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.

Making a difference in Swaziland is no small task. Roughly 25 percent of children in the African country have contracted HIV/AIDS. In the rural area of Gamula, about 70 percent of the community is unemployed, most living on about a dollar a day. As Peace Corps volunteers, Tristan Estes and Rachel Manring are doing their best to make everyday improvements there.

Now the 2008 graduates live in a stone and mud house without electricity or running water. At Flagler, Manring studied communication and Estes was a theatre major. To prepare for their move, the married couple completed two months of training on topics like health, culture, safety and language — a particular challenge, Manring said, because siSwati is “full of clicks and sounds that don’t exist in English.”

They have also battled frequent illness since their departure to Gamula, including Manring’s bout of swine flu in September. But despite the challenges they face, Estes and Manring are enjoying the chance to stretch their boundaries, live with a host family and become part of a new community. Manring’s main tasks are working with school health/anti-AIDS clubs and running self-confidence building workshops for orphans and other vulnerable children. Estes primarily works at a clinic and a preschool, in addition to helping with the workshops.

“These children often feel unloved, hopeless and depressed,” Manring said. “Confidence building is vital because if children feel good about themselves and know that people believe in them, they are more likely to believe in themselves … A better value of life leads to hopes and dreams for the future, which leads to positive decision making.”

Estes said sustainable development work is never a quick fix; he and Manring hope the workshops’ most immediate effects will be improved grades and school attendance.

“Development work isn’t just about building huge structures and throwing money at problems,” he said. “It’s more about interpersonal and small-scale things that can empower people to change their lives.”

The resilience of the community has surprised and sustained Manring during the tough adjustment to life in Gamula.

“Most of the people in our community have been through so much … death of family members, disease, hunger, drought, lack of clean water, emotional trauma, the stigmatization of HIV/AIDS, and abuse,” she said. “They make it through another day, support each other the best they can, and simply try to enjoy their lives. They genuinely want to improve the quality of life for themselves and their community members. This is what inspires us and makes us glad to serve.”

Read more about Estes’ and Manring’s Peace Corps experience on their blog: http://rachandtre.livejournal.com/

Mallory Needleman gets paid to listen to horror stories. As an assistant outreach and archival researcher at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., she catalogues and fact checks interviews with survivors, witnesses and perpetrators of the Nazi Germany genocide that killed roughly 6 million European Jews.

The 2008 Flagler alumna works with about 1,600 of the museum’s audio and video accounts of the Holocaust’s everyday atrocities: not just the typical shootings and mass graves, but unexpected details – like a neighbor who found the village’s Jewish tailor with all his teeth gone, pulled for their tiny gold fillings.

“There’s still a part of me that just doesn’t understand,” Needleman said. “About 95 percent of the museum’s stuff is in a warehouse, and we switch things out … One day, I started breaking down crying.

“I looked to the left of me, and staring me straight in the face were three cans of the Zyklon B. It’s the most ironic kind of thing because it says ‘POISONOUS, USE WITH CAUTION,’ and it was used to kill millions and millions of people … My boss told me, ‘Everybody has their little things. Mine is the hair.’ We have bags and bags of hair, and some of it is braided, and some of it has that baby curl to it. He can’t work with it.”

Needleman has spent her entire college career trying to understand the Holocaust. She studied history and international relations at Flagler and took classes that fascinated her, like Dr. Tim Johnson’s course on Christian-Jewish relations. Now, Needleman is finishing a master’s degree in Jewish studies at Towson University. While her tasks at the museum sometimes stress her, Needleman said she feels lucky to be contributing to a subject she’s passionate about.

“This is a generation that is leaving,” she said. “We need to be able to say 100 years from now that the Holocaust happened … It sounds cheesy, but knowledge is power. If you don’t know, then you’re just going to fall to the depths of ignorance.

“People ask me why the Holocaust happened, and it’s not one thing. These things could happen again today. It’s a destructive economy. It’s the loss of a war. It’s a very influential leader. It’s, ‘We need to find someone to blame this on.’ ”

Needleman’s goal at the Holocaust Museum is to make sure the interviews are as factual as possible, translated into various languages and easy to search; this will allow historians and scholars to access as much reliable information and testimony about the Holocaust as possible.

Currently, she helps coordinate 52 volunteer translators who are working on 70 interviews in 16 languages. Each hour-long interview takes about a month to translate.

Needleman said maybe 20 or so of the museum’s in-house oral history accounts are from admitted perpetrators. She said those interviews are often enlightening, but especially disturbing. Needleman recalled one man in particular: “He gives me chills because he speaks about the Holocaust in the way I think about it: in terms of gray areas,” she said. “Is the perpetrator the person who shot the gun? Or is the perpetrator the person who looked away and refused to hide the neighbor?

“He was one of the mass shooters. He took all their valuables and shot them into graves … And he’s talking about this family, and he’s being honest. He’s like, ‘Well, I shot the dad, and then I shot the kids,’ and he’s just saying systematically what he did. And he says, ‘Being a dad, could you imagine seeing your kid shot? … I did him a favor by killing him first.’ ”

Needleman says such ethical gray areas are important to examine if society wants to prevent future genocides. In addition to her studies, she has traveled to Germany and will soon be visiting Poland to get a clearer picture of both Holocaust history and contemporary culture in the area.

They are faces she can’t get out of her mind. Stories that are now etched in her consciousness — that haunt, or even inspire her on a daily basis.

For Kathy O’Keefe, a 1980 alumna and Flagler College’s former alumni director, the nine-day trip to Kigali, Rwanda, this past summer was something she could only describe as a life-changing experience.

Audio Slideshow: Kathy O’Keefe Speaks About Trip to Rwanda

“I don’t really know how you process [everything I experienced],” she said of the trip, which coincided with the 15-year anniversary of the genocide that killed an estimated 1 million Rwandans. “I think what you do is you just say, ‘It’s a part of my life now.’ Every day I think of certain people who might as well be family members.”

The trip was organized by Seattle’s Luis Palau Ministry, which has been working in Rwanda on a number of service projects. O’Keefe took part in several, including helping to pour concrete floors in what will become homes for women and children who were victims of the genocide.

But for O’Keefe, the trip wasn’t just about service or getting a better grasp of Rwanda’s horrific past. Rather, it was as much about building relationships and making connections with women who had suffered through unimaginable atrocities, as well as orphaned children, many of whom are living with HIV/AIDS.

“You go in and every single person you interact with is a survivor, on some level, of a murder in their family,” she said. “So that is really tough because people want to share their story, and when they do it’s just heartbreaking.”

O’Keefe said she struggled to comprehend how a nation could be gripped by such brutality. But she also said it is a country that is moving forward — focused more on its future than what tore it apart in the past.

“They are an incredible people with a vision of reconciliation and renewal for Rwanda,” she said. “They believe the tribal lines have, at least, blurred, and they have an incredible hope for the future.”

O’Keefe, who stepped down as Flagler’s alumni director in late 2009 to pursue new opportunities, said she intends to go back to Rwanda to see people she now feels so close to.

“Their story has become a part of our lives,” she said. “It is not the place to go if you don’t want to own the story.”

O’Keefe wasn’t the only Flagler grad on the trip. Her son, Tucker, ‘06, and alumnus Ray Spencer, ’94, also traveled with the group.

For Flagler alumnus Clark McCarthy-Miller, ‘08, being a producer’s assistant has meant working on miscellaneous commercials, small movies and television shows. But that all changed when a friend set him up on an interview with a family that would change his life — the now infamous Gosselins, stars of TLC’s reality show, “Jon and Kate Plus Eight.”

After interviewing for the position with four others, the Gosselins handpicked him to work on the show. McCarthy-Miller could be seen on the show’s highest-rated season four opener where he helped the Gosselin family prepare for a birthday bash for the sextuplets.

The Gosselins’ bitter divorce recently brought “Jon and Kate” — which followed the family of one set of twins and younger sextuplets — from popular cable show to tabloid fodder. McCarthy-Miller went along for the ride until the show ended this past fall.

“While I was in communication classes (at Flagler), I was daydreaming about working on movies mainly and didn’t really consider how much I would love television,” he said. “But working on this show and a few other shows here and there, I have really fallen in love with television production.”

His daily tasks included anything that needed to be done to get the show on the air, including running to the airport or loading up the work van. He also took notes about certain shots or scenes that later could be helpful in the editing room.

“It is important that we stay on our game the whole time we are there because there are usually a million things going on at once with eight kids running around,” he said. “The kids are so cute, it is impossible to put into words. Every time I see them, they seem to amaze me in a different way. Seeing them grow up in front of you is incredible.”

The season premiere also included shots of the paparazzi preying on the Gosselins, and McCarthy-Miller was often called and harassed for leaks about Jon and Kate.

“When I started working on the show it was already popular, but didn’t have as much buzz as it does now,” he said. “It has been a real privilege working on a show that has been in the public spotlight for quite some time now.”

But McCarthy-Miller says all the extra attention didn’t really affect his day-to-day routine all that much.

“It is strange to see yourself in magazines, but it really doesn’t affect the work,” he said.

As members of St. Augustine band The Wobbly Toms, Andy Calvert, Zach Lively and Richard Steinmeyer have been entertaining locals for years with their unique blend of folk, punk and rock.

The three men, all Flagler alumni, and all English majors, have been firm friends since their post-grad days.  In fact, they spent much of their free time at Flagler at WFCF and playing in bands — a preview of things to come.

Calvert, in fact, was WFCF’s very first music director.

“Radio stations don’t come in a box,” said Dan McCook, the station manager since its inception in 1993.  “I wasn’t well-versed in alternative [rock].  So, here we needed a music director, and we got Andy.  And he did an outstanding job.”

The Wobbly Toms’ local pedigree is deep.  The trio of Calvert (on bass), Steinmeyer (banjo) and Lively (guitar) were previously members of two of St. Augustine’s popular local bands of the early 1990s.

Lively and Steinmeyer were original members of a band called The Fruitless Lust Sox; Steinmeyer left, and formed the Misunderstood, which eventually Calvert joined until they broke up in 1994.

After graduation, the trio split.  Lively moved to Seattle and Steinmeyer to Kentucky.  Calvert stayed in St. Augustine and got married.

“In late 2002, I headed back to town and found refuge in the Calvert’s attic,” Lively said.  “A few months later, Richard found a new home in the same attic.”

Calvert, ‘95, Lively,’94, and Steinmeyer, ‘94, spent their time brewing beer and playing music.  An incident involving a friend and two bottles of strong mead would later play a role in the naming of the band.

“After a couple months of just jamming, we got to a point where we wanted to play a gig,” Lively said. “So we booked Christmas Eve, 2003 at Backstreets. Not having a name, we remembered our inebriated friend – and thus The Wobbly Toms now had a name.”

The band has now grown to seven members and made a name for itself as one of St. Augustine’s premier local groups, in a city with a burgeoning music scene.

It’s an unusual, but good, jumble of styles that has become the Wobbly Tom’s signature sound.  Lively refers to it as “Appalachian Gypsy punk.”  Steinmeyer, on the other hand, said despite the group’s many various influences, they don’t fit into any specific genre of music.

They’ve covered songs as varied as Gogol Bordello’s “Start Wearing Purple” and the Cure’s “Lullaby.” They’ve played traditional Irish songs like “Whiskey in the Jar,” and they’ve got a solid core of originals, the best of which reflect either their nearly two-decade-long friendship or the city of St. Augustine itself.

“There’s nowhere in the world that you’d rather be,” one goes.  “We’ll toast your return to the city by the sea.”

“The band is part of our life,” Steinmeyer said. “The band keeps me sane.  I have a job because I have to make money … but this is what I do.”

“We’ve done a 180,” he said. “When I first got here there was a fight almost every day … I’ve had people threaten to shoot me. I’ve had kids take a swing at me.”

Fights are rare now. The 2007 Flagler graduate said the club currently has the highest rate of teen participation in the area, and the kids often see him as “one of their own.” Those changes might not have been possible, Black said, if he wasn’t good at basketball.

“In the beginning, that was my way of getting respect,” he said. “I was just really lucky that I was good at it.

“The frustrating thing was them not listening to me … the older kids wait to see who you are and if you’re real. It took them a little while to see that I was going to stick around … That’s how I knew I had to be here – because I knew I could change the atmosphere.”

Black started working at the Boys & Girls Club in 2005, when he was studying sports management and business administration at Flagler. In just a few years, he advanced from a part-time job as sports director to a career in the local club’s highest position: unit director.

The Boys & Girls Clubs of Northeast Florida have honored Black for his commitment to the non-profit organization, and he’s recently been named a “Most Valued Professional” and chairman of the regional chapter of the group’s professional association. Black oversees a variety of activities at the club, including sports, leadership training, community service and teen discussion groups that address issues like drugs and puberty.

“Prevention works,” Black said, adding that the Department of Justice has provided grants to the Boys & Girls Club because their programs help high-risk youth stay away from crime and gang violence. “I love what we can do with kids, and I see the impact every day.”

Because administrative tasks sometimes keep him behind a desk, he puts in extra time to make sure he interacts with the 50 to 80 children who come in for afterschool programs each day; he attends school plays, sports games and special weekend events.

The St. Augustine club keeps receiving good news. The program is preparing to move into a new facility on West King Street that will have about 15 times more space, and 17-year-old Renita Greene recently won the Youth of the Year Award from the Boys & Girls Clubs of Northeast Florida. Black and his wife, Shelli, have mentored the young woman for several years, and in 2008 the Department of Children and Families placed Greene and her 13-year-old sister, Erica, in the Blacks’ home.

Black said his professors at Flagler helped him prepare for his current roles in a variety of ways, but classes like “Sport Ethics” and “Sociology & Sport” were among his favorites.

“It makes sense that that’s what I liked,” he said. “[In my position,] you’re dealing with real issues that will test your ethics and morals.”

By learning about various socioeconomic backgrounds and how they apply to sports, Black said, he saw how coaches have to take different approaches when handling “a team out in the projects, versus out on the beach.”

Ultimately, Black said, truly caring about the children he meets has been the key to helping them.

“Kids learn from the adults in their lives, what they see and what they’re surrounded by,” he said. “They need somewhere to go to develop self worth and that sense of belonging … This is not so much as a job as it is a calling.”

Four years ago, when Jeremy Dean finished his documentary “Dare Not Walk Alone,” the 2002 Flagler alumnus had incurred $30,000 in debt. He spent countless hours securing interviews with reluctant subjects. And he wasn’t sure whether the film — which examines both St. Augustine’s role in the 1960s Civil Rights struggle and the Oldest City’s more modern inequalities — would ever find a receptive audience.

But in 2008, after numerous film festival awards, theatrical screenings and a DVD deal with Wal-Mart, “Dare Not Walk Alone” received its highest honor yet: an NAACP Image Award nomination in the category of Outstanding Documentary. Dean’s film was in good company – fellow nominees included the critically acclaimed Hurricane Katrina movie, “Trouble The Water,” along with documentaries produced by HBO, ESPN and CNN.

“We were really the only independent film [in the category],” Dean said. “But to be compared with other productions of that caliber was very rewarding. We didn’t win, but the nomination opened a lot of doors and gave us a stamp of approval from the African-American community, which was very helpful.”

Dean attended the 40th Annual NAACP Image Awards on Feb. 13 in Los Angeles, with Executive Producer Stephen Cobb. He came away from the experience in awe. “It was a pretty big moment for anyone dealing with issues of race and class,” Dean said. “All the biggest names were there: Beyonce, Jennifer Hudson, Stevie Wonder, Muhammad Ali, Russell Simmons. Once the major stars showed up, it was like being a spectator at a big performance.”

Dean said his biggest personal highlight was meeting the cast from HBO series “The Wire.” He acknowledges the benefit of making industry connections at such a major event. “Not to say that ‘Dare Not Walk Alone’ is going to get picked up by Fox or anything,” Dean laughed, “but it’s always good to meet people for future projects.”

Those projects include combining fine art and film, finishing a screenplay and developing a documentary about surfing in the inner city “favelas” – or shanty towns – of Brazil. Dean was also chosen to serve on the screening panel for the 2nd Annual New York Surf Film Festival.

After spending seven years of his life on “Dare Not Walk Alone,” Dean still remains involved, speaking on college campuses and at other engagements. . Cable channels Sundance and IFC recently passed on the film, but it’s still under consideration by HBO. “Our next big hope is for a television deal,” Dean said.

Laughing, he added, “I didn’t know this, but distributing an independent film takes almost as long as making it.”

For spring 2009 graduate Ryan MacManus, the past four years has had its lows – like being diagnosed with the debilitating Crohn’s disease that nearly ended his cross country running career.

But there have been far more highs, like battling back to top running form and being named 2008 Independent Runner of the Year. He even landed an internship with the FBI in what he hopes will eventually lead to a career as a criminal profiler.

Those accomplishments seemed out of reach in the spring of 2006 while MacManus was running on Flagler’s cross country team. He was experiencing constant fatigue, stomach aches and head aches, and finished last in a race in Gainesville – far from ordinary for an extraordinary runner.

He was eventually diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a severe inflammatory bowel disease that leads to an obstruction of the intestine and the formation of scar tissue. “I went from running 10 to 15 miles a day and loving it, to being told that walking up the stairs could put my heart into arrest,” he said.

MacManus was forced to cease strenuous activity for three months. “It certainly put things into perspective,” he said. “It gave me a new appreciation for being healthy and watching what I put into my body, because every decision can make a difference. And most importantly, running became more fun than ever.”

The results of MacManus’ newly found dedication were never clearer than during the 2008 season when he led the Flagler team to a 17th-place finish in the NCAA Division II South Regional.

His time in the classroom at Flagler, where he was a psychology major with a criminology minor, also ended pretty spectacularly. MacManus spent the spring semester interning at the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Quantico, Va., in the Behavioral Sciences Unit. He worked with field agents gathering research on subjects like workplace violence, sexual offenders, child pornography and counterterrorism.

Shared interests and a chance contact with award-winning author John Bowe have led Diana Briggs, ‘07, down a promising editorial career path with a job working on his upcoming book.

“If someone had told me two months ago that I’d be in Hayes, Kan., I would not have believed them,” she said.

Small-town Kansas is exactly where Diana Briggs found herself this past spring. She spent most of February and March passing through towns in the American West, stopping in each long enough to gather love stories. That’s right, she’s talking to people about love.

Briggs was recruited by Bowe to interview people for his upcoming book, “Mine: Americans Talk About Love.” The book is due out in time for Valentine’s Day 2010.

Bowe is the co-editor of “Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs” and author of “Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy.” It might seem like a leap from slave labor to love, but it was Bowe’s book on that subject that brought him and Briggs together.

After seeing his appearance on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” Briggs Googled Bowe and found an interview with him. She e-mailed the interviewer, and a few days later, received an e-mail from Bowe himself. He became a mentor for Briggs, who at the time was working with the Ritz Carlton in an effort to get fair-trade products into the hotel.

“I got a hold of him to see what he was into,” Briggs recalled. “He wanted me to help him with this book he was starting.”

She flew to New York to meet up with Bowe, who promised to make it worth her time if she stuck with him. Next thing she knew, Briggs was on a plane to Colorado, set to return a month or so later. After the Rocky Mountain state, she followed roads to Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.

In each town she’d hit up coffee shops, post fliers about the book with her phone number, and wait.

“For the most part it’s a feeling,” Briggs said. “I’d strike up a conversation with someone, tell them what I’m doing, and it turns into the best interview — conversation, really.”

When she ran into trouble in Kansas, where no one seemed to be biting on the love-story line, she just walked into a thrift store and shouted, “Does anyone have any love stories?”

“When you’re yourself with someone, they’ll do anything for you,” Briggs said. “I still talk to a lot of people that I’ve interviewed. I can’t tear myself away to find out what’s happening next in their love lives.”

After a few short weeks at home in Venice, Fla., she was back out on the road again to New Orleans, Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee in a search for more love stories.