Knox in the News

From the Boston Gobe:

Anne-Marie Faiola remembers resenting working in her mom’s garden as a teenager while her friends were out having a good time. But if she wanted spending money, she had to work for it.

Yet any ill feelings Faiola had about her parents’ lessons in frugality are long gone. These days, when she sees friends burdened with debt, Faiola, 33, is grateful. “It didn’t always feel like that,’’ said the Bellingham, Wash., website entrepreneur. Yet when the economy went south and she had money in the bank, Faiola knew whom to thank.

Frugality has taken on a certain shabby chic. There’s always been a segment of the population that by conviction, or necessity, saved by eating at home, shopping at discount stores, and choosing practical cars over luxury models.

“I did have my time of going wild, but I always paid it off,’’ said Priti Mehta, 28, who works for a nonprofit and is a graduate student in Albuquerque.

Financial pundits insist children absorb the spending habits of their parents. Yet there’s little research, said Tim Kasser, chairman of the psychology department at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. “Thrift hasn’t been of major interest to American culture in the last 60 years or so,’’ he said.

Yet if parents make saving money fun, give children choices, and explain why careful spending is a good way to live, the children will probably get the message, he said.

From the Peoria Journal Star:

Welcome to the exquisite torture of life on the road with a bona fide genius - a preternaturally gifted blind piano man and singer, whose gospel-saturated voice married spirituals with the blues, who mixed up the sacred and profane, who drew deeply on the darkest shadows within himself and brought forth clear light.

Ray Charles gulped life greedily, seldom getting through a day without women and gin and lording it over backup musicians that he himself picked and insisted on traveling with: Musicians dazzled by a scorching hot sun that sometimes burned them.

David Hoffman was one of those musicians. Starting in 1991, the Springfield native, central Illinois trumpeter and adjunct jazz instructor at Knox College spent 13 years on the road with Ray Charles - a winding, whirling, confusing trip that he has chronicled in a newly self-published book, “What’s That Bus Doing on the Runway? The Antics and Absurdities of Life on Road.”

It’s a journey that brought Hoffman from Bakersfield toBrazil, from the Hollywood Bowl to Moscow’s Red Square, from Barcelona to Macon, Georgia, from Rome to West Virginia.

As he circles and flies or rolls down highways in buses enduring the tedium of watching yet one more screening of “Blazing Saddles,” something happens: Hoffman deepens his musical voice. He discovers again what music really is, what art really is. He sees the value of going crooked where others would go straight, of finding things that fit, which at first glance, don’t seem to fit at all.

From the Register-Mail:

Faculty at Knox College have begun a large research project, with the help of former Maytag employees, on what has happened to those who were laid off when the Galesburg Refrigeration Plant shut down in September 2004 to relocate in Reynosa, Mexico….

In cooperation with Knox faculty members in sociology, economics, statistics and education, and with the assistance of former IAM Local 2063 President Dave Bevard and seven other former employees, the survey will trace how people’s lives have changed since the plant closed. It focuses on job retraining, availability of new jobs, health, income and individual and family well-being.

“It has been six years now since all of us ended our ‘Maytag experience,’” Bevard wrote in a cover letter that accompanies the survey. “Together we shared something that is very difficult for anyone to understand unless they were a part of it.