Multimedia Reporting (Adler-Noland)

As if from a cartoon, the castle-like building appears diminutive from the outside, but inside its door lays an endless realm of creativity, fit for the artistic ability of any age group.

The place is Sunfire Ceramics, a paint-your-own-pottery business that has been on the edge of downtown Lawrence for the last nine years.

It was the only place on Dottie Burd’s mind when her husband, Steve, asked her where she wanted to start off their Valentine's Day celebrations.

"This calms me down. It's totally peaceful," Burd said as she delicately added turquoise designs to a ceramic light switch cover. "I can come and have a great time."

The local popularity of the business has led owner Cheryl Roth to expand. The second Sunfire Ceramics is set to open in the Brookside area of Kansas City, Mo., this Saturday, Feb. 17.

A friend of Roth's who owned a similar business there moved out, giving Roth the opportunity to fill the customized art void in the area.

Though Roth said she would have liked to open another store in Lawrence, she may have actually become less successful. She said that she has seen stores open in a second location and fail, because "they actually end up competing with themselves."

Roth said in recent years, other craft and mosaic shops have only been able to stay open for short amounts of time, leaving Sunfire as the only ceramic studio currently in Lawrence.

She said in her personal experience, the economy has prevented some people from joining the business over the last year, partly because the salary is comparable to that of a teacher.

"And I think at this point, there’s so many of them that they aren’t quite growing like they were," Roth said.

According to several sources, though, they were growing quite rapidly.

The first store of its kind opened in New York City in 1993, and Entrepreneur magazine reported in 1997 that there were 200 stores nationwide.

The Contemporary Ceramic Studios Association said there are now over 2,000 stores in the world. In 2005, that led to 5 million customers and $400 million in sales worldwide.

That much revenue does not mean the art is as expensive as one might think.

For $4 plus the cost of the pottery, Sunfire customers get an artistic experience that results in a personalized piece that can be used as either gift or decoration. Pottery choices include everything from $5 figurines, to plates and mugs, to larger statues costing as much as $50.

Another area paint-your-own-pottery store, The Clay Café at the Great Mall of the Great Plains in Olathe, opened seven years ago in a 4,000 square-foot store. Chad Barton, owner, said it now occupies 12,000 square feet, taking up multiple storefronts in the mall.

Barton and Roth agreed that success is all about location and foot traffic.

Sunfire sits at 10th and New Hampshire streets, just one block away from bustling Massachusetts Street, leading to busy evenings and weekends.

Sunfire also sells work by local artists, offers painting classes by demand and does birthday parties, of which the Burds have taken advantage. They said they regularly come for birthdays and they have had family get-togethers there, too.

"When, for $10, I can take something home where I've designed it and painted it, it just makes me so happy," Burd said.

Debbie Myers owns Happi-Names, an Overland Park store that actually does the painting for the customers. People can bring in picture frames, clothing and invitations, among other things, or pick out similar items from the store, and request personalized art from professionals.

Myers has been in business for 15 years and has expanded twice in that time. She said she understands why people enjoy custom art shops.

"It makes gifts unique. You're putting ownership to that item," Myers said. "Everybody loves to see their name on something, no matter how old they are."

Burd agreed.

"Kids just freak out when they come in here," Burd said. "They say 'Wow, I can do anything!' and they're not intimidated."

In the nationally registered historic district of North Rhode Island Street, nineteenth-century homes resembling dollhouses are the norm. Along a stretch from seventh to eleventh streets, a small apartment building or new multiplex dots the neighborhood every so often, but most of the houses are the same ones that were there in the late 1800s.

1211 Rhode Island is one of 63 homes considered to be contributing structures to the district, meaning that the house has remained essentially the same since its construction.

The two-story, wood-frame house could probably use a fresh coat of cobalt blue paint, but it stands tall about 50 feet from the original brick street with multiple bedrooms and a porch that wraps around one side.

The "historic" tag usually protects buildings from developers, but Reed Brinton, the owner of 1211 Rhode Island, seems to have something different in mind.

On Thursday, the Historic Resources Commission will review a demolition permit application that Brinton, a Johnson County real estate agent, filed on Feb. 16.

The prospect of losing a historic house has some community members up in arms.

"I think it's completely unprecedented. I don't think anyone has tried to demolish designated historic property in Lawrence," Mark Kaplan, who lives near the neighborhood, said.

The house was built in 1870 by the Rev. Henry Belmer on a lot that cost $200. In its present state, the appraised value of the house is more than $150,000.

Brinton, who is $6,000 behind on property taxes for the house, declined to comment on his reasons for wanting to demolish it, saying only that the issue was "too preliminary to talk about."

Both Kaplan and Phil Collison, president of the East Lawrence Neighborhood Association, said Brinton is proposing to build a sixplex on the lot that is surrounded by single-family homes. They said that would subtract from the atmosphere of the neighborhood, which consists of a mix of students, families and older citizens.

"No towns in America have neighborhoods left like this one in East Lawrence," Kaplan said.

Collison said Thursday's meeting would likely not produce a concrete decision. If the Historic Resources Commission rejects Brinton's application, he can appeal to the city commission, at which time preservation groups across Lawrence would begin lobbying the city to deny the permit.

Though he said he did not see any way the commission would approve the permit, Collison said that if it should decide to allow the demolition, "I think we'd be chaining ourselves to the outside of the house to prevent the bulldozers from coming in."

The burden of proof for someone who requests a demolition permit is to show a clear picture of why the house is uninhabitable and to have a plan for what to build next.

"We think the house is in pretty darn good shape,” Collison said. "There would have to be an incredible rationale to having that demolished."

Kimberly Simonetti was part of the last group of tenants to rent the house from Brinton. She said that when she moved out at the end of the summer of 2006, it was in good condition, and she said she was not sure how Brinton could justify tearing it down.

"Granted, there were a few problems," Simonetti said. "It's an old house, but it's still a house, and it functioned just fine."

Simonetti said she thought the proposed demolition was all about money and moving more people into the area, which she felt would change the way people in the area live.

"It's a good place to live," Simonetti said. "It's going to utterly change the makeup of the neighborhood."

Sven Alstrom, architect and member of the Historic Resources Commission, said sometimes a house can be moved to another site as a last resort.

"If it's physically possible to move a house, we should not let it be torn down,” Alstrom said.

But Kaplan said moving the house was not good enough.

"In a historic place like this, it's like 'give me liberty or give me death,'" Kaplan said. "If this place is forced to be moved or demolished, historic preservation is dead in Kansas."

Amid the cacophony of instruments filling the fifth-floor of Murphy Hall with music, Nathan Salazar sits quietly at the grand piano in his private practice room. He opens sheet music to a Haydn Sonata, but as he begins playing with a delicate touch, it quickly becomes clear that he does not need the music.

Sometimes the pace of his fingers seems frantic, but music still emanates from the wooden Steinway as both his eyes and his fingers fly back and forth over the keys.

Humming portions of the melody to himself and putting his concert choir voice to work as well, he rocks back and forth with expression until the tricky fingering in one measure trips him up.

He shakes his head, muttering, "That sucks."

He plays the measure repeatedly, breaking it down and then building it back up, note-by-note, until it has reached his liking.

With only a few weeks remaining until the sonata needs to be perfect, that attention to detail is crucial.

Salazar wants to end his accomplished freshman year on the same high note with which he started it.

Winner of the Mary O. Fearing scholarship, which goes to the best incoming freshman pianist, Salazar's focus has now shifted to his jury, a 20-minute performance that is the equivalent of finals for a KU pianist.

It took three months to memorize the performance last semester, and Salazar said that even though he classifies himself as forgetful and his greatest fear is freezing onstage, he has "never had a train wreck."

"It happens, though," he said. "We're human. We're not robots."

It took complete memorization of hundreds of tiny details, but Salazar received an A on his jury last semester; he wants another. But that is only the latest development in Salazar's growth as a pianist.

Leonard Salazar remembers vividly the time his pregnant wife woke him from a deep sleep in the wee hours of the morning to ask when they should start their son on piano lessons.

"She must have just felt that he was going to be a musician," Leonard said of his wife, Carmen.

They waited eight years, starting Nathan on lessons in the fall of 1996, and it was only a few years later when he had outplayed anything his teacher could offer.

"His teacher approached us and said he needed someone who would challenge him more," Leonard said. "She realized he wasn't a regular student."

Salazar was anything but.

Born and raised in Los Alamos, N.M., Salazar's parents home-schooled him and instilled in him a faith and a drive to reach something better than what sometimes faces young Hispanic people in that area.

"Hispanic kids are just not pushed," Salazar said. "My cousins thought I was trying to be white. It was a bit of a culture clash."

He said he and his parents were sometimes seen as arrogant, but he does not think he has lost the love for his culture.

That flexible home-schooling schedule played a large part in Salazar excelling at piano. He said he practiced four hours each day throughout high school after his second teacher began putting him in competitions regularly.

"She put in front of him a vision of what he could do," Leonard said.

That teacher, Charlene Cox, said that as long as she had Salazar in a competition, "he worked like crazy."

That was a treat for Cox, who saw early on how gifted Salazar was.

"I told my former teacher that he was the student of a lifetime for a piano instructor," Cox said.

That was the reason why Cox said she could not stay out of the decision when it came time for Salazar to choose a college.

"She told me there were only four professors in the country I could work with," Salazar said.

The front-runners were at Rice and Kansas, but Salazar had already played at Kansas for Professor Jack Winerock, one of the Cox's selected few, during the International Institute of Young Musicians.

Rice intrigued Salazar, but he said it was too cutthroat for his tastes, and Kansas seemed like the perfect choice, partly due to the presence of Winerock.

"It's not necessarily where you work, but who you work with," Salazar said.

He meets with Winerock once a week for private lessons to fine-tune and polish his pieces.

"If he works hard, he could achieve some pretty substantial things," Winerock said.

Salazar said the obvious goal of piano performance majors was to be a concert pianist, but he realized only the absolute best in the world will reach that level.

"They don't put you here unless they think you can get somewhere," Salazar said. "But that doesn't appeal to me. I've always seen that my gift lies especially in working with someone."

Salazar wants to be an accompanist at the Santa Fe Opera, putting his choir background to work with his ability to sight-read music.

"I can play something on the spot, and singers like that," Salazar said.

His dad might like that idea, too.

Leonard said he, not his wife, was the one to have a problem with their son being far from home. Although Leonard said he usually speaks to Nathan about once a week, it is not always easy to stay in touch.

"If we don't call him, he doesn't call home," Leonard said. "Sometimes I have to track him down."

If Salazar is hard to find, it is because his schedule is full with piano practice and class, accompanying eight singers in the school of music and attempting to expose his floormates in Templin Hall to classical music.

"After about two minutes of it, everyone leaves," Salazar said. "But I'm still sitting there just riveted."

The adults in his life agree that Salazar just loves music.

"I hoped he would be an engineer, but he was born to be a musician," Leonard said. "Piano is like a natural extension of his personality."

Carbon monoxide poisoning is responsible for more deaths in the United States than any other poison, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Often referred to as the "silent killer," the odorless gas can be difficult to detect and the symptoms of poisoning can be easily misdiagnosed as the flu.

New technology on Lawrence's ambulances should help catch carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning earlier and more often.

Over the past week, Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical has just equipped each of its first-response ambulances with pulse CO-oximeters, hand-held machines that could make a world of difference in the treatment of CO poisoning. They can measure CO levels in the blood on the scene of the emergency in a matter of seconds.

"We used to just evaluate people by their signs and symptoms if their CO detector went off, but now we're able to know for sure," Neil Taylor, Lawrence paramedic, said.

In the past, if emergency responders suspected CO poisoning, the victims had to go straight to the hospital to have blood drawn and tested as soon as possible after the exposure to the poison in order to get the most accurate measurement.

Now, paramedics can take the lightweight machine made by Masimo Corp. anywhere. They clip a sensor onto the patient's finger and it shines an infrared light through the nail, using light wavelengths to measure saturation levels of carboxyhemoglobin in the blood.

The Interscan Corp., a company that makes environmental gas detection instruments, reported that CO bound to the blood's hemoglobin 240 times more readily than did oxygen, meaning it takes the place of oxygen in the blood, which leads to the flu-like symptoms and headaches commonly associated with CO poisoning.

Tom Jones is an EMS training officer at the Kansas City, Kan., Fire Department, which has had the pulse CO-oximeters in service for almost a full year.

"There used to be a very, very involved lab test at the hospital," Jones said. "Us being able to stick this thing on your finger is nothing short of a miracle for us."

If the hospital determined the CO levels to be severe, or beyond treatment with simple 100 percent oxygen, patients would have to be transported to a hospital with a hyperbaric chamber, such as the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan.

James Zeeb, Chief of EMS Training for the KCKFD, said hyperbaric oxygenation therapy was the main treatment for severe CO poisoning, using "a tube that drives gases out of the body," similar to what divers use after long instances of breathing highly pressurized gases.

The first responders can now use the pulse CO-oximeters to cut out a step in the treatment process and significantly reduce the amount of time between treatment and diagnosis.

"If we know ahead of time, we can take them to a hospital that has a hyperbaric chamber to eliminate the middleman," Jones said.

Masimo's Rad-57 Pulse CO-oximeter is the only pre-hospital, non-invasive machine of its kind.

It debuted in October 2005, Pam Mullins, Masimo's Central EMS Regional Manager, said. She said normal pulse-oximeters, which measure only pulse and oxygen levels in the blood, have been around since the late 1970s.

Jones said the KCKFD used a normal smoker's level of carboxyhemoglobin, or eight percent, as their upper limit for safe levels.

Normal levels for a nonsmoker are around three percent, and Jones said that a nonsmoker with levels from five to nine percent would be treated immediately with 100 percent oxygen.

Anyone who reached 10 percent carboxyhemoglobin would be taken to the hospital for further treatment, with no doubt as to what was causing their illness.

"Knowing that it's an emergency we run often, especially in the winter, without having any way of knowing what's in the air, this is such an innovation that can help us do our job," Zeeb said. "It's a win-win situation."

The future of smoking in bars and restaurants in Lawrence hangs in the balance as a case challenging the city's smoking ban now lies in the hands of the Kansas Supreme Court.

The court heard a Lawrence bar owner's argument against the city's ban on April 25 and is expected to hand down a decision no sooner than June 8.

The decision is sure to get attention from restaurant and bar owners across the state.

Phil Bradley, executive director of the Kansas Licensed Beverage Association, is keeping a close eye on the case, but he said that even if the court overturned the ban, it would not make a huge difference in people's habits.

"The damages from the smoking ban have been done," Bradley said. "People who used to go out for a drink and a smoke after work have changed their habits. It will take a long time to get those habits back."

Mandy Buckwalter, Hutchinson junior, said she had gotten used to the ban and that she enjoyed smoking outside.

"I think it's a respectful law," Buckwalter said.

Bradley said that even before the city instituted the three-year-old ban, 85 percent of bars and restaurants in Kansas were already smoke-free, meaning that an overarching law was unnecessary.

"Businesses that felt they could do better as smoke-free establishments had already done so," Bradley said.

He pointed to what he said was a substantial decrease in revenue from drink taxes as an effect of banning smoking in bars. He said it was the first year in decades that revenue had decreased.

The Kansas Department of Revenue, however, showed a small increase in tax revenue, as opposed to an actual decrease.

Revenue from the liquor excise tax revenue, a 10 percent retail tax on liquor sales at private clubs and drinking establishments open to the public, increased 4.5 percent in 2004. In 2005, the first full year with the ban in effect, the tax revenue rose 4 percent.

Revenue rose again in 2006, up 7.5 percent from 2005.

A pre-ban research effort by a 2004 Lawrence task force on smoking in public places and in places of employment said that the lack of change in overall revenue was common after cities put smoking bans in place.

The task force's March 31, 2004 report said that half of all establishments, usually bars, could show a negative impact on revenue, while the other half, comprised mostly of restaurants, would show an increase in business after a ban, balancing out the bars' losses.

Bradley said that even though he is a non-smoker and does not care for smokers in public, he thought the law was too vague and granted too many exemptions.

The ban is supposed to prohibit smoking in all indoor workplaces, but Bradley said some places were exempt from the rule. Smoke shops, hotel rooms, and private residences that may have employed a nanny or maid all fall under the exemption.

Dennis Steffes, owner of Last Call and Coyote's, argued that the city ordinance which prohibits smoking in indoor workplaces preempted the state law allowing owners to determine whether to allow smoking on private property. He also said the law was unconstitutionally vague, meaning that the average person couldn't discern a clear meaning.

Billy Rork, Steffes' lawyer, said the issue was not that Steffes, a non-smoker, believed smoking should be allowed, but that he did not think the city should be able to make it illegal.

"I think businesses should dictate what goes on inside," Rork said. "This is just government interfering."

Sandy Jacquot is the director of law at the League of Kansas Municipalities, which helped the city of Lawrence defend its position to the Supreme Court.

She said cities have the ability to enact ordinances that do not conflict with state law, and that the Kansas Supreme Court traditionally says that ordinances more restrictive than state laws do not conflict with the state law.

Richard Levy, J.D. Smith distinguished professor of constitutional law, said that was called home rule, meaning that Lawrence has the right to make the ordinance as long as it does not conflict with the state law.

Levy said the court would have to interpret the language of the law and decide whether it implies that the businesses have the right to create indoor smoking areas, or whether having an outdoor smoking area is sufficient.

Even that decision may not bring an end to the issue, though.

"Another problem is that for some Lawrence bars, there are outdoor areas, but for others there aren't," Levy said. "If not all bars have the ability to designate a smoking section outdoors, is there a conflict?"

Steffes had been cited for violating the city ordinance, and when he appealed the guilty verdict, the court dismissed the case because the city was amending the code. He then took his case to district court, additionally asking for an injunction until the law was clarified, and finally he went to the Kansas Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court picked up the case because of the possible statewide impact.

Toni Wheeler, attorney for the city, said she expected the court to uphold the ordinance, because she thought the language of the law was clear enough to be easily understood.

If the court rules in the city's favor on the other issues, Wheeler said that Steffes' injunction request should be dismissed.

The court may give the city an opportunity to make changes to the ordinance if it finds the ban to be unconstitutional, and Wheeler said they would try to retain as much of the law as possible.