Category: Interesting Info

DJ Tommy Dean aka Tom Salisbury


I just heard via an IM from a friend at WERU that a friend of mine, Tom Salisbury or as I knew him DJ Tommy Dean (or Cowboy Tommy Dean) passed away suddenly today at an event at the American Legion in Ellsworth, ME. He was 50. I don’t know any more details but.. this is horrible. He was one of those people who was just overly enthusiastic about EVERYTHING he did. He organized a number of big country music concerts up here each year, all benefits for others. He was really into ‘Indepedent Country’ music, not the big artists but the smaller artists scraping to get by. On that end we had lots to talk about since really at that level country/folk isn’t that different. He would often ask me to dedicate Sally Roger’s ‘Lovely Agnes’ song to his wife Agnes. Last I saw him late last month he had a special guest in studio for his show and we couldn’t talk long but I had suggested that maybe we work on getting him a whole stage at the WERU Full Circle Fair. He was interested but wanted to see his big April 6 benefit event through before he could talk about it more. I was hoping to catch him at my next show at WERU later this month, which would have been the last time I’d see him until next fall since he didn’t do his show in the summer when he had to work at his bakery in Bar Harbor.

I suspect there will be some big benefit concerts coming up soon for Agnes & his son Tom (aka TD) and daughters. I’ll do all I can to help with these.

I’m pretty shocked by this. Totally unexpected. Totally weird. Totally sad. Huge loss.

He was a really good guy, and a real genuine person. Humble to a fault, I was always arguing with him that he wasn’t just ‘an old cowboy’ and that he could probably do concert & even organization full time if he wanted to. He was really an amazing guy, the more I think about his passing the more I’m realizing how special he was. I feel honored to have known him.

See this article in the Ellsworth American for more information about him.

He also worked at a bakery in Bar Harbor, The Cottage Street Bakery

He did lots of benefits for Christmas For Families.

I’m sure the latter two sites will have lots of information about him soon. In searching around for info on him on the web I found the following photos.




Update – I found a copy of Tommy’s theme song performed by the Moore Brothers on their website:
Theme song for DJ Tommy Dean’s “Independent Country” show in Bangor, Maine.
Performed by The Moore Brothers
Written by John Moore
WMA or MP3

UPDATE 4/26 – I just found this at WERU, it’s Tommy’s closing theme song ‘Cowboy Tommy Dean’ by Brian Gelina, Everard Dodge & Rosanna Rogers

Cowboy Tommy Dean MP3

\"What Would Tommy Do?\" Bumper Sticker idea

Time Banking epiphany of the day

Before I get to the heart of this letter let me make a few definitions and updates so people have some idea of what I’m writing about here.

Time Banking – A Time Bank is a alternative to cash, where 1 hour of my time is worth 1 hour of someone elses time. For example I can spent 5 hours making a website for someone and then spend those hours getting someone to do some carpentry in our house or housesitting/dogsitting for us when we’re travelling. You can read more about this at http://www.timebanks.org/

I’ve been a member and a ‘kitchen cabinet’ member (which means I’m one of the advisory board) of my local Time Bank, the Downeast Time Bank (http://www.downeasttimebank.org/). We’ve been trying to figure out why we haven’t gotten more members and why things seem to be rather stagnant. I know personally that I’m not comfortable asking someone I don’t know to do something so thus I really only use the Time Bank with friends that I would have probably asked favors of anyways. So what does it take to get people to use this model? It’s a neat idea but it’s not catching on.

So this morning, while driving into work this morning my geeky mind started merging my current day internet/web social networking experience with the Time Bank model and I came up with this epiphany. Time Banking needs a ‘social’ networking model implementing ‘degrees of trust’ along the lines of what is used on LinkedIn (my LinkedIn profile is at http://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbaya). For example, I want to be able to mark the people I trust/know in the Time Bank as my 1st degree contacts, and their direct contacts would be my 2nd degree. I could mark my requests or offers to only be offered to those I know/trust personally (1st Degree), or to folks they know/trust (2nd degree). I think any further degrees out than that is a bit silly, the next level out would be ‘everyone’.

Along these lines I’ve also been pushing for our Time Bank to implement some ‘neighborhoods’ where you could basically trust a group for your offers/requests, for example I could mark my offer/request so it’s only visible to anyone who is part of my church or other non-profit organization. The same 1st Degree / 2nd Degree trust could be extended there, in that I trust any organization that members of the local Unitarian Church trust etc.

The argument against this idea is it ‘fractures’ the time bank, but if people aren’t using it as is, and they would in the fractured model, then hey.. they are using it, this is a good thing imho. You either swim & grow or you stagnate. Things seem to be stagnant right now, something needs to change.

The question is, will the folks writing the timebank organization software, Community Weaver (http://community.timebanks.org), ‘get this’ idea and actually implement it? All I can do is write this and send it around, the idea will either sink or swim. Here’s hoping this idea is a swimmer, I think this is what needs to happen to get this to catch on more.

-Matt