Julia Nagy, the executive director of the Tri-Counties Division of the American Heart Association was in studio today with Tim and me on Intents & Purposes to talk about the 2010 Go Red For Women campaign along with the event’s chair Janet Garufis who is also the president and CEO of Montecito Bank and Trust. The Heart Association will host a Women’s Health Expo fundraiser on March 5, 2010 at Fess Parker’s Double Tree Resort. We discussed building healthier lives free of cardiovascular disease and stroke and simple ways to make big healthy changes. Check out this week’s podcast page.
Posted January 26, 2010 at 17:24. Add a comment
We had our first guest on KCSB this morning: Director of UCSB’s Meso American Research Center and the recipient of the 2000 Rolex Award for Enterprise, Dr. Anabel Ford. She has been studying of the ancient city of El Pilar for decades. This historic Maya community is on the border of Belize and Guatemala. Dr. Ford contests, contrary to many of her colleagues, that El Pilar is a model of the sustainable practice of “forest gardening.” She and her team have worked to study, understand and preserve El Pilar. Check it out on this week’s podcast page.
Posted January 19, 2010 at 22:54. Add a comment
As the Santa Barbara School Board ponders the fate of the Cesar Chavez Charter School Dr. Jin Sook Lee was on the radio today with Tim and me to discuss the the school’s unique dual-language immersion program. Dr. Lee is a professor of Cultural Perspectives and Comparative Education at UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on understanding how cultural, societal and psychological variables affect the way people learn languages. Check out this week’s podcast page.
Posted November 21, 2009 at 09:56. Add a comment
This fall my colleague Timothy Grigsby and I started a new public affairs and eclectic music public radio show called Intents & Purposes on KCSB/KJUC Santa Barbara. Our latest episode features studio guests from City at Peace Santa Barbara, a non-profit organization helping teenagers to create safe, peaceful and productive lives through performing arts. Their group is hosting a climate awareness gathering tomorrow along with others around the world called Project 350. Also we featured music tracks from Systems Officer, David Bazan among others and a special international block.
Posted October 23, 2009 at 22:30. Add a comment
Col. Edward H. R. Green is known locally in Southeastern Massachusetts as the rich eccentric son of “Wall St. witch” Hetty Green, once the richest woman in the world. Col. Green spent his life trying to spend and give away his mother’s fortune, making him the area’s most prominent philanthropist of his time.
MIT erected the "Radome" antenna on top of the Round Hill water tank in the 1950s. (image from Wikipedia)
Having grown up in Rhode Island, I spent a lot of time in nearby Massachusetts. I was always fascinated by the “dish” on Round Hill in South Dartmouth, Mass. Much of the information available to me as a child about this massive, seemingly alien structure was part of local folklore, a muddle of facts, stories and rumors. Some said it was an MIT experiment to eliminate fog, others said it was a radio antenna for listening to deep space. I never quite understood the connection between it and the impressive mansion just to the dish’s north until I began researching it as an adult. In my travels I found an original printed copy of this publication “WMAF: The Voice From Way Down East” published by Round Hills (sic) Radio Corporation in 1923. The document is somewhat of an early “corporate PowerPoint,” outlining Col. Green’s company and the radio station as well as his passion for broadcasting.
WMAF was one of the first broadcast stations in the country when radio was born in the 1920s and WMAF and sister station WEAF in New York were linked via AT&T cable and carried live music, theater and other entertainment on the airwaves between New York and Massachusetts.
Today his mansion on Round Hill is condominiums and his water tank turned lighthouse turned MIT radio antenna demolished, but his legacy as a radio pioneer and early technology enthusiast is documented in this booklet and several other local publications. Col. Green was a bizarre and interesting character whom, if alive today, would most certainly have his own reality show and it would be far more interesting than The Apprentice.
For more on Col. Green and his story check out the book Colonel Edward Howland Robinson Green and the World He Created at Round Hill by Barbara Fortin Bedell. It may be available from Partners Village Store in Westport, Mass. The cover price is $39.95.
Posted September 8, 2009 at 19:53. Add a comment
