Donald Jay Weeks, 51, of Elk Rapids, died May 2, 2011, at Munson Medical Center in Traverse City after a short illness. Born June 11, 1959 in Lansing, he was a graduate of Glen Lake Community Schools in Leelanau County and Michigan State University.
We are back from a great winter on Spanish Wells in the Bahamas. Fisher, Maggie and I spent many days spearfishing as the weather was the best we have seen it in a long time. There were many large sized Mutton fish, Hogfish, Margots and Grouper this season.
Life in Japan was turned upside down on March 11. A 9.0 earthquake struck in the north of Japan, followed by a massive tsunami. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, damaged by the tsunami, stands at the brink of nuclear meltdown. Tens of thousands are dead or missing. Entire towns were wiped off the map. In a country that is ostensibly well developed and best prepared to deal with such natural disasters, the authorities and the people appear to be at a total loss.
On Sunday, March 13, CBS featured this video of our Glen Arbor gem, Lou Batori, skiing at 100 years old. Journalist Bill Geist caught up with Lou on the slopes of the annual gathering of Midwest chapter of the 70+ ski club in Nubs Nob in northern Michigan and watched as he hit the racecourse.
Courtesy of Interlochen Public Radio: Last week, a Glen Arbor resident won two medals in a slalom ski race, not so uncommon Up North. But this racer is 100 years old. Lou Batori has been skiing for 90 years. “You have to ski to stay young, or you have to be young to ski. Your choice,” Batori said last week, skiing at Nub’s Nob in Harbor Springs.
Sarah Wigton Dominguez’s tropical dream looks a bit different, however. The 26-year-old, who recently earned double master’s degrees in social work and public health at the University of Michigan, pictures a lush island –— say, Hispaniola, home to the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic — that includes clean water, blooming mothers with healthy babies, and thriving communities empowered to make educated choices about their daily lives.
If 2011 continues to be as full of excitement, exhilaration, and adulation as its first weekend, Emma Cook is headed for quite a year. On the evening of Sunday, Jan. 2, Emma packed The Loading Dock restaurant/bar in Traverse City with almost 200 of her closest friends for the release party of her new CD, “Days of Wonder”. The fruit of a semester off from the University of Vermont, and an autumn of intense work with Patrick Niemisto at the Holy Wah Studio near Maple City, Days of Wonder is a harvest of Emma’s crystalline voice and emerging songwriting skills.
Maple City area resident Jan Waling (pronounced “Yon Whaling”) is used to being incognito. His job has been to make others shine at what they do. For more than 30 years, Waling has sweetened the sound of performers’ music and voices at concert venues near and far, helping with the setup, running the mixing board and, eventually, recording performances — live and in the studio.
This fall marks the 30th anniversary of what has been called “the most widely watched PBS series in the world.” According to one of the show’s co-writers, almost a billion people worldwide have watched “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage” and gained an understanding of humanity’s place in the universe, and the paths taken by early astronomers to achieve that knowledge. For 26 of those years, Norm Wheeler has shown all 13 television episodes of “Cosmos” to his high school science students at The Leelanau School in Glen Arbor.
Each fall, Empire residents Robert Foulkes and Robin Johnson travel from northern Michigan to southwest Ireland to labor on their 20 acres in County Cork along Glandore Harbor — also known in the native tongue as Cuan Daire or “Harbour of the Oaks.”