In collaboration and partnership with the Himan Brown Charitable Trust, the Key Biscayne Community Foundation created two community-building programs: (1) The Himan Brown Storytellers Project and (2) The Key to Giving Program.
The Himan Brown Storytellers Project
The Himan Brown Storytellers Project utilizes the art of oral storytelling through a series of talks, lectures, and interactive-programming to share ideas, history, and research with the community. The focus areas are science, art history, history, and healthy-aging. We provide a community channel of videos on these different events as well as pod casts from Key Rat Radio, which airs weekly.
The Key to Giving Program
The Key to Giving Program builds community by connecting individuals that care with nonprofits that make a difference. This is accomplished through giving individuals opportunities to share their time, talent and treasure. We work with pre-qualified nonprofits, creating unique-volunteer opportunities (time); matching donations to the nonprofits (treasure); and allowing individuals to support the nonprofits with their unique skills or services on an ongoing basis (talent).
Himan Brown
Himan Brown, who created dramas that used sound effects like a creaking door and a steam engine to enthrall listeners during the golden age of radio, died on June 4, 2010 at the age of 99.
During a span of 65 years Brown produced more than 30,000 radio programs, including “Inner Sanctum Mysteries,” “The Adventures of the Thin Man,” “Dick Tracy,” and “Grand Central Station.” Brown grasped “how sounds would trigger the imagination,” said Ron Simon, curator of television and radio at the Paley Center for Media. “He was one of radio’s great storytellers,” Simon said.
Himan Brown said “Radio drama is the most potent form of theater I know. It gives you an experience no other form of theater- movies and television – can duplicate. It’s the theater of the mind.”
In the 1950s, he bought Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players Studios at 221 West 26th Street (now Chelsea Studios) to produce his shows. When television arrived, Brown produced 26 episodes of the syndicated Inner Sanctum TV series, plus a daytime show, Morning Matinee.
Later, Brown produced They Were Giants, radio programs dramatizing the lives of such literary figures as Walt Whitman and H. G. Wells, and We, The Living, fact-based dramas about the lives of senior citizens.