Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Life

In this episode I talk with Joe Scully, the chef/owner of two highly regarded and very popular restaurants in Asheville, NC where we both live.  We explore Joe’s arduous preparation over several years to become a high-level chef; his subsequent work in various restaurants and high-end clubs in various states; and his decisions to open first one, and then another, restaurant in Asheville, in one of which President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama arrived for a surprise dinner one night in 2010.  We also explore Joe’s time as a young man singing in choirs and acting in various plays before settling into his life’s work in food preparation and presentation.

In this episode I talk with my friend Charles Murry, a retired Asheville physician about his long career in Medicine, as well as two other life-long interests of his.  In college Charles began as an undergraduate major in philosophy and pursued a Ph.D. in that discipline for two post-graduate years before deciding to switch to medical school, and yet he never lost his serious interest in philosophical issues, texts, and thinkers.  In addition, from childhood Charles followed, among others, a third serious pursuit—music—and, along with medicine and philosophy, nurtured that his love of music by playing in a number of bands, one, The Dogs of Pompeii, for over thirty years as well.

In this episode, I interview John Cowart who had a three-decade long career as a clinical social worker at the VA Hospital in Asheville, NC, where he counseled veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). During his years there, John worked with veterans from WWII through Vietnam, as well as many Vets from our more recent wars. A Vietnam veteran himself, John shares insights into PTSD from his encounters with that wide range of Vets and discusses his own post-retirement activities, including a return trip to Vietnam to build a Habitat House and his hiking of the entire, 2000-plus miles of the Appalachian Trail.

In this episode, I talk with my friend John Farquhar about his work at the think tank, the Rand Corporation, in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. I first heard of Rand for its role in providing data to the military during the Vietnam War. Most connect the think tank to the Pentagon Papers, famously leaked by Rand employee Daniel Ellsberg.  But, as John explains, there was, and is, much more to this intriguing organization than that single focus implies.  

In this third podcast episode, I talk with my long-time colleague Lorena Russell and her spouse Kitty Hancock about Lorena's late mother, Jean Love, a former opera singer, a diva of sorts, and, it's safe to say, a rather outlandish personality.  We also discuss Jean's second husband, a life-long con artist and an outrageous character in his own right.

In this episode I interview a colleague who was one of the first two African American young women asked to integrate the female dorms at a small, overwhelmingly white, Southern college in 1969.  During the interview, she recounts some of the challenges she encountered as a seventeen-year-old young woman in this initially stressful situation. Yet she also relates some the ways in which the experience enriched her and caused her to choose to come back later and teach at the same school for over three decades.  

This episode is an interview with a guest who has had a decades-long career in Risk Management, a career that has taken him all over the world, including to some of its most dangerous places: in Africa, the Middle East, and Pakistan. More recently, he took a non-work-related trip, to North Korea for two weeks. In the interview we hear about some of the threatening situations he encountered and helped to manage.