Alumni Profiles
Dodge reflects on success
Expanding cultural opportunities in Indianapolis
Internet station reaching teens
Alumni adopt a son from Haiti
Book review: A Thread of Hope
Dodge reflects on success
By John Tapley
Danny Dodge ’86 came to Anderson University a little unsure of his future. Through a path that wound around the media, he has discovered his passion behind the camera and out in the wild.
Like many other freshmen, Dodge entered college without a clearly defined goal. “At first, I wanted to be like my father and be a pipe designer,” he says. “At the time, I didn’t have a clear-cut path … I considered myself a jack-of-all-trades.” Before joining AU, Dodge had little interest in the field of broadcasting, but at a friend’s request, he enrolled in a communications class. Evaluating the skill and precision of his peers, he treated the degree as a major challenge. “It wasn’t driven by competition, but it was a challenge to be had … no matter how hard I perceived it, I had to take it,” he says.
Dodge attributes most of his success to the knowledge and experience he obtained as an AU student. “When you’re young — before establishing a career — you really don’t understand how much of a catalyst college really is,” he says. “The knowledge I learned all flows out now.”
After college, Dodge decided to stay around Anderson because he felt attached to the college and his friends. Utilizing the skills he learned in photography classes, he eventually worked for Warner Press, snapping shots for various catalogs. Later, he switched roles from director and creator to actor by participating in several commercials for companies such as J.C. Penney and Chevrolet. In 1989, he moved back to Colorado with his wife, Ginger, whom he met during his photography years and found a job as an anchor for the local Headline News branch where he worked for just one year. “News wasn’t my thing,” he says.
In 2001, Dodge started his own video production company, Roadrunner Productions. The company seeks to provide private, serviced marketing to other businesses and media outlets by creating commercials, DVDs, and VNRs (video news releases). Due to the current unstable economy, most of Roadrunner’s productions consist of Dodge’s own work, though he hires others when needed. Along with servicing clientele, Dodge combines his love of nature and video production with a series titled The Living Wildlife Show. In this show, Dodge follows hunters and trappers across North America and records their journeys. “I feel like it’s my adventure,” he says. “It’s allowed me to stay healthy at my age. ... I can do so much more than just vegetate at a computer station. The show is hard work, but I love it.” The program has earned Dodge a Silver Telly Award. Currently, The Living Wildlife Show can be seen on DirectTV’s Pursuit channel, myoutdoortv.com, and on Dodge’s YouTube channel: LivingtheWildlife (www.youtube.com/livingthewildlife). At 46, Dodge is setting his goals on his family. “My biggest aspiration is to keep my family what it is now … to tighten our time together and build a net,” he says. “Sometimes we look back and understand that other factors can take that away. I have a lot of good years ahead, and I’m going to make the best of them.”Expanding cultural opportunities in Indianapolis
By Scott Rees
For Stephen Schaf BA ’91, his impact on Indianapolis all started with tennis shoes.
Ten years ago, Schaf was ready to get out of Indiana. The graphic designer and Shelbyville, Ind., native felt the state had little to offer him to “flourish as a creative soul.” Then one day in San Francisco he had a fateful encounter with footwear.
"I visited this tennis shoe exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. These tennis shoes were exhibited as art, and it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is exactly what Indianapolis needs to see," says Schaf.
It was just the push Schaf needed to found the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art.
“Creating a museum, nonetheless a contemporary museum in Indianapolis, had a background that was unprecedented,” says Schaf.
Schaf says the museum was founded before any of the city’s art initiatives over the last decade went into place, such as sculptures placed around the city.
Through exhibitions and programs, the museum seeks to “stimulate minds, inspire new discoveries and demonstrate the vital connections between visual culture and life.”
Reaction to the museum has been mixed, Schaf says. “It takes a lot ... of understanding and pushing beyond your normal boundaries and looking at things differently,” he says.
That foray into art gave Schaf the confidence to found his own graphic design company, Hotbed Creative.
“I decided that if I could do that, I could certainly start my own design business using commercial art,” says Schaf.
Schaf emphasizes the important distinction of being a studio design company — not an agency.
“We really focus on studio design and providing solutions to our clients, designing from the ground up for their businesses and giving them the branding and creative solutions they need,” he says.
Schaf, who double majored in graphic design and French, says much of his outlook is tied back to some key people on the Anderson University faculty who gave him technical and spiritual support, as well as academic encouragement.
Most notable was art professor Kevin Rudynski, now chair of the Department of Art and Design, and French professor Sally Jo Shulmistras.
“[Rudynski] changed my perspective on design and what it meant to work ethically and morally in the design industry,” says Schaf.
Shulmistras gave him an appreciation for all cultures.
“I gained a great deal of respect for how much she taught and how hardcore she was at getting each one of her students [to see] the real aspects of understanding a culture and the respect you need to have for other cultures,” says Schaf.
Schaf’s vision for the future is to branch out into Indianapolis’ rural areas and expand into places like Chicago and Cincinnati without growing too big, too fast.
A big priority is giving back, whether it is helping the homeless or doing pro bono work for nonprofits.
"The process of starting IMOCA, volunteering beginning with TRI-S Trips, and doing the work I did at Anderson has engrained in me the importance of giving back to the community and working hard to help others,” he says.
For more information about the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, visit the Web site at www.imoca.com. More information about Hotbed Creative can be found at www.hotbedcreative.com.
Internet station reaching teens
By Heather Lowhorn
Walk through any college residence hall and you’ll notice that students don’t listen to music the way some of us did at teenagers. Today’s students aren’t limited to the radio stations in their local areas. Many of them don’t even have radios. Thanks to the Internet, students can listen to stations from all over the world via their computers. They’re called Web-stations, and when Holly (Wells) Schambach BA ’07 graduated with a degree in music business, she quickly found herself in this fast-growing industry.
Schambach works in promotions at remedy.fm, an Internet station based in Ft. Wayne, Ind. Remedy.fm launched in October 2007 with the idea of providing positive music to a generation of young people through the Internet. But it soon became clear that remedy.fm was providing more than great Christian music.
“After we launched, we found that we were more of a ministry to teens,” says Schambach. “Our focus is no longer on the music, it’s on the relationship [with the listener].” Because so many teens use technology as a form of social interaction, remedy.fm is able to connect with teens on a personal level. “We use a lot of different ways to communicate with our listeners. We use instant messaging, Twitter, e-mail, texting, Facebook, MySpace. They feel a whole lot more comfortable talking about stuff to a stranger than they do talking about what’s going on in their lives to even their youth pastors, their parents, or their friends.”
There is no denying that the Internet can be a dangerous place with much content that is opposed to Christian values, but it is also a medium that young people embrace and are very comfortable using. And it provides a wide-open mission field that remedy.fm can use to provide teens with spiritual encouragement. “We’re focused on teens. That’s our target audience. We found that they were a lot more open to talking about the pain in their lives — to tell their stories, what they are going through — because we’re online,” says Schambach. “They would just start opening up to our DJs. We’re there to get the conversation started. We can point them in the right direction, give them encouragement. We’re here to help teens live their lives on purpose. That’s what we do.”
While remedy.fm is based in Indiana, the station has listeners all over the world. The station promotes Christian music events in the Ft. Wayne area, but they also take steps to include their listeners in more than 90 countries across the globe. “We don’t do news updates; we don’t do weather updates,” says Schambach. “Teenagers would rather go to a Web site and see that for themselves, but we don’t do that because we don’t want to put off listeners in France, Iraq, Australia. We don’t want to exclude them.”
Check out the station at www.remedy.fm to hear how Schambach and the staff at remedy.fm are reaching teens in the mission field of Internet radio.
Alumni adopt a son from Haiti
By Lindsay Conner
Randall and Emily Gray didn’t question if they would adopt — just when.
The year before attending Anderson University, Randall BSN ’03 volunteered at The Children’s Home, an orphanage in Haiti. “The only child we took in that year was David,” he says. His mother had died in childbirth, and with no other nursing mothers in the village, the boy’s father couldn’t feed his already ill child. He brought David to the orphanage as a last-ditch chance at survival. Randall took on the task of caring for three-month-old David. “Here I am, 18 or 19 years old, taking care of a little baby, feeding him formula, and changing diapers.” In his early months, David suffered from malaria, scabies, worms, and respiratory infections.
Having already applied to AU, Randall left Haiti to start college. “I felt really isolated that year, like a father who’d left this son in Haiti,” he says. “That made it a really rough first year. I didn’t take advantage of all the freshman year experiences because I was so disturbed from leaving David behind.” Picking up a nursing major at AU, Randall met Emily Kovacik BSN ’04, also in the nursing program. “Even before we started dating or realized we were interested, we talked about adoption and how we’d love to adopt,” Randall says. “On the night I proposed to her, Emily said, ‘So does this mean we can adopt David now?’”
The Grays describe the adoption process as expensive and time-consuming, with many agonizing unknowns. “When you’re pregnant, you have a due date,” Emily explains. “When you’re adopting, you don’t know.” As part of the pre-adoption home study, Emily and Randall got a bedroom ready for David. “From that point, we had to wait two years,” Randall says. “We planned holidays around having a little boy. Our first Christmas without David felt like someone had died, because he was in our hearts and there was a place for him in our home, but he wasn’t here yet.”
In September 2007, the Grays got on a plane and went to Haiti to pick up eight-year-old David, now ten. Becoming part of an American, two-parent household presented its challenges. “Sharing a room with 30 or 40 boys, it was easy for David to get lost in the shuffle,” Randall says. “He’s never had a model of husband and wife that he saw and lived with every day. The whole concept of this nuclear family — parents that care how you tie your shoes and what you eat — it was beautiful to watch him make that transition.”
Within the next two years, the Grays plan to relocate to Haiti and apply for their second adoption. For now, they continue to live in Anderson, volunteer with Mission Haiti Midwest, and work as nurses at Saint John’s Health System. “I heard a statistic that if one percent of all Christians would adopt one child each, there would be no more orphans,” Randall says. “We really feel it’s a gift that God has given us. Our biological clocks are ticking and yet we’re longing to adopt. I think it’s God’s way of birthing something in us and seeing his heart for children.
“God has put in us the desire to adopt, and specifically David,” Randall continues. “It never felt like we were doing a good thing or helping this kid. Even before he was here, there was a place for him at the table and under the Christmas tree. It’s always felt like we went through labor, and our son is finally with us — that he’s been our son all along.”
Book review: A Thread of Hope
By Rachel Ramke
After 100 years of organized missions in the Church of God, a book has been published focusing on the untold stories of women in mission. A Thread of Hope, edited by Mary Ann Hawkins and Juanita Evans Leonard was released by Anderson University Press at the beginning of May and features the biographies of nine women missionaries whose stories span every continent from the early 1900s to the 1990s. The biographies were written by AU alumnae and students serving in missions themselves or preparing to do so in the future.Several of the writers included in the book are now serving in the same countries or continents as the women they researched. The missionaries have been “role models for the writers’ own lives and corresponded with God’s call for them into a specific area,” according to Hawkins. For example, Wanda Kay Cummins Critser MA ’84, who wrote a biography of Jewel Hall and her ministry in Africa, now serves in Africa herself. Carrie Christine Critser BA ’02, MA ’05 wrote about Daisy Maiden in Asia and now has a ministry in China. Abby Smith MA ’09 researched Dondeena Caldwell’s ministry in Latin America and plans to work there as well.
The other missionary women featured in the book are Lima Lehmer, Lydia Hansen, Hester Greer, Lillian Meier, Mary Butz, and Naomi Randall.
The cover (painted in oils by Amity Rees, a current School of Theology student) and title of the book, A Thread of Hope, correspond to the main theme throughout. Hawkins explained that this book tries to show the reader that even though sometimes we don’t understand the thread we’re weaving we should remember that God holds the big picture or the big tapestry in his hands. There are some loose threads that need to be tied up, and the question is whether God is calling you to take up one of those threads. As the editors ask in the afterword of the book, “What thread of the tapestry of God’s love and hope are you weaving?”
A Thread of Hope is available at www.anderson.edu/aupress. All proceeds from the book are being donated to Anderson University to create the Cross Cultural Endowed Scholarship Fund for Women at the School of Theology. Alumni and friends may donate to the fund by mailing their gifts to the Development Office, Anderson University, 1100 E Fifth St., Anderson, IN 46012.
