Everybody’s business

Now you’re cooking
As feared, the popular Butte Culinary Academy is gone from the Chico State campus. The program, which was funded by the Private Industry Council, was cut and chef/teacher Michael Iles has been let go.

But he has a plan: his own cooking school. A name and location are still being finalized for the school, which he hopes will become “a regional food center and information place.” Besides teaching chefs, Iles envisions the culinary school as a breakfast spot as well as a retail space for homemade products.

The school will be for-profit, which is a little “scary” for Iles, but he’s confident that in about a year it will be accredited and students will be eligible for financial aid. Classes will be held late in the day and should start in September.

“We’re going to do something really exciting,” he said. “It’s going to be fun.”

Sign of the times
Here’s something from the “this is why we can’t have nice things” file. People keep vandalizing the sign that hangs in front of the historic Stansbury House on Fifth Street, which is being slowly restored.

Most recently, “somebody put a flying karate chop kick to it,” said Charles Withuhn, the designer who donated his company’s services in making the sign a decade ago and again just a few weeks ago.

“It’s one thing to graffiti a cement wall, but there are people who are out there destroying things that are nothing but a gift to the community of Chico,” said a frustrated Withuhn, whose Signs & Graphic Design has also done charity work for the Jesus Center. “It was a huge pile of work, and I don’t understand why people can’t have respect for it.”

The panel by Signs & Graphic Design, which features a Victorian layout and custom woodworking, has been repaired—by volunteers, of course—and is back up.

Dino Corbin, who put up the repaired, Plexiglas-protected sign as president of the Stansbury Home Preservation Association, took somewhat of a pre-Victorian view of the vandal: “If it were up to us we’d have a public hanging.”

Pow Wow postponed
Organizers who hoped to save the Pow Wow of 2003 weren’t able to raise enough money to compensate for major sponsors who didn’t see fit to contribute to the cultural event scheduled for June 21-22.

“We’re just so disappointed,” said Bebba Aguayo, president of the board of directors. Last year the Pow Wow, which features educational booths about tobacco, alcohol and drug abuse and health care, drew 6,000 people.

The donated funds will be saved in an account to put on the Pow Wow of 2004, which organizers hope can move from the $1,500-a-day Silver Dollar Fairgrounds to the Butte College campus. Next year, Aguayo said, “it will be bigger and better than ever.”