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Fall Issue 2
Oct. 4, 2019
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‘Star Wars’ betrayal
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Chemistry humor See page 8
St. Louis Community College at Forest Park
Black Student Union forms on campus By Kevin Santander The Scene staff
A new student organization has formed to help black students at Forest Park connect with each other and make a difference on campus. The Black Student Union has been meeting since Aug. 16. “We don’t have a black student club,” said President Sia Killian, 19, a general transfer studies student. “We wanted to help communication between black students.” The organization has about 40 members. One is Ronald Thompson, 21, a general transfer studies student. He joined to get more involved in campus activities and to accomplish some goals. Those goals include developing more space where students can play games or just hang out; and bringing back child care for students with children. Thompson also would like to see Forest Park build and maintain a community garden. “It would be a community service to give (vegetables and herbs) to those in need and the culinary arts department, if needed,” he said. The Black Student Union is governed by a board that already has cam-
See Union page 6
College has a cop who cooks Dave Jost’s nickname is ‘Tactical Chef’ By Ethan Tutor The Scene staff One of Forest Park’s employees is leading a double life. By day, he’s a chef-in-training, taking classes through the culinary arts program. By night, he’s a police officer, keeping watch over the campus and its students. Dave Jost, 50, balances the roles masterfully, blending his love of law enforcement and passion for cooking. That’s because the mix is nothing new. “I’ve always enjoyed cooking,” he said. Jost has been a police officer for 30 years, starting with St. Louis County and continuing with the cities of Ferguson, Calverton Park, Bel Ridge and Pacific. He joined the Forest Park staff in 2017. It wasn’t until recently that Jost decided to pursue a baking degree. He had made a lifestyle change and grew more interested in nutrition and its effects on the human body. “I lost a lot of weight and started exercising more,” he said. Jost enrolled in the baking program in January. One of his instructors is Ellen Piazza, culinary arts program coordinator. “Dave has been wonderful to have in class,” she said. “He is always well prepared, interested and strives to create food that is both tasty and attractive. “He has had a great sense of humor about his also being a safety officer here on campus. His personal and professional skills have come into play in the classroom, and he has been very successful in both,” she added.
Police officer since age 21
Photo by Kevin Santander
Black Student Union President Sia Killian
Jost grew up in St. Louis and wanted to be a police officer as far back as he can remember. He joined St. Louis County Police Department at age 21, along with his brother. Jost served as a county patrolman for five years before moving on to other departments and other challenges. “I enjoy the job,” he said. “I really enjoy the interaction with the people and solving their problems. I also love training younger officers.” Over the years, Jost has seen the best and worst sides of people in the St. Louis region. He had to draw his gun “almost on the daily” while settling domestic disputes and responding to robbery reports in dangerous neighborhoods. But he has never had to shoot anyone. Jost was working in Ferguson in 2014 when riots broke out after white police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, a black teenager. Ray Baker, a police officer on the Florissant Valley campus of St. Louis Community College, has been working with Jost since 1991. He describes him as
Photo by Angelica Woody
Photo by Ethan Tutor
“very professional.” “He wouldn’t be doing (police work) this long if he wasn’t good at it,” Baker said. The image of police officers has taken a hit in recent years, with claims of police brutality and unequal treatment of black suspects. But Jost said that doesn’t affect his dedication to law enforcement or the way he does his job. Jost characterized people who are anti-police as a “small minority.” “I’ve had no negative feedback from students or staff, ever,” he said. Jost joined Forest Park Campus Police as a full-time officer in 2017. He characterizes it as the easiest work of his career, mainly
because the environment is more “civilized” than city streets and he spends more time indoors. “There’s a lot less stress,” he said. “... After 28 years on the road, you just want a change of pace. And it allowed me to come back to school.”
Culinary arts student Dave Jost cuts fat from steaks in class. At right, Jost on duty as a Forest Park police officer.
Next up: Food truck?
Jost also is a full-time culinary arts student. This semester, he’s taking a six-credit Food Prep class three mornings a week. Students are expected to make tasty dishes, but they’re also tested on presentation
See Cop page 2
Photo by Mark Ngunjiri
African Festival
Susan Imbeah, left, discusses the price of clothing she is selling with Barbara Brown at the African Festival in the Forest Park cafeteria.
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Cop and nutrition. Jost’s presentation skills have earned him the nickname “Tactical Chef” from classmates and instructors. Jost’s culinary creations don’t go to waste, as students get to eat the food they prepare. Being a college student is “more fun than expected,” he said. “... I’m loving it. I’m having a great time.” Jost likes to eat, but he also exercises at the gym five times a week to stay in shape. He isn’t a fan of fast food, preferring “real” meals. One of his favorite restaurants is Pirrone’s Pizzeria in Florissant. Baker knew cooking was Jost’s passion, so he wasn’t surprised when he enrolled in a culinary arts program. He’s been on the receiving end of Jost’s cooking. “Whenever he owes us a favor, we make him bring us his cakes,” Baker said. “The
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man can bake a cake.” Jost doesn’t have a concrete plan for what to do with his baking degree, but he hints at the idea of operating a food truck. “There’s just so much you can do with a baking degree,” he said. “You can do anything.” Jost takes pride in being part of Forest Park’s culinary arts program, which has a good reputation in the region. He gives particular praise to Piazza and Casey Shiller, coordinator of the baking and pastry program and two-time winner of “Cupcake Wars” on the Food Network. “Such a great group and staff,” said Jost, who encourages students to consider culinary arts as a major. “If you’re curious about what we do, stop by and just ask the instructor to sit in on the class.”
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Business/web manager: Victor Paletta | Circulation: Zacchaeus Windham | Reporters/photographers: Ethan Tutor, Angelica Woody, Mark Ngunjiri, Tyrell Smith, Craig Mershon, Kevin Santander, Ariah Davis, Brian Ostrander | Layout: Katelyn Clancy, Lulu Ali | Cartoonists: Cameron Kuntz, Mackenzie Gregory, Larry Cox | Faculty advisers: Teri Maddox, Fred Ortlip
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Campus chatter Raekwon Kinnard, 21, general studies “Placing fifth in the state of Virginia for wrestling. I went to Alleghany High School.”
Amari Alexander, 20, nursing “Getting a car in my name without anyone’s help.”
Keterreus, Carbiuin, 22, biotechnology “Going to college. I want to work in a career I love.”
Camyiah Moor, 17, biology “Graduating from Lafayette High School. Lots of people in my community don’t get to experience that.”
Alexander Hirst, 20, fine arts “The work I am doing and the growth I am getting from my art classes.”
Bruce Munson, assistant sociology professor “Becoming a parent of a female and being married for 11 years.”
What is your greatest accomplishment Matthew Gleason, 65, general studies “Getting three children through college and them having successful careers.”
Jazmin Johnson, 19, general studies “Coming to college. I wasn’t planning on coming. I didn’t think I was ready.”
so far?
By Angelica Woody
Erica Mtoledo, 18, general studies “I got into Mu Alpha Theta (math honor society). It is basically advance classes in high school. I do not have to worry about those classes in college.”
Leondre Settle, 18, general studies “Getting a job at UPS. It’s my first official job. I get to work hard, and I enjoy the night sky. The best part is, I don’t have to talk to people.”
Bayley Wilson, 18, general studies “Being a volunteer at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. I work in the patient and sibling playroom. I play with children and make them happy.”
Mairiah Wilson, 21, general studies “Graduating from McCluer-South Berkeley High School in 2016.”
Layout by Lulu Ali
Oct. 4, 2019
The Scene
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Photo by Mark Ngunjiri
Someone added a third choice, aliens, on the door of a unisex restroom on the third floor of F Tower.
Photo by Mark Ngunjiri
CJ Jackson, husband of a culinary arts student, looks at flags representing African countries in the cafeteria during the African Festival.
Culinary arts student Ted Vollmar shoots video of program coordinator Ellen Piazza, who is demonstrating how to cut the fat off steaks in the campus kitchen.
Students, faculty and staff sit in lawn chairs and listen to t Photo by Angelica Woody
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Layout by Katelyn Clancy
The Scene
THESCENEFP.COM
Oct. 4, 2019
A Day in the Life of Forest Park Photo by Kevin Santander
General transfer student Sia Killian, 19, sells popcorn in the Student Center lobby.
the band Fresh Rain in the courtyard during the Forest Park Fountain Festival, which also included a food truck.
Oct. 4, 2019
The Scene
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Photo by Angelica Woody
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Opinion
Don’t assume you’re too young to fall Screed Space
By Brian Ostrander The Scene staff On the 23rd of August, autumn quietly fell upon us like clockwork after an almost-eternal summer. It was as inevitable as the sun setting. Three days later, however, in the hollow lecture hall that is C-110, John Snider, St. Louis Community College’s dedicated and equally conversant environmental health and safety specialist, reminded us that the falls of humankind can be prevented. What seemed like a guaranteed-banal assignment quickly turned into something worth remembering. With only myself, a gaggle of four other students and a faculty member for his audience, Snider delivered a seminar worthy of a crammed auditorium. Many of us can’t imagine a mortally debilitating fall in our days at campus. The thought of slipping and smacking one’s skull on a Lysol-laden floor doesn’t cross the college-aged mind much.
We tend to assign that kind of clumsy fate to our geriatric loved ones, and statistics will tell you that this presumption is not unfounded, considering nearly one in four people 65 or older take a tumble each year, with less than half even telling their doctors. However, Snider ominously revealed that an emergency-room-grade fall can be in anybody’s future, given the perfect storm of circumstances. Innocuous factors, ranging from worn shoe treads to rugs bunched up by foot traffic (a personal pet-peeve of mine) to poor balance due to damaged hearing or even just the distracted mind. ... All of these can lead to catastrophic gravity-induced injury. Slip ratings are even available on all commercially available floor cleaning solutions. The facts laid before Snider’s audience were enough to give pause, considering the decrepit state of the tread on my sneakers and my innate clumsiness. Note to self: Buy new shoes when the money’s available. Falls account for nearly 2.8 million emergency-room visits per year, 800,000 of which require hospitalization. These visits are not only physically taxing, but they cost Medicare and Medicaid about $37.5 billion and patients and insurance companies another $12.5 billion. Seminar attendees included Charles Jones, disability support specialist at Forest Park, who was on a mission to relay some of his new-found knowledge back to his department. With a strong sense of self-assured control, he remarked, “These are things we really take for granted.” I concurred, aware of my own sense of reckless self-confidence.
host a series of seminars on fire extinguishers across all campuses. While topics of personal safety (or safety in general) are admittedly mundane, Snider’s seminars grant them a sobering sense of importance and drive home key points, professionally and eccentrically. On the college’s website, anybody with login may view Occupational Safety and Health Administration materials, as well as STLCC campus-inspection reports. There’s a lot to be said for transparency at public institutions, and the latter delivers on that value. During Snider’s seminar, I came to believe the college is undeniably lucky to have a professional who is so passionate about occupational health and safety.
Photo by Mark Ngunjiri
John Snider, environmental health and safety specialist for St. Louis Community College, talks about fall prevention in C Tower. “We get comfortable and have this aura of invincibility until we’re not; until we’re not invincible,” Jones continued in a reflective tone. “We’re reminded these things can happen.” Indeed. And the U.S. Centers for Disease Control completely agrees. It has pithily designated Aug. 23 as “National Fall Prevention Day.” Snider explained to me that up until April of 2018, his fall-prevention seminars were only available to STLCC faculty. Now students also have the opportunity to attend. The first week of October, Snider is set to
Strange Encounters
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pus several activities planned. This includes a Halloween candy sale, an event to raise awareness of mental-health issues and a Black History Month celebration with “A Night of Unspoken Words,” a photography exhibit and a “Throwback Night.” “I want to have diversity in the club,” Killian said. “… I want to thank all the supporters of the Black Student Union, and let’s begin the fight for more student space.” The organization meets from 12:30 to 1 p.m. on the second and third Wednesdays of each month in the Highlander Lounge. For more information, contact Killian at skillian6@my.stlcc.edu.
By Larry Cox
The Scene
THESCENEFP.COM
Oct. 4, 2019
Opinion
Did Disney betray ‘Star Wars’ filmmaker? Culture Geek
By Ethan Tutor The Scene staff George Lucas, creator of the blockbuster movie saga “Star Wars,” has been sitting pretty on a $4 billion mountain of money ever since Disney bought Lucasfilms back in 2012. What fans have been dying to know is what the legendary filmmaker thinks about the new era of his once-cherished franchise. No matter how much you may have enjoyed the latest series installments, it’s impossible to ignore that they have been lessthan-embraced by fans and the box office alike. The last “Star Wars” movie, “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” lost Disney an estimated $50 million during its 2018 theater run, while its predecessors — “The Force Awakens” (2015), “Rogue One” (2016) and “The Last Jedi” (2017) — raked in billions. The explanation many give for this incredible drop in attendance is Episode 8, “The Last Jedi.” Love it or hate it, the
movie destroyed the fan base and split man against fellow man in a conflict that is still being fought. The internet is a place where anybody can speak his mind about anything, and after “The Last Jedi” was released, that fact was never more true. Social-media sites like YouTube, Reddit and Twitter became battlegrounds for a war of opinions over a single polarizing movie. The shockwaves of this fanbase split culminated in the box-office bomb that was “Solo.” Since then, things have only gotten worse. Rian Johnson, director of “The Last Jedi,” argues with fans on Twitter almost daily, desperately trying to defend his movie. Out of 23.3 thousand tweets from followers, many are devoted solely to insulting fans that give fair and constructive criticism to the movie, calling them “man babies,” just for caring about a franchise that has been a part of their lives for more than 30 years. Amid all of this madness, Lucas has been eerily silent. That is, since he called Disney “white slavers” in 2015. Yes, he actually said that. If that didn’t show Lucas’ thoughts on his deal with Disney, I don’t know what would. However, on Sept. 24, we were blessed with even more insight into the biggest acquisition in movie history. It came from Bob Iger himself in his memoir, “The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company.” He definitely shines a spotlight on how the acquisition was received by Lucas. But that’s not all. In a bona fide bomb-
shell reveal, Iger admits to purchasing outlines to the sequel trilogy (Episodes 7-9), written by Lucas. “At some point in the process, George told me that he had completed outlines for three new movies,” Iger wrote. “He agreed to send us three copies of the outlines: one for me; one for (Disney senior executive vice president, general counsel and secretary) Alan Braverman; and one for (co-chairman and chief creative officer) Alan Horn, who’d just been hired to run our studio.
George Lucas with Bob Iger “Alan Horn and I read George’s outlines and decided we needed to buy them, though we made clear in the purchase agreement that we would not be contractually obligated to adhere to the plot lines he’d laid out.” The pubic had heard rumors of Lucas writing outlines for the movies, but never had we known that Disney not only bought them, it threw them away. “(Lucas) knew that I was going to stand firm on the question of creative control, but
Forget It
Oct. 4, 2019
it wasn’t an easy thing for him to accept,” Iger wrote in the book. “And so he reluctantly agreed to be available to consult with us at our request. I promised that we would be open to his ideas (this was not a hard promise to make; of course we would be open to George Lucas’ ideas), but like the outlines, we would be under no obligation.” More and more, it seems Lucas wasn’t big on selling his “Star Wars” movies, which he frequently calls his “babies.” And if he was so reluctant, then why did he do it in the first place? Did he simply succumb to the allure of that ungodly amount of money? Or did he really believe in Disney and its creative team and trust them to honor the characters and storylines? There are even more inflammatory and incriminating sections in Iger’s book: “George immediately got upset as they began to describe the plot and it dawned on him that we weren’t using one of the stories he submitted during the negotiations,” he wrote. “... The truth was, (“The Force Awakens” writer director) Kathy, J.J. (Abrams), Alan, and I had discussed the direction in which the saga should go, and we all agreed that it wasn’t what George had outlined. “George knew we weren’t contractually bound to anything, but he thought that our buying the story treatments was a tacit promise that we’d follow them, and he was disappointed that his story was being discarded. I’d been so careful since our first conversation not to mislead him in any way, and I didn’t think I had now, but I could
See Disney page 8
By Cameron Kuntz
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On the Scene Lovely Lives
By Mackenzie Gregory
Disney
from page 7
have handled it better. “I should have prepared him for the meeting with J.J. and Michael and told him about our conversations, that we felt it was better to go in another direction. I could have talked through this with him and possibly avoided angering him by not surprising him. ... Now, in the first meeting with him about the future of Star Wars, George felt betrayed, and while this whole process would never have been easy for him, we’d gotten off to an unnecessarily rocky start.”
There we have it from the man himself. You can’t get a more reliable source. Now that we have this information, we must ask, “Who allowed Iger to put this information in his book?” It seems that he shot himself in the foot, and for seemingly no reason or gain. Had Lucas known that Disney wouldn’t use his ideas for the sequel trilogy, perhaps he wouldn’t have sold the rights in the first place. Iger may have made a foolish mistake by revealing behind-the-scenes negotiations
on “Star Wars,” but I applaud him for being honest, no matter how shocking and disturbing are his revelations. Oh, to be a fly on the wall in that room when Lucas discovered his saga wasn’t going to end the way he planned. It’s known that Lucas’ sequel trilogy would have explored the weirder side of “Star Wars,” diving into the “microscopic realm” of a lesser-known canon. This doesn’t sound like the best way to go, but many people and especially fans would
welcome anything that came from the mind of Lucas himself. Unfortunately, the world will never know what could’ve been. The “Skywalker Saga” (Episodes 1-9) is coming to an end in December with the release of “The Rise of Skywalker.” A new age of “Star Wars” movies is dawning, straying farther and farther from Lucas’ original vision. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I’m sure the box office numbers will decide.
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