Month: July 2026

Tim Smith

Over the last 25 years, Tim has excelled as a television news producer adept at producing top rated and award-winning documentaries, interviews & news segments for America’s leading news outlets. The quality of his work is attested to by winning a national and regional Emmy, five Emmy nominations, two Gracie Awards, Grierson Award, Genesis nomination & Cable Ace nomination.

Tim has worked with and directed top news talent including Lester Holt, Brian Williams, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Judy Woodruff, Norah O’Donnell, Jim Lehrer, Bob Woodward, Chuck Todd, Charlie Rose, Natalie Morales, Roger Mudd and Savannah Guthrie. His strong record of big gets includes interviews with Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Dick Cheney, John Updike, Joe Biden, Audrey Hepburn, Ted Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Conner, Gerald Ford, Laura Bush, Donald Trump and Mitt Romney.

Samantha Gault

Samantha is the Executive Director of the Mather Homestead Foundation and has a BA from Dartmouth College and an MA from Middlebury College. This beautifully preserved house and landmark offers a glimpse into American revolutionary history through rich and engaging programming, including literary conversations, lectures, and events. This past year Samantha and the Mather Homestead have had a focus on the America 250 celebration from the point of view of Middlesex Parish. Samantha reflected, “for me, studying history and looking back has always been about not losing my way.  How can you know where you are or where you are going if you do not know where you have been? That is as important for nations and communities as it is for individuals”.

The Mather Legacy

Directed by Tim Smith and narrated by Scott Pelley, this short film is a powerful tribute to both the Mather family and the enduring American spirit. Spanning nearly four centuries and interviewing experts in American history, The Mather Legacy chronicles the family’s journey from their 1635 arrival in the New World to the present day.

Darien’s Mather Homestead. Built in 1778 and raided by Tories during the Revolutionary War, Mather Homestead was home to six generations of Mathers, including Moses Mather, Darien’s leading voice for freedom in 1778. It is now dedicated to historical education.

There will be discussion after the 30-minute film.

Steve graduated from Lehigh University with a BS degree in engineering and obtained his MBA in finance from the Wharton School, Univ. of Pennsylvania. He has worked his entire 45-year career in the petroleum industry, holding positions with Exxon, Standard Oil of Ohio, British Petroleum, and Hess Corp. Steve has been involved with, and spoke on, chemical plant design, advertising and promotion, supply and logistics, government affairs, oil and gas trading, financial hedging, oil and gas marketing, and other current topics of interest in the global oil markets.

Add “world traveler” to the list. Steve logged more than 6.5 million frequent flier miles over his career. “I’ve been to Russia six times, China three times, and I lost track of Southeast Asia,” he says. When Villas talks, his stories blend humor, humility, and gratitude. His legacy isn’t just financial. It’s the ripple effect of generosity, mentorship, and heart. “Money isn’t the most important thing you can give,” he says. “What matters is what you share of yourself.”

Global Oil and Gas Market

Steve Villas analyzes the global oil market, highlighting that while the United States leads global production at over 13 million barrels per day due to horizontal drilling and hydrofracking, it remains reliant on imports due to domestic demand and refinery setups. The global market handles roughly 100 million barrels daily, with demand shifting from flat Western consumption toward rapidly growing middle classes in China and India. He will also discuss the impact of the Iran war and the periodic closing of the Strait of Hormuz on supply.

Steve demystifies oil pricing and discusses other geopolitical influences, including how OPEC Plus manages global pricing through strict production quotas rather than fixed prices, and how the Russian shadow fleet circumvents international price caps using covert ship-to-ship transfers. Villas has strong confidence in free markets, asserting that society will never fully run out of oil, though its long-term market dominance will eventually transition to new technologies.

Richard. A Gephardt, President and CEO of Gephardt Group

Mr. Gephardt served for 28 years in the United States House of Representatives from 1976 to 2004, representing Missouri’s 3rd Congressional District, home to his birthplace St. Louis. In his role as Leader, Mr. Gephardt emerged as one of the leading strategists of the Democratic Party’s platform and chief architect to landmark reforms ranging from healthcare, pensions, education, energy independence and trade policy. In his first year in Congress, he was appointed to both the House Ways & Means and Budget Committees. He was elected to serve as House Democratic Leader for more than 14 years, as House Majority Leader from 1989 to 1995 and Minority Leader from 1995 to 2003. Mr. Gephardt ran for the Democratic nomination for U.S. President twice, in 1988 and 2004.

Mr. Gephardt retired from the U.S. Congress in 2005 to found Gephardt Group, a privately held labor relations consulting and government affairs firm. He was Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Scripps Research Institute, a private, non profit research organization engaged in biomedical science. Most recently, Mr. Gephardt was a member of the Board of Directors at SpiritAerosystems, Centene Corporation, Ford Motor Company, CenturyLink and U.S. Steel Corporation. In addition, he is a member of the Board of Directors at The Washington Center for Internships and Academic Seminars, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is the Founder of the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement at Washington University in St. Louis. Widely known for his advocacy for international human rights, Mr. Gephardt served as Chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy, a private, nonprofit organization that endeavors to strengthen democratic institutions around the world through nongovernmental efforts, from 2009 to 2013.

Mr. Gephardt began his career in public service in 1968 as a precinct captain to St. Louis’ 14th ward. From 1971 to 1976, he served as Alderman for the city’s 14th ward. In 1976, he was elected to the U.S. Congress, succeeding 24-year incumbent Leonor Sullivan.

Mr. Gephardt earned his Bachelor of Science from Northwestern University in 1962 and his juris doctorate from the University of Michigan Law School in 1965.

Tim Love is former Vice-Chairman of Omnicom Group, a leading global advertising and marketing services company.  Throughout Tim’s career in the advertising industry he helped clients be more globally sensitive, collaborative and effective.  His extensive global brand-building experience involved residing in Brussels, Tokyo, Singapore and New York City. He worked with some of the world’s most sophisticated marketers:  P&G, Nissan and Infiniti automobiles, PepsiCo, Unilever, Gillette, Mars, UBS, Kraft, Philips and J&J.

Since retiring from Omnicom in 2013, Tim has returned to artistic beginnings. He also co-taught at Oxford University’s Said School of Business MBA program on “Branding and Communication,” he was on the faculty of the US Marketing Communications College, a pro-bono initiative at the Foreign Service Institute of the US State Department. He has also lectured on “Discovering Truth” an initiative he started 8 years to discern how people discern truth in a post-digital world. He has lectured at numerous universities across the country and a the National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting. His 2024 podcast interview with PBS station WGCU won a regional Edward R. Murrow Award and will compete for a national award in August.

He is author of two award-winning books available on Amazon-  “Discovering Truth: How to Navigate Between Fact & Fiction in an Overwhelming Social Media World” (Internationalist Press) and “The Book that Gets Better with Age” (LID London). Recent work is also available on Substack@timloveideas.com- “The Elephant in the Room” and “The Cost of Not Pursuing Truth.” and “The Medium is the Mirror.” His podcast series, Tim Love’s Discovering Truth includes 58 episodes of interviews with leading communication experts including Jane Goodall.

Tim was a founding member and first chairman of the 4A’s Multicultural Advertising Internship program, now in its 52^nd year and a founding member for Business for Diplomatic Action (BDA), focused on improving international business cooperation.

He recently was invited to be on the Council for Responsible Social Media (CRSM) a cross-partisan initiative of Issue One in Washington DC.

Tim is a James Webb Young Fellow with a Masters in Communication from the University of Illinois and he has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a minor in Fine Arts from Miami University in Ohio. Tim Love Ideas, LLC, is doing commissioned art and creating ideas. Also see www.timlovesworld.com

The Medium is the Mirror

Tim Love and The Honorable Richard Gephardt come to Darien to discuss Tim’s award winning book and former Congressman Gephardt’s bipartisan, Council For Responsible Social Media.

In The Medium is the Mirror, marketing veteran Tim Love warns that unregulated digital environments alter global society. Expanding on Marshall McLuhan, Love argues that algorithmic media acts as a mirror that reflects user behavioral data to distort reality, manipulate perceptions, and fragment communities.

This data tracking induces “Neuro-Dystopian Conditioning,” forcing truth to evolve from objective fact into algorithmic consensus. Consequently, polarization deepens, mental health suffers, and trust in public institutions erodes.

Supported by former Congressman Richard Gephardt, the book acts as a blueprint for leadership. It calls for strict platform regulation, algorithmic accountability, and conscious media usage to restore democratic dialogue, ethical clarity, and human empathy in a fractured digital age.

There will be a book signing with a Barrett’s Bookstore representative on-site after the meeting at the entryway table.

“Content Guy” / Prime Storyteller, MorningNewsBeat.com, Author, “Retail Rules! 52 Ways To Achieve Retail Success,” & Co-Author, “The Big Picture: Essential Business Lessons From The Movies”

For more than 40 years, Kevin Coupe has been bringing to audiences all over the world a wealth of experience, sharp storytelling skills, provocative and contextual insights, unique worldview and “serious irreverence” about the world of business and consumers. He is the author of “Retail Rules! 52 Ways To Achieve Retail Success,” a guidebook for competing effectively and efficiently on Main Street, and co-author, with Michael Sansolo, of “The Big Picture: Essential Business Lessons from the Movies,” which uses film narratives to teach about leadership, marketing and surviving the workplace. A quarter century ago, he launched MorningNewsBeat.com, providing “business news in context, and analysis with attitude” to more than 25,000 subscribers all over the world, finding critical, relevant and resonant lessons not just in the world of retailing, but also in sports, popular culture and a wide range of other businesses. An independent survey recently ranked MNB as the “top industry news and information site.” And, Kevin is an adjunct faculty member at Portland State University in Oregon. In addition to speaking at hundreds of conferences in the U.S. and abroad and reporting from 49 states and six continents, Kevin has been a daily newspaper reporter, magazine writer/editor, video producer, bodyguard, and clothing salesman. He has supervised a winery tasting room (happily), run two marathons (slowly), driven a race car (badly), learned to box (painfully), tried stand-up comedy (amusingly), and acted in a major (but obscure) motion picture. He is married with three grown children and lives in Connecticut.

Getting a Grip on Grocery

Consumers everywhere are faced with a plethora of choices from which to buy food – including in Darien, where there are 10 major competitors competing for food dollars just within a seven-mile stretch of road.  Beyond the fragmented competition, issues like inflation, food safety and technology influence when and where people shop.

This is the challenging environment that longtime Darien resident Kevin Coupe has been chronicling for more than four decades, including the last 25 on MorningNewsBeat.com, which is seen within the retail industry as a primary and entertaining source of provocative and irreverent commentary.   In this customized and interactive session, KC will evaluate the competitive landscape that is changing the food industry (and customers), cast a critical eye on how companies’ leaders are judging (and misjudging) the marketplace, focus on the issues that inform the choices of local shoppers, and make some informed guesses about who the winners and losers will be – and why it should matter to Darien consumers.

Come join us for the in-person appearance of two speakers who have traveled from Taiwan and Switzerland for a US book tour, and we are their first stop. Mike Chinoy, who spoke to us via Zoom last session about Taiwan, is co-author along with Kathi Zellweger, the subject of their book, Miss Kathi: Saving Lives in North Korea.

THE AUTHORS 

Mike Chinoy is an American journalist who, along with his co-author Kathi Zelleweger, will be speaking to us live as the first stop on their book tour of the United States. Last year, via remote video, Mike addressed the prospects for China’s increasingly muscular efforts to take over Taiwan. He has reported on many of the most important geopolitical events in Asia since the mid-1970s, including the death of Mao Zedong, the rise of China, the Hong Kong handover and developments in Taiwan, Thailand, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, North Korea and elsewhere. Mr. Chinoy spent 24 years serving as a foreign correspondent for CNN, serving  as the first bureau chief in Beijing, from where he reported live during the Tiananmen Square crisis. He also worked for CBS and NBC in Hong Kong. In addition to receiving an Emmy Award for reporting on Tiananmen Square, he received a Peabody Award, a Dupont Award, and an ACE Award.

He has also covered North Korea extensively, traveling there 17 times since 1989. In1994, he became the only journalist invited to accompany President Jimmy Carter on his historic trip to Pyongyang and was the first journalist ever to file live TV reports from North Korea.

Mr. Chinoy is a consulting editor of the Taiwan Strait Risk Report, a monthly newsletter that quantifies fast-moving geopolitical risk on the Taiwan Strait.. He is also a Nonresident Scholar at the University of California, San Diego’s  21st Century China Center. Previously, he also spent 15 years as a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the U.S.-China Institute of the University of Southern California. From 2006-2009, he was a Senior Fellow at the Los Angeles-based Pacific Council on International Policy, focusing on security issues in China, North Korea, and Northeast Asia. He is the author of six books. Miss Kathi: Saving Lives in North Korea, was  described by former CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan as “an unrivaled account of heartbreak and heroism in the world’s least understood nation, North Korea.”

He has a degree in Chinese Studies from Yale University and a Master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in Taipei, Taiwan.

Kathi Zellweger

Kathi Zellweger is a senior aid manager with over thirty years of field experience in Hong Kong, China, and North Korea. She was based in Pyongyang for five years (2006–2011) as the North Korea country director for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), an office of the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Before joining SDC, from 1978 to 2006, Zellweger worked in a senior post for the Catholic Agency Caritas in Hong Kong, where she played a key role in pioneering Caritas’s involvement in China and North Korea.

She also managed the Hong Kong–based KorAid Limited, a nonprofit she established in2015 to focus on serving children in institutions and people with disabilities in North Korea. She has made 75 trips to North Korea and has the longest continuous history of humanitarian engagement with the country of—literally – anyone.

Zellweger is affiliated with the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC)at Stanford University in California and is  a Non-resident Fellow at the European Center for North Korean Studies at the University of Vienna.  She holds a master’s degree in international administration from the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont.

In 2005, Zellweger was presented with The Bishop Tji Hak-soon Justice and Peace Award from a South Korean foundation established to promote social justice, peace, and human rights. In 2006, she received the honor of the Dame of St. Gregory the Great from the Vatican for her work in North Korea.

THE BOOK

Miss Kathi: Saving Lives in North Korea is the remarkable story of Swiss aid worker Kathi Zellweger, whose history of engagement with a secretive, isolated North Korea over nearly three decades is unprecedented in its scope, access, and humanitarian impact.

One of the first book-length accounts in English by an aid worker operating on the ground in North Korea, Miss Kathi chronicles the story of a woman who has lived out her commitment to the poor and most vulnerable—undaunted by the tensions and threat of conflict perpetually looming over the Korean peninsula.

For many North Koreans, Kathi Zellweger—a native of Switzerland—was the first foreigner they had ever met or even seen. Playing a central role in the early years of international relief efforts in North Korea was a lonely job, as Kathi addressed the humanitarian needs of a suffering people largely ignored by the world because of their citizenship. She befriended local doctors, nurses, and caregivers; negotiated with suspicious government officials; overcame international doubts about the diversion of relief supplies to the military; and, over a period of years, spearheaded an effort that provided food, medicine, and development aid. Ultimately, her efforts saved the lives of thousands of people—most of them children.

As one official in Pyongyang emotionally declared to her during a visit in the late 1990s, even though she was in no way a missionary, “Miss Kathi—you are the Mother Teresa of North Korea!”

There will be a book signing with a Barrett’s Bookstore representative on-site after the meeting at the entryway table.

Joern was born in Germany and came to the United States as a young man, settling in Fairfield County, For 40+ years, he specialized in the business of Ocean Transportation Dry cargo movement, including 30 years with his own Company Alpha Chartering Inc in Greenwich CT, which he closed in 2008. The business provided initial brokerage mediating between Ship Owner and Commodity interest as well as Ship Management Ship Investment.

Joern’s hobby also took him on the water, sailing in the Caribbean with family as well as in the Baltic in Europe. He also has enjoyed long distance sailing such as Newport RI to Bermuda, Long Island to St Maarten and small motor boating on the Long Island Sound.

The Great Loop

The Great Loop is a continuous 6,000- Nautical mile waterway journey that circumnavigates the eastern United States and part of Canada using protected rivers, canals, and coastal channels. It follows a seasonal counterclockwise path through the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, the Great Lakes, and inland rivers.

Joern and his wife Regina did the loop over two summers and will share with us their amazing trip to see our country, and its inhabitants, close up, from the water.

Route and Schedule

• Spring: Head north up from Florida on the Atlantic coast and through the Chesapeake Bay.
• Summer: Cruise the Hudson River and New York canals into the Great Lakes and Canadian heritage waterways.
• Fall: Travel south from Chicago down the inland rivers (such as the Ohio River, Mississippi, and Tennessee-Tombigbee) toward the Gulf of Mexico.
• Winter: Arrive in Florida and the Gulf Coast to avoid cold northern weather.

• Distance: Traveled 6,732 Statute miles and 256 days on board.
• Time: Average of 9 to 12 months to complete a full trip, though many do it in parts over multiple years.
• Locks: Passage through more than 150 locks.
• Vessels: Most commonly completed on motor yachts or trawlers (30–50 feet), but possible in smaller craft (with clearance adjustments up to 21 feet).
• Guidance: Looper Organization guided and supported by America’s Great Loop Cruisers’ Association.