© 2024 WFIT
Public Radio for the Space Coast
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

The Explorer's Club Hosts Lowell Thomas Awards

 

The Explorers Club proudly presents the 2015 Lowell Thomas Awards Dinner, Visionaries of Conservation: Paradigm Shifts in Protecting the Planet. This year, the Lowell Thomas Awards celebrate explorers who exhibit excellence and innovation in conservation, with emphasis on emerging techniques and technologies that meaningfully contribute to our knowledge of the world and how we protect it.

First awarded on the occasion of the Club’s 75th anniversary in 1980, this year the 22nd edition will honor exemplary individuals at the forefront of conservation science.  more info

The Explorers Club was incorporated, and on October 25, 1905, the first regular meeting of the incorporators and subscribers was held during the afternoon. A meeting and “smoker” on that evening inaugurated the Club at its first quarters in the Studio Building at 23 West 67th Street. A year later the Club took up its headquarters at the Engineering Societies Building, 29 West 39th Street, where it remained until 1 March 1912 when the Club moved into new headquarters at 345 Amsterdam Avenue. Here, in an empty loft, the now rapidly growing organization had, for the first time, a home of its own in which to socialize and in which to gather its books, documents, trophies, and artifacts.

The Club began to invite both explorers returning from the field and visiting scientists to tell of their experiences. This informal practice soon developed into the smoker-lecture illustrated talks of the 1930s and 1940s. Today, our Calendar of Events continues to be filled with public lectures, members-only lectures, and other Special Events. Our members also tell their stories through Publications, Flag Reports, and our ECOH Oral History.

In 1912, The Explorers Club took upon its rolls all the members of the Arctic Club of America, to which it had sublet quarters and to which it was closely allied through overlapping memberships. The Arctic Club also had been organized by Henry Collins Walsh when he was one of a party returning to New York after the wreck of the Miranda off the coast of Greenland. This cruise—organized as Dr. Frederick A. Cook’s Arctic Expedition of 1894—ended abruptly when “a single solitary iceberg among the almost countless numbers that would be passed on the way would wilfully crash into the Miranda….” (Walsh 1896. The Last Cruise of the Miranda. New York, Transatlantic Publishing Co.). Walsh, Cook, and the other explorers promised each other to meet annually to celebrate their common bond.

Terri Wright held the position of General Manager at WFIT from 1998-2023.