Other Voices

Jean Lee Hungerford Krull moved with her family to Altamont when she was 5 years old. She is 96 now and says she is glad current residents are fighting to retain the village’s historic Victorian buildings. Krull went through all 12 grades in the single building that was Altamont High School, since demolished. She recalls on this week’s podcast at AltamontEnterprise.com/podcasts when the village was a bustling center of local commerce with three grocery stores and two newsrooms. Her family lived in half of a farmhouse on Western Avenue that is now a group home. During the Great Depression, while her father, Isaac Hungerford, was out of town, working, the couple who lived in the other half of the farmhouse would look after the Hungerford siblings — Jean was the oldest — while their mother, Alma, tended to business like walking into the village for groceries. The Hungerford children, like others in the village, enjoyed the freedom of playing on their own — perhaps as cowboys and Indians, mimicking the films they saw at the Masonic Hall, when the price wasn’t too dear. During World War II, Krull served in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, the U.S. Naval Reserve). She remembers being awakened with other members of the Navy choir on the night of April 12, 1945, the night President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. They marched to a national radio studio to sing his favorite songs, including the “Navy Hymn” — “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” which Krull hummed during the podcast. Krull has outlived most of her friends but finds solace in her still-living children. She keeps house and still loves to read and knit — she wore to the podcast interview a striking blue sweater she had knit herself.

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Jenevieve Lussier was born 22 years ago as Jared Lussier. She and her twin brother, John, were well known in the Helderberg Hilltowns and beyond for their beautiful singing voices, with harmonies reminiscent of the Everly Brothers. They sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Berne-Knox-Westerlo games in a way it had never been heard before. All along, Jenna has been on a quiet, sometimes difficult journey discovering her sexual identity. She’s planning on legally changing her name and changing her body with hormones to fit who she is. Her mother, she says, has always loved her for who she is. When she was a toddler, she wanted pink slippers. As a kid, she spent her Christmas money on Barbie dolls. As a teenager, she was attracted to boys, and thought she was gay — a word that was used as an insult at her school. She is now speaking out about being a transgender woman, hoping to educate others. And she performs now in night clubs as a drag queen named Desirée, and even has a “drag daughter,” whom she loves and supports. “It’s a family,” she says.

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Alicia Stenard believes that a topic percolating just below the consciousness of the American public — school lockdowns — needs to be addressed. As a longtime Albany teacher, she worried about the effects lockdown drills had on her students’ psyches. Not only did the drills distract from learning but they could leave lasting scars, leading kids not to trust school as a safe place. Still, Stenard could see that the drills are needed. So she came up with a solution. She told her kindergartners a story — serious enough to get them to do the drills promptly but not frightening. It worked so well, she wrote a book, “The Elephant in the Room: A Lockdown Story,” to share with other teachers. The book is colorfully illustrated by Greg Matusic, the father of one of Stenard’s former students. The story, Stenard says, works for kids up to age 7 in the stage of Magical Thinking that allows them to believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. Her story tells of escaped circus elephants who roam a school seeking the children’s peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches but, as the students perform their lockdown drill, the elephants, monkeys, and ponies are safely lured away by clowns bearing peanuts. In this week’s podcast, Stenard shares more than her light-hearted story; she shares her deep concerns about modern children’s anxieties and also shares ways parents as well as teachers can help their kids deal with stress.

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Lisa Campo-Engelstein, Ph.D. of Altamont was chosen by the BBC as one of “100 inspiring and influential women from around the world for 2019.” She teaches students at Albany Medical College about the human side of being a doctor. In this week’s podcast, Campo-Engelstein talks with passion about her work as a feminist bioethicist. She reports that half of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned and argues for the need for a male birth-control pill, which has been more than 50 years in the making. Campo-Engelstein also works in fertility preservation, for example, arguing that insurance companies should cover this for cancer patients. She enjoyed meeting women, from artists to athletes, at the BBC symposium in London and only regretted that World Cup winner Megan Rapinoe couldn’t make it. Campo-Engelstein is herself a soccer player and also admires Rapinoe’s advocacy for human rights. Contact us at [email protected].

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Mary Jo Batters was, as she puts it, “cloistered” for six years, caring for her mother who had dementia. She learned some important life lessons in those years, such as the way the core of a person remains. Her mother, who was a nurse, cared about people up until the very end. Batters also learned how to reassess her mother’s needs and her own challenges every day so that she could get through each day, one at a time. She learned to think, “Thank you for this day and anything in it.” When she emerged from “the missing years,” Batters says, “My sense of self was distorted.” To re-enter the world at large, she plunged into doing volunteer work for the Community Caregivers, a not-for-profit group that provides non-medical care for people, often the elderly, so that they can stay in their homes. Batters is still volunteering, taking clients to doctors’ appointments or grocery shopping, and becoming a friend to many. In this week’s podcast, she describes the process of becoming a volunteer caregiver and the satisfaction she derives from her work. “Give yourself permission to try,” she urges. Batters also turns the cliché upside down, saying, “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.” By this, she means, you don’t have to be a pro to take on a new task; you can learn as you go.

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Sue McDonough began her career as a New York State Trooper in 1978, specializing in animal cruelty cases. McDonough worked as a wildlife rehabilitator for 15 years and believes wild animals are better protected — in a program where rehabilitators are licensed and their facilities inspected — than domestic animals. She is now associated with the New York State Humane Association. Since the state’s laws protecting domestic animals like cats and dogs are not part of the penal code, but rather come under Agriculture and Market Law, McDonough believes many police officers are not well versed in enforcing the law. She has worked with district attorneys, veterinarians, and police officers throughout the state to put together a training manual for police, which can be downloaded from the NYS Humane Association website. In this week’s podcast, at AltamontEnterprise.com/podcasts, she talks about the links between animal abuse and human violence and describes some of the crimes she has encountered. “We have an obligation to see that animals don’t suffer,” McDonough says. “We can’t save every animal.” She also says, “We all need to work together.”

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The Enterprise experts in local news looked back at some of their most important stories for 2019.Noah Zweifel, who reports on the Helderberg Hilltowns, focuses on the Multi-Use Residential District proposed by Knox Supervisor Vasilios Lefkaditis to encourage business in the rural town. The two Democrats on the town board voted against the MRD because many of the people in the proposed district didn’t want it and because of environmental and safety concerns. A supermajority vote was needed because the Albany County Planning Board had recommended against it. Lefkaditis’s slate was elected in November so it looks like Knox will eventually have the new MRD. Zweifel also talks about highway safety issues raised by a Berne councilman who, come Jan. 1, will be the sole Democrat on a town board where all of the members have been backed by the GOP chairman, who is also the highway superintendent.Sean Mulkerrin, who covers the town of New Scotland and the villages of Altamont and Voorheesville, discusses two long-running legal challenges that had an effect on the ballot box. The Voorheesville School Board president was ousted in the spring after a popular girls’ basketball coach claimed in court papers that he was fraudulently forced to resign from his coaching post. He sued to get his job back. In Altamont, a group of citizens challenged the village board’s rezoning of property from residential to commercial to allow the Altamont Stewart’s to expand. In the March village elections, two incumbent trustees who had voted in favor of the rezone narrowly kept their seats. The village board then voted again in favor of the rezone. Elizabeth Floyd Mair, the Enterprise Guilderland reporter, talks about the evolution of a story on a Lynnwood teacher, Tod Mell, accused of inappropriately touching one of his students. Floyd Mair changed the narrative when, after quoting from glowing letters in a story on Mell’s sentencing, the victim came forward and told her side of the story to Floyd Mair. In the podcast, Floyd Mair also talks about how a sad story on the closing of Christ Lutheran Church in Guilderland led to a happy story about the Micronesians who joyously worship at the church.

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Cathy Light is a rambler. In her six decades on this Earth, she has been an art teacher, a businesswoman, a marketer, a minister with a degree from Yale Divinity School, and is now a Guilderland school bus driver. She uses skills from all those professions in her new business, renting vintage campers. She has restored the campers — one plucked from a dump and named, after her mother, “Tin Can Annie” — with artistic flair. She delivers the campers in person, hearing the stories, both of joy and pain, of the people who are using them. Some have been used for country weddings or festivals, others for families who need a respite, and one — the S’Lumberjack, outfitted with an Adirondack theme — was rented by a woman for her nonagenarian mother to make new memories. Light’s love of the campers is rooted in her childhood in Ontario where her family, including her grandmother who had once lunched with the queen of England, went on adventures together. “I’m always looking for new experiences to learn,” said Light. Her philosophy on being a rambler through life, whether in relationships or jobs, each of which she pursues with passion, is: “Just because it doesn’t last forever doesn’t mean it wasn’t good.”

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After Charlotte Palmeri was diagnosed with cancer in 2013, she thought, “I wonder how long until I can help someone.” Inspired by a verse in Ecclesiastes, about how farmers who wait for perfect weather never plant, Palmeri founded a support and prayer group for women with cancer in 2015. She named it In His Presence. The group this month moved from meeting at Hamilton Union Presbyterian Church, where Palmeri is the church organist and choir director, to the Lynnwood Reformed Church to be accessible to those who can’t manage stairs. The group has sent out over 700 cards, often handmade, each with heartfelt messages, to people suffering from cancer. In this week’s podcast at AltamontEnterprise.com/podcasts, Palmeri describes some of the many ways she has helped others. This includes helping those she is close to — being with a friend as she breathed her last breath — and helping those she doesn’t know; she plays music for a weekly luncheon at St. Peter’s Hospice and has organized faith retreats — the first featured a Christian magician and the second a Christian ventriloquist. “When you give, you get so much back,” says Palmeri. She also advises: “Take a bad experience and use it for good.”

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