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.

For Waterfowl Festival president Ken Miller and his colleagues on its board of directors, their mission is simple; help celebrate the unique culture of the Chesapeake and raise money to protect it.

While it is true that the majority of the Board’s work is focused on the smooth operation of a three-day festival now in its 51st year, Waterfowl’s real business is to work with local conservation organizations, artists, artisans, hunters, and watermen to help educate the public on how rare and exceptional life is for those fortunate to live on the Eastern Shore.

Much of this effort has historically gone into land protection. Close to $6 million has been raised and donated to the cause of land protection on the Shore. And more recently, it has started a scholarship fund for young people eager to become leaders in the conservation movement.

But the real challenge for the organization happens every year in the streets and buildings of downtown Easton. Part of the labor is finding sponsorships and attracting the best waterfowl artists and artisans, but more importantly, to continue to creatively engage the thousands of families who attend with programming for all ages.

In Ken’s case, a boyhood in rural New Jersey was where his conservation passion began. Growing up in a small town in the farm country of that state, Ken started hunting as a kid, primarily ducks and muskrats, which led him to a love for duck carving during his teens. And from then on, Miller has always found a way to be part of the culture.

While his real job in life has been a succession of leading insurance companies, followed by a successful role as an entrepreneur in private equity finance, Ken Miller remained a lifelong hunter but has also engaged in land use and conservation. From chairing Morristown’s Open Space Committee to installing living shorelines at his family’s now permanent home on Broad Creek in Talbot County, Ken and his wife, Julia, have been active participants in ecological preservation.

The most recent example has been Ken’s work with the Waterfowl Festival. A Board member for years, he recently agreed to serve as president for a one-year term. The Spy sat down with him last week to talk about the Festival (which starts this weekend), the organization’s mission, and some of the challenges Waterfowl Festival faces as it enters its sixth decade.

This video is approximately three minutes in length. For information and advance tickets please go here.

After moving to St. Michaels after a long and successful law career, Jeff McGuiness set out to catch up on many things he had missed out on during his professional life. The first was to return to his passion for photography which he abandoned after serving as an Air Force photographer to enter law school. The other was catching up on his reading, beginning with David Blight’s award-winning biography of Frederick Douglass a few years back.

Like many in America,  McGuiness was profoundly moved by Blight’s portrait of Douglass, including passages devoted to the formerly enslaved person’s life in Talbot County, some of which occurred just a stone’s throw away from his home. But it also started to occur to Jeff that what Douglass had literally seen two hundred years ago could still be seen just outside his door in the 21st Century. Be it the Miles River, the historic estate where he was enslaved, or an old-growth forest down the street, those fields of vision were still there. More importantly, those images could be captured and synchronized to Douglass’s own words, so brilliantly documented in his three autobiographies about his life on the Mid-Shore.

The intersection of photography, history, and sense of place started Jeff McGuiness on a five-year journey to connect all three into a new book, Bear Me Into Freedom, which will be released next week. The photographer came by the Spy studio last week to discuss the project.

This video is approximately five minutes in length. For more information about Bear Me Into Freedom please go here.

Frederick Douglass Day in Talbot County is set for Saturday, September 24. It will begin with hundreds parading from Easton Middle School to the County Courthouse, a walk that will commemorate the experiences and achievements of the county’s most famous native son. It will also remind us of a walk 198 years earlier that involved just two people—six-year-old Frederick Bailey and his grandmother Betsey.

In August of 1824, Frederick Bailey, who would become Frederick Douglass, was being taken by his grandmother from the cabin that he had grown up in along Tuckahoe Creek to the Lloyd Plantation at Wye House twelve miles away. Betsey Bailey had nine daughters and at least twenty-five grandchildren, all enslaved. After their birth, many of the grandchildren grew up under her care, but with so many coming along, those reaching the age of six or seven would have to be moved out of her cabin to make way for the newcomers. Typically, they would be transferred to the home of their enslaver, Aaron Anthony. He was the chief overseer of the thirteen farms that were part of the Lloyd empire and lived on the Wye House grounds.

Frederick’s walk to Wye House was probably the first traumatic experience of a life that would be filled with traumas. Frederick rarely saw his mother, and now he was leaving the warmth of his grandmother’s care to be placed in what was, among other things, an orphanage for enslaved youth. But the experience was not just distressing for him. It must have been far more so for his grandmother who saw Frederick as the very special person he was and was fully aware of the potential path before him. Not only might she never see her grandson again, Betsey Bailey had no idea where a life of bondage and its attendant violence might eventually take him.

To observe this important event in Douglass’s life, Brie Wooden and her five-year-old son Keegan were invited to walk the Wye House grounds and imagine what Frederick and Betsey were thinking at the time. I was asked to photograph their meditation.

Looking at the resulting images, we can glimpse what may have been going in the minds of Frederick and Betsey. “The liability to be separated from my grandmother, seldom or never to see her again, haunted me,” Douglass wrote in one of his autobiographies. He remembered his “grandmamma” as “looking sad. She was soon to lose another object of affection, as she had lost many before.” 

Frederick recalled that when he and his grandmother reached Wye plantation that August day, “Great houses loomed up in different directions, and a great many men and women were at work in the fields. All this hurry, noise, and singing was very different from the stillness of Tuckahoe.” Young Frederick must have stood there transfixed by the spectacle, gazing at the new world he was entering, wondering how his life would be changing.

As Frederick neared the end of the walk, he looked up at his grandmother. “I knew she was unhappy, and the shadow fell from her brow on me, though I knew not the cause.” 

Frederick Bailey would return to Wye House as Frederick Douglass in 1881 when he was 63, and this time not on foot. He was transported there by the United States Revenue Cutter Guthrie that docked at the farm’s landing. In those intervening 57 years, Frederick Douglass had become a fixture in America’s history, one of the most consequential figures of the nineteenth century. He was invited by members of the Lloyd family into “the Great House” and graciously entertained. The shadow that had fallen from his grandmother’s brow so many years earlier had been obliterated by the brilliance of his works during the intervening half century. “To say that our reception was every way gratifying is but a feeble expression of the feeling of each and all of us,” Douglass penned.

Frederick Douglass Day will be held on Saturday, September 24, 2022. The program and schedule can be downloaded here.

Jeff McGuiness was the senior partner of a public policy law firm based in Washington, DC, and founder of HR Policy Association. A fine arts major in college who served as a photographer in the Air Force during the Vietnam War Era, he is the author of the forthcoming book, Bear Me Into Freedom: The Talbot County of Frederick Douglass.

For more than 22 years visitors to Talbot County and local residents have enjoyed a unique dining experience at Out of the Fire restaurant on 22 Goldsborough Street.  In September, Amy Haines, proprietor and founder, is relocating her restaurant to 111 South Washington Street, making it an appropriate time to reflect on the past and ponder the future of one of the most popular dining places on the Eastern Shore.

Eat Well, Be Well, Give Back, the mantra of Out of the Fire, personifies Amy Haines, a business leader, philanthropist, steward of the environment and restaurateur. Opening the doors on June 1, 2000, Amy pioneered the farm to table dining experience on the Eastern Shore. Together with Chef, Chris Berger, Sous Chef, Jed St. Landau and the rest of the Out of The Fire team, Haines has created a warm and unpretentious local dining destination offering quality food for long time Easton residents, newcomers and visitors to the shore.

Haines is always doing cool things before they become popular or trendy.  After a west coast stint in the biotech industry, she moved to Talbot County in 1998. Two years later, Haines opened Out of the Fire, melding together her many passions.

She was at the vanguard of sourcing food from local and sustainable vendors.

According to Cleo Braver, Owner of Cottingham Farm, “Amy and her crew, really focus on fresh sustainably and locally produced foods, the raw materials from which they craft their amazing meals. It’s a wonderful thing that they support the local agricultural heritage and allow it to flourish and grow.”

Her love of art led Haines to make the restaurant a home for local artists to display and sell their work. She also became a local business leader focusing on “giving back” to the community and a role model for other women business owners.

Local artist Howard Lapp described Out of the Fire as being more than a restaurant. “It’s been a community meeting place, one that has supported the art community by virtue of Amy’s generous use of her knowledge of art. And right from when she started the restaurant this was her theme, to support artists and their work. And she’s done so consistently for 22 years.”

Haines and her team’s pioneering work at Out of the Fire was also a foundational ingredient that helped create today’s thriving culinary scene in Easton, which has garnered much attention. When asked about her restaurant’s durability and success, she always deflects giving the big share of the credit to her Chef, Chris Berger, Sous Chef, Jed St. Landau and her Out of the Fire family, local partner growers and of course, to her loyal patrons and humbly says, “I just provide the canvas.” 

Haines’ canvas significantly expanded with the purchase of a two-story house located at 111 South Washington Street in a historic Easton district, which will be the restaurant’s home this fall. The new location will incorporate many lessons learned, especially the last few challenging pandemic years. Out of the Fire 2.0 will offer a different dining experience compared to the original location. The Washington Street location will feature smaller, more intimate dining areas, outdoor seating, a private dining area for special gatherings, a 900 square foot kitchen with a vaulted ceiling, among other amenities. Out of the Fire will close its doors temporarily at the end of August and reopen in September. The official opening date will be posted on Out of the Fire’s social media. What will not change is the restaurant’s spirit of friendship, community and good food. 

This video is approximately nine minutes in length.

The video and this article were written and produced by Mary Beth Durkin and Hugh Panero. Mary Beth Durkin is an award winning filmmaker and freelance journalist who focuses on food and its intersection with the environment, our health and public policy. Her work can be seen on PBSNewsHour’s online site at pbsnewshour.org and ybrproductions.com.

While the famous saying goes that success has many fathers, it’s a matter of record that the Izaak Walton League had precisely 50 of them when it was formed in Chicago in 1922. Created by a unique group of lawyers, doctors, and advertising executives, one of the country’s oldest conservation organizations grew from a small number of hunters and fishermen into a significant force in land and water protection.

And yet one prominent figure was not among the founders. Izaak Walton, whose name is honored as the organization’s masthead, had been dead for almost 250 years before its forming, but those 50 original members had good reasons to recognize and pay tribute to the man considered to be the father of flyfishing.

Walton, whose book The Compleat Angler gave birth to recreational fishing, was a unique visionary. As one writer noted, he was a man “‘knowing how’ before ‘knowing that'” in the unheard-of field of water protection. His legacy led his followers to protect fishing opportunities for future generations.

While the Izaak Walton League has intentionally been low profile since its founding, the impact of the organization’s work on the Mid-Shore has been impressive. With a Talbot County chapter created in 1949, the IWL has not only protected and maintained its 50-acre Bolingbroke Park in Trappe, where it holds its meetings and provides opportunities for hiking, kayaking, and fishing but took a leadership role in recycling in the region and now provides over $13,000 in scholarships, much of which is dedicated to students at UM’s Horn Point Lab.

The Spy sat down with Chapter president Calvin Yowell the other day to learn more.

This video is approximately five minutes in length. For more information about the Izaak Walton League please go here.

There are a few things that are front and center for Easton Airport Manager Micah Risher these days. The first is starting the long-awaited design phase to relocate and expand the airport’s primary runway over the next five to seven years. This major upgrade, which has been planned for almost twenty years, will be one of the most significant and largest infrastructure projects ever on the Eastern Shore, adding some 1,900 feet in total surface area to the strip, the destruction and reuse of the old Black & Decker plant, and the upgrading of the airport’s physical plant and technology.

And the second priority, perhaps having just as much history as the main runway extension plan, is the very sensitive issue of noise abatement as aircraft traffic continues to grow for this jet-friendly airport. And while it should be noted that the noted increase in executive jet use of EAS is rarely the culprit of this form of sound pollution (given their modern engines and long flight paths), the fact remains that the airport is seeing noticeable growth in the smaller aircraft that do sometimes require higher decibel take-offs and landings.

In both cases, Micah has some important points to share with the Mid-Shore community. Yesterday, he sat down with the Spy to talk in more detail about the runway project and its important safety goals for what is one of the region’s most important economic drivers. In fact, using a independent consulting firm in 2018, it was determined that the airport had close to a $50 million a year impact of our local economy.

Risher also talks frankly about the noise rebatement concerns for which he and his family have “skin in the game” being a homeowner in one the nearly neighborhoods affected by sound issues. Over the last few years, Micah has doubled-down on that particular challenge with a number of programs, including changing flight paths and creating the airport’s Good Neighbor Program to mitigate as much as possible aircraft engine noise.

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