Over the last couple of months (and as recent as this week), Montecito residents have been repeatedly reminded of the […more…]

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...]

When two children got lost during a hike in rural New York with oncoming rain commingling with the darkening night, […more…]

National Disaster Search Dog Foundation has had tremendous success in rescuing rambunctious shelter dogs and turning them into highly-trained rescue […more…]

When the debris flow hit Montecito on January 9, 2018, Riley was ready.  Having been deployed to the tsunami in […more…]