PORTFOLIO:
JENNIFER KOPF
2019 PA Associated Press award, Best Feature Writing.
If you’d like to learn more about my body of work, and how we can work together, drop me a line.
TELLING STORIES
'I SERVED WITH HEROES': 75 YEARS AFTER D-DAY, VETERAN REMEMBERS
JUNE 2019
The helmet’s dull green color hasn’t faded much with the years, its surface slightly roughed with minor scrapes and a few larger marks that hint at heavy wear and more than a few close calls.
Paul Winters treasures this helmet, and he handles its surprising heft with ease, his hands gripping the rim when he demonstrates how he’d flip it over to provide a seat when it was time to rest, when he recounts how he insisted on keeping it with him no matter what, when others wanted to replace it after he’d been hit and wounded the first time — or the second time, or the third — during his endless months in Europe in World War II.
[PHOTO: DAN MARSCHKA | LNP MEDIA GROUP]
FINDING CLEO: FOR YEARS, JOHNNY SEMAGANIS WONDERED HOW HIS SISTER DIED. A PODCAST BRINGS TO LIGHT THE HUMAN COST OF CANADA'S SIXTIES SCOOP.
AUGUST 2018
It’s a small rectangle of granite, slightly bowed at the top, planted in the earth just a few feet from a wrought-iron fence, a residential street, houses.
“Beloved daughter,” it reads. “Cleo L. Madonia.”
It’s one marker among many that look just like it in Park View Cemetery in suburban Medford, New Jersey.
There’s a large tree nearby, shading adjacent gravesites. Small American flags and arrangements of artificial flowers often mark the scattered headstones.
It’s here that Cleo Madonia, just 13 years old when she died, waited since 1978 for her siblings to find her.
Her oldest brother, Johnny Semaganis, was just 100 miles away, in Lancaster County.
The siblings weren’t told that fate had dropped them so near to each other, a continent from where they’d started.
(PHOTO: CHRIS KNIGHT | LNP MEDIA GROUP)
BREAKING THE CELLPHONE TETHER
March 2019
As an exercise of the imagination, Libby Modern says, it was an interesting experiment:
As part of an ArtWalk exhibit at her Modern Art gallery in Lancaster city, she and collaborator Joanna “Jo” Davis Seedorf built a “hotel” of sorts for phones. Gallery visitors could park their cellphone at the “phonotel” for an hour or the weekend, and wander the city cellphone-free.
If you signed up and parked your phone, you got a survival kit of sorts in return: a dummy phone, so you’d have something to do with your hands, a guide on how to use a map and a pay phone, even conversation starters to smooth over those awkward moments in which we often resort to cellphone distractions.
Like much of Modern Art’s work, there was a sense of humor built in — as well as a point.
[PHOTO: SUZETTE WENGER | LNP MEDIA GROUP]
'DO GOOD TODAY:' FOR 500 MONDAYS, CHURCH HAS GIVEN KIDS BREAKFAST, LOVE AND ENCOURAGEMENT
January 2019
The walk to school on a January morning, when the sky is still sunrise-pink, is a chilly one.
Monday mornings, after a weekend off, can feel even chillier.
But a little hot chocolate, some fruit snacks or crackers, maybe a pencil and a new eraser, along with a greeting from the same four friendly faces every week, can make that last few hundred yards to the school building a little better.
For more than 500 Mondays — every Monday during the school year, with summers off — Christ United Methodist Church at 935 E. Walnut St. has handed out juice, hot chocolate and to-go breakfast snacks to all students who want to make a stop during their walk to nearby schools. It’s just a shortcut through the church parking lot and across East Madison Street and Lehigh Avenue to McCaskey High School and Lincoln Middle School.
[PHOTO: JENNIFER KOPF | LNP MEDIA GROUP]
FOR RITA SMITH-WADE-EL, MU PROF AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ADVOCATE, DYING IS ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO TEACH
SEPTEMBER 2018
Your desire to have tasks taken care of before death...?
I wanted it my way. See, they might have have actually buried me in something green or gray or blue ... (“We really wouldn’t have, but that’s OK,” son Ismail chimes in from the dining room. “We know you and red. You’re not subtle about that ... the couch, the cars, the kitchen cabinets...”
"I don’t know if I’m subtle about anything,” Smith-Wade-El responds).
I tease my students about my children, that I don’t think my children appreciated (getting everything taken care of). I said I just didn’t want them going, ‘Aruba? (or) Mama’s funeral? Aruba? Mama’s funeral?’ Because they’d probably pick Aruba, if you know what I mean!
So I figured I’d pay for it all so they didn’t have to choose between this fancy funeral and going to Aruba ... funerals are expensive!"
[PHOTO: RICHARD HERTZLER | LNP MEDIA GROUP]
LANCASTER'S LUCA HOSTS AN EVENING AT WORLD-FAMOUS
BEARD FOUNDATION IN NYC
September 2018
NEW YORK -- She was just a random out-of-town customer, stopping by Lucafor a bite to eat while house-shopping. But just a few weeks later, that meal led to an emailed invitation for the owner of the Lancaster city restaurant, Taylor Mason. It read, “Would you be interested in cooking a dinner for members and guests at the Beard Foundation in New York City?”
Turns out that the woman, Moira Sedgwick, is a member of the programming committee at Beard, the epicenter of American cuisine. And the invitation, Mason says, “is the opportunity of a lifetime.”
The timeline is tight. And the expenses aren’t insignificant, what with travel and all the ingredients needed to make a four-course meal, plus appetizers — with wine pairings — for nearly 80 people.
[PHOTOS: JENNIFER KOPF | LNP MEDIA GROUP]
A FINAL SALUTE: VETERANS' HOSPICE
November 2018
By the time he passed away at Masonic Village Health Care Center in February, Bill Anderson didn’t remember his distinguished career with the FBI.
He’d performed his last polygraph examination at 81, but couldn’t recall that skill. He was no longer aware that he’d helped create the criminal justice department at West Chester University. His beloved woodworking equipment stood unused.
Alzheimer’s disease had stolen all of that from the 93-year-old Anderson.
So when Larry Wolford, a volunteer with Masonic Village’s hospice program, arrived to perform a special veterans’ ceremony for Anderson, no one was sure he’d understand what was happening.
[Photo of Larry Wolford, left, and Herb Ridyard. BLAINE SHAHAN | LNP MEDIA GROUP]
LISTEN TO YOUR GUT: FINDING THE BACTERIA BALANCE
July 2018
When it comes to questions about a vast number of health issues, the mantra researchers are increasingly turning to is simple:
Trust your gut. Specifically, your gut’s biome, the colony of bacteria unique to your body.
Studies show its influence extends far beyond digestive health, with research indicating it may affect mood, our tendency toward obesity, autism — even conditions such as Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis.
[PHOTO: HUE 12 PHOTOGRAPHY | UNSPLASH]
IN LIVING COLOR
June 2018
“I really don’t see anything (without the glasses), is what this just taught me,” says Karen Mertzman, 44, of Lancaster, shaking her head as she gazes at the mural. “I didn’t realize there were so many colors ... different colors over here” on the mural. “Wow!” she half-whispers. “I had no idea!”
[PHOTO: JENNIFER KOPF | LNP MEDIA GROUP]
A BURNING TREND: SHOU SUGI BAN
April 2018
It’s the “trend” that’s been around for millennia.
It’s a process that, counterintuitively, uses fire to make wood more fire-resistant.
And it’s a technique that preserves wood by, in a sense, destroying its surface.
Welcome to shou sugi ban.
(PHOTO: JARED ZIMMERMAN | FLICKR)
'LIFT UP THE UNDERDOG': THE ROLE OF RELIGIOUS LEADERS IN LANCASTER'S CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVISM
April 2018
From his pulpit during the 1960s, the Rev. Alexander L. Stephans didn’t preach directly about civil rights marches and protests.
Instead, the former pastor of Lancaster's Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church city’s says, he preached about Christianity, about Jesus.
“I felt the pulpit there was really about Christianity,” Stephans says today. “But the leader of Christianity, Jesus Christ, it always seemed like he was trying to lift up the underdog.”
That intertwining of faith and the civil rights movement, of the spiritual and practical, was nothing new. Especially in American churches where people of color traditionally made up the congregation, faith leaders were community leaders.
(Photo of Russell Howell, lifelong member of Bethel AME Church, Lancaster: RICHARD HERTZLER | LNP MEDIA GROUP)
SPOTLIGHT: SARAH ALBERICO OPENS THE DOORS TO ROCK FORD'S LANCASTER CITY NEIGHBORHOOD
March 2018
It’s happened more than once, Sarah Alberico says: Someone passing by Rock Ford Plantation stops and asks the site’s curator and education and volunteer coordinator if she lives in the stately 18th-century mansion.
They may be recent immigrants, or there may be a language barrier, or they may simply be new to the area.
It gave Alberico an idea: “We thought by extending an invitation in the form of a neighborhood open house, we could ... provide our neighbors with a way to connect” with the home of Gen. Edward Hand, an adjutant general to George Washington during the Revolution.
(Sarah Alberico. PHOTO BY DAN MARSCHKA | LNP MEDIA GROUP)
BEHIND ASMR IS A PHENOMENON SCIENTISTS ARE ONLY BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND
March 2018
Josh Dorsheimer often turned on some background noise to fall asleep. Something familiar usually worked — a television tuned to interviews, or Bob Ross’s gentle art-instruction lessons quietly murmuring in the background — and the Lancaster actor could let his mind wander and drift off to sleep. But one night, as he lay there, the sounds triggered a strange sensation in his head. “I was trying to fall asleep, and my head was all,” Dorsheimer says, waving his hands on either side of his head to indicate buzzing. “I was like, ‘What. Is. Going. On?’ ”
FUNGAL PHARMACY
March 2018
The healing powers of mushrooms show up in the legends of Siberia and in folk tales of the Aztecs. Puffballs were used by the Ojibwe, Navajo, Pawnee and other Native American tribes to stop bleeding; tribes all over North America used mushrooms to ease childbirth, to alleviate joint pain, treat dysentery and solve a host of other medical challenges. Increasingly, modern medicine is taking a renewed interest in the medical properties of fungi, including mushrooms. One of the world’s leading facilities dedicated to researching medicinal properties of mushrooms is located at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.
SWEDISH SANCTUARY
February 2018
Tucked into the rise and fall of southern Lancaster County’s landscape, Tamarack Farm unfolds slowly.
Here, an orange farm cat snoozes in the weak winter sunlight captured in a doorway. Somewhere up by the barn, an insistent rooster is crowing. That alerts Willow, the farm’s horse, to turn from the fence to check for interlopers.
And Gunilla, Helena, Anna, Eva, Gustav and nearly three dozen other sheep briefly glance up to inspect the human who’s interrupting their afternoon cud-chewing.
[PHOTO: JENNIFER KOPF | LNP MEDIA GROUP]
CANDY? OR POTATO? CITY NEIGHBORHOOD'S 'POTATO MAN' PLANTS A HALLOWEEN TRADITION
October 2017
It’s Halloween night, and you’re a child again, lugging around an ever-heavier bag of candy while trying to keep your mask from slipping and your feet from tripping on the sidewalk.
There’s a line up to the front porch of a city house in the 200 block of North Pine Street. You figure they must be giving out something awesome, maybe even full-size candy bars. So you join the kids snaking their way up to where the man on the porch leans in and asks each trick-or-treater a question before reaching in and placing a treat in their bag. Finally, finally, it’s your turn.
“Trick or treat!” you yell.
And the man on the porch leans over to you and tells you that you have a choice of two treats. Which would you like?
“Candy? Or potato?”
That man would be Pat Foy.
SHATTERED BY WAR
September 2017
Charles Miller was a 19-year-old Marine fighting in Vietnam when he was awarded a Purple Heart after shrapnel tore up his body. A year later, his kid brother was killed there. Miller's experience was part of a multimedia package of stories, oral histories, maps, timelines and video marking the premiere of a Vietnam War documentary.
This package won 1st place in the 2018 Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors' Special Section and Multimedia categories.
[PHOTO: DAN MARSCHKA | LNP MEDIA GROUP]
