Horror Star Bill Moseley, Entrepreneur Ed Chaffin, Walking Miracles' Brett Wilson, and Cheryl Lovell of Vassia Care
This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with horror icon Bill Moseley of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and much more. A lifelong horror fan spooked as a young man by the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Moseley recounted the delightfully unlikely break that made his career: while working on a Wyoming ranch, a coworker's random outburst inspired him to write and film a short spoof called The Texas Chainsaw Manicure, in which he also appeared. He got a copy to director Tobe Hooper, who was so tickled that he cast Moseley as the unforgettable Chop Top in the sequel, launching a run that would later include Otis in Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects. Moseley, who lives in Los Angeles, spoke warmly about Halloween as a celebration of monsters, admitting that he happily stays in on the big night, calling it amateur hour, and stocks up on the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups he loves. His affection for the genre and its fans was unmistakable.
Neil then welcomed entrepreneur, author, and executive coach Ed Chaffin for a Storehouse Media Group simulcast about his remarkable business journey. Chaffin clarified that the company was publicly traded rather than his own, but that he ran its largest division, some 1,200 employees and roughly 150 million dollars in revenue, part of an operation built through a dozen acquisitions from five million to three hundred million and sold for 1.4 billion dollars in 2007. In 2008 he reinvented himself as an international leadership consultant and executive coach, and, a storyteller at heart, he described printing out the flood of farewell emails he received at retirement, tucking them in a folder, and using them as the seed for the next chapter of his work helping leaders grow. He drew a sharp line between the many self-styled gurus who have never actually built or sold anything and the hard-won credibility of having done it, a distinction Neil underscored in introducing him.
The hour continued with a moving conversation with Brett Wilson, CEO and survivorship navigator of the Walking Miracles Family Foundation. A two-time childhood cancer survivor, diagnosed with leukemia as a toddler and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at nine, Wilson has spent fourteen years building the resources she and her mother never had. She explained that because she and her family faced the disease in rural West Virginia with little guidance, often driving two to three hours each way for treatment, she vowed as a child to create a center so others would not have to navigate cancer alone. Through Walking Miracles she connects families with patient navigation, travel help, counseling, and survivorship plans that link people to specialists who watch for the long-term effects of treatment, effects she still lives with today. Her book, I Am A Walking Miracle, carries the same mission, and the foundation can be found at walkingmiracles.org.
The program closes with a Storehouse Media Group simulcast hosted by Sherrie Price Clark, welcoming returning guest Cheryl Lovell to announce the launch of Vassia Care. Drawing on a background in health consulting, Lovell explained that the venture came together after she connected with an entrepreneur from a healthcare-technology background who wanted to bring real innovation to the way care is actually delivered. Together, she said, they are building Vassia Care to modernize the provider space and bring technology-driven innovation to the actual delivery of care, a story she had been eager to share since her first appearance.
