November, 2006 |
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From NOAA hijinks to “Nut Lady” —these are people with a cause
At 7:30 a. m. on October 22nd, in a parking lot across the street from the Silver Spring headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Takoma Park author Mike Tidwell met with a few friends who were in on his plan for “a total breach of security.” They checked off a list of items – a 30-foot extension ladder, two “swedgies,” a pair of human-strength rubber suction cups, and two colleagues made up to look like window washers.
At 8:00 a.m. two others from Mike’s protest gang entered a front door at NOAA and passed themselves off as tourists. They unfolded a map. Intentionally they held it upside down. The security staff peered at the map and did not notice the two phony window washers outside as they put up their ladder to the right of the “hand” sculpture and ascended to a second-floor ledge. Within a minute they had attached themselves by suction cup to an overhead window and dropped down a banner that read “Bush: Let NOAA tell the truth.”
 The men on the ledge attracted 10 police cars, a SWAT team, a couple hovering helicopters, two Homeland Security cars and two fire trucks, and Mike got the attention of TV crews and national newspaper reporters. “It was necessary to be dramatic because our message is dramatic and important,” he says. “There have been seven major scientific studies in the past 14 months that link climate change to the escalation in the strength of hurricanes. Yet the Bush Administration is keeping NOAA on a leash and suppressing the truth.”
For the past six years Mike, short-bearded, reflexively-quotable, has been on a personal mission to alert a mass audience to the ferocity with which global warming is changing the planet. He wrote the book “Bayou Farewell” that prophesized the flooding of New Orleans and has now published a sequel, currently in the stores, with the self-explaining title, “The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas and the Coming Death of America’s Coastal Cities.”
He also started an activist group, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, and has been a prime mover behind Takoma Park’s corn silo and wind-power investments and a new Maryland law that compels a reduction in greenhouse gases.
Mike came up with the idea for scaling the front wall of NOAA after leading a sit-in on the same grounds in August at which the names of the Katrina victims, two of them distantly related to him, were read aloud. “NOAA gave us a permit for the August protest, but it was a false kind of cooperation because the larger issue is getting the truth out about climate change,” he says. “Of course, I realized this next protest would make them really angry.”
Indeed, the NOAA security guards shouted several times to the gathered cops, “Get those guys down! Get them down!” Shortly after noon, with a cherry-picker borrowed from a nearby construction site, police took into custody John Glick, a veteran of civil disobedience, and Paul Burman, one of Mike’s interns. They were charged with trespassing, disorderly conduct and reckless endangerment, and their cell phones were confiscated.
“This is not the end,” Mike says. “There will be more protests.”
Going nuts:
a certifiable case
 Pamela Fields is known as the “Nut Lady” and not only because she volunteers for such drive-you-bonkers jobs as PTA president and Takoma Soccer coordinator.
Pamela drives around with white sacks of acorns in her car trunk. Piles of acorns roll around on the family front porch on Holly Avenue. Her son, 10-year-old Aaron Richards, keeps special bags in his school backpack so he can grab acorns off the ground while waiting for the bus. On a Sunday in October, at a soccer game for her daughter, eight-year-old Alana Richards, Pamela said “Come with me” to the younger children standing around, and they picked up 30 pounds of nuts under one pin oak at Oak View Elementary.
“I guess the acorns kind of call to us in this nutty family,” the always-smiling Pamela says.
It started with Aaron’s wish to “help trees” for Rosh Hashanah four years ago. Pamela, who also holds down a day job in international relations, found out about a program at the Potomac Conservancy, called “Growing Native,” that asks good souls to gather up the seeds of Maryland hardwoods. The seeds are planted at state nurseries, and the seedlings then replanted as riparian buffers along the Potomac River.
Pamela promoted the program to teachers and the librarian at Rock Creek Forest Elementary, where Aaron and Alan are in “Spanish Immersion,” and the next thing half the 500 students were out hunting for nuts. Then Pamela challenged the families at Highland View Elementary into a friendly competition.
The Scouts of Pack 33, of whom Aaron is one, also came under her influence. Rummaging under oak trees is now a routine in their fall camp-out, and it is an autumn duty to deliver acorns to the Fields-Richards porch.
“This year I actually thought we might take a break because I’m a PTA prez, which is a total drain, but then the acorns started to fall, and it never occurred to my kids that we wouldn’t keep doing it. So here we are again!” Pamela says. “Besides, it’s a bumper crop.”
As for next year, her plan is to invite the kids and parents at all local elementary schools to be part of the obsession.
Our “public geek”:
Cheapest tekkie in town
 The novelty of the Computer Age has not worn off Phil Shapiro. High-tech ideas stream from him. His head works up and down. He is determined to inspire a love of geekdom.
Hired a year ago as an instructor on the library staff – he calls himself the City’s “public geek” — Phil has become the irrepressible genius of the computer rooms at the community center. His schemes are incessant and liberating and cost almost nothing. “My whole thing is to use software tools that are basically there for the asking,” he says.
For local artists, there is his “Infinite Museum” project in which the human hand meets Google Sketchup, a free 3D drawing program, found at www.infinitemuseum.blogspot.com.
If you want to be the Charlie Rose of your neighborhood ask Phil how to conduct an interview over the Internet. This summer he figured out a trick to get clear video and audio. You need acamcorder with a microphone jack, but you can talk free via such Internet services as Skype or Gizmo and distribute free via the web hosting of Google Video. You can interview an author and play it for your book club. Or interview a panel. Or interview yourself. Phil has done it (www.rosetimes.com).
“To me the value of the new technologies is to express yourself, whether it’s writing or speaking or drawing,” he says. “Don’t hold yourself back. Everyone should be a media producer.”
Most of Phil’s time at the community center is spent as a tutor of children, many of them without computers at home. The work takes him back to the East Harlem Tutorial Program where he started out in 1977. “I kept the old yellow East Harlem t-shirt for years.”
Recently Phil wrote and produced a children’s story, “Sammy’s Autograph Book,” with local illustrator Tammy Fulton and local voice-over guy Bob Holmcrans — available without charge (www.sammybook.blogspot.com). Phil himself is available at psharipo@his.com. Put “Takoma Park” in the subject line to catch his attention.
Metro board gets earful:
Add stores, parkland & parking
At a public hearing on October 11th more than 60 local residents from either side of the District-Maryland line, including every member of the City Council, told the Metro board what they think is wrong with the board’s plan to put 86 townhouses on the open 6.8 acres next to the Takoma station.
No retail stores, a loss of 20 on-site parking spaces, no room left for bus bays in the future, little room for parkland, the “wrong message” sent by two-car garages – these and other “deficiencies” formed the basis of the criticism.
Some speakers spoke in favor an alternative layout by District architect Lex Ulibarri that would limit the number of townhouses to 65 and add more parking and parkland. Following the hearing, U.S. Representative Chris Van Hollen also sent a letter opposing the Metro Board’s plan.
The public debate over how to develop the site is now in its third year. No deadline has been set for bringing it to an end. The development must also pass muster with the Federal Transit Administration.
Holiday shows for Old Takoma;
Street work postponed
The criticism that Old Takoma is a little muted during the December holidays is about to be invalidated. For ten evenings, December 15th to 24th, live performers will issue songs of the season from the gazebo and act out a live Nativity in a parking lot at the corner of Laurel and Eastern. The Old Takoma merchants group is sponsoring the songfest, and the Takoma Park Seventh Day Adventist Church is staging the Christmas enactment with 80 actors, plus camels and sheep, and is setting up bleacher seating for 500.
For a while the City was planning to add even more activity to the downtown commercial center in December – pouring concrete for bump-outs to the sidewalks near the clock tower – but that work has been delayed until the spring.
CUC decides not to sell
 The news from Columbia Union College is the status quo. For a few days it seemed that the Adventist college’s land and buildings at the corner of Flower & Carroll Avenues might be sold to the Washington Adventist Hospital to pay off a $7 million debt, but on October 18th the college board of trustees rejected the proposal. The trustees decided a better solution is to expand the student body and the curriculum.
At present there are about 1,100 students, most of them in liberal arts – the college has a world-class music program – and about 250 in nursing and respiratory care. If the plan of the trustees goes forward, new medical courses will be offered, perhaps in pharmacy and physical therapy, through an alliance with the hospital.
The plan now awaits a decision of the college’s ultimate governors, a group of school and church members, who will meet on November 17th.
Big addition for TP Elementary
The portable classrooms at Takoma Park Elementary will be replaced by a 16-room addition to the school under a larger $39.9 million good-riddance-to-portables project that has the support of Takoma Park’s George Leventhal, current president of the Montgomery County Council.
If a majority of the Council approves, the money will be added to this year’s budget. George, whose son Francisco is a second grader at Takoma Park Elementary, announced the project with Jerry Weast, county school superintendent, in a news event at the school on October 30th. When construction would take place is still to be determined.
A new home for Dan’s old business
The business that civic activist Dan Robinson started in 1985, Sligo Computer Services, is moving into a new building at 6411 Orchard Avenue in a woodsy part of the Pinecrest neighborhood. Dan sold his business to the employees a few years ago and put the proceeds and a lot of his time into the cleanly-styled building. Sligo Computer will occupy the top floor, but the main floor and basement will be up for rent. “The windows open onto a quiet street, looking onto trees and a park,” says Dan (www.6411orchard.com).
Comings & Goings
Carol Bannerman, who has been the public voice of the Police Department, recently left to take a federal job. Detective Andrew John is her replacement.
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