that we are grateful for it. I learned how to read long, complex articles and actually comprehend them and be able to relate them to broader issues. It made me feel really smart anytime someone brought up some current event in a conversation and I knew a ton about it, simply from reading the front page articles of a newspaper every day. It’s time consuming, but it’s worth it. Whether or not I will continue to keep up with reading every article every day is unknown, but I know now how important it is to keep up with current events as a journalist and I will continue to do that to the best of my ability.

He sees his kitchen as if it were an orchestra, dynamically conducting his multifaceted staff to create something beautiful. It is his passion; it is his life; it is his revitalization. Marshall Eck, Food Service Director at Eugene Mission, has spent the past year feeding and working alongside homeless members of Lane County as a way to help others who are struggling with the same bad decisions he once made, but will never make again.

He grew up in Blue River, Oregon, 35 miles outside of Springfield, “Where the men are men and so are the women,” Eck said, chuckling to himself. He fell in love with the food industry during his first job as a busboy at the age of 15. After graduating from high school, he spent two years at the Lane Community College Culinary School, but dropped out to manage Jack-In-The-Box restaurants. It was here where his life took an unfortunate turn. Marshall Eck became addicted to methamphetamine.

“I sold my relationships, my life, and my soul all for the use of a drug,” Eck said. “I was disgusted with my own life.”

For almost five years, he struggled with this addiction until one day he decided he’d had enough. Amidst another one of the numerous fights with his ex-wife, he stormed out of his house, got into his car and backed out into traffic, waiting for and praying that someone would hit him and take him out of his misery. When nothing happened, he drove for hours in circles until finally ending up at his father’s office. The minute his father opened the door, he started sobbing.

“I will never forget that day,” Eck said. “My dad said to me, ‘Let’s get this monkey off your back for good,’ and I stopped crying and looked up at him, and I was ready.”

From there, he began treatment and counseling at Serenity Lane and moved to Veneta after a couple of months where he worked in a restaurant called Daily Bread. It was there that he met and fell in love with his second wife. Two years later, they bought the restaurant from her parents and were the owners for several years. Eck said he enjoyed owning the restaurant, but it took away time he wanted to be spending with his three children.

“I only made it to 3 out of 38 of my son’s baseball games,” Eck said. “Missing out on those moments, was a dagger to my heart. I knew something needed to change.”

It wasn’t long after this realization that Eck received a phone call from his mother, the senior director of operations at Eugene Mission, informing him of a job opening they had for a food service director. He was put on a temporary trial period, because the hiring board didn’t want any nepotism, but eventually was selected for the job.

In June, it will have been a full year since he began his culinary work at Eugene Mission. The kitchen staff puts out roughly 15,000 meals a week to the residents of Eugene Mission. His 15 employees are homeless men and women that are a part of the Life Skills program, in which they dedicate a year of their lives to bettering themselves and prepare to immerse themselves back into the community.

“I always said that if I ever got out of that bad situation, if I could go back and help at least one person avoid making the same bad decisions I did, I would sign up for that,” Eck said.

When I asked him to describe himself, he said he thought he was fun, energetic, compassionate, a bit reckless, but a friend to all. One of the things he wishes he could change about himself is that he loves too easily. At first, he wasn’t sure he would be able to do the job because of that.

“The hardest thing about working here is seeing guys that you build a relationship with and love them dearly and watch them fail,” Eck said. “It’s hard to watch guys go through the program and then have to walk the plank and fall off again.”

This man is a compassionate, strange, complicated and interesting human being with an inspirational story that I would love to tell. He has had to overcome much, but now he is changing his life and the lives of the residents of Eugene Mission. Eck’s humorous, witty personality and openness about his past makes for a very compelling story.

Marshall Eck

Food Service Director: Eugene Mission

Work: 541-344-7523 ext. 113

Cell: 541-228-8033

marshalle@eugenemission.org

Eugene Mission helps feed, house, cloth, and rehabilitate the homeless in Lane County. They provide shelter and food as well as several rehabilitation programs that help get these people back on their feet and put them out in the community again.

Knight Library opened its doors this Saturday to hear from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alex Tizon about his new book Big Little Man at the annual Page Turners event for the University of Oregon. The book takes a look into Tizon’s own experiences while exploring the psyche of Asian males and the challenges they face.

He started off by reading rejection letters he received from publishing companies during the agonizing process of trying to find a publisher interested in his book. Much of the feedback he received told him that it needed to be more of a memoir.

“The book is a personal investigation,” Tizon said. “In the end, sometimes the most compelling story you can tell is your own.”

The population of the lecture was a mix of friends, colleagues, community members, and students from both Tizon’s reporting and Page Turners classes.

Aliya Hall, a student in the Page Turners class, said she purposely took the class because it was about Tizon and his book. She expressed her enjoyment of his teaching style and the way the book described in detail what life was like for Asian males.

“I didn’t realize the struggles that Asian men went through and I never thought about their portrayal in the media,” Hall said. “It was very eye opening.”

Tizon received a lot of support during the process from his family. Among the audience Saturday night was Tizon’s wife, Melissa Tizon.

She said Tizon took a piece of cardboard and made a “Do Not Disturb” sign that he would hang on his office door every time he was writing.

“The writing process is very hard so it’s difficult to live with someone who is in the midst of writing something so personal,” Melissa said. “In the end, I was really proud of him because this is something that he’s always wanted to do. To be married to someone or even know someone that’s doing what they’ve always wanted to do is a really cool thing.”

Tizon spoke about his writing process and the things he discovered about himself along the way. He grew up being taught that men that looked like him were inferior and could never prevail over white or black men.

Both Tizon’s schooling and the media perpetuated stereotypes of Asian males. It wasn’t until he began writing the book that he discovered a life-changing realization about his concerns with racial discrimination.

“The thing I really needed to confront was less about race and more about shame,” Tizon said. “I realized that shame can attach itself to any aspect of life and that realization was liberation for me because it freed me of his vague notion of race I’d lived with all my life.”

His book, Big Little Man, was published in June 2014 and is available online and in stores.

Prisons are a lot like zoos. I never liked zoos. Even as a kid, I could never wrap my head around why anyone would want to go look at something that’s being held captive. At least zoo animals are aware that you’re watching them, but watching prisoners from behind one-way glass was a whole new type of invasion. There were about 20 women in the low security cellblock, all wearing bluish/grey scrubs and orange foam sandals. One woman let her wet hair out of the towel she had wrapped around her head, while another older woman stood at the phone mounted on the wall. Her brow was furrowed and the lines on her face reflected a long life of hardship and grief. One hand rested on her forehead while the other held the phone to her head as she spoke urgently into the receiving end. A small group of women were gathered on the second level of the room, chatting with each other and laughing while fixing their hair. I stood there, watching them as if they were bugs under a microscope. I knew they couldn’t see or hear me, but there were moments when a woman would approach the glass to look at her reflection and I would freeze. Even though I knew I was invisible to them, I felt they could sense my presence. I don’t know if there is a word to describe the feeling I had after leaving that place. It wasn’t depressed or upset, or even scared. It was just this overall feeling of pure unhappiness that I couldn’t shake for the rest of the evening.

Quotes by Joe Pishioneri, Deputy Sheriff:

“We had to release someone who was convicted of first degree rape. That’s how bad it is here.”

“We have to look at each person that comes in and decide how well they’ll play with others.”

“A firm hand with a soft glove; that’s how you deal with folks here.”

“Our staff isn’t here to judge. We’re here to make sure everyone is safe.”

“We have to treat the inmates like they’re preschool children.”

His hair resembled that of an 18^th century British parliament wig. The sides of his head were shaved down to the scalp and long strands of wavy, bleached white hair fell down around his face. His right hand ran through his hair, over and over again while his left hand was tucked neatly in his front pocket, as he stood slumped over, gazing at student’s architecture blueprints. The boy was tall. Not unusually so, but tall enough to make a 5’5’’ journalist feel like a child. He wore a button-up grey shirt, with the sleeves scrunched up to his elbows, black jeans rolled up several inches to reveal grey wool socks tucked into his shiny, wing tip brown shoes. Perhaps it was the contrast with his pale skin and white hair, but from afar, his eyes looked like two coals embedded in his skull. The boy wasn’t much of a talker. He stood in silence as a bald man in a turtleneck sweater talked to him. Occasionally he would nod or throw in a “Yes absolutely,” or “I agree,” but he was not a conversationalist. The boy was a nail biter. Whether it was a bad habit he couldn’t cure or a nervous habit he couldn’t help, he bit those nails like they were corn on the cob at 4^th of July barbeque.

Me:

If her outside ever reflected how she felt on the inside, she would probably resemble a Disney witch. But instead, her smile shone as brightly as the colors of her outfit. She wasn’t particularly short or particularly tall, although she had been called petite her entire life. Her hair fell down to the middle of her back, dark blonde and wavy like the hair of a mermaid. Each morning, she carefully selected a dress from a large array of colors, patterns and styles in her closet. She takes pride in the fact that she has never owned a pair of sweatpants. She likes to use makeup to highlight her features, not hide them. Most times, people will say that they “saw you coming.” People tell her they can hear her coming; her sharp voice piercing the air like a knife.

1. The paths, although some gravel, were mostly covered in grass and moss with thousands of tiny daisies sprouting up from the ground.

2. Most of the headstones were small, but some towered over all others, standing almost as monuments to the bodies buried underneath them.

3. One grave, belonging to Clara Billmire (1865-1932), had red, plastic roses surrounding the base of the headstone.

4. The graveyard is almost silent, aside from the dull roar of surrounding areas, birds chirping, and insects flying from flower to flower.

5. When examined more closely, the larger tombstones are there to represent a family name and the area surrounding it is that family’s plot, each member buried next to one another.

6. I originally assumed the graveyard was just long, but is in fact wide as well. A placard mounted on a small building within the cemetery, says the plot is approximately 16 acres in size.

7. The further you walk toward the back of the cemetery, the older the tombstones get.

8. One grave, with a tombstone shaped like the Washington Monument, was circuited with tiny blue bells. None of the other graves had those, which suggested that someone must have planted them there long ago.

9. A tomb stone towards the back of the cemetery read:

Baby Mildred

Dec 17, 1918 – Dec 30, 1918

It was a flat, small slab of cement and next to the baby’s tomb, the two parents were buried.

10. There is a dog food and water dish underneath a water spigot sprouting from the ground near the small building in the cemetery.

It’s Friday, and as the sun begins to rise over Damascus, Oregon, most children are getting ready for school, with the exception of one. Josie Greer plops down in front of the television set, flips to the Food Network and prepares for another full day of culinary inspiration.

Greer began experimenting with cooking at a very young age. Growing up in a household with two working parents, she and her younger brother were often left to fend for themselves when it came to preparing meals. Her school did not have class on Fridays, so she utilized that time watching the Food Network to expand her cooking repertoire.

Greer said her love for the culinary arts is definitely linked to her family. Her Polish father kept a garden on their acre of land, in which he grew a large assortment of fruits and vegetables. The hillside next to their house was covered in blackberries and several apple trees. She fondly remembers making applesauce in the fall with her mother, and jam in the summer.

But the best memory she has is the annual cook-off with her cousin. A spin off of Throwdown! With Bobby Flay, she and her cousin would take a dish and recreate it with their own twist. After hours of hard labor, sweat and tears, their family would judge the final creations. Although her cousin passed away last year, she continues to strive for perfection in the kitchen.

Over the years, she learned to cook many things, but barbequed foods occupy the biggest space in Greer’s heart. Most of her large family reunions consisted of barbequing, and she loves the variety in meats, cuts and sauces that comes with this particular style of cooking.

She has always had a special connection with food. Anytime her family traveled, most of the details of the trip were lost to her, except the food they ate. She said there is no explanation for why that was, but the taste and smell of the food were seared into her memory forever.

As she begins her journalistic career at the University of Oregon, Greer found there is one path that calls to her most. With all of her design experience from working for her high school yearbook and from her classes at the U of O, Greer’s dream is to combine her career path in magazine journalism with her favorite hobby and work for a food magazine, creating what she deems is the perfect job for a journalism geek and lifetime food fanatic.

The work of sophomore Josie Greer was chosen this March by Professor Lisa Heyamoto to serve as an example of design excellence for upcoming Gateway III classes. Greer’s journalistic success started early on. As a freshman in high school, Greer joined the yearbook staff and immediately began designing, spending over 15 hours after school every week in order to create a superior product. Over the next four years, she worked her way up the editorial board going from being copy editor, to business manager, to managing editor. Senior year, Greer attended a statewide yearbook workshop with a small team from her staff. Each team was required to design a mini yearbook and Greer and her staff won first place for their design. That was the point at which she realized her passion for design and chose to pursue it by attending the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. In her second year, she was highly complimented for her design work in Gateway to Media III. Greer’s annual report cover and table of contents for her client received praise from both her GTF and Professor Lisa Heyamoto. She said this made her feel really good about her work and encouraged her to invest more time improving her skills. Greer hopes the future holds more opportunities for her to better herself as a journalist.

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