Retired now, he lives in the rural Helderbergs and believes some of the worst suffering happens in rural areas.

Wallace, a lawyer who advocated for kinship family rights, had a hand in creating a dozen laws in New York state that gives grandmothers and other kin rights in caring for children whose parents are unfit.

“Why I got into kinship care and meeting grandparents raising kids is that my home was really a broken home,” Wallace says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “My father was an alcoholic, worked on the waterfront. He was a good person but, when he drank, it was a nightmare …. We grew up in a state of toxic stress.”

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The mother-daughter duo together coach a crew of dragon boat paddlers.

Matthew, the mother, is an art professor at Union College. Judge, her daughter, is a certified personal trainer who led her mother into the sport.

“A dragon boat is a 40-foot long, very narrow racing boat,” explains Matthew in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “That became standardized in the 20th Century but it’s based on a thousands-year-old Chinese tradition of racing the big rivers in China.”

A dragon boat has 20 paddlers, two to a seat, with a person in the stern who steers and a person in the bow signaling directions, traditionally by drumming.

“It’s the national sport of China,” said Judge “so it’s quite big in Asia and has subsequently spread to Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.”

It came to the United States through Canada, she said, citing the work of a doctor in British Columbia who changed prevailing medical opinion on exercise for breast-cancer survivors.

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She has been the pastor of the New Scotland Presbyterian Church for 25 years.

“The church is a place to try to understand what is something larger than myself, both within that community of people, and with God,” she says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

She describes her becoming a pastor as a journey.

Cameron grew up in Alabama, in a time and place where women weren’t ministers. That time is not necessarily distant as this month delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting voted to amend their constitution to say their churches must have “only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture.”

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Hams have a saying as they try to inform the public that amateur radio operators use the latest technology: “We like to say, ‘It’s not your grandpa’s hobby anymore,’” says Fritze in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

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He started a farmers’ market in Guilderland, near where he lived, and has a second market in Albany.

It’s a vital need for the community, Abraham says, to support local farmers while getting fresh produce and knowing where your food comes from.

He opened the original Guilderland market in 2018. Five years later, Abraham is starting a new venture: Meet Your Neighbors Open Market started this month and will run every Sunday in June from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. as a “test run,” he said.

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He inhales the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and Langston Hughes, and breathes life into their words as he recites them as naturally as if he were exhaling. Their words, entwined in his thoughts, his very identity, flow naturally in conversation.

Slade writes his own poetry, reams of it, imbued with what he has learned from a lifetime of reading literature but uniquely and personally his.

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“When horses are in pain,” she says, “they need help. They can’t tell us with words, but they certainly tell us with body language and action,” which can include biting, bucking, and kicking.

Martin has been familiar with horses since before she was born. Both of her parents rode horses. And, Martin’s mother rode horseback when she was pregnant with Martin, which she says made her comfortable in utero with the rhythm of riding.

In her book, “The Horse Less Traveled,” Martin writes that horses were the glue that kept her family together.

She describes her father as a “real hillbilly” who did trick riding at a mountain resort for city folk, which is how her parents met.

“My mother’s obsession for horses and my father’s rebellious James Dean personality. It was a perfect match!”

As a very young child, Martin writes, she would spend hours quietly observing horses. “There was something going on very deep inside me, as if I could hear them, as if I knew their thoughts. This was a connection that was very personal. This was a window that they allowed me to see into their world.”

As she grew older, Martin rode her pony, Candy, everywhere. “Being a quiet little girl my pony gave me courage and confidence,” Martin writes. With Candy, she felt secure, and that’s how people knew her as she traveled her neighborhood on horseback.

“I always felt like even my own feet were foreign to me,” Martin says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “But being on top of a horse was more natural and comfortable. I was fascinated by them.”

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When it is Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

The character Joseph wears his coat in this weekend’s school production in Voorheesville — where it takes on a life of its own, swirling in its many-splendored colors.

“It definitely has a stage presence,” says the woman who created the coat, Megan Viscio.

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She collects them from often well-off kids who don’t use them and redistributes them to children who can’t afford them.

Rifkin was hooked, she says, by a little boy from the Caribbean.

“He didn’t speak much English, was desperate to play the violin, and his school did not have enough violins to give him … He was lonely,” Rifkin says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

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A neighbor said, “Hey, if you title it to me, I can register it in my name and I can then park it.”

The widow didn’t know where to turn. She thought maybe she should have a contract with the neighbor.

She called 518-400-5544. That is the number for the Legal Hand Call-In Center. Any Schenectady or Albany county resident seeking help can call that number or email SchenectadyAlbany@LegalHand.org.

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The less lawn she mowed, the more native plants grew up. “They would bloom and then they’d be covered with bees,” she said.

Similarly, plants in her garden beds had been purchased at a garden center and came from other parts of the world.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/02032023/mckeon-says-nurturing-nature-native-plants-something-everyone-can-do

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A sheep farmer in Berne, Vincent had a brain tumor removed in January of 2020.

“After I got out of my surgery, I had just the most horrendous vertigo that you could ever have,” recalls Vincent in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “It was really hard.”

Vincent, a registered nurse, had regularly commuted to New York City where she worked in intensive-care units.

Now, she couldn’t stand up for long. “When I stood up, I was teetering. I looked like I was perpetually drunk. I couldn’t drive, so I couldn’t get down to my job in New York City.”

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“I like being challenged,” she says in this week’s Enterprise podcast of what motivates her.

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She has spent up to a thousand hours each year for more than five years working, for free, to help them.

Asked why, Galvin says simply, “They all need help.”

Pressed further, she says, “Because I speak Spanish and because I’m a lawyer, it’s a perfect set of skills to do this kind of work. So how could I not?”

Galvin, who lives in New Scotland, has responded to prejudice against immigrants, undocumented workers, writing in a letter to the Enterprise editor, “Undocumented immigrants are contributing members of our society and deserve to be treated as such.”

She says in this week’s Enterprise podcast of the kids she represents, “They work hard and they do jobs nobody wants to do.”

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It’s not an exaggeration.

Pitcher, now retired from his Army career, was stationed in Tehran in 1978. His wife and their three young children — ages 5, 7, and 9 — were with him.

Pitcher had spent a year learning Persian-Farsi before he left. At first, life was peaceful, with the shah’s pro golfer teaching Pitcher’s two young sons to golf.

But everything changed in a matter of months. That’s when the Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Khomeini threw out the pro-Western shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, ending the historical monarchy. Pitcher was the provost marshal in charge of security — and had eight installations overrun in 48 hours.

“We got captured … They weren’t killing us or our families, which was good,” says Pitcher in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

Find more at altamontenterprise.com

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As he talks about the art and science of origami, which he came to late in life, he sounds like a poet.

“The greatest gift you could ever give a child, as far as I’m concerned, is to introduce them to folding paper ….,” he says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “You can fold paper for the rest of your life and you will still have some discovery … It’s a river. It reminds you you have a brain and you have fingers … It’s something that no other living thing can do.”

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She has done a lot while still in her 20s.

She owns the weekly gig economy newsletter, the Forum, as well as Fortuna Forum, a suite of online financial resources; she is a CNBC contributor; and she hosts the Freelance Fairytales podcast. She says she has over 900,000 followers across social media.

Fasulo describes her book, “Freelance Your Way to Freedom: How to Free Yourself From the Corporate World and Build the Life of Your Dreams,” published by John Wyle & Sons, as “a generic freelancing Bible.”

She had such fun writing the book, she says she has a running list of 20 other titles ready to go right now. Ten of them are business topics, including side hustles, freelancing, the business of want, and virtual assistants.

She also loves philosophy and writing poetry and, noting there are many books about dogs, wants to write about her Siamese cat who was her constant companion for 20-and-a-half years but died last summer.

Fasulo spoke to The Enterprise from the United Kingdom, where she is traveling through England and Scotland, which has inspired her to want to write fiction or fantasies, Fasulo said.

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She was born in the Filkins farmhouse on Joslyn School Road in 1930, in an era when not a lot of women were involved in politics.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/11252022/peggy-warner-says-our-country-gives-people-right-choose

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Miller, who lives now in New Scotland, was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and raised, with three brothers, on a farm in a small town on the outskirts of the city. It was a “very, very poor area,” Miller says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

Read more at https://altamontenterprise.com/11132022/life-time-pacifist-takes-children-seriously

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“I had cancer and I got myself through chemo and I wanted to help other people,” Dollard says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “When I closed my business, I wanted to find someplace to help somebody run their business.”

She found that place at the Guilderland Chamber of Commerce. Dollard is the chamber’s new executive director.

Read more at https://altamontenterprise.com/11042022/chamber-leader-dollard-creating-connections

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“She said, ‘You know, I worked my entire life. And now I don’t have enough. And I don’t know what to do.’”

McDonnell said, “It breaks my heart.”

He knows what it feels like to need help.

When McDonnell started his career at Veterans Affairs, he was a full-time government worker, married with two kids. “And I qualified for WIC,” he said of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. “I qualified for reduced lunches at school and I missed qualifying for food stamps by $25 a week.

“The first time I had to walk into WIC …,” he said, “‘Humbled’ is probably not even the word for it … It sucks, honestly.”

He wants Guilderland residents to know they will be welcomed at the food pantry. “If they’re hungry, they’re not going to leave that way …. One person at a time, we can change the world.”

Read more at https://altamontenterprise.com/10282022/guilderland-food-pantry-director-says-if-you-need-us-were-here

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She has signed up for a green burial.

“I’m going to go in… a totally biodegradable wool blanket and plant flowers on me. No chemicals. No embalming fluid …. That’s what we’re supposed to do,” says Dwyer, a registered nurse, in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

Dwyer was raised in Guilderland Center by a mother, a nursing professor, who “was a big follower of Rachel Carson and ‘Silent Spring,’” she said, referencing the 1962 book that documented the harm caused by pesticides and sparked the modern environmental movement.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/10272022/wendy-dwyer-holds-hope-she-fights-against-all-odds-better-world

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Throughout that half-century, Alan has been involved either driving school buses for Berne-Knox-Westerlo or supervising the transportation department.

He has also served Berne as supervisor and as a town justice.

Millie taught elementary school children for 35 years, along with coaching cross-country and track, and then went on to earn certification as an emergency medical technician to help with the Helderberg Ambulance squad.

Alan says he can pinpoint the event that made him get involved in community service. In 1977, as members of the Berne Reformed Church — another long-time commitment for the couple — the Zuks were involved in an activity at the church hall when the fire siren sounded.

“Basically, every man left our activity to go fight the fire except me …,” Alan recalls in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “That’s when I joined the fire company.”

Read more at https://altamontenterprise.com/10072022/millie-and-alan-zuk-lifelong-care-community

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“We didn’t even know. I woke up one morning and I had text messages and Facebook messages from the entire Altamont community,” said Raza who owns a Pakistani restaurant in the village.

Heavier monsoon rains and melting glaciers combined to put half of Pakistan under water, affecting 33 million people and causing losses of over $40 billion.

“We woke up watching the news and realizing that a third of the country was wiped away …,” Raza says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “We were seeing millions, millions of people had become homeless, lost their homes, lost their lives.”

Raza’s family, living in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, were safe. But news videos brought the horror into their homes.

“Flocks of people just walking in these big bodies of water … and the one guy I remember saying, you know, we’ve been walking for ten, 12 hours … and one of the kids is bound to get tired,” said Raza, describing the news clips. “And I’m thinking in my head, ‘Oh, my God, how are they going to get through this? You know, if somebody gets tired and there’s water all the way to their knees, how are they going to sleep?’”

Raza contacted The Enterprise in hopes of raising public awareness about the need for aid. “I don’t think that it’s getting the amount of publicity and the amount of help that they should be getting,” she said.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/09292022/nadia-raza-follows-her-passions-fashion-pakistani-food-and-helping-after-her-homeland-was

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“It is a way of acknowledging every piece of the Earth … and to center yourself in your role as a human being in the Earth, not on the Earth, but in the Earth, and how it influences who you are and how life happens,” she says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

Walsh is now the associate director of the Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy where she oversees an initiative to honor the indigenous history of the Bozen Kill Conservation Corridor. On Friday, a ceremony was held to celebrate new kiosk signs at the Bozen Kill and Wolf Creek Falls Preserves to inform visitors of the land’s history.

https://altamontenterprise.com/09252022/indigenous-ways-knowing-are-totem-sarah-walsh

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“Inside the Green Lobby: The Fight to Save the Adirondack Park” has just been published by the State University of New York Press.

Melewski, who grew up in Halfmoon, has an abiding love for the Adirondacks and continues to be vitally interested in the park’s welfare.

“I was very fortunate to have an opportunity to have an outsized influence for one individual …,” he says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “I often describe myself as a political scientist with a law degree and, as a political scientist, to be able to be at the front lines of influence and change over a long period of time, especially on things that are important to all of us, like the environment, I just couldn’t possibly imagine a better career outcome for me.” 

One of his important contributions, detailed in the book, was to help end, or at least limit, the acid rain that was killing Adirondack wildlife.

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She sees communication as a common thread in her life, taking her from parts she played in the school productions of her childhood through a career as a speech and language pathologist, to a never-ending passion for community theater and now founding a company to make a documentary about local activists.

Howard first trod the boards as a Voorheesville Elementary School fifth-grader, playing the part of Alice in “Alice in Wonderland” — her mother made her costume.

Before she graduated from high school, Howard had directed Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit” and donated the proceeds to the Heldeberg Workshop.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/09122022/chris-howard-documenting-stories-world-needs-hear

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“I planted about 15 trees this year, little saplings and things all over the place secretly,” she says, improving open land.

Barry explains in this week’s Enterprise podcast that she was removing a friend’s Oriental bittersweet, which kills trees “because it strangles them,” when she discovered the maple saplings.

“I’m growing them so I can go get more next year …,” she said. “Oh, it's fun!”

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/09062022/laura-barry-plants-hope-along-native-trees

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“The bond is that strong,” said Connolly in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

The three women are not related by blood. Rather, they are part of what they describe as a “church family.”

They belong to St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year.

Williams, who does academic advising at the University at Albany, came to the church when her daughter was a baby — she’s a teenager now. But Williams still calls herself a “newbie.”

That’s because Zell, who recently retired from Tax and Finance, and Connolly, a stay-at-home mom who works now at Bella Fleur in the village, have each spent a lifetime in the church. Both of them were baptized at St. John’s and married in the church.

Zell’s father was a member of the church and so was her grandmother. Connolly, who has four children and seven grandchildren, says her children who live elsewhere have come back with their babies to have them baptized at St. John’s.

Read more at https://altamontenterprise.com/08262022/st-johns-celebrates-150-years-community-caring-and-cooking

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He has just published his first book, “The Power of Plus: Inside Fashion’s Size-Inclusivity Revolution.”

The book is “For the women who changed my life and the people who saved it.”

“I wanted to dedicate it to the women the book is about,” Russo said of the plus-size models he interviewed, explaining the first line of the dedication.

“But then I really stepped back and I thought … What’s the purpose here? I had gone through such a difficult period in life, from age 18 until I was about 21, where I felt like I had no purpose, where I felt I was lost.”

Talking to the courageous women who shared their stories, Russo said, helped heal his own wounds.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/08222022/power-plus-russo-was-healed-telling-stories-courageous-women

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He makes marbled paper — the sort of colorful patterned paper that you see in centuries-old books — the traditional way.

“It is a profession and I am a professional,” Bielik says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

He is also a performer, an entertainer.

“I’m an act,” he says.

Bielik will be, for the first time, at the Altamont Fair this week, making marbled paper.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/08152022/ringmaster-bieliks-show-about-preserving-historic-way-marbling-paper

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So does Rachel, also 13, the central character in the book Shreya wrote, “The Hidden Realm.”

“I definitely do think that she has come from me,” said Shreya of the character she created. “I have been into art from the time I was super young. It’s always something I’ve been really passionate about.”

Creating art, Shreya says in this week’s Enterprise podcast, brings her peace and joy.

Read the full story at: https://altamontenterprise.com/08052022/what-happens-when-girl-loses-herself-her-artwork

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“I think that description has remained accurate over the years,” says Parker.

At age 17, she has graduated with honors from Hudson Valley Community College. 

Her applications to four-year colleges have gone well and Parker plans to start college next fall as a junior studying math with perhaps a second major in computer science.

“I have many different interests,” Parker says in this week’s Enterprise podcast, naming medicine, social sciences, and natural sciences among them.

Read the full article at https://altamontenterprise.com/08012022/parker-encourages-others-never-be-afraid-make-your-own-path

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At age 40, she was named world champion at the Scottish Masters Athletics International World Championships held last month in Moncton, New Brunswick in Canada.

Tessarzik is using her fame to help strong women feel good about themselves — through social media. At the same time that she is controlling the image of at least one woman in sports, she is also earning money from her posts that allow her to travel to far-flung competitions — and to support her as an athlete.

Tessarzik, who now lives in Ohio, grew up in Guilderland and remembers playing football, basketball, and pond hockey with “a bunch of boys” in the neighborhood.

Being tall and strong, she said, “I definitely didn’t get picked last, that’s for sure.”

Every year, her family would go to the Capital District Scottish Games, held at the Altamont fairgrounds. This year, she’ll be competing in those games on Labor Day weekend.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/07292022/fighting-patriarchy-one-throw-and-one-post-time

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“There’s a lot of kids moving up to the Hilltowns that weren’t here before,” she says. “And I want them to know … how it’s changed.” She said of the stories in her book, “This may be like grandparents or great-grandparents of some of the kids because our community is so tight-knit up here.”

Her book is called, “Then and Now … Growing up a Hilltowner.”

Hanley, who was pursuing her Gold Award, Girl Scouts’ highest honor, was looking for something impactful and long-lasting that she could do for her Hilltown community.

“I talked to a bunch of people and history kept coming up …. That’s not something I know,” Hanley says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/07222022/ashlyn-hanley-learned-her-hilltown-elders-and-wrote-book-their-life-stories

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“The Crucible of Public Policy: New York Courts in the Progressive Era,” his latest book published by the State University of New York Press, examines cases heard by the state’s top court, the Court of Appeals, which Dearstyne posits was arguably the second most important in the nation, behind the United States Supreme Court.

In the early part of the 20th Century, the Court of Appeals served as a place of test or trial where forces interacted to cause change — a crucible.

Dearstyne’s book shows how the high court mediated among the competing rights of the legislature to regulate through laws, of business owners to manage their businesses without government interference, and of individual New Yorkers to exercise personal liberty.

What he strove to do in his book, Dearstyne says in the week’s Enterprise podcast, is “to present the evidence and say to people … read the decisions for yourself.”

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/07182022/go-back-source-urges-historian-dearstyne

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“As a kid, I remember building jumps on the side of the road …. We used to build little mountain-bike trails,” he said.

Now grown, Conley just hosted the first Helderberg Cliffhanger, a mountain-bike race that drew over 350 participants to Thacher Park on Father’s Day.

Conley came up with the name for the competition, a nod to the escarpment’s limestone cliffs as well as a reference to the suspense of racing. He also designed the race logo, which features mountains with a silhouetted cyclist hanging from a steep slope.

“I’m a builder,” said Conley, “so I like to build and design and create things.”

“The coolest part to me,” Conley says in this week’s Enterprise podcast, “is that 160 of those registered were kids from 3 years old on a strider bike to 8 years old in a mountain-bike group through high school.”

Conley himself has a 7-year-old son, Pierce, who raced and he also has a 5-year-old daughter, Charlize.

He promoted the race with Andy Ruiz, whom he called “a local cyclist legend.”

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/07122022/passion-cycling-led-conley-organize-first-helderberg-cliffhanger

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The most important first step, he says, “is just reach out to somebody.”

Prue and his wife, Olivia Cohen-Prue, struggled to start a family for five years — including three cycles of in vitro fertilization and two miscarriages — before their daughter, Eliza, was born.

To cope with the anxiety, Prue did massive amounts of research, and he wrote. The writing — a way to process what he was going through — was cathartic, Prue says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/06242022/keegan-prue-shares-his-struggles-starting-family-so-other-men-will-feel-less-alone

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Take women’s suffrage for instance.

In 2017, as New York was celebrating its centennial for women’s suffrage, the William G. Pomeroy Foundation notified historical societies across the state about a grant program for markers.

At a Lansingburgh Historical Society meeting, Philippo recalled, the secretary mentioned the Pomeroy letter and said, “We didn’t have any suffragists here, so we’ll just move on to the next item on the agenda.

“And I said, ‘Wait a minute … Let me just look first.’”

Philippo discovered Lansingburgh, which is now part of Troy, had a significant suffragist, Caroline Gilkey Rogers.

She spoke at local and national women’s rights conventions and her home was nicknamed the Equal Rights Hotel because, whenever there were out-of-town suffragists visiting for conventions in the area, they would stay with Rogers, Philippo learned.

Rogers attempted to vote in Lansingburgh in 1885 and recounted the experience in remarks before a State Assembly Committee on Grievances. Philippo unearthed this account of her comments in an 1885 report in the Daily Saratogian:

“A short time ago a call was issued for all taxpaying inhabitants to come out and vote upon the question of introducing the water works into the village. Being very anxious for this measure to be carried I went with a lady friend to the polls, but our ballots were refused, and when I pointed out to the inspector that ‘all taxpaying inhabitants’ were urged to come, he said: ‘oh that does not mean women.’”

Philippo applied to the grant program and got a marker for Rogers.

Now a trustee of the Bethlehem Historical Association, Philippo had a similar experience when in 2020 he urged a museum exhibit to commemorate the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote nationwide.

The association president “didn’t think we really had much in the way of items that we could put together for an exhibit,” he recalled.

Philippo did the same thing he had for Lansingburgh, checking databases to look for suffrage activity in Bethlehem and its hamlets.

“I quickly found that, here again, there certainly was suffrage activity in Bethlehem,” he says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

Read the full story at altamontenterprise.com

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Early one Sunday morning, she heard a broadcast on National Public Radio about No Mow May.

“It captured my imagination,” says Howie in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “And I thought, ‘Well, that’s easy.’”

As she talked to The Enterprise last Friday, she likened her lawn to a prairie or to undulating ocean waves. Howie named the many wildflowers flourishing there and declared, “I just think it’s beautiful.”

Howie lives at the end of Prospect Terrace so her neighbors have not been bothered by her wild lawn, she says. She revels in seeing new flowers as she walks to her compost pile.

Her husband, Dick Howie, who died a year ago, on June 2, used to love to be outdoors, mowing their lawn. “He was quite a particular man and liked things orderly,” says Howie. “On the other hand, I’m not particular. I’m not very orderly …. I like the wild things.”

The Howies were happily married for 63 years. They met in the Ramsey High School band; she was a freshman, playing the French horn while he was a junior who sat nearby, playing the trombone.

No Mow May, which encourages people not to mow their lawns during the month of May so as to increase plant diversity as well as nectar for pollinators, was launched by the charity Plantlife in Great Britain in 2019. It has caught on in many places in the United States with some entire cities signing on.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/06132022/ellen-howie-understands-consequences-care

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Mulan spares her grandfather by disguising herself as a boy so she can become a warrior in his stead.

“Somehow I cannot hide who I am, though I’ve tried,” Harbeck sang to the Miss America judges in Peekskill. “When will my reflection show who I am inside?”

“I think the whole point of the song is a girl talking about how she feels like she can’t be herself because she’s trying to please other people,” says Harbeck in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “And I think … that as girls in the organization, we’re obviously teens and we’re growing and we’re learning … I really wanted to have a piece that myself and other girls could relate to, so that’s why I chose that song.”

Harbeck, 17, is a Guilderland High School junior and Miss Capital Region Outstanding Teen. She has a passion for singing, she says, and sings in both the concert choir and the chamber choir at her school. She also played the part of Clarissa in the school musical last year, “Little Women.”

Read the full article: https://altamontenterprise.com/06062022/emma-harbeck-says-everyone-beautiful

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He notes that there is no diagnostic category for hate, and it is wrong “to assume that hateful people, whatever their color, creed, or stripe, must be mentally ill.”

People suffering with mental illness are more often the victims rather than the perpetrators of crime, he says.

As violent crimes are increasing not just in Albany County but across the nation, Giordano says, “The solution is not just going to be a mental-health solution …. If we are alienating and isolating and stigmatizing and discriminating against portions of our community, that’s going to come with a cost … One of those costs may very well be violence.”

Giordano also says, “I think people who cause other people pain are very likely in pain themselves.”

For 11 years, Giordano has served as the mental health commissioner for Albany County. It’s not an easy job. The work took on new dimensions over the last two years as the pandemic, with isolation-inducing restrictions, caused more mental-health problems.

Giordano, who grew up in New York City, and says his heart is still there, majored in philosophy as an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

“Some of the questions that are dealt with historically in philosophy are about how to live, what’s right, what’s fair, what does suffering mean,” says Giordano in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

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“This is an activity about community,” says Perlee, a lawyer and Albany County legislator who describes himself as an amateur historian.

He has joined forces with Joe Burke, director of the Altamont Free Library, and Dan Barker, curator of the Altamont Archives, to help village residents delve into learning about their homes — regardless of the building’s age.

“The activity itself can help build community,” said Perlee, who worries that the decline of civic participation is bad for the state of our democracy.

“The Kiwanis clubs and local garden clubs and church memberships and the things that used to kind of bind people together aren’t as prevalent,” Perlee says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “People are much more inward.

“They’re much more tied to their own social media … They’re on their phones … People go to their respective silos and Democrats only talk to Democrats and Republicans only talk to Republicans.”

Perlee, a Republican, hopes the Every House project will bridge those gaps and let villagers see that they share a common history.

He’ll give a presentation on May 25 at 7 p.m. at the Altamont Free Library to provide “a common toolkit” to anyone who is interested. A Facebook page will be set up so those doing research on their homes can communicate with one another.

Read the full article at https://altamontenterprise.com/05222022/perlee-hopes-empower-villagers-tools-research-history-their-homes-and-so-build-community

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When she and her husband, Leonard Laub, moved to Westerlo, they immersed themselves in local issues and made a difference.

Now they have sold their historic farmhouse and are packing to move to southern France.

“We saw a wonderful community with wonderful people,” says Kohl-Laub of their move to Westerlo. “In this community, basically, it doesn’t matter what you have as long as you’re good. If you’re good folk, they like you. And it’s been wonderful living here.”

Among other commitments, Kohl-Laub chaired the first Republican committee in town in modern times, founded in 2008. Now, for the first time in decades, Westerlo has a Republican-dominated town board.

Kohl-Laub was also instrumental in securing a doctor for the rural Heldeberg Hilltown after the legendary Dr. Anna Perkins died.

Leonard Laub, worried that the town wasn’t protected from a developer’s land grab, his wife said, chaired Westerlo’s planning board. Laub said in 2007, when 160 of Albany county’s 400 farms were in Westerlo, “We are agricultural here.”

Laub also said then that agriculture was the economic, cultural, and aesthetic base for the town and would be the “keystone” for Westerlo’s first comprehensive land-use plan. A plan was, after several twists and turns, finally adopted last year by the current town board.

More recently, Laub served on a committee that secured $1.7 million from the federal government to lay down fiber-optic cable and greatly expand broadband access in Westerlo. He had seen all the cars parked at night near the Westerlo library, his wife said, realizing parents were there so their children could use the library’s internet to do their schoolwork.

In this week’s Enterprise podcast, Kohl-Laub said some people had wanted her husband to run for supervisor. “We could make a mistake and not know it because our bones aren’t here,” she said.

Read the full story here: https://altamontenterprise.com/05142022/she-packs-france-kohl-laub-reflects-life-change

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Gifford, the conservation director for the Albany Pine Bush Preserve, got his first job at the preserve literally setting fires, controlled burns.

Fire, he explains in this week’s Enterprise podcast, recycles nutrients in a way that benefits rare plants.

“You can think of wild fire almost like instant decomposition,” he said, likening it to what happens in a compost pile — but almost instantly.

“Fire is taking nitrogen in particular, but also phosphorus, calcium, potassium, and other nutrients and releasing them into the soil and making them available for plant uptake,” he said.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/05092022/neil-gifford-brings-back-birds-and-butterflies-brink-extinction

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Read the full article at https://altamontenterprise.com/04292022/col-christine-rem-offers-home-women-vets-who-need-one

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She was “not looking one way or the other to find something, just seeing where the primary sources led me,” Serfilippi says. “And I cannot ignore where they were leading me.”

The primary sources — including letters and cash books in Hamilton’s own hand — led her to this conclusion: “When those sources are fully considered, a rarely acknowledged truth becomes inescapbly apparent: not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally.

“The denial and obscuration of these facts in nearly every major biography written about him over the past two centuries has erased the people he enslaved from history. It has also created and perpetuated a false and incomplete picture of Hamilton as a man and Founding Father.”

Serfilippi, who works as a historical interpreter at the state-run Schuyler Mansion in Albany, had those words published on the state’s website as part of her carefully researched 28-page paper, in the fall of 2020.

A firestorm followed.

Read the full article at https://altamontenterprise.com/04202022/serfilippi-upended-hero-hamilton-narrative-so-those-he-enslaved-could-take-their-place

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Lawrence thought he’d buy a book on Adirondack place names at the Blue Mountain Museum to answer the question. But there was no such book.

So he wrote one.

He and his wife, both retired teachers, operate as a team, Lawrence says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “We just enjoy life,” he said — traveling cross-country in their camper, gardening, playing with their dachshund who is named Adirondack.

“What’s with Those Adirondack Mountain Names?” is Lawrence’s second book. His first book, “Sailor of the Stars,” takes students through the process of astronaut training — beginning with the application process and ending with a post-mission press conference.

Lawrence says, as a child of the sixties, he grew up on the space program, watching every space launch. He was a paperboy for the Watertown Daily Times in northern New York and “read every article on space.”

That also inspired him to be a writer, Lawrence said. He wrote for the Space Launch News and once involved his eight most gifted writing students in interviewing and writing about astronaut Eileen Collins and Albany Med doctor Heidi DeBlock, who monitored the hearts of astronauts when they landed at Kennedy Space Center.

“I was even able to interview my favorite folk singer,” Lawrence said. Judy Collins had written a song, “Beyond the Sky,” for Commander Collins and her crew before their launch in July 1999.

His current book starts with a song written by a friend and fellow teacher, Dale Wade-Keszey: “Marcy was some important guy,” go the lyrics. “But the rest, can you tell me why?”

Lawrence, who has retired from his career as a Guilderland teacher, taught fifth grade at three elementary schools — Lynnwood, the old Fort Hunter, and Guilderland — before teaching at Farnsworth Middle School. He’s stayed in touch with some of his students and next month is going to the wedding of a former sixth-grader of his.

Read the full article at https://altamontenterprise.com/04192022/retired-teacher-educates-others-adirondack-mountain-names

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Rowen was fishing once after a tropical storm blew through the area and caught a beautiful rainbow trout. Another time, he was fishing when, he recalled, “All of a sudden, the stream bottom started to move and I looked closer … There was a snapping turtle about 15 feet upstream from where I was that was about the size of a manhole cover.”

Rowen finds the many encounters he has with fish and with nature very appealing.

In this week’s Enterprise podcast, recorded on April 1, the traditional opening day for trout season, Rowen provides a primer for would-be anglers.

Read the full article at https://altamontenterprise.com/04122022/after-lifetime-fishing-rowen-still-finds-surprises

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Right now, he’s organizing the annual Council of Georgist Organizations conference to be held this year in Albany, from July 15 to 17.

Batt’s signature sign-off on his emails is a line from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, “The fox knows many things — the hedgehog one big one.”

“I tend to see things in very global perspectives,” says Batt in the week’s Enterprise podcast.

Over his lifetime, he has embraced three paradigms to explain the world.

The first was the cognitive developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, understanding the stages of learning and moral development that people go through.

Soon after graduating from college, where he studied political science, Batt was among the very first Peace Corps volunteers. He lived in a small village in northern Thailand and didn’t speak English for two years.

“Their ways of thinking were very limited by their own experience ….,” he said of the villagers. “That led also to their cognitive limitations. But of course, those people who were more sophisticated were the ones that had exposure to cities and literature and history.”

In his thirties, Batt found a new way to look at things through the integrative psychology of Ken Wilbur. Wilbur’s integral theory maps human experience with a four-quadrant grid, along the axes of “individual-collective” and “interior-exterior.”

The paradigm that currently enthralls Batt is a modern take on the 19th-Century political economist Henry George. Batt became enamored of George’s theories after he stopped teaching as a university professor to serve for a decade on the New York State Legislative Tax Study Commission.

Read the full article at https://altamontenterprise.com/04012022/bill-batt-says-wed-have-fairer-taxes-and-richer-economy-if-we-followed-henry-george

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“When I was younger, I was forced to run by my parents,” said Scanlan in this week’s Enterprise podcast. Her mother expressed the belief, “You have to get comfortable being uncomfortable.”

“I think that’s very true,” said Scanlan. “You have to get past the pain and you’re going to be like, OK, this workout is going to feel awful, and I might vomit afterwards. But it is a feeling like no other, like when you finish a race … and you go, wow, I just did that.”

Barnhart, on the other hand, said, when she first started track, her parents knew nothing about the sport.

She started as a student in Coach Christopher Scanlan’s gym class, she said, and, with his encouragement, decided to give running a try.

Once Barnhart got into track, she said, her parents did, too, and then her younger sister “fell in love with jumping, which she’s very good at,” Barnhart said.

The team of four girls — Barnhart, Scanlan, Maeghan Hickey, and Parker Steele — placed third in the 4x55m Shuttle Hurdle Relay at the New Balance Nationals, held in New York City from March 11 to 13.

They finished the relay in 34.99 seconds, placing them fourth in the United States and first in New York — while also breaking their school record and the Section 2 record.

This is Scanlan’s third time, and Barnhart’s second time being named All American.

Read the full article at https://altamontenterprise.com/03252022/all-american-athletes-have-deep-love-their-sport

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In this week’s Enterprise podcast, Burnside describes the sound of each member of a platoon pulling forward the bolt on their rifles at the exact same time.

“You can only hear one sound … It is awesome,” he said.

Burnside recently competed with the Shock Platoon of Norwich University at the Mardi Gras Drill Competition hosted by Tulane University in New Orleans. His squad got perfect scores and placed first both in the Color Guard and Squad Basic competition.

He’s in the Shock Platoon, Burnside said, because it gives him a sense of discipline and order.

“If you can’t do a right face correctly, you’re not going to be able to go through and lead a group of people. If you can’t hold yourself accountable to not move when you’re told to not move, you’re not going to be able to go through under pressure … to focus and lead people,” said Burnside.

He concluded, “Do the small things right and then you do the big things better.”

Burnside, who graduated from Berne-Knox-Westerlo in 2019, knew from a young age he wanted to be in the military. Both his father and uncle served in the Air Force. He spoke with a recruiter at the age of 16.

He is a member of the Corps of Cadets at Norwich, leading a military lifestyle. Founded in 1819, Norwich University – The Military College of Vermont is the oldest private and senior military college in the United States.

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Her mother, Ruth, was being filmed in the next room in an interview, which Bischof had set up, for the Shoah Foundation.

Bischof has spent her life trying to piece together her parents’ past and has spent 10 years writing a book about the experience.

“This interview, I now understand, was a way for her to accomplish her healing is a safe environment and to let people know what the Nazis had done to demolish and totally change her life; it took away her life as she knew it,” Bischof writes in her memoir.

When Steven Spielberg was filming “Schindler’s List,” he heard stories from Holocaust survivors and decided they should be recorded. The Shoah Foundation has recorded the stories of genocide survivors from arond the world.

Neither of Bischof’s parents — her father was a concentration camp survivor — would talk about what had happened to them before coming to the United States.

Bischof’s mother was born in 1910 in the Prussian Empire and became Polish in 1918. Bischof, in her book, describes her mother as a tall, beautiful woman with olive skin and dark hair who spoke a half-dozen languages and sang with a lovely soprano voice.

As a mother, she was strict and made clothes for her daughter that did not show her shape. The family listened to opera on Sundays and the four children — Patricia was the oldest — weren’t allowed to listen to rock and roll.

“Sometimes I just felt lost,” says Bischof in this week’s Enterprise podcast. She didn’t fit in with her classmates at school. “I couldn’t relate. Sometimes even today I can’t even relate, if you really want to know.”

Bischof writes in the introduction to her memoir, “We all need connections to our past.”

Read the full story: https://altamontenterprise.com/03132022/memoirist-bischof-pieced-together-her-parents-past-and-found-her-voice

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Irwin is an associate professor of history at the University at Albany and has written books about the shifting world order.

“Gordian Knot: Aparthied and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order” explores how African independence altered the international system at the height of the Cold War, and “Vast External Realm: America and the Invention of the Free World” probes some of the assumptions that underlay American world power.

Irwin spoke to The Enterprise on Friday, the day after the Russian army started its attack on Ukraine.

When African states first joined the United Nations, Irwin posits, the United States was challenged in profound ways. South Africa was an “unapologetically racist state” and so was thought to have no place in the United Nations yet the United States itself was practicing Jim Crow.

The United States has expanded its influence over the course of the 20th Century while denying its existence as an imperial power, Irwin says. He sees liberal institutions equating freedom with certain rights, like the right of expression, the right to life, and the right to property — and thereby naturalizing and extending American power.

Even decolonization fits this pattern. “We’re going to take apart these old European empires, grant self-determination, but then make sure that those states have a seat at the United Nations, which happens to be located in New York City,” says Irwin.

“We’re watching that argument fall apart,”said Irwin in this week’s Enterprise podcast. Today, far fewer Americans than in the 1990s or early 2000s are willing to see the United States as something other than an empire, he said.

Read more at https://altamontenterprise.com/03032022/historian-irwin-notes-no-empire-has-expanded-forever

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She was one of just eight school librarians from across the United States to serve on the William C. Morris Young Adult Debut Award Committee for 2022.

When she applied for the post, Davis thought she wouldn’t be chosen, reasoning, “Nobody’s going to pick … a librarian from a small library and I haven’t done anything so phenomenal.”

Many would beg to differ with her modest self description. She has been Berne-Knox-Westerlo’s secondary school librarian for 26 years where she fulfills a wide variety of roles and is now serving students who are children of students she originally served.

When she got the letter asking her to be on the committee, Davis screamed with joy.

“I did not realize the amount of work involved, but I would do it again in a heartbeat,” she says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

The committee was chaired by Patty Gonzales Ramirez who lives in Texas. The other members besides Davis were Kit Ballenger, Rebecca Caufman, Michelle Cheng, Kara Hunter, Beth Kirchenberg, and liaison Ellen Wickham.

Davis and her counterparts each read scores of books written by first-time authors for readers age 12 to 18 and then met extensively, through their computers, to finally winnow the selection to five finalists and ultimately a first-place winner.

Davis herself read over 200 books up for the award. And 200 new books are being donated to the BKW Secondary School library because of her efforts.

The Morris Award, first given in 2009, is named for a beloved publisher who promoted literature for children and teens.

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He grew up in Slingerlands, was trained in forestry, and now — after a sometimes far-flung career in environmentalism — he is the new project manager for the Bender Melon Farm Preserve.

McCandless says a bullet was dodged when a grassroots uprising prevented a mega-mall from being built on the rural land, which is now undergoing development on its perimeter.

In December, the Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy paid $1 million for the 176-acre former Bender Melon Farm, near the corner of routes 85 and 85A in New Scotland.

To help pay for the purchase, the conservancy sold 20 of those acres along Route 85 for about half-a-million dollars to Ron Kay, who plans a hamlet-type development with retail and residential spaces.

At the start of the 20th Century, Charles Bender’s farm was famous for its melons, which were served in New York City’s finest restaurants. The farm was sold to William Taylor in 1939 as public tastes and farming itself changed.

McCandless, from his childhood, remembers the Bender property as a dairy farm, seeing cows wandering around in the fields.

He is interested in preserving its history and says in this week’s Enterprise podcast that there are still remnants of the famous Bender melons in the old barns on the property. Preserving the viewshed and the open space is also important to McCandless.

Read the full profile at https://altamontenterprise.com/02182022/come-out-and-enjoy-it-and-support-it-says-new-manager-bender-melon-farm-preserve

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His work caused a bit of a stir when the late Guilderland town historian, Alice Begley, learned that Haluska had already painted 22 markers when she saw a photo of him posing before a half-painted sign in the Sept. 8, 2016 Altamont Enterprise.

Begley had been, said Town Supervisor Peter Barber at the time, in charge of an ongoing process of repainting signs, as needed; signs were picked up by the highway department, Barber said, and taken back to the department’s shop for sandblasting, followed by repainting with paints provided by the state, in the correct colors.

Haluska is now working with the town as highway crew members have repaired broken signs. He continues to spray paint the signs in place, using Midnight Blue and then highlighting the raised letters in Sunburst Yellow.

Haluska considers Begley’s booklet, “Historic Markers in the Town of Guilderland,” published in 1994, which shows an image of each sign and tells the story behind it, to be “a treasure trove of information, information so well researched.”

He is hoping for “triple-digit attendance” when he speaks, through Zoom, to the Guilderland Historical Society on Feb. 17 at 7:30 p.m. about his project.

Haluska explains in this week’s Enterprise podcast that he was inspired to paint Guilderland’s markers after he drove into Greenville more than a decade ago and “was greeted with these wonderfully freshly painted signs.” He learned it was an Eagle Scout project and said to himself, “I’d like to do that for the town.”

Read the full article here: https://altamontenterprise.com/02132022/john-haluska-have-brush-will-emblazon-history

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It made her angry then when people told her that things happen for a reason.

But now she realizes she learned so much, especially on the road to recovery.

Barcomb has just published her first novel, which opens with the description of a terrible car accident. The book’s central character, Rebecca, at age 7, survives, after a coma, but her beloved mother, a healer, dies.

Barcomb, who has wanted to be a writer her whole life, stresses in this week’s Enterprise podcast, that the book is not autobiographical. Even so, she has drawn on many of her real-life experiences to make it vivid.

Read more: https://altamontenterprise.com/02062022/barcombs-first-novel-tells-story-healing-and-hope

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Bassler’s own red thread may be providing service to others.

Raised in the Helderberg Hilltowns, where both sides of her family had lived for generations, she says, “I was the first grandchild on either side of the family so I benefit from a lot of attention and love and teaching, which is with me still today.”

She describes, in this week’s Enterprise podcast, a series of seemingly small encounters that became life-changing events. “Small opportunities are what big opportunities look like when they’re young,” she says.

As Bassler has worked with visionaries “at extreme emotional edges,” she said she learned how to keep herself whole and support courageous others to stay whole.

Now, she said, international organizations are “more clued up about what needs to be done to support people at extreme emotional edges — and COVID has pushed that even further.”

Bassler calls this the mainstreaming of trauma.

When she was shaken by the death of her father, she stumbled upon a class in neurogenic shaking, which is used to release trauma and tension.

She practiced what is known as TRE — tension or trauma release exercise — that helps her stay regulated. With the shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Bassler became a certified provider and now teaches TRE online.

She has supported health-care workers and first responders. “A lot of folks are struggling …,” she said. “They’ve gotten to that edge where they can’t make meaning of what’s happening. There’s a continuous state of dread and uncertainty or discomfort.”

Bassler says she helps people in a few lessons learn how to keep themselves regulated.

Noticing the way society has become fragmented and divided — even in the town where she was raised — Bassler has found it useful to look for the wounded place — for her, that may be despair about the state of democracy — in the person with whom you are trying to connect.

“That’s going to make it easier to find common ground,” she said.

One of the things Bassler remembers about growing up in the Hilltowns was that it was completely normal to drop in, “to just pop by.”

“I’ve lived all over the world. Never anywhere I’ve lived since is dropping in as normal …. It was a queue of safety. It was a daily symbol of trust,” she said.

“And here we get back to the red thread,” said Bassler, “because one of the things I think I became able to do from my work in hotspots, in places of conflict … instead of holding all the suffering in me, with a sense of helplessness, somehow, I cultivated an ability to see the people who had the vision to move through … who were going to be courageous despite suffering, who were going to be both vulnerable and brave.”

Although for the last two years Bassler hasn’t traveled — not on a plane or even in a car — through the internet, she said, “I am able to support leaders who are doing courageous things.”

Read the full article on our website: https://altamontenterprise.com/01282022/terrice-bassler-helps-leaders-who-are-both-vulnerable-and-brave

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Vallee is the director of the Center for Community Justice, based in Schenectady, which has just launched a new Legal Hand call-in program, an access-to-justice initiative, free for residents of Albany and Schenectady counties.

In this week’s Enterprise podcast, Vallee shares several personal narratives that, over decades, have a central theme: With the help of volunteers and pertinent information, individuals can be empowered to make beneficial changes in their lives.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, in 1998, Vallee volunteered for the Court Appointed Special Advocates program. CASA volunteers advocate for children, often foster children, who have been abused or neglected.

“They really need a voice,” said Vallee. The goal is to settle children in safe and permanent homes.

A CASA volunteer can flush out information from teachers or medical providers about a child and bring that information to the judge hearing a case. 

Vallee recalled once talking to a teacher about a middle-school boy she was helping. The teacher told Vallee, “Thank God somebody asked me about this young man because I can tell you he comes to this class every morning … puts his head down on his desk. He’s crying, and no one was asking: How is he doing in school?”

The center’s newest program — Legal Hand — also depends on volunteers.

“Access to justice means information,” said Vallee. “It means a willing ear. It means very patient, thoughtful, and kind volunteers who are helping the visitor. Often people just want someone to listen and understand. And sometimes that’s really all that they’re looking for.”

Legal Hand was started in 2015 by Helaine Barnett and Vallee believes it will eventually become a national program.

The local call-in program, which started earlier this month, trained 18 volunteers who work from computers in their homes to answer questions and help local residents navigate systems that can be complex or confusing.

A volunteer, for example, might help a visitor fill out an application for public benefits or help with employment or landlord issues. Two areas Legal Hand does not assist with are divorce cases or criminal matters.

Any Schenectady or Albany county residents seeking help can call 518-400-5544 or email SchenectadyAlbany@LegalHand.org.

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“I love you both and hope to see you again someday,” he said.

Houck of East Berne chairs the New York Affiliate of the National Parents Organization.

His organization is pushing for changes in state law that would make it more likely, after parents divorce or separate, to have their children spend half their time with each of their parents as long as those parents are fit and loving.

Currently, he reports, the norm is that children spend 65 percent of their time with their mother and 35 percent with their father.

He was divorced in 2011 and said he shared equal time with his daughters until 2013.

“Their mother had moved to a different town and the normal things started to happen where they wanted to see me every other weekend and one night during the week, and I had become a little bit hardened to that,” he said.

Houck went on, “I love my daughters. I was an involved father. I went to all their school functions, all their field trips.” His daughters had been were Berne-Knox-Westerlo students from kindergarten through elementary school.

After the estrangement started, Houck said he tried father-daughter and family counseling and reunification counseling to no avail.

“We began litigation in June of ’16,” he said. “We didn’t finish up litigation until January of 2021 — five years, seven adjournments in Family Court to try to get an ending verdict.” By the time the verdict came, his daughters had aged out of the system.

For five years, Houck said, he had “no contact at full child support” and no finding on fitness.

He also said, “When the estrangement happens with children, many times it cuts off an entire side of a family …. My mother lost the relationship with her grandchildren.” She had been “a primary caregiver” for his daughters, he said, “going through school, getting [them] on and off the bus before and after school.”

Send letters, questions, or ideas to mhs@altamontenterprise.com

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The ancient Scottish game is not just about technique and precision, but also about strategy.

Bentley ought to know. Two years ago, she was a United States Women’s Curling Association Senior champion along with teammates Marilyn Goldstein, Martha Naber, and Wendy Berger. The four women had been curling together for 15 years.

They competed on their home ice, which longtime Albany Curling Club member Melvin Abelseth has called the best-kept secret in Guilderland.

Their clubhouse, with two ice sheets and a “warm room” — where spectators can relax and watch the competition — is located on McKown Road. 

The club was founded in 1955 with 16 members and now has about 150.

There are four players on each team — eight players in a game — and their goal is to slide 43-pound granite rocks as close as they can to the center of a series of rings, which looks rather like a bull’s eye, 140 feet away.

Once a little-known sport, curling’s popularity increased after it became an Olympic sport in 1998.

Bentley was drawn to the sport when she went to an open house at the McKown Road facility. “Myself and my son just absolutely fell in love with it,” Bentley says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

One of the things she loves about the game is the camaraderie it inspires. Her club frequently holds weekend-long bonspiels — from the Dutch for good games. The curlers visit other clubs for bonspiels and connect with their competitors.

“After the game, the two teams, eight people total, will sit together and socialize,” says Bentley. “The winner buys the loser a drink.”

The six-month season runs from October through the end of March although some clubs play year-round, she said.

Sometimes, in upstate New York, winters can “seem a little long,” said Bentley. But, with curling she said, she looks forward to the season. “Every winter,” Bentley said, “gives me a lot of socialization activity.”

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Noah Zweifel discussed how social-media accounts can vary from facts. He spoke of several stories he wrote this year — notably one involving dishonest posts meant to slur a candidate before elections — where finding and reporting the truth was essential in setting the record straight.

Zweifel, the only reporter to cover elections in the four Hilltowns, reflected on the changing political landscape in the rural towns — all of which have more enrolled Democrats than Republicans and all of which went for Barack Obama in 2012 but went red for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Republicans dominated the local elections this year after prior decades of Democratic dominance.

Melissa Hale-Spencer spoke of how pandemic coverage this year and last changed the way The Enterprise puts out news, with regular updates on the website and in a free daily newsletter as well as a weekly round-up for print readers. The goal is to make the evolving science and government programs and regulations understandable and accessible to our readers while also covering how the pandemic plays out locally.

Sean Mulkerrin discussed the ever-evolving lawsuits centering on Pyramid. At the same time the behemoth company is challenging the town of Guilderland to nearly halve its tax assessment, it also partnered with Guilderland this past year to successfully overturn a lower court decision that would have halted construction of a 222-unit apartment complex and a Costco wholesale center.

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“Jessyka went to school for painting and art, and so she’s always been very involved with that,” says Keven in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

Keven went to Syracuse University for mechanical engineering so he designs their gingerbread creations, starting with building half-scale models.

The two of them grew up in Guilderland, both students at Altamont Elementary School, with Keven a year ahead of Jessyka.

As the years have gone by, the complexity of their creations has increased. They now make all of their own pieces rather than incorporating store-bought candies as they had when trimming the Brooklyn Bridge.

Each creation takes hundreds of hours. The couple starts working on their annual project in October to be ready for the Christmas season.

Gingerbread has long been associated with Christmas. One legend, based on an 8th-Century Greek document, has a fourth wise man setting out to bring ginger to the newborn Jesus Christ. While the three wisemen from the east arrived in Bethlehem with their gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the fourth became ill in a Syrian city, giving his chest of ginger roots to a rabbi who had cared for him.

The Hebrew Bet Leḥem means “House of Bread,” and the Syrian rabbi would have his students make houses of bread in hopes of their saviour being born in Bethlehem. The waylaid fourth wiseman, the legend goes, thought of adding ginger to the bread.

The Brunks will make a ceremony out of destroying their creation. Early on, they had left one of their gingerbread houses — far too old to eat — in the woods for deer and other animals but family dogs found it and ate it instead, becoming ill from the sugar.

“My dad thought that it should go down in ceremony after all the work we put into it,” said Jessyka. “So we shoot it with BB guns or air rifles.”

“We invite people over to come look at it ...,” said Keven. “Our friends bring their kids —

 “And we allow the kids to touch it,” said Jessyka.

The Brunks have this advice for others who might want to make a gingerbread house:

“It’s not that hard to come up with your own little patterns instead of buying the one out of the box,” said Keven.

“Even if you do get the one out of the box, you should at least make your own icing,” said Jessyka.

They both agree that following your own ideas is the most fun.

****

If you’d like to see Jessyka and Keven Brunk’s Winne-Bear-Go creation and the other gingerbread houses in the Hudson Valley Gingerbread Competition, they are online at https://bit.ly/3s4Yhy9.

Voting runs till Dec. 24 and the winners will be announced on Dec. 28.

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“I’m in love with words,” Delhagen says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

He was installed in late October as the pastor at Hamilton Union Presbyterian Church, established in Guilderland in 1824.

Although Delhagen grew up in a pastor’s family, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be pastor or raise his own family that way. “I fought against going into the ministry for a long time,” he said.

Delhagen grew up in the Reformed Church in America. His mother’s father was also a Reformed pastor. Delhagen himself was ordained in the Reformed Church.

He likes the Presbyterian Church because it is “much, much bigger, much more expansive, much, much more tuned in to issues of justice that were passionate to my heart.”

While the Reformed Church in America is one of the oldest denominations in the country, founded in 1628, Delhagen notes it is very small. It has about 200,000 members compared to 1.7 million in the Presbyterian Church.

Delhagen loves lots of people in the Reformed Church, he said, but feels it is “tearing itself apart over issues of human sexuality.”

“And so I have found myself to be adopted into this denomination,” Delhagen said of Presbyterianism. “And I love it here.”

His congregation has taken up the Presbyteran Church’s Matthew 25 vision. In that chapter of the Bible, Delhagen explains, Jesus “talks about that day of judgment when God is going to separate out the people and put at his right hand those who did God’s will and, at his left hand, those who didn’t.

“And he says, ‘You know who fed me when I was hungry, you clothed me when I was nakend, you visited me when I was sick and in prison.’ And the people say, ‘When did we do that, Jesus?’ and he says, ‘Whenever you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.’”

So churches that adopt the Matthew 25 vision seek to dismantle systemic racism and address structural poverty among other things. Hamilton Union this year focused on hunger, helping the Guilderland Food Pantry and the Regional Food Bank, Delhagen said.

Hamilton Union also raised $5,000 to fill a metaphorical ark, through Heifer International, with cows and chickens and goats to help people in undeveloped countries.

“I want to challenge my congregation and our community … to look at how issues of race and gender and economics intersect in creating systems of poverty,” said Delhagen.

He went on, “There’s a saying that, if a fish washes up on the shore, one might ask: What’s wrong with the fish? If a bunch of fish wash up on the shore you have to ask: What’s wrong with the water?”

With poverty, churches and society tend to focus on addressing individual needs, which is important but, he said, we also need to look at the larger picture and address the issues keeping people in poverty.

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“Toshi is my service dog,” says Will in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “He means so much to me because for years he’s been by my side.”

Once Will, at age 12, was matched with Toshi, he began to produce the antibodies he needed to fight infections.

“Toshi has been life-changing for me,” says Will, explaining why he wanted to write the book. He wants other people with disabilities, who may be scared of being ridiculed and judged, to know they can get service dogs to help them. 

In the introduction to the book, Will’s mother, child psychologist Laura Assaf, writes, “Will became more independent and mature as he started caring for another being instead of needing everyone else to care for him. The character gifts Will has — his kindness, perseverance, generosity of spirit, and empathy for others — were no longer overshadowed by the incongruent behaviors he demonstrated when his brain was inflamed.”

Will has a condition known as PANS, from which Assaf said one in 200 children may have flare-ups although the syndrome is often misunderstood and misdiagnosed. PANS stands for Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome.

Will is also immunodeficient, which fewer than 20 percent of children with PANS are, his mother said.

Assaf called it a “double whammy” since her son’s body was unable to produce the antibodies needed to fight infections so he spent lots of time getting infusions to try to build a healthier body. He also underwent seven years of long-term suppression therapy on antibiotics, probiotics, and medications to treat symptoms.

“When there’s inflammation in the body and there’s inflammation in the brain, then we get behaviors” that can often look psychiatric, leading to frequent misdiagnoses of the condition, Assaf said.

When Will’s condition was misdiagnosed by local doctors, his parents pushed to find national experts who understood the condition. Some children with PANS can be treated with a 30-day antibiotic instead of six years on an antidepressant, said Assaf. “It sends them down a very scary and dangerous path,” she said of misdiagnosis.

Will’s book, “My Boy, Will,” captures his five years with Toshi in a narrative written for children illustrated with simple expressive artwork created by Will.

****

William J. Gibney will be selling and signing his book, “My Boy, Will,” at Colonie Center, outside the entrance to Macy’s, on Sunday, Dec. 12, from noon to 2 p.m. The book-signing will double as a seventh birthday party for his dog, Toshi. All of the proceeds from sale of the book are being donated to Canine Companions, which provides service dogs free of charge.

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Her mother grew up riding horses, too.

“My favorite picture I have is of me when I was probably about three or four months old with my mom sitting on our old horse, Bandy,” Reynolds-Flynn says in this week’s podcast.

Her mother would take her on trail rides as a baby and she would fall asleep in her mother’s arms on the back of a horse.

Now an adult, Reynolds-Flynn’s passion for horses has not faded. She lives in Alaska with her financé, Travis Perkovich; her horse, Tango; and their husky puppy, Gimli.

She has bred a mare named Girlfriend and is expecting a foal in June. The gestation period, she explained, is 340 days or roughly 11 months.

This fall, Reynolds-Flynn became Berne-Knox-Westerlo’s first graduate to earn an American FFA Degree, the top honor earned by fewer than 2 percent of the more than 730,000 Future Farmers of America members.

Her family ran a business in Knox, providing carriage rides for weddings and special occasions like holiday sojourns around Stuyvesant Plaza in Guilderland. She described a “white Cinderella carriage” pulled by Belgian horses

Behind the fairytale was a lot of work, feeding the horses every day and gradually desensitizing them to the hurly-burly of modern traffic.

A young horse would be paired with an old horse who was “basically bombproof,” said Reynolds-Flynn as they traveled a two-mile circular route along two busy roads to get back home.

Reynolds-Flynn took classes in agriculture at BKW from Micaela Kehrer and joined the FFA.

At 16, she won the People in Agriculture competition at the New York State FFA convention after making a presentation on State Police canine handlers — her dream job at the time.

After graduating from BKW in 2019, she went to the State University of New York College of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill. Reynolds-Flynn started in the canine program and said she had a lot of fun working with dogs.

But she came to the realization that her true passion was working with horses and she majored in equine husbandry.

She moved to Alaska to be with her fiancé. They live in Soldotna, population 4,000, on the Kenai Peninsula at the edge of a two-million-acre wildlife preserve.

“It’s almost like the Hilltowns,” said Reynolds-Flynn of the small-town atmosphere.

She works in a shop that melts down lead, putting it into molds to make weights for fishermen’s nets.

Reynolds-Flynn tried salmon fishing herself this past summer, donning waders and standing hip-deep in the Kenai River. “It’s almost like fly fishing,” she said.

Her major focus outside of work is on her horse, Tango. Because she competes in barrel racing — she started at the Altamont Fair — she is training Tango on endurance and bending into turns.

She likes challenges and has stepped into traditionally male roles, like being a volunteer firefighter in Knox.

Her biggest thrill was receiving her American FFA Degree on Oct. 30 at the national convention in Indianapolis. Up to 60,000 members from across the country assemble for the annual convention.

Earning her degree involved more than just an academic record or FFA membership for three years. She also had to demonstrate outstanding leadership, complete at least 50 hours of community service, earn $10,000 and invest $7,500, and work in excess of 2,250 hours in agriculture.

Reynolds-Flynn has this advice for others who might want to follow in her footsteps: When it seems like it’s getting tough, just keep on pushing through it and there’s always light at the end of the tunnel.

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He is the new pastor at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Altamont. “The word of God …,” said Reimer, “needs to be proclaimed wherever people are. The Lutheran movement itself exists largely because of changes in the way people communicate.”

Martin Luther’s ideas in the 1500s had been expressed before by other theologians, but Luther was able to print them and distribute them quickly before they could be repressed, said Reimer, leading to the Protestant Reformation.

“And then once his ideas were out there, he took advantage of things like using woodcuts to make interesting illustrations to accompany his catechism, so Christian teachings and instructions would hold people’s attention,” Reimer said.

Luther was also an advocate of translating the scriptures from Latin into languages people spoke and could easily understand.

Whether it’s on Twitter or Facebook, Reimer said, the church should be where “God’s people are.” He went on, “And so whenever there are ways to advocate for peace or to care for one another or to love our neighbor, the church should show up and proclaim that.”

In his job as a pastor, Reimer says on this week’s Enterprise podcast, “A lot of what I do is creative.” This includes writing sermons and inventing fresh approaches to Bible study. 

His job also involves relationships, providing spiritual care in homes and hospitals. This has been complicated by COVID-19 restrictions, Reimer said, and some of his congregants he has met only through screens.

As a teenager, Reimer worked at a Lutheran summer camp — and continued to work there for seven summers. One of the things that attracted him to Altamont was its proximity to the Adirondacks. 

He floundered when he first went to college, Reimer said, but was grounded by his desire to return to work at the Lutheran summer camp. “Being there for others … was what I was called to do,” he said.

He discerned his call to the ministry at the camp, Reimer said, as he likened being a pastor to being a counselor for life. He described his work as a lifelong cycle of sharing joys and sorrows with a group of people.

The outdoor aspects of the camp, like hiking on the Appalachian Trail, he added, reinforced the importance of working together and caused intense bonding.

Being there for others, as Reimer put it, sometimes involves people you don’t even know. 

As the Thanksgiving holiday approaches, Reimer closed with a challenge.

“It’s always appropriate to give thanks,” he said. “And whether you’re a Christian or not, I think we can all benefit from the act of actively giving thanks and looking for things to be thankful for.”

Reimer challenged podcast listeners “to spend the week looking for different reasons to be thankful … to have gratitude. And I will then challenge you to find new ways to express that gratitude to others. And to help build relationships and spread love.”

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Her goal is to create a community of learners. While she focuses on kids, her tendrils reach to nurture their parents and grandparents, too, as well as into the community at large.

In one library project, Brown paired kids with veterans so that young people would understand the sacrifices of war. The Military Memories and Veterans Voices project made history come alive and Brown believes it is something the kids will carry with them for the rest of their lives.

She recalls in this week’s podcast how one young man who loves history was paired with a Korean War veteran. “Mrs. Brown, this is better than any textbook,” he told her.

Brown had started her career as an English teacher. She paused in her teaching to raise her own children and decided to become a librarian because it allowed her to be more creative in her pursuits, not restricted by set curricula.

Brown was also instrumental in 2019, before the pandemic, in launching Voorheesville’s first Screen-Free Week.

Read the full article here: https://tae.news/ifc

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He was born in Charleston, South Carolina and raised in Brooklyn so he says he’s always known the deep divisions in the United States.

“My mother has just turned 89 years old and she’s a master teacher,” says Simpson in this week’s podcast.

As a first-born son, he has his father’s name. “My father was one of the foremost African art dealers in the world. He also was at the vanguard of the expressionist art movement with Picasso and Romare Bearden,” says Simpson. His father was an artist himself and also a jazz musician.

Simpson is an Albany County legislator, representing Arbor Hill, Sheridan Hollow, Washington Park, and West Hill.

He came to Albany in 1978 “for a job” — as a senior minority group personnel specialist for Civil Service.

“My job was to get employment in New York State government for Blacks and Hispanics who had been traditionally neglected by Civil Service,” said Simpson. 

As a lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit, Simpson v. New York State Department of Civil Service, Simpson won a long legal battle, securing a $45 million settlement for more than 4,000 Black and Hispanic state workers and job applicants who claimed a Civil Service test was biased.

The litigation stretched from 1997 to 2010. “It was a long but historic and necessary fight ….,” said Simpson. “People were promoted on the basis of a test that didn’t legitimately test their knowledge, skills, and abilities and also was tremendously discriminatory.”

He also said, “Had I not stopped that test, it would have been used in every state in the country.”

While a friend continually encourages Simpson to run for Congress, he said, “I can do more in the Albany County Legislature in real terms than I could in Washington because of the tremendous gridlock.”

He recently spoke passionately at a legislative committee meeting on expanding the county’s version of the CROWN Act and elaborated on that with The Enterprise. (See related editorial.) CROWN stands for Creating a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural hair.

“When it comes to the CROWN Act, what we see is another manifestation of the denial of the legacy of racism in America,” said Simpson. The committee was discussing adding headcoverings to the list of protected hairstyles, which Simpson described as “a longstanding feature of Black people in America and that’s a cultural transition from our history in Africa.”

He went on, “We actually have present situations here in Albany County where people have been denied employment rights or been treated in an inappropriate way because of their hair preferences, which has nothing to do with their ability to do their job.”

He recognized there could be jobs where certain hairstyles would present a hazard but said, “When it comes to a question of: well, you just think it’s nice to have short hair, then that’s a problem.”

Traditional black hairstyles can help some people do their jobs better, says Simpson, stating that the New York City Police Department for many years has not had restrictions on how Black officers wear their hair.

“In many communities, to see people who have sort of indigenous hairstyles endear them to the community,” said Simpson.

He’s an advocate of community policing done by people who are part of the community “because there’s a knowledge, understanding, and a commitment to that community.”

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Route 20 seemed long to Bryan Farr when he was kid, traveling with his family every summer from the Fingers Lakes where they lived to the Darien Lake, an amusement park near Buffalo.

But, as a young man, he embraced the entire length of the historic highway, driving through 12 states from Boston, Massachusetts to Newport, Oregon in two weeks: 3,365 miles from coast to coast, America’s longest highway. Farr describes it as a once-in-a-lifetime trip on this week’s podcast.

Farr, a meteorologist with a penchant for photography, took pictures along the way and planned to put together a book. He wrote to the towns he had traveled through and asked them to write three things about the town. He was sent three-page emails in return.

As his interest in the history of the route burgeoned, Farr founded the Historic U.S. Route 20 Association, a labor of love.

Farr will be speaking, through Zoom, to the Guilderland Historical Society at 7 p.m. on Nov. 18. The public is invited to the free event. Details on how to join the meeting are posted at www.guilderlandhistoricalsociety.org.

Farr knows the history of the route intimately. The stretch between Albany and Buffalo, he says, almost became defunct in the 1850s because the Erie Canal was so popular.

As automobiles started replacing horse-drawn conveyances in the early 20th Century, Farr says, “Good roads were hard to find.” In 1921, the Federal Highway Act allocated funds to states; each was to pick their best roads.

Leaders met regionally and then, in 1925, Farr said, all the regions met to connect the dots. The act laid the groundwork for a national highway system.

That’s when the numbering system for highways was developed, with the lowest numbers for roads running north and east and the highest for roads going south and west. Even numbers were for east-to-west roads; odd numbers for north-to-south roads. A zero at the end of a route, as in Route 20, means it’s a cross-country highway.

Such a numbering system was useful, Farr notes, before the age of GPS when travelers had to find their own way.

Once the roads were numbered, roadside motels and cabins popped up, Farr said, noting motorists could travel only 100 or 150 miles a day and would stop along the way at the mom-and-pop businesses, often with a shop, restaurant, and gas station — and sometimes a kitschy attraction.

“Roadside architecture really started to bloom,” said Farr, as a landlocked lighthouse or a giant teapot beckoned to travelers.

By the 1950s and ’60s, traffic became so intense that, in some places, it could be backed up for a mile or more. Once superhighways, like New York’s Thruway, were built, some of the towns along the old Route 20 dried up almost overnight, said Farr.

Cherry Valley, west of Guilderland, became a ghost town, Farr said, describing the Thruway as “the nail in the coffin.”

One of his association’s goals is to highlight small towns so visitors return there. Recently, Iowa gave Route 20 an historic designation, which took several years to secure. There are now 250 signs across Iowa to help travelers follow the historic Route 20 there.

Farr and his association were following a similar approach in New York State. Both the Guilderland Public Library and Gade Farm in town posted signs, noting they stand along Route 20.

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He is perpetually aware of the ecological balance of which he is a part.

Every morning, Kleppel and his border collie bring their 30 sheep from barn to pasture and then, every night, return them to the barn.

Overnight, coyotes eat all the vermin in the pasture. There are no rats in the Kleppels’ barn.

In ecology, Kleppel explains in this week’s podcast, there is no competition; rather, there is co-opetition. “We cooperate and we compete,” says Kleppel.

Kleppel, who has a Ph.D. in biology and, for 15 years, directed the graduate program of Biodiversity Conservation and Policy at the University at Albany, came to farming by way of oceanography.

When he and his wife, Pam, who is now retired from her job as a business manager for Albany Law School, bought Longfield Farm in Knox, it wasn’t farmed. There were just five plant varieties on their 16 acres; now there are 51 varieties.

He rotates the places where his sheep graze, perpetually creating fresh pastures.

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The language like the location had changed, but the mission was the same: To uncover and tell a largely unwritten part of American history.

Jack Daniels writes in the introduction to his 1999 book, “I hope there will be others who wish to add to or amend the historical record; also to keep it up to date.”

Starting today, Oct. 21, the Schoharie County Historical Society is hosting a series of discussions on Jack Daniels’s book.

Katherine Hawkins is leading the first session and says one of the goals of the series is to inspire what Daniels had requested 22 years ago — that the history of Blacks in Schoharie County be updated and added to.

She stressed that anyone is welcome to come to the free sessions, which will be held at 7 p.m., starting Oct. 21, and will continue monthly through April at the Schoharie Presbyterian Church.

Daniels died in 2012 at the age of 96.

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Tom Capuano, a retired professor, once wrote a book-length narrative poem on the founding of Altamont, grounded in history but with imaginative creation of characters. He raises sheep now in an 18th-Century barn on land that both figure prominently in some of the ghost stories.

Thom Breitenbach, an artist who lives in a castle he built on the hillside above the village, wrote and produced a musical about Hieronymus Bosch, a 15th-Century Dutch artist who, like Breitenbach, creates imaginative creatures. In Breitenbach’s musical, those creatures come alive.

So where does each draw the line between imagination and reality?

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She has been teaching about agriculture and its many related subjects at Berne-Knox-Westerlo’s secondary school since 2017. That year, she also founded a chapter of Future Farmers of America in the rural community.

Now, Kehrer has been named Outstanding Agriculture Educator for the FFA Region VI National Association of Agricultural Educators. She is one of just six finalists across the United States; the winner will be named in December.

Kehrer started her journey as an ag teacher when, growing up in Rhode Island, her father’s best friend urged her to attend an FFA meeting — she had been more interested in marine biology or history at that point — telling her he wouldn’t mention it again if she didn’t like it.

She loved it, especially the camaraderie.

A vibrant woman, Kehrer has always been drawn to male-dominated fields, she says in this week’s podcast at altamontenterprise.com/podcasts.

She studied landscape design — like farming, another male-dominated field — for a degree at Cobleskill before earning a master’s degree in ag education at Cornell University.

Kehrer serves as a role model at BKW where a lot of girls were initially attracted to her classes; she is also enthused about teaching boys.

Among the many grants Kehrer has helped secure is the most recent one, for $5,000, that the FFA chapter is using to buy life-size fiberglass models of a cow, horse, and pig. Students will research, design, and paint the internal organs of each species on one half of the models; on the other half, they will paint the markings for a given breed standard.

The BKW chapter of Future Farmers of America is active on many fronts. Next month, 30 students will go to Oswegatchi, a camp in the Adirondacks, Kehrer said, noting the trip is booked to capacity.

Members compete in contests and career development events; they also do public speaking and learn about leadership. Until COVID-19 intervened, the group made an annual trip to Indianapolis for the national FFA convention; BKW’s participation will be virtual this year.

Kehrer repeatedly credits her BKW colleagues and other FFA chapters for her many initiatives.

“I’m a constant learner. I’m always watching what others are doing,” she says.

She also urges everyone: “Support your local farmers.”

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Albany hotelier Adam Black Jr.; James Matthews, the state’s first African-American judge; and James Dickson, a New Scotland native and general manager for the Slingerland family, will be reborn on Oct. 5 for those attending the New Scotland Historical Association meeting.

 “They come back to me like I’m listening to lyrics in a song,” says Hyman in this week’s podcast.

Hyman researches the often-forgotten men he portrays both online and through original documents like letters and church records. “I try to find in their own words things they would say,” he says.

He likens it to being a coffee or wine taster — finding the subtle differences, the idiosyncrasies that distinguish one from another.

Hyman concludes of these 19th-Century African Americans, “If the door were open, they would definitely go through it.”

Hyman, who grew up in Brooklyn, has a particular fondness for Harlem and its rich history. He studied fashion design at Parsons, focusing on styles during the Jazz Age of the Roaring Twenties, and on the rock-and-roll era of the 1950s.

A world traveler, Hyman embraces all of history. Travel, he says, “keeps you from being brainwashed.”

He has written plays for the State Museum and portrayed enslaved people at the Schuyler Mansion.

Hyman says of the Capital Region, “I just stumbled upon it, like a gold mine.”

When he first arrived in Albany, Mary Liz and Paul Stewart, who have restored the home of abolitionists Harriet and Stephen Myers for their Underground Railroad Education Center, walked him around the neighborhood and he felt its richness.

Hyman likens what he does now to prospectors who pan for gold, sifting through the debris to find the nuggets.

Rather than celebrating baseball players or rappers, he likes to portray individuals who prevailed and overcame. In Jamaica, Hyman said, they would say of these individuals, “They overstood.”

“It’s not about me,” he concludes of his work. “It’s about their legacy.”

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Litten, who grew up in Queens and lives now in Altamont, remembers going to a teach-in for the first Earth Day in 1970. Since then, over the last half-century, she has hung her laundry out to dry; she’s never owned a clothes dryer. Litten is part of a local group focusing on the dangers of synthetic turf. 

As The Enterprise has reported at length over the last several months, part of the Guilderland school district’s proposed $21.8 million capital project includes a $2.5 million plan to build a synthetic playing field at the high school. The public vote on the project is Oct. 7.

In July, athletes, coaches, and sports boosters spoke enthusiastically to the school board about the need for a turf field. David Austin, the district’s director of Physical Education and Athletics, said, “I don’t think it’s a luxury. We’re at a disadvantage.” He said that, before the year is out, 10 of the 15 Suburban Council schools will have turf fields, which puts Guilderland players at a disadvantage.

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Monitoring species that don’t belong is “a never-ending job,” he says, but worthwhile. “This is the greatest threat to endangered species and our ecosystem as we know it today,” said Williams on this week's podcast.

The Capital Region PRISM, hosted by the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Saratoga County, serves 11 counties, including Albany, with a staff that includes an aquatics coordinator, a terrestrial coordinator, and an educator.

New York State has eight PRISMs, each involved in early detection and control of invasive species.

“We train citizen scientists,” said Williams. Capital Region PRISM has partnered with iMapInvasives so that volunteers, each responsible for a grid, report on invasive species they’ve seen through an app.

Invasive species can cause huge economic effects. It is thought the spotted lantern fly can cost losses of $400 million in New York State, Williams said. They start their life cycle in the tree of heaven, a Colonial invasive, he said.

When they leave their host tree, they feed on stone fruit, like plums and peaches, and are attracted to vineyards and hops. They excrete a sticky honeydew-like substance that makes fruit inedible because of the mold it causes.

“No native pest will eat them,” says Williams.

Williams, who is a gardener himself, urges gardeners to plant native, resilient species and to diversify their plantings.

“I love showy plants,” says Williams but he notes, “Quite often, they come from other countries.”

Individuals can make a difference for the good. Other than planting wisely in their own yards, Williams said, they can adopt a favorite park or preserve to work on identifying and removing invasive species.

People, he concludes, need to become more conscious of their goods and services and actions.

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The historic district will encompass about 106 properties, Manning said, including some on the north side of Western Avenue, most of Waverly Place, and parts of Norwood, Glenwood, Parkwood, and Elmwood streets. The architectural styles are typical of popular home construction in the early 20th Century, ranging from Colonial revival to Arts and Crafts bungalows. The streets are lined with century-old trees and the neighbors know one another, Manning said.

She called research conducted by McKownville volunteers “remarkable” as they documented the history and wrote descriptions of individual buildings. Manning noted such work is often done instead by hired consultants. On Sept. 14, residents whose homes would be in the historic district are invited to a public meeting, which will be held virtually. Details are posted to the association’s website. Manning herself moved to McKownville in 1998. She had lived in Albany all of her life and was always aware of the neighborhood, having gone to McKown’s Grove as a child to swim. She describes her Arts and Crafts style home, built in 1914, as having “a lot of charm, inside and out.” She likes the simple lines, rustic feel, and natural features of the Arts and Crafts style, which replaced the fussiness of the Victorian period. Manning also appreciates the intimacy of the neighborhood with the houses close together and enjoys walking the tree-lined streets. She has noted, since the onset of the pandemic, many more walkers. “It’s bringing more people out,” she said.

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Diversity, explains Pinchinat in this week’s podcast at AltamontEnterprise.com/podcasts, means recognizing people not from our background, and includes differences in thought as well. Now, he will be shifting his influence from just the students in his classes to the entire school district, from kindergarten through 12th grade. He is hoping to bring about system-wide change. The work, he said, calls to his heart, reaching people “in that human core” and paying forward the support he has been given. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, several Guilderland graduates, all Black women, had talked to the district’s superintendent and some school board members about the racism they had encountered at Guilderland and problems with the curriculum. Subsequently, the school board formed a standing committee to deal with diversity, equity, and inclusion. Then, when drafting the budget for the 2021-22 school year, the board created the post Pinchinat will now fill.

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New Scotland is growing at a faster rate than any other municipality in Albany County, with a 5.8 percent increase in population over the last decade, according to the recently released federal census data.

Kowlowitz sees an irony in people moving to New Scotland because it’s a beautiful town and then having the development pressure erode what drew them to town in the first place.

“You can’t preserve what you don’t know,” says Kowlowitz in this week’s podcast.

Kowlowitz chairs the joint village and town Historic Preservation Commission. Voorheesville and New Scotland this summer were awarded a $10,000 grant from the Preservation League of New York State to fund a cultural resource survey for the village and the hamlets of New Salem and New Scotland.

About 300 buildings, each at least 50 years old, will be photographed, researched, and mapped with the information uploaded to the state’s Cultural Resources Information System.

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The not-for-profit was founded by Pastor David Traynham in 2015 after Michael Brown Jr., a Black man, was shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Traynham felt it was just a matter of time before a similar incident would happen in Albany and he wanted to bring law enforcement together with the community to have one city united.

Trynham and his wife, Brenda, founded the New Horizons Church in Albany.

“The key is relationship,” says Barr in the week’s podcast.

ALERT hosts an annual sports challenge, with a carnival-like atmosphere for kids, and a community and law enforcement summit as well as doing outreach.

For example, Barr, who is president of Senior Hope Counseling, will be visiting seniors in housing projects with others to talk about substance-abuse disorders, opioid issues, and life-saving measures, he said.

Through one personal connection at a time, Barr said, the goal is “turning down the violent atmosphere.” Anyone is welcome to join the ALERT task force or to contribute to the cause.

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With a chainsaw in her hands, she has a running conversation in her mind, changing what she creates as she carves. “My mind switches on me so quickly,” she says.

Black will be creating her sculptures in front of onlookers next week at the Altamont Fair. What she does is both an art and a sport, says Black in this week’s podcast.  Black, who lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York, used to host competitions and has worked with chainsaw carvers from all over the world.

She loves doing her work in front of an audience. “I love their discovery at the same time as mine,” she says. “We are discovering what’s in this log together.”

As she travels to fairs and festivals, she especially likes it when there are children in the crowd. Black looks them in the eye and says her parents were surprised she is not a librarian. “We all can do whatever we want,” she tells the children.

She is one of very few women in the field. When she traveled with her grown son — both of them wearing T-shirts proclaiming she was the carver with a big banner announcing the same thing — people would look past all of that and shake her son’s hand as if he were the carver.

Black, who has herself been at it for nine years now, says she is in pain all the time. She did the podcast interview on the way to see her chiropractor whom she visits twice a week. “My hands right now are burning … from running a chainsaw six to eight hours a day.” She likened chainsaw carving to playing pro football, which has an expiration date. But Black keeps at it because she loves it. “If you can’t love what you do, you need to stop,” she says. When she’s carving, she says, “The pain melts away.”

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Right now, 74 children are waiting for a Big Brother or Big Sister. Anyone who is 18 or older with a car and a license, can apply to the program. After screening and training, each Big is paired with a Little. The pair go on twice-monthly outings and talk weekly on the phone.

During the pandemic, the program went fully remote. “We wanted to keep our families and matches safe,” says O’Sullivan in this week’s podcast.

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Eckhardt, who lives in Guilderland now, grew up listening to her English mother sing everything from folk songs to bar songs as she bustled about the house, doing chores. “There was music in the house all the time,” she said. Eckhardt did the same, raising her own children. Singing, she says, gives her a sense of freedom. “You don’t have to explain yourself,” she said. A registered nurse, Eckhardt became a massage therapist and used to work with hospice patients. She found that playing music from an era that mattered to her patients could comfort and uplift them as well as their families. She has sung in church choirs since she was 7. And now she also is a member of the Octavo Singers. “We primarily sing masses,” she said of the group of men and women, 100 strong. Every year, the group performs Handel’s “Messiah” and Eckherdt has heard regular concert-goers say, “That is Christmas to me.”

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In it, he has a trunk that came from Italy with all of the possessions of the Colucciello family when they immigrated from Fontanarosa, Italy in 1929. A decade-and-a-half later, Nicolina Colucciello, one of eight children, was at a square dance at Pat’s Ranch in Altamont where she met the man who would become her husband, Marshall Barber, Dennis’s father.

Barber’s family history embraces not just the American immigration experience but the pioneering settlers as well. His great-great-grandfather, Josiah Barber, was born in Berne in 1839 and enlisted in New York’s 61st Infantry at the age of 23 to fight in the Civil War. He was wounded at Gettysburg in 1863.

In this week’s podcast, Barber reads a narrative that he wrote with his brothers, detailing the life on their family’s farm. It was not an easy life but the Barbers were resilient. The family’s barn burned twice — in 1958 and the new one in 1984 — only to be built again.

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Aubrey says teaching is in his blood — both he and his sister became teachers, following their father and grandfather. With the Hawk Watch, he combines his passion for teaching with his role as a citizen scientist, reporting the numbers of each kind of raptor counted over 16 days to the Hawk Migration Association of North America and the NorthEast Hawk Watch.

Aubrey describes the shapes and flight patterns that identify various raptors and says the local turkey vultures — “their wings in a V” — “act as a Welcome Wagon” for the raptors passing through, as they see the turkey vultures getting a free ride.

“It’s environmental monitoring,” says Aubrey of the count in this week’s podcast at AltamontEnterprise.com/podcasts.

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“To me, words are sacred,” Milton says in this week’s podcast. “Words are almost living things.”

Milton, who lives in Tannersville in the Catskills, has adapted Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”  and Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” for the stage. He shortened Richard Wilbur’s translation of Molière’s “Tartuffe,” in iambic pentameter, by one-fifth, writing it in tetrameter instead.

Milton is currently directing Jack Cunningham’s “Women and War” — a collection of fictional stories based on historical fact. Online performances are at 7 p.m. on July 1 and 2 with a live performance at Conkling Hall in Rensselaerville on July 3, also at 7 p.m. Three couples — with the men fighting in Europe during World War II, in Korea, and in Vietnam — correspond through letters. Milton directs the actors to focus on the words and the emotions carried on those words.

“They call theater the fabulous invalid,” says Milton, noting the impending death of theater has been proclaimed with the advent of movies, then of television, and now of the internet. “We are a species for which stories are important,” says Milton, whether they are told through religion, in newspapers, in novels or on stage.

“Theater is one of the major ways in which a community can come together,” he said. A play is not etched in stone like a movie. “It can’t react when you laugh; it can react when you cry. You are part of the play,” he said.

Asked who should watch “Women and War,” Milton said, “The audience is anyone who is curious about our history, which of course should be everyone.”

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One of the focuses is on The Generation Project — music passed down through families and community groups. Ustad Shafaart Khan, a classical Indian musician, for example, is a 16th-generation sitar player and the Great Gambian Griots play Mandinka kora music, passed from father to son for untold generations, making their own koras, 21-stringed harps, from calabash gourds, leather, wood, and fishing strings. “The direction is to push forward to inclusivity,” said Bennett.

She has performed for 25 years with an a cappella, all-women group called The Johnson Girls. The name comes from one of the sea chanteys they sing: “The Johnson girls is mighty fine girls, walk around, honey, walk around,” sings Bennett on the podcast in a lusty voice.

The group had to break through a glass ceiling while performing — “Those who thought a chantey singer had to be male, bearded, and with a beer gut, needed to think again,” wrote the Cornwall Guardian when The Johnson Girls performed in England, and Bennett recalls being told, “You girls sing like you have balls.”

Bennett explains that the chanteys are work songs sung by crews on 19th-Century sailing ships as they raised anchors or pumped out water; the songs coordinated their efforts and oxygenated their bodies. The chanteys were the first world music, Bennett believes, and her group has left a mark with changes they’ve made, which they hear when audiences sing with them. She says, “It is just exhilarating.”

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Jason Brinkman, who grew up in Guilderland, is the general manager and vice president of the Albany Dutchmen, one of 16 teams throughout New York State in the Perfect Game Baseball League. After being closed out last summer by pandemic restrictions, the team is moving to Dutchmen Field at Roger Keenholts Park in Guilderland this season. Brinkman, in this week’s podcast, calls the ballpark, with lights for night games and new chair-back seating as well as picnic areas, “a hidden gem tucked away.” The Dutchmen’s home opener is Saturday, June 5. College players from across the country — including from Vanderbilt, Louisville and Old Miss — converge for a summer season “with the hopes and dreams of … being drafted by Major League Baseball,” said Brinkman. The team is looking for local families to host players — with information at dutchmenbaseball.com. All that’s needed is a spare bed, said Brinkman, and the bonds can last a lifetime. Brinkman thinks a sense of normalcy will return with the boys of summer. He said, “I’m thrilled to have baseball back.”

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A year ago, their production of “Legally Blonde” came to a screeching halt a week before opening night when restrictions were put in place to stem the spread of the virus. Not only did the young actors lose the chance to perform but the club, which had already invested in costumes, sets, and props but couldn’t sell tickets, took a financial hit as well. Nevertheless, the Dionysians are putting on a musical this month — it can be viewed through ShowTix4U.

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— Photo from Bill Combs Jr., Combs Wildlife Photography

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As an adult, she traveled the country, studying and teaching history, and ended up back in the Northeast, as a professor of American history at Siena College. She involves her students in community projects, meant to help them think more broadly about the value of history; they also learn that active citizenship is about more than voting.

The Franciscan and liberal arts traditions at Siena teach students to be problem-solvers, Dorsey said, adding, “Service and advocacy and education all go together… to advance the good of the Capital Region.” As church-going declines nationwide, Dorsey sees anxiety levels rising and doesn’t think yoga or diet programs are adequate for managing that anxiety.

“As a culture, our anxiety levels are just beyond the pale …,” said Dorsey. “Religion is such an important tool for me to feel grounded and safe and protected by God who is steadfast in his kindness and love.”

Support our newsroom of local journalists at altamontenterprise.com/contribute

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Michael Vincent talks turkey for our Thanksgiving podcast. Here, he sounds a turkey call he made himself. He shares memories of hunting all the way back to his boyhood on his grandparents’ farm on Pleasant Valley Road in Knox. There, he hunted on the land for food which they ate. He also shot woodchucks for safety on the farm, preventing holes that could blow tractor tires or break legs. He was proud of the woodchucks he shot, and hung them on the fence stakes to show off. A city visitor saw them and offered Vincent 25 cents for every woodchuck he shot and cleaned. Vincent lives now in Berne and has been a member of the Berne Conservation Club since his youth. The club was founded in 1932 and is in need of new members. Vincent talks of the camaraderie that club members have with each other and with members of other gun clubs against whom they compete at trap or skeet shooting. He shares trophies he’s won and also tells of a famous Berne native, Captain Adam Henry Bogardus, who became a world wing-shot champion and traveled with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

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