Wednesday, December 13, 2023 

The Bob story posted this weekend in The Gazette and Recorder(early Saturday)

"Christmas through the years"

$125.00 collected over the Weekend for Go Fund Me, Thank's to all.

This week we need to rally $225.00

 Please help us continue The Historians Podcast by making a donation.  Please contribute at https://gofund.me/777777e9  or send a check made out to Bob Cudmore, 125 Horstman Drive, Scotia, NY 12302. $5305.00 the goal $7000.00 by the end of the merry month off December

from The Daily Gazette

Mary Zawacki

by Stan Hudy

https://www.dailygazette.com/life_and_arts/schenectady-historical-society/article_79c4ce7e-98fa-11ee-8887-87cb9265ce50.html

GETTING TO KNOW - A University of New Paltz graduate in 2009 with a bachelor of arts in history and French, Mary Zawacki is passionate about the past — especially Schenectady County’s history.

Zawacki is the executive director of the Schenectady County Historical Society at 32 Washington Ave. in the Stockade District of Schenectady, joining the organization in 2014 as its curator and becoming executive director in 2017.

Bob Cudmore conversation with Mary Zawacki

Episode 433-A history of the Mohawk River with Mary Zawacki, executive director of the Schenectady County Historical Society. When the last Ice Age began to melt 22,000 years ago, the Mohawk River flowed with more force than Niagara Falls.

An eye for a good story
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette and Amsterdam Recorder. 

Amsterdam High School 1945 graduate Richard Ellers had a sharp eye for a good story.

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Ellers and his family moved to Amsterdam and rented a flat or apartment on an upper floor of a commercial building on East Main Street.

There was only single pane glass on the windows and Ellers said, "I can still hear the clink-clink-clink of snow chains on cars driving below. Occasionally every third or fourth clink would be counterpointed with a double thunk, which was the sound of the ends of a broken chain slapping the underside of a fender."

The flat was a few doors west of Coogan's Grill, operated by local Democratic political leader William Coogan.

There was a side door to Coogan's in the hall, originally the lady's entrance. Ellers said, "I knew this door well because, before I was of age, my dad would send me to Coogan's to buy him a quart of beer. I would enter that side door, pay Mr. Coogan, who would then deliver the quart to me, in a bag, out in the hall.

When Mohawk and Bigelow-Sanford carpet mills in Amsterdam were producing canvas, not carpet, for the armed forces in World War II, high school boys became part of the work force.

The Board of Education changed the high school day to start and end early, so that male students could take part time jobs in the mills.

The students worked four hour shifts after school. Ellers worked at Bigelow-Sanford Carpet, helping make Army squad tents out of canvas woven in the factory.

Ellers wrote, "Our job was pulling large sections of canvas for women who sat at huge industrial sewing machines putting sections together.

"We helpers pulled the canvas as the women sewed. You wore your oldest clothes because the dark green sealant/fireproofing on the canvas came off on anything it touched.

"The sewing women wore really big aprons, plus long cuffs on their forearms. I think that when summer vacation came, they put us on full eight-hour shifts. I cannot remember if the high school girls took jobs, too."

Ellers paid tribute to a Market Street pool hall proprietor known as Reverend Louie Allen, "We called him Reverend, partly because he was strict about behavior."
Ellers said no cussing was allowed at Louie's, "But he was always ready to shake 'buck dice' for money or just for a soda pop and his back room was a haunt of poker players and some crap shooting."
Allen's first floor pool hall was on Market Street at an alley that led to the police station. The building was torn down for urban renewal in the 1970s.
Ellers was voted by his 1945 high school classmates as the wittiest and noisiest boy. He witnessed FDR's Presidential funeral and wrote a first person account for the school paper, The Item.
Ellers skipped his May 1945 high school graduation ceremony to enlist in the United States Navy, serving as a gunner's mate on minesweepers in the Pacific Theater, reaching the Philippines and Japan before the war ended.

Taking advantage of the G.I. Bill, he studied at Kent State University's school of journalism, graduating in 1953. He worked as a reporter and photographer for the Warren Ohio Tribune Chronicle from 1954 to 1965 and then for the Cleveland Plain Dealer until his retirement in 1992. His reporting beats included presidential political campaigns, science and nature, industry, and human interest.

Ellers, 93, died in July 2021 at his home in Warren, Ohio. He had married Martha McLaughlin in 1956 who survives, as do two children.

Friday, December 15, 2023-Episode 503- Jack Warren is author of FREEDOM: The Enduring Importance of the American Revolution. Freedom is a look into British America, the Revolutionary War, the birth of a new nation, what freedom means, and how the events of the past are important even today.

Mohawk Valley Weather, Wednesday, December 13, 2023

33 degrees in The City of Amsterdam at 5:48AM