It began 40 years ago with a plan that must have seemed a bit crazy to some: Take a former luxury hotel that had seen better days and convert it to an all-women’s liberal arts college in the heart of the Nation’s Oldest City.

With fewer than 200 students, Flagler first started classes in 1968 and the college struggled through its early years before it was reorganized in 1971 under the leadership of new President William L. Proctor.

But 40 years later — with a rising reputation, thriving enrollment and award-winning programs — no one would doubt what an incredible idea it was to put a college in what is today a National Historic Landmark.

As Flagler celebrates its 40th anniversary, take a look back at those formative years when cars still rolled through the breezeway and students sent letters — not e-mail — to folks back home.

More Info: 40 Years of Flagler

“I still get a rush every time it happens,” Thomas Graham said. “Every time I see a student out in the world, achieving something, and I realize that’s the same quiet girl who sits in the back of my class. These students are high achievers — they’re doers. I’m always pleasantly surprised by the capabilities of my students.”

His sentiment rings true for all three retirees, each of whom has seen tremendous changes in the size, technological capabilities and culture of Flagler College. When Graham started in 1973, the college enrolled just 300 students.

“In those days, we all knew each other,” he said. “Today I see new faces all the time, but I think the culture of the College has prevailed, and we are still at our core a group of supportive and creative people.”

When Lou Preysz joined the faculty in 1982, Kenan Hall was still a vacant building.

“We had classes in Ponce Hall, in Markland House, in the Billiard Room,” Preysz said. “There was an old Coast Guard building where the gazebo is today. There was no Proctor Library, no Student Center. It was a different place.”

Graham realized the importance of being involved in the early growth of the college.

“Flagler gave us a chance to invent something,” he said. “We were a part of something. We were creative. We made it happen.”

Graham, a native of Miami, was debating several job offers when he threw his hat into the ring with the 5-year-old college in St. Augustine. “I saw this as an opportunity to get in on the ground floor — literally — and write the future,” he said.

When Preysz took a pleasure trip to St. Augustine in 1982, he was feeling burned out from a long career in banking. The former Florida Army National Guard Captain had been teaching part-time and looking for a full-time position. As he drove down Cordova Street he saw a faded sign: “Flagler College.”

“I have to admit, my first reaction was, ‘My gosh, there’s a college here?’” he remembers. “I pulled in and started wandering the campus. I ran into Dean [Robert] Carberry and pitched him right there on the spot. The rest, I guess you would say, is history.”

In addition to his role as associate professor of business administration, Preysz is known for his service as adviser to Flagler’s Society for Advancement of Management. Preysz recently led the Flagler SAM team to an unprecedented eighth national championship.

By the time Tom Pace signed on in 1996, the college was celebrating the grand opening of Proctor Library. He served as an education professor throughout his tenure and as Chair of the Education Department until 2004. A key force in securing Florida Department of Education accreditation and the state-mandated ESOL endorsement for Flagler, Pace remains unassuming about his professional achievements.

“When I came, all the faculty had been here a long time,” he said. “Now we see much
of the old guard handing over the reins to a younger generation of faculty. I think that’s a good thing. I like progress. It’s very exciting to think about where Flagler is going to be in the next 40 years.”

The new Crisp-Ellert Art Museum hosted Flagler’s first juried student art show this spring, giving students from all majors a chance to show off their talent, have their work judged by professionals and – in a few cases – make some money.

Nearly 300 students submitted artwork created in a variety of media, from sculpture to paintings to looping film displays. “It was one of the best shows we’ve had so far,” said Sarah Kelly, director of the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum. “Their work was of the highest caliber and really showed some great inventiveness and creativity.”

First place and $100 went to Sierra Strasburger for her oil painting, “Il Futuro.” Addie Hassel won second place for an intricate wire piece entitled “Grandma’s Lace,” and Kaitlyn Thompson took third place for her graphic design entry, “Billy’s (Mid-life) Crisis.”

None of the artwork on display was priced, but Kelly said she put several interested buyers in touch with the student artists. Several pieces sold.

The museum on Sevilla Street opened in December. Artist and author Dr. JoAnn Crisp-Ellert and her husband, Robert Ellert, donated the historic property and art collection to the college.

Kelly said she’s planning a variety of public events at the museum. A faculty show is scheduled for this fall, and nationally and internationally acclaimed visiting artists will exhibit their work, lecture and work on projects with students during the next year.

The claustrophobia set in when Michael Arbuthnot was about 700 feet underwater, crunched into a space barely seven feet wide with Hollywood director James Cameron. At that depth, the last traces of sunlight disappear.

Their tiny submersible descended to the ocean floor with 5,600 pounds of pressure per-square-inch crushing against it. Outside, strange creatures occasionally drifted by in the sandy abyss until out of the darkness, the giant hull of an “unsinkable” ship emerged — the Titanic.


“As I gazed upon her massive anchors and chain, watching her stern disappear into the darkness, I felt a sense of surreal time travel,” Arbuthnot said. “Here she was, a moment from the Edwardian 20th century, frozen on the bottom of the sea … located in an environment where no human can go unaided by sophisticated technology.”

A bacterial byproduct clung to the hull, making the ship look like it was melting, bluish rock. As Cameron excitedly narrated the scene – “Look! See how the telemotor remains so perfectly intact!” – Arbuthnot said little. He was too busy feeling “small before history.”

Arbuthnot, an archaeologist and Flagler College adjunct professor, often shares stories from his travels to archaeology sites around the globe with students. But the Titanic trip – which took him 12,600 feet below sea level – is probably Arbuthnot’s most exciting tale.

“People have this idea of archaeologists sitting there with a brush and toothpick,” Arbuthnot said, “but it can be exciting.”

In 2005, Cameron – who produced, wrote and directed the Academy Award-winning movie “Titanic” – recruited Arbuthnot to work on the first systematic archaeological survey of the famous sunken ship’s internal bow structure. The trip’s goal was to collect as much information as possible from the wreck before the ocean destroyed the ship’s remains; the findings were compiled for the Discovery Channel special “Last Mysteries of the Titanic.”

Arbuthnot worked with one of three remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) sent out to explore the remains of Titanic, which sunk nearly 100 years ago. He crowded into an underwater vessel with Cameron and an engineer for several 14-hour dives to get close enough to the wreckage and gather images and data from inside the ship’s bow.

More than 1,500 people died on Titanic, but Arbuthnot’s team found no bones. The ocean environment didn’t preserve the skeletons. Instead, the team found some remarkably preserved areas, including an opulent Turkish steam room complete with beautifully detailed tiles and chairs. The trip’s discoveries meant a lot to Arbuthnot, who sees archaeology as a chance to preserve cultural resources and find “potentially revolutionary” artifacts.

“Once they’re gone, they’re gone forever,” he said. “We’re capturing a moment in time. We can learn about ourselves, about the present and what to do in the future, by studying the past.”

His passion for studying remnants of the past tends to rub off on students. Alethea Geiger, who graduated from Flagler with a degree in fine art this year, said the archaeology class she took with Arbuthnot inspired her. She picked up a lot of practical advice on how to launch a career in archaeology, Geiger said, and she’s currently looking for jobs at natural history museums and researching archaeology tracks at graduate schools.

“He was one of the best professors I had,” she said, adding that her favorite part of the class was getting to inspect bones from one of Arbuthnot’s work sites. “We also had the opportunity to meet a working experimental archaeologist from Georgia … He did a wonderful job of actually allowing us to participate in the field.”

When he’s not teaching at Flagler, Arbuthnot is an archaeologist for a local company, Environmental Services Inc. He has worked on a variety of land and ship surveys, some of which uncovered new information on Native American cultures. He said archaeologists use those findings not only to reconstruct histories, but to learn how ancient disasters caused societies to collapse – and how to prevent those disasters in the future.

“Archaeologists were some of the first environmentalists,” he said. “Findings can result in practical applications and profound insights.”

For Arbuthnot, who studied philosophy as an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Barbara, archaeology offered a unique opportunity to dig for important information and actually get a little dirty in the process.

“I wanted a career that was going to put me outdoors more, with the potential to have a discovery,” he said. “In philosophy, one of the most fundamental questions is the meaning of life – what does it mean to be human? And anthropology seeks to answer those questions.”

Communication professor talks about his days as a journalist in Havana, Cuba, meeting Fidel Castro and his thoughts on the future of the communist island

Slideshow: Cuba in Pictures

There’s a marker on the tip of Key West that proclaims Cuba a mere 90 miles south of American soil. As tourists stare out across the water trying to catch a glimpse of the communist nation, it seems as if the gulf between these two nations is bridgeable and small.

But distances can be misleading, as communication professor Tracey Eaton will tell you, and there is much more between the two countries than just water and miles.

An island he once called “strange and special, stirring and sad,” Cuba is saddled by years of communist rule and economic hardship, yet buoyed by an intense spirit, a strong sense of culture and above all, an electrifying zest for life.

Eaton will tell you there’s much more to Cuba once you scrape below the surface and get to know its politics, its people and its culture, all of which will also leave you scratching your head.

And Cuba is attracting renewed interest now that long-time ruler Fidel Castro — who Cubans often signified by stroking an imaginary beard with their hand — has stepped down and the political winds of American presidential politics are stirring. With Florida and its huge concentration of Cuban-Americans likely to figure prominently next November, presidential candidates have already begun laying out what their policies will be on Cuba.

That gives Eaton, who was one of the few — and first — American journalists to report regularly from Cuba, a unique perspective on the communist country’s future.

“I think the Cuban government is stronger than a lot of people who haven’t lived
there think,” he said. “It has controlled so many aspects of everyday Cuban lives. The demise of [Fidel] Castro won’t really mean the demise of the government, which is set up to sustain itself politically.”

It was in 2000 that Eaton set up shop in Havana Vieja as a correspondent and bureau chief for The Dallas Morning News — one of only five American news organizations that the Cuban government had permitted to report from its soil.

“This was no ordinary island,” Eaton wrote in a farewell piece after The Morning News re-assigned him after almost five years, and some 28 reporting trips before that.

It’s a country that is a mystery to most Americans — a land best known for its larger-than-life revolutionary leader, and made famous by Hemingway, memories of the heyday ’50s, pungent cigars as thick as sausages and the captivating sounds of its folk music and salsa.

“Cuba has seemed like it has been in a time capsule,” Eaton said in a recent interview, talking about everything from the 1950s American autos that still prowl the streets to its colonial architecture. “I think now it really is changing. Just how much, we’ll see.”

Castro ruled the communist nation since leading a rag-tag band of revolutionaries to power in 1959. But with his health failing, the 81-year-old stepped down as president in February and handed the reigns of the tight-fisted government (and its sputtering economy) to his younger brother, Raul.

Raul has led Cuba’s military for the past 50 years and is seen by some to be more willing to embrace change for the island. Even so, Cuba continues to struggle years after the fall of the Soviet Union, which had helped subsidize its economy. Others doubt that the younger Castro will make any significant changes at all, especially on critical issues like bringing about democracy, improving human rights, allowing capitalism to thrive, or loosening the clamp-down on opposition leaders and Cuban journalists.

“I think it’s real difficult to predict what will happen in Cuba in the future,” Eaton said. “Raul is much more pragmatic, and not as much an ideologue as his brother. He has to know that some of the things he’s doing will make people [in Cuba] happier.”

And he has loosened some restrictions on Cubans, allowing them to own cell phones and stay in expensive hotels once reserved for foreigners, if they can afford them. But so far there has been nothing more substantial.

For those reasons, Eaton doesn’t subscribe to the belief that once the Castro regime is gone, the communist government will crumble and democracy will suddenly flourish.

“I don’t necessarily see people rising up [because Castro is gone],” he said. “A lot of things are business as usual. There’s no revolt in the streets. Why would things be so different when he dies?”

Part of the issue, he says, is that the Cuban revolution that Castro launched and sustained for almost five decades is not so much a Socialist or Marxist revolution, but instead a nationalist revolution.

“It’s about being independent and free from foreign rule,” he said, which is part of why many Cubans, even living under harsh economic conditions and numerous state controls, still feel a bond with the revolution, and Castro himself.

Eaton said Fidel’s grip on the nation for half a century inspired great loyalty among Cubans, as well as great fear.

“There’s a whole cult of personality surrounding Fidel,” Eaton said. He remembers the first time he
got a chance to meet the bearded revolutionary: at a reception for American businessmen in Havana.

“Just to watch him work the room, he’s a master politician,” Eaton said. “When he’s talking to you, he makes you feel like you’re the only one in the room, and he’s very charismatic.”

Eaton left the journalism world in the fall of 2007 to join Flagler’s Communication Department and teach a future generation of journalists the art of newsgathering.

“I miss the action, and I miss kind of being at the center of things,” he said about leaving a career that spanned 24 years. “But I’m really enjoying it here.”

The “center of things” was a journalist’s cornucopia of assignments ranging from Cuba to assignments in Mexico, Haiti, the Middle East and even Afghanistan after U.S. forces struck at the Taliban following the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Before Flagler, he worked for The Houston Chronicle, where he had been the Mexico/border editor and later the metro editor. He became somewhat of a specialist investigating Mexican drug cartels, organized crime and political corruption.

Fluent in Spanish, he had always wanted to cover Latin America, and began his career working for the The Miami Herald and The Orange County Register before moving to The Morning News.

“My goal was to be a foreign correspondent,” he said. The Dallas paper sent him to their Mexico City bureau in the early 1990s, just as Mexico started making international headlines, all beginning with the Zapatista uprising.

But it was Cuba — a land that few Americans are allowed to visit thanks to a U.S. travel ban — that fascinated him the most. Eaton first journeyed there in 1994 on assignment for The Morning News, which was trying to broaden its coverage of Latin America.

“We were really trying to raise the profile of the newspaper and take the place of The Miami Herald in Latin America,” he said.

After seven “very difficult” years of trying to open a bureau in Cuba, Eaton moved there permanently in 2000 to get a taste of the troubles a foreign journalist can have while trying to report on a media-adverse communist government. Cuban media is all state-controlled and primarily government propaganda — a far cry from the kind of journalism Eaton practiced.

“We wrote about economic and social problems in Cuba, which were often scathing and hard-hitting,” Eaton said. “That didn’t sit well with the Cuban government. But we couldn’t compromise and write fluff. We wanted to write what we felt was the truth [about Cuba].”

While it didn’t sit well, Eaton wrote it anyway, even if it meant occasional calls to visit the Foreign Ministry where a Cuban official would explain to him why a story was unfair or incorrect. But he said he was never censored or pressured to write pro-Cuba stories, and his travel was never limited. Cuban journalists don’t have it so well, he noted. In 2003, he wrote about how the government rounded up more than a dozen journalists and sent them off
to prison.

Eaton’s time in Cuba left him somewhat conflicted about the nation — on the one hand trying to understand its repressive and dictatorial grasp on the people, and on the other marveling at the Cuban people’s resourcefulness, pride, generosity and resilience.

There’s a much greater sense of community there — of culture and of unity — than you find in many other countries, he said. His wife is Cuban, and that has also given him greater insight into the island.

“People are poor in Cuba, but everyone is poor. You don’t have the rich exploiting the poor,” he said.

It would be great if you could take what’s good about capitalism and what’s good about their system and combine them.”

He recognizes that’s probably wishful thinking, and that change will come to Cuba — in many ways it has already started. The bigger question in his mind is in what form it will come, and how much it will change a “strange and special” island that has become so close to him.

Click play to hear excerpts from an interview with Margaret Finnegan

In Tasha Walden’s classroom, six fourth-graders sit around a table in silence. When Walden asks a question, three arms dart up to answer. When one girl is picked, she walks to the Smart Board, touches a set of numbers and slides it across the screen.

“Put the numbers in order from least to greatest,” Walden says. As she talks, her hands are a flurry of movement, stretching apart on the word “from” as if pulling taut a piece of string. When a student gazes at his notebook-sized white board, Walden taps the desk in front of him to get his attention. When the whole group works together to find an answer, she smiles and cheers, “Yaaaay! Good job,” her hands rising above her shoulders and fingers wagging.

Meanwhile, on the floor, a girl is sprawled in front of a laptop playing a loud math game. “Pedro has 46 cents,” the computer asks. “What can he buy?” She punches some keys and gets a loud, cartoon-y failure tune in response: “Wamp wamp waaaaah.”

But the sound means nothing to her, and her classmates don’t glance over. None of them can hear it – in fact, many of them can’t hear anything at all. Walden, a 2004 Flagler graduate, is the only one in the room who hears, speaks and signs clearly.

And she’s responsible for helping her students learn despite a disability that can make everyday communication difficult, if not impossible. As Helen Keller once described it, deafness can mean “the loss of the most vital stimulus — the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of man … to be cut off from hearing is to be isolated indeed.”

Relationships

Like many of her peers, Walden wanted to study deaf education and sign language because she sympathized with the challenges facing deaf people. Her interest started in high school, when one of her good friends had a deaf sister.

“I was like, ‘I can’t even tell her happy birthday,’ ” Walden said. “I’m not the kind of person who would just go, ‘I can’t sign, so I’m just not going to learn.’

“I didn’t want her to feel isolated or left out … So the first thing I learned to sign was ‘Happy Birthday.’ ”

Walden chose Flagler’s deaf education program because it offers an uncommon opportunity to spend time at the nearby Florida School for the Deaf and Blind (FSDB) — the same place where Walden teaches professionally now. Each year, Flagler’s close ties with FSDB help about 55 deaf ed majors gain American Sign Language skills, teaching experience and familiarity with deaf culture. The Flagler deaf ed curriculum requires students to complete observe-and-assist hours and internships at FSDB before they graduate.

“We have a relationship with FSDB that’s almost as old as the college,” said Margaret Finnegan, professor and director of Flagler’s Education of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Program. Flagler Chancellor William L. Proctor served for numerous years on FSDB’s board and as its chair, and Flagler Assistant to the President Mary Jane Dillon is the board chair today. “FSDB is the largest school for the deaf in the country … You get a sense of what the breadth of the [deaf] population is. Some students have cochlear implants, some don’t. Some parents are involved, some aren’t.

“It gives our students an opportunity to work with all those different dimensions of deafness and to have a broader perspective of what their role is going to be and how they’re going to refine their skills … The more authentic experience our students have, the more likely they are to make good decisions as teachers.”

Deaf and elementary education major Jillian White agrees. She’s been spending three hours a week with an FSDB kindergarten class helping with various activities: math practice, reading, playing games, planting lima beans. White says the observe-and-assist has affirmed her interest in deaf education.

“I am amazed at how well I can communicate with the students,” she said. “Also, obviously, the experience helps. I want to work there, and the people that I meet are so amazing. I see my future in the students and faculty.”

Jessica Kaspar, a 2004 Flagler graduate who teaches second grade at FSDB, says her FSDB internship and volunteer experience helped her prepare as much as possible for a challenging first year in the classroom. For her, the biggest benefit was a chance to acclimate to the nuances of deaf communication.

“It’s like if you were going to go to a different country for a year,” Kaspar said of her preparations. “It was getting in there and doing it and learning from my mistakes.”

Walden experienced a similar period of initial awkwardness when she interned at FSDB.

“It’s a scary experience when you first come in and you get a chance to be on the other side – you’re the one who can’t communicate as well,” she said. “It was tough, and you have to think, ‘How can I say that conceptually accurately?’ But when you’re educating the future, you have to think about it.”

Contrary to popular belief, most sign languages – and there are vastly different versions used throughout the world – have developed independently of oral languages. That means signed messages have their own complex forms of grammar, and meanings can be altered by seemingly unimportant factors like body posture. In short, American signs are not necessarily word-for-word translations from English.

And deaf culture is like any other, according to Finnegan, who previously taught at FSDB and has a deaf daughter: it’s interesting and different, but a difficult adjustment. She used homecoming at FSDB as an example.

“Homecoming at a deaf school is unlike anything you’ve ever seen,” Finnegan said. “It’s just a big sign fest … It’s very expressive, very touchy.”

And it’s surprisingly loud.

“Deaf people don’t know how noisy they are,” she said. “When I’m at home with her [my daughter,] doors are slamming, water is left running … she scoots her chair across the floor.”

Adjustments

The deaf and hard-of-hearing classes at FSDB are small compared to public schools. There are typically five or fewer students in a class, and they come from all over the state. Many of them live in the FSDB dormitories and go home for weekends and holidays. Some of their families sign, others don’t.

Kaspar says deaf and hard-of-hearing students often face a variety of unique emotional and educational challenges – but technology has helped teachers overcome some of them. She and Walden have Smart Boards that allow them to project a computer screen or document on the wall; students can even touch and move items on the board. And when a lesson is over, Walden says, she prints out notes – which, when students have to keep their heads up and eyes alert to receive a lesson, can be difficult to jot down on their own.

Still, there are rough days. “It’s sometimes such a struggle,” Kaspar said. “They [deaf children] develop language in the same way hearing kids do, but it’s a little delayed.

“I think all good teachers, though, they have to change and modify … I think when people think of teaching, they think of big manuals. They think of ‘Open your book to this page and answer that,’ ” Kaspar continued, her hands running down an imaginary list on the table. “People don’t think of crying kids or ‘I don’t understand, I’ve never been to a zoo.’ … How do you explain when they don’t understand that the past is two weeks ago and yesterday?”

Walden says she has the most difficulty adjusting to the broad range of individual academic levels in her classroom. Deaf children learn at different speeds, just like public school children. Whenever she gets frustrated, Walden looks for inspiration in her students.

“I had all the kids write a paper about what it’s like to be deaf,” she said. “There was one kid, I was almost in tears reading his paper. He loved the signs and the people and the culture … other kids say, ‘I don’t know why I’m deaf. It’s not fair.’

“It’s important at the beginning of the year to find something special about each child … and I keep journals of those little ‘a-ha!’ moments when they got something.”

Communication

Kaspar, who never wanted to be a teacher growing up, says a family-like sense of connection drives the deaf community. There’s a closeness that makes the task of teaching – and mastering a new language with both head and hands – worthwhile for her.

Both Kaspar and Walden find it difficult to stop signing now. Their hands move in rhythm with their speech long after their students have gone to lunch. If you don’t sign, it’s easy to feel a little flat in their presence – as if your own hands somehow have less life in them, and are leaving important things unsaid.

“With sign language, if you say ‘I’m proud of you’ and your face is like this,” Kaspar said, her face falling into a blank expression and snapping back into motion, “it doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes I’m a better communicator with sign language than verbal, now.

“I remember when I was a little girl, I was so shy. I didn’t talk at all or show body movements…I got to college and became more expressive. Especially being here – it helps.”

Before Walden’s class can leave for lunch, the students have one more assignment to complete – a written one. A boy bends over his directions and mutters to himself, mulling over the problem. The girl next to him, who has a small, tan device curved above her ear, glances at the hearing people sitting in the back of the room. She glares at the boy and shakes her head.

He doesn’t see her, so she taps his shoulder and makes an exasperated face, all raised eyebrows and dropped mouth. Her hands clasp over her ears. She doesn’t say a word, but we know what she means.

When wounded soldiers are being transported out of Iraq on a massive, medically-equipped C-130 or C-17 transport plane, there’s a good chance they will find Flagler alumnus Thomas “Jerry” Ricketson there to help treat them until they reach the safety of a military hospital abroad.

Ricketson is not only certified as an emergency medical technician, but also flight-qualified to treat patients. As a staff sergeant in the U.S. Air Force, he’s been risking his own life as he and the rest of the crew of the fully-equipped medical transports, think hospitals in the sky, fly wounded soldiers out of combat zones like Iraq.

“The majority of the patients that I’ve carried recently are traumas due to IEDs [improvised explosive devices],” he said. “There are a lot of impact injuries, lacerations, amputations and head wounds. If the injury is severe enough to limit the soldier’s ability to continue to do their job, they need to be replaced. [Aeromedical evacuation] is how that process starts.”

Ricketson, who graduated from Flagler in 1992, thought he would end up in the broadcast journalism field, but a year later he decided to join the U.S. Air Force. He was originally working on
B-1 bombers, but after re-upping for active duty in 2000 after spending time in the Reserves, he found himself attached to the 375th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron. That’s where he’s remained, weathering deployments to Germany, Japan, Jordan and Qatar.

Although Ricketson isn’t technically based inside military hotspots like Iraq, his work as an air medic has found him flying in and out of combat zones time and time again to pick up military
personnel whose injuries require more specialized or intensive care.

Currently, aeromedical evacuation crews operate primarily from Al Udeid, Qatar or Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

“We normally start the mission heading to Ali Al Saleem, Kuwait, and then we enter the Area of Responsibility and fly into Kirkuk, Tikrit, Mosul and Balad, Iraq,” Ricketson said.

Balad is considered the “clearinghouse” for Iraq because it has the largest military hospital. From there, Ricketson said, “crews from Germany pick those patients up on regularly scheduled missions and take them either to Ramstein or Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, which is the largest U.S. military
hospital in Europe.”

But Ricketson emphasized that serving in Qatar and flying from air base to air base — many of them only miles from live battlefields — presents its own set of challenges.

“Most of us don’t really appreciate the magnitude of taking off and landing in a combat zone,” he said.

The scariest and most dangerous part of the journey comes as the plane descends or as it slowly takes off again. “Cargo airplanes are very large targets on approach or takeoff, and we try to do most of our missions at night to minimize enemy opportunity,” he said.

But, as in any war, close calls do happen. “Last year, when I was in Al Udeid, it was the first time I’ve ever been on a plane that has legitimately ‘popped chaff and flare,’ ” he said, “meaning someone was likely shooting an RPG [rocket propelled grenade] or missile of some kind at us as we took off.”

“Chaff and flare” refers to defensive counter-measures performed by pilots flying in and out of combat zones, and Ricketson described the maneuver as “creating a larger heat source and therefore drawing the missile away from the plane.

“When the inside of the plane lights up because the outside just lit up, it’s very sobering to realize that you could have just been on the news as the latest casualty,” he said.

Serving in the military involves plenty of sacrifice, and Ricketson has seen both sides of the air medic coin, operating not only above the battlefield, but also on the ground in Germany. He stressed the importance of the ground crews, describing them as a major part of the aeromedical evacuation operations team.

“The ground crews facilitate the on- and off-load of the air crews, their equipment and the patients, and there is a sense of urgency to get the patients to a fixed medical facility, as there is with any emergency patient move.”

The ground crews also help to coordinate the military buses and ambulances present when a plane full of wounded soldiers lands, leading to understandably hectic situations.

“I’ve had up to three Ambuses and two ambulances offloading at the same time to different facilities,” Ricketson said.

And although the six to seven-hour flight in and out of Germany can be taxing, he saves the most admiration for the men and women operating out of Qatar: “The air crews at Al Udeid face the same challenges four or five times per mission, since all of their pickups are in Iraq.”

Fifteen years of service and many critical missions later, Ricketson still belongs to the Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron, although he is currently receiving retraining stateside.

He said at some point, he would like to retire from the Air Force and move back to Central Florida, where his nine-year-old daughter Logan Nicole lives with her mother.

Photography By Scott Smith (‘04)

Click play to hear excerpts from an interview with Mel Barber

Like most Americans, Mel Barber has made technology part of his everyday life. He drives to work, sends e-mails, tinkers with the thermostat in his home.

But unlike most Americans, Barber — an associate professor of sociology at Flagler — worries that, despite its many comforts and conveniences, technology is making people feel more isolated from each other than ever before. He argues that cars, air conditioning and television have caused a radical shift in society — one that’s destroyed local communities and led to a variety of negative side effects, from increased crime to diminished etiquette skills.

“We think that progress will always better our lives,” Barber wrote in an article published in the Journal of Evolution and Technology in 2006. “But if we weigh the benefits versus the costs, we will find that the benefits are small … Individuals have been insulated from interaction from others. The result is that we do not know others as persons, but we know them only in a restricted and formal way.”

Barber’s theories on technology and community come from his research into the social forces behind crime. Prior to joining Flagler’s faculty, he directed the Center for Community Development at Florida A&M University. He was also the principal investigator for a Florida Department of Juvenile Justice grant that recruited and trained more than 2,000 students to mentor troubled youth in detention centers and schools.

At FAMU, Barber was asked to speak to a group of colleagues about race and crime. But as he investigated the reasons behind crime, Barber noticed “every time it came up, there were issues dealing with community. In a community, people always watch what’s going on. Any strange things that take place, people all know.” Without that local involvement and awareness, Barber said, crime became easier to commit.

As he took a closer look at the neighborhoods around him, Barber realized most residents no longer bothered to speak with each other, let alone spend any time together. And when he researched why those once commonplace interactions had all but disappeared from neighborhoods, Barber found technology to be the main cause.

According to Barber, cars posed the first real challenge to community life. People used to walk everywhere — and run into neighbors, acquaintances and friends along the way.

“People talk, they touch, they laugh, they smile, they shout, they tap and punch,” Barber wrote. “In short, people get to know one another … [but] with the automobile, we can go wherever we wish without interacting face-to-face with anyone.”

Also, with cars to quickly transport people long distances, many activity centers relocated away from neighborhoods: workplaces, shopping areas, restaurants.

“We don’t know the people who work in our local businesses, restaurants,” Barber said. “That leads to a great deal of anonymity on our part.”

Air conditioning compounds that sense of isolation, Barber said. When people had to deal with extreme heat, they used to gather on their front porches or under shade trees. During cold seasons, they communed by a stove or another heat source.

“They would engage in story telling, news swapping and gossip,” Barber wrote.

That frequent gathering also allowed the younger generation to learn about the beliefs and social norms valued by their elders. According to Barber, this inherited collection of shared experiences and values eroded as people shrunk into the air-conditioned comfort of their homes.

Finally, Barber said, television killed American communities. While air conditioning and automobiles pushed families into their homes, television encouraged people living in the same house to separate. Most homes have more than one television, he said, allowing people to sit by themselves and watch what they’d like.

“Families take meals separately,” Barber wrote. “Instead of reading and telling stories, the family watches television … parents use it to baby-sit and take care of their children.”

The eventual consequence of all this technology, Barber said, is a society that doesn’t pass down strong moral codes or teach the importance of civil interactions. Hence, more crime — and a tendency to fear the unknown people around us.

“We’re in a society where we are actually encouraged to be protective of ourselves, to insulate ourselves from prying eyes,” Barber said. “These forces are pulling us apart.

“People say, ‘Oh it’s just natural for us,’ but it’s not … We have to realize that the automobile is a killer in more ways than one.”

On an individual level, Barber had little advice on how to reverse technology’s effects and revitalize communities. It’s not his role: as a sociologist, he looks at the majority, the larger group. And, as he pointed out, it takes more than one person to change a society.

On a bright note, Barber called it “serendipitous” that global warming and other environmental issues linked to overuse of technology have recently become highly publicized problems.

Meanwhile, some theorists find hope in the Internet. They see online communities and social networking sites evolving into valid and positive replacements for local connections. And some people argue that modern privacy, individuality and autonomy are positive side effects of technology.

Barber doesn’t buy it. “A lot of the things we consider our freedom are directly related to the fact that we are pretty isolated,” Barber said. “When you spend a lot of time around people, you get to learn a lot about them — and a lot of it is not something that is said or typed.

“You don’t see their reaction when you hurt people online … In some ways, it [online interaction] may be counterproductive. It doesn’t do what communities do, where you have close-knit relationships, which allow you to develop as a person with a distinct place in life and a distinct outlook and a distinct history … where people know all these things about you, and they still like you.”

To become a clinical psychologist for the U.S. Army, Parker had to go through basic training. The experience was supposed to help the ’00 Flagler graduate better relate to her patients – who, as she put it, “have gone into a war zone one to five times and have been blown up, burned, amputated, dealt with human remains of their fellow soldiers … etc.”

Parker will also need the training in Fall 2008, when she leaves Brooke Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston and deploys to Iraq. There, she’ll help soldiers in the field deal with combat stress.

“There’s no such thing as a protected area anymore – everything’s a frontline,” Parker said. “We [army psychologists] are not safe or removed anymore. We’re sitting in the back of the humvees … You have to qualify on a weapon just like everyone else.”

She will be in Iraq for at least a year, debriefing soldiers after fire fights and making sure they get “three hots and a cot” – a day of real meals and rest – before returning to duty.

So, to recap: Parker gets to wear camouflage every day, try to help patients deal with almost unspeakable horrors and, eventually, expose herself to the same kind of conditions that leave many soldiers without life or limbs. It’s a situation that’s led many of her friends, along with this reporter, to ask: “Why?”

Parker laughed a little at the question. It was a friendly, “I know, I know” sort of laugh: not bitter, not sarcastic.

“You always hear people say, ‘The recruiter didn’t tell me this,’ ” she said. “I talk to my friends across the country who are doing civilian residencies.

“They say, ‘I saw someone who had a little bit of depression.’ … I’m thinking, that’s it? That’s all you saw today? I can’t even begin to explain what I saw today.”

After receiving her master’s degree in mental health counseling from the University of Florida, Parker thought the Army would give her unique opportunities in her field. She said most people don’t realize that many advances in clinical psychology have come from the military’s treatment of soldiers during wartime. Parker hopes to be “on the cutting edge” of diagnosing and treating problems like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and severe brain injuries.

She’s also learning to help patients despite a variety of setbacks that aren’t found in most mental health settings. Most people in the military tend to develop a stoicism that prevents them from easily talking about their problems, Parker said. On top of that, she added, many of them suffer from survivor’s guilt.

“It’s reeducating: ‘It’s okay to be a soldier and it’s okay to have feelings,’ ” Parker said. “You have folks who say, ‘That should’ve been me, I should’ve died. I’m sitting here complaining to you, and I don’t feel I should be doing that.’ ”

Parker said there are also issues of how to treat soldiers who will be heading into combat again. A common problem when they return home is hyper vigilance – a symptom of PTSD. Parker said some soldiers can’t relax with family and friends because of wartime habits they’ve developed. They constantly search the street while driving or walking, trying to figure out if a roadside bomb is hidden in a pile of trash.

In average PTSD cases, Parker said, patients would be taught to overcome those fears. But Parker can’t help her about-to-deploy patients to relax completely.

“PTSD dealing with a rape victim is very different than dealing with PTSD with a combat victim,” Parker said. “For a rape victim, I want that person to feel comfortable around members of the opposite sex and not look over their shoulders all the time.

“You’re looking at probability [of a repeat incident]. They [soldiers] are like, ‘I have multiple burns and I’ve been blown up 30 times.’ … If I take away all their alertness and hyper vigilance, I’ve just made them a danger to themselves and their convoy.”

After hearing so many stories of loss and danger, Parker said she’s not immune to her own fears of deployment. But she believes in what she’s doing in a way she never did before.

“I think before I got into the military, I saw therapy as a choice in a lot of ways,” Parker said. “Some people say psychology is just for the wealthy…you know, the classic image of the guy lying on the couch and complaining about what someone said to him.

“But you realize it’s such a practical field. There are syndromes and issues that are just so complex, you can’t figure them out on your own … Coming into this type of setting with this intensity, you realize: ‘I do have a purpose.’ ”

Parker said she loves her job. The soldiers she works with keep her motivated – and as ready as she can be to leave for Iraq.

“I can’t tell you how much I am inspired on a daily basis by 19-year-olds with 50 percent burns on their bodies, missing limbs and saying, ‘Captain Parker, please don’t get me out of the Army. I want to go back to my unit,’ ” she said. “They believe in what they do, and that is why I go to work every day.

“These guys are heroes. You haven’t lived until you are walking down the hallway of the hospital with one of your patients who has prosthetic legs – and he is out-walking you.”

“The photos are taken really close, within a foot to five feet,” he said. “I’ve never been hit except one time, when a surfboard hit the front of my camera. It all happens so quickly, and you get under water as fast as you can – as long as you’re under the surface, it slows everything down.”

Storms don’t worry Stafford, either: “The best waves are after.” Although, traveling can be a bit riskier than some might expect.

“Weird things happen everywhere,” he said. “The scariest thing that ever happened to me just happened in Brazil. The second-to-last night, a guy was murdered just outside our hotel door.”

But like most surfers, Stafford takes a laidback approach to his work – and he’s humble about his success. But as his photo editor, Pete Taras, puts it, “Not a lot of surf photographers come from the East Coast. He was born in Pennsylvania, and now he’s sent to Hawaii, ducking under 30-foot waves. It’s quite an accomplishment.”