• April 05, 1976
• Vol. 5
• No. 13

Lookout

Joachim Krassowski is one of only 25 qualified feather judges in the U.S. With a working knowledge of 250 varieties of feathers, Krassowski, 23, was lured a year ago from his native Hamburg, West Germany to the North American Feather Company in Grand Rapids, Mich. He works in a closetlike room testing feathers from all over the world. By squeezing them and tossing them in air, he can determine the amount of down (the fluffy undercoat that grows on many birds) there is to feathers. The down is valuable—thanks to the current boom in parkas and comforters. Krassowski—he was renamed "Joe" by his co-workers—spent three years as an apprentice in Germany to learn his trade and was almost denied entry into the U.S. until immigration officials discovered there was a short supply of feather testers in this country. With the help of local congressmen, he received his visa and arrived with only a few personal belongings and a down comforter. Krassowski estimates he has inspected one million pounds of feathers in the last year and is confident about the future of feathers. "The business is going to grow," he notes. "Soon fuel will be so expensive that people will be sitting at their desks at work with down jackets on."

Craig Steven Shuler, 26, moves in celebrated company. In the last 15 years, the American Ballet Theatre in New York has commissioned only two composers to write scores for new ballets—Duke Ellington in 1970, and, last summer, Shuler. He provided the score for a Robert Weiss pas de deux called A Promise. This past December his second score for a Weiss ballet, Awakening, was performed by Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov and drew critical raves. Shuler and Weiss, a dancer with the New York City Ballet and a novice choreographer, met in a church. "I was ushering, and he had heard I was a young composer," recalls Shuler. "I knew virtually nothing about ballet then, so he gave me a complete indoctrination." A native of Pittsburgh, Shuler spent three years at Northwestern before transferring in his senior year to North Texas State University, a move which he says "forced me to delve purely into classical music." Except for a year in Florence, Italy on a Fulbright Scholarship, Shuler has worked for the Juilliard School of music since 1971. He teaches music theory and history to dancers, in addition to working on his doctorate. Besides his two ballets, he has written several chamber pieces and is currently at work on a major orchestral composition.