About Dave Wheelan

In an era of when America’s large cultural museums have become masters of blockbuster exhibitions, marketing savvy, and significant building projects, it is hard not to worry about the fate of the thousands of the smaller community-based museums throughout the country.

These pint-sized, mostly storefront operations could easily be seen as an endangered species given that their big brother/sister counterparts are increasingly taking center stage in terms of membership and philanthropy. But Stuart Parnes, the current president of the Oxford Museum, predicts a healthy future for these cultural gems.

And Parnes should know.

With a resume that includes directing the acclaimed Mystic Seaport and the Eastern Shore’s beloved Chesapeake Bay Marine Museum, as well as a well-established career as a museum consultant, Stuart is well versed on the positive impact these large institutions have their visitors and communities, but when he puts on his local volunteer hat,  it’s been interesting to note that it is to help lead the small but mighty Oxford Museum.

In his Spy interview, Stuart talks about how this tiny museum not only remains relevant but can even compete with its larger peers in hosting unique exhibitions. A case in point is the Oxford Museum’s upcoming plans to host a Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition entitled Water/Ways.

Too large for the Oxford Museum’s venue on Morris Street, Water/Ways will be on display at the Oxford Community Center and St. Paul’s Church. At the same time, the museum plans to complement this significant exhibition with the work of the highly respected local photographer David Harp.

This video is approximately four minutes in length. Water/Ways will be from July 13 to August 24. For more information about the Oxford Museum please go here.

Even today as you walk on the Johns Hopkins campus at Homewood in Baltimore, the fingerprints of its first president, Daniel Gilman, can be found everywhere. From the physical forms of classroom buildings and laboratories to the current undergraduate curriculum, Dr. Gilman’s intellectual contributions and legacy as a higher education genius are still intertwined with one of this country’s most distinguished research institutions.

But there is one part of this legacy that has gone missing from this narrative for many years. Beyond the countless ways that Gilman put Baltimore on the map, it was his other contribution, his daughter Elisabeth, that Ross Jones, author of the newly published Elisabeth Gilman: Crusader for Justice, believes she deserves much more attention.

To document Elisabeth’s life, which eventually led her to become one of the country’s best-known leaders of the Socialist party, was an easy task for Jones. A product of Hopkins himself, who eventually rose to become one of the school’s senior vice presidents, Ross immediately took up the biography project after his retirement. He believes that Elisabeth was the centerpiece of the socialist movement in Maryland.

The result is a book which is not only well-researched record of one of the country’s first truly independent women in the country’s political life, but documents a time when religion and socialism were strange bedfellows in the pursuit of American justice. He also tells the charming story of a progressive family at the beginnings of America’s modern century.

This video is approximately four minutes in length. Elisabeth Gilman: Crusader for Justice is published by Secant Publishing and is available on Amazon here.

Over the last several years, the southern tip of Middletown, Delaware has assembled an extraordinary retail experience specifically designed to attract Marylanders seeking tax-free shopping. Starting with a Walmart Supercenter and then followed by the addition of a cineplex, popular restaurants, and a half dozen national chains like Michaels, Marshalls, and Kohls, this once sleepy town had transformed itself into a major commercial zone for the Mid-Shore.

Complimenting that vision was the addition of a significant bypass for Route 301 to seamlessly connect with Delaware’s Route 1 and later Interstate 95. After years of construction, the state opened the new toll road a few months ago, saving commuters and second homeowners on the Shore close to 15 minutes in drive time to and from the Delmarva Peninsula.

That was the good news.

The bad news started immediately after the Route 301 bypass ribbon cutting. Maryland drivers noticed two things about the new traffic pattern. The first was it was impossible to access Middletown Warwick Road, where all these new stores were located, without using the new toll road. The second, with no warning, was provided about the excessive charge, for doing that. It was going to cost a driver $4.00 each way to exit Rt. 301 after only traveling less than 2 miles using EZ-Pass. It was even worse for those without it with a bill in the mail for $5.60 one way.

Perhaps Delaware’s goal was to make the history books as one of the most expensive toll roads in the United States. If that was the case, they succeeded. But in doing so, the state’s highway planners not only have angered Maryland drivers with kind of highway robbery but created the unintended consequences of severally damaging Maryland’s secondary roads like the Cecilton-Warwick Road for drivers seeking toll-avoidance routes.

And nowhere is this felt more than in the unincorporated village of Warwick where car traffic on Saturdays has risen from 20 to 30 cars per hour going through their small hamlet to up to a 1,000 or more vehicles per hour on roads never designed for this level of traffic.

While common sense would suggest that the first exit could be prorated based on the short distance involved with a simple software update for EZ-Pass toll collections, Delaware has no formal plans to make that adjustment.

One person who has been watching this closely as been Galena mayor John Carroll since the toll road was being planned some ten years ago. The Spy sat down with John in the town’s council room to talk about unfair pricing of the new highway and the incalculable damage to Maryland’s roads and the Upper Shore’s way of life.

This video is approximately five minutes in length.

It is always quite remarkable to witness the journey of an extraordinarily busy executive, fully engage in life and work, transition into an active community volunteer leader. There is a certain curiosity about this somewhat dramatic shift of purpose and what motivated that profound change.

A case in point is Wittman’s Aric Rosenbach. For decades, Aric ran a highly innovative software company that focused on how mainframe computers could “talk” to each other. This technology was quite scarce thirty years ago, and Rosenbach and his small team grew into a hugely successful firm working with dozens of Fortune 500 corporations with their computer needs. Business was so good that Aric learned to fly so he could commute from the Easton Airport to his company’s offices just outside New York City.

Life continued to go well for Aric, and his Sandy, until December 7, 2008, when at eighteen years old, their nephew died of a drug overdose. Their grief was so overwhelming for Aric that he decided he had to become proactive with kids and to protect them from a similar and tragic fate.

His answer was to to go all-in with the Civil Air Patrol.

Combining his love of aviation and how it can play an essential role in teaching young people critical life skills, Aric was drawn to the organization’s mission.

As Aric explains in our Spy interview, the CAP is not the same organization it was when it was first created to help find downed aircraft 70 years ago These days young men and women not only learn about search and rescue, but the importance of volunteerism, leadership and, most importantly for Aric, becoming “wingmen” for each other as they navigate through the challenges of teen life.

This video is approximately five minutes in length. For more information about the Civil Air Patrol in Easton please go to their facebook page here.