Chillin' Wit' Maiken Scott of WHYY Radio
A native of Germany, she tries to get her kids speaking her native tongue.
Chillin' Wit' is a regular Monday feature of the Daily News that spotlights a name in the news away from the job.
AN IMPROMPTU foot race is on, to the fire hydrant on Maiken Scott's street in Fairmount, her young son vs. his younger sister.
For Scott, host of WHYY's "The Pulse" and a longtime behavioral-health reporter at the radio station, it's a brief moment to take a drink from her "green shake of doom" and catch her breath. There's no such thing as sleeping in on Sunday mornings with young kids.
"They get up so early," she says with a laugh, taking a sip.
When Julius, 6, and Helene, 4, come back, she speaks to them in German, or at least tries to.
They're not always up for it.
"I try, I try," says Scott, a native of Karlsruhe in southwest Germany.
Inside the living room of the rowhouse that Scott shares with her husband, Graham Gormley, Julius gets busy with Transformers and Legos while Helene plants herself in Scott's lap, scrunching up her mother's hair in her little hands. Scott does a masterful job of balancing a cup of coffee through it all.
Philly, Scott says, is an ideal place to be reporting on health and science. And her husband, an adjunct professor at Villanova, says she's skilled at making complicated items easy to understand.
"She can really get to the gist of it," Gormley says.
This Sunday, however, is all about fun, not work. There's a birthday party and they have plans to visit some friends who moved from their neighborhood to Swarthmore. Before they leave, though, Scott and the kids will phone Germany to talk with her parents.
Scott came to the United States in 1992 after briefly working in radio in Germany. She got a journalism degree from Temple, started at WHYY in 1999 and co-owned a music studio in Port Richmond that was mostly a labor of love.
"I think I probably made a dollar an hour when it was all said and done," she says.
- Jason Nark