New England Public Radio

The towers framing the majestic roof of Centennial Baptist Church reach for the heavens near downtown Helena, Ark. The elaborate red brick church stands out in a neighborhood that’s seen better days, given the boarded-up homes and businesses nearby.

But a closer look reveals that the century-old church has seen better days, as well. Bricks are breaking apart and falling away and a huge metal structure abuts the back wall.

Heritage tourism is a growing industry across the South, as civil rights pilgrimages take note of historic sites like the restored Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed.

But in smaller towns like Helena, finding the resources to save lesser-known landmarks is a challenge.

Inside Centennial Baptist, pigeons roost along the hardwood floors and pews where parishioners once worshiped. Beer and whiskey bottles litter a corner and scaffolding holds up the high-pitched roof.

This isn’t just an endangered, beautiful building from the turn of the last century. Centennial Baptist Church is a National Historic Landmark.

Phyllis Hammonds, executive director of the foundation that owns Centennial, was baptized and married in this church. She’s now carrying on her late mother’s mission to save it.

“The history is so rich,” Hammonds says. “Two former slaves collaborated and built this structure.”

Those men were a Baptist pastor, Rev. Elias Camp Morris, and Henry James Price, a self-taught architect. Price’s grandson, Harold Jefferson, says he was a skilled woodworker by trade. The congregation met in a house in the late 1800s, Jefferson says, until Morris asked Price to build a new, more regal house of worship in 1905.

“And Dr. Morris went to Europe and he wanted to find a picture or … to see about a building that he wanted to bring back to Helena, Ark.,” Jefferson, a longtime member of Centennial Baptist, explains. “Grandmother told me that he brought it back and showed it to Price and said, ‘Can you fix this like this picture?’ “

Price did, and Centennial became a source of pride for the African-American community in segregated Helena, once a bustling port on the Mississippi River.

Historian Bobby Roberts, director of the Central Arkansas Library System, says Centennial is a prime candidate for preservation.

“One, it is a monumental building just in terms of size,” he says. “Two, it is a major piece of African-American history. So it really is a unique structure I think, not only in the Delta, but in Arkansas and in the South.”

Morris rose to national prominence as the first president of the National Baptist Convention, the largest historically black denomination. Centennial had about 1,000 members when Morris died in 1922.

But by the turn of this century, active membership had dwindled to double-digits. Roberts, a Helena native, says that reflects the hard times in the Delta as people left the region to find work.

Maintaining the church was an uphill battle for the congregation, he says. “It was too big for them. So they turned it over to a foundation with the idea that the foundation would be able to save the church. And they did protect it.”

The E.C. Morris Foundation got started with state funding to shore up Centennial in the 1990s. Little Rock architect Tommy Jameson, who drew up the plan, recalls when he first stepped inside.

“It was somewhat frightening … from a structural standpoint. But it was magnificent,” he says. “The architecture is incredible. The soaring spaces. It’s 40 feet up to the ceiling. It’s a wonderful space and incredibility intact — unchanged substantially.”

Jameson estimates it will take more than $2 million to restore the church — and the foundation would need even more to operate the cultural center they envision.

That’s proven to be a daunting amount of money to raise. And in Helena, Hammonds says it’s hard to garner support when issues like education, violence and poverty are more pressing.

“People are about surviving,” she says. “Many folks don’t understand the significance of restoring this facility because they’re so busy trying to survive. And I can understand that.”

But the restoration project has also faltered because of a clash of personalities, and age-old racial mistrust.

In 2006, the foundation teamed with local preservationists to win a $300,000 Save America’s Treasures grant. But the partnership soured before the required matching funds were met.

Hammonds accuses white preservationists of trying to co-opt Centennial’s history. “I view it as a plantation mentality: ‘You give me the information and we’ll tell your story.’ “

She objected when a community development bank put conditions on the foundation that she feared would take Centennial out of the hands of black church members.

“I would rather see it fall and say, put up a sign, ‘Here Centennial stood.’ At least we would still be in control.”

Her group lost the federal grant, and the preservation effort stalled.

“Sometimes you have to share a dream to make it a reality,” says Cathy Cunningham, a historical development consultant who once worked with the Centennial Foundation.

“I don’t know of anyone that’s trying to take church away,” she says. “I would hate to think that the church will fall down. But .. I don’t know.”

The apparent power struggle is frustrating for former church members. Retired educator J.J. Lacey Jr., who was a member of Centennial in the 1960s, says the foundation needs to mend relationships with the local preservationists who have been successful in restoring Helena’s Civil War-era landmarks.

“They are in the catbird seat, you know, just being blunt about it,” Lacey says. “They have the purse strings. We have to give and take.”

Roberts, the Arkansas historian, agrees, but he says jump-starting the restoration of Centennial Baptist Church means treading touchy historical ground.

“The exploitation of African-Americans in the South and in the Delta has been notorious,” Robert says. “Even though that’s in the distant past, those wounds and hurts I think are still there and there’s a feeling of distrust, understandably, I think, if you only look at the past. You have to get over that fear.”

And a national treasure is at stake in Helena, Roberts says. “Nobody loses if that church gets saved. Everybody loses if it falls down.”

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

It’s the end of an era in aviation. The McDonnell Douglas DC-9, a plane that once ruled the skies, is finally retiring.

The DC-9 first took flight in 1965 and production stopped in 1982. While most airlines phased the planes out in the ’90s, Delta overhauled its fleet and kept them in the air, until now.

On Monday, Delta Flight 2014 from Minneapolis to Atlanta marked the last scheduled commercial flight for a DC-9 on a major U.S. airline.

At Atlanta International Airport, Capt. Scott Woolfrey stood inside one of the now retired planes that will head to its final resting place in Blytheville, Ark.

“The DC-9 is a workhorse,” he said.

Woolfrey knows how these planes perform. He’s flown them since 1997 and he piloted Monday’s final flight as the sun set across the horizon.

“As we took off it was light out. And as we got closer and closer to Atlanta, the skies turned an amber to a deep purple, then finally set completely on the aircraft,” Woolfrey said. “We arrived, it was dark and taxied to the gate. It was very symbolic of the flight.”

Woolfrey calls the DC-9 a pilot’s plane. Take a look inside the cockpit and you’ll get a glimpse into a different time in aviation.

“It’s all analogue gauges,” he said. “Pilots are very intimately involved in flying the aircraft, flying by needles and balls and with a single autopilot.”

And there’s no GPS to use.

“We navigate by ground-based radio beacons. Our needles point to a station and then we get a distance from a station. So we know where we are, we use the old paper charts and we navigate that way,” Woolfrey said.

The DC-9 is known for its relatively small size — Delta says the dual-engine jet can seat 120 passengers — which has allowed it to land on short runways. Over the course of its nearly 50-year career, it expanded travel to hundreds of communities that were previously served by slow propeller planes.

Woolfrey said his best memories of the plane are descending through mountains to land at airports in little towns that dot the West: “It’s indescribable in clear weather to start your descent, it’s almost a two-dimensional view. Once you get down into the mountains like [near the Montana cities of] Helena or Bozeman and see the majestic peaks around you, it’s just absolutely an amazing sight.”

These days, the DC-9s are outdated. They’re noisy and not fuel efficient. But Woolfrey said they’re fun to fly and he’ll miss taking them up.

“It brought us from Minneapolis to Atlanta safely and comfortably,” he said. “Kind of nostalgic just setting the brakes for the last time.”

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The old bathroom building behind Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church in rural Vacherie, La., was little more than a shack. Hurricane Rita almost knocked it down in 2005. It finally got bulldozed in October.

Some members of the parish say that was long overdue.

When the bathroom building went up in 1959, one set of doors was painted white; the others were a different color. Ushers would follow black parishioners outside to make sure they entered the correct door.

“Let me tell you something maybe not too many people know,” says Anita Battis, 76, a parishioner at Our Lady of Peace her whole life. “As long as I’ve come to this church, I’ve never, ever used that restroom. Never.”

Her grandfather helped build the church, back before the days of indoor plumbing.

“This was, I would use the word, a slap in my face,” says Battis of the segregated bathroom. “If I can’t go in any one of the doors, I just as soon don’t go in any.”

Margaret Cortez used to pile into a station wagon with her eight siblings to get to mass as a kid. Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, Cortez never thought about why the doors of that bathroom were different colors before they were painted over. The bathroom was in use until a few months ago.

“I never looked at it as a separation of people, and I couldn’t understand when people would talk about it why it meant so much,” she says. “It’s just a bathroom.”

It was just a bathroom, until Cortez joined a discussion group with Battis and others from the church to talk about racism in the community. And that inspired a special Wednesday night mass.

“Let us acknowledge the mistakes, the decisions, the policies, the rules, the evil, the sins we committed that unfairly separated us, especially our African-American brothers and sisters, both living and deceased,” Father Michael Miceli told the crowd at the church.

Then he set fire to pieces of the old bathroom building. And from the pulpit, the priest apologized. “Please, forgive us,” he said.

Miceli’s sermon the previous Sunday had also gotten applause — but not from everyone. During the sermon, Miceli said:

“Dear brothers and sisters, I know that many of you are not prejudiced or racist. But I also know some of you are.”

Some parishioners sent letters to Miceli and to the bishop of the Baton Rouge diocese, arguing racism is gone from Vacherie and that the priest is just trying to stir things up.

“As time goes by, we’ll see how many people show up at church, the collections and stuff like that,” says Miceli. “But I don’t worry about any of that. When you do the right thing, the Lord will make a way.”

At a gathering right after Miceli’s from-the-pulpit apology, Battis told him it felt like a burden had been lifted. “And it just was an awesome feeling that I accepted that apology from him for all the injustice that was done in the church,” says Battis.

The next morning, a bulldozer tossed the old bathroom building into the air.

Later this month, the group discussing racism in the church will meet again to keep the conversation going.

Copyright 2014 WRKF Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.wrkf.org.

The snowpack in the Mountain West this year is at just a small fraction of its normal level. In fact, 2013 was the driest year ever recorded in many parts of California, and there’s little relief in sight. But water managers are trying to squeeze every last raindrop out of Mother Nature with a technology developed in the state more than 50 years ago: cloud seeding.

Droughts tend to produce a lot of wishful thinking, and researcher Jeff Tilley says it definitely comes his direction.

“There’s only so much we can do. If we could make the clouds appear out of the thin air, we would, but we can’t do that yet,” he says.

Tilley runs the cloud-seeding program at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev. Weather modification, as it’s called, is about making rain, not making clouds.

It happens at the summit of the Alpine Meadows ski area in California, on the northwest side of Lake Tahoe — right where the chairlift drops off.

Most skiers don’t notice the green metal bunker with a chimney on top. This isn’t a snow-making machine like the ones ski resorts are relying on this winter. It’s designed to improve the water supply in the area by releasing tiny particles of silver iodide. These are the seeds in cloud seeding, rising thousands of feet up into the air.

Building A Better Cloud

Clouds are made of millions of tiny water droplets, but those drops don’t automatically fall as rain or snow. They need something to stick to, like tiny dust particles. If a cloud doesn’t have enough dust, Tilley says, “you have these very static, dead clouds that don’t precipitate, don’t produce any water and just keep on moving right through.”

That’s where the silver iodide comes in. Tilley says it’s the right size and shape to help snowflakes form.

Cloud seeding only works in certain conditions — you have to have clouds already, and it has to be colder than 20 degrees — but over a season, it can make a difference.

“What we find is a range of anywhere between 8 and 15 percent increase in water,” Tilley says.

The silver iodide ends up in the local environment, and some worry it’s a contaminant. Tilley says tests show only trace amounts.

When cloud seeding began, it was seen as “magical thinking,” an idea Tilley says has stuck around. “We get voodoo, we get Dr. Frankenstein, we get all sorts of things. But we’ve been able to refine the technology.”

Worth The Money?

Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, a water policy think tank, says it’s hard to verify exactly how much water cloud seeding produces — and if it’s worth the money. A 2003 review by the National Academy of Sciences found that more research needs to be done to prove its effectiveness.

“For a long time, there’s been hope that we could somehow figure out a way to squeeze more water out of nature,” Gleick says. “We get a certain number of clouds with moisture in them. If we can wring a little more out of those clouds, that’s sort of the idea behind cloud seeding.

“But we’re not going to wring a lot more out of those clouds. So it’s not a silver bullet. There is no silver bullet for California’s water problems,” he adds.

Across the state, water agencies spend $3 million to $5 million each year on seeding, which is estimated to boost runoff by about 4 percent. That might not sound like much, but as water resources get tighter, Tilley says, cloud seeding is getting a second wind.

Nine other Western states also use seeding, including Colorado, Texas and Utah, where it’s commonly done with airplanes.

“I think, for the entire Intermountain West, it’s becoming more important,” Tilley says. “It’s not going to be the whole answer but it can be one tool in the tool kit, and it’s a cost-effective one.”

Tilley says cloud seeders are looking to cut costs further by using drones instead of planes. The demand is on the rise, he says, as the Western states rely more than ever on every last raindrop.

Copyright 2014 KQED Public Media. To see more, visit http://www.kqed.org.

On a frigid day at Hatcher Pass, north of Anchorage, Alaska, cross-country skier Holly Brooks glides up to a start line.

This race is just a practice with her Alaska Pacific University teammates. It’s a chance for Brooks to test her skills before heading to Europe for the busy World Cup season, and then to Sochi in February for the Winter Olympics. Brooks is now a seasoned member of the U.S. Ski Team, but a little more than four years ago, she was on the sidelines.

On July 4, 2009, that all changed.

Brooks was competing in Mount Marathon, the Super Bowl of Alaskan sports. It’s a rugged mountain running race, straight up and back down a nausea-inducing incline.

“It was actually this really awkward and odd epiphany,” Brooks says. “I was leading, and I suffered [an] extreme case of dehydration, and I passed out right in front of the emergency room, which is conveniently along the course of Mount Marathon.”

She was just a few tantalizing blocks from the finish line.

“And just how close I came to winning, it’s like it flipped this switch in my mind and my body. And I was laying in the emergency room, and I said to myself — I didn’t tell anyone — ‘I want to go to the Olympics.’ “

It was an improbable goal. At the time, Brooks was 27, at least a decade older than most cross-country skiers who set their sights on the Olympics. Brooks had done well in two popular recreational races, but had zero international experience. The Winter Games in Vancouver were just seven months away.

“You know, there were a lot of people that told me, ‘Oh, with your background, you can never do this,’ ” Brooks says. “Or, ‘You’re too old; the U.S. Ski Team will never nominate you.’ You know, ‘You’re past your prime.’ “

But Brooks believed she had a shot, and so did many of the athletes she coached, like Don Haering, who she coached when he skied in high school and college. He says that when the team was training, coach Brooks was always right there with them.

“I knew Holly was fast,” Haering says. “It’s not like she would stand there on the side of the trail and tell you where to go; she would go ski with you the whole time, and if you did a hard interval set, she might do the whole thing with you. And then you go home and rest, and meanwhile, Holly has another session to do, and I would assume she would do the same thing with them too.”

Brooks pursued her dream with “reckless abandon,” as she puts it, and it paid off. In 2010, she eked her way onto the Olympic squad; four years later, she has a shot at a relay medal in Sochi. Looking back, Brooks says she can’t exactly recommend her unusual path to other skiers. But she says her background gives her something many of her younger competitors lack: perspective.

“You know, I am the oldest one on the team,” Brooks says. “I know that I don’t have 10 more years in my career, so there’s a certain amount of — I hesitate to call it urgency — but I’m really excited for what’s to come.”

Back at Hatcher Pass, Brooks is rounding the last corner of the racecourse, eyeing the finish line. This race may be just for practice, but Brooks doesn’t hold anything back. She wins by 3 seconds and finishes exhausted — but with a huge smile on her face.

Copyright 2014 Alaska Public Radio Network. To see more, visit http://www.aprn.org/.