Ways of Life from WCAI

Bobby Wetherbee has been playing piano in Provincetown every summer for the past 57 years. After years of hustling, he’s now helping the new generation find its voice. His mentee, Jon Richardson, is helping him keep an old tradition alive.

Bobby Wetherbee and Jon Richardson Credit Photo courtesy of Jon Richardson in Provincetown, October 6, 2018. Edit | Remove Bobby Wetherbee has been playing piano in Provincetown every summer for the past 57 years. After years of hustling, he’s now helping the new generation find its voice. His mentee, Jon Richardson, is helping him keep an old tradition alive.

Colette Cummings thought she had reached the peak of the fashion world. But that all changed when she was fired from her role as vice president of Talbots. Since then, Colette’s career has taken her in a totally new direction. She got a part-time job at a rubber duck toy store in Chatham, and just months after, was asked to take over the business. Colette bought the store, despite warnings from her family. She’s now found something she was never able to find working in the corporate world.

Some days, Tim McNerney is just Tim; a Master's degree graduate who delivers UPS packages on Martha’s Vineyard. Other days, Tim transforms into Reina Del Taco, a drag queen as transformative as Barbie. After travels to LA, NYC and Mexico City, Tim has started to settle into a new phase of Reina del Taco’s trajectory: story time at the local library.

Yiddish was once spoken by over 11 million Jewish people before it was nearly wiped out in the Holocaust. But it spread to the New World and flowered in places like New York and Boston. Today, however, it’s declining quickly—by about fifteen percent every decade. Even the United Nations has declared Yiddish an “endangered language.”

Cuttyhunk is a tiny windswept island off the coast of Cape Cod -well known by game fishermen and sailors, but only a dozen people call it home year-round. Fisherman Bruce Borges and his wife Carolyn made their home there and Cariad Harmon went out to tell their story.

5 years ago Bob Mailloux took a leap. He had noticed a lot of kids around the Cape were getting in trouble, and he was worried. He signed up as a mentor, through Big Brothers Big Sisters.

The usual or expected teenage angst is exacerbated today by concerns about the planet, affordable college, and the fear of school shootings. Joyce O'Connor is the school nurse for Mashpee Middle and High Schools. She walks us through the changes school nursing has made to deal holistially with student health.

First Parish Plymouth is the oldest contiguous congregation in America. They trace their lineage all the way back to 1606, in Scrooby, England – before the Pilgrims even left England. They’ve had a church on the same land since the year after the Pilgrims landed. Mayflower Meeting House is the fifth one, built in the 1890s after a fire decimated the previous one. But it’s gone largely unrestored since its completion, and the building was starting to show serious structural damage. As the 400 th anniversary of the Pilgrim landing approached, the congregation had some tough choices to make about their future.

Proper diet and exercise is what every doctor recommends for proper health. For Amelia, an intense new workout experience helped exercise not only her body, but saved her life.

Panchita Peterson has worked most of her adult life addressing racism on Cape Cod. She trained at the National Coalition Building Institute and worked as a Diversity Specialist in schools across the Cape. Panchita is in her late70's but came out of retirement a few years ago because she felt like she still had work to do.

Summer 2019 was one of the worst on record for Eastern Equine Encephalitis in Massachusetts. Gabrielle Sakolsky is Cape Cod’s first line of defense when it comes to mosquito-borne disease. From the cedar swamps to the lab, her job is to search for something she hopes she won’t find.

John and Olivann Hobbie always thought of themselves as sensitive to social issues on the Cape, especially housing insecurity, but in 2012 they confronted the issue head-on by opening up their home.

It’s hard to go anywhere on Cape Cod and not see litter. People leave plastic bottles and food packaging on the side of the road and along hiking trails. Trash washes onto the Cape’s beaches, from people but also strong storms and ocean currents. Ralph Bousquet is a Cape Cod native. He’s a poet who started a new group to combat the litter problem on the Cape. But the reason he’s doing it isn’t really about litter, nor about his art. It’s about something greater than himself.

Boy Scouts of America has been in the United States for over 100 years. Earlier this year it changed its policy to admit girls into Scouts BSA – that’s the program formerly known as Boy Scouts. Troop 137 in Falmouth is one of three troops with girls on the Cape and Islands.

Peterson Farm in Falmouth is one of the oldest farms on Cape Cod. It dates back to 1679, and was farmed by the same family for nearly 300 years. The town of Falmouth purchased the land in 1998 to preserve the open space. But after its last tenant left, the farm was handed over to two somewhat unlikely shepherds. Diana Wickman and Simon Thorrold are now working to restore the land with the help of their flock.

Jacek Zuzanski is an actor, director, and, above all else, a puppeteer. He's been performing with his theater company, Dream Tale Puppets, for children on Cape Cod area using various hand-crafted puppets to tell the stories like Rumpelstiltskin and Cinderella. But he doesn’t always perform for a large audience, and some shows get canceled. But numbers are not Zuzanski's measure of success.

For emerging writers & visual artists, acceptance into the program is a dream. Rosana Ybarra is one of the Center's recent fellows and while art was one of her earliest passions, pursuing it as a vocation wasn't only unlikely — it was unimaginable.

Danielle Cholewiak is a research ecologist at NOAA. She has spent her career becoming a leading expert on finding and interpreting whale sounds. This past summer, she set her sights on finding one of the most elusive whales in the Atlantic Ocean. The plan was to be out at sea for a full month, scanning the horizon with binoculars and listening to hydrophones being towed behind them.

Athena Aicher is a boat builder on Martha’s Vineyard, but she wasn’t always. Seven years ago, Athena moved to Woods Hole to work in a lab at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Athena gave up life in the lab to work in a boat yard. Today, she hears sea birds while she works and can smell the salt air. Her dog, Clio, runs on the beach. The work is hard – bending straight planks of wood into a new, curved life is not easy -but that’s part of the appeal.

About 100 babies are born every year on Nantucket Island- most of them at Nantucket Cottage Hospital. Parents who choose home birth can turn to the one midwife of the island. Sunny Daily has been training to be Nantucket's midwife for the past decade. But sustaining a midwifery practice nearly thirty miles offshore comes with unique challenges not to mention that sometimes home birth means delivering a baby on a boat.

Maggie Bernard is a teenager with cerebral palsy. She overcame her disability with the help of her best friend Noble, a 27 year old horse that works as a therapy animal on Martha’s Vineyard. He is great with kids and loves his job, but in the beginning of the year, Noble started to show some health problems. His owners decided it was time for him to retire and found a place for him in another farm. But Noble didn’t like the idea.

When you walk into an art gallery on Martha’s Vineyard you might see a painting of a lighthouse. Maybe two… Or ten. Along with many other classic paintings of island landscapes. What you won’t see in those galleries is Richard Limber’s art, but not for lack of trying. His work is provocative, even considered grotesque by some.

Follow your passion. Singular – one passion. It’s a common piece of advice. By college, many of us have picked between the arts and sciences. For fun, we take personality tests that tell us whether we are thinkers or feelers. This is a story about Elizabeth Bradfield of North Truro, a writer and a naturalist. In an age of specialization, she has chosen not to choose between her passions but rather to let one inspire the other.