Category: Notable Locals

Episode 68: Diane Raver and Lauren Concar Sheehy of the Garden State Film Festival

This week the Garden State Film Festival will be celebrating its 20th anniversary right here in Asbury Park—with in person viewings beginning Wednesday March 23 and running through the 27 with online viewings available as well for those who cannot make it to the in-person events. On this episode, with the help of Ming Chen of A Shared Universe PodcaStudio, Amy & Joe welcome Festival co-founder Diane Raver and Festival Executive Director Lauren Concar Sheehy to the podcast and talk about the history of the Festival, how it started and how it lasted 20 years.

Episode 67: Kay Harris & Michelle Gladden of the Asbury Park Museum

This week, with the help of Ming Chen from A Shared Universe PodcaStudio, Amy & Joe welcome Kay Harris and, for her second appearance on AP Pod, but wearing a different hat, Michelle Gladden, President and Secretary, respectively, of the of the Asbury Park Museum.

The mission of the Asbury Park Museum is to re-introduce, educate and advance an understanding and appreciation of the history of the diverse, progressive, resort and urban community of Greater Asbury Park, New Jersey—the birthplace of both 3-n-1 oil and the song Honeysuckle Rose—two of the many many interesting facts that you can discover at the museum.

Episode 66: Yvonne Clayton & Jennifer Souder of the Asbury Park African American Music Project

This episode starts with the voice of saxophone player Cliff Johnson sharing some memories of growing up and playing music in and around Asbury Park’s Springwood Avenue Music circuit. His is just one of the many oral histories of the Springwood Avenue scene collected by the Asbury Park African-American Music Project (Asbury AMP). This week, with the help of Ming Chen from A Shared Universe PodcaStudio, Amy & Joe welcome Yvonne Clayton and Jennifer Souder from Asbury AMP to discuss the history of the Springwood Avenue music district and what Asbury AMP is doing to preserve that history and discuss their plans to restore Asbury’s legendary Turf Club.

Episode 65: Bradley Hoffer & Porkchop Save Christmas

Asbury Park art community, Porkchop and Bradley Hoffer, both of whose works feature prominently on the world famous Wooden Walls Project on the Asbury Park Boardwalk and who just this week saved Asbury’s Christmas by creating the remarkable 17 foot high Christmas Tree Sculpture, named “The Giving Tree”, now on display in Convention Hall. We encourage you all to go down and check it out!

Episode 64: Tim Donnelly

Photo by Wes Orshoski
This week, with the help of Ming Chen from A Shared Universe PodcaStudio, Amy & Joe talk to Tim Donnelly, who together with Danny Clinch, is a founding partner of the wildly successful Sea.Hear.Now Festival in Asbury Park; which wrapped up its third iteration this past September. We talk to Tim about the festival, and its connection to his history of activism with the Surfrider Foundation and working his way around the county on tour with Lollapalooza.

Episode 63: Sam Herried’s Journey From Alaska to Asbury

Amy Quinn and Joe Walsh talk to Sam Herried with the help of Ming Chen from A Shared Universe PodcaStudio. If you have not ridden a mountain bike on a Glacier Range in Alaska on your way to work, well neither have we. But today we are talking to Sam Herried, native of Fairbanks, Alaska, and PhD researcher in glaciology, who has. We talk to Sam about funding, conducting and publishing glacier research as a citizen scientist, all while holding down a barista job at the world-famous Asbury Roastery on the boardwalk. But as you will hear, Sam’s many other interests proved too fascinating for us to stay on just one topic–so we grilled him about training for 100km ultramarathons, how does one play piano, drums and sing at the same time? and are there outdoor cats near the Arctic Circle? So many things that we might need to bring him back for a part II.

Episode 62: Surfing and KYDS

Amy Quinn and Joe Walsh talk more surfing as we talk to Rodney Salomon from KYDS Asbury Park (which stands for Konscious Youth Development & Service) and Christian May from the Asbury Park Surf Club with the help of Ming Chen from A Shared Universe PodcaStudio. We learn how Rodney and Christian teamed up to get the kids of Asbury Park (or Neptune or Long Branch) onto their beaches, into the water and up on a board. This is not as simple as it sounds, as you will hear.

Episode 61: Surfrider

This week Amy Quinn and Joe Walsh talk with Mike Castellano and, making her encore appearance on Asbury Pod, Diana Pittet—both from the New Jersey chapter of the Surfrider Foundation—with the help of Ming Chen from A Shared Universe PodcaStudio. We find out what the Surfrider foundation does—which is everything from beach clean-ups and sponsoring Asbury Park’s Family Day at the Beach, to activism in support of beach access and regulation of pollution from plastics.  Surfrider also provides an army of volunteers in support of the upcoming Sea Hear Now Surf Music and Art Festival in Asbury Park—and we also hear Amy Quinn wish very hard out loud that someone would introduce her to Ani DiFranco.

Episode 60: Amy Russo from Toast

This week Amy Quinn and Joe Walsh talk Peace, Love and Pancakes with Amy Russo, founder and driving force behind Toast Restaurant here in Asbury Park. With the help of Ming Chen from A Shared Universe PodcaStudio, we talk to Amy about the birth of Toast, its expansion from Montclair to Asbury Park and now Red Bank—what’s it like to get a rave review in the New York Times when you least expect it, and how the pandemic has affected her business.

Episode 59: Kiwanis Club of Asbury Park

This week we welcome Sarah Bloom and Michelle Grezner of the newly re-chartered Kiwanis Club of Asbury Park with the help of Ming Chen from A Shared Universe PodcaStudio. We get right to the heart of the matter in this one and to find out what is Kiwanis? What do they do? We were hoping that they would be mysterious and creepy like freemasons. But no, to our great disappointment we found out that they seem to be non-secretive, inveterate do gooders who might just be your nice neighbors and whose organization you might want to join after hearing this episode.