Other Voices

Other Voices

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

  • Craig LeHoullier — tomato guru says 'dig in'
    Craig LeHoullier is a tomato guru. He thinks the time of coronavirus, when people are home and wary of grocery shopping, is the perfect time to become a gardener. He does Instagram Live on Fridays from his North Carolina home —@NCTomatoMan — as he tends his garden and answers inquiries. A chemist by trade, LeHoullier treats the growing of vegetables like a science but also takes great delight and pleasure in the color and taste of his produce. He and a gardener in Australia, Patrina Nuske Small, have spent 15 years working with people from around the world to develop 123 varieties of dwarf tomatoes, which even city dwellers with just a pot of soil can raise. He’s also perfected the art of growing vegetables in bales of straw, and will soon have books on both of those initiatives. His first book, “Epic Tomatoes” — he called writing it an act of courage — is not just a practical guide to growing tomatoes but a personal life history of his favorite varieties. In this week’s podcast, at AltamontEnterprise.com/podcasts, LeHoullier urges people to follow his passion into gardening. “You’ll get healthy,” he says as you work to a soundtrack of birdsong and learn from your mistakes. (— Photo by Kip Dawkins)

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    31 min
  • Sara Slack — Sojourn to Antarctica
    Sarah Slack — here, on the deck of the icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer — says science teachers who taught her at Farnsworth Middle School and Guilderland High School shaped her into the explorer and teacher she became. “Our job is not just what we talk about in the classroom,” says Slack, who teaches eighth-grade science, technology, engineering, and math, known as STEM, at The Montauk School in Brooklyn, but, rather, modeling “who we are as people.” In this week’s podcast, Slack talks about her most recent sojourn — to Antarctica where she worked with professors and graduate students to map the seafloor under the edge of the Thwaites Glacier. Called the Doomsday Glacier, Thwaites, which is about the size of Florida, is melting more than other glaciers because of warm currents below. “It is a stopper, holding back four other glaciers,” said Slack. If Thwaites were to melt, sea levels would rise two feet, said Slack, and, if those four other glaciers melted, too, sea levels could rise another catastrophic 13 feet. Throughout her journey, Slack stayed in touch with her eighth-grade students through a blog and relished answering their questions. Her last post features a picture taken shortly after the icebreaker where she had lived left the Drake Passage, known as the roughest water in the world, causing Slack to be seasick — it is a picture of a rainbow.

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    29 min
  • Hedi McKinley — Mental health notes from a centenarian
    Hedi McKinley grew up in Vienna, Austria, the only child of poor storekeepers; they lived over their grocery store. Her father, who fought in World War I, had been taken prisoner by the Russians and spent four years in Siberia and then another two years walking home to Austria. When Hedi was 18, she and her parents were turned out of their home by Nazis on Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938. Yet Hedi survived and prospered and has spent decades working to make the world a better place. She went first to England and then came to New York City where she worked as a waitress and studied nights at Columbia University. She graduated magna cum laude and went on to get a master’s degree in social work. She taught for years at the University at Albany while also maintaining her own practice and publishing scholarly articles. She regularly wrote a mental-health column for The Enterprise and also became a radio personality, giving no-nonsense advice. She will turn 100 on April 15. In this week’s podcast she recalls how, when she was 8, she thought it was strange people would fight about praying to different gods. “I could not understand killing someone else who has a different belief,” she said. She would like to see the word rid of envy, saying, “The idea you have something I don’t … has brought about more death than anything else.”

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    31 min
  • Ward Stone — former wildlife pathologist
    Ward Stone, Ph. D., wildlife pathologist for the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation for more than 40 years, has fought his way back from a series of strokes that almost killed him. “I can’t walk, but I can think,” he says. At almost 82, the passion he’s had since his boyhood for wildlife and for discovery is unquelled. He says in this week’s podcast that he has an unfinished job — to fight for the environment. He recalls helping Mohawks discover what was polluting their water, working to identify the West Nile virus in New York, and predicting the sort of pandemic that we’re suffering from now.

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    44 min
  • Steven Wickham, Guilderland Coalition for Responsible Growth
    Steven Wickham last week undertook a spontaneous act of civil disobedience. As chairman of the steering committee for the Guilderland Coalition for Responsible Growth, he got a call last Thursday afternoon that Pyramid was clear-cutting trees to make way for a Costco before the project had gone through the state-required environmental review process. In this week’s podcast, Wickham tells how he ended up sitting on the blade of the tree-cutting machine. He also talks about the way civil disobedience, over the centuries, helped in founding our nation and in moving it forward. When he was in second grade, Wickham says, he wanted to quit school because his teacher insisted her students color in the lines and believed no one could get a perfect score. After he moved schools in high school, his chemistry teacher, who had become a friend, told him the school was warned that Wickham was a “troublemaker.” His teacher came to understand that Wickham is someone who would stand up for himself and others who were wronged, he said. Wickhasm believes that now, with climate change and the severe decline of birds and insects, that we need to think differently about where and how we build.

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    36 min
  • Evan, Lena, and Clara Thomas — Berne-Knox-Westerlo students
    Berne-Knox-Westerlo students, from left, twins Evan and Lena Thomas, both 13 and both in eighth grade, and their 11-year-old sister, Clara Thomas, a sixth-grader, talk from their Berne home in this week’s podcast, at AltamontEnterprise.com/podcasts, about what their days are like without school. After one week without classes, the thrill of sleeping in has given way to missing friends, teachers, and their school routines. Clara, who wants to be an actor, was disappointed the school musical, “Flapper,” had to be canceled but she likes the extra time she gets to spend with family and she likes doing schoolwork at her own pace. Lena, who likes having time to improve her skills playing the guitar, also worries about how she’ll get credit for her Regents science course. Evan is learning how to develop games and edit video. He likes technology but misses the atmosphere of school. Lena has this advice for parents: Be patient. — Photo by Laurie Searl

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    23 min
  • Chris Claus — Gallupville House
    Chris Claus — a retired Guilderland teacher — grew up in Gallupville and lives there still, right next to a historic 1872 building, the Gallupville House. It was built as a hotel and, in Claus’s youth, served as a Grange Hall. He has fond memories of the secret rituals and the plays he participated in there as a boy, which he describes with verve in this week’s podcast. With the nation’s Bicentennial celebration in 1976, the building was reborn as a community center. The town of Wright owns the Gallupville House and holds court in its basement. Last month, the Gallupville House Association launched a website — www.gallupvillehouse.org. The day of the Enterprise podcast, Claus came up with an idea of how the house’s central location combined with the association’s community spirit and new website may be able to launch a project that would help people in need during the coronavirus pandemic. The Gallupville House Association, Claus said, is all about the preciousness of community.

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    48 min
  • Thom Breitenbach, an Altamont artist and his legacy
    Thom Breitenbach built, with his own hands, the castle where he lives on the shoulder of the escarpment. He wrested Helderberg bluestone from his land and forged its iron hardware. Born in Queens, he had moved to the outskirts of Altamont when he was 10 and revelled in the natural surroundings — collecting insects and rocks, identifying flora and fauna from field guides. As a teenager, he built grandfather clocks and a harpsichord. He started to paint in earnest after a Guilderland High School classmate gave a presentation on Salvadore Dali and Hieronymus Bosch. The fascination lasted a lifetime. At 24, Breitenbach painted “Proverbidioms,” depicting over 300 common proverbs and clichés, which made him famous. He had read a review of Pieter Bruegel’s painting of Dutch proverbs, which said the language was more colorful then, in the 1500s, he explains. Breitenbach proved otherwise and has continued to paint sequels. He went on to create what he calls “Nu Creatures,” and wrote a “field guide” for them, with both Latin and common names. More recently, Breitenbach wrote and produced a musical about Hieronymus Bosch, the medieval Dutch artist who, like Breitenbach himself, gets lost in his imagination; the fantastical creatures he paints inhabit his home. Breitenbach’s goal now is to paint a triptych as large as Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” He is also in the midst of setting up a not-for-profit so that, after his death, all of his artwork will remain in his castle where admirers can appreciate it for years to come.

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    35 min
  • Bethany Mazura, marathon runner, "Find a thing you love"
    Bethany Mazura has some advice: “Find a thing you love to do and don’t be afraid to put it out into the world because you never know who’s going to come calling and end up in your life.” Mazura found something she loves to do — running. She started when she was depressed after a miscarriage. Her first experience running the Freihofer’s 5K was not a good one. She tried again when she was going through a divorce and this time — preparing for the race and running with a group of women — it was transformative. She has gone on to run not only a marathon — 26.219 miles — but two ultramarathons as well. She’s captained a team for a Ragnar where 12 runners race in an overnight relay; together, they covered the ground from Saratoga Springs to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks. Mazura manages to keep at it while working full time as a lawyer for the state and while raising two young sons. Sometimes her ex-husband, herself, and their sons race together. She is engaged to be married and is planning a wedding with her fiancé, also a runner, that will involve running. Mazura lives in Guilderland and describes in this week’s podcast why she loves running the trails at Thacher Park as well as those close to home in the Pine Bush. She sees running not as a solitary sport where the goal is to win but rather as a social activity that is good for both the body and the spirit.

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    29 min
  • Karen Magnuson Beil, local author on names, science, and Carl Linnaeus

    Karen Magnuson Beil has always been fascinated by names. Her latest book, “What Linnaeus Saw: A Scientist’s Quest to Name Every Living Thing,” is an insightful look at the life of the 18th-Century Swede who developed the modern system of naming organisms. Carl Linnaeus — mocked by one of his critics as “a second Adam” — lived at a time when Europeans’ view of the world and their place in it was rapidly expanding. Linnaeus, a traveler and explorer in his youth, later sent his students to the New World to gather as many new plants and animals as they could find. His far-flung network of correspondents included the work of Jane Colden, who lived in the Hudson River highlands and used the Linnaean names to describe the plants she observed and recorded in exquisite drawings; Beil terms Colden America’s first female botanist. Beil writes in such a way that the reader is left to make discoveries as the story unfolds. “Science is a mystery,” Beil says in this week’s podcast. It involves trying and failing and trying again, she said, adding, “I wanted readers to feel curious and ready to ask questions.” Beil, who lives in Guilderland, believes it’s important to cultivate young scientists. She also writes of Linnaeus as someone whose enthusiasm made science accessible. “We need more science popularizers,” said Beil, “so everyone understands the role of nature and our role as human beings.”


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    37 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…