People
Arty Animals in Ice

Snow sculpture is popular among residents of wintry areas, but one NEA member has taken the art of snow sculpture to new heights, winning a best of show award in the process.

Ellen McKinney (right), a first grade teacher, lives in McCall, a small town in western Idaho. Every winter, for over 60 years, McCall residents have held a winter carnival.

The centerpiece of the carnival: an ice sculpture contest.

McKinney has been a regular contestant in this competition, and this year, after seven tries, McKinney finally won first place--for an 8-foot-high by 14-foot-long sculpture based on Maurice Sendak's book Where the Wild Things Are.

This was no ordinary snow character. McKinney and her helper, Roxanne Hills, brought Sendak's characters vividly to life--in ice.

"It took about 150 hours to finish the sculpture," explains McKinney. "Most of the time was spent getting the figures in rough shape. Then we had to carefully mold the fine detail."

Unlike most ice sculptures, adds McKinney, "ours was built from the ground up, one handful of ice at a time."

More than a graveyard emerged from the underbrush outside Chattanooga. The past came alive.

Although a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, music teacher LaFrederick Thirkhill had never heard of Pleasant Gardens, a 22-acre cemetery only three or four miles from his home.

Then, two years ago, Thirkhill read about the 1906 lynching of a Black man named Ed Johnson by a mob of white vigilantes. He became intrigued by that tragic incident and decided to visit Johnson's gravesite in Pleasant Gardens.

What Thirkhill found was shocking: acres of headstones, many of them overturned, lying on sunken graves covered with weeds and thorny vines.

"Under all the weeds and brush, I could see all of the beauty and history," says Thirkhill. "It was a feeling that I can't explain."

Since then, Thirkhill has started a not-for-profit organization called Friends of Pleasant Gardens. The group has raised money to restore the site and conducted volunteer cleanups every other Saturday. Thirkhill estimates that close to 1,000 volunteers have taken part in the restoration project.

"It's not just a cleanup,'' he notes. "It's deeper than that. It's a way for people to connect with their past.

Adds the music teacher:"Young and old, Black and white, are working hand-in-hand to restore the cemetery. In a way, it's a form of racial reconciliation."

Murder, She Wrote

After 27 years of assigning journal writing to her students, middle school language arts teacher Marlis Day has picked up the pen to fill her own pages. The result? A well-received first novel, Why Johnny Died.

Day, who teaches in southern Indiana, has always loved writing. "Everyone has a story inside," says Day. "If you don't write that story, it will never be told."

And Why Johnny Died is certainly a story to tell. The novel incorporates the true-life experiences of Day and her students. When Johnny, who symbolizes neglected and abused children, dies, his teacher Margo Brown suspects foul play.

"A child's death seems so pointless and unfair," says Day. "It's our job to look after the Johnnies of this world."

Day never expected her message to affect readers from Maine to California, as it has. But success as a novelist isn't going to derail her teaching career. For Day, teaching is a family legacy: Her father, four siblings, and husband all teach.

Music to His Ears

Come this July 4, Montana music teacher Craig Naylor's Symphony #2 will ring across the rolling farmlands of Osceola, Wisconsin.

Naylor is one of just 50 composers, chosen from over 900 applicants across the country, to have his symphonic work accepted for the Continental Harmony Project.

On July 4, towns in all 50 states will premiere works by Naylor and the 49 other composers to celebrate America's community heritage.

But Naylor, an elementary and high school music instructor, isn't resting on his laurels. In the works is a piece commissioned by a consortium of university and high school wind ensembles that includes UCLA and the University of Georgia.

In all, Naylor has about 60 compositions in his portfolio, everything from elementary band and choir pieces to film scores.

"One minute of music for orchestra equals about 20 hours of notation work on the computer," notes Naylor.

Naylor often gets up at 5 a.m. to fit in a couple of hours composing before school. After a full day teaching public school, he's off to more teaching at the local junior college.

Naylor says he enjoys the challenge of teaching at both the elementary and college levels.

"It satisfies," he explains, "different parts of my love for teaching."

Celebs Show History Matters

When Tom Jordan's high school history class polled celebrities to find what historical figure they would like to have met, they got some amazing answers. Tom Hanks chose Jacques Cousteau. Rosie O'Donnell picked Rosa Parks. And the Beastie Boys joined Jesse Jackson and Dan Castellaneta--the voice behind Homer Simpson--in choosing Gandhi.

Jordan, who teaches U.S. history at Haverhill High School in western Massachusetts, began his "People We Respect" project four years ago as a way of showing that history matters and that "it isn't boring after all."

"History is not something that happens 45 minutes a day," says Jordan. "The letter-writing project gives students a tangible piece of information, something they can research later on."

Each year, Jordan's students pose a question and identify a list of people to contact. This school year, about 300 letters were mailed.

"Not everyone that students wrote to was a celebrity," stresses Jordan. "The concept is that you need to respect the person, and so we also wrote to people like the minister who ran the local shelter for battered women.''

Nearly 200 responses were received this year. Many were reported in the March issue of American Heritage and also in USA Today.