Riff: KWVH’s Community Outreach Party & the Hill Country Honeys The team of Dee Rambeau and John McGimsey of “The Empowered Community,” a Friday morning 7 to 9 a.m. program on KWVH, wants you to be prepared in the event of an emergency. They’re inviting us to the station’s Community Outreach party on October 18 at the Wimberley Community Center from 5 to 7 p.m.
To keep things fun, there will be free beer and Margaritas and Rose Gabriel and the Hill Country Honeys will perform. General Manager Tim Kiesling will provide updates on the exciting new things happening at KWVH, including the new broadcast tower and power boost, the new KWVH website, new programming schedule, and the upcoming “What’s On” newsletter.
A member of the Wimberley Emergency Response Network will talk about the role KWVH plays in the local information system. Meet your favorite on-air show hosts and DJs, hear great music and learn where to turn when disruptions occur.
Roam: San Leanna This week’s roam took me to San Leanna, a small village in Travis county south of Austin. It began as a subdivision in the 1950s and in 1970, it incorporated. Fewer than 500 residents live there today, but it is home to the Onion Creek Memorial Park.
Several of us had gathered for the 100year anniversary of the birth of Yetta Resnick Japko, my mother in law, to remember her odyssey from New York City to a tiny cemetery in San Leanna.
Born in Brooklyn to a family of four sisters in 1923, her parents were traditional Jewish immigrants from Russia. After the birth of her youngest sister, Yetta’s mother became bedridden and Yetta, and an older sister Molly, were sent to foster care at the ages of 5 and 6. Until they completed high school, they worked for seven families. Some were Communists looking to indoctrinate them, others were looking for cheap labor, and yet others were in it for the money they received from the foster care system. It was not, by any means, an easy existence.
Yetta entered nursing school in 1941 on Governors Island, the large, 172-acre island in New York harbor, 400 yards from Brooklyn across the borough’s East River. Upon graduation, she was slated for the European theater in support of the D-Day invasion. One way to stay stateside for a graduated Cadet nurse like Yetta, was to marry, so she and her steady beau, Morris Japko, made the trip to City Hall. Instead of treating the wounded in Europe, Yetta helped soldiers heal in her hospital on Governors Island. Decades later after the premature death of her husband, this mother of six left the Bronx for Amarillo, following the trajectory of her oldest son. With her were two of her youngest children and her sister Molly, with whom she had spent 12 long years in foster care, sometimes together and sometimes estranged from each other. It was a symbiotic relationship, family members liked to joke. “Yetta lived to take care of Molly and Molly lived to give Yetta grief.”
From Amarillo, Yetta and Molly moved to Austin where they lived close to several of Yetta’s other children. She continued her career as a nurse well into her 70’s. She was an athletic, high-spirited jokester, who took the misfortunes of her life in stride, exhibiting a kind of grace and exuberance for what she had that few people can muster. By all accounts, she rarely ever looked back.
In 2012, her sister Molly died and in 2017, at the age of 94, Yetta was laid to rest next to her in the San Leanna cemetery. It’s a liberating exercise to contemplate the arc that some lives follow.
Rave: projectART Wimberley’s new ARTSPACE The brand new ARTSPACE kicked off their inauguration last Saturday in the former Sugar Shack building on River Road. It was standing room only as supporters, artists and students spilled out onto the grounds under the sky’s Supermoon.
The inauguration was a milestone for projectART. The nonprofit was founded in the fall of 2019 by a group of impassioned parents and art educators who believed that improved access to art education and other creative opportunities would be a good thing for students interested in a professional career in the arts.
“Wimberley students don’t have the same access to museums, arts facilities and funding as do their urban counterparts,” said Bregan Ford, Executive Director at projectART Wimberley. “ARTSPACE will present at least four contemporary exhibitions per year as a student-run gallery space and will host artist talks and workshops, performances, events and art classes.”
The inauguration showcased a contemporary still life exhibition of the work of 16 artists. “For our opening exhibition, we wanted to put on a big show with a lot of artists and a welcoming feeling. We landed on the still life theme to deliver a ‘welcome to our new home’ type of atmosphere. The 16 artists we included create imagery and objects that play with ideas of the home, the domestic, or the everyday,” said Jules Buck Jones, Head Curator at projectART Wimberley.
The inauguration comes on the heels of projectART’s third annual projectMENTOR Show which raised nearly $5,000; a partnership with Wimberley Independent School District to approve a for-credit practicum program; and the donation of more than $5,000 in art supplies to Wimberley schools. “ARTSPACE gives us the space to reach more students more often. It allows us to expand already successful programs, such as project-MENTOR, and build on the momentum we’ve been gaining since launching projectART in 2019,” said Jennifer Ober, founding member at projectART Wimberley. To learn more about this important grassroots endeavor, visit projectartwimberley. org.
