(upbeat music) - This is Inland Edition.

I'm Lillian Vasquez.

On today's show, we're going to look back at the past year living in and through this pandemic.

My guest today to have this discussion is my longtime colleague, Rick Dulock.

Rick Dulock is KVCR radio's program manager, and he is also the fill-in guy for "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered."

Thanks for joining us, Rick.

- Thanks Lillian, yeah, we all wear a lot of hats around here.

- Small station, but mighty right?

- That is correct.

- So we're gonna look back as I just indicated, over the past year and how KVCR, who is here to serve the community, I feel that we really jumped in and said, how can we help, and what can we do?

So let's talk about some of the things that we, we tried to accomplish this year for our community.

- Well, first of all our staff in the building, I mean, that changed drastically.

So anyone that could work from home, we had TESS, which is the IT folks from the San Bernardino Community College District our licensee.

They helped set people up at home with laptops so that they could do their work remotely.

Now that isn't possible for all of us, you know, you're you're hosting two shows, I'm here to to run the programming and I have to be here and we have our hosts and operations people and engineers.

And so we were trying to keep it down 10 people or less in our building.

And we were able to pretty much do that.

We're starting to grow the staff a little bit back here but right at the beginning it was down to about 10 people or less.

And we accomplished that pretty well.

And what else did you want to talk about?

The programming?

- Well, well, how we served both the TV and the radio side, first of all, on the television side we kicked in with our, At-Home Learning program and that was our opportunity to partner with the County schools.

- That's right.

In fact, we at about the same time that we did that, we, we invited the superintendents of Riverside County and San Bernardino County in to speak on the radio.

And that's when we launched Inland Edition.

So kind of at the same time we launched Inland Edition.

We spoke to Ted Alejandre, who is the superintendent of San Bernardino County schools.

And then Judy White, who's the superintendent of Riverside County schools.

And they were the first two guests on Inland Edition because we kind of started with COVID in that, in that way, trying to serve the people who were all of a sudden at home trying to continue with school.

And I think you can talk about the programming that we did on television - Right.

So it's, it's really interesting.

We talked about putting the show together with our general manager, Alfredo Cruz, and we said, and, and Tony Papa, and we said, what can we do?

How can we do this?

We need to create a show within a week.

We talked about it.

The following week, we had our first guests which was Ted Alejandre and then Judy, Superintendent Judy White, she has since retired in this year.

So, but they, they were our first two guests to kick it off.

And really, we put that show together overnight.

And I know I've said this to other radio stations and they just can't believe that we could put a show together that quickly.

And the focus was COVID and we've tried to cover a variety of topics in that time.

The other thing we did and, and remind you that we did a lot of this within five days because COVID hit and we put so many things into place on the television side, we partnered or we did the same thing as other PBS stations had done throughout the nation.

And that is partner with PBS kids and put kids show making sure that there is content pre-K was already pre-K to I think second grade was already built with some of the shows like Peg plus Cat and Curious George, and all the shows that we had that already had a built-in curriculum.

But we added shows for programs for the fourth graders and the fifth graders, the seventh graders, all the way up to the 12th grade.

Programs like a Heal Housers Missions.

I know they study that in - It's either fourth or fifth - fourth or fifth grade their, their curriculum and the San Bernardino County schools and Riverside County worked with us.

They helped us create curriculum.

They then created it in Spanish.

We had it on our website.

We created a full page that had all this content there.

So if kids weren't able to get programming or get education, one way, we were trying to fill that void until teachers could get in the groove of what they were trying to do and everything let's, you know remember everything was working at such a fast pace.

So we, we changed our programming.

We added Tim Stytle on the, the TV side put all the billboards, telling people here's what's coming, we're changing our schedule.

Here's here's the programs for the kids to view.

This is what's coming.

And here is where you go for more education.

We, we shouted out and we said, check out KVCR.

This is what we're doing.

We're trying to serve our kids and the community.

So we did that.

And then graduation time came.

- Oh yeah.

- And obviously our 2020 grads got ripped off, of, of their commencements as they normally are, their proms and so much.

We then put on the many, we aired many of the ceremonies of the graduations for both college, San Bernardino Community College and Crafton Hills College and many of the high schools throughout the region.

And, you know, they'd give us a file that had they had shot it, but Tim, again, had to edit it prep it and get it ready for air.

And we were touring turning these around very quickly and filling our airways with the graduation.

So parents and grandparents could see their their student or be recognized for their accomplishments.

And then we got a grant from the Frieda Berlinski Foundation which allowed us to produce 26, one minute spots.

And each one minute we focused on five graduates throughout the Inland Empire that we had.

And we share, we aired that for about 30 days.

We also sent the parents the file so they could put it on their social media as we did as well, but have that, that little salute to our graduates for their keepsake.

So a lot was going on in a very short time and I'm feel really proud of our station and both sides, TV and radio, since we both work for both sides of what we're able to accomplish.

- And, and I think, you know, like the, the students that we highlighted, I think there was a hundred students five times 20, right?

And of course, that's not all the students, but that could could spark the initiative of families to make their own video and put it on social media so that their graduates could be honored at least by friends and family, you know through social media.

So I think some of that happened being triggered by what we were trying to do on the air to show - It was actually 126 that we were able to do.

And somewhere in English, somewhere in Spanish we have a staff here, Alfredo Cruz writes and speaks Spanish.

So he was able to edit those.

Yeah.

I just feel really proud about that entire project and yes, 126 is is not a lot of students throughout our Inland Empire.

But the parents that had there, that sent in the information, cause we, we did a shout out, right?

- Right - For people to send in your graduates and a picture fill out this form, go to our website.

And we did get, and we, we accomplish everyone who submitted something.

I made sure that they were - Something was on the air - Something was on the air to acknowledge them.

Cause I'm just so proud of what they had to endure this past year, a challenging time, for sure.

- Yes - So that's how KVCR television, KVCR radio, kicked in to serve our community.

- And the first two shows of Inland Edition were back to back.

March 31st with Ted Alejandre and Judy White, superintendent of Riverside County schools was on April 1st.

We were doing two shows a week there for a while of that.

(laughs) In addition to..., Lillian was also hosting her show, "lifestyles with Lillian Vasquez".

So pretty busy.

You've been pretty busy this last year or so.

- I have been pretty busy and fortunate that my health was good and I was able to come to work because I don't have a microphone set up.

I don't have a studio in my house.

So I was one of the, as was as, were you and David Fleming someone that was here five days a week doing what we could to keep content on the air and keep things moving along.

- That's five days a week when, whenever we're not here on the weekends.

- That's right.

And we typically do see each other here on the weekends as well.

This is my home away from home.

- Right.

- Okay.

In this past year, we, we got a grant from United Way and SoCalGas and it was to focus on small businesses in our community.

So we did again a call-out to say, if you're having trouble if you need some, if you need us to tell your story we want to tell your story.

And we had several businesses that submitted.

We weren't able to do all of them cause not all of them quite fit.

It was a little hard to do but we did get several businesses in our Inland Community where we're able to spotlight them.

We ran the spots in October and November.

And recently we reached out to them.

Perhaps you heard some of the spots on our air but we recently reached out to all of them.

And some of them got back with us and kind of gave us an update of how they're doing and how things are now.

Our goal here was to get the word out that they were keeping their doors open or doing their best to, to keep afloat.

Rick, can you go through some of the some of the businesses that we're going to hear from?

- Sure.

So the first business is A & R Tarpaulins Inc., they're in Fontana.

We've known folks from that business for, for quite a while.

Bud Weisbeart is the founder and former president of the company.

I think his wife, Carmen is the president now and here's Bud on how they were doing during the pandemic and his update after the small business spotlight - We're doing better than we've ever done in the history of the company because of the growth and particularly in the aerospace, but also the architectural work.

And we're making some great plans to expand where we can compete more effectively in the industrial and commercial area, particularly the truck cover market which has been impacted by low price imports.

So we've been going full speed ahead.

And we have so far in 2021, we had our biggest booking day in the history of the company.

And we've been really, really busy except for the one week that we closed down and decontaminated the entire company because of the number of folks who tested positive in our organization.

The future is as it has been for the last 44 years, we have a core competency to make things out of fabric, which are applicable to a wide variety of markets.

So that's been our strategy and make sure it paid off during the COVID crisis because we weren't niched into oblivion you might say.

- Bud Weisebart from A & R Tarpaulins in Fontana, the, on their website somewhere it says a lot of their work is in space.

They, they use kind of special fabric materials.

And so some of their things are flying around on some of their materials flying around on satellites and things like that.

And then, like Bud said, truck tarps which with the shipping companies, those trucks need covers.

The next business is Cynthia Baer.

She speaking about Baer Fitness Training in Riverside.

- The business has been doing great.

I was more in-person training at first but I just took it online.

We are able to train out of gyms right now in certain areas.

And it just happened to actually just take a turn that it ended up better for one, it, it gives clients more time to work, like if they are working or have kids that they have time to work out and with the way that we tracked for it to be online.

And then we do meet up here and there but it's basically mainly online now.

The future of my business is to grow online.

There's a lot of people who I've been doing it and we're now hiring other online coaches as well with their fitness training and just building a bigger branch to help more people.

- And that was one of the industries that really took a hit with COVID because gyms, people are in there touching equipment and, and, you know gathering there in a kind of a small space and passing each other and so gyms shut down but some folks moved online and had some success with it.

- And you hear her voice saying that, you know they're coming out stronger because of it.

So they pivoted and their pivot worked for their industry, which is, which is really nice to hear.

- The next one is Mito's Doner Kebap.

Now this is they've provide food.

They're out of Pomona and this is Jennifer Ward-Batts - We're doing okay.

We're squeaking by.

Our business is growing very slowly as more customers find us and try us out over time.

We were amassing a lot of good reviews which I think had to our high quality and our good service but business is still very slow due to the pandemic and my husband and I continue to work a lot of hours every week.

And neither of us gets a paycheck out of the deals but we are able to cover our other costs, our labor costs, and our rent and insurance and all that stuff without having any government assistance for which we didn't qualify because of the timing of our opening.

It's been rough, but we were ready to open in March, 2020.

And we ended up opening in May after a delay in getting the health department inspection because of COVID.

And ever since then, we have been able to stay open.

We cut our days down to three days a week once but we are back up to five days a week and we have several employees.

We are seeing a lot of improvement in the pandemic at the moment.

And we think that as people return to their normal work patterns and return to school in person in particular there are a lot of colleges and universities close by to us that we had expected to be serving food to a lot of those students.

And a lot of doctor's offices around us that have been operating either not at all or very small fraction of their usual capacity.

So we think has all of that returns to something more like normal that our business is really just gonna grow in leaps and bounds.

And we're also already starting to think about another location in particular.

We want to expand further into the Inland Empire.

We've had ladies drive over from San Bernardino with us and people coming from Riverside and other places.

So we are definitely thinking about expanding in that direction.

- And imagine if you were just ready to open a business and COVID hit.

- Right.

- And that's what happened to these folks at Mito's Doner kebap and - Jennifer did mention that she sent in a message and said that several people heard it on KVCR and she was happy and they would go in and say, Oh, we heard it on KVCR - They wanna help - Yeah and she said, what was so nice was to meet other NPR lovers or fans, you know?

So that was really good.

- Well, that's nice.

Here's Amy Malone.

She runs a public relations firm called Girl in Charge and it's located in Fontana - We weather the storm.

It's been a process.

There have been some tough times, but we got through it.

Things are looking up.

There's been a lot of prayer, a lot of prayer and just making adjustments to meet the needs of our clients and to meet, you know what their changes have been in their business but we're thriving.

We're starting to see ourselves move in upward trajectory.

One of the things I did was reach out to the small businesses and organizations to see how I could help them stay afloat and helping more businesses based right here in the Inland Empire as well because that's not something that I used to do.

Inland Empire was not originally my target client base but I'm really reaching out and trying my best to help women owned businesses in this area learn their brand and be able to reach their market.

But I think that if people start working together cross promoting collaboration, collaboration, you know that's just huge to me right now.

That's how we will keep our businesses thriving in the Inland Empire.

I really believe that.

- And this is someone who most of her business prior was in the Los Angeles area and in the entertainment business getting people's profiles out there, you know, even you know, actors and things like that, but she's in Fontana and the LA stuff kind of died out and she went hyper-local and she's being successful with that.

- Yeah that's great.

- Some great examples of a local businesses that were profiled on KVCR and those are some of the updates.

We have more, right?

- Yes.

There's a, there's three more that we want to hear from and these, they just sent in their comments.

So Rick is gonna share those.

The first one is Mark Monninger, longtime listener long-time supporter.

And they had some challenges there with Hopper's Office Furniture - That's right.

And with their update, they said, we're doing very well.

Business is almost back to quote unquote normal still waiting for more of the movie studios to reopen.

They catered to movie studios quite a bit with furniture.

They received the second round of PPP money which they say definitely helped to the accountant feel more comfortable in paying some of the bills.

And Mark said, we never closed our doors even during the height of the pandemic.

And as far as the future goes, he said last week Hopper's is considering hiring another delivery person.

So that's good news.

- That is good news.

Yep.

Okay.

Next up is Alex Reyes.

- And that this is from a New Color Screen Printing and we asked how they're doing now.

They said they're keeping busy printing and they've been able to gain new clients and have been able to keep the doors open, complying with city and County ordinances during the pandemic.

And now they're hoping to hire some wonderful new employees because they need help answering all the calls that are currently coming in.

So good news there as well.

- Yeah.

She shared also that people heard the story on KVCR and we know many of our listeners are strong supporters of those that, you know, that are on our air.

We support and support those that we hear.

And that love NPR as well.

Right?

- That's right.

The next business is Riverside Food Co-op and this is Salah Ponick.

She says operations are still going.

Membership continues to grow.

So it's a membership food co-op it's a little more slowly or less explosively than it was growing before the pandemic.

Demand for the crop boxes has kept pace with growth in membership.

So crop boxes is I guess one of the things that they, that they send out.

They're starting their major planning phase which includes a final marketing study and a financial proforma.

The proforma will tell them how much money they need to open a store and operate it until it begins to really pay for itself.

So they're getting ready to open a storefront after doing kind of that remote delivery type service.

It sounds like.

- So those were some of the businesses that because of a grant we received from United Way and SoCalGas we were able to tell more stories of our community and so good to hear from many of them and how they're doing.

In this last segment of today's show.

We want to share some clips from the past year and a personal story of how this pandemic affected our staff.

Rick, will you share some of the topics that we tried to cover throughout the year on Inland Edition.

- Well, we already talked about education, small business and some other things.

We took, We spoke to someone from the blood bank about the challenge in getting enough blood to supply hospitals and clinics.

And we talked about economics a few times with updates.

We talked about airport and air, air travel, - Or lack of travel - Or lack of air travel but in the Inland Empire with Ontario Airport freight was huge with all the mail, all folks ordering things online.

We talked to some nonprofits, like I said, we also talked to people about challenges for families like childcare and we talked to someone about domestic violence as well.

And of course we had an education special in there but we want to talk about some specific things and run a couple of clips.

You interviewed an ER doctor.

- Yes.

And that was Dr. Sam Zidovetzki from Riverside community hospital.

And we have a clip from that, let's play it.

- Gavin Newsome, our governor, was looking to find a group of doctors that were go to New York and help with this pandemic because they were among the hardest hit areas in the United States.

And so, you know, I volunteered to go, my co-faculty at Riverside community hospital agreed to take my shifts and allow me to donate my time to fly to New York.

So I thought that's what I needed to do at that time.

I was pretty nervous on the flight over there.

I didn't know at all what I was going to expect.

I had heard terrible things in the news about all the COVID and people on ventilators on the floor.

And so I knew that I would have to rely on my training as a physician to go into this new setting.

But you have residents there that are willing to help you with the kind of intricacies of a new system there was nurses from out of state who was there.

And they were very welcoming of physicians.

I think a big part of it is also they were wanting to tell their stories, you know, they want it to be heard.

They wanted people around the United States to know what they were going through and hopefully prevent what they were seeing from happening elsewhere, or having to watch patients.

decompensate without having a family members around unable to really talk to their families because of COVID.

So they were having to tell their family members what was going on through iPads and things like that that are very not ideal.

And that was heartbreaking for everyone.

- And that was Dr. Sam Zidovetzki, an ER doctor from Riverside community hospital who flew to New York to help in the height of the pandemic.

- That was a really touching interview.

It was a hard interview, but he was so wonderful to talk to.

And he shared so much.

And at that point he hadn't seen his elderly parents and still hadn't months later.

So I was glad to have that to share his story and then come back and still he is also on faculty at UCR and does his thing there.

And Rick, it, it kind of goes to show how important these first responders, the nurses the doctors, the, all those that are working in the medical field were and you know, firsthand.

- Yeah.

In early December, I, I was diagnosed with COVID the only person to my knowledge on the KVCR staff, that, that has had it.

So I'm pretty sure I didn't get it here.

I was observing masking and, and and the lockdown and, and everything else.

But somehow I, I caught COVID early December.

I was in Redlands Community Hospital and kudos to the doctors and nurses there.

They were burning the candle at both ends.

One of the nurses, I had said she rented an apartment.

So she didn't have to expose her children, her small children, to possibly getting COVID if she carried it home with her.

So it was, it was really an interesting experience.

I was only there for a few days.

They were waiting to get oxygen delivered to my house.

I just needed oxygen to help me breathe.

I didn't need a ventilator.

And I was put on steroids and, and vitamin regiment and, and I was fine, but for 41 days, I had an oxygen tube in my nose and I worked from home.

And also thanks to the folks at KVCR for taking up the slack while I was gone.

We were in close contact quite a bit.

I was still able to write scripts for Inland Edition.

And so I was working from home just as hard as I work here but it was a trying time, but, Oh my goodness the medical workers are amazing and they continue to work so hard.

Some of them were working six and seven days a week.

- Yeah.

Alright.

Let's hear from our economic buddy.

- This is Dr. Keil, Dr. Manfred Keil.

He is with the Inland Empire Economic partnership and he's also at Claremont McKenna school of economics.

- What is remarkable at the moment is how fast the numbers of new infections have come down.

It is much more so than many of us had anticipated.

I've had my two shots.

So we know that as of last week in Los Angeles County 21% of people between the age of 16 and 64 have had at least one shot maybe add to that a conservative estimate of how many people were infected with the virus and that would be 20%.

We could be approaching 40, 50 60% in terms of people who are immune.

And that would be herd immunity.

The fact that we were able to vaccinate this fast, that's remarkable.

That really gives me hope for the, for the near future.

- We talked to Dr. Keil three different times during the pandemic.

Is that correct?

- Yes - He was pretty early on kind of in the middle and then just last week.

- Yeah.

He was great.

He, he, he always answers my difficult challenging.

He says questions, but I just feel like the, you know, your your regular guy that doesn't know what he knows.

And so he's always been a breath of good information and we're so pleased to have him as one of our guests There were been so many guests over this past year that we're so grateful to, to speak with and share so much on the COVID.

So that's our show for this week.

To hear any of our past shows, visit our website at KVCRnews.org/inlandedition Rick, thanks so much for being with me to share our look and review our, our last year as a KVCR TV and radio weather through it.

- And we hope you keep listening and watching.

- This program was originally produced for 91.9 KVCR radio.

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