setting volume permissions

[pkaplan1 at comcast.net]

I have an external USB disk attached to an LTS6.06 box.  There is a vfat 
partition and two ext3 partition, but normal users can't write files to any of 
the partitions.  The mount points (/media/hd1, /media/hd2, and /media/hd3) are, 
as expected, owned by root and this can't be changed even with sudo.

Since this is a single user system, only one normal user (and root) needs to be 
able to r/w/x to the volume.  What do I have to enable this functionality?
TIA
Paul