Kent County loves its critters and just proved it again with the opening of the Animal Care Shelter for Kent County on Worton Rd.

After five years of planning, fund-raising, and construction, the $6+ million shelter is a state-of-the-art facility designed to care for lost and surrendered animals until they are reclaimed or find a forever home.

Executive Director Richard Keaveney says that promoting the health and safety of the animals are their primary goals, and to that end have constructed spacious cat and dog galleries, unique adoption rooms for cats with access to outside areas on warm days, and outdoor play areas for dogs who are walked by staff and volunteers four times and day.

To maintain an optimum health environment, a controlled air system is in place to block any cross-contamination. This safety feature, along with separate areas for sick animals and a special medical room eventually for minor surgeries, dentistry, and neutering, are central to the health care of any animal at the facility.

A food prep kitchen to accommodate special diets and meds and an industrial laundry room help staff and volunteers work at an organized and comfortable pace. A separate break room is available for everyone during the day.

Additionally, Animal Control now maintains an office at the new shelter to bridge the lost and stray animals to the facility and on their way to healthier lives and forever homes.

And yes, there’s even a special “barn” for feral cats where they will learn to socialize and be introduced to the adoption galleries.

An official ribbon cutting will open the new facility to the community in May. The Spy will keep you posted.

Here, Executive Director Richard Keaveney walks the Spy through this extraordinary addition to Kent County.

This video is approximately 14 minutes in length. For more about the Animal Care Shelter for Kent County, please go here or call 410-778-3648.

Two artists, two states, one canvas, and one acclaimed painting. You might have recently seen a write-up on their collaboration in the Spy. It was an idea neither artist expected would happen.

Jill Basham from Trappe and Southern California’s Kim VanDerHoek met at an Easton Plein Air event almost a decade ago. Each admired the other’s work—both the similarities (including their preference for aerial views of landscapes) and differences. VanDerHoek is more of a textural artist, referring to her style as ‘loud.’  On the other hand, Basham prefers capturing the softer, subtler moments. Couldn’t the meshing of the two types, they wondered, create an interesting outcome?

The decision to design one painting came about as their challenge and an opportunity for growth. “It meant,” said VanDerHoek, “not silencing or obliterating the other person’s voice stylistically. It’s easy to let your ego take over, but that’s where the mutual respect and admiration of one another’s work is so important.”

As was reported, the painting, started by Basham using a photo of D. C. as reference, was then sent to VanDerHoek, who added her artistic talents. Having agreed not to share progress, the nearly completed painting was returned to Basham for a final edit. “When I opened the box, it literally took my breath away,” she said. That moment is captured in a video.  The 24”x36” painting is now on display and available for sale at Trippe Gallery in Easton.

As exciting as this collaboration was, VanDerHoek and Basham are now back to creating their own paintings. They each admit that the partnership was well worth the effort and allowed them to reflect on their careers and how this experience has changed them.

For VanDerHoek, thoughts about becoming an artist started when she was a child and was reinforced in high school. In college, she majored in fine arts, worked as a graphic designer, then took time off after her son was born. It was then that she discovered Plein air. “It was something I could do and not worry about him getting into my supplies,” she said. “It didn’t take very long for me to realize that that was the career path I’d always wanted to take.”

Contrast that to Basham’s path, one that she considers a ‘late start.’ “I was a social worker and then a transportation planner for a while. It was not something I cared much about, so instead, I stayed home and raised four kids. When my youngest was in third or fourth grade, I signed up for a drawing class at the Academy Art Museum and then went on to take classes in painting. That’s when I got that ‘aha’ moment and knew this was exactly what I wanted to do. It still gives me goosebumps.”

Despite their focus on painting, both Basham and VanDerHoek learned they had different ways of starting a project. For VanDerHoek, it’s a matter of finding or inventing something with a strong design that will keep the viewer engaged. She prefers to paint on wood panels and uses different tools such as squeegees, brushes, and a palette knife to add layers of paint that will give her both the soft, quieter passages and the bold textural areas. “Unlike Jill,” she said, “I work on one painting at a time. I wish I could work on more, but I have to finish one before starting another, or it loses momentum, and I’ll never return to it.”

To Basham, her ability to work on several paintings is something she feels is ‘undisciplined.’  “I have 20 paintings going on at once,” she said. “I really don’t have a process for a beginning. Sometimes I’ll use a photo reference, or I’ll just start with a design and look for the abstract strength of that design. I might turn the canvas and see what I see. And then start creating a memory of a landscape that comes to mind.”

Although they may not always agree on how to start a painting, they are more aligned in knowing when to stop. “I’ll add five details and take a step back,” said VanDerHoek. “If the painting isn’t any better, then it’s time to stop. I’m just adding unnecessary detail.” 

Basham said to her it’s all about time. “I need to sit with it and let it breathe. We, artists, tend to want to keep on painting, but that will just end up potentially distracting or detracting from the overall quality of the work.”

Both artists welcome any additional collaboration knowing it will depend on the commitments each has made to their respective careers. For now, Basham’s thoughts are on teaching workshops at the Academy Art Museum while supplying galleries with her work.

VanDerHoek admits to life getting in the way at the moment, consuming her better intentions to spend more time painting. She knows it’s all temporary, though. “This is, after all, still a job. You must still show up and create work. You still have deadlines.” Deadlines which include shows and art festival events.

Like all Plein air artists, they are preparing for the season. “I love painting at our Plein air. It’s something I always look forward to. It will even be more special in 2024, which will be their 20th anniversary.”W

VanDerHoek is particularly looking forward to coming back to Easton. “Easton has done a huge amount for me as an artist. Besides friendships with other artists like Jill, it has helped me advance my painting style and fostered a love of the area, the landscape, and the supportive art community. That’s been significant and impactful for me.”

Jill Basham: https://www.jillbasham.com
Kim VanDerHoek: https://kimvanderhoek.com
The Trippe Gallery, https://www.thetrippegallery.com

 

If you’ve come to recognize radio personalities by their voice signature and wondered what their lives are like, Mary Saner’s book, “What Else You Got?: Freelancing in Radio” is a fun place to start. It’s a peek into her life as a radio journalist.

Saner has been in the broadcasting business for 40 years, first as a news anchor at WFDMD in Frederick, then as a freelance producer in search of the unique stories found only off the beaten path of broadcasting journalism.

In fact, it was an article about Echo Hill Camp that first brought her through Chestertown 25 years ago.  Later, when she and her husband, attorney Robert “Buzz” Saner, thought about moving out of Washington DC, Chestertown rose to the top of their list of potential locations. 

“What Else You Got?”—a common editor’s refrain—is a book of vignettes about her ongoing career in broadcasting.

Sparked first by an impromptu broadcast promoting women’s basketball at George Washington University, Saner soon landed in internship at WFMD under the tutelage of the highly respected Bernard Adams. Taking one of life’s left-hand turns, however, the new broadcaster was tasked with news rather than sports.

Her three-month internship at WFMD culminated with a four-part award-winning documentary about teen pregnancy and she was off to another station in Virginia, all the while hearing the call for independence and the freedom and risk of becoming a freelance documentarian.

Saner’s book is an entertaining glimpse into the world of freelance broadcast journalism and the twists and turns that occupation requires. And it’s packed with characters, some anonymous, others, like high-wire artist Philippe Petit or young congressman Bill Clinton, remarkable moments.

Oh, did I mention that she also rides motorcycles?

The Spy recently talked with Mary Saner about her career and what lies ahead.

This video is approximately 12 minutes in length. Her book may be purchased at the Bookplate in Chestertown.

 

 

While the new Talbot County Public Schools superintendent Dr. Sharon Pepukayi is indeed home-grown, with a long family history based in Bellevue, including her parents ownership of Bellevue Seafood, years spent as a counselor Camp Pecometh in Centreville, and a very proud graduate of St. Michaels High School, she does start her new career at TCPS with a learning curve challenge. For her entire professional life, including her recent twelve years with Middletown, Delaware public schools, she has never worked within the Maryland public school system before taking her new job.

In “normal times,” this gap of experience is relatively easy to overcome, but with the rollout of Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, the state’s massive multi-billion dollar public education reform act, as well as surveying the full impact of COVID on her students, Dr. Pepukayi is the first to admit that she’s been on a rapid orientation since she was appointed last summer.

Nonetheless, Pepukayi is well aware that her school district will be not only entering a new era, but it may also be it’s most transformational. With the support and funding of the Blueprint plan, the superintendent sees a remarkable opportunity for both students and teachers to fulfill the County’s consistent desire to provide the best possible education for its young people.

And while the Blueprint offers some remarkable hope, it doesn’t stop the complexities and current challenges of her 4,524-student school system. That includes, but is not limited to, getting students caught up after losing almost two years to COVID, very poor test scores, school safety, and such things as dress codes and the use of cell phones.

Dr. Pepukayi touches on these complex issues in her first interview with the Spy. She also talks about her professional journey, her love of her native Talbot County, and her devotion to public education.

This video is approximately eight minutes in length. To support the work of the Talbot County Public Schools please go here.

 

 

 

What better place to study 19th-century English Romantic literature than to immerse oneself for a few summer weeks in England’s northwest Lake District, wake to a damp shawl of mist over glacial ribbon lakes and hike the rugged mountains while discussing Wordsworth and Coleridge?

Each summer for twenty years, Washington College Professor Emeritus Dr. Richard Gillin, his wife Barbara, and a dozen students from Washington College did just that as part of the Kiplin Hall program they co-founded and chaired.

The learning project’s mission was to connect “literature and landscape” using the our-hundred-year-old ancestral estate of Lord Calvert, whose son Cecil Calvert founded one of Maryland’s first settlements in the 1600s as a haven for persecuted Catholics. 

Each day, the Gillins and students explored the surrounding countryside of North Yorkshire and West Cork, Ireland, an experience he would later describe in his book A Guide to Hiking the Liberal Arts as “an explanation of what the liberal arts are and how learning history, art, philosophy, literature are so important It’s not a matter of collecting numbers or gathering simple facts. It demands experience, time, and contemplation.

Princeton Review selected A Guide to Hiking the Liberal Arts as one of its 2020 Best 300 books. Publisher Robert Frank wrote that the book is a tribute to the extraordinary dedication of America’s best undergraduate college professors “and the vitally important role they play in our culture, and our democracy.

The Spy chatted with Dr. Gillin to talk about how the Kiplin Hall project came about and his reflections on why experiences like the summer learning tours are fundamental to a liberal arts education. 

This video is approximately six minutes in length. The Bookplate bookstore’s ongoing Authors & Oysters series will feature Dr. Gillin at 6 pm. Wednesday, January 8 at the Retriever Bar at 337 ½ High Street. The event is free and open to the public.

 

 

 

The old joke about consultants is that they ask for a client’s watch to tell them what time it is. This attempt at humor does accurately describing the reality that many answers companies seek are actually in plain view. But what it fails to note is that many of those clients simply don’t have the expertise or staff to notice them in the first place.

Historically, these clients have been corporations and other large institutions, but increasingly small towns are turning to outside advisors to help them manage such challenges are tourism, economic development, affordable housing and the like. Lacking the internal resources to identify unique opportunities, as well as funding sources to pay for those initiatives, these tiny municipalities are increasingly breaking from their “do-it-yourself” problem-solving approach and are bringing in real pros to analyse those issues and develop thoughtful action plans to address them.

In the case of Mid-Shore towns, it would be hard to find more capable or well-known outsiders than Ross Benincasa & Sam Shoge, the partners of the newly-formed Roads and Rivers Consulting firm based in Easton.

Active Talbot County residents will immediately recognize both men. Before starting on his own, Ross had been the highly-regarded executive director of Discover Easton at a time when Sam was serving as the economic development coordinator for the County. Benincasa led the effort of Talbot County’s first Arts & Entertainment District during his tenure and has remained an active board member of Chesapeake Music and Talbot Interfaith Shelter. The Elizabethtown College graduate also serves as an advisor at the innovative SVN Miller Commercial Real Estate firm, focusing on infill development projects.

And Kent County citizens have known Sam since he grew up in Chestertown and later when he was a member of Washington College’s admissions office just after graduating from Elon College and more recently as the former director of the Kent County Chamber of Commerce and member of the Chestertown Town Council.

The Spy asked Ross and Sam to stop by the Spy studio earlier this month to talk about this new partnership and why small towns and organizations benefit from having a new set of eyes look at their structural challenges.

This video is approximately eight minutes in length. For more information on River and Roads Consulting please go here.

The old Chinese proverb says, “success has many fathers,” which is the case when one looks at the journey of the small Eastern Shore town of Berlin and its remarkable turnaround over the last forty years.

Left to die in the wake of the Great Depression, this quiet village witnessed for decades the economic demise of their once thriving downtown in the shadow of the booming growth of Ocean City, only ten miles to the East. And like many small towns in America, an inevitable resignation had settled in that this once vibrant, architecturally charming community of 5,00o had already seen its better days.

But to the shock of more than a few naysayers, ten local families banded together at the beginning of the 1980s to revise that perception. With each household kicking in at least $100,000 each, those families bought and restored Berlin’s legacy Hotel Atlantic to its original design, allowing it to open its doors to the public in 1981.

That was the milestone, says author Cee Williams, when one can pinpoint the time and place when Berlin’s fortunes changed. The hotel not only proved to be financially successful, but it also stood as a perfect symbol of what this little place was capable of doing. And since then, Berlin has become a poster child for the small-town revitalization movement.

The author has the perfect background to offer such an opinion. A native Berliner, Gee and his wife made a fatal decision to return to their hometown after a journalism degree was earned at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1974, Cee took a job as the local newspaper editor, where he would eventually become its publisher. That led to almost 40 years covering the town, but it also helped in his decision to run for the town council and later became Berlin’s mayor from 2008 to 2020.

Taking all of these varied experiences together, Gee has now written a book about the Berlin success story and what other towns can learn from its miraculous coverage and re-birth. Part history, part how-to guide, Williams provides countless examples of what a small town can do to get its groove back.

Gee was kind enough to drive up to the Spy studio last week to discuss his book and experience.

This video is approximately seven minutes in length. published by Secant Publishing in Salisbury, Turn Your Town Around can be purchased at local bookstores and here. 

Executive Director of RiverArts wasn’t on Chris Sade’s bingo card for mid-2022, but lucky for the Chestertown community, here we are.

Sade and his wife Marianne discovered Chestertown in 2015 during a visit to explore a job opportunity for Marianne at Washington College Library. Months later, accepting the job, the couple made the leap of faith and moved to town.

Fast forward to July 2002 and RiverArts’s search for a new executive director to steer one of the community’s paramount arts organizations into 2023 and beyond. Enter Chris Sade.

Chris brings 35 years of experience in the art world as the founder of a national transportation company in Washington DC that would cater to museums and organizations throughout the country.

“In 1996 we sold it to a firm it was based in DC and from there I ended up working with them for nearly 20 years helping them expand their business and provide services to museums such as packing, storage, transportation, and a conservation lab to help with inventories,” Sade says.

Sade says his role was to find new work for the company and tapped into the many connections he’d made over the years.

“I’ve been to about every major museum in the United States and some others around the world so I got to know people and they got to know me because trust is a large issue and allowing somebody to walk in and take care and custody of their valuable work.”

Connecting is the key, Sade says, and he hopes to expand his network of friends in Kent County to promote RiverArts mission to support artists, offer programming, arts and crafts shows, and arts education to the community.

Sade’s first project will redesign RiverArts’s floorspace by moving the gift area into a newly enhanced adjacent gallery space rather than combining it with the main gallery. Identifying the space as a standalone gift shop will help with retail sales, the foundational revenue that supports the organization. A grand opening for the gift shop will be in February.

The Clay Studio and Arts Education Center will hold a Grand-Re-Opening January 6 at 204 High St. (First Friday) from 5-7 pm, Clay Studio posting may now be found on RiverArts Facebook page, here.

The Spy sat down with Chris Sade last week to discuss his vision for 2023.

This video is approximately seven minutes in length. To join RiverArts or volunteer, see their website here.

The last time the Spy interviewed Wendy Palmer was documenting the bittersweet moment when she and her partner, Gretchen Gordon, stepped down as the owners of the very popular Oxford restaurant Latitude 38 in May of this year. 

What we didn’t realize at the time was how far back Wendy’s relationship goes with the Easton Family YMCA. It turns out it went back decades, but in the last five years, as both director of operations and promoted to associate director of the two-campus Y program in Easton. And that relationship changed once again when it was announced in October that she would be the new executive director of one of the YMCA of the Chesapeake’s flagship programs. 

In her first interview with the Spy in her new position, she documents how well the Easton programs have come back from the challenging days of COVID, the major expansion to accommodate the growing popularity of Pickleball, the YMCA’s highly successful fitness programs for those suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, and a renovated wellness center at the Peachblossom campus. 

This video is approximately minutes in length. For more information about the Easton Family YMCA please go here.