In an effort to stand out in the vanilla world of business casual, attorney and Flagler alumnus Ben Meredith, ‘07, began wearing bowties to work. Nearly a year later, he’s turned his personal style into a profitable business.

Meredith owns Starboard Clothing Co., selling more than 20 styles of bowties, with a new winter line that came out in late 2011.

Meredith says he was always a fan of dressing “preppy,” but also knew that as an attorney, he would have to wear more traditional suiting. And that’s where the bowties came in.

“I ran through my seven–tie collection pretty quickly and began looking for other options,” he said. “I decided, on a whim, to wear the sole bowtie I owned to work one Friday.”

To his surprise, he got a lot of compliments. Meredith said he was hooked and began buying more bowties, but he never really intended to start a business. He was really just looking for a way to stand out and still look professional.

“After looking at the construction of the ties and fabrics in person, I thought to myself, ‘Well I could do this,’ ” Meredith said.

He started making the ties for himself using an antique Singer sewing machine he found on Craigslist for $35. With a little help from his grandmother, Meredith taught himself to sew from reading about it online. He admits, though, that his first project wasn’t exactly his best work.

“It was not adjustable, and it was not very good, but it was a start,” he said.

As he got better at making bowties, he began wearing some of the ones he made, using gingham and other fabric that wasn’t widely available.

When he told a few people that he was making his own neckwear, friends started asking him to make bowties for them. After putting up a website to deal with the orders he was receiving, requests eventually came in from all over. He gradually turned his initial $70 investment into a gross profit of more than $10,000.

“It has brought me to a place I never expected to be,” he said.

Still, the popularity of his bowties doesn’t surprise him all that much.

“In a world where business casual is becoming the norm, more and more people are splitting the difference by wearing a bowtie with a sweater and jeans,” Meredith said. “It allows people to stand out, but to do so in a good way. People are embracing that.”

Read Ben Meredith’s blog, Bowties and Boat Shoes.

It was once a grand, sunlit gathering space for Ponce de Leon hotel guests. In the college’s early days it served as a one-of-a-kind library and occasional classroom.

Now it’s been closed off for nearly 40 years and with its locked doors and stacks of old furniture, has become the subject of speculation by many Flagler students over the years. But now the Solarium is getting a second chance as the college plans to start renovations of the gorgeous domed area above the Rotunda.

The mysterious fourth floor
Few remember the days when the college’s Solarium was open for student use. In fact, it was used as the library in only the earliest days of the college before it was closed due to safety concerns.

When alumna Linda (Hall) Mignon, ’71, was a theatre arts major in the early 70s, she had a class with Tom Rahner under the Solarium’s soaring dome.

Mignon recalled Rahner telling his class to lie down on the floor and pick a spot on the ceiling. He then told them to stare at that spot and not to think about anything.

“I think I held out for 30 seconds,” Mignon said.

It took a recent trip to the Solarium for Mignon to remember even having been up there. She barely remembered the fourth floor at all.

In those days, just a handful of classes were held in the area, and the Gargoyle — the student newspaper — had its office down a narrow corridor on the east wing off the solarium. But its main use was the library — until it had to be closed for lack of a proper fire escape route.

Flagler College President William T. Abare Jr. remembers moving the books from the Solarium to what is today the Flagler Room.

“We formed a human chain to move the books,” he said. “Each book in the library was handed down individually. We didn’t use carts to move them en masse.” Once the books were relocated, the Solarium was closed off.

Over the years, the Solarium and its winding east corridor have become almost legend in Flagler College lore. By the time Kirk Damato, ‘01, was arts and entertainment editor for the Gargoyle in 2001, it was too tantalizing to pass up. He managed to tag along with some friends on a rare “authorized” trip to the fourth floor for a bit of exploring.

“Oh, of course, the forbidden floor was a place I’d always wanted to see,” he said. “I remember it being a lot more open than one would expect.”

When he found an old bulletin board in what used to be the Gargoyle office, he carved his name and the date into the aging cork. But much like Mignon, he barely remembers being in the Solarium. The board, which has since been relocated to the Gargoyle office in the Proctor Library, still bears his name.

“I absolutely didn’t remember carving my name on that bulletin board,” he said. “I was pretty shocked, actually, to see it.”

Henry Flagler’s vision, reinvented
Once renovations are complete, the Solarium and its surrounding rooftop terraces won’t be so mysterious, but the views will be striking.

The domed Solarium rises above the St. Augustine skyline as the centerpiece of Ponce de Leon Hall – today a National Historic Landmark. When Henry Flagler built his Gilded Age hotel in the nation’s oldest city in 1888, it served as a winter haven for the nation’s elite. The Solarium was one of many gathering places inside the hotel, but this one provided unparalleled, panoramic views of the city, and that will be a focal point of the renovation.

The space will be restored to much of its previous grandeur, along with some modern conveniences. The idea is for limited special events to be hosted there, along with the accompanying east and west terraces. Rooms to the east of the dome will also be given a new life.

Because of the historic nature of the structure, plans for its renovation and ultimate use are still tentative. But Abare says he hopes to host special events in the area once it’s complete.

The Solarium itself is quite different from the other parts of the former hotel. The large floor-to-ceiling windows on all four sides allow light to pour in. The center of the room is flanked with eight square columns, supporting vaulted walls, leading to a ribbed, wooden ceiling.

The design of the Solarium both encloses the space, bathing visitors with light and warmth, and, simultaneously, invites their exploration of the large roof terraces outside.

Board of Trustees member Delores Lastinger and her husband, Allen, have already committed a $500,000 challenge gift to the project.

The Lastingers have long been committed to historic preservation through philanthropy. Delores called the project a perfect fit because of her and Allen’s interest in Florida and St. Augustine history.

“It has been, and will once again become, one of the many jewels of the original Ponce de Leon,” she said.

The college has already matched the first $100,000 of the Lastinger’s donation and will match the full amount. This gift helped to kick off a full-fledged campaign to raise money for the Solarium renovation.

“The Solarium and fourth floor are the last major spaces of Ponce de Leon Hall to be restored and would truly be the crowning achievement in preserving Flagler’s heritage,” said F. Mark Whittaker, vice president of Institutional Advancement.

Celebrating the Ponce
The restoration is scheduled to be complete by 2013, just in time for a year-long celebration of the 125th anniversary of the opening of the Hotel Ponce de Leon.

The college has kicked off a major fundraising campaign to help advance the restoration efforts.

Naming opportunities in the Solarium range from $10,000 to $500,000, each of which can be pledged over a period of five years.

Visit www.flagler.edu/support-our-vision for more information or call (904) 819-6437.

Of all the news coming out of predominantly Muslim countries, many of the women living there wish the Western media spoke more about women who are fighting against repression and less about the abuses they endure.

Alumna Cassandra Schaffa, ’05, found herself helping spread that very message after she answered an ad on Craigslist last year. Schaffa was in her last year of her master’s degree in cinema studies at New York University when she stumbled upon an ad for an internship at a unique film festival.

Women’s Voices Now was conceived as a way to empower women in the Muslim world by putting cameras in their hand. It evolved to include stories of Muslim women living as minorities around the world and women of all faiths living in predominantly Muslim countries.

Schaffa, a communication and Spanish major, says the idea was simple: “If you give somebody who is facing an issue a camera, then they can highlight their own circumstance. They are being given a voice and being empowered.”

Over the course of 14 months, Schaffa, along with the other staff members, reviewed submissions, secured judges and promoted the fledgling film festival. But there was another aspect that needed special attention.

Because she had literally no personal experience with Islam, and none of the other women working at Women’s Voices Now were Muslim, Schaffa relied heavily on Muslim women to give them advice for the festival. What she heard intrigued her. These women didn’t want sympathy or pity. In fact, they wanted to stay away from a lot of what Western media had been reporting; they simply wanted to tell the world what great things they were doing to help themselves. They wanted a voice.

“What we heard was, ‘Yes, there are problems in these countries. But there are so many women who are empowered, so many women who are making changes within our countries.’ ”

Schaffa said they were able to tell those stories without even trying to steer the submissions in that direction. “We were very happy … that we weren’t getting the same information that was being provided on the traditional news sources, ” she said.

One of the more than 200 stories told through submissions to the festival was a 25-minute documentary of a female prosecutor in Afghanistan who was fighting for the rights of Muslim women. The word “women” is misleading, though.

One of the “women” she helped defend was a 9-year-old girl who had been married off by her father and beaten and burned by her husband for simply trying to sleep. It won first place in the documentary category.

Schaffa says people were shocked – not necessarily over the treatment of the women and girls highlighted in the film, because that was anticipated – but because they didn’t know you could make movies in Afghanistan, let alone that there were female prosecutors who fight for women’s rights.

And it wasn’t just the stories of women told in the films that influenced Schaffa. “What shocked me … was in terms of communication with people in these countries,” she said. “We’ve become more globally connected in the past 10 years or so. I never realized how much.”

Schaffa said she received emails from all over the world thanking her and Women’s Voices Now for their work with the festival. “[I remember thinking] there’s no way we’re going to reach that far into those countries,” she said.

Women’s Voices Now is continuing its work making sure these voices and stories are heard. They embarked on a university tour, booking lectures and screenings at American universities and even in Jordan and Qatar. Their goal is to give the films a longer shelf life.

“It would have been a waste to collect all these films and then not get them out there,” Schaffa said.

Some of the films are having larger impacts than simply story telling. One of the student films, called “Breast Cancer in Qatar – Overcoming Cultural Boundaries,” deals with healthcare in a country where women’s body parts are never talked about. “If a woman talks about a problem with her breasts, it’s taboo,” Schaffa said. “She’s suppose to be covered up.”

And so women stay in the dark about medical conditions, often to their detriment. But the film highlights an effort to raise awareness. Women are gradually becoming more comfortable discussing their health with doctors, and it’s becoming less embarrassing for women to seek treatment.

Schaffa, who has since moved on to look for more permanent work, says that film characterizes her goal for Women’s Voices Now.

“[The women are telling] the world their circumstance, but they’re also being given a voice,” she said.

For landscape architect Sharon Fowler, it’s all in the details. From signage and drainage systems to plazas and gardens, nearly everything on Flagler’s campus has seen a significant face lift in the last five years.

Having just completed a plaza at the west entrance to Kenan Hall, Fowler is now finishing up work on a new locker room facility at Flagler Field. But it’s the smaller details that make Fowler the most proud.

“You add up all the details, and people go ‘Wow, that campus is beautiful,’ but they don’t realize it’s because of the individual details,” she said.

In fact, her first project under contract to the college was to examine the historic campus and make suggestions to college President William T. Abare Jr. about areas she thought could be improved.

When she began her report, Fowler looked at the campus with fresh eyes. She pointed out an area of campus few had probably noticed: a small alcove in the south breezeway that had been boarded up and hidden for more than 20 years.

The boards and plexiglass were hiding the hotel’s original luggage drop. Upon checking in to the Ponce de Leon Hotel, guests’ luggage was taken to the breezeway and dropped at the top of four steps where a bellman retrieved the bags and brought them up to the guests’ rooms using a service elevator. The breezeway area has now been restored and provides a focal point to the stairs leading into the rotunda.

Once the initial improvement study was complete, Fowler was tasked with some of the major building projects on campus. She designed outdoor spaces for the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, the Ringhaver Student Center, the Molly Wiley Art Building, the Florida East Coast Railway buildings, and most recently a permeable drainage system behind Lewis House. There isn’t much on Flagler’s campus that escapes Fowler’s scrutiny.

This fall, students returned to a brand new plaza between Kenan Hall and the Lawrence Lewis Jr. Memorial Gazebo. But Director of Business Services Larry Weeks says it was a project nearly 30 years in the making — a plaza was on the original plans for the renovation of Kenan Hall.

“It was always meant to be,” Fowler said. “It was on the plans in the ‘80s to have a plaza.”

The original plaza sketch featured an Italian-style fountain, designed by retired art professor Enzo Torcoletti. Weeks says the plaza was beautiful, but didn’t have today’s students in mind.

The recently completed Kenan Plaza is a state-of-the-art outdoor gathering space, replete with movable tables and chairs, electrical outlets for students to plug in laptops, decorative lighting and a sustainable drainage system that eliminated the issue of standing water in front of Kenan Hall. There is no fountain, but there is a focal point: a granite accent in the center of the plaza that features the college logo.

It’s a beautiful area, with towering dactylifera palms, but Fowler is most proud of its more practical features. Within a week of classes starting, students were already using the space for studying and socializing. Fowler saw two students sitting at one of the tables with a laptop plugged in, and they were working on a project together.

“[They] were doing what I imaged them to do,” she said. “It looked like it was meant to be.”

The new plaza is certainly a focal point for Fowler’s work, but it’s the bigger picture that keeps her motivated. Weeks says you can already see the positive influence thanks to all of the smaller changes.

“You can’t put your finger on any one thing,” he said. “You see everything as a unit.”

Fowler says the historic buildings make the campus beautiful, but she says it’s also important when making improvements to make the campus inviting and maintainable, as well as to complement existing materials as much as possible.

“What I’m really passionate about and love about working with Flagler College is the variety of things I get to work on. Every project is unique.”

“If I’m working next to Kenan Hall, I’m totally influenced by Kenan Hall,” she said. “One of the things I love is you can really see Kenan Hall with the plaza finished. It’s a beautiful piece of architecture — striking really.”

Along with Weeks, Fowler is often seen on campus matching brick for walkways or selecting materials for campus projects.

“I really like to complement the architecture,” Fowler said. “And that’s why I painstakingly pick out materials. Respecting the historic materials is particularly my priority when I’m working.”

Fowler remembers going up in a cherry picker during the construction of the courtyard at the FEC buildings. She says she’s afraid of heights, but took the contractor’s offer to take a ride to the top of the building. She wanted the bricks on the new columns to match some existing bricks on the buildings.

It’s that attention to detail that initially attracted Abare’s attention. He was playing golf at the Red Tail golf course in Lake County and remarked how much he liked the entryway to the course. It included a covered bridge designed by Fowler to complement the golf course. Abare immediately knew he wanted to speak with the designer.

“I was impressed right away with her professionalism, her creativity, and her work ethic,” Abare said. She is a talented landscape architect who brings a great amount of creativity, imagination and dedication to her work.”

Fowler says there was never a doubt in her mind that she wanted the job.

“I think it took me a millisecond to say yes,” she said.

It’s been a labor of love ever since. In 2007 she helped redesign Sevilla Street from the Proctor Library to the Ringhaver Student Center. Thanks to Fowler’s suggestions, the street was made one-way and sidewalks were widened. The effect is dramatic. The area is much more friendly to pedestrian traffic and unifies the buildings on the western side of Sevilla Street with the West Lawn, Ponce de Leon Hall and the Molly Wiley Art Building.

“What I’m really passionate about and love about working with Flagler College is the variety of things I get to work on,” Fowler said. “Every project is unique.”

Fowler has even offered suggestions on areas that had been entirely overlooked. In fact, she updated the entrance to the maintenance area in the Kenan parking lot.

“I watched people walk down Valencia and look at the maintenance area,” Fowler said. “And I thought ‘This is a main view corridor.’ ”

It was a utilitarian area that served its purpose, but it was also highly visible to visitors. She sketched design solutions that eventually helped obscure some necessary ductwork. It’s certainly not as glamorous of a project as creating a new plaza, but Fowler is nonetheless proud of the accomplishments. The result is dramatic. Visitors now focus on the Gilded Age architecture instead of ductwork and pipes.

“I cannot say enough about the work that she has done for the college,” Abare said. “She has transformed the appearance of our campus.”

Photo by Scott Smith, '04

Sometimes roadblocks turn out to be open doors.

That’s what happened to history major Jillian McClure when she wanted to register for a religion class her sophomore year. When that class was full, she picked “Civil Rights Movement” with Dr. Michael Butler, and the rest, as they say, is history.

This past semester, McClure, 20, helped bring one of the country’s best-known Civil Rights activists — Ambassador Andrew Young, a former associate of Martin Luther King Jr. — to Flagler College, where he showed a new documentary about the civil rights struggles in St. Augustine. After that visit, Young decided to host the archives for the film and other important historical material at Flagler.

McClure plans to study southern culture and race relations in graduate school. But that wasn’t always the case; she discovered her passion for civil rights history almost by accident.

While in high school, she saw Flagler alumnus Jeremy Dean’s documentary “Dare Not Walk Alone,” which piqued her interest in the Civil Rights movement. It would be several years before she really began to truly understand the historical significance of St. Augustine during the Civil Rights Movement.

“I was just really amazed at what had happened here,” she said. “The colonial aspects of St. Augustine are talked about so much, and yet, there’s so much history of St. Augustine that happened in the 20th century that no one knows about.”

It was her first taste of St. Augustine’s civil rights history.

During her sophomore year at Flagler, McClure, now a senior, was just beginning to take classes for her history major, and she wanted to take a class because she liked a particular professor. When she discovered the class was full, she decided to enroll in Butler’s class on civil rights. The second-choice class turned out to be her favorite at Flagler. She had found her passion.

“I wasn’t ever intending to pursue it [race relations] … I just loved the class,” she said. And now she says, “I love this; this is what I want to do.”

Since then, McClure has been studying everything she can about southern culture and race relations. She says she loves interviewing people about their experiences even though it can be a bit nerve-wracking.

“It’s really wonderful to have so many resources here because I can study what I want to study and access it down the street from Flagler College and interview people who live in my home town,” she said. “And it’s really exciting at the same time because there is so much of it that’s been hushed and so much of it that isn’t exposed, so it’s really fun to discover new information.”

Perhaps it was the “hush” that masked the importance of an event mentioned in “Dare Not Walk Alone.” Dean had found footage of one of the turning points in Civil Rights in St. Augustine: a 1964 beating of Young, a friend and supporter of Martin Luther King Jr. who later became mayor of Atlanta and a United Nations Ambassador.

King had sent Young to disband increasingly violent protests in the Oldest City, but when Young saw the situation in St. Augustine, he decided to march alongside local residents — an event that would be a turning point in the movement nationwide. As Young attempted to cross a St. Augustine street while leading a peaceful march, he was brutally attacked and beaten unconscious. Young was arrested and didn’t even know the beating was taped until 2005 when he saw “Dare Not Walk Alone.” When he viewed the footage, he knew he needed to tell his story in his own words with his own documentary.

“It was really incredible to know that I was meeting these people who had participated in the civil rights movement and had done so much to bring about the Civil Rights Act and equality in America. I was just so incredibly grateful for what they had done. People were thanking me, and I was just saying, ‘No, thank you,’ because I’m just so appreciative of what they’ve done for everyone.”

Young was a key strategist and negotiator during the civil rights campaigns in Birmingham and Selma that resulted in the passage Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But many believe it was that historic street crossing in St. Augustine, which McClure and many other local residents had never even heard of, that served as the catalyst for the passage of the historic legislation.

“Andrew Young was never a name that really stuck with me,” McClure said. “Martin Luther King was the one who was talked about coming here all the time. I just never realized how important his [Young’s] role was in the Civil Rights Movement here until I was getting in to my research last semester.”

McClure was researching local demonstrators for a paper and Young’s name came up. She discovered that he was one of the few key figures still alive, and he was living relatively nearby in Atlanta. She decided to send him an e-mail and tell him about her project.

The immediate and enthusiastic response was overwhelming. Not only was he willing to answer her questions, but Young’s foundation also wanted to host an exclusive screening of their documentary, “Crossing in St. Augustine,” in the city where it had all happened. McClure was elated.

“I’m really excited for the doors this could open,” McClure said last February in an interview prior to the screening.

On Feb. 9, 2010, Young showed his documentary to a standing-room-only crowd in the Flagler College Auditorium. It was a historic event, not only for the prestige of having a former UN ambassador and mayor of Atlanta visit St. Augustine, but also because of the symbolism of Young being welcomed back with open arms to the city that had shunned him so many years ago.

“Freedom is a constant struggle,” Young told the audience after the film. “And you all made a significant contribution.”

McClure said she was in awe of the civil rights pioneers in attendance and found it odd that they were thanking her for bringing the documentary to St. Augustine.

“It was really incredible to know that I was meeting these people who had participated in the civil rights movement and had done so much to bring about the Civil Rights Act and equality in America,” she said. “I was just so incredibly grateful for what they had done. People were thanking me, and I was just saying, ‘No, thank you,’ because I’m just so appreciative of what they’ve done for everyone.”

McClure says she was grateful just for the opportunity to speak with Young. She didn’t expect anything more.

“I initiated the contact with him, but I was not expecting to play any kind of role,” she said. “[But] then getting to do a radio interview and a television interview and all of the stuff it was just really … exciting. I wouldn’t have traded it for anything, except maybe some sleep.“

She makes light of her role, but it’s hard to ignore McClure’s contribution to the legacy of Young’s historic 1964 visit. The interviews and other material used in the film will be given to the college for the creation of a civil rights archive chronicling the local struggle — clear evidence of McClure’s influence.

Butler, whose class sparked McClure’s interest, says the long-term impact of Young’s visit is “immeasurable.”

“Our hosting of the event is a step in the right direction, but it is going to take much more than participation in one event to move beyond 40-plus years of suspicion and hurt,” he said.

Butler also says the premier and the donation of the archive materials placed Flagler in a great position to participate in the preservation of the city’s civil rights legacy. In fact, Butler and College President William T. Abare Jr. were asked to serve on a committee looking at bringing a civil rights museum to St. Augustine.

“The material being donated by Ambassador Young [to the college] will provide an excellent foundation for building a collection on the important role of St. Augustine in the Civil Rights Movement,” Abare said.

Alumna Summer Bozeman’s passion for St. Augustine’s past turned into a paying gig when she was tapped to author a pictorial book on the Nation’s Oldest City.

When Bozeman graduated from Flagler in 2007, she bought several books on St. Augustine history and found herself fascinated by many of the historic photos.

One of the books the communication major bought was “St. Augustine in the Gilded Age,” from Arcadia Publishing. The book was chock full of Flagler-era photographs featuring St. Augustine landmarks and landscape. Bozeman began walking around the downtown area comparing the old pictures to what’s currently in those spots.

“I thought it would be really cool to make myself a scrapbook with old pictures and then the new pictures,” she said. “And maybe someone else would want that, too.”

Aracdia’s “Then & Now” series fit the bill. When Bozeman called the publisher, she found they had already been looking for someone to take on the project. Within a month she was digging through old photos and papers.

Bozeman did all the research for the book — searching archives and selecting photographs. Then she went out and recaptured the locations in her own photos. She climbed walls, moved branches, and even once had to lie down on top of a wall to get the shots. She says a lot of the shots were hard to get because the landscape has changed so much.

“In the past 100 years, a lot of people have planted a lot of trees,” Bozeman said. “No matter what shot I wanted, there was a big tree in the shot.”

She spent many hours working with the St. Augustine Historical Society and the Florida Archive in late 2008. With just four months to complete the book, Bozeman found it was the passion for the work – and a little help from her mother – that helped her stay on track.

Bozeman currently works as an intern for the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau in Macon, Ga., but she says she wouldn’t rule out working on another project like her St. Augustine book in the future. In fact, she recently helped her mother with a “Then & Now” book on Macon.

“I loved going through archives … putting my hands in all those letters and newspaper clippings, and the research was so much fun,” she said.

College President William T. Abare Jr. recently approved the updates after a study of existing logos and visuals used by the college. Abare says the need to redesign was largely driven by confusion over which college logo was the “official” visual identity.

“It became clear to me that we need a single, universal College logo,” Abare said.

The college has chosen a logo that reflects the best of Flagler’s heritage, history and traditions. At the same time, it also attaches itself to the hearts of the Flagler College family by retaining a part of one of Flagler’s previous logos that students, faculty, staff and alumni have embraced over the years: the rampant lion.

“We found that many of our constituents have a deep-seeded attachment to the lion, but we also knew it wasn’t distinctly Flagler,” Abare said.

For that reason, the new logo combines the familiar rampant lion with a new shield element that signifies strength and stability.

“We now have a logo that truly reflects the prestige of Flagler College,” Abare said.

Also, the school colors were updated from the yellow and red of the Spanish flag to a more sophisticated crimson and gold. A warm gray was added as an accent color to provide additional depth and to permit some flexibility for the athletic teams, who were looking to achieve a more consistent color scheme for uniforms and facilities.

The changes will go into effect on March 1. The athletic teams will also roll out a new logo later this year using the new Flagler crimson and gold.

Mike Galluzzi, ’88, is in the business of space. And right now the space business is in a period of transition.

The current shuttle program is set to retire by September 2010, leaving a gap in human space transportation for at least a few years while the new “Constellation” program takes off. Constellation’s plans echo the heyday of the space program with exploration of the moon and eventually manned missions to Mars.

One of Galluzzi’s jobs as NASA’s supply chain manager for the Explorations Systems Mission Directorate is to help ease the transition by streamlining common processes and eliminating redundancies — even looking at ways to use the resources on the lunar surface as part of the interplanetary supply chain. He calls it “designing for sustainment.”

“When you look at us going to the moon and beyond, I like to say ‘Spares are not an option,’ ” he said. “We really have to be focused on what we call the ‘ilities,’ which is reliability, maintainability, supportability and more importantly, affordability, and from an agency perspective, accountability.”

With the significant time gap between human space flight programs, it is unknown whether the companies that supply components of the shuttle will still be producing the same products. Galluzzi says this is the key to his line of work. It’s not just about streamlining current business practices. It’s also about ensuring these same processes can be applied to future programs as well.

“What we’re [NASA’s] designing today may be obsolete when we get up to production,” he said. “So it’s my job to ensure a healthy supply base and ensure that we’re flexible and agile enough to allow the engineering community to design in the next evolution or innovative product.”

At the end of the day, space exploration is still a business. But because of its unique challenges — NASA is entering uncharted territory with the Constellation program — existing business models don’t always apply. Missions to the moon are no longer a week-long “camping trip.” The goal is in-depth, long-term space exploration, and that creates new supply chain dilemmas. Any delay in parts or supplies increases exponentially the moment you leave Earth. Galluzzi has invented software that could help to solve some of those problems.

Prime Supplier™ is a one-of-a-kind supply chain simulation software, which NASA is pursuing a patent on. He developed the software to look at the percentage of business NASA generates for its suppliers, which are shared with the Department of Defense and the aerospace industry as a whole, and to help NASA determine mutually beneficial systems, pooling of resources, etc.

Galluzzi says his philosophy comes from a basic economic concept he learned at Flagler: supply and demand.

“How do you adjust to changing economic and customer demands?” he said. “That is essentially the foundation that I built everything else on, from Prime Supplier, to simulation, to possibly ultimately influencing policy for the agency.”

In an industry where the average civilian worker is an engineer, Galluzzi gets to use his knowledge of business to influence processes that could be used for years to come. But that career path wasn’t always clear.

After graduating from Flagler on a baseball scholarship, Galluzzi was somewhat torn. Within the course of two weeks he had three possible career options: play baseball in Italy, become an Air Force pilot or work in the space industry. Three choices that, in his mind, were dreams come true.

Galluzzi says the decision to join Rockwell International Space Systems Division and work as a logistics engineer on the environmental control and life support system for the space shuttle seemed like the best chance for a long-term career.

“I had the most unique opportunities fall into my lap,” he said. “Then the offer from Rockwell came. So I thought it’s time for me to quit playing around and grow up.”

Galluzzi has “grown up” immersed in business, from that first job at Rockwell, to returning to school for more specialized training, to owning his own company. It’s all helped him understand those basic supply and demand principles even more. But business models aside, Galluzzi really believes in the objectives of space exploration.

“When you start seeing the next vehicle … you start saying ‘Wow, I want more of this. We’ve got to do more.’ When I first stepped into the lunar rover (LER), I thought, ‘I want more … we need to go to Mars.’ We need to do all of these things, and the timeline, from my personal standpoint, is too long. We need to become agile and come up with quicker design and contracting processes.”

That includes looking out for the types of scenarios that will eliminate situations like on Apollo 13 when NASA scientists literally had to find a way to fit a square peg into a round hole because parts weren’t interchangeable.

It’s undeniably a tall order to fill, but Galluzzi tries to stay focused on the big picture.

“There are times when you just stand back [and realize the magnitude of what you are doing],” he said, “but I try not to let that happen. I must stay focused and not be so lost in the fog of admiration that you lose touch with what’s important. Literally people can get hurt if you don’t focus.”

Of course, when you spend your days “seeing what some might consider science fiction become reality,” it’s hard not to live every day in awe of your surroundings.

“We really do work with rocket scientists,” he said.
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Sánchez describes her art as “exploding optimism.” A colorful mix of shapes and textures, the effect is quite upbeat, but Sánchez, ’97, says that is rarely her intent.

“The movement and colors that are used take this happiness because of the colors,” she said. “And I don’t intentionally create happy paintings. That just comes out.”

To say she works in mixed media would be an understatement. Sánchez’s art is an intriguing medley of acrylic paint, markers, pens, highlighters, paint pens, cut paper, pencil and ink. She creates on both canvas and paper. But most surprising of all is what inspires her distinctly geometric work.

After graduating from Flagler with degrees in fine art and graphic design, Sánchez didn’t set off to start her career as an artist. Instead, she joined the Peace Corps.

“I wanted to serve, and I didn’t want to focus on me,” she said. “I joined the Peace Corps to get a different perspective on life and to serve the community.”

Those experiences had an effect on her art, but Sánchez says she didn’t realize it until a few years later.

“The colors in Africa really influenced my work,” she said. “I was in a rural mud hut, with a thatched roof, hours away from a city. I just couldn’t get over that three-quarters of my frame of vision was sky.”

She was equally entranced by the African lifestyle.

“There is no frivolity,” Sánchez said. “Everything you do in a day is to survive. You spend time going to get water, collecting wood for burning. I remember thinking that I was privileged that I could paint — that I had the materials and time that I could paint.”

And that freedom to paint has helped her earn a grant from the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance and a residency with the Robert M. MacNamara Foundation as well as exhibits in galleries in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Atlanta, to name a few. Ultimately, she credits her love of color and her understanding of it to a class she took at Flagler with art professor Don Martin.

“I got a lot of support at Flagler,” she said. “No one was competitive, like a lot of art schools can be. If someone’s strong point was color or sculpting in clay or casting, that was the person you went to for advice and help. Everyone played off everyone else’s strengths. Everyone helped each other.”

For more of Jennifer Sanchez’s art, visit www.miss-sanchez.com.

In a secluded graveyard, simple labels like “mother” and “grandmother” peek out from slabs of cement, colored brightly with shades of pink and blue. Love is apparent there, as is the lack of money loved ones have to spend on deceased relatives.

But right next to the makeshift plots, separated only by a transparent fence, sits the pristine and modern Evergreen Cemetery. Visitors would have to move branches and step through weeds and overgrowth to get back to this “other” area, where the dates on the markers are as recent as 1990.

Audio Slideshow: Photo Essay by Haley Walker

Senior Haley Walker found this stark contrast between the haves and have-nots in West Augustine while completing a project for a Flagler College photojournalism class that also ran in The St. Augustine Record’s monthly publication, Drift.

“[The plots are] old, but not from a time when people should have to be doing this to bury their loved ones,” Walker said.

The communication major and editor of the Flagler newspaper, The Gargoyle, wanted to learn more about the cemetery and its lonely neighbor, but she wanted to tell the story in a different way.

“I didn’t want to interview anyone and intrude to ask what this [area] was,” Walker said. “So I started taking photos to document the difference between the areas.”

The link she found between the life a person lives and his ability to pay for a final resting place comes across in her photos. In this, the poorest community in St. Augustine, some could only afford simple concrete slabs, plastic fencing and acrylic paint, while others had granite monuments and manicured lawns.

“The things we see in life will also carry over into death,” she said. “They’re still in poverty. The people who cannot afford to buy a house can’t afford to pay for a gravestone for their loved ones. So they have to make their own gravestones … right next to beautiful, granite stones.”