Other Voices

Other Voices

By The Altamont Enterprise & Albany County PostSociety & CultureKids & Family
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Other Voices episodes

  • Milton Hart — WWII veteran vying for local monument
    Milton Hart is the only child of two only children. His service in World War II — as a combat infantryman with the 70th Armored Infantry Battalion, 20th Armored Division — gave him a sense of camaraderie. The soldiers he served with, he said, were “as close to me as a brother would be.” Hart has stayed in touch with his comrades in arms throughout his life and, at 94, is one of the few surviving. He tears up when he remembers liberating Dachau, giving away his rations to the “walking skeletons.” He laughs when he remembers the celebration after the Armistice as German and American soldiers traded guns and, rather than shooting each other, shot tin cans together. “I guess they didn’t want a war any more than we did,” said Hart of the Germans. His troop ship landed in New York City — the soldiers were set to train for an invasion of Japan with heavy casualties expected — on Aug. 6, 1945, the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. “We figured that saved our lives,” said Hart. He returned to his home in Berne, working at The Mill as his father and grandfather had before him. The town’s long-gone Honor Roll, listing World War II veterans, was replaced with a replica in 2006, built as an Eagle Scout project. That monument is now in disrepair and Hart would like to see a more permanent monument, perhaps of Helderberg bluestone, to honor Berne veterans of all wars.

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    34 min
  • Grace Nichols — recording bats in the pine bush
    Grace Nichols is a citizen scientist and also an activist. In this week’s podcast, the former biology teacher talks about a group she has formed to document the many species of bats that live in portions of the pine bush slated for development. “Clunk, clunk — click, click,” she describes the sounds heard on their bat detectors, the pitch too high for human ears to hear. Recorders from a local bat expert have produced sonograms of various species — each as individual as a fingerprint. Standing near the fringes of green in the midst of suburbia, said Nichols. “You become more aware of how alive the whole world is.” Nichols was instrumental in getting Albany County last year to pass a resolution to be pollinator-friendly. People have told her, “Grace cares more about insects than people.” Her response: “There are no people without insects.”

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    36 min
  • Mohammad Yadegari — hard truths in an immigrant's experience

    Mohammad Yadegari of Guilderland has written a book, “Always an Immigrant: A Cultural Memoir” that describes his life in three parts: as a child, growing up in an Iranian family in Iraq; as a young man, learning about life on his own in Tehran; and as a newcomer to America where he studies in Albany, marries, and becomes a teacher. He spent a decade writing the book, crystallizing a lifetime of experiences into compelling stories, which reveal some hard truths. As a schoolboy, he was told by his teacher, describing empires that had over history, risen and fallen, that America did not build an empire but brought many people together and melded into a nation. Deep down, he is sad seeing the news now because he cannot understand how someone feels better than another because of the color of his or her skin. He writes, “We are what we observe, learn, and experience in our momentary journey on earth. The degree that separates us from one another is the way we come to regard our perceptions as facts.” — Photo from Mohammad Yadegari


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    39 min
  • Judith Enck — Beyond Plastics
    Judith Enck has devoted her career to protecting the environment. She has had a role in initiatives great — regional director of the United States Environmental Protection Agency under the Obama administration — and small: designer of her town’s rural recycling program. In this week’s podcast, Enck talks about some of her current causes, including her founding of Beyond Plastics. Her insights are valuable at a time when the current administration is making rollbacks in environmental protections, having cast such protections as harmful to business.

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    40 min
  • A barber's grand opening delayed

    Campus Barber has not reopened for humans yet but owner Joey Barr can still give the shop dog, Zero, a cut. Barr, now 30, started his career as an apprentice at age 16. He was fond of the Albany shop that taught him his trade but, after four years, plied his scissors and razors in New York City. There, he learned some sophisticated techniques but says he felt like a little fish in a big pond. A decade later, Barr headed back to the Capital Region and bought his own shop off of Western Avenue, near the University at Albany uptown campus. His grand opening was to be in mid-March but then barber shops and everything else were shut down to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. “Three weeks turned into three months,” Barr says in this week’s podcast. Barr used the time to renovate his shop and looks forward to opening soon. “I’m happy to be here and excited for the future,” he says. (Photo by Jackie Orchard)


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    31 min
  • Alice Green, executive director Center for Law and Justice in Albany
    Alice Green, founder and executive director of the Center for Law and Justice in Albany, talks in this week’s podcast, about structural racism that affects not just our criminal justice system but everything from our schools to our health-care system. Seven years ago, in the aftermath of a Florida jury finding George Zimmerman, a white man, not guilty of any crimes despite his shooting and killing an unarmed black youth, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, Green wrote a paper, “Pathway To Change: African Americans and Community Policing in Albany.” In it, she details the decades of racial tensions between the Albany police department and the community it serves, going back to the 1984 police killing of Jesse Davis, a mentally ill, unarmed black man, in his Arbor Hill home. Police officers claimed they had to shoot Davis because he came at them with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, and a grand jury cleared police of any wrongdoing. “A police department photograph uncovered years later showed Davis’s lifeless body clutching only a key case in one hand and a toy truck in the other,” Green wrote. She continues to work for change, and currently the center’s website features responses from Albany leaders to the center’s recommendations. — Photo from the Center for Law and Justice website

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    46 min
  • Brenna Autrey, Guilderland teacher, is “100-percent in”
    Brenna Autrey describes herself in this week’s podcast, as “100-percent in” and “very headstrong.” An English teacher at Guilderland High School for 18 years, she cares deeply about her students, some of whom she has stayed in touch with throughout their lives. She vividly remembers Sept. 11, 2001 when she was teaching ninth-graders in rural Iowa and had to “put on a face” to guide them through the day of the terrorists’ attacks. She decided that day to return closer to home and, after finishing out her obligation for the school year in Iowa, set her sights on Guilderland. Now, she is guiding her students through the crisis of coronavirus, teaching them remotely while missing the face-to-face classroom exchanges. She is also co-advisor to the Class of 2020 and has marveled at their growth over the past four years, particularly at the way they have reacted to the loss of many rites of passage like their senior ball and traditional graduation ceremony. Rather than harboring a sense of entitlement and crying, “Why me?” or being angry, she says, they have developed as-yet-to-be-announced ways to come together and also contribute to others.

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    30 min
  • Christine Primomo — Answer the census, get engaged
    Christine Primomo, a retired nurse living in Coeymans, is an activist who is passionate about many initiatives, among them the need for every Albany County resident to be counted in the 2020 census. In this week’s podcast, she notes that currently only 59 percent of county residents have filled out the brief survey. Primomo stresses that the census can be answered by phone, by mail, or online — and that the responses remain confidential. “We each need to do our part. It’s up to us. It’s our money. It’s our community,” she says. A member of the nonpartisan, not-for-profit League of Women Voters, Primomo remembers, as a grammar student, being taught civics. “That doesn’t happen any more,” she said. “People have lost their faith and just don’t feel their vote counts … If you don’t like the way something is working, get engaged,” she urges.

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    29 min
  • Karen Sigond, R.N. — “Get the care you need.”
    Karen Sigond, R.N. of Berne says her mother and grandmother taught her to sew and to recycle things. So she has used colorful scraps from her quilting projects to make hundreds of masks for people who need them. “That’s how I grew up,” she says. Her thought with the mask project was: “Let me use what I have,” she says in this week’s podcast. That statement seems to be a metaphor for her life. Sigond wanted to be a nurse since she was a child in a small northern New York town. Her father was a nursing assistant and she volunteered as a Candy Striper in a local hospital. She went to the Albany Medical School of Nursing, where she appreciated the hands-on learning, and still works at Albany Med. She later pursued a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree while raising, with her husband, three boys — all the while continuing her nursing career. She recalls taking books to Little League games and doing her schoolwork on the kitchen table during weekends. As an Intensive Care Unit manager, she did research on the importance of communicating with families. She was also part of a national collaboration on increasing organ donations for transplants. Now that Albany Med and some other area hospitals are opening up for elective surgeries, Sigond says, “Hospitals are safe places. People should not be afraid to have surgery.” She urges, “Get the care you need.”

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    34 min
  • Melissa Hale-Spencer — the Golden Dozen of editorial writing
    Melissa Hale-Spencer loves taking her dog on miles-long walks at the foot of the Helderberg escarpment where she lives. The longtime editor of The Altamont Enterprise, Hale-Spencer has, for the 10th time, been recognized among the best opinion writers in the weekly press. The Golden Dozen awards were announced recently by the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors. In the society’s annual contest, opinion writers are judged for their editorial skills and courage, with the best of the top dozen winning the Golden Quill award. Hale-Spencer learned to write from her father, a lifelong newspaperman. She took her first reporting job when her parents called on her to help at their Adirondack weekly, The Lake Placid News, in 1975, where her future husband, Gary Spencer, also began a career in journalism. Hale-Spencer started writing for The Enterprise as a young mother of two daughters in the 1980s. In this week’s podcast, she talks to co-publisher Marcello Iaia about the joys and challenges of being a weekly newspaper editor.

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    33 min

About Other Voices

From the publisher's feed

Often, truth isn’t handed down from public officials but comes from listening to other voices. Once a week, you can hear a wide variety of views from people who shape our corner of the world in New…