When the water’s rising, the smoke is thick, and the chips are on the curb, there’s one guy you want on your team and it’s Dee Rambeau. He’s the co-host, along with John McGimsey, of “The Empowered Community” program on KWVH every Friday morning from 7 to 9 a.m.
Offering what community radio ought to provide, the show “informs and educates listeners how to be more prepared, more resilient and more sustainable in the face of a societal disruption — whether that disruption is political, medical or climactic,” he told me in a recent interview. “We talk about having food, water, clothing and equipment ready if something happens, not only for ourselves and our family, but for our neighbors.”
On last week’s show, for example, his guest was Garrett Allen of Wimberley Water who talked about water consumption for 2024. Other guests inform listeners about generators, rainwater, emergency networks and other equally important issues.
“You could say that both Johnny Mac (John McGimsey’s radio handle) and I are closet preppers,” he said. As residents of Wimberley, a town too small to qualify for a large network of first responders that cities enjoy, being prepared is a smart way to live.
Dee moved to Wimberley in May 2016 and by August, he was involved with KWVH. He is the former co-host of the “Breakfast Taco” morning show with Phil McKeon, and has gone on to host other shows, one of them with Abby Vasek, HGTV’s celebrity interior designer.
A self-proclaimed “hard charging entrepreneur who was set in his ways,” Dee spent 20 years in sports television and another two decades as an entrepreneur developing software called mediaroom.com, later bought by PR Newswire. In 2004 PRWeek magazine named it the “Innovation of the Year.”
Dee is a take-charge kind of guy who plays as hard as he works. He likes a good cigar, a great motorcycle, a hard workout, and golf, as well as his wife, the lovely Ann that he recently married. He’s also warm, funny and grateful to the people of Wimberley whom he finds “remarkable.”
“There is magic here. There is empathy, strength and compassion in this community of perseverance and miracles.” He can, he says, trace everyone he knows in town to KWVH. Rambeau is a board member and is currently writing a book about KWVH, calling it a “very chewy story filled with so many anecdotes.”
JOHN MCGIMSEY AND DEE RAMBEAU, CO-HOSTS OF THE EMPOWERED COMMUNITY, AT KWVH’S 2023 DERBY DAYS. PHOTO BY TERESA KENDRICK
