The Edge of Ajax Blog

GRASSROOTS AND “AJAX” =  CAREER LAUNCHERS

The majority of our original volunteers at GrassRoots, who had little or no previous television experience, went on to what might be considered Higher Levels in the field of communication. Some are teaching, some have started their own companies, at least one is running a cable company.  Examples will follow.  Look them over. It is an impressive record.  One thing I recall from my Aspen days: when one of our television engineers was leaving for greener pastures we always found an excellent replacement, usually a local carpenter who was ready for new challenges and was willing to be trained in a new discipline.

         Here are the stories of some of our early volunteers and their “life after GrassRoots.”

From Candi Harper, a journalist who teaches  communications in East Coast colleges and high schools:       “I have wonderful memories of GrassRoots.  It was definitely one of the most exciting and creative times of my life.”

From Buddy Ortega of Woody Creek, CO, who played  Lance Boyle, a leading male role in the Edge of Ajax:    “Those days of ‘Ajax’ were beyond special!”

From Maura Eggan, leading lady from The Edge of Ajax, who played Felicia B. Wheeler and was a “love interest” of Lance Boyle in the soap opera.  Maura, is marketing vice president for Premium Outlets, Napa, CA. She flies to Beijing this spring as a delegate on Governor Brown’s first trade mission to China. “I was in a New York restaurant and my table companion pointed out that all the men at the next table were staring at me.  It turned out it was the Julliard String Quartet, and they recognized me from The Edge of Ajax, which they watched after their performances in Aspen.”

 

From Linda Maslow, who runs Maslow Media Group, Washington, D.C., which provides video production, camera crews worldwide, payroll services and staffing services for the media industry. “The Edge of Ajax was my directorial debut!!! That’s how I got my earliest technical training.  I adored it.  David (Wright) used to make me get there early to set up zillions of cables so I know how to be technical.  I loved those morning shoots at Maura’s house.  Also that summer we were teaching portable video to interns in front of the Wheeler Opera House, then taking them inside to learn editing.  My goodness, my closest friends in the world are still my friends from Aspen!!”

And this just in from Randy Bean in Palo Alto, CA. “I moved here for a journalism fellowship at Stanford in the early 80’s and never really left.  Stayed in video and documentary production all these years, news divisions in Washington, Bill Moyers in NYC, KQED out here, etc.  Still doing documentaries, executive producing freelance projects after pioneering HD stuff at Stanford and elsewhere.  It’s been a fun, lively, productive career.  I’m still in touch with Linda – one of my best friends in life, and I keep up with Jackie and Andy Stone in Aspen.  I’ve been back to Aspen a few times.  It’s so different, but underneath all the glitz, our funky little mountain town still exists, still feels the same.”

Shelley Nemerofsky Sims reports she is coaching people in Washington D.C., many of them internationals who need help communicating more effectively in the media.  “I loved working at GrassRoots in my earlier days.  I went from taking a video course in Baltimore to moving to Aspen for the sole purpose of getting more hands-on experience at GrassRoots.  John Smith was the person who I’ve described as my mentor in all things, video, public access and community television, and more.  I loved it when John brought George Stoney, to Aspen, the “father of public access” television.  [Editor’s note:  Shelley speaks kindly of John Smith perhaps because he wrote her mother regularly to say how well Shelley was probably behaving in Aspen.]

David Hayes was a Very Important Person during the early years of GrassRoots, just as he is now in his hometown of Carbondale, CO. (David would write this blog himself, but he stays very busy winning Special Olympics skiing races all over the west.)  David worked in the GrassRoots office for years. We had staff meetings there every week to keep things running smoothly.  I sat at one end of the table and David was at the other end.  On each side was the staff. I would say: “How about programing?” (or technical, or intern training etc.) The staff member in charge of that area would report progress and also mention any problems that needed to be solved.  If there were problems, other staff members would come up with solutions. I finally realized that David could do a much better job than I.  “David, why don’t YOU run the meetings from now on.”  And he did.  I always knew that as long as David was with us, we would never fail.

Full disclosure requires me to explain that there are exceptions to the string of successes you just read about.  Like me, for example. I go by the name of John Smith to hide my real identity. After seven or so years of pretending to know something about television, and management, I simply burned out, drove away (sadly, actually) with my dog Ajax. I traded the mountains of Colorado for an old wooden sailboat and the vast Pacific Ocean.  Fast forward a few dozen years and I find myself living on a small farm in Oregon, very involved in hydraulics (rain water), physical therapy (digging ditches and shoveling gravel) and mental health (breathing moist air deeply.)  Yet suddenly I am writing for a web site, and I don’t even like computers.  Where did this start?   Catherine reminds me that I was going through old boxes in the shop.  “Hey, here are the old Ajax scripts!”  Then I write to Maura Eggan, James Salter, Buddy Ortega, Barbara Allen, call Shelley Nemerofsky, Candi Harper, Linda Maslow, and John Masters, the Executive Director of GrassRoots, and the idea of  this web site just grew and grew – along with the idea of having an early 50^th  GrassRoots reunion in Aspen in the fall of 2014.  Can you imagine GrassRoots lasting so long?  It’s a miracle!

                                                                                                   J.S.