Davisville: Recent Episodes
Bill Buchanan
Davis has interesting people, ideas, connections, and events. On Davisville, host Bill Buchanan presents stories that have some connection to Davis. The program has won eight Excellence in Journalism awards from the San Francisco Press Club.
These days, you can get all the quick takes and snap judgments you want. They seem easier to find than facts, partly because they're catnip to the algorithms and impulses that drive social media. Today’s guest is doing something different with opinions — something more difficult, in my book, and more useful, especially in the long run. Since fall 2022, Claire Schad has been writing opinion columns for the California Aggie, the student newspaper and news organization at the University of California, Davis.
Writing opinion columns will seem like an outdated, narrow pursuit — newspapers in any format have much less influence than they did — but a good column that hits its mark generates ideas, not just reactions. It can create room for nuance, for admitting and engaging different points of view. Writers learn about people and ideas, and how to make ideas useful. How to move them forward.
Claire is graduating in June, and we talk about her experiences today on Davisville.
Long before he flew four missions on the space shuttle, Steve Robinson was the first DJ of a now-vanished Davis commercial radio station, KYLO, in the late 1970s. Decades later, he’s a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC Davis, and director of its Center for Space Flight Research — and he will soon return to local radio as occasional fill-in host for Rod Moseanko, host of the station’s Silver Nine Volt Heart. (The photo shows Steve, left, and Rod in the KDRT studio May 11.)
Today on Davisville we enjoy a serious conversation about space flight, plus hear Steve’s memories of KYLO — including what happened when he told listeners he was running out of records to play — and learn what brought him to KDRT. After he returned Davis in 2012, Robinson said, “I was looking for some good radio,” and found it with Rod’s show. “I thought, ‘this kind of radio is still alive. It was very exciting to me.’ ”
The Capitol Corridor trains that connect Davis with the Bay Area and Sacramento are evolving as the service recovers from the pandemic. The corridor is adding passenger cars and resuming a full weekday schedule this year, experimenting with a tap-on/tap-off payment system to eventually replace tickets, and proceeding with plans to change access in Davis so that passengers board from an expanded center platform reached via an underpass (or perhaps an overpass) from the parking lot and Olive Drive.
Longer term, the service plans to shift to hydrogen or possibly electric power for its trains. We talk about all this, as well as this year's ridership trends and efforts to improve their timekeeping, on Davisville with Rob Padgette, managing director of the service. Today’s program updates our conversation about the corridor from early 2022.
In this illustration from a city report, the Davis station is center left. The underpass to the tracks is shown in red from the station side, in blue from Olive Drive.
In Harboring Happiness: 101 Ways to be Happy, author Dan Brook says happiness is worth pursuing despite all the awful things happening across the globe. He bases this on research and on what he has learned during his decades as an instructor and sociologist (he earned master’s and doctorate degrees in sociology from UC Davis in the 1990s).
So how do you become happier? You probably have to work at it. His suggestions range from “getting more experiences,” and feeling gratitude, to “being around people who make you happy” and converting the fear of missing out into the joy of missing out.
“I’m happy not because I ignore the problems of the world, but in spite of them,” he says. Work to fix what’s wrong, but “being miserable does not help solve those problems.” He elaborates on his ideas during today’s Davisville.
In winter 2023 we talked with Andy Jones and Margaret Merrill of UC Davis about ChatGPT, a new artificial-intelligence app that was setting off alarms for its advanced ability to "write" reports and articles. On today’s Davisville they report that among the faculty they work with, the sense of panic present then has now eased “quite a bit.” People know more about the limits of chatbots, and are asking more about how and where to use the tools in teaching, instead of just fearing them as a plagiarism machine.
We talk about handling chatbot hallucinations, resisting the biases that chatbots suck into their text databases, and hear a few examples of how UC Davis instructors are using the tools in their classrooms.
Too many AI tools are arriving too quickly to keep up with them all. You have to keep up, but not with every twist and turn. “Rather than always trying to figure out what is in store for us from the next AI engine,” Jones advises, look for ways to “connect meaningfully with one another.” The human connection is essential.
(This image wasn’t created by a chatbot, but the caption error illustrates the hallucinations the bots can create.)
Today’s Davisville is a story about the new — and about getting started in Davis, as well as art, life after the pandemic, ambition, and the weird. We talk with Toni Rizzo and Harry Greer, who along with Stephanie Peel have started the Secret Spot, an arts gallery and music lounge business that opened this month in a former house at 117 D St. downtown. #ConstructiveDiscomfort #RookieRoom #ArtMania! #LockdownArt #DavisSound #ArtAsTherapy #PsychicScream #HelpingOthers The photo shows, from left, Toni, Harry and Stephanie
Finding information and news about Davis is harder than it should be. The Enterprise still prints and posts local stories, but lacks the scope and heft it had before the rise of internet technology decimated newspapers as a business. Other paid sources of news and information have also retreated, turning what used to be a town commons for communication into a series of walled gardens, with information about local events and news scattered across a variety of formats, outlets, and channels. If the information is present at all.
Autumn Labbe-Renault, the executive director of Davis Media Access (the parent of KDRT), thinks DMA could work with the community to create a new source of information and news about Davis, and eventually Yolo County. The venture has the working title of civic information hub. The idea is in its very early stages, and we talk about it today on Davisville.
Measure N is the latest Davis schools parcel tax to come before voters — the latest in a string that goes back 40 years. Relatively few school districts in California have such taxes, and few levy as much as Davis does.
The sample ballot for the March 5th election presents the arguments for and against Measure N, plus a list of what the $768 tax supports. For context, today’s Davisville talks with John Fensterwald, an editor at large with EdSource, about how Californians pay for public schools, the pros and cons of parcel taxes, and why Davis receives less money per student from the state than most other districts receive. EdSource, a nonprofit, reports on education issues in California.
The Artery co-op/gallery/store turns 50 this year. Most of its downtown Davis neighbors from the 1970s are gone, so how has the Artery lasted? Heidi Bekebrede and Adele Shaw, two of its members, list several reasons on today’s Davisville, and some might surprise you — they include the hours (most art galleries don’t open daily), the variety (most don’t display so many artists), members who work in the shop, turnover that brings in new artists, fresh displays, and a town with lots of people interested in the arts. The train station a block away helps too.
We also talk about the store’s name, how they find members, the other meaning of “cute” in Bekebrede’s Cuteware, the way Putah Creek inspires Shaw’s paintings, and how managing a 32-machine laundromat in San Francisco introduced Shaw to first- and second-hand stories of her neighborhood from many decades before.
Bekebrede, on the left in the photo with Shaw, is also a singer and the composer of “The Davis Song.”
You’ve probably got a smartphone. Does it ever confuse you, or do anything you don't expect? When you have a question, where do you get answers? From friends? YouTube videos? Many of us just click different things and hope for the best.
Smartphones do wonderful things, but they’re also tricky, sometimes inscrutable, change frequently, and are almost essential in the modern economy. Today’s guest on Davisville, Louie Toro, is teaching classes this winter and spring at Davis Adult and Community Education for people who want their smartphones to be less of a black box. We talk about common questions (“a big one is almost always downloading files”), how he teaches, and how to live more of your life outside your phone. The phone is “just a tool,” he says. “You should be the one who chooses how to use that tool.”
Housing in Davis has kept evolving since we last talked about it on Davisville in summer 2022. The supply has grown, more new housing is in the works, and the city logged just 354 home sales in 2023, when in “a really strong year, [Davis will] get upwards of close to 600 home sales,” says Davis real estate broker Steve Boschken. Rising interest rates were a cause.
Today’s returning guests on Davisville are Steve; Kit Boschken, manager of Boschken Properties, which she co-owns with Steve; and their son James Boschken, a real estate agent and property manager who moved back to Davis from Texas a year ago. We talk about rents, prices, the G Street downtown apartment proposals, opting to live in Woodland, and a few interesting details from the market last year — like the three UC Davis seniors who moved from Davis to Sacramento, Kit says, because they had to be in Davis only two days a week and Sacramento had “more of a nightlife.”
The photo shows the 200-unit Plaza 2555 project, now being built in south Davis.
Traffic on Interstate 80 is often frustratingly slow through Davis, and has been for years. What’s the remedy? Caltrans proposes adding a fourth lane, and the options include allowing free use of the lane only to vehicles with at least three occupants — anyone else using the lane would pay a toll. That’s the option the Yolo Transportation District Board unanimously endorsed a couple weeks ago.
In other words, there are two big changes on the table — a bigger freeway, plus the start of tolls for some of the traffic on I-80 in Yolo County.
The project is in the news this season as people respond via surveys, comments, and various events (including this Davis teach-in). On today’s Davisville we talk with Autumn Bernstein, executive director of the Yolo Transportation District, and Lucas Frerichs, who chairs the county Board of Supervisors and is a former mayor of Davis, about what's proposed, and why.
Some individuals’ work in Davis is so visible that they end up personifying their jobs. Today’s guest is one of those folks — Bruce Gallaudet, a longtime, prolific writer about sports in Davis. A former editor and sports editor of the Davis Enterprise, he has retired from the news organization twice, and recently returned for the second time. Officially, he’s now a sports correspondent for the paper.
On today’s Davisville our topics include why he’s back, how he’s working within the limits imposed by a publication that’s a fraction of its former size, and what people miss when they dismiss sports stories as uninteresting. "There's a great deal of flavor in sports," he says.
Fairfield Mayor Catherine Moy was among the first people a few years ago to draw attention to extensive and secretive land purchases in Solano County by Flannery Associates. Who the buyers are, and what they wanted, has now become much clearer thanks to reporting from The New York Times and other media — Flannery wants to build a green “dream city” from scratch on rural, arid land in southeastern Solano County, one of the least-populated parts of the greater Bay Area and Yolo County’s southwestern neighbor. The backers include some of the wealthiest people in America, with ties to Silicon Valley.
Today on Davisville, Moy criticizes the idea, says the opposition is large and growing, and chides the buyers for conceiving big plans involving Solano County while not engaging the people who live there. “I have literally had several hundred people [in Solano County] contact me,” she says, "and about 95, 96 percent want them to go away. For a number of reasons.”
After this interview was recorded, Flannery began saying more about its plans. This SFGATE article has details.
Sonora Slater is the 2023-24 editor of the California Aggie, whose days as a printed newspaper for students at UC Davis are largely over. It prints 4,000 copies each Thursday during the academic year, and Slater says a lot end up in recycling bins, not in the hands of students. The Aggie has a larger presence online, but many of UC Davis’ 40,000 students don’t seem to know it exists.
Slater intends to change that. She wants to draw students back, through both new products — such as a 15-20 minute podcast twice a week, timed to fit students’ bike commutes — and a larger focus on stories that interest students, not only the journalists. Plus use of Instagram takeovers, use of social media for updating news, new events with student groups, maybe a caption contest ... she has a list. We talk about all this today on Davisville.
The photo shows Slater atop the Hutchison parking garage at UC Davis, a scene recreated on her tote bag.
Bill Pride is retiring this fall, and this is news because he has been really influential in addressing homelessness in Davis, at several levels. He started with Davis Community Meals and Housing 30 years ago as a volunteer with its Saturday meal program, and will leave this fall as its executive director. The nonprofit has helped create 160 units of permanent supportive housing for the homeless in Davis, as well as transitional housing and other services to help people, and has grown along with the need — this photo shows Pride on the fourth floor of Paul’s Place, the DCMH project that opened four months ago on H Street.
Today on Davisville we get insights from his long career and familiarity with Davis, and his ideas on what’s needed to solve the homeless problem in Davis and California. Affordable housing is the biggest piece of the solution, he says, but not the only piece. "Everybody knows what the cure is," he summarizes near the end. "No one wants to actually take the medicine."
Ukraine is far from Davis, but we reduce the distance today on Davisville by talking with Vice Sturla, a producer for the NBC News program Dateline who has lived in Davis for years (pictured in the KDRT studio earlier this month). He went to Ukraine last fall to report on the war with Russia, and tells us what he saw.
“These are tough, tough, tough people,” he says. “I was there in November. It was snowing, it was cold, and these relentless missile strikes had really had an impact as far as taking out the electrical infrastructure across the country. [In Kyiv,] folks were typically without power for 20 hours a day. That’s light, electricity, everything.
“A lot of people live in high-rise buildings. So, no elevators. You might have to go up 20 flights of stairs. And down again. That’s just life. With a flashlight. But without complaint. The whole thing is, ‘well, just think with what our guys are putting up with at the front. This is nothing. I can do this.’
“Restaurants would stay open. You had two menus. A power-out menu, and another for when we do have power. It seemed like everyone you spoke to has lost somebody through direct combat, stepping on a mine, unexploded ordnances, executed during an occupation.”
Three separate housing proposals have recently emerged that would add about 460 apartments and live/work lofts at three locations on G Street downtown, from 2nd Street near the Amtrak station north to the former Hibbert Lumber property on 5th. You can find the applicants’ plans and illustrations on the city’s projects website. One feature that immediately stands out is the idea of building most of these new homes without parking for cars.
Our guest today, Steve Streeter, has a background in planning and recently completed two terms on the Davis Planning Commission. He has no stake in any of the proposals. We talk about what’s proposed, context, why these projects are emerging now, and how the city's downtown plan and new state laws that encourage homebuilding are influencing these developments.
The developers would be wise to arrange pre-development conferences, he said. They’re “a sounding board for the applicant to see if their conceptual projects are going to fly as is, or if it’s going to need some significant modifications.”
If you’ve enjoyed a performance at the Mondavi — maybe the Beethoven “Sonatathon,” Bo Diddley concert or the Maria Callas hologram with the Sacramento Philharmonic — today’s guest had something to do with that. This August, after 17 years, Don Roth is retiring as executive director of the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at UC Davis. Today on Davisville we talk about choosing performers, the influence of tech, how the Mondavi spent the pandemic, and why pianist Stewart Goodyear’s “Sonatathon” was among Roth's favorite moments.
I asked about audiences returning after Covid. “People need to gather. That’s [our nature]. … Gathering together, being in the same room with an artist or a speaker and sharing a collective experience is just something that however good your virtual equipment is at home, that doesn’t replace it,” Roth said. “And I hear that all the time from people who have come back.”
Biotech has a major presence in our lives, especially here in the Bay-to-Valley region, even if it isn't as visible as other big influences like housing, traffic, or lately artificial intelligence. Last week, giant biotech company Roche said it plans to pull out of its huge Genentech plant in Vacaville, west of Davis, and today’s Davisville uses the news of that change to update our conversation with Jim DeKloe about biotech: its inventions, careers, potentially enormous impact, potential, and risks.
That plant was a big story when it opened 25 years ago.
Dr. DeKloe, a biotech instructor with a long string of achievements and accolades, started the Industrial Biotech Program at Solano Community College. Stick around for the end, when he draws a lesson from 1970s films Soylent Green and King Kong — he was an extra in both to help pay for his studies at UCLA — on how to address the problems that technology presents.
Program note: You’ll hear barks from a friendly dog during this interview, a sound familiar to anyone conversing (or recording) online while working from home these past few years. The dog is happier, and quiet, starting halfway through.
Hanna Nakano (pictured in KDRT’s studio) is the latest owner of The Dirt, which aims to be the main place for listings and information about concerts, events, shows and other gatherings in and around Davis. The print-and-online publication began in fall 2010. She took charge a few months ago, has made a few changes, and plans to make more. Today she talks about what drives her, how she landed here after working in television back east, an algorithm-free new feature that recommends shows and attractions, and what she’s doing to make The Dirt work.
How do you make sense of what just happened in Davis? Two people stabbed to death in public parks, and a third person seriously injured. The town’s responses included mourning for David Breaux and Karim Abou Najm, vigils, donations to help Kimberlee Guillory recover from her injuries, and fear, followed by a huge sense of relief when Davis police arrested the suspected killer.
And — now what? How do you find perspective? Listening can be a start. Today on Davisville we talk with Susan Cosio, a retired hospital chaplain, ordained pastor and longtime resident of Davis, who has spent most of her adult life helping people navigate crises.
To get his Davis business Watermelon Music through the dislocations caused by the pandemic, Jeff Simons took on debt, delayed payments, tried new ideas — and three years in, the numbers weren’t working in his favor.
So in April he opened a GoFundMe account to ask his customers and friends for $104,000 to pay the debt. He didn’t think he’d get anywhere close to that amount. Instead, as word spread quickly that Watermelon needed help, the business experienced a moment like the end of It’s a Wonderful Life. About 900 donors chipped in sums from $6 to $10,000, testifying to Watermelon’s positive presence in Davis and the many people who appreciate the store.
Jeff is our guest on Davisville today to talk about the response, working through the pandemic, changes at Watermelon, music, operating in Davis, and what convinced him to actually send his request for help, not just think about it.
Emma Jochim, a PhD candidate in entomology at UC Davis, has a particular interest in trapdoor spiders, plus a knack for explaining arachnids in ways that make them seem less creepy to the public. She used those skills at a recent Bohart Museum of Entomology open house, and uses them again on today’s Davisville when we talk about spider myths. For example: Many people think poisonous brown recluse spiders exist in California, and they don’t. Nor do you ingest several spiders in your sleep each year.
Communicating accurate information to the public isn’t easy, and we also talk about that, including a post by a UC Riverside arachnologist frustrated by beliefs "solidly based on erroneous general consensus.”
Benjy Egel says he’s been interested in food since he was a kid in Davis. “I grew up doing cooking camps through the city of Davis programs, at like Cesar Chavez Elementary,” he said. After cooking during his college years and working as a journalist after graduating, “I just sort of fell into [food writing] professionally by accident.”
Today he is the Sacramento Bee’s food and beverage writer, which includes writing reviews as well as reporting food trends and news in the region. He’s had the job about 5 years so far. Today our subjects include food and restaurants in Greater Sacramento, trends, staffing, the scene in Davis, and how he approaches his job.
The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, known for both talent and self-effacing humor, will play at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts in Davis on April 28. This week on Davisville, founder George Hinchliffe and creative producer/performer Leisa Rea talk about the music and why the orchestra came together in the first place.
“We’re a strange kind of musical juggernaut,” Rea says, “and we seem to delight people all over the world, no matter what the culture, no matter whether there’s a language barrier or not. Somehow the ukulele is the people’s instrument.”
Among other things, we talk about tuning, their choice of songs, ukes as kindling, and Hinchliffe’s friendly encounter with George Harrison of the Beatles. A typical Ukes concert, Rea and Hinchliffe say, “is a sort of white-knuckle shopping-cart dash through just about every musical genre.”
The city's plan to cut carbon pollution in Davis to net zero by 2040 relies on electrifying buildings and transportation, plus other visible changes. On today’s program Kerry Daane Loux, the city’s project manager for the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan, and City Council member Bapu Vaitla talk about why Davis must change, and what’s ahead.
The council will take up the plan again in April.
“The next steps are very important. We’ve arrived at a hundred actions, 28 priorities, but we know that we need to prioritize within the priorities and say this year, what are the three, four, maybe five actions that we want to become law,” Vaitla says on Davisville. “It doesn’t necessarily need to be mandates, but it does need to be policies that we would place at at top of the list in terms of the climate impact they’re going to have, in terms of the greenhouse-gas reduction impact.
“ … The idea stage is nearing the end of its first phase, but now it’s the implementation stage where all of us need to be involved and give, give of ourselves.”
If you’re reading this, you likely already know at least a little about the Tuskegee Airmen. These 16,000 men and women helped defend the United States during World War II even though as Black Americans they had to overcome Jim Crow laws and racism just to be allowed to fight for their home.
Today’s guests are Leigh Roberts and Lanelle Brent, whose father George “Spanky” Roberts was a fighter pilot and Tuskegees’ commander during the war. The sisters help run the Tuskegee Airmen Heritage Chapter of Greater Sacramento. You might have heard them speak in Davis.
We talk about what the airmen endured, why they said they endured it, and what they achieved. We also learn about George Roberts, who earned an engineering degree as a teenager, and retired from the Air Force as a colonel in 1968. He and Edith McMillan Roberts (in photo, on their wedding day) married right after he finished flight training. Right after -- as in, within minutes. "They were married immediately after the graduation,” Leigh said. George had promised Edith they’d marry as soon as he graduated. He was always that literal, Lanelle said. Edith “called it the engineer brain.”
ChatGPT is a new tech tool that can write — maybe “write” should appear in quotes — by using advanced technology and vast databases of text. So is this ability a good thing, the word equivalent of a calculator? Or does use of ChatGPT reduce the need for people to learn how to think and write coherently?
In today’s Davisville we talk with Andy Jones, a longtime writing instructor and educational technologist, and Margaret Merrill, a senior instructional design consultant, both at the University of California, Davis. They list pluses and minuses of ChatGPT, their encounters with the tool, how they can tell when someone has used ChatGPT to write something, and how they approach this latest evolution in artificial intelligence. Their discussion is fascinating.
The student government at UC Davis employs more than 1,000 people, speaks for one of the most important constituencies in Davis, and runs popular local services and events like Unitrans and Picnic Day.
But less than 6 percent of students voted in the Associated Students of UC Davis fall 2022 election, so what are people overlooking?
Today we talk with ASUCD President Radhika Gawde (pictured) about engagement, students’ biggest concern (the rising cost of living), and their relief services for students, plus her appreciation that UC Davis lets students dabble in classes across disciplines, and wish for more late-night food options in town.
In the nearly 106 years that Davis has been a city, the City Council has had fewer than 100 members total. Not a big number for a city that now numbers 67,000 people.
Today we talk with Dan Carson, who became the newest former member of the council after losing his seat to Bapu Vaitla last November. We talk a little about Measure H and his lawsuit challenging the ballot statement opposing the measure, a criticized tactic that Carson later regretted. We spend more time on what he learned about the city from being on the council, how he thinks Davis is doing, and what he does and does not miss now that he no longer has the job.
We have two main threads today: the chaos at Twitter since Elon Musk took over, including why the social platform matters, plus a conversation about social media and whether we’ll ever figure it out. Cindy Shen says we will. She’s a social media expert and professor of communication at the University of California, Davis, and points out that people have always figured out how to get a handle on disruptive technology -- including things we no longer view as technology, such as the printing press.
“Over time, as people become more accustomed to the technology, we don’t see technology as this causal agent," she says. "We realize that humans have agency as well. ... We have a say about how we want to use the technology, maybe to maximize its positive impact and minimize its harms.”
How do we get to this better place? Digital media literacy is a start.
The end of the year is a big time for giving. Today we talk about what people in Yolo County prefer to give to, what inspires them to donate, and what doesn’t, as measured by this year’s survey of donors from the Yolo Community Foundation. The county has about 600 nonprofits. Executive Director Jessica Hubbard discusses the survey, the limits of the responses, where local wealth comes from, concern for arts/culture nonprofits and other “second responders,” and the outlook for 2023.
Yiyun Li’s reputation as a writer continues to rise. Her books have earned her several major awards and have taken her to Princeton, where she teaches and serves as director of its creative writing program. In spring 2015, when she was teaching writing at UC Davis, she appeared on Davisville to talk about her work and the short story “A Sheltered Woman” that had won her what was then her latest award. Today we replay that interview from May 18, 2015.
Derrick Bang says he’s looking forward to seeing Steven Spielberg’s new movie, The Fabelmans, but hopes to pass on the modern-cannibals-in-love story, Bones and All. It’s time for our annual year-end movie talk with Derrick, and Davisville host Bill Buchanan begins by confessing he has seen only one movie in a theater this year. We also get Derrick’s take on some of 2022’s worst movies, some of its culturally significant ones, and how he keeps interested in movies after watching, reviewing and dissecting them since his days at the California Aggie in the 1970s.
There’s a lot of magic in Vince Guaraldi’s music, especially A Charlie Brown Christmas. This fall Craft Recordings is releasing extended deluxe versions of the holiday classic, and we talk with three of the people involved: brothers Jason and Sean Mendelson, whose late father Lee Mendelson was the executive producer of the Peanuts holiday specials, and Davis author Derrick Bang, who wrote the expanded CD/LP’s liner notes.
We also talk about the soundtrack to It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, which Craft released in August.
Holiday music would be very different if Lee Mendelson hadn’t brought Guaraldi and Peanuts creator Charles Schulz together. We hear about how they met, talk about Guaraldi and the music — and Jason gamely recreates the moment when, as a kid, he was voicing Marcie in the Happy New Year, Charlie Brown TV special and the character gave Charlie Brown a smooch.
Old rooftop TV antennas can become shovel handles. Discarded bedframes can be feedstock. Owners of balky vacuum cleaners can learn how to maintain them, instead of trash them. Boomers with a house full of unwanted possessions can get advice on handing them off to new uses. Community Mercantile, a new nonprofit store stocked with re-used items that offers this kind of serious recycling to the town, has its grand opening this Sunday, Oct. 30. Today on Davisville, we talk with co-founders Larry Fisher and Stephanie Koop about what they’re doing, and why.
It’s 1909, and the Golden Fleece Traveling Players have arrived at the Woodland Opera House to present a melodrama, Daughter of the West. But strange accidents disrupt preparations for the performance — and the ghost of William Porter, who has haunted the Opera House since dying there in a fire in 1892, takes credit for the trouble when he appears to one of the company’s players.
This is a partial synopsis of the WOH’s current play, Ghost of the Woodland Opera House, and here’s the Halloween angle — some of the story is true. Today on Davisville we talk with Matthew Abergel and Bob Cooner, the co-authors of the play, which Matthew is also directing.
Young adult buyers rediscovering a sense of community as they listen to records together. Interest in long-gone bands like Led Zeppelin. High prices for LPs you couldn't give away a decade ago. People emerging from the pandemic who bring in boxes of their vinyl records because they want to get stuff out of their homes, and they don't want the records to be thrown away. Paul Wilbur, the longtime manager of Armadillo Music in downtown Davis, says the current market for LPs and CDs isn't easily explained, but love for music is a big part of it. He’s our guest today on Davisville.
In a remote Chilean desert, the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization is building a huge telescope that promises to see deeper into space than any optical telescope now existing. The work involves five countries and more than a dozen leading universities and institutes — and the president of the nonprofit that’s building it, Robert Shelton, lives in Davis. He joins us today on Davisville to talk about this huge new eye on the distant reaches of space and what it might show us, like whether we’re alone in the universe.
(The rendering depicts the Giant Magellan Telescope, now being built in Chile.)
Imagine that you want to speak, but you can’t, because a stroke or disease has robbed you of the ability. Two researchers at UC Davis are helping to create a “brain-machine interface” that would use a brain implant and technology to recreate an individual's ability to talk. That advance would be profoundly important to the individual, of course, and for all of us, it’s a promising use of technology.
Today on Davisville we talk with Drs. David Brandman and Sergey Stavisky about their research, how the interface would work, who it can help, recent advances in neuroprosthetics, the novel leadership set-up of their lab, and what brought them to UC Davis.
(This UC Davis Health photo shows members of the UC Davis Neuroprosthetics Lab, with Sergey Stavisky at the far left, and David Brandman second from right.)
The night sky is one of the best parts of Davis during summer and early fall. Hot days yield to mild evenings that make it easy to spend time outdoors after sunset, and a bright moon on the horizon can feel elemental, inviting thoughts about subjects that go far beyond the daily routine.
On today’s program Vinita Domier from the Davis Astronomy Club talks about the attractions of the night sky. With the James Webb space telescope, humans can now see farther in space than ever. We also we hear from stargazers at two recent nighttime events where the club's members brought out their telescopes: one event in the Explorit Science Center parking lot, and the other at a Yolo Basin Foundation benefit held one Saturday night deep in the Yolo Bypass.
The migration of people from the Bay Area to Davis inspired by the pandemic has cooled, the average price of a house in Davis has shot past $900,000, and more than half of the city’s homebuyers now seem to be millennials. That's some of the updated Davis housing information you'll hear in today's conversation with three members of a Davis family who have made local real estate their career: Steve, Kit, and James Boschken. Steve, a real estate broker, and Kit own Boschken Properties, where she is also manager, and their son James is a real estate agent and property manager who’s about to move back to Davis from Texas.
(This July 2022 photo shows the site of the Chiles Ranch new home development planned on East Eighth Street in Davis)
Today we dig into a form of American political expression that dates way back in U.S. history, applies to any type of view or opinion, and leaves behind artifacts of campaigns that helped shape who we are: political campaign buttons and memorabilia, powered by the people, events and aspirations the items represented. My guests are Bob Warren—son of Earl Warren, former governor of California and onetime chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court—and Adam Gottlieb. Both live in Davis, and both are active in American Political Items Collectors, which has its next national convention in Reno July 22-23.
And if you happen to find a certain button from the 1920 Cox/Roosevelt campaign in a box you inherited from your grandparents, your ship has just come in.
Today we have a summer show. It’s an appreciation of pop music as created by my guest Bob Cowsill (on right in photo) and by his siblings—together, known as the Cowsills. They had top 10 songs in the 1960s, but there’s more to their story than their hits “Hair,” or “The Rain, The Park, and Other Things.” The Cowsills perform in Sacramento on July 11 at the Crest Theatre as part of the Happy Together tour, and they have a new record due out this fall.
And, dear listener, if the songs we talk about today aren’t ones you heard as a kid or young adult, well, then as you listen, I invite you to think about the songs that helped alert you to the fun and the feeling of music. Because that’s the larger story here: the power of music. And maybe the power of a family.
My first question for Amanda Portier (pictured), this year’s top graduating senior at UC Davis, was how she managed to achieve straight A’s in her classes while chairing Picnic Day for 2022 and doing everything else she did as a student here. As you might imagine, she’s been asked this question more than once the last few weeks. Insights she gained from synchronized swimming are part of the answer. On today’s Davisville we also talk about community and regional development (her degree), using statistics to influence people (she minored in statistics) in a culture that seems to pay more attention to individual expression and personal experience, and what she’ll take from Davis as she leaves.
Craig McNamara, 72, now grows walnuts near Winters, but he grew up in Washington, D.C., at the center of power. His father Robert McNamara was the U.S. defense secretary for presidents Kennedy and Johnson during the Vietnam War. In his new memoir Because Our Fathers Lied / a Memoir of Truth and Family, from Vietnam to Today, Craig writes about opposing the war, his love for his dad, loyalty to the Constitution instead of to a president, coexistence, and other aspects of his life shaped by this core conflict. We talk about his story today on Davisville.
So here we are in Davis, starting another summer during a drought while also adjusting to larger changes in the weather. Don Shor (pictured) sees the impact of these changes from several angles, as the owner of the Redwood Barn Nursery in Davis, and as a certified nursery professional, landscape contractor, and lifelong gardener on his land near Dixon.
Local gardeners get the benefit of his advice on the weekly Davis Garden Show, which he co-hosts with Lois Richter on KDRT, and in his garden column in the Davis Enterprise. Today we extend the conversation to talk about how plants mediate heat, changes in what people are buying in Davis, why Davis is a good city for his business, and smart ways to use less water to get trees and plants through this drought.
Have you heard about Monticello, the small town west of Winters? In the 1950s it was destroyed and flooded to make room for Lake Berryessa, the reservoir created by Monticello Dam. This vanished town is the subject of the current exhibit at the Winters Museum. Today’s guests talk about why Monticello existed and how it emptied, and share stories about people who lived there.
Our guests are Woody Fridae, president of the Historical Society of Winters and a former mayor of Winters, and Carol Fitzpatrick, whose family lived in Monticello. She tells an interesting story about meeting a man in his 80s who, decades earlier, had been visiting Monticello at what turned out to be a critically important moment for her family.
The photo shows a desk from the Monticello school, signed by students and teachers who learned or taught there. It's part of the Winters Museum exhibit.
As the Covid pandemic dials down in Davis, people are finding different ways to reconnect. Today’s story presents a way that’s off the scale in charm and whimsy -- it involves tiny crocheted triceratops that students are making and hiding on the UC Davis campus, for other students to find. Just for the fun of doing it. A Discord server for the project has more than 3,400 members so far, and Berkeley might be next.
Today we hear from the founder and two co-leaders of the Davis Triceratops community: UC Davis undergraduates Jennine Eng, Ada Lei, and Sebastian Carpintero. This photo (from left) shows Ada, Jennine, and Sebastian with three of the hundreds of dinosaurs created so far.
Watching movies on the big screen was once a mainstream, shared cultural experience. Think of the crowds that turned out for the Harry Potter movies or Titanic. Those days are gone. So wrote New York Times columnist Ross Douthat last month, and today we ask longtime film reviewers Derrick Bang and Matias Bombal what they think about this idea. Is the change due only to competition from other media, or is something else at work? What does it matter, regardless? Derrick, an author and frequent guest on Davisville, writes for the Davis Enterprise and his blog, Derrick Bang on Film. Matias posts reviews at Matias Bombal’s Hollywood and on KAHI radio, and formerly managed the Crest Movie Theatre in downtown Sacramento.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed “care courts” for every California county. They would “allow treatment for more homeless people with severe mental health and addiction disorders,” says the Associated Press, “but also compel some of them into care.”
That’s a change — compelling severely disturbed people to accept care, instead of just offering it to them. Bill Pride, executive director of Davis Community Meals and Housing and one of today’s guests on Davisville, estimates that half of people who are homeless have a severe mental health disorder. This change could make a major difference in their lives, and in the extent of homelessness. Pride cautions that achieving this change in care would require years of sustained efforts and expense. We also talk with Yolo Chief Deputy District Attorney Jonathan Raven about the county’s existing Mental Health Court, and how Newsom’s proposal might work alongside what Yolo already does.
The photo shows DCM's project, Paul's Place, under construction in Davis on March 30, 2022.
It'll take awhile to fully understand what the pandemic has changed at UC Davis, but we learn more about the impact today during a return visit with longtime instructor Andy Jones. Andy, who is also an educational technologist, last appeared on Davisville a year ago, when the pandemic was about a year old. At the time, he was teaching one of the first classes to meet in person since the pandemic shut down the campus in spring 2020. Conditions have improved this past year — UC Davis will mostly stop requiring masks indoors on March 19 — but “normal” no longer means what it did. We talk about what that means, plus opportunities that have emerged from the disruption.
Live music is music, obviously, but it’s also culture, a reason to get together with friends, part of the economy—and this spring, as in-person performances continue to resume in Davis, it’s another marker of how the Covid pandemic is easing. Knock on wood.
Today we talk with Danny Tomasello, who’s part of the Davis Music Fest, and musicians Sam Misner and Megan Smith about the hodgepodge return of local concerts, what might have changed for keeps during the pandemic, this June’s Fest, and the need for someone to write about local music the way that Wendy Weitzel writes about local businesses and restaurants.
(The photo shows Misner and Smith onstage at Berryessa Brewing in Winters in February 2020, right before the pandemic hit.)
There’s lots of news this spring from the Capitol Corridor, the Bay-to-Sacramento passenger train service. Short term, it's recovering from the pandemic, plus taking steps to counter problems that have made too many trains run late. Longer term, it's considering 1) a new central platform in Davis that would connect to an underpass from the station and from the Olive Drive side of the tracks, and 2) changes to the County Road 32 crossing east of town. And if you look ahead a few decades, the corridor anticipates faster trains and better connections from Davis to the Bay Area through the ambitious Link21 "megaregion" project. We talk about all this today with Rob Padgette, the service’s managing director.
This interview with the late Anne Hance, who died in August 2019, first aired on Nov. 27, 2017.
Anne Hance lived an interesting life. A zoologist by training, she grew up in England during World War II, came to Davis in 1968, co-founded and helped lead the Explorit Science Center for a third of a century … and those details are just part of her story. She also had the most wonderful voice. We talk with her on today’s program.
You might remember this story from all the attention it got in spring 2021: Research at UC Davis says that adding small amounts of a certain seaweed to cows’ diets reduces the methane they produce by up to 82 percent. This change in diet could do a lot to help the climate, because cattle and other ruminants produce about 5 percent of greenhouse gases in the United States.
The University of California says this work was one of its 10 best UC research stories for 2021. Today we update the story with UC Davis Animal Science Prof. Ermias Kebreab, who explains the research, its value in feeding people and reducing climate change, and how far along they are in bringing their work to market.
Today we talk with Jonathan Edwards, a reporter for the Davis Enterprise a dozen years ago who joined the Washington Post last July after working for news outlets in Nebraska and Virginia. We talk about differences in reporting, objectivity, establishing credibility when audiences are polarized, and what he learned in Davis all those years ago.
He also has a good story about the experience of sharing his name with other people, including the North Carolina senator who ran for vice president in 2004, the current governor of Louisiana, the musician who created the hit song “Sunshine” in 1972, and the influential 18th century American revivalist preacher who wrote Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. The title inspired an English teacher to have a little fun when handing classwork back to Jonathan at Davis High School.
Few things created in 1843 are still relevant, but A Christmas Carol still is. One of the lasting versions of Charles Dickens’ classic story is the adaptation that today’s guest, Richard Hellesen, wrote for the Sacramento Theatre Co. in 1987. Its latest run wrapped up this month. Today we talk with Richard about what he calls the “pure luck” that landed him the offer to write the play, why Carol is timely, and why & how Davis could become more of a regional center for live theater. UC Davis, where Richard studied, is a catalyst.
Every December, the volunteers for STEAC’s Holiday Program clear out a big room at the First Baptist Church in west Davis, fill the space with boxes of donated food and gifts, and then give it all away in a few hours, this year to 475 low-income families and singles in Davis. Today’s Davisville focuses on the program and the nonprofit behind it.
This is a story about people, Davis, adaptation, the pandemic, bringing donors and recipients closer together, changing demographics, poverty, relief, logistics, food, gifts — and a growing need, matched by a growing willingness to meet that need. We talk with Kelly Coleman, who runs the Holiday Program; Liane Moody, the Short Term Emergency Aid Committee's executive director; and two of the volunteers who worked on this year’s distribution day, Saturday, Dec. 11.
Today's program re-broadcasts a March 2011 Davisville interview with Stan Forbes, a former Davis City Council member who was one of 14 members of the first California Citizens Redistricting Commission a decade ago. Every 10 years, following the U.S. Census, the commission redraws the boundaries of the state's congressional, state Senate, Assembly and Board of Equalization districts to reflect the state's changing population and "create districts of relatively equal population that will provide fair representation for all Californians."
This fall, the 2021 version of the commission is presenting its draft maps for the 2020s, and is collecting comments for about another month. This interview from 2011 presents the roots of this effort to reduce gerrymandering and put more power in the hands of California's voters.
The New York Times recently posted a list of 115 new movies scheduled for release between now and the end of the year—way too many to track! Enter Derrick Bang, film critic for the Davis Enterprise and his blog Derrick Bang on Film, for our yearly talk about movies to see and avoid during this high season for movie-viewing.
The pandemic pummeled ticket sales in theaters this year, and movies are no longer the center of popular culture. Even so, Derrick says 2021 has been a terrific year for movies.
We're living in a labor shortage, and signs like this one in downtown Davis aren't hard to find. The pandemic is a huge part of the reason but other factors are also at work, such as childcare, more people working for themselves, the cushion provided by benefits and a high savings rate, and baby boomers retiring. And yet California has the highest unemployment rate of any state except Nevada.
Today's guest is Suzy Taherian, a lecturer in the Graduate School of Management at the University of California at Davis, and the chief financial officer of Xpansiv, an international company based in San Francisco. She describes conditions she and other CFOs are seeing as we talk about reasons for the labor shortage, including some you might not have heard yet; how employers are responding; how it might resolve; and how employees can take advantage of the opportunities it presents.
For Halloween this year, we have a return visit with the imaginatively named Lord Blood-Rah, host of Lord Blood-Rah’s Nerve-Wrackin’ Theatre on TV and Nerve-Wrackin’ Auditorium on radio. They're available in Davis on DCTV (channel 15 on Comcast, menu 99 on ATT U-Verse) or KDRT. Our guest, whose real name is Frank Wallace-Ailsworth, is a science-fiction/horror-show host in the tradition of Bob Wilkins and Elvira.
We talk about ... well, pretty much what you'd expect, such as classic radio, and movies from good to bad to charmingly stupid, plus what's in the “Venusian cocktail” created for one of his in-person showings at a movie palace in Orinda, and why anyone would watch a film like My Son, the Vampire. The story concerns a would-be vampire and his misguided robot. October is high season for stuff like this.
(Both of his programs are made possible by Lord Blood-Rah's Patreon supporters, as is the Patreon-exclusive weekly series Lord Blood-Rah's Cathode Zone. Information at patreon.com/lordbloodrah)
My guest today is Seb Oñate, the editor of the Davis Enterprise. Our subjects include the appeal of hyper-local community journalism, a "rough couple of years," popular types of stories among Enterprise readers (crime and local government), nostalgia for newsprint as paid print circulation fades but online readership grows, engaging the town's college students, and working in “a town as engaged as Davis.”