Trailer life brings blessings, problems

Article originally published in the Panama City News Herald.

PANAMA CITY — Kaelee and Kaydee Johnson are just about ready to go to school. Kaelee has her Chromebook and pencils, but Kaydee can’t find her pencil case. In the family’s 26-foot trailer in the FEMA group site on the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard and 15th Street, there are only so many places it could be.

Their father, Chris Brockman, steps outside to check the family’s truck. He doesn’t find the pencil case, but instead finds a pool of water. The murky water flows down the cracked pavement and spreads into their neighbor’s yard.

Chris and his wife, Holly Johnson, are frustrated. Just the day before, after days of waiting, FEMA sent a maintenance worker to repair a leaking water pipe in the trailer that made it impossible to wash dishes. Both of them take out their cellphones and try calling maintenance.

With a cellphone in one hand, Chris looks into Kaydee’s bunk and moves around her toys and bedding, finding the pencil box. As he is on the phone with FEMA explaining the seriousness of the situation flooding his street, he hands her the box.

The Brockman-Johnson family moved into their trailer provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency with one bedroom and one bunk bed near the end of January after losing their apartment at Foxwood Apartments. After Hurricane Michael, the family stayed with friends in town, then an RV in Destin, a rental condo and then received housing assistance from FEMA to stay in a hotel. In December, the family was told FEMA would stop providing rent assistance and instead provide them a trailer.

Holly and Chris feel incredibly fortunate to have a safe place to live. In some ways, they prefer their new home to their old apartment.

“We’ve been trying to get out of (Foxwood), and so now we’re finally out and we’re in here, and I really do not want to go back in there,” Holly says.

With shooting after shooting, the parents were tired of living somewhere they couldn’t let their kids play outside. Now, the girls can play on their front porch made of wood pallets without fear of another daylight shooting.

But living in the group site is not without problems. The site is mostly fenced off, but gaps in the fencing and the angle the trailer is placed at worry Chris and Holly. The street lights are bright and cast a wide beam, ridding the family of any sense of privacy in their own home. And limited storage space means constantly reshuffling their belongings to find items they use daily.

“I feel bad for being that way, because we have people coming around asking how to get in these trailers because they are in their cars,” Holly says. “At the same time, this is really small.”

One of the most disruptive changes in their lives is simply the address. The group site is only a few blocks away from their old apartment, but living there moved their youngest daughter out of the zone for her elementary school and their eldest out of the busing zone for her middle school. Because of that, Chris, the only licensed driver in the family, has to spend upwards of three hours a day ferrying his children to and from school everyday.

Still, Holly and Chris feel this is part of God’s plan for them, that the obstacles in their path are not roadblocks, but redirection towards His mission for them.

“Like it’s God telling me, ‘I don’t want you to do this. If you finish this application you will get the job and that’s not what I have for you.’” Chris says.

After talking about the list of problems her family faces, Holly laughs.

“Nothing can stop me! Jesus got me!” she says.

Chautauqua, family help meet challenges

Article originally posted in the Panama City News Herald.

PANAMA CITY — DJ Franklin sits on a loveseat in the living room and waits for his stepfather, André Hanks, to take him to summer school at Chautauqua Charter Academy. As he waits, he drums the air with pantomimed drum sticks.

“He’s always been musical,” says his mother, Sonya Hanks. “You’ll find him in his room, listening to three things at once, picking out each rhythm perfectly.”

André hands DJ his cane, and they walk to the car. DJ has cerebral palsy, caused by a right hemispherectomy he received to stop seizures as an infant. This, and his left hip socket not developing fully as an infant, has presented DJ with challenges he will have to face for the rest of his life.

At Chautauqua, he is greeted by classmates and professional caregivers. To gather materials for a cooking lesson later in the day and give the students practice taking public transportation, director Cynthia McCauley decides to send a group of students to Walmart with a paraprofessional from the school.

On the trolley, DJ sits with his friend Mariah Moore. The two talk and joke as the trolley makes its way from 15th Street in Panama City to the North Tyndall Parkway Walmart in Callaway. At the store, the nearly dozen students help paraprofessional Carissa Boston find taco seasoning, meat and tofu.

There was a time when Sonya and DJ’s doctors were worried DJ would not have this level of independence. Depending on the brain’s ability to reassign functions to other parts of the brain, people with hemispherectomies have a wide range of outcomes after surgery. Still, it is unlikely that DJ will be able to have a fulfilling career.

“That’s why Chautauqua is so important,” says Sonya. The charter school provides a level of meaning and activity that the work force would not realistically be able to provide, considering his disability. After finishing a post-high school four-year program at the charter school, DJ will attend the adult program at Chautauqua and navigate the byzantine world of services for adults with disabilities.

As the trolley approaches their stop, Carissa pulls the cord, and the bus lets off the students. While other students rush back to the school, Carissa, Mariah and DJ talk as they gradually make their way back with bags in hand.

Volunteers remodel the bedroom for two special needs children in Lynn Haven

Article originally published in the Panama City News Herald.

LYNN HAVEN — Joelle Davidson walked into her children’s bedroom holding her 3-year-old daughter Mayvory Rienzo, followed by her boyfriend Josh Brady, holding her 5-year-old son Maverick Rienzo, and 16 volunteers.

Davidson and Brady set down the two children, each only a little taller than 2 feet, so they could walk around their new room. They looked around and saw a newly painted room filled with Mickey and Minnie Mouse decorations and furniture at their scale.

“It’s honestly perfect,” Davidson said, looking around the room in the Lynn Haven home.

The two beds, decorations, clothes, custom 18-inch high shelves and a painted kitchen were done for free by Rooms with a Purpose. The organization renovates the bedrooms of children with life challenging illnesses. Founder Sherry Melton said her organization means to, “give these children not only a place to go and rest and recuperate from what they are dealing with, but to give them independence anyway that we can.”

The two children with a rare genetic disorder similar to dwarfism, were nominated by Denise Bass, the children’s nurse care manager. Her job is to help the family navigate complex medical programs and coordinate appointments. Bass first heard about Rooms with a Purpose from other families she works with in Bay County. After seeing the single mother struggle to find safe furniture for children so small, Bass reached out to Rooms with a Purpose.

Because the children are so small, standard size children’s beds are to large and high off the ground for them to use safely. Bass saw that they were sleeping in cribs with holes cut in the mesh sides. This worked for a while, until Maverick, who his mom describes as “fearless,” started climbing the sides to get out instead of stepping out of the cut out onto the floor. Picking out clothes was also a challenge because dressers are much taller than the children.

Saturday morning, volunteers headed to the home in Lynn Haven to begin work. Four volunteers pulled everything away from the kitchen walls and painted the kitchen avocado green. Two volunteers took to the bed room and finished painting the inside of the closet to match the paint in the rest of the room.

Joe Warren, a volunteer and carpenter, brought two miniature beds shaped like homes. Davidson and Melton picked out the design because having the children on the floor would be safer than a raised platform bed.

Mayvory, walking into the room, went directly to the closet to find a new wardrobe at eye level. Maverick ran after being set down to his new bed, covered in warm tone LED lights. After looking at the beds, the brother and sister found the two chairs in the room, just low enough to the floor that they could sit in comfortably. Maverick handed pillows to the volunteers sitting in the room and motioned for them to play catch with him and each other.

Davidson is hopeful about the coming school year and thinks the new room will be a comfortable place they will want to spend time in.

“They do everything kids their age should do,” Davidson said. “Nothing holds either of them back.”

The annual Wasau possum festival in Florida marks 50th anniversary

Article originally published in the Panama City News Herald.

WASAU — Dalton Carter hushed the audience at the Possum Palace during the 50th annual Possum Festival in Wasau on Saturday to introduce festival chairman Joe Tharp. Dressed in his peach polo embroidered with his name and an image of a possum, Tharp looked anxious as Carter, the founder of the Fun Day and the Possum Festival, began his remarks.

“Joe Tharp will be retiring as the chairman of the Possum Festival,” Carter said.

Carter invites everyone from the city of Wasau, the firefighters, the Wasau Quilt Club and Wasau Development Club to come up to the front of the stage. As representatives from each of the groups came forward, Tharp’s eyes grew glassy and he pursed his lips.

As Carter hands Tharp a plaque celebrating his 25 years of service as chairman of the festival, he said that he’s spent more time with Tharp than he has with members of his own family.

When Tharp takes the microphone, he said that this decision was a long time in the making. Whenever he would tell the committee, he said, they would look at him and continue planning. But after 25 years, he feels it is time to pass the responsibility to someone else.

“We are gonna start the possum auction off in just a second, Tharp said. “I’m gonna hold the first one when we auction it off, and y’all gonna take it from there brother. That’ll be the last one I hold up.”

The Possum Festival was started 50 years ago by Dalton Carter with the Wasau Development Club back when the town had a population of only 313 people, he said. For years before, the Panhandle town, 30 miles north from Panama City, the only community event was an annual fish fry.

In 1970, the Wasau Development Club asked him to run that year’s fish fry. He noticed that if people wanted a fun festival with something for everyone in the family, they would have to go all the way to Chipley or Panama City.

“What I tried to do is include in my program something for everybody to do here,” Carter said.

He organized a parade, a cornbread contest, hog calling and live music.

Tharp remembers the first Wasau Fun Day in 1970.

“They had coffee in a washpot, they had a 100 pounds of mullet, local entertainment on a flatbed trailer and it rained. They sold out of everything,” Tharp said.

After the success of the first Fun Day, Carter looked to find a way to draw more people to festival. The following year organizers captured possums and auctioned off the opportunity to take a possum by the tail and shake it for the audience. The first winning bid was $50 from Lenzy Corbin, who served on the Washington County Board of Commissioners for 28 years.

For the last 50 years, a lot has changed with the festival. Now the Possum Palace can hold dozens of people comfortably. Food and art vendors line the field in front of it and people come from around the world to see it. Politicians seeking statewide office are almost required to place a bid on a possum in an election year.

But the things that are important to Joe Phillips have not changed.

He is the third generation of owners of a house built in the 1930s on the parade route in downtown Wasau. As a kid he captured the gopher tortoises for the gopher races and was the Hog Calling champion one year.

“It is pretty much the same town as it has always been,” he said.

He said he loves how people take care of one another and loves the fellowship people share during the festival.

Wayne Rudd has one of the most important jobs at the festival. He watches the possums before the auction and safely delivers them to the stage. He said taking caring of wild possums, which are released right after the festival, isn’t hard. All they need is food, water and to be left alone.

But to Rudd the Possum Festival is more than just a fun sideshow in North Florida.

“The possum is symbol of pioneer independence,” Rudd said. “People was here before the Depression and they made do. Everything we do here pays homage to that. Everything we do honors them people that founded this country around here,” Rudd said.

Volunteers support local scallop population

Article originally published in the Panama City News Herald.

PANAMA CITY - “They grab ahold of the net,” Joie Thacker said as she dumped 95 scallops into a bucket for scientists from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to count and then place in protective cages.

On further inspection, Kelly Williams, a scallop biologist for the FWC, was thrilled to see how large and healthy they all looked. So far, Thacker, her daughter and niece caught the most scallops of Saturday’s Scallop Rodeo in St. Andrews State Park.

The Scallop Rodeo helps with scallop restoration efforts by taking wild scallops and placing them in predator exclusion cages. Volunteers are given a temporary permit and asked to bring back no more than 100 scallops, all alive.

The 3-foot by 3-foot cages prevent the scallops from being eaten and helps them reproduce. Scallops are broadcast spawners, meaning they release their eggs and sperm into the water in the hopes the two will mix and create viable larva. When populations are as low as they are now in St. Andrews Bay, it often means scallops are far away from one another, decreasing the odds of fertilization. Living 500 to a cage increases their odds.

For some, volunteering to wrangle scallops is fun because it helps with conservation efforts, and for others because it is the only legal opportunity to fish for scallops in the bay, said Cameron Baxley, a scallop biologist at the FWC. Since the 90s, the population has been so low that there has not been a regular season for scallops.

Reese Thacker, 11, was excited to help out the conservation mission. She and her family jet skied out to a beach in St. Andrews Bay and snorkeled in hip deep water to look for the mollusk.

“I like snorkeling,” she said. With the rodeo, “you can do something good while you do something fun.”

Baxley hopes that over the next several years conservation efforts will help birth enough scallops to bring back regular scallop fishing in the bay. But there are many hurdles to creating a big, healthy community of mollusks. The decline of seagrass, general water quality, red tide and their one year lifespan can make hard-won progress disappear each year.

Joie Thacker hopes her 95 scallop contribution will help bring back the bounty found in the past.

“I want to be able to harvest scallops in my backyard,” she said. “You gotta start somewhere.”

Capt. Anderson V replaces boat lost in Hurricane Michael

Article originally published in the Panama City News Herald.

PANAMA CITY BEACH — Deral Smeby cut a bundle of red snapper from a hook hanging from the Capt. Anderson V and yelled out “43!” on Tuesday. One of the dozens of people who just left the boat following a six-hour fishing tour, checks his ticket and walks forward to collect his fish.

The Capt. Anderson V is the newest boat in the Capt. Anderson fleet and replaces the Gemini Queen that was destroyed in Hurricane Michael. The new fishing boat is a catamaran, like the Gemini, but is slightly larger, has more comfortable seats and other features that should make it easier to fish from. Capt. Anderson officials held a ribbon-cutting for the vessel on Tuesday, though it has been in service for about two weeks.

Smeby works as a deckhand on the Capt. Anderson V and said he has many fond memories of the Gemini. He was 13 years old when he first fished on the Gemini with friends when the boat was based out of St. Andrews. His father was the captain, and when Smeby was old enough he worked as a deckhand. He worked on the boat for 20 years.

One of the things he liked about the boat was the trough along the rim of the boat.

“It was almost like a food trough,” Smeby said. “It made it easy to put on your bait. A lot of good people came on that boat. Dealing with customers for so many years, you become friends with a lot of them.”

Still, Smeby said he is excited about the new boat.

“It’s a really nice boat, a comfortable boat,” he said. “I think it’s a really good addition to the Anderson fleet.”

Because it is a similarly sized catamaran-style boat, customers have mostly not noticed that it is new, he said. The only difference people have noticed is the smaller canopy, which means less shade but more room to cast fishing lines.

Getting the new aluminum hull catamaran was out of necessity after Hurricane Michael. Days before the storm made landfall, forecasts led Pam Anderson, operations manager at Capt. Anderson’s Marina, to believe the hurricane would be only a Category 2 or 3 hurricane. The company took the Gemini and tied it down to three boats in Watson Bayou. After Michael, they found all the boats tangled together on land in a “spiderweb of heavy lines,” she said. All the boats were damaged, but the Gemini Queen was damaged beyond repair.

“It’s a part of history,” she said.

The new boat still is connected to Anderson history. When Pam and her husband first started dating, the pair would go fishing off the original Capt. Anderson V on Friday nights when it was based in her hometown of Sarasota. They would catch black snapper from 7 p.m. to midnight. They decided to name the new boat after the original.

Anderson said she is excited about the new boat. The aluminum hull will make it easier to maintain, and the new “airplane”-style seats are more comfortable inside the boat, she said.

Red snapper season is almost over, but the boat will be available for fishing during upcoming fishing seasons.

NAACP back-to-school event expands its scope

Article originally published in the Panama City News Herald.

PANAMA CITY — Hurricane Michael inspired the Bay County chapter of the NAACP to expand their vision for their annual Back to School Family, Friends and Fun Day at the Glenwood Community Center on Saturday.

The organization pushed to invite more nonprofits and civic organizations to attend and serve students and families in Glenwood. The annual voter registration drive and family event this year also had tables with workers from veterans organizations, two PanCare mobile clinics and local disaster recovery groups.

“This is a way of centralizing and disseminating the information under one roof,” said Dinah Crayton, first vice president of the Bay County branch of the NAACP. “Families that are still recovering from Hurricane Michael may not be aware of programs headquartered in other parts of Bay County, so bringing the organizations to Glenwood can help those in need find help. People know about the CRC (Community Resource Center) but have never been there.”

Crayton said there’s several reasons why people have never visited the CRC, based in the Bay County Public Library, such as fear, lack of transportation and not knowing where to start or where to go.

In addition to information, local civic and church groups hosted activities and gave out clothes, school supplies and lunch. Local alumni chapters of historically Black sororities filled more than 300 backpacks with school supplies.

Aviva Burris, dressed head to toe in red, black and white with a delta print scarf, and Raslean Allen, with black, pink and green glasses, bracelets and a polo, packed children’s backpacks at the Glenwood Community Center.

“The Zetas, the Sigma Gammas, we all work together for one common cause,” Allen said.

Stacked four deep, the backpacks come in sizes for students from kindergarten to high school.

“It’s everything you need for school,” Burris said.

Latisha Stanley brought her two sons to the event.

Her youngest son will start kindergarten at Cherry Street Elementary School this fall, and often events will only have backpacks too large for small children. Every day this summer he has told her he is ready for school, she said.

“It’s great that they had backpacks for really little kids,” she said.