Is that a lightsaber?

A Lord of the Rings novice watches The Hobbit.

Maggie Kane

A pale, balding creature stares through the screen with blue saucer eyes. He is trying to answer a riddle told by Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit attempting to escape an underground maze with a battle of wits. It’s the emotional high point of Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit,” as this violent but somehow endearing character eventually realizes that Baggins stole his precious ring. He flies into a panicked rage, beating himself up emotionally and threatening the hobbit.

Unfortunately this captivating character is not the protagonist of the film. He does not appear until late in the movie, barely rousing me after nearly two hours of slow storytelling. I read “The Hobbit” as a young child, but remember little. Looking for a light film with rolling country scenery, I decided to journey into the shire once more and check out the movie.

Baggins, a shy homebody who decides to go on an adventure after an elderly wizard boosts his ego, is the story's main character. Martin Freeman plays him well, using subtle tics like wringing his hands to physically express discomfort and nerves.

Baggins joins a band of dwarves on a quest to reclaim their home. On the way, they battle myriad roadblocks, or rather, myriad bands of identical beige monsters. Are they trolls? Orcs? Goblins? Are these species interchangeable? The jury is still out.

The plot gets interesting late in the game, when Baggins discovers he has acquired a sort of medieval lightsaber. It directs the group of adventurers into a cavern that is aesthetically part Tim Burton, part Hayao Miyazaki. Ominous, bulbous creatures shuffle around on dimly lit ledges connected by ziplines. It’s visually impeccable.

At this point, Baggins accidentally splits from the group and finds himself alone with the ring-guarding creature. Eventually triumphant at mind games, he escapes and rejoins the dwarves.

After another scuffle or two—it’s hard to keep count of the rapid-fire action scenes packed into the last third of the movie as if to make up for its lackluster start—Baggins and the dwarves spy home in the distance. Apparently it will take them two more movies to get there.  If I were better versed in Middle Earth, I might eagerly await the resolution to the story. Instead I wish Jackson luck with stretching the journey out for another six hours. 

Rob Townsend's Biggest Project Yet

Intended for the Kalamazoo College Index, lengthy features piece.

Rob Townsend refers to the day Kalamazoo College hired him as “the sweetest day.” It was Valentine’s Day of 1980 and he came to the school as a sanitary engineer which, he says, is a fancy term for custodian. After six months he moved up the ranks to grounds maintenance, and twelve years into the job he started working on his prized project: the recycling program.

Rob has a cheerful demeanor and an impressive beard. “If he shaved his beard, no one would know who this man was,” says Maddie Baxter, a student who has worked on Rob’s staff for a couple of months. The bushy patch of grey hair hangs down several inches below his chin and connects to a comparably thick moustache above his upper lip.

He was born hearing impaired and uses white hearing aids, visible when he turns to the side. They allow him to catch about 80% of a conversation, he says, which is good enough for him. As a young child, Rob’s parents took him to university medical centers, where he was taught lip reading, how to identify sounds and speech techniques.

It seems fitting that Rob found his career calling at a college, given that he has been around them since his toddler years. Rob came to K when, after a couple of years of taking college classes, he tired of relying on his parents for housing and money. He learned from a friend that the school was hiring and decided to apply.

The recycling part of the job was not something Rob had anticipated when he came to the College, although he says it fits in with his way of life. The youngest of five boys, Rob says, “I got a lot of hand-me-down clothes, hand-me-down toys…I’m not real picky about brand new stuff.”

20 years ago Facilities Management (FacMan) decided to take over a small recycling program started by student environmental group EnvOrg and biology professor Paul Sotherland. Paul Manstrom, Associate Vice President of FacMan, looked to Rob to head the program. He cites Rob’s commitment to sustainability as a major reason for choosing him. Rob says, “[Paul] thought that I was just going to go pick up paper. No, I had a long-term goal and, as you see, where we’re at—that’s my long-term goal.”

Rob’s enthusiasm sometimes goes to far, says Paul Manstrom. “He’s very stubborn,” he says. “Sometimes [his] vision wants to carry him faster than we have the resources for.”

Lately Rob’s vision has been directed toward composting. “Composting in soon to be more in demand,” says Rob. “[The College would] like to step it up to pursue in the composting, so that will be my major project this year and this summer.”

Right now Rob has an active yard waste composting system in place at the College’s Lillian Anderson Arboretum. Since early spring Rob has advised FacMan to resume dumping leaves and grasses at the site, something they did years ago. “We’ll start collecting the yard waste this coming fall, winter,” he says.

Rob wants the composting arrangement to include food waste. Currently he collects bins of cafeteria leftovers and brings them to a farm 20 minutes from the College, three times a week, where he gives the food to pigs.

Moving food to the composting site would save Rob time and fuel, he says. He also takes issue with the fact that the school pays the farm to take its leftovers. “I totally disagree with that,” Rob says. “The way I see it is we’re helping them decrease the cost of food they need to feed their livestock.”

Paul Manstrom dislikes the arrangement as well. “[It’s] not a great situation,” he says. But he says the farm was the only place he could find that would take the food. The transportation and collection processes that he and Rob have worked out for taking the food to the farm, he says, will be useful once the composting program develops.

Rob needs to figure out the logistical issues involved with the project, namely the target balance of food and yard waste, and the space needed to realize the project. “We generate anywhere from two to three tons of food waste per week,” he says. ”When I get enough [yard waste], then that will justify for me to put the food in.”

Paul Manstrom says the College is also apprehensive about putting a large composting site in the Arboretum, which they hope to use as the site for a still-in-the-works Center for Environmental Stewardship.

Rob and Paul Manstrom both agree that Rob needs an assistant if he wants to complete the project. They have run into financing roadblocks with the administration on this issue, says Paul Manstrom. Many departments want funding for extra staff, he says, and the administration does not necessarily see recycling as a top priority.

The rest of the recycling program currently competes for Rob’s attention during the day. He oversees a staff of 20 students, who notice that Rob can seem overextended. “Sometimes he seems kind of disorganized and flustered,” says Aya Cockram, who worked for recycling throughout her four years at K.

“He’s not the most organized person I’ve worked for,” Maddie agrees, but is quick to add, “he’s probably one of the most pleasant and friendly people I’ve worked for.” Aya also emphasizes Rob’s positive side over his disorganization. “He’s the best,” she says.

Rob hopes to stick around at the recycling program for another five or six years, health permitting. He has recently experienced health setbacks that have pushed him to slow down and to listen to his body, he says. “There are days where I feel crappy and I just don’t feel like I want to come in,” he says. “But you know, it’s kind of hard for me [because] I’m so dedicated to K College.” Rob, ever optimistic, tends not to dwell on this negativity. “I got time,” he says, reassuringly. “I got time.

Final Process Writing

This is going to be a jumbled mess of words.

Writing the pieces for this class has taught me a lot about what kinds of stories I like to cover.  I chose to do a profile piece for my final assignment in part because I've discovered I really enjoy learning about people.  I like doing pieces where I can spend several hours with a subject and follow them around while they work.  I want to hear people's stories.  My struggles come when I have to write biased pieces about said people.  I tend to enjoy my time with interview subjects, so I think sometimes my pieces are too positive.  The irony of this is that I get annoyed when reading other people's pieces that have no depth like this.  So that's a thing I realized I need to work on as I continue my journalism career.  

The personal essay was also an interesting practice in new writing for me.  I don't write about myself, especially not for other people's reading.  I struggled with trying to make sure the piece focused on me instead of my peers, who were a big part of the story I tried to tell.  I think telling a story about myself helped me to learn about telling other people's stories.  I had to dig deep to figure out how to express all that I wanted to express, and that made me realize the depth I should strive to achieve when I talk to other people, so that I can tell their stories as well as possible.

Workshop was great.  I love constructive criticism.  It is my greatest tool for improving my work, and I prefer it when it is not sugar coated.  Readers gave me great input on my pieces.  Lots of times I would put in elements confusing to someone who hadn't been there, and feedback there was invaluable in improving my pieces.  The hardest part of workshopping was sorting through comments and choosing which ones to address.  Lots of times comments could have pulled my piece in a number of different directions, so this really just came down to where I wanted the piece to go.  I usually had an angle in mind, so I looked at comments that applied to the angle.  Sometimes I put more value on comments from people whose writing style I prefer, which is maybe not the best way to go about things, but I always considered all of the feedback.  Sometimes it didn't matter because everyone gave useful feedback that pointed me in one direction.

I think this course mostly taught me how to get more depth out of a piece.  In doing interviews for The Index and writing shorter pieces, I didn't always get the chance to really know my subjects.  Sometimes I still don't, but I've tried harder to have more meaningful and longer interviews with people who know about a topic.  Also I've learned about organization for long pieces.  I'm used to defaulting to inverted pyramid for stories, but in doing features stuff I've had fun learning how to weave back and forth between topics and information in ways that keep the reader interested about a topic.

Personal Essay Supplement

These are the trailers for a documentary made recently about the football team at the high school I would have attended in Dearborn, had I not moved.  It touches a lot on post-9/11 sentiments both in the community and from outsiders, which is what I wrote about for my personal essay.  Just in case anyone was interested in learning a little bit more about the place/situation I wrote about months ago!

Rob Townsend Audio Slideshow

This is an audio slideshow for my article about Rob Townsend.  It focuses on his recycling project.  

The audio didn't turn out as well as I wanted because I did interviews outdoors and inside.  The microphones on these recorders don't handle wind very well, so the background noise really varies from clip to clip.  Otherwise, enjoy!

"Busiest Guy on Campus": The Process

I had a great time working on this piece about Recycling Coordinator Rob Townsend.  I spent two and a half hours following him around last week, during which he took me to the arboretum to see the composting site and to the pig farm where he deposits leftover food from the caf.  He's chatty: I think I have over three hours of audio, which will be interesting to edit when I set up my slideshow.

Right now the piece's most glaring error is that I've only talked to Rob himself.  This is mostly a product of timing--I wasn't able to follow him until last week.  So far I have two interviews set up with other K College staff members that he said know him well and one with a girl who works on his recycling staff.  Hopefully those will give me some more insight into his personality.

My biggest question has to do with content: is it interesting?  I have so much stuff that I struggled with what to leave in and what to cut out.  My goal is to weave a story about his background in with the story of his current life at work, but I'm not sure if I got too bogged down in background and didn't give a clear enough picture of the recycling program.  I also have an awkward break between the fourth to last paragraph and the rest of them.  Hopefully interviewing other people will help me fill in some gaps.

A big thing I'd like to add: Rob's love of art.  He's showing me his art books on Thursday, and he refers to it as his real passion.  He majored in art when he went to Western and still does it now.  He says it's the first way he communicated with his parents since he couldn't yet talk when he was really little.  I'm trying to figure out where to plug this in because I think it's really important to his personality.

Also, it's going to be really long if I don't cut things and I add in the art thing and the other interview information.  Problematic!  Let me know if you have any suggestions on what to cut out.

Kalamazoo College's "Busiest Guy on Campus"

Rob Townsend refers to the day Kalamazoo College hired him as “the sweetest day.” It was Valentine’s Day of 1980 and he came to the school as a sanitary engineer, he says, which is a fancy term for custodian. After six months he moved up the ranks to grounds maintenance, and twelve years into the job he started working on his prized project: the recycling program.

At the time, the newly formed environmental student group EnvOrg wanted to start up a recycling system on campus. Rob says one of his bosses asked him if he would take on the job.  He asked for some time to think it over, but took the job a couple of days later. “[My boss] thought that I was just going to go pick up paper. No, I had a long-term goal and, as you see, where we’re at—that’s my long-term goal,” Rob says.

He has come a long way from his early years, when the educational administration in Kalamazoo said he most likely would not graduate high school. Rob was born deaf. A car accident during his mother’s pregnancy left him with undeveloped hairs in his inner ear, which have a crucial function in the process of hearing. 

It took his parents a while to realize it. By the time he was 18 months, however, they noticed he didn’t respond when they called out to him. They took him in for testing and learned he had impaired hearing.

“I did not go to kindergarten or preschool like most kids do; I went to college,” Rob says. “I went to George Washington University at 18 months old to learn lip reading, identifying sounds, speech.” At the time he lived in Washington, DC. His family moved to Ohio a couple of years later because of his dad’s job in the Air Force. There, he went to Ohio State. By the time the family moved to England, Rob was ready to start elementary school.

He had no trouble in the classroom overseas learning to write and read with other kids who were not hearing impaired. Rob had hearing aids to help him function in a verbal setting. He and his family moved to Kalamazoo permanently after his dad retired from the Air Force and, there, Rob began to have some trouble in school

His second grade teacher liked to focus on kids she identified as gifted, Rob says. She did not know what to do with a hearing-impaired student. Rob began to struggle in class and she recommended he go to a school for children with disabilities, where he repeated second grade.

His parents spent four years fighting with the school board to put him back in the regular school system. When they succeeded, Rob had to repeat fourth grade, putting him two years behind his peers. This is when he was told he would most likely never graduate.

Rob proved the system wrong, earning enough credits to graduate high school a semester early but opting to stay and spend time with his friends. He started at Western Michigan University a week after graduation, and eventually moved to Kalamazoo Valley Community College where he could be in smaller classes.

The upside to Rob’s stint in the school for students with disabilities came years later, when he decided to attend a school reunion. “I kind of was looking around and all of a sudden there’s these little sparkling eyes,” he says. “I noticed this one girl, this one gal kept looking at me.” He started dating the woman, Jenifer, soon after and they eventually married.

Rob comes from a big family—he’s the youngest of five brothers. “I think that’s part of the reason why my job is sort of related to recycling,” he says. “I got a lot of hand-me-down clothes, hand-me-down toys, so I’m accustomed to it. I’m not real picky about brand new stuff.”

Some of Rob’s duties directly involve hand me downs. He runs the Resource Exchange Program, a collection of discarded objects to be handed down to new students. People dispose of products no longer useful to them—from academic tools, to kitchen utensils, to lamps—and other students can peruse the storage room and take things they need for free.

Rob also works on recycling-related programs off campus. He started a composting initiative at the College’s Lillian Anderson Arboretum, just over 10 minutes west of the campus. Right now he composts yard waste, but he hopes to one day incorporate food waste into the mix.

Rob collects bins full of the cafeteria’s leftovers several times throughout the week. Currently he takes them to a farm about 20 minutes from the College called Lake Village Homestead. Rob drives onto a field and dumps the food into a pile for eager pigs. “They’ve got the best meal plan,” he says.

Moving food to the composting site would save Rob time and fuel, concentrating both tasks in the same place. Rob also takes issue with the fact that using the current system, he says, the school pays the farm to take its leftovers. “I totally disagree with that,” Rob says. “The way I see it is we’re helping them decrease the cost of the food they need to feed their livestock.” This situation frustrated him enough that he started looking into ways to add food into the arboretum composting mix.

Rob does not anger easily. His wife, who is also hearing impaired, speaks American Sign Language. This has taught him to be patient during disagreements. “I don’t know how to argue with my hands,” he says. He has a general philosophy of taking things as they come. Negative dispute, he says, “is a waste of my time and energy.”

His attitude carries over to his job. Rob has a special system for categorizing problems. He breaks them down into the good, the bad and the ugly. “If it’s good, leave it alone. You’re happy with it,” he says. Bad things, he says, can be good or ugly. They are things you still want to work on, things that could eventually be made good. Ugly things are not worthy of time and energy. “Get rid of it. End of story,” says Rob.

Rob hopes to stick around at the recycling program for another five or six years, health permitting. He was recently diagnosed with stage one non-Hodgkin follicular lymphoma. It is a slow growing cancer, he says, and he does not currently have to undergo treatment. However he was also told that it can be treated, but not cured. The diagnosis has inspired him to listen to his body more, he says. He has let go of some responsibilities, namely retiring from the LandSea program, an outdoor orientation for first-year students entering into the College.

He hopes the summer will give him a bit of a break too. He will be working on a variety of projects, from revamping recycling bins to organizing an annual furniture sale that benefits the recycling program. He will have a staff of 15 people helping out with the projects, 10 of whom have worked recycling before, he says. Their knowledge will make it easier for him to run the program over the academic break.

“There are days where I feel crappy and I just don’t feel like I want to come in,” he says. “But you know, it’s kind of hard for me [because] I’m so dedicated to K College.” Rob hopes to take a month off at some point to visit as many of the 59 state parks as he can with his wife, but otherwise he plans to stick around. “I am very optimistic about it; I’m a fighter,” he says. “I am determined to try to beat this thing. So I got time. I got time.”