Monterey >> Eric LoMonaco had a simple message for the more than 500 students at Friday’s Pebble Beach Authors and Ideas Festival presentation.
“Wish it! Dream it! Do it!” the director of diagnostic and interventional radiology at Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula told that group assembled at Santa Catalina School.
LoMonaco was just one of the many presenters speaking during the festival started by Jim McGillen, co-founder of the Carmel Ideas Foundation and the Authors and Ideas Festival, with his wife, Cynthia. This portion held inside Santa Catalina School’s performing arts center was free and designed to expose under-served middle and high school students to accomplished authors, scientists and other career professionals.
On Friday, students from Alisal, Carmel, Gonzales, Monterey, North Monterey County and Salinas high schools were among the 2,200 public school students gathered.
This is the event’s 10th anniversary. Past speakers who have graced the stage there have included astronaut Jim Newman and former United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
“Every year what we try to do is find someone with a very different background and road to success,” explained McGillen, noting that over the last 10 years, he and his wife, along with others involved in the festival have made a conscious effort to reach out to those students from areas that are less likely to be exposed to such authors and field professionals.
For his part, LoMonaco, who regularly speaks to at-risk youth in the community, said he was there to tell kids that there disadvantages can actually serve to create opportunities. Now a member of the staff at Community Hospital, he once lived in his car after running away from a home in Los Angeles full of alcoholism and other family challenges at age 16.
“My goal was to graduate from high school alive,” explained LoMonaco.
On Friday he used props like a candy bar and a rubber band that once released can shoot high into the air to demonstrate to students the potential their life can have.
“Basically it’s a state of mind,” he regularly tells kids, using a green line on the ground to show the choice that can be made in terms of where you stand with your attitude.
“Our disadvantage is our advantage – that struggle, that’s our power,” said LoMonaco. “In anything you do in life, you have a choice.”
LoMonaco spoke after Dr. Mark Siddall, curator and professor at the American Museum of Natural History in the Institute for Comparative Genomics, otherwise known as “the leech guy” to his peers. He explained to students the DNA sequencing he’s done to understand the evolutionary relationships of leeches and his work to eradicate parasitic diseases.
Gonzales High School sophomores Paulina Rivas and Destiny Diaz were excited to hear all the presentations Friday.
“I’m looking forward to hearing all these great stories of their research and hearing about how they were able to come to their ideas,” said the 15-year-old Rivas. Diaz was more interested in the literary side of things.
“I want to hear about how they came up with their stories,” said Diaz, 14.
Now, 10 years after starting the festival, McGillen, 84, recalled his initial hesitation when he first came up with the idea.
“I saw the TED Conference and the Aspen Idea Festival and asked my wife ‘How come we don’t have stuff like this in Monterey?’” After mumbling about it out loud for a couple weeks, McGillen’s wife Cindy finally said “Why don’t you just stop talking about it and go do it!?”
McGillen contacted his close friend Frank McCourt, author of “Angela’s Ashes,” who agreed to be the festival’s first speaker. Later, writers like Doris Kearns Goodwin and John Grogan of “Marley & Me” fame came to speak.
Now, some 10 years later, McGillen can’t count the number of times he’s witnessed students hug one of the speakers after a presentation or leave the event with a grin on their face from ear to ear.
“I never thought I’d hear things like ‘I’d love to be an astronaut!’ coming from the mouths of these kids,” said McGillen. “That’s when I realized ‘I don’t have the ability to make things happen – but what I can do is plant the seed.”
As LoMonaco puts it to kids, “You get knocked down, keep going,” noting that the arrow to the top isn’t a straight line but fully of squiggly lines on the way to the top. “What you do, do it well. At some point, it will be your payday.”
The festival continues on Saturday and Sunday at Stevenson School in Pebble Beach. For ticket information and a schedule go to http://pbaif.com/home/
Carly Mayberry can be reached at 831-726-4363.
