POPULARITY
Super excited to announce new guest, Christopher Shih, to The Story!Physician and pianist Christopher Shih has a remarkable dual career as both full-time practicing physician and actively concertizing pianist. Hailed by the New York Times as "an intelligent and thoughtful musician," with "effortless performances" and "consummate control," he has performed in major venues worldwide and has soloed with numerous orchestras, including repeated engagements with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall in Washington DC. His performance with the National Symphony on the Capitol Lawn for an audience of 50,000 prompted the Washington Post to declare, "If Shih is as gifted in medicine as he is in music, he has some serious career decisions to make. His performance was fluent, gracious, miraculously light, and a joy to the ear." Other orchestral engagements include the Georgetown, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, New England Conservatory, Harvard-Radcliffe, Newton, Lancaster, and Paris Garde Republicaine symphony orchestras.Christopher is the winner of the sixth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs in Fort Worth, Texas. He was also a press and audience favorite at the professional tenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram raved, "He demonstrated a magical touch in voicing and a fine Chopinesque rubato...a total sense of style across three centuries. For Shih, technical control supports impeccable musicianship." Christopher is also the grand prize winner of the amateur competitions in Paris, Boston, and Washington DC. His playing and interviews have been featured in television and radio programs worldwide, including NPR's All Things Considered, APM's Performance Today, WGBH's Inner Voice, WQXR, WETA, WGMS, WBJC, Radio France, Radio Classique, Canadian CBC, Taiwan CTV, and Pianist Magazine.Christopher is currently a board-certified gastroenterologist with U.S. Digestive Health in Lancaster, PA. He received his B.A. cum laude from Harvard University and his M.D. from The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He did his internal medicine residency training at the University of Pennsylvania and his gastroenterology fellowship training at Johns Hopkins. He is also active in community and charitable services, formerly sat on the GI board exam committee of the American Board of Internal Medicine, and is a Fellow of the American College of Gastroenterology. An avid chamber musician, he regularly performs with world-class artists, ensembles, and principals of major orchestras across the nation. In recent seasons he has appeared with violinists Nurit Bar-Josef, Alexander Kerr, David Kim, Elizabeth Pitcairn, Michael Shih, and Scott Yoo; cellists Narek Hakhnazaryan and Amit Peled; clarinetist Anthony McGill; pianist Jon Kimura Parker; the American, Daedalus, Dover, Escher, Miró, Pacifica, and Ying Quartets; and the string quintet Sybarite5. He also serves on the Board of Directors for Chamber Music America.Be sure to check out Christopher and his projects here:https://www.christophershih.com/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-story/donations
Catherine Meloy, CEO of Goodwill of Greater Washington and The Goodwill Excel Center, is host Andy Ockershausen’s guest in this all new episode of Our Town, and who Andy calls “a wonderful wonderful friend.” Andy recalls welcoming Catherine to Our Town in 1983-84 and prompts her to start at the beginning . . . her life before Washington, DC. Catherine was born in Camp Lejeune North Carolina. Her Dad was a Marine for 25 years, and now lives in St. Louis where he and her Mom decided to retire to be close to their parents, Catherine’s grandparents. Andy and Catherine discuss her emotional attachment to the military, and how she loves living now in Annapolis, a military town. Catherine attended high school and college in St. Louis. She tells Andy, that “we had to pay for our own college at that time . . .and at the end of my Sophomore year I owed $10,000 in college debt .” I dropped out “because I just hated owing people money.” Afterward, Catherine went to work for the St. Louis Cardinals as an usherette, then went on to work in the club's executive offices for announcer Mike Shannon and the coach, Joe Torre. Catherine and Andy spend a minute or two recalling other great announcers such as Harry Caray, Jack Buck, and Bob Costas. After the Cardinals, in 1976-77, Catherine went to work for the Sheraton Jefferson in St. Louis, at a time when there weren’t many women in executive positions. As luck would have it, they had a few women that were earmarked for their executive training program and she was one. Catherine moved to Kansas City. While there she attended an annual Sheraton meeting and saw the man who would eventually become her husband although neither of them knew it at the time because they didn’t even know each other. Catherine recalls “I did not know him. He walked from the back of the room to the front of the room just to be on this panel and I thought to myself if I ever meet that man I’m going to marry him. Little did he know.” A year later at the annual meeting in January in New York, Catherine and David Meloy met, fell in love, and the rest is history as they say. We encourage you to listen in to how this came about. It is a relationship truly made in heaven. Catherine moved to Boston to be with David and decided then to leave the hotel industry altogether. Catherine tells Andy, that after leaving Sheraton, she “went door-to-door looking for a job and went to WEEI . . .and did the craziest thing . . . I just went into the radio station . . . and said I wanted to speak to the general manager . . .the general manager came out . . . I think he was so surprised that somebody would just knock on the door and say ‘here I am how about if I come work at this radio station’ . . . and he said anybody's got this much gumption you’re on I could start on Monday.” Catherine and Andy discuss her stellar radio sales career starting at WEEI in Boston with the yellow pages on commission. Despite her fear of failure, she stayed with it and it turned out great. Catherine and David moved to New York and she was able to transfer to CBS stations there. Then on to Denver where in short order she was promoted to General Sales Manager. Catherine and Andy met after she and David moved to Washington. She worked at WBAL in Baltimore initially and then was recruited as National Sales Manager by Tony Reneau at WMAL. At the time (1983-84), Catherine was delighted to be working in the community in which she lived. Catherine and Andy reminisce about meeting each other for the first time and how it just felt right to Andy to hire her. Listen in and you will clearly understand a shared mutual love for WMAL and the good old days when relationships with the advertisers and the audiences were so important and really what mattered. Catherine left WMAL in 1986-87 and moved to Alexandria to work for WCXR classic rock and then WGMS classical music which later became Sports Talk 980.
The convergence of the AM networks across the UK is a complex tale. Each of the original commercial stations, compelled by the regulator to do something more useful on their AM frequencies, generally chose to launch oldies stations of various flavours. Individual names like Supergold, WGMS, Brunel and GEM.AM gradually evolved into a mighty GWR network of Classic Gold stations, which was nothing to do with the original Yorkshire Radio Network ‘Classic Gold’ station. Meanwhile, At that time, Bauer were merrily amalgamating their AM stations into a Magic AM network, which was nothing to do with the London soft AC of the same name. Capital was assembling its own Capital Gold network too, comprising all its AM offerings such as Xtra-AM, WABC and South Coast Radio. Come August 2007, with GWR and Capital merged into GCap, their two AM networks Gold and Classic Gold became simply Gold. With the new name came programme changes, and here David ‘Kid’ Jensen hosts his last morning show after five year in the slot and prepares to begin the breakfast show. As a sunny day comes to an end, he generously pays tribute too to his colleagues who won’t be part of the new plans. Not sure if he took his competition with him. The single 'Gold' launched at 7 pm on 3rd August 2007, as the stations joined the sustaining service which was to be itself.
Find out what's going at WGMS. Made by kids for kids. This Grovecast was recorded 2/15/08.
The Grovecast podcast 2/8/08 episode 3. Find out what's up at WGMS.