Other Voices

Other Voices

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

  • Charles Gehring, On America's Dutch roots
    Charles Gehring who lives in New Scotland goes each day to work at the New York State Library in Albany where he travels back in time several hundred years. His life’s work has been translating the records of New Netherland, which the English claimed at the fort in New Amsterdam when they took over from the Dutch in 1664. “The embryo of certain ideals we have as Americans,” says Gehring, including not only tolerance, which comes from the “Dutch freedom of conscience,” but also the idea of social mobility, where power and importance need not come from inherited wealth or position, are from New Netherland. In this week’s podcast at AltamontEnterprise.com, Gehring talks about his life and his work, which is unlocking the past. He is 80 now — about three-quarters of the way through the more than 12,000 pages of New Netherland records — and still pursuing his passion.

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    58 min
  • Rich Schreibstein, photographing the local landscape

    Everyone with a cell phone thinks they are a photographer, says Rich Schreibstein. “A phone doesn’t make you a photographer anymore than it makes you an orator,” says Schreibstein. “What you are is a picture-taker.” Schreibstein, of Altamont, takes his photography seriously. He is president of the Schenectady Photographic Society, founded in 1931, which he says is the oldest continuous photography society in the nation. Schreibstein has won many of the society’s juried competitions and helps to organize its exhibits and workshops, which draw both professional and amateur photographers from throughout the Capital Region. Schreibstein took his first photograph — of Mount Fuji as a 6-year-old in 1954 with a Brownie box camera when his father was stationed in Japan after the Korean War. A teacher at Shreibstein’s El Paso high school changed his life when she introduced him to a darkroom. Today, as Schreibstein explains in this week’s podcast, he uses those same darkroom techniques to create the effects he wants in his digital photographs. Enterprise readers will be able to see his photographs as they listen to Schreibstein’s descriptions.


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    44 min
  • Michael Vincent, hunting and the Berne Conservation Club

    The Enterprise — Marcello Iaia

    Michael Vincent talks turkey for our Thanksgiving podcast. Here, he sounds a turkey call he made himself. He shares memories of hunting all the way back to his boyhood on his grandparents’ farm on Pleasant Valley Road in Knox. There, he hunted on the land for food which they ate. He also shot woodchucks for safety on the farm, preventing holes that could blow tractor tires or break legs. He was proud of the woodchucks he shot, and hung them on the fence stakes to show off. A city visitor saw them and offered Vincent 25 cents for every woodchuck he shot and cleaned. Vincent lives now in Berne and has been a member of the Berne Conservation Club since his youth. The club was founded in 1932 and is in need of new members. Vincent talks of the camaraderie that club members have with each other and with members of other gun clubs against whom they compete at trap or skeet shooting. He shares trophies he’s won and also tells of a famous Berne native, Captain Adam Henry Bogardus, who became a world wing-shot champion and traveled with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

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    37 min
  • Teresa Gil, author on a life of service
    Teresa Gil was named after Mother Teresa, the saint of Calcutta, who was a lifetime friend of Gil’s aunt, Catholic journalist Eileen Egan. Gil, one of nine children of immigrant parents, activists in peace movements and in helping the poor, says her life of service was preordained by her upbringing. A professor and psychotherapist, Gil has published a book, “Women Who Were Sexually Abused as Children: Mothering, Resilience, and Protecting the Next Generation,” based on years of helping women acknowledge childhood abuse to be reborn as caring mothers. “This book unravels the veil of silence,” she writes. Gil writes with both her head and her heart, winning praise from academics as well as from women who have suffered abuse and will no longer accept the shame as theirs. In this week’s podcast, Gil talks about the importance, for all of us, of truly listening to and caring for each other.

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    37 min
  • Mike Moak, A 50sub4 runner racing Father Time
    Mike Moak of Guilderland Center describes himself as competitive. He says his high school wrestling coach at Voorheesville, the late Dick Leach, inspired that in him. Last month, Moak reached his goal of running a marathon in every state. But it wasn’t enough for him to just complete those marathons; he had to do it in under four hours. Moak is one of only 126 runners — members of the 50sub4 Club — to do so; and he is the second oldest. Moak is 63 and started his quest 15 years ago. A pilot, Moak has traveled with his wife, Heidi, to the various marathons across the United States where they also take in the local sights and eat pasta at Italian restaurants before each race. Moak finished his final marathon on Oct. 12 in Hartford, Connecticut where his extended family — surprising him in matching blue T-shirts that said “Team Smoke” — cheered him on at the finish line. In this week’s podcast, Moak says he was racing Father Time to finish the 50 marathons before he was too old. But he’s not done yet. His next challenge will be to run a marathon on each continent, where he anticipates tigers in Africa and glaciers in Antarctica.

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    39 min
  • Damion Coppedge, poetry, chess, and Buddhism in prison
    Damion Coppedge is a poet, a chess teacher, a Buddhist. He honed these aspects of his life during the 22 years he spent in prison. He is now making his way in the world, living in a half-way house in the Bronx since his release on July 31. He appeared in The Enterprise six years ago in a chess column written by the late Clarksville lawyer and activist, Peter Henner. They played chess by mail. Coppedge also corresponded with a young chess prodigy in Uganda, Phiona Mutesi, who lived in the slums of Katwe. Disney made a film, “Queen of Katwe,” about her meteoric rise in the chess world, based on a book by Tim Crothers, which includes a letter from Coppedge to Phiona. This week’s podcast starts with Coppedge reading one of his poems and ends with his advice: “If you have a desire to do something … and you can’t find a way to get people to see your vision, just do it.”

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    34 min
  • Zach Appio, telling stories with Odd Concept Media
    Zach Appio is a storyteller. When he and his brother, Frank, were both seniors at RPI five years ago, they produced a prize-winning psychological thriller, “The Baby Monitor.” Now, Zach has found new ways to tell stories — through comics and music. From his fertile imagination — he taps ideas into his computer and jots on notebooks around his home, even next to his bed — have sprung three comics. “Just T & Cakes” — watch out for verbal and visual puns in Appio’s work — tells the story of a neat sloth named T — he wears a bowtie — and a messy goat named Cakes in a same-sex but different-species marriage. Their love shines bright as they take on life in a big human city. “Tish & Squish” is the tale of two look-alike cats that, as in Mark Twain’s “The Prince and the Pauper,” trade places. Finally, “The Home” is a spooky story of kids in a 1970s orphanage who are given stuffed animals that come to life. The teddy bear, Chunks — Appio sewed patches on a bear himself — is a symbol for Appio’s company, Odd Concept Media. In the same way children invent lives for a favorite toy animal, Appio has invented lives for his characters. Appio has also produced an album — think Jabberwocky, all nonsense syllables, with hip-hop and rap music — that he composed himself from his Altamont bedroom: Zac Roc — Irritable Vowels. Hear his music and his ideas in this week's podcast.

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    34 min
  • Altamont Story Swap, Pt. 2
    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 the second half of the lively story swap that took place on the eve of the village's first Founders Day last Saturday. Among the tales are a few of high-spirited hijinks on Halloween.

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    41 min
  • Altamont Story Swap, Pt. 1
    “I Remember Altamont”: Villagers with long memories gathered at the Altamont Free Library last Friday night, on the eve of the village’s first Founders Day, to share memories and swap stories. Joe Burke, who directs the library and hosted the event, started off with a story about the late Ev Rau remembering his first visit, at age 5, to the train station that now houses the library. He and his grandfather rode the train to the state capitol, where his grandfather wept to see the flag he had fought under during the American Civil War. 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, which can be heard on this week’s podcast portrays a village that was at once self-sufficient while its residents depended upon one another.

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    32 min
  • Corrina Goutos, artist: “Let your kids dream so big"
    Corrina Goutos has this advice for parents, “Let your kids dream so big. Be their safety net.” Goutos, who grew up in Altamont, said her parents did just that for her. Since childhood, she had a love of beauty and a gut need to fight for what is right. She combines both in her art. Goutos lives in Germany now and the jewelry she designs and creates is shown internationally and has won many awards, most notably, she was a finalist in the Art Jewelry Forum for her collection, “Foul Play.” Goutos was inspired when she walked the streets of Berlin on Sunday mornings and saw the “remnants of exuberance” from the night before. She tells in this week’s podcast how she took that “vibrant energy” and turned it to art. Much as in her childhood, playing along the Bozenkill, she’d find trash amid the beauty of nature, Goutos, on the streets of Berlin, would photograph, say, a beer can entwined by a vine. Back at a foundry she built herself, she’d break the rules on casting techniques that she learned at the Savannah College of Art and Design, not using molds but pouring wildly and playing with the metal as it cooled, which she called “completely spontaneous and very liberating.” As her Dutch grandmother taught her as a child to make a dress for her Barbie doll rather than buying one, Goutos values work done with her own hands, eschewing capitalism. “Sales are slow,” she concedes, but she pursues her passion.

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    25 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…