In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Today, at the venerable age of 90, Professor Emeritus Dr. Bob Fonda cheerfully admits that he has seen many milestones over the years at Minnesota State Mankato. One of those would most certainly be celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Dental Hygiene Program, which Fonda started almost single-handedly in 1969.
Dr. Robert Fonda will be at the Department of Dental Hygiene’s 40th Anniversary Reunion on Saturday, September 29 in the Centennial Student Union Ballroom.
Although the program has turned out countless well-qualified dental hygiene graduates over the past four decades, it got off to what Fonda characterizes as something of a “rough start.” That may be a bit of an understatement.
The genesis of the program came about like this:
After spending four years in the Navy, Fonda practiced dentistry for 23 years in the small town of Rockwell City, Iowa. Unfortunately, spending that many years hunching over patients as he worked contributed to significant back problems, and in 1969, Fonda began to think about finding a new job in the dental field.
At about that same time, Minnesota State Mankato was investigating the possibility of starting a professional two-year dental hygiene program. Fonda met with college administrators and was offered a job. He accepted and agreed to come to campus to start putting the program together late in 1969.
What Fonda discovered once he arrived on campus was nothing. No books had been ordered. He didn’t have a classroom, a secretary or even a telephone. The college lacked a physical clinic in which students could receive practical instruction, and in fact, there wasn’t even a curriculum outline for the classes that were scheduled to begin the following spring.
Asked now if he realized what he was getting himself into all those years ago, Fonda chuckles. “No, not really,” he says. “I thought I knew but as in many cases, after you get there and sign the contracts and so on, you discover that there are other things that you are going to have to do…that weren’t maybe exactly the way you want to have them, but you just take the ball and run.”
The history of the Dental Hygiene Program — and Dr. Fonda’s role in it — is documented in a new book from the department.
Fonda rolled up his sleeves and got to work. The first order of business was to design a program and curriculum that would meet the accreditation standards of the American Dental Association. He spent countless hours doing that. He also began to interview and hire professional staff who could then teach to those standards.
That done, Fonda turned his attention to another pressing problem: The University had purchased a significant amount of used dental equipment from the Veteran’s Administration in anticipation of the new program. As Fonda inspected that equipment, however, he discovered that much of it was hopelessly outdated, damaged or simply not acceptable for use in modern dentistry. That started another scramble to find better equipment.
In addition, the physical clinic needed to be constructed, and Fonda spent a great deal of time supervising the construction, all while also sorting out the other details that the new classes would entail. “I had some sleepless nights, let’s put it that way,” he says. “Sometimes I went home at night and just laid there and looked at the ceiling and thought, “Oh my goodness…”
Classes began in 1970 on the lower campus, with Fonda and the other instructors traveling from classroom to classroom carrying their tools and textbooks with them. In spite of all of the confusion of those early days, Fonda says he loved teaching. “I liked passing on the information that needed to be passed on to students about dentistry and the various aspects of dentistry, and what kind of background would be required so that you would even be able to perform the duties,” he says. “I loved the student contact. I just thoroughly enjoyed that.”
As the program attracted more students, Fonda was also instrumental in finding new ways for the students to interact with the public at large, including working at the Faribault State Hospital, nursing homes, the White Earth Indian Reservation and other areas.
Today, Fonda remains delighted with the progress of the program he fathered. Even though he retired in 1986, he remains fiercely proud of its success.
“It was a pleasure for me,” he says. “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”
…when the sewing machine came into popularity in the middle of the 19th century, it caused a boom in textile production. In Gloversville, New York, the main product of the textile industries was fine leather gloves. 20 years later, there were 116 glove and mitten manufacturers, and the Fonda Johnstown & Gloversville Railroad was constructed to haul their products out to market. What would it be like to experience the railroad 80 years later, in a simulator? We’ll find out in this review…at the railyard!
By Florence Fabricant – February 13, 2012, 11:49 am
Roberto Santibañez is replicating Fonda, his three-year old Mexican restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in an East Village space.
Roberto Santibañez is replicating Fonda, his three-year old Mexican restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in an East Village space that is about 50 percent larger, with 60 seats and a menu of well-crafted, richly flavored regional dishes, including Yucatean shrimp, a Guajillo-style burger and chicken from the north with Chihuahua cheese. Crowd-pleasers like taquitos, flautas, braised pork in adobo sauce, and enchiladas suizas are also featured.
Mr. Santibañez said that the Manhattan restaurant, which is to open Feb. 21, will have more bar food and brunch dishes. “In Brooklyn, this is a neighborhood place, a hangout, and I hope it will be the same in Manhattan,” he said. His commute, on the F train, will be an easy one, too, but he is also depending on cooks who have been with him for years.
Fonda Restaurant, 40 Avenue B (Third Street), Manhattan
“For Mexican food, your prep cooks are the most important,” he said. “They’re the ones who mix the moles and pipians and those are not last-minute sauces. They take time.” He also plans to feature more mezcals at the bar. He serves only two in Brooklyn, but he thinks that his Manhattan clientele might be more interested in trying them
Fonda, 40 Avenue B (Third Street), (212) 677-4069.
Happy early birthday, George Washington. Now there was a guy who loved spicy guacamole and hibiscus-infused margaritas. Wait. It may have been wooden teeth and chopping down cherry trees. Regardless, we’re sure if he were alive today, he’d want you to have these enchiladas.
A Large Concentration of Enchiladas on Avenue B
Meet Fonda, a Mexican restaurant on Avenue B that has everything you’d want out of a Mexican restaurant on Avenue B. Good queso. Authentic mole. And a big wood bar full of powerful tequila elixirs. And it opens Tuesday. This place comes to the East Village courtesy of Park Slope (yes, the Yucatán Peninsula of West Brooklyn) and a Latin-blooded chef (the former Rosa Mexicano culinary director) who’s all about the three B’s. Braised meats. Bold salsas. And absolutely no mariachi Bands.
Not that you need an excuse to frequent an establishment that serves slow-stewed duck on soft, warm tortillas, but taking a date here would be a nice idea. See about reserving the lone booth in the house. It’s up front in the red-painted dining room and right next to the bar. Which is key, considering what we’re about to tell you.
These guys do margaritas right. Fresh fruits (guava, mango, pineapple), a touch of orange liqueur and a heavy slug of silver tequila. Just the way G.W. liked it.
By Victoria Dalkey, Bee Art Correspondent, Friday, Jan. 27, 2012
Gioia Fonda’s drawings begin as photos of street debris.
You would expect an exhibition at a college gallery to be educational. Gioia Fonda‘s show at the James Kaneko Gallery on the American River College campus is that in spades. Fonda documents every step of the labor-intensive process by which she creates her masterful drawings of piles of junk. This body of work, one of which won the best of show award at last year’s State Fair art show, is a poignant comment on a sad aspect of the economic downturn our city has been experiencing.
She begins with color photos of trash piled up on the street in front of houses in her neighborhood. “Most of the piles,” she writes, “seem to occur when an address has experienced an eviction, a foreclosure or sometimes a death: always some kind of transition.” Like canaries in coal mines, they are harbingers of worse things to come. For Fonda, they represent “not only a reflection of the lending crisis but also a comment on our rampant consumerism and the utter disposability of what we produce and what we buy.”
Gioia Fonda stands in front of her winning state fair art piece, “Pile, With Soccer Ball.” The acrylic on canvas art piece placed first in the 2011 California State Fair and is currently displayed in the Kondos Gallery. Tony Wallin wallintony@yahoo.com
That is scarcely a new idea, but Fonda treats it with a mixture of sadness and a formal integrity that lends the piles a kind of monumental grace. The giant pile with a soccer ball, a potted plant, an old bike and a wheelbarrow that was shown in the State Fair exhibition is on view here and is even more imposing in the smaller Kaneko gallery.
Surrounding it are other drawings, among them “Watering Can,” a triangular pile of trash in which a watering can plays a small but significant role. A trio of drawings on the wall across from it features tangles of netting, worn tires, plastic jugs, and a stuffed toy. These are not only commentaries on our throwaway culture but strong abstractions reminiscent at times of Bauhaus Constructivism.
As interesting as the finished drawings are, a series of works that demonstrate how Fonda arrives at her destinations. She begins with the color photos, then isolates the shapes of the objects in the piles, draws them on paper and cuts them out. These cuttings she piles up and arranges into collages from which she then makes Xerox prints. It’s a lengthy, exacting and time-consuming process, but it pays off with drawings that are both moving and formally elegant.
Accompanying Fonda’s works at the campus gallery is a series of mostly small bronze and ceramic sculptures by Garr Ugalde. Their imagery is both innocent and menacing. Combining childhood toys with instruments of war, they comment on “how quickly the world engages its children in war.” “Beehive Rocker” places a child on a crude rocking horse surrounded by alphabet blocks. A beehive placed over the child’s head adds a surreal note of danger. “Pecker” combines grenades and bird skulls. “Night Mother” gives us a pregnant woman with a birdhouse on her head.
Children’s toys and the use of bird imagery, Ugalde writes, “speak to the ideal of freedom, innocence, and the safety of home.” Though superficially, he notes, they seem to be innocuous, lurking among them are instruments of destruction, many derived from war toys. Ugalde’s small works made of bronze are intricate and imbued with a dark humor that turns disturbing as you note the details in them. A larger piece made of ceramic is blunter. Titled “I Used To Carry a Big Stick, Two,” it gives us a pit bull with a grenade in its mouth sitting on a block covered with an American flag. Small texts cite places in which confrontations have occurred, among them Wounded Knee, Guantánamo and Havana. Ugalde’s work is a nice complement to Fonda’s and the two visions result in a show that is both moving and thought-provoking. Curator Ramsey Harris has done a great job of installing the show.
GIOIA FONDA: THE PILE SERIES
GARR UGALDE: WAR STORIES
What: Gioia Fonda lends a monumental grace to piles of refuse that she sees as “a comment on our rampant consumerism and the utter disposability of what we produce and what we buy.” A complementary exhibit of small bronze and ceramic sculptures comes from Garr Ugalde. His imagery is both innocent and menacing, a comment on “how quickly the world engages its children in war.”
Where: James Kaneko Gallery, Room 503, American River College, 4700 College Oak Drive, Sacramento
When: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Fridays, or by appointment, through Feb. 8
Cost: Free
Contact: (916) 484-8399
FONDA, New York — Gazing down a frozen New York field, the statue of a Mohawk girl about to become the first Native American saint exudes calm. Yet the real Kateri Tekakwitha had a brutal existence — and ghosts from her dramatic life still haunt these hills. The 17th-century figure will make history when the Vatican canonizes her later this year, although the joy among America’s indigenous tribes will be mixed with some painful historical memories.
Kateri Tekakwitha will become the first Native American saint in the Catholic church (AFP/File, Stan Honda)
No other “Indian”, as the original inhabitants of the United States and Canada are widely, but wrongly, called, has made sainthood. Following centuries of being dispossessed, caricatured, or ignored, Native Americans will soon have the unusual experience of appearing in a positive light. Mark Steed, the Franciscan friar heading the Kateri Shrine on the banks of the Mohawk River, said that after more than 30 years of working among Native Americans, he is happy to see them win this boost. “They were put down, bypassed,” Friar Mark, a soft-spoken but steely tough 71-year-old, said. “So I think when you have a repressed people, any star in their crown is a plus.”
For many Native Americans, especially among the Mohawk and other Iroquois tribes straddling the US-Canadian border, Kateri’s sainthood was overdue decades ago. The Vatican needed a certified miracle from the three-centuries-dead tribeswoman and so followers submitted reports of dozens: everything from healing the sick to levitating a man off the ground and appearing herself, hovering in deerskin clothes. None of these passed muster. But then in 2006 doctors in Seattle confirmed an astonishing event. Against all medical expectations, an 11-year-old Native American boy fatally ill with a flesh-eating bacteria made a full recovery. His parents had been praying to Kateri. Although needing another five years, this one convinced the Vatican, and last month Pope Benedict XVI cleared Kateri for canonization. Her followers may not have a date yet, but they are already excited. “It will be a celebration of first magnitude,” proclaims the January issue of the shrine’s Tekakwitha News.
Friar Mark Steed at the National Kateri Shrine in Fonda (AFP/File, Stan Honda)
Kateri’s life story encompasses the despair and — for some — the hope sown in those tumultuous early years of the white settlers. According to Jesuit accounts and oral history, Kateri survived a settler-introduced smallpox epidemic at four, but was left orphaned and near-blind. The next calamity was a raid by French settlers and native allies who burned her village to the ground. Again she survived, spending the next decade in a newly built village across the Mohawk River in the woods near today’s Kateri Shrine. It was here, when she was about 20, that she was baptized and entered the crucial last four years of her life.
Ostracized by her tribe, Kateri — whose native name Tekakwitha translates as “The Clumsy One” — fled to a village of converts in what is now Canada. Despite being ravaged by illness, she tended to other sick and lived a life of extreme asceticism — including burning herself with hot coals — that attracted admiration from missionaries and converts alike. Tradition has it that when she died, aged 24, her smallpox-scarred face suddenly cleared. That story still inspires people around Fonda to gather in the shrine’s open-air chapel in summer, or in the 230-year-old wooden barn housing a chapel where a large painting of Kateri hangs behind the altar. But intertwined is the dark history of European conquest and the role played by Christian conversions. Tom Porter, who lives a short drive down the road from the Kateri Shrine, believes Kateri unwittingly contributed to the destruction of her people. “She was used,” he said in a rare interview.
Statue of Kateri Tekakwitha by Joseph-Émile Brunet at the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, near Quebec City.
Unlike many modern Mohawks who have either converted or are not interested in any religion, Porter works actively to restore the old beliefs. He lives with family and a handful of followers on a farm where they grow their own crops, raise cattle and use work horses to plow the earth. A longtime Mohawk acting chief, Porter is immersed in the spiritual ways of his forefathers. Inviting a reporter to join a huge family meal in the compound’s main house, Porter, whose native name is Sakokwenionkwas, or “He Who Wins”, said the moon, the sun and thunder are more important to the Iroquois than saints or popes. “Christianity is not a shoe that will ever fit. Not for my feet, or my heart, or my soul,” he said. A humorous man, Porter carries echoes in his face of the proud, eagle-like features seen in old pictures of tribesmen. But he could not conceal his bitterness. To him, there is no difference between the spread of Christianity and the cruel policies, including forced assimilation in grim 20th-century government boarding schools, that were used to subjugate Native Americans.
Aged 67, Porter has made sure every one of his five daughters, one son, and 11 grandchildren follows the traditional ways. He thinks Kateri was probably forced to become a Catholic. “I don’t know if she really was a Christian or not,” he said. “They were in poverty at that time. The Europeans had destroyed everything, people were destitute and starving, and if you wanted to get help of any kind you had to be a Christian.” Porter conceded that few Mohawk agree with him. He even admitted that some in his extended family are devoted to Kateri. “It breaks my heart,” he said. Friar Mark acknowledged that there had been “terrible” sins and was determined to heal the wounds.
In the wooden chapel at the Kateri Shrine, a native blanket covers the altar. Snowshoes and deerskins hang from the rafters, and sacred herbs like tobacco and sage lie drying. There’s a crucifix, of course, but also a picture of the tree and turtle at the center of the Native American creation legend. Soon after taking up his position in Fonda a year ago, the tall Canadian friar went to call on Porter. “He was amazed,” Friar Mark recalled. Since then, the two have met often and while they don’t agree, they listen to one another, an odd couple making peace on the spot where a future saint once lived. “He’s a friend,” Porter said of Friar Mark. “When I was growing up, there was no one who hated priests and nuns more than I did. But I got over that now. All my enemies — they became my good friends.”
