NewCanaanite.com (https://newcanaanite.com/category/new-canaan-residents)
New Canaan engenders a strong sense of identity among its residents. In our “Local People” profiles and features, we celebrate that strength.
This week on 0684-Radi0, our free podcast (subscribe here in the iTunes Store), we launch a new series with the 0684-Radi0 podcast. “New Canaan Lifers” will profile lifelong residents of the town, and we start with a personal favorite among New Canaanites: Beth Jones. Here are recent episodes of 0684-Radi0:
Rich Caniglia has always been fascinated by the weather.
At five or six years old, the 1993 New Canaan High School graduate recalled, he would run from window to window in his family’s home whenever it snowed. Cable television arrived when Caniglia was around seven, and while other children watched cartoons and sports, he remembered watching the weather channel all day. “Well, I’d watch the Yankees games,” he admitted. Caniglia recently celebrated his 20th anniversary as the morning weatherman for the WHEC news network in Rochester, N.Y.
It wasn’t until he went to Cornell University to study atmospheric physics that Caniglia met other people as interested in weather as him. “I don’t know if it’s something people are born with—an infatuation with the weather,” he said.
Despite unpredictable weather—including a poor forecast that postponed Wednesday’s installment to Thursday—the town’s annual Waveny Summer Concert Series has once again been a great success this year, according to Recreation Director Steve Benko. Held on the lawn out back of Waveny House, the event is “a fun family night out,” Benko said.
“A lot of people will get together with friends…they have a conversation, listen to the music, and have a nice time under the stars,” he added. The series has been running in some form for nearly 40 years, Benko said. It started out as a collaboration with Manhattan-based Music Performance Trust Fund, and has since evolved into a 12-concert summer series featuring a variety of local and area musicians. Sponsors this year include Rand Insurance Co., Hobbs Inc., Kaster Moving Company, the New Canaan Board of Realtors and Karl Chevrolet.
Town native Jim Pickering, a 1980 New Canaan High School graduate, recalls the exact day he started as a New Canaan firefighter.
It was July 3, 1989, and Pickering was 27. “The fire department is a brotherhood,” Pickering told NewCanaanite.com Monday. “I have made some great friendships over the years.” At the end of this month, Pickering will retire as a firefighter after 30 years of service with the New Canaan Fire Department—an agency he was inspired by his own family members to join. “My dad was a volunteer, and my uncle—my dad’s brother—was a career firefighter for the town of New Canaan,” he said.
Before starting his New Canaan High School Senior Internship in the Department of Public Works, Kevin O’Brien Brunner said he never thought about how the town ran. “I just assumed that things happened,” Brunner said on a sunny afternoon last week. “Being able to actually work here, I not only get to see what’s behind the curtain—how it actually runs—but I also get to meet the real people with real lives who are making it run,” he said. The NCHS Senior Internship Program has grown in its nine years that nearly all seniors participate in it. What’s more rare is for those college-bound teens to work the summer after graduating NCHS at their internship sites.