If you close your eyes in this summer heat and humidity while listening to Phil Dutton and The Alligators, you might think you’re in a Louisiana roadhouse munching po-boys and knocking back a sweating mug of beer. Bonus: no plane ticket.

For seven years, Dutton and The Alligators have delighted local audiences with their gumbo stew of toe-tapping Louisiana musical styles. Their one hundred song list includes zany zydeco, swamp pop, and R & B jazz, with a nod to iconic musicians like Satchmo and Clifton Chenier.

Dutton, a Louisiana native, discovered his interest in music as a church organist, but it wasn’t until after his professional life in business that he reconnected with his love for the piano and decided to hone his skills at the keyboard.

“One of the first concerts I saw as a kid was Dr. John at a big stadium in Shreveport, and that was when he created the persona “Dr. John” on his Gumbo Tour. He comes out with that big headdress on. It kind of blew my mind. Well, I guess that stuck,” he recalls.

But it was after Phil and his wife Linda moved to the Eastern Shore, the musician caught the Louisiana music bug again and embraced the New Orleans piano style. As he began to play with other like-minded musicians, The Alligators took shape.

When he’s not rehearsing with the band, Dutton is involved with community social issues. He’s on the board of Minary’s Dream Alliance, co-chair of James Taylor Justice Coalition, and is a member of Social Action Committee for Racial Justice. Linda also dedicates much of her time as board member of PFLAG Chestertown Chapter, an education and advocacy group promoting LGBT equality.

Dutton appreciates Kent County’s support of arts and attributes it to The Alligators’ ongoing enthusiasm to entertain.

“This is such an accepting community for artists,” he says. “You can do no wrong; everybody is so supportive.”

Over the years, The Alligators have dazzled their way across the Mid-Shore with performances at The Avalon Theatre in Easton, The Mainstay in Rock Hall, and at The Shanty at Tolchester Marina for several years, along with private parties and spontaneous get-togethers.

The Spy recently visited Dutton in Worton and asked for a quick lesson in “Junker Style” piano. As always, he brightened the moment with talent, class, and good humor.

This video is approximately five minutes in length. For more about Phil Dutton and The Alligators, see their Facebook page here.

 

In a world trying to keep its balance during a global pandemic, health issues are paramount, whether internationally, statewide, or at a community level. Even aside from the pandemic, health needs for rural areas have become high priorities for adaptation requiring innovative answers to serve their geographically challenging population. 

After six years of negotiations with University of Maryland Medical System of Chestertown and Maryland State lawmakers—and spurred on by the activist group “Save Our Hospital”— the long-held fear that the hospital would be downgraded to an outpatient care center would be dispelled with a new designation as the State’s first Maryland Rural Hospital, a pioneering model for delivering healthcare to the region.

This designation puts the University of Maryland Shore Medical Center at the forefront of creating new strategies to serve Kent and upper Queen Anne’s Counties and on track to provide specialized care for an aging population with its additional designation as an Age-Friendly Health System and a dedicated Aging and Wellness Center of Excellence.

To meet this standard of a new model, UM Shore Medical Center will be adding “a new emergency medicine physician with geriatric emergency care certification, expertise that is essential to the hospital’s emergency services earning special designation as a Geriatric Emergency Department (GED).” 

Additionally, a new focus on “population health” via a network of outreach programs will employ prevention and healthcare strategies to better serve our rural area. This approach will be based on a close study of risk factors and health characteristics of the region.

With the advent of telemedicine, the Medical Center will also provide a wider range of specialized care for county residents along with a focus on greater access to healthcare through improved transportation. 

The Spy recently met with Dennis Welsh, Vice President, Rural Health Care Transformation and Executive Director, UM Shore Medical Center at Chestertown, to talk about the multi-tiered transformation of the hospital and steps going forward.  

This video is approximately 12 minutes in length.

 

One August day, some years ago, I made my intermittent pilgrimage to Arlington National Cemetery. I always manage to choose the hottest day of the season. The heat and the whining of the annual cicadas have become emblematic since my first visit as a ten-year-old walking behind the horse-drawn caisson carrying my step-grandfather to his gravesite.

Over the years, I’ve followed the horse-drawn and flag-draped caissons three times, the sound of hooves on macadam as solemn and eloquent as the bugle call, Taps.

I began to know the place by heart: from the asynchronous Greek- Revival pillars of the Amphitheatre to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and its revered precision of the Changing of the Guard, Kennedy’s Eternal Flame, and Arlington House, once Robert E. Lee and the Custis family residence. During one visit, I discovered that Custis Walk took me to the gravesites of the US Colored Troops, an adjacency of wry and poetic justice.

Only recently, I have come to learn that several sections of the cemetery I traversed had been a “Freedman’s Village” of 50 residences, with a community kitchen, school, and hospital surrounding a pond. There, freed slaves began their lives free from bondage. The village continued to exist for almost 30 years. More than 28,000 residents of Freedman’s Village are buried in Section 27 of the cemetery.

It was one of those days, walking from the Changing of the Guard toward the cemetery’s entrance, that I had an odd encounter.

Pausing to decide on my route—the cemetery is a maze of hilly paths and narrow roads—I noticed a man holding a sheet of paper and staring at me with that expression only the lost can project. I knew he was about to ask me for help as he approached. He was tall, with close-cropped silver hair and wearing a suit, the tie long gone. He held out the sheet of paper and uttered “Brown Bomber” as a question drenched in a heavy German accent.

He was holding a map, a sort of tourist guide for Arlington visitors, and he wanted to see Joe Louis’ memorial. I had no idea Joe Louis, the illustrious boxer, was interred at Arlington.

We found the famous boxer’s memorial stone in minutes. My acquaintance stood before the monument, its bas-relief of the fighter eternally posed in a boxer’s stance. I hung back
listening to the cicadas in the stifling furnace of the afternoon. He turned and nodded his head, as if to thank me.

He said he was a young boy in Prussia when he listened to the famous 2-minute fight at Yankee Stadium between Louis and Max Schmeling on the radio. Schmeling, having beaten Louis in a previous fight and heralded by the Reich’s propagandists as the Nazi’s golden boy, was decimated in the first round of the rematch and sent to the hospital for ten days with a broken vertebrae. A Black man had beaten him.

As we walked down the hill toward the entrance, he told me that he was Trappist monk in Germany and promised himself a trip to honor Joe Louis and to thank him for a small sense of triumph over adversity, homage to the man who gave so many a shred of hope in a Europe quickly being ravaged by Hitler’s quest to crush Europe. “That fight was what we needed at the time,” he said.

Over the years, I thought about that moment at Arlington and have come to learn of another dimension of the fight heard by 70 million people worldwide. Louis and Schmeling were complicated products of their time with cultural, political, and racial implications. Schmeling walked a tightrope: he had tea with Hitler and gave the Nazi salute after one fight, had a Jewish manager, but he was not a Nazi, nor was he a racist. He even personally saved two Jewish children by hiding them at his residence. Louis, revered by Blacks during an America in the thrall of Jim Crow racism where even the Northern press traded in racist headlines, had become the hope of an America as a land of opportunity. Both were caught in a drama bigger than boxing. They were avatars of contradicting ideologies.

After all this and the “great rematch,” Schmeling and Louis became lifelong friends, the German even assisting the “Champ” financially until his death in 1981.

And I thought about the little boy in Prussia glued to the radio, hoping for a hint that at least for a moment the world could be right.

As I left, I looked back up at the Arlington hills where 400,000 souls lay buried: Union, Confederate, Black, white and brown, men and women, families of the fallen. The sacrifices, the loss.

I was standing next to a small marker inscribed with “Infant Civilian.” Where it all begins.