Sylvia Bugg, 53, describes her job at PBS as “the chief question asker.” Officially she’s the network’s chief programming executive and general manager for general audience programming, a major position that puts her in charge of “any content that’s on PBS that’s not kids’ content,” she says. Shows she’s brought to air include fan favorites “The Great American Recipe,” “Next at the Kennedy Center” and “Southern Storytellers.” The Clarksburg resident spent several years at Silver Spring’s Discovery Communications before returning to her second employer out of college, PBS, where she has been since October 2020. We asked the chief question asker about what she’s learned along the way. 

I had a former boss who oversaw production programming [at Discovery] who was also a mentor. He said something in front of me to someone else: “Sylvia can do anything.” I was really just starting out in the cable world and beginning to understand how it all worked and where I would fit in that experience. And just hearing that really stayed with me.

What he meant was that I could grow into doing many things as it related to my career. At that stage of my career and my life I don’t think I had quite fully realized what my potential was, so when he said that, it meant so much to me. People will often comment on your abilities or your skill, especially early in your career, when you are not in the room, but to hear someone say that when you are in the room—well, it has stayed with me for 20 or 25 years. It instilled in me the confidence to know that if I really put my head down, worked really hard, kept being a really good listener, and surrounded myself with positive people, that I could do anything. 

There has always been this idea in leadership that you have to do it all. At some point in my career I felt I could do it all. I can do anything, right? But maybe not all of it. So in some ways those two ideas combined: Doing it all and doing everything. But that was not quite right.

The signs of a good leader are those who surround themselves with other great leaders and great teams. Early on, I probably did not fully understand that. I may have had situations where I was trying to juggle too much and really needed to think about what it meant to be a good leader. It really is a 360-degree experience. So often we have to manage up, we manage across, we manage down. But the whole idea is 360-degrees leadership, and for me, that’s been a valuable lesson. 

I try to think about ways to be influential and be a good contributor and be collaborative—and that will really take you far. That’s one of the principles I’ve tried to live by and lead by—through example. 

—As told to Buzz McClain

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This story, originally published at 4:12 p.m. July 12, 2024, was updated at 1:46 p.m. Aug. 7, 2024, to include broadcast times and streaming information.

Fans of Bethesda’s beloved and influential free-form progressive rock radio station, WHFS-FM 102.3, will be able to see what they were hearing when regional PBS station WETA broadcasts the feature-length documentary Feast Your Ears: The Story of WHFS 102.3 FM multiple times in mid-September.

The documentary is scheduled to premiere at 9 p.m. Sept. 14 and will be available to stream for free that day on the PBS app, according to WETA. It is also set to air at 2 p.m. Sept. 15, 9 p.m. Sept. 16 and 3 p.m. Sept. 17. Early streaming access on the PBS app with WETA Passport begins Sept. 1 . 

The deal was inked earlier this week, director Jay Schlossberg told MoCo360 the day of the signing.

The film follows the station through the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s and includes new interviews with local and national musicians, fans and record executives detailing the influence of the station, which went off the air in Bethesda in 1983. It will also air on the WETA Passport streaming library and will be available on-demand on the PBS Video App.

“We’re always looking for fascinating stories made by and about the people who call the DMV area home, and Feast Your Ears is a near-perfect example,” said Devin Karambelas, vice president of TV programming and operations at WETA in Arlington, Virginia.

The call letters WHFS were in the news last month when IMP Concerts announced the return of the HFStival music festival this year at Nationals Park on Sept. 21. The festival was a summer fixture for music fans when the radio station originated the concert at RFK Stadium in the 1990s, drawing up to 90,000 fans to hear bands played on the station. (The station is not involved with the new festival.)

The station, located during its ground-breaking peak in the 1970s and ‘80s in a condo at Triangle Towers at 4835 Cordell Ave., tweaked radio’s rules by letting the disc jockeys play what they wanted, which was just about everything mainstream radio did not. Readers may remember the 2016 Bethesda Magazine story, “When Bethesda Was Cool,” which prominently featured the station.

The format introduced area listeners to new and unknown artists in rock, country, bluegrass, jazz, as well as emerging genres including punk and New Wave. The station also played local artists who could not otherwise find airtime elsewhere, including the Slickee Boys, Tru Fax and the Insaniacs, and cult-favorite Root Boy Slim. The musician was managed by longtime local visual artist Dick Bangham, who edited and helped produce the film.

The station made local celebrities of its DJs, including Jonathan “Weasel” Gilbert, who served as consulting producer on the film and who lives in Bethesda; Cerphe Colwell; Bob “Here” Showacre; Adele Abrams; and David and Damian Einstein, sons of the station’s owner, Jake Einstein.

Director and executive producer Schlossberg, founder of the North Potomac-based production firm Media Central, said the film drew surprisingly large audiences during its movie festival tour around the country. Audiences saw how a 2,300-watt FM station created “a huge community of local and national musicians, music venues, record shops, health food shops, stereo stores, and a huge population of die-hard fans,” he said. “What they created there morphed into something very special and rarely, if ever, repeated in any other city.” How the DJs did that—purely through the music—is what fascinated Schlossberg, who briefly worked at the station in 1972 as a high school student.  

During the 2024 D.C. Independent Film Festival, more than 400 tickets were sold for a screening at the Avalon Theatre on Connecticut Avenue, he said. The film went on to win the festival’s 2024 Best Documentary Feature award.

“Whether you were tuned into HFS in its heyday or are just generally a fan of American history and pop culture, Jay’s film is sure to delight, as it did at festivals in the U.S. and Europe,” Karambelas said. “We’re excited to share it with a wider audience across our broadcast and streaming platforms.”

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New York native Melina Bellows now lives in the Palisades neighborhood of Washington, D.C., where she applies her considerable experience as a journalist at Ladies’ Home Journal, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan and as the former longtime publisher of National Geographic Kids to her own Fun Factory Press, a local firm specializing in children’s nonfiction. Bellows, 58, lives by words of wisdom delivered to her in her 20s by two people you might have heard of.

I was going through a bad breakup with a boyfriend, and there I was in Chicago interviewing Oprah [Winfrey] for Ladies’ Home Journal. And because it’s Oprah, you have a real conversation, you know? And she told me that when anything bad happens to you, it’s actually a gift if you ask the situation what it has to teach you.

That really did a couple of things for me. First of all, it stopped the pity party. And instead of saying, ‘Oh, I didn’t get that job’ or ‘I made a fool of myself for doing that,’ it puts you in the power seat to say, ‘What can I take from this? What can I learn from it?’ It has you thinking about the future instead of thinking about the past. That was really powerful to me. If something bad happens to you, it’s not necessarily bad: It has something to teach you.

When Oprah gave me that advice, it made me think about the way I spoke to myself, and it made me aware that I had a really negative voice running in my head. I was suddenly aware of that and I could turn it off, or at least ignore it. ‘Don’t believe everything you think,’ right?

I have since learned that Oprah got that advice from someone who mentored her: Dr. Maya Angelou. Oprah said she was whining or crying about something, and Dr. Angelou said, ‘You stop that crying right now. This is a gift.’ So Dr. Angelou gave her tough love, and Oprah passed it on to me and I continue to pay it forward to my young interns.

A second story: I interviewed my all-time idol, [author and filmmaker] Nora Ephron, who took me under her wing a little bit. In my 20s, I was looking for love and going about it in all the wrong ways, and Nora taught me—like Oprah did—when something bad happens to you, it’s actually great, because you can make a great story out of it later. She taught me to take the bad stuff that happens to you and use it. 

She also said the worse the thing is, the more people want to hear about it. She said people love hearing about terrible things that happen to other people, and she should know: She wrote Heartburn, which was about the demise of her marriage to [journalist] Carl Bernstein. And it became an incredible movie starring Meryl Streep.

This story appears in the May/June edition of Bethesda Magazine.

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Bethesda native Paul Sheehy, 60, is co-owner with his brother and sister of the ubiquitous 27-dealership Sheehy Auto Stores (he runs the used car division). He also co-owns Old Glory DC, the local Major League Rugby franchise that plays its home games at the Maryland SoccerPlex in Boyds. Sheehy still lives in Bethesda with his wife, Nicky; their three sons and daughter have recently flown the nest. We asked Paul, businessman and player in the 1991 Rugby World Cup, about who said the right things at the right time that changed his professional and sporting life. Not surprisingly, he cited the wisdom of two rugby coaches—and the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi.

I was playing for a rugby team, and the coach, Clarence Culpepper, sent the players a letter saying what he expected from us: It was “supererogation.” I didn’t know what that meant, so I looked it up. It means simply “to do more.” And that was very similar to my dad [Vincent Sheehy III], who started [Sheehy Auto Stores], and how he always looked at things: Hard work is the foundation of what you have to do in our business. So, whether it was rugby or starting a car dealership, I just simply had to put in the extra work. And I thought that was hugely important.

I’m reading When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi, and there’s a quote of his in the same vein, which I love: “Leaders are made, not born.” They’re made by hard effort, which is the price all of us must pay to achieve any worthwhile goal. 

I also think about “that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” because at one time I had to run one of our tougher dealerships. It was hard for 10 years, and I’d say I came out of that far better than if I’d had an easier opportunity. …It really comes down to hard work and putting in the hours and leading your team.

Another lesson came from rugby. In 1993, I was captain of the Washington rugby club and we were playing for the Rugby 7s national title. USA Rugby disqualified us and the (Bethesda-based) Maryland Exiles because of a paperwork error. We had the best teams that year, so I’m livid. We drove to the national game and protested in the middle of the field. When we finished the protest, the coach of the USA national team, Jack Clark, told me, “When decisions are being made by people whose boots haven’t been on the ground in a while, we’re in deep trouble.” 

I’ve taken that to apply to my own business. I always talk to our people who are actually meeting our customers and ask them, “What are you really seeing? How are (corporate) decisions impacting you?” You go to the source. The decisions are being made by me and my brother, but I always talk to our people who are actually doing the hard work every day up front, getting their feedback and their input. That’s how we run our company. I’ve told Jack many times that was probably the best advice I’ve ever gotten. 

This story appears in the March/April issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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Nothing, it seems, can stop humorist, columnist and novelist Drew Magary from publishing an apparently daily torrent of topical and timely copy about sports and culture for Defector, SFGate and other outlets. The only interruption to his ceaseless flow occurred when a 2018 brain hemorrhage put Magary in a coma for two weeks, and even then, he wrote a book about it, his sixth, The Night the Lights Went Out: A Memoir of Life After Brain Damage. The 47-year-old Minnesota native lives with his wife and three kids, ages 17, 14 and 11, in Bethesda and tells us a vital life lesson he learned decades ago—as Santa Claus.

In elementary school we had a Christmas pageant and they asked if anyone wanted to be Santa Claus, and I was already an attention whore, so I was like, “Me, me, me, me,” and the teachers said, “OK, you get to be Santa, and you get to run down the center of the aisle when the kids are singing ‘Here Comes Santa Claus,’ ” and I’m thinking, This is going to be great, everyone’s going to see me and they’ll love me.

So I got a pillow and I stuffed it up my shirt and I lined up in my Santa suit and waited in the back of the auditorium and they start singing ‘Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus,’ and I start running down the aisle. But…I had not secured the pillow inside my Santa suit, so five seconds into running down the aisle it starts coming out, and I’m grabbing at it to keep it from coming out and everybody starts laughing—all the kids are laughing. That’s how I remember it, because when you’re a kid, it’s the end of the world. No kid ever wants to be embarrassed; it’s the worst feeling in the world.

The truth is, now I write things that end up being wrong and make me look silly and I’m glad that I got over my fear of embarrassment. I think Americans in general are too afraid of being embarrassed, particularly online—nobody wants to look bad online, which is hilarious because it’s online. No one will remember it 30 minutes after it happens; it’s ephemeral. But Americans are constantly in fear of being embarrassed and being made to look silly, and that’s funny, because it’s OK to look ridiculous. But people get very self-conscious about it anytime they get embarrassed. They feel it defines their public image, because in the internet age everyone has a public image now and everyone is very, very careful about grooming it on Instagram or anywhere else on social media. Everyone is fussy about their self-branding.

If you’re always afraid of embarrassing yourself, well, then you’re really just infantilizing yourself. You’re going back to me, in second grade, embarrassing myself.

If you asked me to be a Santa now, I would go ahead, and I would run down the aisle, and if the stupid pillow fell out, I would just roll with the punches. I think we’re sort of unlearning how to do that in the internet age, how to be vulnerable. And that’s bad. There’s a lot of good that happens from those moments if you’re willing to see them that way. 

This story appears in the January/February issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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Pat Pacious is president and CEO of Rockville-based Choice Hotels International, which counts some 625,000 rooms in 7,400 hotels in 45 countries and territories. As one of 11 children growing up in Montgomery County, Pacious (who declined to provide his age) realized a Navy ROTC scholarship was key to paying for college, which is how he came to learn a hard lesson as a young officer in charge of a ship in the dead of night. Here’s what he learned when he “lost the bubble.”

One of the biggest things that happened to me that has been key to managing my career happened in the Navy. You get qualified in the Navy to stand on the bridge of the ship and maneuver it in a fleet exercise. This was probably my third or fourth time doing that, but I took the watch without being prepared. About 15 or 20 minutes in, I had, what they call in the Navy, “lost the bubble.” Ships were moving everywhere, and I had no idea what we were doing or what we were going to do next. And the embarrassing thing is when you have to call the commanding officer and say, “I need you up here on the bridge.” 

You’re humiliated in front of everybody because you’re supposed to be the guy in charge. It’s 2 o’clock in the morning and you can’t see things other than lights or blips on a radar screen, so it’s not obvious what’s happening out there. Where’s your ship in the fleet? Where is it supposed to be in the next move? It’s a dangerous game: There are 450 people on that ship who are depending on me to make sure we don’t run into another ship or get in the wrong place. The consequences were major, and it was clear to me early on I better call the commanding officer and tell him I’m in over my head here.

That mistake really taught me. There’s an old adage, “prior proper planning prevents poor performance”—there’s a Navy version that’s a little more salty—but it’s really about being prepared for when you are going to take on something that you haven’t done before. In our business today, if we’re going to do something major, it’s all about that prior planning and thinking a couple of moves ahead.

At the end of the day, the commanding officer said, “You did the right thing. Calling me was the right thing instead of letting it cascade into a bigger problem.”

I’ve never forgotten that experience. I was probably 21 or 22 at the time. It’s a reminder to me that you learn from those mistakes and you say to yourself, Well, the next time I’m going to be better prepared. If there would be one mistake early in my career that really set me on a different trajectory, that would be it. 

This story appears in the November/December issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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Former Maryland state Del. Mark Shriver (D) is president of Don Bosco Cristo Rey High School and Corporate Work Study Program, a private Catholic college prep institution in Takoma Park. The Rockville native and Georgetown Prep grad lives in Bethesda with his wife, Jeanne, to whom he has been married for 31 years. The two are empty nesters now that the final Shriver teen has flown the coop for college (all three opted for Boston College). He is the son of philanthropic luminaries Sargent and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, whose legacies as leaders for the marginalized and underprivileged clearly have made a lasting impact.

I never had a “road to Damascus moment” where I got knocked off my donkey, but the framework from which I was born and raised around is a saying from the Scriptures, “That you know to whom much is given, much is demanded.” And I think that speaks to, at least to me, from a place of guilt. It took me a long time to move from that place of feeling like I had to do something; to me it comes from a place of duty and responsibility and not as much from joy. I don’t want to say I was guilt-ridden, but to find joy, for me, is an ongoing mission. 

I believe deeply in a couple of lines from the Scriptures, one from the Old Testament Book of Micah: “This is what Yahweh asks of you; only this: to act justly, to love tenderly, and walk humbly with your God.” I love the word “only,” as if to act justly, love tenderly, and walk humbly is not that hard. It is, you know. God only asks you to do “only” these three little things as if it’s easy. It’s a great, joyful challenge, and for me, for a long part of my life, it wasn’t joyful. I use that word “joy” because you have to find joy—it’s not necessarily happiness or fun.

I am now trying to come from a place where it is better to give than to receive. And if you can act justly, love tenderly and walk humbly with your God, that’s a lot better place to be coming from. 

I think I receive more than I give every day. I don’t feel as guilty about it as I did 20 or 30 years ago. I try to come at it now from a position of gratitude and then share it joyfully, whatever it is.

My job as president of Don Bosco brings me joy. Our students work one day a week at jobs, for example, at Ernst & Young or Children’s [National] Hospital, and they go to school four days a week. (Editor’s note: Two Don Bosco students interned in 2022-23 at MoCo360.) They give up a lot if they must work and miss basketball practice or band practice—these young people are earning their own scholarships. They’re working hard and they’re inspiring. That brings me joy. They’re really pursuing the American dream; the goal is for them to go to college and get through college, and for most of them, nobody in their family has gone to college.

My father always told me the hardest thing to do is listen. If you really listen, it’s exhausting. Most people don’t listen—they judge and give their opinion immediately. They pretend they’re listening, but they’ve already formed what they’re going to say as compared to really listening to where that person is coming from or what they are saying. I try to listen more. I try to be present in the moment. And I try to share joyfully. 

This story appears in the September/October issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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Six-time Emmy winner Eun Yang, 47, has been anchoring the news desk each weeknight since April on NBC4’s News4 at 4 and News4 at 6 after 12 years making mornings brighter on News4 Today, the region’s top-rated a.m. show. The University of Maryland alum grew up in Silver Spring and attended Paint Branch High School, and now lives in Washington, D.C., with her entrepreneur husband, Robert Kang, and their three teens. 

Part of how I got to where I am is just the nature of who I am as a person. I’m very curious. I see things and hear things and experience things and wonder: What’s going on there? Who is that person? Why does she get to do what she does? Why did he say that, and what does it mean? Those sorts of questions came to me from a young age, and my inquisitive nature led me to this field. I’m curious. I want to know why things are the way they are. I want to get to know somebody. I feel like when I get to know somebody, I really want to know why they made the choices they did, because I really believe everyone has a story.

I come from an immigrant family. I didn’t think I could be a television news anchor. My parents are immigrants from Korea. They worked extremely hard, sacrificed so much, and while I knew that broadcast journalism was something I was interested in in my heart, it wasn’t practical in my parents’ eyes—or, to be honest, in my eyes. It was like saying you wanted to be a rocket scientist, right? It just seemed out of reach for so many reasons. When it came to applying for a [college] major, I considered going into political science or something that would lead me to law school, something more practical in my parents’ eyes. The summer after graduating high school, I kept asking myself, What do I want to do? And nothing else filled my heart with desire like journalism, and I decided, I’m going to go for it.

I told my parents I was going to study journalism, and it was very tough for them. They looked at me like I was crazy. My parents were blue-collar workers. My mom worked in a factory; my dad was a mechanic and owned his own shop—hardworking immigrants, working six, seven days a week, who did not go on vacation and did not complain. They found gratitude through all of that. 

I knew it was a tough choice, but I was going to work my butt off. I needed to make sure that the choice I made would be true to myself, that I would honor myself, but at the same time honor my parents and make them proud, too. That connection is very strong for me. I really felt the strong need and duty to make my parents proud. 

Do I feel fortunate and blessed? Yes, and I use the word “lucky” sometimes, but I have worked very hard. Yes, I’ve had an incredibly unique and interesting path. But if you look at that path, it’s not paved with gold. I have busted my butt and paid my dues to get to where I am. And I don’t regret the path that I took.

This story appears in the July/August issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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Chef Spike Mendelsohn, 42, runs a restaurant empire from his Bethesda headquarters. He launched PLNT Burger in Silver Spring in 2019 and has since added 12 more locations, crafted the menu for Vim & Victor at the new St. James Bethesda fitness center, and oversees several D.C. restaurants, including Good Stuff Eatery, Santa Rosa Taqueria and We, the Pizza. 

I’ve been in the kitchen since I was about 12 years old, so I’ve learned a lot. But when I was younger, I had a much more ego-driven style of management, and I think that maybe was born from training in the north of France, in a kitchen with a brigade of 60 chefs. It was an intense kitchen, with lots of yelling, and things would get thrown at you if you didn’t do something right. I kind of carried that into my own career. I used to be that chef, and it felt good to me for some awkward reason because I was getting respect. Maybe I liked the idea of having power. But it didn’t do justice to the business or the employees—it would do the opposite, and that was a big mistake.

Eventually I was able to conquer and learn from that over the course of many years. I learned our kitchen staff is like your second family and you have to treat every position with respect, whether you’re washing dishes or plating something or you’re the front-of-house manager—you have to really make an effort to make everyone feel comfortable at work. We run a vegan burger chain that has 13 locations, and we do a lot of culture training—we focus on it a lot. 

And you know, once we decided to focus on it, we saw so much more positive performance. There’s a lot of turnover in the restaurant business, but we started to see so much better job retention, keeping the same faces in our business, and I wish I would have done that earlier in my career. I wish I would have done that. 

I’ve made a lot of mistakes, you know. This new (planet-friendly snack) business that I’ve entered, Eat the Change, well, we had a product to develop: mushroom jerky. It was my first go-round doing that product line, and we just hit the market too soon. We really weren’t ready, both from packaging or taste point of view. But we were really hungry to get the product out there, and we worked a little bit too fast. That came back on us a bit. We learned to make sure when you hit the market with any product that you’re really ready and that you understand what you’re doing. 

An overarching lesson is that you make mistakes because most of the time you’ve taken some type of a risk. I invite risk in our companies, and I invite people to make mistakes. You learn a lot more from your mistakes than you do from your successes. That, to me, has always been a pillar. 

I’m not saying, “Hey everybody, take a bunch of risks and make a bunch of mistakes.” But when you make those mistakes, you really have to dig in and learn about them. That’s what I’ve learned about making a lot of small—and big—mistakes over my life: Don’t be so quick to just move on without studying what got you there, because that will earn you success the next time around.

This story appears in the May/June issue of Bethesda Magazine. 

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Imagine being inside a gigantic game of Wii tennis. The idea is to bat the balls coming at you in the direction of targets but—and it’s a big but—you don’t use your hands to control the paddle that moves up and down against the wall.

Your entire body is the controller: You make the paddle slide by moving back and forth inside the game, and as the balls come more frequently and with greater speed, you are sliding to and fro with wild abandon, all in the name of scoring points and not looking bad in front of the others in the room. 

But, of course, you gave up all pretense of that when you put the goofy space-age visor-antenna deal on your head as you entered the room.

Welcome to Immersive Gamebox, a fast-growing franchise that opened last year in Arlington, Virginia, as Electric Gamebox. (The next closest location is in Manhattan.) The games are team-building events, with players working together to complete each level. The Alien Aptitude Test: London ’84 that we played is a brisk 60 minutes. Up to six, paying as much as $49.99 each (based on age), can fit into the bright cube, with each player donning a visor that’s outfitted with motion tracking sensors.

Once you get the hang of them, let the games—including those based on Angry Birds and Netflix’s Squid Game—begin. With one eye on the scoreboard and another on the ever-moving targets, the challenge increases with each new level and game. The beer for sale may or may not improve your score.

Ballston Quarter mall, 4238 Wilson Blvd., Unit 2233, Arlington, Virginia. Open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday. immersivegamebox.com

This story appears in the March/April issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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