MU| F e a t u r e s
On Pages 8 and 9, MU
student Denisse Marioni
(center) enjoys ice cream
at the Yummi Bunny in
downtown Fort Wayne
with her children (from
left) Michael, Lelan, Jacob
and husband Michael.
The family moved to
Fort Wayne from El Paso,
Texas, so that Denisse
could get her Pharm.D.
degree (photo by Nate
Corder). Above, the
skyline of downtown Fort
Wayne (photo courtesy of
Visit Fort Wayne).
T
hey come to this place from everywhere,
this side of the world and that, from desert
scrub to glacial peaks to Midwestern corn
and beans.
In the parking lot at Manchester University’s Fort Wayne
campus, and to more or less the same extent on the North
Manchester campus, you’ll find license plates from Texas
and Michigan and California and Alaska, from Illinois and
Florida and North Carolina and Kentucky. But what do
they find here, in Fort Wayne, Ind.?
For Stacy Erickson-Pesetski, associate dean and associate
professor of English and a passionate runner, it’s the trails
along the three rivers and baseball games in Parkview
Field and the food trucks downtown, where she frequently
meets her husband, a Fort Wayne native, for lunch.
Caitlin Granfield, who’s from right down the road in
Kokomo, loves the city’s “beautiful parks.”
And Parth Patel, who’s from pretty much everywhere,
finds the “wholesomeness” of the Fort’s Hoosier ethos
entrancing.
Then there’s Denisse Marioni.
She’s from Texas, most recently El Paso, a military town
of 683,577 that sits across the state line from Las Cruces,
N.M., and directly across the Rio Grande from Ciudad
Juarez, the biggest city in the Mexican state of Chihuahua.
El Paso is where Marioni got undergraduate degrees in
biology and nursing, 1,500 miles and a world away from
Fort Wayne, where she moved with her husband Michael
and three children to pursue a pharmacy degree at MU.
What she found in Indiana‘s second-largest city is a family-
centric community on fast forward. Downtown, once an
area where the sidewalks rolled up with an audible snap
at 6 p.m. or so, is in the midst of a boom that includes
restaurants, apartments and condos, and various gathering
(Continued on page 12)
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