The faces of a bad economy

January 24, 2010

Last winter Bennington, Vt., got decimated by layoffs. I wrote, “The faces of a bad economy: Unemployed workers try to find their way in tough times,” just after the holidays. It was published in the Bennington Banner on Jan. 7, 2009.

BENNINGTON – Sarah Weber started noticing a difference while leaving work in her last few weeks on the job.

Weber, an administrator at NSK Steering Systems America, had to walk through the manufacturing plant’s floor to get to her car. “It used to be just as noisy and bustling as if you were going out at lunch time,” she said at her Johnsonville, N.Y., home on Monday, “but the last few weeks, it was so quiet walking out at 5 o’clock.

“It was kind of creepy — just so deathly quiet.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Running Raw: Vegan athletes tests limits of endurance

November 2, 2009
Tim VanOrden drives for the finish line.

Tim VanOrden drives for the finish line.

Runners/endurance athletes are known for being a bit crazy, but Tim VanOrden goes way above and beyond the norm, which is why I decided to profile him for the Bennington Banner in April 2008.

I went on an eight mile run with VanOrden on the vast trails behind his parents’ Bennington home, where he does most of his training. To this day, I’m not sure if I really understand VanOrden (what makes him tick?/what caused his drastic life change?), but I tried to present him as I saw him, with little judgment, in the story below and hopefully allowed readers to make their own conclusions.

This video also ran with the story. It was the Banner’s first original video shot by photographer Peter Crabtree.

BENNINGTON — Tim VanOrden will do whatever it takes today to get his body to the top of a 62-story skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles before hundreds of others.

But unlike his competitors, he is only fueled by fruits and vegetables, some nuts and some seeds, and he eats them only in their natural state: uncooked, unprocessed and unrefined. He is a raw vegan athlete and has been for the past three years.

That is when a mysterious illness caused him to quit his job and try something entirely new. That is when he started running up mountains, then buildings, now in snowshoes and on the track.

Read the rest of this entry »