Meet the Garrulous Dr. Sally Ray

It's appropriate that we talk about Dr. Sally Ray at this time. She is a recognized authority on the airlines' responses to crashes. More about that later. It's interesting to observe Sally when she enters the room at our Rotary Meetings. It takes her 15 minutes to get to her table. She stops by every person she meets and has a pleasant conversation. Frankly she's just a very outgoing friendly person. Not bad for the Chairman of the Communications Department of Western Kentucky University. Sally is also our International Service Director.
Sally was born in Mayfield in Western Kentucky. Her dad died when she was 8 and her mom remarried. The family moved to Morehead when she was 12. Sally's Mom was the head of the Nursing Education program at Morehead and her step dad, Col. Arthur Kelly, was head of ROTC. Sally graduated from Morehead's Model High School (Breckinridge High) in 1979. She went to Centre for a year but came back to finish at Morehead. She then got her Masters Degree in Communications from Eastern Michigan University and her Ph.D. from Wayne State in 1988. She taught from 1988 to '90 at UK then at U of L from '90 - '91. She came to Western in 1991 and became Department Chairman in 2000. My son Kenny got his Masters under Sally and she hired him to teach Speech at Western. He loved teaching and is finishing up his Ph.D. and teaching Speech at Florida College in Tampa. He and Sally remain good buds.
Sally published a book in 1999 called Strategic Communications in Crisis Management: Lessons from the Airline Industry. You can click on the title to find it on Amazon. Sally is working on a new book to be titled Aviation Accident Investigation as a Tool for Organizational Learning.
Sally is married to Dr. Roger Vincent who will be the head of Magna's education program. Roger and Sally are sports car enthusiasts. Sally's Step Dad Col. Kelly is a veteran of three wars. He has a book of WWII oral histories called Battlefire also available from Amazon and is linked here.

A Tragedy Handled Well - Crash of Flight 5191

John Rhodes, Vice President of Bluegrass Airport was our guest today at the invitation of General Dan Cherry. John was involved in coordinating the airport's response to the awful tragedy of the crash of Flight 5191 in August of 2006. He talked about the all-out effort by airport personnel and the community. John told us that Bluegrass Airport has over 1,000,000 passengers a year. It has 15 gates and upwards of 84 flights per day. There are two runways. One is a 7000+ foot runway for commercial aircraft and a much shorter 3500 foot runway for daytime general aviation. The accident was attributed to the pilots mistakenly getting on the shorter runway.
John said he was awakened by a call to come in to work shortly after 6 a.m. the morning of the crash. A media center was quickly established across Versailles Road at Keeneland. John said the folks at Keeneland were extremely helpful and gracious. Later the Crowne Plaza Campbell House manager asked his registered guests to allow him to place them in neighboring hotels so he could provide the entire complex for family members and others directly involved. The owner of several Appleby's brought food on many occasions. In short things were handled well. John says their website had over 1 million hits in the first 24 hours after the accident. There were 6100 articles written nationally about the accident in the first four days.
Interestingly our own member, Dr. Sally Ray, is a leading authority on communications related to aircraft crashes. She and John are both Morehead graduates and Sally made a comment to the group that she had been in a NTSB meeting for two weeks some time after the crash. She said many of the people from NTSB went out of their way to comment on how impressed they were in the way the people in Lexington had responded.
Well we're having a great month learning things about aviation. General Cherry keeps tantalizing the group about an ACE ARMSTRONG that he's trying to line up for one of the two remaining programs he has. Could be very interesting as they used to say on Laugh In.
By the way I want everyone to know that I soloed a Cessna 150 at Bluegrass Field back in the late 1960's. As far as I know there was only one runway there at the time. Thank God I found it when I got ready to land.

Come Fly with KY Air National Guard's Colonel Steve Bullard

Our attendance last week was 45%. I suspect it was about the same yesterday when Colonel Steve Bullard spoke. For those of you who missed, you missed a good one. To be more accurate you missed a GREAT one! Thanks to our own Air Force General (ret.) Dan Cherry and Carroll Hildreth our January programs have revolved around aviation. Dan had heard Col. Bullard's program at a meeting and invited him to present it to our club. Steve is stationed out of Louisville and is attached to the Kentucky Air National Guard. He was deployed to Afghanistan and returned a little over a year ago. WOW did he have some things to show and tell us.

Col. Bullard began by showing one of those videos you see on TV taken through the windshield of a moving vehicle. The driver was another Guardsman from Louisville who was traveling with a companion. They were driving through a small village in Afghanistan. The scene was dry, dusty, dirty and dangerous. Cars and trucks parked along the road were potential caches of improvised explosive devices. People walking along the road could be homicide bombers. Col. Bullard said that traveling in the country was fraught with danger but necessary anyway. As the guardsman was leaving the village and heading back into open country there was a man walking on the right side away from the camera and another walking on the left back toward the village. Suddenly there was a flash from the left and the camera went dead. The man on the left had gotten nervous and detonated himself prematurely. The driver and his passenger were unharmed.
Col. Bullard was eventually put in charge of operations at the Kandahar Airport and effected the return of commercial aviation there. He told the story of a senior Taliban leader that was taken out by a drone operating at 24,000 feet. He talked about President Karsai's brother being the biggest exporter of opium in the country. Col. Bullard remembered our continuing presence in Japan and Germany and said that likewise we will need to be a presence in both Afghanistan and Iraq for a long time. After taking questions from the audience our club rose to give Colonel Steve Bullard of Kentucky's Air National Guard a standing ovation.

Jeff Reed the Leader of the Band

Jeff is a former club member and a former lawyer. Before he went to law school at U of L he had been a music educator. He was born in Goshen, Indiana in 1962 but moved to Wabash by age two. He tells me Wabash is near Ft. Wayne and is the home of Crystal Gayle and is also notable for being the first electrically lit city. (Take notes that will be on the final exam.) He graduated in 1980 from Vinton High School then earned a BA in Music Education from U of L in 1984. He went to the University of Iowa and got his Masters in Music with an emphasis on Conducting. He taught music at Floyd Central in Southern Indiana then at Wagner in Louisville. From my point of view Jeff then went into a fugue for the next ten years and earned a law degree from U of L in 1991 then worked for the Huddleston Brothers. His wife Sherryl is from Cave City and a local physician. By the year 2000 Jeff had decided to found the Bowling Green Chamber Orchestra. He was with us today, January 9, to explain to us his philosophy of music. The photo above is from a short DVD that he played during his presentation. Jeff thinks concerts should be both entertaining and enlightening. He also thinks many orchestras forget this. Jeff reviewed the schedule for the remainder of this season and previewed next season. I think anyone who appreciates music at all would be excited about his plans. I did learn that our Chamber Orchestra is entirely professional utilizing not only local musicians but also some from surrounding cities. Bravo Maestro.

Get to Know Paul Cannon

Paul is from Northwest Pennsylvania just below Lake Erie and near the Ohio border in a town named Greenville. Actually he attended parochial school in Mt. Vernon, Ohio from grades seven through high school. He graduated in 1959 and went to Andrews University majoring in Theology. He subsequently earned a Masters in Religion in 1964 and a Masters of Divinity in 1975. He helped start a drug dependence program in Williamsburg, KY in 1975 and after a couple of years moved it here in 1977. His program is now called The Bridge to Recovery for which he is President and Chaplain. Their focus now is more on co-dependency and caring for individuals from dysfunctional backgrounds. His wife Carol has published two books. The most recent is called Hooked on Unhappiness. They have two sons one is a CPA in Birmingham and the other a Yale educated PhD cell biolgoist in Boston. Paul says he enjoys walking, bird watching, bicycling, and more and more knocking around with his 6 grandchildren. He said the arrival of the newest one is imminent.

Ken Hines tells us about the Airport

Our first program of 2008 was a History of the Bowling Green Warren County Regional Airport presented by our own Ken Hines. Ken said he grew up close to the airport and spent a good deal of time hanging around there as a youth. Ken is instrument rated with a commercial pilots license. He lived 30 years in Phoenix and says he used to fly quite a bit out West. Our airport has evolved a great deal over the years and is now highly regarded by members of the general aviation community.

Ken graduated from Bowling Green High School in 1952 and got his degree from Bowling Green Business College in 1956. He went to work for the Hartford Insurance Company in 1960 and served in a variety of towns including Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Evansville, St. Louis, and Hartford. In 1973 he was sent to Phoenix where he stayed until 2003 when he came back home. He and his wife Barbara have a son and a daughter and three grandchildren in Texas and three in Missouri. Ken's interests include refinishing furniture including some caning, golf and reading especially about the Civil War. Ken says a project that is near and dear to his heart is an effort to encourage renewed interest in the Barren River. He'd like to see an excursion boat route developed between Bowling Green and the Greencastle Dam which is 12 miles downstream. I hope he is successful. Ken welcome home. We're delighted to have you back in BG.

The Tax Man - Kevin Mays

Kevin Mays is our Director for Vocational Service. Last year he was Director of Community Service and was instrumental in developing a community immunization program for Hispanics. Recently Kevin made a job switch from banking to Accounting. He is now the Tax Manager for J.C. Holland CPAs. Kevin is a 1981 graduate of East Hardin High School in Glendale (think Whistle Stop and Depot Restaurant). He came on down to BG and graduated from Western in 1985. Kevin and his wife Stephanie have one daughter named Remington. He likes to hunt and ride bicycles. Kevin is an all around good guy and hard worker. I'm delighted we were able to keep him in our community.