Wilma Melville is the most inspirational person I’ve ever met. She has done more during her retirement than most people have done during their entire careers. I recently had the pleasure of visiting her at the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation Training Center in Santa Paula, California, and then again in the hangar where she lives with her airplane. “Spark plug” is an overused term I have never used before. She is a spark plug. She is Annie Oakley. She is Amelia Earhart. Above all, Wilma Melville is an exhauster of my internal thesaurus of superlatives. One of the things [...more...]

In 1945, William Zimdin, an Estonian immigrant who had fled fascism to California, dedicated his fortune to sending relief parcels […more…]

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As the COVID crisis has intensified across the globe in recent weeks, Santa Barbara-based humanitarian agency Direct Relief has accelerated […more…]