Cityscape: Learning a lot from sources

Reduce, reuse and recycle

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SBJ photos by Karen Craigo

It was a privilege to tour the city of Springfield’s Noble Hill Sanitary Landfill on Oct. 13 with Laurie Davis, bottom left, education outreach coordinator for the Department of Environmental Services. I left with new resolve, though – I’m going to take those tote bags into the grocery store with me instead of leaving them in the trunk. Davis and market development coordinator Ashley Krug show a map of the landfill, which is estimated to have a lifespan of 50-plus years. Refuse received at the landfill is 26% paper, 12% food waste, 11% plastic and 9% wood waste, with textiles, electronics, metal, glass and other items making up the rest.

Learning a lot from sources

funny goat isolated on a white background

THOUGHT-PROVOKING: One of my earliest landlords instilled in me a respect for a mix of wisdom and surprise through a goat, no less. | photo courtesy Vera Kuttelvaserova/Stock.Adobe.com

My junior year of college, I lived with some friends in an unheated farmhouse about 20 miles from campus. Our closest neighbors were cows and a cemetery and a huge field of morning glories.

One day I approached my landlord, a guy named Gordy Barber, with a request: I wanted a goat.

Gordy thought for a minute, kind of rocking back on his heels. He asked a few questions: Where would you keep a goat? What do you plan to feed it? How will you keep it safe from predators?

Finally, he reached his verdict.

“Sure,” he said. “I reckon you kids could learn a lot from a goat.”

It’s always nice to get the answer you’re looking for, but three decades later, what I continue to love about this exchange is the element of surprise. Future landlords would divulge no concern at all for my growth and development as a person, but Gordy did something that was already hard to do so early into my adulthood: He astonished me.

As a reporter, I still love the unexpected, and my interviews with intriguing sources are the best part of a truly wonderful gig.

I thought I’d share some surprising or insightful moments from interviews I conducted in 2023. Some of these showed up in news stories, while others are outtakes. I won’t go so far as to say these sources are GOATs (the greatest of all time) – I don’t have favorites. But I learned a lot from them, and that’s something Gordy would surely approve of.

January: Matt Williams, chief technology officer for Coryell Collaborative Group, on installing electric vehicle charging stations into apartment buildings: “You’re going to be seeing them more and more as the technology gets better. It’s going to kind of become like an iPod, when nobody has Walkmans anymore.”

February: Jeven Russell, then co-president with father Jeff of Russell Cellular Inc., on working with his dad: “You have to maintain relationships. You can still dive in and get in weeds when you need to but not live there. I love having a platform where Jeff and I can work together. He can rope me in and say that may not be a direction to go down, but I wouldn’t call that constraint as much as collaboration.”

March: David Harrison, children’s author, poet laureate of Missouri and namesake of Harrison Elementary School: “For a while, there were actually two living people in Springfield with schools named after them, but I’m the last one standing. It’s the thrill of a lifetime for me. Among my writer friends, that’s something that comes up all the time. Nanner, nanner, I have a school.”

April: Tammy Fallen, owner of Asian World Market and Cambodian native who moved to the United States at age 5: “Taste can bring back so many memories. Food always brings you back home.”

May: Randy Little, who sold PFI Western Stores Inc. and bought a berry farm: “You know, I’m on the back side of my life. We’re going to make it as long as it stays fun. That’s my whole point. I’m not in it for anything other than fun.”

June: Amy Molea-Koppitz, Realtor with Home Sweet Springfield: “To us, the prices here feel high based on all we’ve seen and known for this area. Looking at the nation as a whole, we’re still much cheaper. People have the ability to work from anywhere, and they’re asking, ‘Where can I go where my kids can have a nice, big yard, there’s a better quality of schools, lower taxes and more freedom?’”

July: David Pennington, Springfield fire chief, on the city’s new firehouses: “We consider our firefighters to be professional athletes. If you have ever watched them work, you would understand why. Each of the new facilities has a planned fitness area with workout equipment, and it is a huge fan favorite.”

August: Jenny Green, printmaker, retired teacher and inaugural tenant of New Moon Studio Space: “I had to kind of be brave about it. Whatever our job, we have to take a leap of faith. I did not know when I retired that New Moon was going to happen, but it fits in perfectly with my new career.”

September: Springfield Art Museum Preparator Brian Fickett on discovering art: “The best way to explore the museum would be to use what you love as an entry point and then have an open enough mindset to explore and have your mind changed by what’s immediately here. From a curatorial standpoint, the point is to walk out of here with a new story having been told to you.”

October: Steve Prange, vice president of Crawford, Murphy & Tilly Inc., on a master plan for Lake Springfield that would double or triple the size of the boathouse and marina: “It’s really tranquil, you know? And it’s close. Everything is in Springfield, but it makes you think you’re out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a nature preserve. So, we wanted to harness on that idea.”

November: Steve Childers, Springfield’s new director of Planning and Development: “I always heard developers say, ‘Give me a set of rules and let me play by them, but don’t change the rules in the middle of the game.’ Communication begins at the very start of the process. It’s important to be flexible. I don’t think that being hard-nosed is the way to go,”

December: Brandon Jenson, Springfield City Council member, on the need for housing reform: “It’s becoming increasingly apparent to me that we have empires of slum in our community, and these have to be broken up. If these property owners aren’t going to maintain their properties in accordance with our laws and with the needs of those they serve, then they should not be operating housing.”

I look forward to discovering what you and I can learn from story sources in 2024.