**Allyson Cain**
_MUCK-ing awesome_

Allyson Cain is the president of the MU Clay “Klub.” MUCK is comprised of both undergraduate and graduate ceramics students.

Cain plays a key role in planning the club’s meetings and fundraisers, including last week’s Valentine’s Day sale.

“In December, we always have a holiday sale, and we have another one right before Mother’s Day,” she says. “But this is the first time we’ve had a Valentine’s Day sale.”

The purpose of the sale was to raise funds for the club’s trip to the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts conference.

Cain, who says she’s “in the studio all the time,” hails from Marshall, Mo. She’s a third-year student with senior standing.

Eric Ordway, a grad student studying ceramics and Columbia native, says the club’s goal is to foster awareness of the arts and provide educational insight. The club makes an effort to bring in visiting artists in hopes of inspiring the ceramics students.

**Bob Wood**
_Repairing shoes with joy_

When he was a child, Bob Wood would walk around his grandpa’s shoe repair shop, nearly swallowed in a workman’s apron.

His dad and grandpa had laughed.

“They told me I had more polish on me than on the shoe,” says Wood, a third-generation shoe repairman who started spending time in his grandfather’s shop at the age of 8.

“I fell in love with fixing shoes,” he says.

Since then, Dawson’s Shoe Repair Shop has moved from Ninth Street to Eighth Street, but Wood still runs his business the way his dad and grandpa taught him — by following the “Golden Rule.”

“Jesus first, others second, yourself second or third,” he says. “If you have God first, you’ll never go wrong.”

He might just go crazy, though, if he can’t work and talk with his customers. The word “retire” isn’t in his vocabulary.

“No, no, no,” Wood says. “That’s a six-letter word. That’s ugly.”

Wood says he doesn’t think too hard about the future. An old, yellowed sign hangs in a frame on his office wall. It reads: “When I works, I works hard. When I sits, I sits loose. When I thinks, I falls asleep.”

“That’s me,” Wood says with a grin.

He’s taking life one shoe repair at a time.