The Spy “Exit Interview” series is part journalism and part oral history. Over the last eleven years, the Chestertown Spy has interviewed dozen of local leaders at the moment of their retirement to reflect on their work and some of the challenges they have faced in their professional careers and the nonprofit organizations they have helped as trustees.

David H. LaMotte is our subject for this installment. We asked David to reflect on his lifetime career at LaMotte Chemical and how this modest family business started by his grandfather, had relocated from Baltimore in 1956. Under his guidance as president, he grew into a mature, growing company with over 200 employees.

A few months ago, a significant end of an era in Chestertown commerce went mostly unnoticed for most of the community. After a lifetime working at LaMotte Chemical, David LaMotte discreetly stepped down as president of the Kent County-based chemical testing company, which he had led after Arthur H. Thomas Company purchased the business, in 1986.

In his Spy interview, David reflects on how this family enterprise grew, decided to sell the company, and the excitement of leading a team to expand their products and services on an international scale, all from their modest headquarters at the corner of Washington Street and Morgnec Road.

This video is approximately ten minutes in length. 

 

I’m convinced cats live in a parallel universe and for brief moments slip into our lives to eat, plot and sleep. It must be exhausting on the other side. For seven million years they have been perfecting their “I’m a cat and you’re not” sensibility.

Kidding aside, I recently visited Chestertown’s Cat Colloquium on the second floor of the newly renovated 18th-century landmark Stam’s Luncheonette to talk with CEO Laura Johnstone Wilson about their mission.

Cat Colloquium was founded by cat-lover and entrepreneur Wendy Culp and conceived as an educational forum with a “commitment to revitalizing downtown Chestertown by establishing a dynamic and inviting community space for both human and felines alike.”

Through partnerships with others, Cat Colloquium also acts as a fundraising source to support organizations that care for animals, children, and the community,

Meant as a community open space and educational hub for meetings and school visits, the floor was architecturally designed to be a haven for cats. A 20-ft rope encased tree, with limbs reaching the skylights, sits like an art installation in the play area. Cat tunnels, platform areas, nooks, and pillows abound and there’s even a narrow staircase down to Stam’s front window.

And yes, there are cats!

A dozen felines encamped at Cat Colloquium are special—they are all rescues and many of them have suffered from various injuries and medical conditions. Robinson, for example, is blind, but lives and thrives to annoy the group with his antics. Peake (Chesapeake) was bread without ear cartilage—now an outlawed procedure—and Buster lost his tail after being hit by a car. Each cat receives special medical care from Dr. Renee Rucinsky from Mid-Atlantic Cat Hospital.

Cat Colloquium is open to the public. If you are a cat lover, it’s some kind of paradise.

This video is approximately seven minutes in length.  To learn more about Cat Colloquium please go here. 

 

 

 

The Spy “Exit Interview” series is part journalism and part oral history. Over the last eleven years, the Spy has interviewed dozen local leaders at the moment of their retirement to reflect on their work and some of the challenges they have faced in their professional careers and the nonprofit organizations they have helped as trustees.

In this installment, the Spy talks to Glenn Wilson, president of Chesapeake Bank and Trust in Chestertown. After almost forty years in banking, which included leadership positions at Maryland National Bank, AmeriServ Financial Inc. in Pennsylvania, and the past five years with Chesapeake, Wilson and his wife, Diana, will be heading down to Florida to be closer to their two sons.

Wilson is the first to note that he leaves Chesapeake amid significant challenges. While he is pleased that his bank has come out of the COVID-19 induced 2020 recession in good shape and on the course of a full recovery, he still feels the pain of the coronavirus crisis as Chestertown’s merchants and restaurateurs continue to pick up the pieces of a damaged local economy.

Glenn also talks candidly about the challenges of nonprofit organizations that he served in leadership roles. Starting with the United Way of Kent County and the needs assessment, he helped determine the area’s most pressing issues and the Sultana Education Foundation, which remains severely impacted by the pandemic shutdown. And on a brighter note, his conviction that UM Shore Regional Health, where he also served on their board, and the State of Maryland will find a way to keep Chestertown’s hospital open and thriving for many years to come.

This video is approximately minutes eleven in length. 

 

 

Bill Peak, the Mid-Shore’s “library guy,” has just completed an interview for the Spy with Alice McDermott, who has been called “the Virginia Woolf of American letters.”  Peak’s interview was performed as part of a partnership between the Talbot County Free Library and The Spy to introduce area readers to the poets and writers behind some of our country’s best literature.  

Alice McDermott’s eighth and most recent novel, The Ninth Hour, made it to the Best Books of 2017 lists of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Time Magazine, among others.  Her seventh novel, Someone, was long-listed for the National Book Award.  Three of her previous novels, After This, At Weddings and Wakes, and That Night were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.  Charming Billy won the National Book Award.  That Night was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award.  

McDermott’s stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harpers, Commonweal, and elsewhere.  She has received the Whiting Writers Award, the Corrington Award for Literary Excellence, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for American Literature.  In 2013, she was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.  McDermott retired last year from Johns Hopkins, where, for the past 23 years, she served as the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities.

This video is approximately sixty minutes in length. You can also listen to this as a podcast at the following:

 

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There is poetry in Rodney Carroll’s descriptions of things he’s passionate about. But you won’t find his words in a book. Instead, you can experience them in his 30-60 feet tall three-dimensional sculptures that are erected in front of buildings, universities, and museums. His works, some of which take a year or more to complete, have mostly consisted of soaring interpretations of abstract concepts. But even those take on life when his explanation for what inspires him takes us on a trip from the conceptual to the romantic:

“I’m interested in the spatial relationship of elements and the negative space between them,” he says. “That gives me a notion of the wind coming through on the coast in a hurricane, forming the waves and shaping the sand dunes. And that also translates to the relationship two people may have, and the sense of how close they stand together and the energy between them and how that energy flows.”

You might have come across Carroll’s work around the country. There’s Couple in Arms in Norfolk, VA, Tango in Cary, North Carolina, or Meridian in Cleveland Heights, OH. Closer to home are the Three Muses and Apollo in Bethesda, Firebird in Baltimore, or Birth of the American Flag on Massachusetts Ave in DC. They’re large, expressive, poetic. You can’t help but be in awe of the vision behind them.

The manufacture of these massive steel structures is also impressive. Carroll explains that he doesn’t use a computer to create the sketches for his design. Instead, he works three-dimensionally, sculpting smaller models of his concept. Working with his own crew or a metal fabricating shop, he is inextricably involved in the whole process of cutting, welding, bolting, and erecting the pieces.

Not surprising given his talent, three years ago, Carroll was invited to create a sculpture for the lobby of The Hotel at the University of Maryland in College Park. Also, predictably was when he turned to the Chesapeake Bay as a muse for his design. Even though UMD’s mascot is the terrapin, Carroll knew there was a more powerful statement to be made. “Look at the salt marsh islands,” he said, “especially in Dorchester County around Blackwater that are the most fragile. These land elements and ecosystems are going on and going under because of climate change and sea-level rise. So, these salt marsh islands are, in a sense, temporary because in 30 years, they’ll be flooded and gone.”

So that’s what he made for The Hotel, a tribute to these tenuous marshlands. Called Blackwater, the three-dimensional 18×40 foot 2-panel curved wall sculpture is made of steel and copper. CODAworx, the art and design website, describes the piece as “brushed ripples in the stainless steel (which) represents the reflection of the light on the water while the copper-nickel salt marsh islands are shown as they rise and sink into the Chesapeake Bay.”

But Carroll explains the poetry behind the steel: “With the marshes, there are no two groupings that are the same. The way the water cuts through them with the tide running in and out… It’s all kind of magical how little mud bank with some grass stays there with the wind, the waves, and the tides and hurricanes, and all the fish, turtles, and birds lay their eggs there and grow. It’s a wonderful sense of the beginning of nature.”

After the installation of the panels, The Hotel expanded its design theme to encompass the idea of ecology and the Chesapeake Bay. The project also changed Carroll, who, besides residing and having a studio in Baltimore, bought a home close to the marshes that have become his inspiration.

“That’s pretty much why I came over into the Cambridge area,” says Carroll, “because Cambridge came down to the Dorchester and Dorchester has Blackwater, and they have all the salt marsh islands, more so than probably any other place on the Chesapeake Bay.” It didn’t hurt that he also found CK Lord, a local metal fabricating company that was able to work on his pieces after the fabricator that did his work for 30 years, closed their business.

But it’s the marshes that keep him coming back.

“I walk around,” says Carroll, “I boat around. I get the skiff, or I drive around looking at places. It’s almost to the point where I come down here, and I think I could just quit making my big sculptures. I could just spend my whole life making sculptures about salt marsh islands, instead.”

Although he probably won’t ever stop making the large-scale sculptures that are his trademark (he’s currently working on one for a town outside of Chicago), he’s now creating a series of smaller wall pieces based on the salt marsh islands. He’s also considering finding a place to display them. Not just for himself as an artist, but in the hope that it will be an inspiration to others.

“I feel that’s so important to draw attention to this ecology and this disappearing thing that we’re not going to see it anymore. I’m not a scientist or photographer documenting these, but drawing attention to the importance of them is a worthwhile endeavor. I feel good about the effort, and it makes me feel very good about my work too.”

For see more of Rodney Carroll’s work, check out his website here.

Val Cavalheri is a recent transplant to the Eastern Shore, having lived in Northern Virginia for the past 20 years. She’s been a writer, editor and professional photographer for various publications, including the Washington Post.