Other Voices

Matthew Pinchinat was recently named as the director for diversity, equity, and inclusion — a new post for the Guilderland school district. 

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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As newcomers move to Voorheesville and New Scotland, Alan Kowlowitz hopes they will embrace their heritage, not as a matter of genetics, a love of place handed down through family, but rather like the love that ties a marriage together.

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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Brian Barr of Guilderland was one of five people recently recognized as a Community Bridge Builder at the inaugural awards ceremony held by ALERT, the Albany Law Enforcement Resolution Team.

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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Jennifer Black looks at a log and sees how it could become a bird or a lighthouse or a bear.

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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Lisa O’Sullivan and Quetta Duran share a passion for helping children. In their work for Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Capital Region, they see how mentors paired with children can transform lives. The program, based in Albany, serves four counties: Albany, Saratoga, Rensselaers, and Schenectady.

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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Meg Eckhardt has a soothing alto voice. “Music speaks to a person’s heart,” she says in this week’s podcast.

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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History is personal for Dennis Barber. He lives in a Civil War-era house on a farm that has been in his family for a century.

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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Will Aubrey, who has led the Helderberg Escarpment Hawk Watch at Thacher Park for more than two decades, is passing the torch — or perhaps the binoculars — to John Loz, who just finished his term as chairman of the Audubon New York Council. Each September, about 3,000 birdwatchers come to Thacher to count the raptors on their annual migration to South America.

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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Director Jim Milton says he was attracted to theater because, being raised as a Cathoic, he found this Biblical phrase profound: “The Word was made flesh.”

“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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