For the record, artist, and Easton gallery owner, Betty Huang is not giving up on her art or Studio B on Goldsbrough Street, but she’s actually retiring from being the president and board member of the Working Artists Forum after 12 years of leading this Mid-Shore arts organization. Given this remarkable tenure, the Spy thought it appropriate to ask Betty to participate in our ongoing chats with community leaders in all fields about their contributions and impressions about the organizations they have served and their future.

With an active membership that has grown from 30 artists to now over 100, there is good reason to celebrate WAF’s unique success. A grass-roots group with no paid staff, Working Artists Forum has a mission to support local artists and showcase their work in statewide exhibitions, as well as provide workshops and educational programs for those artists to develop their skills and advance their careers. Under Betty’s leadership and her supportive volunteers and board members, WAF has increasingly used art as a way to raise funds to support art programs in Mid-Shore public schools and, more recently, using WAF art shows to raise money for breast cancer research and patient care.

Betty stopped by the Spy Studio a few weeks ago to reflect on the growth of the organization and how it has helped her personally with her art, a passion she finally was able to return to after a successful professional career with the International Monetary Fund.  She also talks about her arrival in Easton in 2006 and her immediate love affair with the Eastern Shore.

This video is approximately seven minutes in length. For more information about the Working Artists Forum please go here.

It is with profound sadness that the Spy was notified yesterday of the unexpected passing of Spy columnist Howard Freedlander. It is a stunning loss for his family, friends, and colleagues here at this small online newspaper. The loss of this very special person in this publisher’s life makes me speechless as I reflect on how much he meant to his beloved town of Easton and to the causes he cared so much about.

There will be another time and moment to reflect on Howard, but in the meantime, I wanted to share with our readers an exit interview Howard did with the Spy after he and his wife, Liz, made the painful decision to leave Easton after decades to be closer to family.

 

The Spy continues our informal series of long-form exit interviews with some of the Mid-Shore’s most well-known leaders in public affairs, the arts, and regional culture at the end of that individual’s tenure of employment. Many of those profiles tend to focus on sometimes decades of work and deeds, but in other cases, like with Cambridge City Manager Tom Carroll, these can be short-lived experiences.

Hired two years ago after successful roles as city manager in Loveland, Ohio, and village manager in Silverton, Ohio, Carroll quickly won the praise of many Cambridge stakeholders with his professional manner and effective management style. He also created a positive working relationship with current City Council members, including Mayor Steve Rideout, as the city worked through several serious municipality challenges.

And yet, despite this early record of success, Tom Carroll gave notice last month, and he is not subtle about the reasons why.

Over the last nine months, Carroll grew increasingly concerned about the strategic vision, transparency, and financial funding of Cambridge Waterfront Development Inc.’s (CWDI) plan to develop over 30 acres of the city’s waterfront. After making efforts to resolve those concerns, the city manager decided to resign rather than support a scheme that he thought had the potential of catastrophic financial consequences for Cambridge and its residents.

In his Spy interview, Carroll specifically details those concerns, but also the progress that Cambridge has made even during his short tenure, and more importantly, his confidence in the city’s future.

Carroll will become the new town manager of Lexington, Virginia, later this summer.

This video is approximately 17 minutes in length.

 

Modern Life is challenging in ways our ancestors never imagined.

It’s nice to have a place to get away from it all once in a while.

“A place to unplug and watch the day go by” is the way Bayly Buck, president of the Wading Place Hunting Club in Queen Anne’s County, describes that kind of sanctuary. “A world apart. A step back in time.”

The Wading Place, 1631: Back when English colonists established their earliest communities in America, the shores of the Chesapeake Bay were among some of the first places they settled. In 1631, a pioneer named William Claiborne built a trading post on the largest island in the Chesapeake Bay. Claiming the island for Virginia, Claiborne named his Jamestown outpost after his British hometown of Kent.

Sometime soon after, nobody knows exactly when inhabitants of the region started calling the area where one could pass between The Isle of Kent and the eastern mainland without using a boat, “The Wading Place.”

And not only don’t we know for sure when Kent Island’s Wading Place came into being, nobody really knows where it was either.

An obvious assumption is that it was most likely located near what we now call Kent Narrows, the strait separating the island from the rest of the Eastern Shore while connecting the Chester River to Prospect Bay. According to J. Coursey Willis, president of the non-profit Historic Kent Island (https://historickentisland.org/), the earliest evidence of The Wading Place’s location, patented in 1649, has been lost to the tides of history, but there is an existing survey issued in 1658 identifying a 300 acre parcel on the east side of Kent Island as Wading Place Neck.

In Willis’s opinion, the northwestern landmark of what was the Kent Island side of “The Wading Place” would be located in the vicinity of Queen Anne’s County’s present-day Ferry Point Park and run south to the area around the county boat slips and the Kent Island Yacht Club near Goodhands and Kirwans Creeks. There are also references from this time to Wading Place Swamp and Wading Place Bay. Willis thinks Wading Place Swamp was probably what we call Piney Creek, and Wading Place Bay is what’s been known since at least the mid-19^th century as Prospect Bay.

The Wading Place Hunting Club, 1945: Locals and travelers alike have always needed to cross back and forth between Kent Island and Delmarva proper. According to Willis’s research, the first official mention of a ferry at The Wading Place was in 1711. A series of causeways and bridges have subsequently been built at Kent Narrows over the years, including a 1902 railroad bridge and the still-existing drawbridge that opened mere months before the Bay Bridge was dedicated in 1952.

When that drawbridge was built, Kent Narrows was nearing the end of its fifty-year run as one of the hubs of a seafood packing industry that supported a big portion of the regional economy. 

In the mid-to-late 1940s and early 1950s, The Eastern Shore was undergoing significant changes. A way of life that generations grew up experiencing was nearing an unprecedented cultural transition.

In 1945, John C. Legg Jr., a Baltimore investment banker, purchased thirty acres of the Horsehead Peninsula on the eastern Grasonville side of Prospect Bay and called the hunting retreat he built for family and friends The Wading Place. Legg created a corporation, issued stock that was issued completely to his two daughters-in-law, and sat a board of directors that consisted of himself and his sons, John the Third and William. John died in 1952 at the age of 41. A year later, William was fatally shot in a hunting accident at The Wading Place. He was 33. His 9-year-old son was in the duck blind with his dad when it happened. Afterward, the Wading Place Hunting Club was sold to eight friends, including Dr. Walter ‘Dick’ Buck, whose cousin’s son Bayly is The Wading Place Club’s current point man.

Bayly Buck first visited the club when he was 12 years old, and though he was not originally a fan of the cold hunting season weather, he learned to love the place and the bonding opportunities he experienced there, as well as the area’s wild beauty and the feeling of being apart from the surrounding modern world. He says that to look at it, the clubhouse doesn’t present much of an image, facilities are rudimentary at best, but members past and present have loved it that way. “Wading Place has remained a boys club,” says Buck. “Cast-off furniture, no doilies, no curtains, and no big chores to do.” It’s a great spot, he says, “to just relax in resplendent squalor.”

The Wading Place, 2024: Between 1981 and 1998, The Wildfowl Trust of North America, with the intent to protect endangered wetlands through education and stewardship, purchased the entire Horsehead Peninsula with the exception of the 30 acres owned by The Wading Place group.  On a mission to create a bond between people and the world around us, the Chesapeake Bay Environmental Center (https://bayrestoration.org/) offers both recreational and educational opportunities for visitors of all ages.

An educator, coach, and conservationist, Matt LaMotte, a member of the Wading Place club for more than fifty years, says his group has been longtime advocates of their environmental center neighbors. “We’ve had members who have sat on the CBEC board, we provide financial support whenever we’re needed, and we maintain a portion of the center’s trails.”

LaMotte no longer hunts but still visits the club’s property whenever he can to take walks, birdwatches, and soak in either the solitude or camaraderie with other members.  “Sitting on the porch and watching the sunset here is a unique and special privilege,” he says. “For me, it’s been a haven from the hustle and bustle of daily life as well as fellowship among a life-long group of close friends.”

Bayly Buck concurs. He says the Wading Place club is “a tradition handed down to us by the generation before us, which we now hand down to our kids, and recently to our grandchildren.

“Unrepentantly” borrowing the unofficial motto of Montana, Buck calls the club’s waterfront slice of the Eastern Shore “The Last Best Place.”   

“Because we like to sit here (at the clubhouse) and watch the sunset sink into the water, I usually finish notes to the membership with “See ya on the porch.””

It’s a reminder and an invitation to enjoy life’s quieter moments.

See ya on the porch.

Brent Lewis is a native Chesapeake Bay Eastern Shoreman. He has published two nonfiction books about the region, “Remembering Kent Island: Stories from the Chesapeake” and a “History of the Kent Island Volunteer Fire Department.” His most recent book, “Stardust By The Bushel: Hollywood On The Chesapeake Bay’s Eastern Shore”won a 2023 Independent Publishers award. His first novel, Bloody Point 1976, won an Honorable Mention Award at the 2015 Hollywood Book Festival. He and his wife Peggy live in Centreville, Maryland.

Anyone who has ever had a chat with neurosurgeon Khalid Kurtom, MD, at UM Shore Health knows firsthand his extraordinary grasp of knowledge of his chosen field but may not realize his in-depth understanding of both the profound complexity and rapid advances in neuroscience and neurosurgery. And that’s why the Spy always welcomes the opportunity to spend time with him.

This time around, we sat down with him and his longtime colleague, nurse practitioner Wendy Towers, to discuss the differences in brain injuries, detailing how they are classified into mild, moderate, and severe categories based on their severity. Mild injuries, usually from minor incidents like falls, require short-term observation and scanning before patients are released with follow-up instructions. Moderate injuries necessitate overnight hospitalization and possibly interventions if there is bleeding in the brain. Severe injuries involve comatose patients who often need to be flown to specialized centers for extensive neurocritical care.

Symptoms of brain injuries can vary but commonly include headaches, confusion, slurred speech, and often a lack of self-awareness that anything is wrong. These indicators often prompt family members to seek medical attention for the patient. More severe cases can progress to more concerning neurological symptoms such as weakness, numbness, vision troubles, and memory issues, typically leading to hospital admission and repeated scanning.

Both Kurtom and Towers highlight two particularly vulnerable groups: the elderly, who may underestimate minor head traumas, and athletes, who are prone to concussions with lingering effects like trouble sleeping and focusing.

Finally, the two discuss advancements in neurosurgery, emphasizing the shift from traditional methods to cutting-edge techniques like robotic surgery and navigational imaging tools that allow precise interventions, significantly reducing hospital stays and improving recovery outcomes.

This video is approximately ten minutes in length. For more information about Neurosurgery at UM Shore Health please go here.

While the function of a welcome center seems fairly clear from its title, the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum wanted to use this generous new space to go beyond the simple task of visitor orientation. With the prospect of installing exhibitions at the very beginning of a new guest’s trip to the St. Micheals campus, the CBMM saw an extraordinary opportunity to tell stories and share artifacts that would immediately connect the Bay, specifically with those not familiar with its history or culture.

Leading that effort has been Jen Dolde, the director of curatorial affairs & exhibitions at CBMM. The Spy asked Jen to stop by the Spy Studio a few weeks ago to talk about this challenging but fun objective and how these stories help visitors see the Bay through the eyes of those who lived and worked there.

This video is approximately minutes in length. For more information about the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum please go here. 

The original idea for the Mid-Shore-based Sprouts! to expand to Annapolis was neither original nor all that new. That’s because Ryan Groll, co-founder (along with his wife, Emily) of the locally prepared and ready-to-eat meal company, actually grew up there and had long planned to find a way to return to his home base, where many of his old friends had started their own businesses.

So Sprout’s move to a space right across from the popular Trader Joe’s near the Westfield Mall was a perfect spot to attract food-conscious customers who wanted to support local agriculture but did not have the time to make healthy meals for themselves and their families.

Sure enough, the Annapolis branch has turned out to be a remarkable success story. and one of their best customers turned out to be those working in the state house, either as elected officials or their staff, who perfectly describe Sprouts, customers, and a series of chitchats with those clients open the door for a totally unplanned invitation to be the primary vendor for the state of Maryland’s capital and office buildings downtown.

The Spy was intrigued by this unique pathway for Sprouts and asked Ryan to stop by this Spy Studio to talk about it a few weeks ago.

This video is approximately four minutes in length.

 

In historic Centreville, a unique small-scale environmental project is taking root, literally.  The Captain’s Houses Conservation Landscaping Project, located along the picturesque waterfront, has demonstrated that even these tiny efforts can have a big impact for history and the environment.

The project centers around the Captain’s Houses, a set of four frame houses built in 1880 by Captain John H. Ozmon. These houses, now on the National Register of Historic Places, have become the focal point of this innovative initiative led by the homeowners’ association. Recognizing the importance of environmental sustainability, the association agreed to install three conservation landscape beds in the common areas.

These beds are more than just a beautification effort. They serve multiple ecological purposes, such as enhancing the stream buffer to Mill Stream Branch, providing habitat for wildlife, and reducing stormwater runoff. The initiative is a perfect example of how local communities can contribute to the protection of vital waterways like the Corsica River and Chesapeake Bay.

The project also holds a special place within the community context. Adjacent to a public walking trail and the Captain’s Walk pier, the conservation beds will be a point of interest and education for both residents and visitors.

The Spy caught up with Sandy Huffer, who has been spearheading this effort with her fellow homeowners’ association members to talk about how this was done in Centreville and how it can be done in other communities.

This video is approximately four minutes in length.

 

Cambridge is starting the year in arts with a big bang! Most events here are provided free with bar and snacks for purchase.

Back by popular demand, Open Mic night at Dorchester Center for the Arts (DCA) runs every Tuesday night through the end of April.  While weather has prevented the past two Tuesdays, there are 15 more on the schedule, giving talent and audience alike much to look forward to.  Each Tuesday, a different host stagehands the gathering, making sure all those interested in playing get on the list and get to play.  Music isn’t the only thing welcome at Open Mic night.  Storytellers and poets, and actors and writers are welcome too.

For any not acquainted with Open Mics, it simply means that anyone who wants to perform and can keep their performance within allotted time frames (which can change depending on how many sign ups there are) are welcome on the stage.  Generally (and at DCA), it is first-come first-serve on the sign-in sheet.  The DCA audience has proven itself appreciative and attentive and willing to stay until the last performer is done.

Also at DCA, a brand new “Open” concept previewed to enthusiastic attendance and audience participation on Thursday, January 18.   Happening weekly, Thursdays, Open Dance was created and is being shepherded by Cambridge Kitchen Designer and lover of all things dance, Binny Olsen.  Binny has modeled Open Dance on Open Mic.  Because she couldn’t find a place where dance was center stage in Cambridge, she approached DCA about allowing her to put this program together.

Betsey Harrington, Board President and Treasurer at DCA, says that, for DCA, Open Dance, like Open Mic, is a great way to “get the community to come together in a fun activity and to see the Art Center.  Binny gets all the credit for putting together the format, instruction and music.”

Binny, for her part says, “This is purely selfish.  It wasn’t here.  I need it, so I’m creating it.”  (Which begs the question:  what do you need that you haven’t found and might create?)

For the first Open Dance on January 17th, Morgan Hunsicker performed host duties, opening with a self-choreographed dance.

When asked what made her want to participate in this brand new concept, Hunsacker said, “I love dancing and I want to share that love with people who want to move.”

Hunsacker recently graduated from The Joffrey Ballet Schools Jazz and Contemporary program. While at Joffrey, she also completed several semesters of her Dance BFA degree at New Jersey City University. Hunsacker is professionally trained in many genres of dance such as ballet, jazz, contemporary, hip hop, musical theatre, Latin jazz, street jazz, partnering, and modern. She has assisted with Joffrey rehearsals, has taught at Eastern Shore Dance Academy, and is currently in rehearsals for Les Fêtes de Thalie with Opera Lafayette which will premiere May 3rd-4th at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.

When invited to “come on up and dance,” the audience was not shy.  The spacious “stage” set up in the upper room of DCA is a generous dance floor for learning, and the stage set lighting (no bright overheads, and colorful changing lights aimed at the floor) created a safe and fun environment to learn and laugh together as we (yes, even I got up) did our best to follow Hunsacker.  Her teaching skills shined in her ability to break down her dance into learnable segments.  She was in no hurry and answered questions and requests for more repetition. In addition to her own choreography, we were introduced to the Jerusulema, a dance based on a song by South African DJ and record producer, Master KG featuring South African vocalist Nomcebo with lyrics sung in Zulu.

As with Open Mic, in Open Dance other dancers/teachers are invited to share their pieces. Those in attendance were thus delighted with a performance by Joyce Ritz, a line-dance teacher who holds regular line-dance get togethers at the local Elks Lodge Wednesdays, from 6:30 – 8:00 p.m as well as at the YMCA in Cambridge . Ritz brought many of her regulars with her, and when it came time for audience participation, there were many dancers there to help those who were new to line dancing.

Hunsacker will be back to host the January 25th  Open Dance, so if you missed last week, you have a second chance to see what all the energy and excitement around this newly created event is about, and to learn from her.

Paul Ellwood, a regular at just about every event at DCA says, “I enjoy dancing with such a bunch of beautiful and talented people so much that I can’t wait until next Thursday to kick off my shoes and join in again!”

Julian Jackson, staff at WHCP, the local NPR radio affiliate, provided dj services.

But, wait! There’s more!  Wednesday, January 24th at 1 p.m. at DCA, Ed Krell, of Chalk Festival fame ((and recently also oil painting), along with his chalker-and-art colleague, Collin Cessna, will host Art Project #1, with music to work by provided by Marianne Syles and Jon Jacobs.  Attendees will be encouraged to, as the Facebook event page says, “pick up a canvas and join in.”  In addition to DCA, this event is sponsored by Old Salty’s Restaurant, Hoopers Island General Store, Marianne Styles Music, and Riverside Lodge (Hooper’s Island).

Finally, Sol Roots performs at DCA on January 27th.  Tickets for this performance are still available, and proceeds go to support The Harriet Tubman Museum and Educational Center in Cambridge.

All of this in just one week.

Cambridge:  the Arts are definitely alive!

Tammy Vitale. an artist herself, has fallen in love with all the facets of art available in Cambridge/Dorchester County, and wants the rest of the world to know and love the arts and artists of this area as much as she does. Cambridge artists (broadly defined) are invited to contact her [email protected], subject line “Arts.” See The Arts are Alive in Cambridge, MD, Facebook page for daily updates.