BY ABBY FOX

When you lose your job as a production manager at a printing company and your brother doesn’t want to work in the mortgage business anymore, what do you do? The answer for Lucia and Tom Asprinio was to start a chocolate business.

Last year, this brother-and-sister-team was inspired to put the chocolate-peanut-pretzel-raisin chunks their mother made for them growing up in East Greenwich, into a product for sale. A year ago, Lucia said, she would say: “Sell it? We don’t have time to sell it!” Then, she said, they had the time.

Reinhard Straub in front of one of his paintings at his Carolina studio.

 By JON GIBBS

CAROLINA–Some people get to crawl up close to the Great Abyss and come back to tell of it. The ones who can best describe what they saw there: the shades and nuance of darkness, the textures and the feeling of terror, dread and horror – all mixed up with Truth, we call artists. The very best of those artists leave just enough out of their vision to allow us to get involved with it and make our own interpretation.  
 Meet Reinhard Straub. He is a fifty-nine-year-old bundle of talents, experiences and occupations that would ordinarily be parceled out to a committee of people, not one sole individual. Put another way: If he were a literal, not a figurative, ball of yarn, it would take a quartet of cats all of their combined lifetimes to unravel him. He is a fascinating mix of therapist, musician and artist. And while the term “Renaissance Man” gets tossed around a lot, most of the time it is applied to people who do a lot of things but do none of them particularly well. Straub, however, does the things he does very well. It just has not been an easy, or particularly direct, route in getting the recognition he has begun to receive. And that recognition is about to be doled out with a grand opening at his studio in Carolina on Oct. 4 and following that, at the HopArts studio tour on Oct. 17 and 18.

BY ABBY FOX

Students and parents anxious to start playing on the new turf field at the high school are going to have to wait some more, now that officials have decided to test the field again in order to truly know if the sub-base underneath is up-to-par.

Town Manager Bill Sequino called a meeting last week and on Friday he and others met with GZA, the firm that reported back on the first tests several weeks ago. “We had them clarify the results from the testing,” said Jean Ann Guliano, chair of the school committee. School Superintendent Victor Mercurio attended the meeting, as well as Project Manager Ernie DiSaia.

Photo: Abby Fox
Eldredge Elementary School teacher Renée Hadfield is partnering with fellow teacher Kara Ratigan on a grant from the East Greenwich Education Foundation to teach on the theme of Past, Present and Future.

BY ABBY FOX

Studying the “Past, Present and Future” as a year-long theme may seem like a huge topic for fourth-graders to handle, but their teachers at Eldredge Elementary School say they’re up to the challenge.
Kara Ratigan and Renée Hadfield received a $2,369.98 grant from the East Greenwich Education Foundation to incorporate interviewing elders at Greenwich Bay Manor; learning about Native Americans at George B. Parker Woodland Wildlife Refuge in Coventry; and studying every region of the country’s way of producing energy, all in one school year.
“It puts everything together,” Ratigan said, whereas in past years, they’ve been able to do one or more of these projects, but not all of them at once. “Without the funding, there’s no way we could have paid for all of it.”
In fourth grade, the students are required to study state history and “land and water” in the sciences and Ratigan and Hadfield now have exciting ways to bring those topics to the children: through one-on-one interviews with older people, on what life was like for them when they were fourth-graders, and later, by making what’s called a “spiral book” that reveals what they’ve learned in their social studies and science curriculum, through writing and art work. “It makes the curriculum meaningful for the kids,” Ratigan said.
Then toward the end of the year, students will pair up with the younger generation, second-graders at Frenchtown Elementary School, “to teach them what we’ve learned,” they said, and to read aloud the children’s books they’ve written.
This is the second-year the two have team-taught together. “We bounce things off one another,” Hadfield said. “And then we build from that,” Ratigan said. 

Dancast Update

When it comes to the weather, we will remain tranquility base today and tomorrow—no problem here, Houston.  We await the ever-so-slow progress of a storm system over the upper Midwest and its trailing cold front.  Thanks to tenacious high pressure just off the coast, any rain will likely hold off until late Tuesday night into Wednesday.  South to southwesterly winds on the back side of said high pressure will also siphon warm air our way—expect highs in the mid 70s today and tomorrow, with lows in the 50s to around 60.

Photos: Abby Fox
Lucia and Tom Asprinio started a candy business last year, when their jobs dried up in the recession. They make a chocolate, pretzel, peanut, raisin combination from their mother’s recipe file.

 By Jonathan Gibbs

There is nothing that brings a husband and wife closer than being forehead to forehead, tearduct to tearduct, whispered prayer to whispered prayer on the non-slippery side of a surgical screen as a team of doctors on the other side work with great, quick urgency to save her life and that of your unborn, but struggling, son. And there is nothing like the knowledge they might not succeed to push you farther away from your hold on your own sanity and your will to keep living in a world without them. To push you violently away from faith.

Photo: Abby Fox
Students went back to school last Wednesday. Here are some First Day of School moments from Frenchtown Elementary School.

 BY ABBY FOX

The teachers’ union and the negotiating team for the school committee reached a tentative agreement on the teachers’ contract last Wednesday night.
Matt Oliverio, attorney for the school committee, will present the contract at the school committee’s executive session Sept. 15, for the full committee’s approval, and the union is scheduled to hear it the following day, he said.
“We have to submit them to our respective representatives, me to the school committee and the union negotiation to their rank and file, at which time, once it’s been ratified, we can disclose the terms,” Olivierio said. “Until that arrives, we agreed we’re not going to disclose the terms. We still have to persuade them. As far as I’m concerned, the negotiations went well: they were tough but they were productive.” The public “will be very satisfied with the progress that was made. It’s a very responsible contract, from a fiscal and managerial point of view, and fair to the teachers.”
And the time-management was good too, he said.
“The negotiations were done in record time. We had ten sessions. In terms of a cost to the district, it was extremely prudent and reasonable.”
The last go-round of negotiations, “the cost district at least $60,000 and a cost this time was a fraction of that,” he said.

With a friendly name like Bill, it’s hard to believe a hurricane could prove much of a rough sort.  As of late this week, however, Hurricane Bill means business as it continues its trek in a westerly—and increasingly northerly direction.  Will the Providence hurricane barrier get much use this weekend? Most likely not, as it still appears the storm will recurve to the east and out to see before bringing much in the way of wind and/or rain to southern New England.  That said, a tropical shower or a gusty breeze or two can’t be ruled out entirely, and the seas and surf should be in particularly gnarley mode as Bill makes its way within a few hundred miles of the region. 

 Siena Ducharme, four-month-old daughter of David and Kellie Ducharme, whose T-shirt business Are You Outside the Box? is finding its own niche in the market, models one of their shirts.

BY ABBY FOX

Local newshounds may remember the name David Ducharme, who works for E. Turgeon Construction, the contractor for the new East Greenwich Police station on First Avenue.

The Ducharme name is back in circulation again, now that Richmond residents David Ducharme, and wife Kellie, have started their own brand of organic T-shirts based on the idea: “Are You Outside the Box,” and in little time, have turned it into a profitable online business: www.ruoutsidethebox.com

The story is an inspiration for any would be–entrepreneur. Ducharme said the idea was born by accident two years ago when he was on a plane to the West Coast for a vacation. He was disappointed that a problem at work had forced him to fly behind his family. “How was that a problem?” he asked himself. “We just had to look at it another way.” Ducharme was doodling on a cocktail napkin, thinking, “No one’s thinking outside the box on this stuff,” and laughed a little when he realized he had scratched something pretty interesting: a sketch of a box, but a broken one. It was the image of someone breaking away, going “outside the box.”