Door County’s Own Hope for Haiti

For weeks the world has been inundated with images of the death and destruction from Haiti’s Jan. 12 earthquake.

A plea for help has been heard, one that reached even our geographically isolated peninsula. For one night at the Door Community Auditorium (DCA) on Jan. 23rd, the county’s music community came together in a benefit concert for Haiti.

Sam Kahr performs.

“The original idea to have a benefit concert came from one of the original [DCA] board members, Anne Emerson,” said Larry Thoreson, vice president of the DCA board, and the organizer of the concert. “The auditorium is the heart of the community, and we knew it was our duty to bring everybody together to help the people of Haiti.”

With only one week to organize the show, the concert was a lofty undertaking.

“We sort of missed the news cycle,” Thoreson explains. “The idea came up so fast that we couldn’t go through the conventional channels of advertising. I just told everyone I talked to please help spread the word about the event. For the most part it worked out really well.”

The community made their presence felt at the free event by donating over $8,000 to the American Red Cross Lakeland Chapter. The funds collected will help Haitians displaced by the earthquake by providing shelter items such as blankets, tents, clean drinking water, and food.

“The Red Cross is in this for the long term,” says Kathy Sanden, a member of the American Red Cross Lakeland Chapter. “This is not something that is going to end next week and it is not something that is going to end when the media stops covering the event.”

She says the fact that the show packed the auditorium in January says a lot about Door County.

“Though we live in a small community, we are very aware of the world,” she says.

While it was the compassion and good will of the event that caused many to attend, it was the efforts of the many performers and organizers that truly caused the event to be successful.

“After watching the news footage of Haiti, we wanted to be able to do something,” explains Gibraltar math teacher Paul Bremel. “With all of the local talent and students in the event, it was a great way to support both the cause in Haiti and local artists.”

With close to 30 performers, the night’s music spanned from Irish jigs on the fiddle to the blues of “Sweet Home Door County.”

“I originally had the idea of doing a Bob Dylan show but not everybody wanted to play a specific genre. I then told everybody that they could do whatever they felt like and the list started to grow exponentially,” says Thoreson. “I had a feeling that we could conceivably have a very large crowd when word got out about who was going to be there. It was really the ‘who’s who’ of Door County.”

The stage united people from all walks of life.

“The people of my generation and people of younger generations interacting on and off stage was such a cool thing to see,” explains Thoreson. “The best part of the whole event for me, however, was the deep respect that everybody had for the craft of music. Everybody was really serious about what they were doing.”

While much of the music uplifted people’s spirits, a somber mood surrounding the devastation in Haiti still lingered in the audience.

“I was upset that they called off the search after 11 days when they pulled an 84-year-old woman out of the rubble this morning,” said local resident Lon Emanuelson. “I know there are people still trapped under the rubble, and I wish I had a big concrete saw and crane to get them out. May God bless the people who are still trapped alive.”

And while the residents of Door County can sometimes feel powerless and isolated, those that gathered for the event certainly showed their support and goodwill. It was perhaps local artist and musician Jeanne Kuhns statements before her first song that summed up the impact of the benefit concert best.

“As I was driving one day to Algoma, I saw this beautiful field of clover, and I realized that all those little plants are connected underneath by roots,” she said. “That is how we are; connected all over the world, yet sometimes we don’t know how react to it. This event tonight is one way that we can help people very far away from us by gathering and giving them our energy and love through music.”