Features: Talk of Takoma • Howard Kohn

August, 2006

In Takoma Park, volunteerism is alive and well

Fifteen cents in Takoma Park worth one acre in Guyana

One Saturday this spring Alex Rice and his friends in Cub Scout Den #7 set out to save part of the planet by selling lemonade and cookies, and before you assume this was worth no more than one hoot and a holler you should know that Alex's dad, Dick Rice, is an optimist-pragmatist with Conservation International and is clever about money.

In 2002 Dick helped arrange a special lease of 200,000 acres of rainforest in the south of Guyana to keep out the chainsaw gangs. "It's a pretty unique approach," he explains. "We're paying the government exactly what they'd have gotten from the loggers -- a conservation concession instead of a timber concession."

In Guyana timber rights are still cheap, about 15 cents per acre per year. Once Alex heard numbers of that scope he got excited. A glass of lemonade at 30 cents equaled the leasing fee for two acres. A cookie at 60 cents was worth four acres.

Alex's older sister, Adrian, drew this equation on a long sheet of white paper. The Cub Scouts colored it in and hung it as a banner over a wooden sales counter on the day of the soapbox derby of Boy Scout Troop #33 on Old Town streets. The Scouts took turns wearing a sandwich board and hawking business along the racecourse.

Several customers left big tips at the stand. One boy ran home and came back with $40 in bills from his personal stash. He donated all of it. The lemonade and cookies sold out. The day's take came to $350.

Dick's colleagues in the Washington office of Conservation International put up a matching amount, as did those in the office in Guyana. A couple Peace Corps volunteers who heard about Den #7 collected another $500, also matched by Conservational International.

The total covered the annual leasing fee for about 11,000 acres, seven times the size of Takoma Park. "Usually the only people willing to pay for the rainforest are those who want to cut it down, and if no one competes with the loggers they will win, period," Dick says. "But if a few Scouts can help change that dynamic with a simple lemonade stand, that's pretty cool."

Kevin Adler's greening of the Folk Festival

It wouldn’t be the folk festival without meats on a stick and sizzling dough, but when the music stops there are stacks of empty food boxes and at least 50 gallons of spent deep-frying oil.

Last year the festival’s chief organizer, Kevin Adler, seized on an idea to recycle as many containers as possible, and now he’s found a way to get rid of the cooking oil. At the end of this year’s festival (on September 10th), the leftover oil will be loaded onto a truck and hauled away to be used again as biodiesel fuel.

“It’s a win-win,” says Kevin. “No one has to worry about how to dispose of the oil, and, meanwhile, a biodiesel vehicle gets free fuel.”

Since taking over the festival three years ago after the sudden death of longtime organizer Lenore Robinson, Kevin has steadily put his stamp on it. At this spring’s Azalea Awards, where civic service gets recognized, Kevin was given a personal award as “volunteer of the year” for his work on the festival and another on behalf of the festival itself.

Dealing with the cooking oil has always been a hassle. Some years ago a few vendors caused trouble by dumping oil at Takoma Park Middle, the traditional festival site. The recycling idea came from Nadine Bloch, who has done this at other events and will also be doing it for the street festival (on October 1st).

Tony Langley's hoop dream: Making kids "get" it

The one thing boys on Tony Langley’s basketball teams talk about is how he gets them to sprint the length of the court over and over, how he keeps at them to ignore the heat in their throats, the dead pull on their legs. And how he gets them to do all the other repetitions, the pushups, bounce passes, and jump shots.

For more than 20 years Tony has been Mr. Basketball for the Takoma Park Boys & Girls Club and, for most of that time, the club president as well. No one has kept track of the huge count of kids who have graduated from his teams, nor the number of triumphs and trophies. In July his 10-and-under team (Dequan Abrom, Troy Stancil, Michael Warren, Johnnie Shuler, Everette Quick, Marcus Murray) added one of the bigger championships, winning the National Junior Olympic AAU Tournament in Winston Salem, North Carolina.

Three years ago Tony was recruited to coach the boys’ team at Takoma Park Middle. Of the students who came out to play, very few had ever competed in a refereed game. In basketball years they were old, well behind the curve for learning the basics. Tony put them through his standard bust-a-gut drills. An upbeat attitude took hold. This past winter the Takoma Park Middle team went undefeated.

Tony’s coaching is almost year-round, and it starts in the late afternoons, after his day work as a District police officer. When practices are done he often takes kids from his teams to the Takoma Park library. He sits them at a table and gets them to work on school assignments. “I can’t think of a better way to spend my time,” he says.

A teenage take on hometown pride

There had never been a Miss Takoma Park Teen until Rosa Trembour applied to be a contestant, and she couldn’t be prouder.

“Sometimes the girls in a pageant feel the need to justify their reasons for entering, but I am happy to say that when people ask me, ‘Why would you do that?’ I can answer honestly: ‘I am so proud of Takoma Park that I just have to be the one and only beauty queen representative of our town,” Rosa says with the same wild exuberance that wowed the judges last year when she was named Miss Congeniality and again this year when she won 3rd runner-up for Miss Maryland Teen.

Rosa lives on Birch Avenue, goes to school at Einstein High and is seen on local stages dancing with Tappers With Attitude. In the competition for Miss Maryland Teen she tap-danced to a piece choreographed by a friend and spoke with fervor about more support for American soldiers coming back from Iraq as amputees.

For the grand opening of the Takoma Park community center last year Rosa was lined up to wave to the crowd, but then the date of the event was changed, and the new date conflicted with one of her dance gigs, and she missed out.

No other big occasions have come along for her “to strut my stuff,” as she says, but she did have a moment when she introduced herself at the 2006 pageant: “Of all the cities represented Takoma Park was by far the smallest. So I walked up to the microphone and practically screamed the words, ‘Coming to you live from Azalea City and the birthplace of Goldie Hawn, my name is Rosa Trembour, Miss Takoma Park Teen America.’” A huge cheer rose up from family, friends and several others quite taken by her unabashed shout-out.

After the pageant Rosa retired from the beauty-queen circuit, but until someone else claims the title she is still Miss Takoma Park.

Comings and Goings

• Susan Harris is giving up her presidency of the Takoma Park Horticulture Club to concentrate on her work with D.C. Master Gardeners and her writing career, which includes her Voice column, freelance gigs and a possible gardening book.

• Renay Johnson, a former administrator at White Oak Middle and Paint Branch High, is the new principal of Takoma Park Middle.

• Adrian Baez, the big-grinning PE teacher who probably could have won most popularity contests at Takoma Park Middle the past 12 years, is leaving to take a job at Einstein High, where he will keep tabs on students in danger of dropping out. Adrian is also the varsity soccer coach for boys at Blair High, a job he will keep.

• Two college kids who came through the Takoma Park public schools are the new student-body presidents at the University of Maryland and at Duke University. Emma Simson (U-Md) graduated from Blair High, where she was a standout student and star softball pitcher. Elliott Wolf (Duke), a computer whiz and also a Blair alum, contributed a wide range of commentaries to the Voice for several years, starting at age ten.

• Brynna Scherloun, daughter of Ann Scher and John Salmen, departed for Jamaica on July 6th to train as a Peace Corps volunteer. Her college degree is in geography, and her most recent job was at S&A Beads in Old Takoma.

Miscellany

• At least one more set of condos will be built in Old Takoma, but another has been canceled. Moving ahead is Ecco Park, a four-story glass-and-stone building at Carroll & Maple Avenues where the U-haul rentals used to be. Going in a different direction is the L-shaped “Taliano’s project” at 7001 Carroll. The principal owner, ICG/Takoma, is selling the property rights to local developer Bruce Levin, who says he plans to rent the space on long-term leases to retail stores and perhaps a restaurant to fill in for the closed-up Taliano’s.

• It is now possible to chat on the Internet while sitting at an indoor table or outdoor bench in Old Takoma. Shop owners there installed a wireless WiFi system in July and will explain the full extent of the possibilities at a public meeting on August 8th (7 p.m.) at Middle Eastern Cuisine.
• Salvaging the 1200-seat auditorium at Old Blair is $200,000 closer to reality with the addition of a new federal grant approved in July.

Wrong man accused of Langley Park murders

A Langley Park drug dealer traded $100 in crack for the lives of Cesar Mayorga and Anival Hernandez Escobar Cruz, or so went the official theory of why they were killed last August with deep slashes across their throats in the parking lot by Toys ‘R’ Us.

On July 13th, however, three days into the trial of the man arrested for the murders, Edgar “L.A.” Reyes, the Prince George’s prosecutor’s office dropped the double-homicide charges. The prosecution’s only witness, Oscar “Flaco” Molina, had claimed a kind of nobility for himself, saying he had rejected the drug dealer’s $100 offer but Mr. Reyes had then acted on it.

Under cross-examination, though, Mr. Molina’s version of events did not hold together, and he also admitted smoking crack on the night in question. The presiding judge apologized to Mr. Reyes for the seven months he spent in jail.

The case has been reopened.

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