[M]ost days, VTDigger, as a news organization, is obliged to tell readers what is going wrong in our little corner of the world here in Vermont.
But we also write about Vermonters who, against the odds, have achieved success, overcoming ridicule, illness and discrimination to make the world a better place.
Kevin O’Connor, a freelance reporter based in Brattleboro, tells the stories of people in Vermont who have made a difference and give us all a reason to hope.
This holiday season, we hope you’ll enjoy five stories Kevin has written about Vermonters who have faced adversity and inspired their communities and the larger world.
— Anne Galloway, editor of VTDigger
Vermonter overcomes odds to run Boston Marathon
When Vermonter Nancy Heydinger witnessed the bomb blasts after completing the 2013 Boston Marathon, she didn’t foresee that four years later her biggest roadblock would be a brain tumor.
The bombings made Heydinger more determined than ever to run the marathon again, even though she thought her running days were over. After a series of health problems, Heydinger was diagnosed with a plum-size growth in her cerebellum last year that required immediate removal.
But in April, after a journey more fearsome than the race’s Heartbreak Hill, she did just that.
Read the full story here.
Confederate mascot spurs broader discussion about racism
What happens when a Vermont high school drops its longtime sports identity because of Confederate connotations, only to face a backlash from those who believe the move is too politically correct?
South Burlington, whose school board voted to retire the “Rebels” nickname, need only look to Brattleboro, where students, alumni and the public faced a similar debate a decade ago.
Brattleboro Union High School’s mascot at the dawn of the millennium was a Colonel that spurred fans to wave Confederate flags. The high school’s motto was “Pride of the South.”
Curtiss Reed Jr. couldn’t believe the logo he saw on local uniforms. He took steps to help local Brattleboro residents understand how offensive the Colonel mascot is to black Americans.
“In the absence of few, if any, black Americans in Brattleboro and none at the high school 60 years ago, adults compounded the ignorance of its student body with benign neglect,” Reed wrote in a commentary published by the Brattleboro Reformer. “No one bothered to connect the dots between embracing racist imagery and symbolism and the effects such symbols have on the community.”
After Reed brought public pressure to bear, the school board retired the mascot in January 2004.
Read the full story here.
Wolf Kahn: Mastering the art of painting Vermont
It takes a special talent to smear pink, orange and purple oils and pastels on canvas and spark vivid thoughts of the Green Mountain State. That’s why, as artist Wolf Kahn marked his 90th birthday this year, the Brattleboro museum presented a major new exhibit of his landscape paintings.
“I’m not trying to paint Vermont,” Kahn says. “I’m painting paintings, and it turns out people think they look like Vermont.”
Kahn is that rare nonagenarian who is still actively working, and the paintings from the last decade may be his best yet.
“Wolf Kahn is to southern Vermont what Winslow Homer is to the coast of Maine, Georgia O’Keeffe to the New Mexico high desert and Claude Monet to the French countryside,” Brattleboro Museum & Art Center museum director Danny Lichtenfeld asserts. “Wolf’s depictions of our barns, fields, trees and hillsides form the prevailing visual impression of our area for people all around the world.”
Kahn’s personal story, however, is anything but placid. He was born in Germany and at age 13, he was beaten by a gang of Nazis (“they broke my bicycle, too”) and was forced to flee his homeland on a “Kindertransport” train that saved Jewish children just weeks before the start of World War II.
Read the full story here.
Alison Bechdel’s broadway musical comes home
Before Alison Bechdel was named winner of a $625,000 MacArthur “genius” grant, she was in a less-than-happy place.
Specifically, her family’s hauntingly Victorian funeral home.
“Caption: My Dad and I both grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town,” the artist recalls as if drawing. “And he was gay, and I was gay, and he killed himself, and I became a lesbian cartoonist.”
Seeing the results of her father’s sexual suppression, Bechdel decided to share her story. She started in 1983 with the comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” syndicated nationally in 50 alternative newspapers. That led to the 2006 graphic memoir “Fun Home,” which led to a 2013 off-Broadway theatrical adaptation and 2015 transfer to the Great White Way, which led to five Tony Awards, including one for best musical.
Some 35 years later, with casts about to translate the work in Barcelona, London, Manila, Singapore and Tokyo, it came all coming full circle with a performance in Burlington.
“What a strange experience this has been to have this story that I was writing for seven years up on my hill in Bolton turned into a musical,” Bechdel told a local preview audience.
Read the full story here.
Howard Mosher: Best piece of writing advice came from his grade school teacher
Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher’s storied half-century writing career began with, in his words, “the least likely source”: his eighth-grade grammar teacher.
“She said, ‘Now Mosher, if you want to write, you have to read the classics, revise your work and write about what you know — and you, my boy, have a long, long way to go in each of those departments.’”
Mosher laughed as he remembered “the first and possibly the only good piece of advice I got about writing” right up to his death earlier this year at age 74.
Mosher known for such fiction-turned-films as “Disappearances,” “Northern Borders” “A Stranger in the Kingdom” and “Where the Rivers Flow North,” had surprised friends and neighbors early in 2017 on social media with a post about his sudden cancer diagnosis.
“In early December I thought I had an upper respiratory bug that has been going around,” he wrote Jan. 22. “Well, it didn’t seem to respond to antibiotics, so I had a chest X-ray and a CAT scan that found cancer.”
Mosher died not long after.
O’Connor recalls the impact of Mosher’s storytelling about the rugged Northeast Kingdom.
Read the full story here.
