Other Voices

John Hughes of Altamont stands at the Aulanko Nature Reserve in Finland near Hameenlinna, a city north of Helsinki where he lives with his Finnish wife, Tuulikki. The couple met at an educational media conference in Honolulu — she was a college professor in Finland; he was a media producer for SUNY. Both are retired now. They married last April, in the midst of the pandemic, in front of the Guilderland Town Hall, and now split their time between Altamont and Hameenlinna. For the fourth year running, a report sponsored by the United Nations has named Finland the happiest place in the world. The joke in Finland, Hughes says in this week’s podcast, is: “It wins that year after year because all the sad people kill themselves.” Finns have a very dry wit, he said. But, he said, there is a feeling of safety and contentment in the country with a socialized medical system that takes care of needs, and faith in the government and the police.

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Alexis Pris, an Eagle Scout, proudly wears the shoulder patch of her patrol — the Dangerous Cupcakes. She is a founder of Boy Scouts of America Troop 1075G based in Delmar and the troop’s first girl to earn Boy Scouts’ highest rank. She and her patrol mates chose the name, Lexi says in this week’s podcast, to show their feminine side but also to show that they are strong, independent females.

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Carol Maslowsky has lived most of the history of her family’s century-old farm in Westerlo. Her late father, Clayton Barber, remembered moving from his home on West Woodstock Road to the farm on Woodstock Road on his third birthday, Dec. 6, 1920 — in a hay wagon pulled by a horse. Years later, his wife — a city girl from Schenectady who had studied French — would sit on the porch of the mid-19th Century farmhouse there and, looking out at a vista that reached to the Catskills and Vermont, would give the farm its name: Belle View.

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Gudrun Bellerjeau values cultures from around the world and has collected “quality-made” goods from far-flung places to sell in a 200-year-old barn she and her husband own in Knox — the Pleasant Valley Exquisitum. “You don’t have to buy junk stuff,” she says, adding, “The shop is really a psychology center … a place to get away from the hassles, from the phony stuff. You’re stepping into a different world.” Bellerjeau was born, raised, and educated in Germany in a “very poor family,” she says in this week’s podcast. Her father was killed in Russia at the age of 27, leaving his 23-year-old wife, pregnant with Gudrun’s brother, to raise two children. Bellerjeau recalls riding a train to the city with her grandmother and staring, transfixed, at the beautiful things in shop windows.

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Ellen Zunon of Guilderland was brought up on stories of her Dutch ancestors. Her father’s side of the family goes back to Cornelis Van Slijck who came to Fort Orange, now Albany, from the Netherlands in 1634. He married a Mohawk princess, the story goes, although now Zunon is “not so sure about the princess part,” she says in this week’s podcast. Bridging two worlds, van Slijck’s daughters became interpreters; a son founded Schenectady Village in 1661, she said. Zunon is a member of the Dutch Settlers Society, established in 1924, and also a trustee of the New Netherlands Institute, a not-for-profit that supports the translation of old Dutch documents in the State Archives. Zunon notes that Albany has a sister city in the Netherlands — Nijmegen in the province of Gelderland — a relationship that began in 1947 after Nijmegen had been bombed at the end of World War II. The bulbs Nijmegen sent in thanks for the goods from Albany were the beginning of Albany’s Tulip Festival, she says. This week, Zunon gave a talk, online through the Guilderland Public Library, based on a journal — “A Journey into Mohawk and Oneida Country, 1634-1635” — kept by a young Dutch barber and surgeon, Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert. Van den Bogaert kept a daily journal as he traveled, in the midst of the Little Ice Age, with two other young Dutchmen and five Mohawk guides 100 miles west from Fort Orange into central New York to negotiate prices for beaver pelts with the Mohawk and Oneida people. Zunon notes the account has the first recorded listing of the five tribes making up the Iroquois Confederacy and also, judging by their reaction, their introduction to guns. Zunon has developed her own recipes from the descriptions of the food the men ate on their journey — made from corn, beans, and squash, staples for the Iroquois diet. Zunon is Dutch on her mother’s side, too, as her mother’s parents immigrated from the Netherlands in 1911. As a child, Zunon learned to play the Dutch national anthem on the piano. She has her mother’s music book of Dutch songs and her next research project is linking songs from the 1500s and 1600s to the Dutch Eighty Years’ War for independence. In her own life, Zunon has bridged two worlds. As a student majoring in French at the University at Albany, she joined the French club where she met Denis Zunon, a student from the Ivory Coast in Africa who became her husband. They raised their two children there until, when their daughter was 12 and their son was 6, political unrest brought the family to the United States. “Living in two cultures gives you a broader view of the world,” says Zunon. “It makes you less judgmental of other cultures.”

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Sandra Stempel was raised, one of six children, by a father, Rudolph Valentino Stempel, who taught her the value of perseverance, and by a mother, Sheila Catherine Stempel, who flew solo as a young woman and wrote a poem for every one of her children’s birthdays. Words are important to Stempel. She writes a weekly Enterprise column for the Berne Library, under her married name, Sandra Kisselback, that often includes her own poetry. In her column, she also tells the stories of local people, recently of those who are giving TEDx talks for the library. Stempel created a Word of the Month Club that has gotten readers to stretch their vocabulary. A longtime member of the Berne Historical Society, Stempel will soon be the town historian. “Everybody out there has a story and they should be told,” she says. She also wants to inspire more interest in the Berne Historical Museum, which attracted 200 visitors on its opening day on Nov. 11, 1970. A series of rooms upstairs in Town Hall, which was once a hotel, are outfitted with donated artifacts from different eras. The Children’s Room, for example, has a bicycle with wooden wheels and a magic lantern. Stempel encourages others to read — she and her sister are on a quest to each read 100 books this year — and to write. “Writing helps you discover yourself,” she says.

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Peter Lindemann, who lives in Schoharie County, is immersed in its history, documented in several books he has researched and written. Lindemann likes looking at big, national pieces of the past through a local lens. As a boy, he was fascinated with Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. His sister, who grew up to become a teacher, gave him a book on the subject. He memorized the Gettysburg Address as a child and today, as he takes on the role of Lincoln for local performances, he recites the address his own way. Rather than words softened into accepted platitudes over time, Lindemann’s Lincoln reads the words as a defiant speech, a rallying cry given at a time when the union could well have been lost. The address is still a needed rallying cry today, Lindemann says after reciting Lincoln’s words in this week’s podcast. On Feb. 25, Lindemann will present a virtual program, sponsored by the Old Stone Fort Museum and the Schoharie County Historical Society, titled “They May Have Found James Tanner’s Legs.” Tanner, a Schoharie farm boy, joined the Union Army in 1861 at age 17.

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Major David Erickson, of Knox, retired from a career in the military that taught him “we’re all much more alike than we are different.” He was stationed in Germany when the Berlin wall came down and soon after visited Prague. A Czech he met there was a boy when the Americans liberated Prague but told him the Russians rewrote the history books, removing the Americans’ role. “I never forgot,” said the Czech. Erickson now teaches Albany High School students in the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps. The battalion is named for Sergeant Henry Johnson, a young African-American from Albany who, during World War I, fought off a German raiding party in Argonne Forest, saving his unit. He was finally awarded the Medal of Honor in 2015. “I tell the kids one person can make a difference,” said Erickson. He stresses that the JROTC is not a military recruitment program but rather a citizenship and leadership program, run by the students themselves. It has both academic and fitness components. “Forty percent of my kids are true refugees,” Erickson said, noting they come from every continent except Australia and the South Pole. He tells several of their stories in this week’s podcast. Francis Hungman, a refugee from Burma, now Myanmar, walked through woods and was in a boat that almost sank. He led his team to a first-place win at a Fort Dix competition. Emmanuel Tay from Liberia was elected president at Boys’ State and remained friends with the Albany HIgh student who ran against him. Tay is now serving in the Marine Corps. Nevaeh Boyd, an Albany native, won an American Legion oratory contest, speaking about the Constitution. She hopes to be admitted to Siena or Saint Rose to become a teacher. His students learn to speak their views and to listen; they are diverse but learn to work as a team, Erickson said. He loves his work with students he calls “my kids” and says, “The future is bright.”

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