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Who are we? … the Groundwaters Staff

July 19, 2008 on 5:13 am | In Staff profiles | No Comments

Sonny Hays-Eberts, Photographer/Contributor

Sonny Hays-Eberts at Groundwaters party 2007

Sonny Hays-Eberts is the husband of Judy, who founded Groundwaters magazine. Sonny is a database administrator at Oregon State University, but is also a talented photography hobbyist. He has taken many of the pictures featured in Groundwaters as well as designed many of the graphic images used in advertising and features. Sonny has created and designed the Groundwaters website at http://www.groundwaters.org and oversees its growth.

Sonny is best known for his Groundwaters series of articles called “Moments of Valor” in which he profiles the experiences of local military veterans. The respect he has for them is obvious to his readers.

Sonny wrote a biographical sketch about his brother and himself for the January 2008, Volume 4 Issue 3 “Choice” issue. The following piece will tell you a little bit about Sonny and is an excellent example of his writing skills.

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A Matter of Choice
By Sonny Hays-Eberts

Choice. Rarely does such a simple word impact our lives so dramatically. Some choices alter our lives forever. The results of these choices, such as decision to act violently, pursue an unwise business decision or to choose unhealthy or illegal activities can have lifelong consequences.

Some choices segregate us from others. In the realm of politics, religion or sex, the difference in our choices can range from vocally passionate to violent confrontation.

Sadly, I feel, we as a people look at the choices we and others make and use those to distance ourselves from others. We consider only the result of a choice and not the experiences we all share which help mold our own individual choices.

Consider two mythical people who grow up poor and often hungry. As a result of her experience, one person is determined to never be poor or hungry again, and to ensure the same for her family by ensuring fiscal stability for all. Her focus may be on employment opportunities or stock performance. A second individual might use that same experience and yet make choices leading to his efforts to ensure community or global hunger is eradicated. It is likely these people will consider themselves to be at odds philosophically and perhaps find it difficult to understand each other’s choices when they focus on the results of the choice.

For a more concrete and less politically-charged example of how shared experience can shape our choices, I will take a detailed look at the hobbies my brother and I chose to pursue. On the surface, his decision to collect glass and pottery and mine to collect militaria do not seem to share much beyond the aspect of collecting. His collection is fragile, colorful and based on art and the beauty of creation. My collection is musty and, other than some colorful ribbons, drab. It speaks of valor, blood and even destruction.

But, when one considers the experience we had growing up as military brats – having to often leave possessions behind to make weight, exposure to historical people and places and living overseas and feeling separate from American culture, it makes sense we would be drawn to collecting.

Every two or three years, our family would move to a new home. Often this was overseas, and the Air Force would only pay to ship a certain amount of weight. The cost of shipping any additional weight was prohibitively expensive. This was not a large amount, usually just enough to cover important items like clothes and some household items. We oftentimes discarded games, comics and all the little things important to a growing boy. I think this experience we shared helped create an attitude that cultivated a desire to keep things, and by extension, collect things.

We also lived in many places; New Mexico, New York, Japan, Canada, Germany, Holland, Virginia, Mississippi, New Hampshire and other locations. These locations exposed us to a vast sense of history and I think may be why our collections are composed of older items that share a link to history. My brother knows the lineage of his various pots and each artist. He knows that some of his Scheier pots were owned by the youngest scientist in the Manhattan project in Los Alamos. He knows which potters studied under others, where the studios were and what the timeline of glazing styles are. He knows the founder of La Luz pottery (his first collection), R. Hazard, who was also the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. I know the lineage of various Army units and what campaigns they were involved in and what insignia was in use at what period.

By the time I was 20 and my brother 18, we had lived overseas for 11 years. Our collections are focused on American culture. He focuses on pottery created in La Luz New Mexico, and also the American Pottery movement of the 40s and 50s. I have some militaria from other nations, but the bulk of my collection is from the U.S. armed forces.

Often it seems our choices serve to separate us from others. The debates of political, religious and sexual choices are often incendiary and divisive. The phrase ‘pro-choice’ itself is the basis for contentious struggle.

But what can appear to be widely varying decisions made by different people may be found to be different interpretations of a shared experience. It is my hope that by understanding why people make choices, we can more easily identify with them instead of distancing ourselves from those who make choices different from our own.