Other Voices

Rebecca Platel is looking at similarities, rather than differences, as she studies rural-urban connections. Platel, the Sustainable Communities program manager at the Carey Institute for Global Good in Rensselaerville, received with the town a $10,000 grant from the Hudson River Valley Greenway Community Grants Program to sustain her work. She says about half of Albany County is urban and about half is rural. Growing up in Rensselaerville, she had two distinct experiences — although the Helderberg Hilltown is rural, it is influenced by people from New York City who live in the historic community, she said. Platel was aware of a world beyond the Hilltowns and, as she got older, she learned about the power of social capital.

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Dennis Cyr owns Mountainview Prosthetics on Maple Avenue in Altamont. A Republican, he has long flown a Trump flag under the American flag outside of his shop. Now the front yard of his shop has 13 red Trump signs arrayed on the lawn. In this week’s podcast, Cyr explains that each of those signs is for someone who stopped by his shop to voice their support for Donald Trump. In a liberal place like Altamont, Cyr said, many people don’t feel comfortable placing signs in support of Trump on their own lawns. Cyr, who lives now in Knox, grew up in a close-knit family — his father worked as a machinist; his mother was a homemaker — where politics weren’t important. He had good feelings about Ronald Reagan as president. Cyr says the presidential election has not yet been officially decided and, if Trump loses, he would support him for a run in 2024.

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Ed Biittig, who is 72, has been in recovery from alcoholism for over 46 years. He started drinking at age 13 and by the time he was 26 had totaled five cars in drunk-driving crashes — yet was never arrested. For one of those crashes, Biittig says in this week’s podcast, “I had my 3-year-old son in my car. That crash, I could have killed my own son.” Biittig was finally arrested for driving while intoxicated, after nearly swerving into a police car, and tested .20 for blood-alcohol content. He says that East Greenbush Judge Patrick Maney probably saved his life. Judge Maney gave him a choice between jail or enrolling in the new SPARC (St. Peter's Addiction Recovery Center) program. Biittig wears a piece of slate around his neck, inscribed with the date he had his last drink: Valentine’s Day, 1974. He makes slates for others recovering from drug or alcohol addiction. For more than a decade, Biittig has shared his story through the Choices program, founded by Ed Frank in Altamont and now run by Sergeant Tracy Mance with the Albany County Sheriff’s Office. School kids, now grown, have told him the difference it made in their lives by telling them about his journey on the road to recovery. Biittig spoke at his brother’s funeral two weeks ago. His brother, who called Biittig his best friend, recently died of COVID-19. “Nine days later, his wife died,” he said. Biittig believes he caught COVID-19 at his brother’s funeral. Biittig faces his demons every day, counting each sober day — over 17,000 — as a victory. His advice to others who are battling addictions: “I don’t care if you’ve tried to stop drinking or drugs 10 times, there’s the 11th time.”

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Helen Marie Lounsbury and Walter Galicki, pictured here on their wedding day, Dec. 21, 2019, combined their movie collections as well as their households when they married. As Galicki was organizing the collection, he came upon a DVD of a film of typical Hilltown scenes made in 1950 by Ray Morrow. Through “computer wizardry,” he paired the images with music of the era. Galicki, who grew up in Brooklyn, played the accordion as a child — once with Arthur Godfrey and Lawrence Welk — and often on a Polish radio show. “I was known as Dizzy Fingers,” he says in this week’s podcast. Lounsbury, over her years as a teacher at the elementary school in Berne, had delighted her students with the film. She used her many Hilltown acquaintances to piece together the identities of each of the buildings — from houses to businesses to churches to post offices — and each of the people — from proprietors to teachers to ministers to farmers — pictured in the film. The information culled from heartfelt sessions where old timers shared their memories is included at the end of the film. “Visually, Berne is a place that time has forgotten,” said Lounsbury. “A lot of the houses are still standing.” While the landscape and many of the structures remain the same, the experience of watching the film is like going back in time — to an era when women wore dresses and pillbox hats, where men lined up to shoot clay pigeons, and where children took care of their farm animals and in their free time went swimming in a pond in summer and sledding down a hill in winter — not a screen in sight.

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Brian Barr, a social worker who lives in Westmere, speaks in this week’s podcast in what he calls the “afterglow of an incredible experience.” Thirty-six years ago, Barr, who directed the clinical program at the LaSalle School, came up with an idea for his Rotary Club, which, like other community organizations, had been showering awards on the high school students who were “the cream of the crop.” It struck him that children in the foster-care system, who are overcoming myriad difficulties, are rarely recognized for their achievements. So an annual luncheon was set up where each of the local child-care agencies — St. Catherine’s Center for Children; Northern Rivers, formerly Parsons; the LaSalle School; St. Anne Institute; Community Maternity Services; and Equinox — could nominate a student to be recognized for their courage, perseverance, and achievements. Because of the pandemic, this year’s luncheon was held virtually. Barr decided, despite the difficulties, to push on because the kids wouldn’t get another year to be recognized.

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John Arrighi lives in an historic Rensselaerville church and, as president of the Friends of Conkling Hall, is helping to improve another one, which serves as a community meeting space. Arrighi is seated on the edge of the stage at Conkling Hall. The hall, on Methodist Hill Road, was built as a church in 1839 and changed to a community center in the early 1900s. Arrighi, who was born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island, and came to Albany County to study at the University at Albany, discovered Rensselaerville when his pottery professor, Frances Simches, invited him to her workshop and home — the 1836 Baptist church he now calls home. “If someone comes to a generous giving heart through religion, that’s great,” says Arrighi in this week’s podcast. Although he is not a believer himself, he says both still-active churches in Rensselaerville play a positive role in the community. He recently made a video of the “hidden treasures” in the hall’s attic, a fascinating way to understand both the modern retrofits and the historic castoffs — from ornate plaster moldings to a pipe that brought gas to a now-electrified chandelier. The Conkling Hall volunteers have used the time of coronavirus, when the usual cake walks and chili cook-offs are impossible, to make improvements, from painting to installing Wi-Fi. Arrighi sees people sitting on a bench outside the hall to use the hotspot — a symbol of evolving uses for a community meeting place.

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Marcy Forti, in her 2018 Berne-Knox-Westerlo valedictory address, used a phrase from Southern African philosophy, Ubuntu, often translated as “I am because we are,” which she felt spoke to the way she was raised in the close-knit, rural Hilltown community. The BKW superintendent, Timothy Mundell, has modified the phrase to “They are because we are” to use as the school district’s motto. “I was really touched that my little 18-year-old musings had an impact,” says Forti in this week’s podcast. She wishes, as well, that students would learn about the South African culture that produced that philosophy. Forti is now a junior at Union College in Schenectady where she is majoring in biology while also pursuing minors in chemistry and Spanish. She liked learning about the intersection of Christian, Islamic, and Jewish cultures when she studied in Cordova, Spain — her first time crossing the Atlantic. Forti has long loved animals — from her family’s pet dog to a fledgling pigeon she rescued to hens she raised in 4-H — and would like to become a veterinarian. She is currently rooming with friends, who are like family, and, in the midst of the pandemic, is learning mostly remotely except for going to the laboratory. She did a project at Union where she chalked the anonymous stories of students who had been sexually assaulted or made to feel powerless, writing their words on a walkway. “I wanted to interrupt the daily routine,” she said. “It shook me to read those stories.” Forti advises: It’s OK to learn you were wrong and change. Diversity and acceptance is a work in progress, moving toward something better.

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Inga Boudreau grew up on a farm in Westerlo, the daughter of German artisans. Her mother, a sculptress, could recreate a Chanel outfit by looking at a picture and she told stories that came from the heart. Her father heeded Will Rogers’ words — “Buy land; they’re not making it anymore — and in 1932, sight unseen, bought a 200-acre farm in Westerlo for about $300. Inga and her sister attended the grade school in Westerlo and then went on to graduate from Berne-Knox High School. Boudreau fondly remembers two of her English teachers: in eighth grade, John O’Leary taught her respect for the English language; in high school, Nancy Hayden told her, “Never stop writing because you gave me chills.” Boudreau never did stop. With master’s degrees from New York University and Columbia, she launched a career in children’s book publishing. In this week’s podcast, she talks about some of the authors she worked with whom she grew to know and love: Maurice Sendak, E.B. White, Madeleine L’Engle, and Tomie dePaola. She describes her author friends as kind, egalitarian, and nonjudgmental and treasures their cards and letters. She has always liked the ending of E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web.” Wilbur, the pig rescued at the start of the book by 8-year-old Fern, is missing his friend, the spider Charlotte, and he thinks, “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”

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A year ago, story time at the Altamont library took on a new meaning when residents gathered to share memories from generations' past. This week's podcast is a rerun of that session in honor of the Altamont Free Library, under the direction of Joe Burke, winning the Program of the Year Award from the Upper Hudson Library System. Three women with the longest memories — Carol Dubrin; Jean Hungerford Krull, who came with her daughter, Kristin; and Mary Hughes with her daughter, Meg — told tales that stretched back generations. Ron and Lois Ginsburg shared memories from the last half-century as did Mary Elario. Ellen and Dick Howie came not just with their own stories but with some from Newt Ronan, too. The tapestry their voices wove portrays a village that was at once self-sufficient while its residents depended upon one another

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Timothy Rau, mallet in hand, stands in front of the post-and-beam barn he built for his wedding. He learned how to make mortise-and-tenon joints from his grandfather, the late Everett Rau, to create a timber frame for a sign that announces the name of their Guilderland farm. He’s hardly stopped since, and now owns the New World Barn Company, which both restores ancient structures and builds new ones in traditional ways. He says in this week’s podcast, that he was inspired by the words of John Ruskin, the Victorian English art critic and philosopher: “When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, ‘See! This our fathers did for us.’” Rau is saddened that the 1833 house that Altamont’s first doctor, Frederick Crounse, lived in and practiced from is to be demolished. The town of Guilderland and the village of Altamont together purchased it for $40,000 in back taxes in 2006 and then let it languish. The municipalities have each set aside $50,000 to demolish it. Rau would like to work with the demolition crew to save at least the post-and-beam frame with the idea it could be rebuilt elsewhere, perhaps at the Altamont fairgrounds where the public could appreciate it and learn from it. "There's nothing more honest than a timber frame," he says. "Everything is there for you to see — the marvel and the awe."

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