Interview Date: June 29, 2023
Oral History: Sung Kim & Ray Pultinas
Full Interview
Sung Kim was born in 1967 in Imsil, Korea. Her parents were both farmers and had to work hard to grow rice, hot peppers and other vegetables to make a living and sustain the family.
Even at an early age, she and her other siblings had to work hard in the field under the hot sun, which was challenging. As a hungry little child growing up in a rural village, she often went outside to exuberantly find and munch delicious berries, various fruits, young stalks and leaves.
She still remembers how delicious it was to eat dishes made with fresh vegetables right from the garden and the unforgettable aroma of newly harvested cooked rice.
Like most of the children growing in the villages, she went to the big city and attended a college. After working several years full time, she quit the job to come to America to study art in 1998. When she turned forty, she got to miss touching the soil and started to volunteer for NYRP and soon joined a community garden. It was thrilling to have a small garden bed to grow vegetables and herbs and she started to dream of building a beautiful garden and sharing it with people.
She started to take classes on gardening and composting with Bronx Green-Up at NYBG. While volunteering for Bronx Green-Up, she met Ray at an Earth Day event in 2016 and began to help his garden projects. Sung and Ray got married on Earth Day in 2021 beside a magnificent sycamore tree in Riverdale Park. She helped Ray to form the nonprofit James Baldwin Outdoor
Learning Center in 2018. They have been operating the JBOLC Garden Community Farmers Market since 2020.
Interview Date: June 29, 2023
Ray Pultinas is Founding Director of James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center, an educational and charity 501c3 non-profit whose mission is to strive for
project-based solutions at the juncture of food, environmental and social justice.
JBOLC manages expansive permaculture garden spaces on or close to the DeWitt Clinton High School Campus in the Bronx (including Meg’s Garden and Edible Forest), operates the weekly JBOLC Garden Community Farmers Market from June through October, sponsors high school student internships and coordinates community volunteer programs, community events and multi-age environmental educational programming. Before retiring in 2017, Ray taught English for 25 amazing years at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx (James Baldwin’s Alma
Mater) and has served as Sustainability Teacher, Sustainability Coordinator,
Journalism Advisor and Witt Seminar Advisor, among other roles.
Ray cherishes his memories as a child of time spent on his uncle’s dairy farm in
Cheshire, CT not far from where he grew up in Waterbury, CT. He remembers
helping his grandmother pick from her strawberry field and being rewarded with
jars of jam. His mother, raised on the same family farm, was an avid gardener who inspired his love for and knowledge of plants. Ray dreamed of traveling the country in a van taking and studying soil samples and entered the University of Connecticut in Storrs as a horticulture major, but eventually changed his major to English with a minor in Fine Arts (Printmaking). His passion for growing plants returned when he and his Witt Seminar students started the Clinton Garden in 2010. He loves the full
spectrum of garden work from digging trenches to planting to pruning as well as
long walks in the forest just to observe its beauty or forage for wild edibles. Among
his current dreams is the realization of the Mosholu Teaching Forest – a 21 acre
parcel of forested Mosholu Parkland across the parkway from De Witt Clinton that had been neglected and abused with trash dumping and smothering invasive vines.
Every human being deserves the healing power of a nearby and thriving forest
ecology to remind us of what truly matters to all of us – clean air, healthy living, and nature’s beauty. Furthermore, every plant, tree, animal and creature has the right to fulfill its lifecycle with respect, beauty and grace.