Gulf Coast Life

The Heights Center’s MOSAIC program provides opportunities for children from low-income households to learn to play a musical instrument and to perform with ensembles of their peers. We learn about the program in a conversation with musician, educator, and Director of Arts and Community Programs at the Heights Center, Melissa Barlow, who founded the program.

If you’ve ever called 211 here in Southwest Florida to find assistance with things like housing, food, healthcare, mental health — the list goes on — the United Way of Lee, Hendry, and Glades is who is supporting the 211 service, and is helping to fund the many agencies and nonprofits around the region who are there to help. Each year their fundraising campaign is designed to raise the money they need to help fund more than 90 partner agencies who help around a half-million people each year. Put simply, the United Way of Lee, Hendry, and Glades provides an essential backbone for social services in southwest Florida. We learn about a breakfast on Monday, Aug. 4 that will help set the tone for this year's campaign.

Winston Scott grew up in Miami and attended Florida State University to study music. While at FSU he started getting into engineering and at one point the word astronaut flashed briefly through his mind. So, after graduating in 1972, he entered Naval Aviation Officer Candidate School and two years later became a Naval Aviator and served as a production test pilot flying the F/A-18 Hornet at A-7 Corsair. Mr. Scott was then selected by NASA to become an astronaut and reported to the Johnson Space Center in 1992. These days he’s Director of Operational Excellence at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex and in that role was touring last week so we brough him by the studio to talk about being an astronaut, and what goes on at the KSC Visitor’s Complex.

Back in the 1990s, as the southwest Florida population grew, it became apparent that local water bodies and waterways were being impacted — and impaired — by nutrient pollution. So, in the late 2000s several local governments began implementing ordinances that prohibited the application of lawn fertilizer during the rainy season, which generally speaking runs from June first through September or so. We learn about Lee County’s ordinance, and the importance of complying with these rules to benefit our waters and ecosystems.

The Gulf Coast Symphony continues to grow and offer year-round programming even as other regional symphony orchestras have closed. Gulf Coast Symphony Founder and Music Director Andrew Kurtz explains how the organization works to diversify its performance offerings and attract new audiences.

Lightning comes in different varieties, the most common kinds don't reach the ground, called intra-cloud and cloud-to-cloud. Cloud to ground lightning actually only makes up about 10-20% of strikes. About 1% is ground to cloud. Then one of the outlier forms of lightning stretches for miles (sometimes dozens of miles) horizontally and can resemble a spider web, and that’s why it’s called spider lightning. We learn about ongoing research at Florida Gulf Coast University into this form of lightning with the instructor who is leading it and a student who helped her work with the data.

Doug MacGregor has been an editorial cartoonist for more than 40 years. He got his professional start at the Norwich Bulletin in eastern Connecticut in 1980. He moved to Florida in 1988 and drew cartoons for the News Press in Fort Myers until 2011. Doug created five cartoons every week, year in and year out, for nearly a quarter century. He has donated a large collection of his original drawings (mostly pertaining to the local environment) to Florida Gulf Coast University’s “Archives & Special Collections” at the school’s Wilson G. Bradshaw Library and students have completed the process of digitizing them and the team at the Archives helps students use Doug’s work in their studies.

The concept of birthright citizenship dates to English Common Law, and it was codified in 1868 by the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and was upheld in 1898 in a Supreme Court ruling called United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and it was further strengthened in 1940 when Congress passed the Nationality Act. President Trump signed an Executive Order that claim “The 14th Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States,” and says that only children born of at least one citizen parent will be a U.S. citizen. We get some clarity and context with two immigration attorneys, one with the ACLU and the other who has worked on immigration law for nearly 50 years.

Actor, musician, and playwright Randy Noojin brings his one-man biographical and musical production “Seeger: The Music of Pete Seeger,” to Players Circle Theater for a limited performance run July 18-20. Noojin joins us to talk about this heartfelt tribute to the legendary folk singer and activist and perform live in studio.

A contemporary woman discovers that an aunt she never knew was part of a group of Black girls that went missing in the 1960s.