About Dave Wheelan

Every year in February, the United States goes out of its way to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. And every year, Washington College uses this opportunity to remind the country that the first real monument to America’s founding father was the establishment of a liberal arts college in Chestertown in 1782.

It is a story worth telling. With Washington’s specific approval, accompanied by a significant donation, William Smith, the college’s first president, set out to create an entirely new curriculum dedicated to training its students to prepare for leadership and citizenship in a very new country. So new, in fact, that it had only completed its formal separation from Britain just months before Washington College opened its doors.

But what gets lost all to0 often in the narrative of the founding of Washington College is the fact that its genesis was much more the result of some of the country’s best and brightest living in Maryland making an extraordinary investment in what they considered to be an essential resource for the Eastern Shore.

With landowner names like Goldsborough, Lloyd, Paca, and Tilghman, many of whom served as Maryland governors, representatives to the Continental Congress, or signers of the Declaration of Independence, these families generously donated for the new college’s founding despite the considerable distance Chestertown was by land or water from their homes.

That is one of the many rich takeaways from the Spy’s recent conversation with historian and author Adam Goodheart, Washington College’s long-serving director of the Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. In addition, Adam talks about the remarkable backgrounds of these Talbot and Queen Anne’s sponsors (who donated almost two-thirds of the funds needed to launch the college), their vision for the Shore, as well as frank discussion on their slaveholder past.

This video is approximately eight minutes in length. For more information on Washington College Starr Center please go here

Chesapeake Harvest, which has been incubated by the Easton Economic Development Corporation for the last several years, started out focused on preparing Eastern Shore farmers to expand their market reach by training them with best practices and food safety guidelines required for larger markets.

But from the very beginning, Chesapeake Harvest was also eager to help those farmers with marketing and sales strategies to satisfy not only wholesale demands, but develop creative new ways to open up retail and institutional opportunities.

One of those new opportunities has been the development of Chesapeake’s online farmers’ market. With the leadership of advisory board member Jordan Lloyd, his wife, Alice, Chesapeake Harvest’s Elizabeth Beggins, and EEDC director Tracy Ward, the team switched on their website a year ago to test the waters of this entirely new way to bring local food to local family tables.

Last week, the Spy sat down with Jordan at the Bullitt House in Easton to talk about this new program and its future.

This video is approximately three minutes in length. For more information about Chesapeake Harvest and to access their website please go here.

Mid-Shore craftsman Bob Ortiz calls his program a “vacation workshop” but that might be a bit misleading for a few reasons.

The first is that while his workshop is indeed fun for the inspiring woodmaker, the “vacation” actually describes five, eight hour days working in Bob’s Chestertown woodshop to produce one piece of furniture during that time. The second is that while the word”workshop” may imply that you will have fellow students, the reality is that it only includes one pupil working side by side with this master craftsman to create an exquisite dinner or side table that the student can honestly say, “I made this.”

These are also perhaps the reasons why Bob’s workshops have grown in popularity since he started offering the program two years ago. From an NPR journalist to a top executive at Facebook, twenty-four students of all ages have now graduated with a legacy of craftsmanship that can be passed on for generations.

The Spy sat down with Bob at the Spy HQ in Chestertown to talk about this remarkable program.

This video is approximately three minutes in length. For more information about Robert Ortiz Studios and Vacation Workshops please go here

If there is a good example of what Martin Luther King Jr. was hoping for in America, it might be found with Cecil County Circuit Court Judge William W. Davis Jr. The product of a mostly white high school in Delaware, followed by a primarily black college experience at Morehouse College in Atlanta, and now as the first elected black judge in a county that is made up of 90% white residents, Davis understands first hand the importance of diversity, as well as how America has changed since Dr. King poetically asked that Americans be judged by the quality of their character and not the color of their skin.

Davis also understands the importance of fair justice.  And while he is the first to admit that the American legal system has a long way to go before “justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” he faithfully believes that he and his fellow judges in Cecil County are making that a reality on the Upper Shore.

As the judge prepares his remarks for his keynote address at the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Breakfast in Rock Hall next week, the Spy ran up to Elkton last week to talk to him between his court cases, about MLK, his thoughts on young people in the African-American community, and the mighty stream of justice in Maryland.

This video is approximately four minutes in length. For information on the Martin Luther King Jr. Breakfast please go here.

Unlike most authors who have been kind enough to sit down for an interview with the Spy to talk about a new book, Mid-Shore artist Jim Richardson’s recently released novel is almost sold out, is not available on Amazon, nor available at local stores. In fact, if you want to buy a copy (only 50 left in inventory), you’ll need to knock on his door in Claiborne with eighteen dollars in cash to get one or borrow it from a friend.

While the popularity of Middle Blue is indeed extremely comforting to Jim, it’s not without the knowledge that he only ordered 200 to be printed in the first place. His pleasure comes from successfully finding a way to tell his family and friends what it was like as a twenty-one year old drafted into the Vietnam War.

Disinclined to use the more traditional format of writing a memoir, Jim took his wartime experience and channeled it through the experience of three fictional characters who find friendship in the midst of the tragic and surreal last years of America’s attempt to win a war that could not win.

Jim sat down with the Spy to talk about the experience of writing the book (including the book’s illustrations), his goal of sharing his Vietnam experience with loved ones, and the therapeutic value that comes with memories rediscovered and documented.

This video is approximately three minutes in length. As noted, this is book is only available from the author. Jim’s email is designs@atlanticbb.net