My Interview with Marge Hazelett

I had a very good time at my interview, I spend all afternoon with Marge, and I didnt leave her house until about 7:30 p.m. My Interview was only about 2 hours long, but I enjoyed spending the day with her and having dinner with her. I loved this experience, I learned alot of things about Marge that I had no idea, she has a beautiful home that she has worked hard for, I found out that she has lived there alone for 12 years. Her husband passed while they were breaking the ground for her home. The best question I asked was about her life as a kid, she told me that she loved to go to the country and pick berries with her family every saturday and sunday. I thought this interview was going to be interesting, and to my surprise it was so much better them what I expected.=) Just smile and make sure you really listen to what they have to say.

Statue of Liberty

 After reading the profile of Charlie Deleo and the discussion we had in class I realized that I didn't know as much about the Statue of Liberty as I thought I did.  I knew she was a gift from France, but that is about it.  I knew she was created by the French sculptor Fredric Auguste Bartholdi.  Among all the other facts that I found what I was curious about was the story of how they got such a large statue from France to the United States considering that logistics than was no where near what is now.  Turns out the base of the statue was built here and the statue itself was sent from France in 350 separate pieces and assembled here in the United States.  Also, I found a lot of websites concerning the Statue of Liberty and it's connection to the Freemason.  I found this interesting, but didn't really concentrate on it. 


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Liberty I started here at Wikipedia and than I went to these sites.
http://www.statueofliberty.org/Statue_History.html 
http://www.nps.gov/stli/index.htm

My Interview with Charles Tindley

My interview went extremely well and lasted well over four hours and honestly probably a little over five (I lost track of time). And that was after i started to rush him a bit at the two hour mark. I only had to ask i believe three loaded questions and he took the show from there. It was not as if he was rambling either, because almost all of what he told was in a narrative format (interesting ones at that) and had what seemed like he had almost total recall, which is amazing in itself considering he is 86 years old. Almost each one of his stories had a much wider theme about life including the hardships of racism, love one another, perseverance, importance of education, the hardships that many go through, etc. It is hard for me to even pick a favorite story from him because they are so varied and he was an extremely good orator. The story about the time he meet and had small talk with Martin Luther King Jr. was especially amazing. However, the story about when we worked in West Virginia with Senator Jay Rockefeller advocating for health care aid, but more specifically Alzheimer's, was equally moving.

Honestly, this is a man that I feel I have been completely lucky to have meet and my life is more enriched because of the time I have spent talking with him. And the fact that he was so humble about everything makes it even more amazing as he said "you know it does seem as interesting having lived through it."

Jim Bishop: Castle Builder Update

I thought since it’s been 20 or so years since the interviews in the novel were conducted I thought I would find out an update on one of the more interesting profiles to me, the Jim Bishop profile. It seems that since the publication of the novel, Mr. Bishop has still been hard at work adding more and more to his existing castle. Jim is at least 65 now if not older but still maintains his monumental structure that he started building over 40 years ago. I thought it would be interesting since he is probably one of the few profiled people who are still alive today. I also found out that Mr. Bishop is becoming fairly fanatical about the government and it seems to be a big part of his life of what i saw in this interview on Youtube.

Jim Bishop interview clip

Looking at the updated photographs, that come up relatively fast when Google searched, it looks like most of his progress on the castle has turned it much more into a homely since the interview took place. Curious to learn more I searched for modern castle builders here in the U.S. I did not find many actual castles that were building here in the U.S. save for maybe a hand full. The majority of my search results however were dedicated sites to how to castle build and related topics revolving around the art of castle building. Which i found interesting in themselves for the shear fact that they are self help sites for building castles. Here are some links to the some of the castle builder sites that I came across.

• CastleMagic
• USACastle

Upon further research I actually found another site that has a long list of current known castles here in the United States and is quite extensive. There also seems to be a theme with castles in the U.S. and anti-government sentiment-weird right? I thought so too.

Castles of the United States

Building a Grotto

My favorite profile that I wanted to learn more about was how Father Louis H. Greving was able to build so many grottos in his lifetime. A grotto is a small cave that is built for decoration or religious reasons. I found a site that tells you how to build your very own grotto and the process looks like it would take a while to build just one grotto. So when Greving was talking about how his hands would bleed after building a grotto I could understand that this was not an easy job, and I could see how passionate he really was about building eight grottos in his lifetime.

http://www.ehow.com/how_8530734_make-grotto.html

Serpent Handling

The biggest thing that want to learn more about is serpent handling at religious ceremonies. I have never heard of that before in my life until I read the profile in the book. It is found in a small number of Pentecostal churches in the U.S. They believe that they will cast out devils and speak new tongues. It says that nothing shall ever hurt you, not even the most poisonous of creaters. As it says in the book of Mark from the Holy Bible, "And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover." The book of Luke from the Holy Bible also has a passage saying, "Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you." The snake handlers are supposed to lay their hands on the sick, speak in tongues, provide miracles, and occasionally consume poison to prove that it can't hurt them with the power of God. I thought this was very interesting to learn more about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_handling#Snake_handlers_today_and_practices

Being passionate coach

I thought the team in Johnny Tocco was being a good coach and being passionate about what he did. Coaches impact their team more than they realize. Before you can be a coach in Ohio you have to take a class and in the class you learn how to be a good leader and how to teach your team qualities they will need the rest of their lives. While I was interviewing my pastor, he told me that one person that had an impact on him was his track coach. When I look back to my high school experience, I looked up to my cheerleading coach and she was the one who got me my coaching job I have now. At the end of the season, l look at the girls and I think about how they were when I took over and they’ve improved so much but if they had a coach that didn’t care, they wouldn’t look very good. Coaches have to take pride in their team. Everyone starts somewhere. No one starts out being the best. You have to work at it and the coach has to care about their team. They have to have passion for what they are coaching or they will be miserable and make it miserable for the team.
http://www.usahockeymagazine.com/article/2009-10/what-makes-great-coach