Sao Tome RPCV Michael Barolak is a board member of St. Louis ArtWorks, a 10-year-old charitable collaboration that provides job training each summer for area 14- to 21-year-olds in the visual, literary and performing arts
AT HOME WITH ... Michael Barolak
By Susan Fadem
Special to the Post-Dispatch
01/07/2005
Caption: Michael Barolak credits his sense of order to the fact that he grew up in a family of seven children.
(Laurie Skrivan/P-D)
ON HEARING, mistakenly as it turned out, that a home in the Dogtown neighborhood had been bequeathed to one of the area's Greek Orthodox churches, Michael Barolak wasted no time in calling the church. He happened to telephone during the funeral of the deceased homeowner.
"I don't think whoever answered was very happy with me," recalls Barolak (pronounced BEAR-o-lack). "But I found out who the executor of the estate was." The plan, he learned, was to sell the home "as is." Social worker Barolak, assistant director of an alternative discipline center in the Parkway School District, bought the house immediately. Previously, home ownership was "sort of an intangible," he says. "And then this just sort of fell on my lap."
Q I'm told that your dining-room fixture, which resembles an inverted lampshade, is something of a neighborhood landmark. How did that happen?
A At first I was very taken aback by comments like "Great lampshade!" And these were made by people who had never been in my house. But I'm on a very busy corner. There's a Bi-State bus stop here. I'll be eating dinner, and my house sits up high. The blinds will be open, and an entire busload of people will pull up and stop. I'll have 20 people staring at me. It's kind of neat. Also, there's a lot of foot traffic. Especially with the fixture turned on, you can see it from several blocks away. I kind of like it that way.
Q There is not a framed picture out of line, not an object that doesn't look as if it were purposefully placed. Is your sense of design intuitive?
A I have an undergraduate degree in interior architecture from Kansas State University. I worked for four years designing the interiors of corporations.
Q How did you wind up being a social worker?
A I joined the Peace Corps for two years, from 1994 to 1996, and went to Africa. I was in Sao Tome and Principe (an independent country in West Africa consisting of the two aforementioned islands, located in the Gulf of Guinea). One of the things I did in my village was a school renovation. The school was falling down on top of the kids.
Being in Africa made me think that when I got back, I would like to work with kids somehow. I enrolled in graduate school in social work at Washington University, and now I'm in my sixth year working with middle-school and high-school students who have been suspended.
Q Are your masks and wall hangings things you brought back from Africa?
A Yes, except for the couple that were gifts from friends, like the kuba-cloth (woven from raffia, or palm-tree fibers) wall hangings. They were used as currency in the Niger region of Africa many, many generations ago.
Q What attracted you to the house?
A The house was built in 1938. From what I've pieced together, the previous owner grew up in the house, and when he got married, he and his wife lived in the basement. When his parents died, he and his wife moved upstairs. They never had children.
When I saw the house for the first time, the wife's pajamas were still laid out on her bed. She had been dead for 14 or so years. It was as if the husband and wife had just gone to the store. What I really liked was that they hadn't tried to modernize the house. It still had the original bathroom, which I kept, and the kitchen, which I gutted to the studs. The house has arched doorways and a really good structure.
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Michael Barolak is a board member of St. Louis ArtWorks, a 10-year-old charitable collaboration that provides job training each summer for area 14- to 21-year-olds in the visual, literary and performing arts. For more information, call 314-589-8019 or visit the Web site, www.stlartworks.org.
