By Rita Weinstein, JTNews Correspondent
Though many Council House residents reflect on their lives — even as much as 100 years’ worth of memories — others tend to look forward. On February 6, its most senior resident, Zerline Aronin (who still walks a dozen blocks to the grocery store several times a week), celebrated her 102nd birthday. As Zerline looks back at more than a century of accelerating change, two other residents are busy engaging Council House in a new millennium of technology and art.
Former merchant marine captain Felippe Jacques, a 72-year-old graduate of the French Naval Academy, has been a resident of Council House for nine years. He arrived in Seattle after almost 20 years of driving tanker ships in the merchant marine. Two weeks after arriving in Seattle from Boston to take a job in 1991, he suffered a stroke. Soon after, he moved into Council House.
Although he never sailed uncharted waters in his years as a sea captain, Jacques found the transition to retirement to entirely new territory. In particular, he was not used to his new-found solitude, as his wife and daughter were no longer alive. Needing to find a new project to give his life purpose once again, he found one that has filled not only his own life, but that of every other resident in Council House.
Jacques believes the Internet is “the greatest tool ever to be put in the hands of man.” He felt that this “window to the universe” would be just what was needed in a place where people quickly begin to feel isolated from what was once normal life. Several years ago, he had the idea that Council House needed a computer lab. So he set to work learning all he could about reconditioning and setting up computers.
Lacking formal training, it was all trial and error. But he got help from a group called Seattle Wireless, and being a “pushy guy,” as he calls himself,
he was able to obtain donated computer equipment from various sources. As he learned how to work with computer hardware, he pushed past the inevitable glitches to create a lab of six workstations in the building’s penthouse.
Having accomplished that stage of having a “wired” retirement community, Jacques pushed forward. After the building underwent a renovation, an Internet service-providing company asked to use some space on the roof for an antenna. In return, the Council House offices would receive free Internet access.
Jacques saw this arrangement as an opportunity in need of improvement. After some negotiation, Jacques received permission to expand the agreement so that all of the residents of the building would have free access.
The donated labor of some electrician friends and donated wire and equipment made it possible for Jacques to wire all 12 floors of the building into the antenna. With the help of Vista volunteer Dan Hieb, who works for the Seattle Community Network, he has since brought Internet access to residents on every floor of the building and is in the process of wiring every empty apartment. Now that he’s made all his mistakes, he said, “it has become easy.”
The project has been so successful that Council House now uses free Internet access as a new selling point for potential residents.
Residents regularly receive instruction in the lab, and, as businesses donate used computers to Jacques, he and Hieb recondition them in an unused apartment on the first floor. These reconditioned computers are either installed in residents’ apartments or donated to other agencies for low-income people or to schools.
The residents are pleased with their new ability to access this window to the world. Sculptor Paul Davis listens to music from his former home of Mexico City at the workstation he put together in his bedroom.
Davis and his wife, artist Esther Davis, 77, came to Council House in 1998 after living in California, New Mexico, Texas, Micronesia, and Mexico. What Esther brought to Council House was an attitude she’s carried with her all of her life: “If you’re not making a place better, it’ll get worse.”
Davis has studied art throughout her life, although she has a Ph.D. in psychology. In 1975 she became associated with a gallery in La Jolla, Calif., and worked with them for many years. She is no longer a gallery artist because of all the extra time and energy that entails, but she still paints and “makes things.”
She describes her work as being about the expressiveness of color. She began as a representational artist, but since has evolved into using color, rather than objects, as a means of expression.
“Dazzling” is the only word to describe the mobiles Esther created for the dining room and computer lab. The large mobile in the center of the dining room features compact disks decorated with reflective papers and origami birds that complement the luster of the CDs’ luminosity.
It creates an explosion of light and color in what can no longer be called an ordinary place to eat. The mobile Esther created for the computer lab also incorporates CDs and bright colors, and transforms the high-tech monochrome into a delight to the eye.
Esther’s paintings, large panels of carefully composed colors, shapes, and lines, also brighten the penthouse, computer lab, Council House offices, and the apartment she shares with husband Paul. Although she has put her brushes down for the time being, Esther also loves to quilt, because it also focuses on color and shape. She has made dozens of bright and beautiful tablecloths for use at Council House events.
Council House was founded — without an inkling of what its residents could add to the environment — in 1972 as a federally subsidized retirement home under the sponsorship of the Seattle Section of the National Council of Jewish Women. Operating as a nonprofit membership corporation, its 164 units on Capitol Hill offer first-class accommodations and a full calendar of activities to seniors.
Thanks to Jacques and Esther, the penthouse atop Council House not only affords a dazzling view of the city outside, but of a whole world accessible to residents who once felt cut off from it.