Other Voices

This year, 2019, is the centennial of a law that created the post of local government historian for each city, town, or village in the state; New York was the first state to do so. Christopher Philippo, on this week’s podcast, talks about his work for a former state historian, collating and cataloging the annual reports of local government historians, the cruel irony being that decades of reports from the keepers of history were lost while others were nonexistent to begin with. Philippo looked up Altamont’s first village historian, as reported in The Enterprise: May R. Silvernail. The state historian in 1919, James Sullivan, saw local historians as instrumental in collecting information from municipalities on New York’s role in World War I. Philippo said many of these first historians, like Silvernail, were women, and the history they collected involved efforts on the home front as well. The Enterprise wrote of Silvernail’s efforts: “This record will include army and navy enlistments, records made in Liberty loan, Red Cross and War stamp drives and other campaigns, and any other items which will show our village’s part in winning the war.” Philippo, a trustee of the Bethlehem Historical Association, also talked about the association’s recent purchases of ephemera of Maria Becker, a schoolteacher and the daughter of a prominent Bethlehem farmer who lived at Becker’s Corners in the mid-19th Century. Philippo found on eBay over 200 letters written to Becker, most recently kept in a cellar in Maine, and three of Becker’s diary, in a cellar in Philadelphia. All of the documents are now in the schoolhouse, owned by the historical association, where Becker once taught.

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Nick Yetto of Clarksville has published his first novel, “Sommelier of Deformity,” and is at work on another, to examine the meaning of truth, about a real-life con woman who “cured” people through radio waves. Yetto’s picaresque novel is narrated by Buddy Hayes — “a connoisseur of the unwanted, a sommelier of deformity, a coveter of the unloved” — who lives a solitary life in a run-down upstate New York town, Ilium, residing with his mother and grandfather, a World War II veteran and a double amputee. Buddy suffers from scoliosis and his view of himself as ugly. He finds both love and work online as a web designer, pretending a familiarity with New York City. His life changes when a handsome black man, and one-time actor, is hired to care for his grandfather. Yetto, in this week’s Enterprise podcast, says he drew on his own love for his grandfather and his own desires as a young man to succeed in New York City to write the novel. While Yetto has found satisfaction with his life writing novels, and now a screenplay, as well as developing websites, as he and his wife raise their children in Clarksville, the closing chapter in his novel has Buddy Hayes riding a train to New York City.

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Fan Pen Chen started gardening, under her father’s tutelage, as a child in Taiwan. She later gardened in Libya and Canada. When she moved, in 2003, to an apartment in Guilderland — she teaches nearby at the University at Albany — she discovered the Guilderland Community Gardens and has been gardening there since. When Chen is gardening, she says in this week’s podcast, she doesn’t think about teaching or about her translation of Chinese texts or operas into English or her research into ancient female warriors or shadow plays. Rather, she clears her mind. “I just do a little bit and nature gives so much back to me,” she said. “Whatever happens, whatever nature wants to give me, I’m fine. I’m a Daoist gardener; I go with the flow.”

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The cover of Dorothy Bremer Kohler’s book depicts the farmhouse in Gilboa — her Shangri-La, where she was raised — painted by her granddaughter, Jacklyn Kohler. Kohler, who is 89, wrote the stories of her life as part of a memoir group at the Voorheesville Public Library under the tutelage of Dennis Sullivan, who is also an Enterprise columnist. Kohler will read from her book and sign copies at the library on Sunday, Sept. 15, at 2 p.m. Although Kohler’s stories are firmly rooted with details of a particular time and place — first, Astoria in Queens where her father, from Germany, drove a horse-pulled milk truck in the 1930s; then the farm in Gilboa, which Dorothy always considered home; and finally, the home in Voorheesville her father and uncle built for her own growing family and where she has lived for more than 60 years — they offer universal lessons about work and faith, about love and family. Even as a child, Kohler thought for herself. When her Sunday-school teacher told her only humans had souls so only they would go to heaven. Kohler, who loved her terrier, Skippy, decided, if her dog wasn’t going to heaven, she didn’t want to be there, either. She also writes, “We don’t always get what we think we want.”

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Edgar Tolmie wanted to make this podcast so his children and particularly his granddaughter Sarah would be able to hear his voice and be guided by his life’s philosophy when he dies. Although he is still in his 50s, he suffered a massive heart attack and is on a waiting list for a heart transplant. He talks about the meaning of courage, the importance of kindness, and the lessons he learned from playing chess — the need to make moves based on what another is doing. His son, Alexander Edgar Tolmie, died in a motorcycle crash at the age of 19 in 2006. Mr. Tolmie has since taken comfort in these words penned by Alfred Lord Tennyson: ’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

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Laura Shore, the Georgia O'Keeffe of vegetables, has some of her artwork, in postcard form, before her. Part of the profits from her work goes to support open-space preservation. Shore, biographer of the late Ev Rau, a farming icon in Altamont, has now plunged into researching Lucie Cassidy — responsible for Altamont’s name as well as for the founding of St. Lucy’s Church — and her family, which will be part of the village’s first Founders Day celebration in October. Shore is president of Altamont Community Tradition and she and her partner, Nancy Ota, live in the historic Jacob Crounse Inn, which they have lovingly restored. In this week’s podcast, Shore talks about the meaning of contributing to community.

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Christopher Philippo puts together pieces of the past in researching gravesites and in uncovering his own history. He recently reunited the 19th-Century headstones of Robert Matthews and his son, James, with their remains. Since at least the 1930s, Robert’s stone had served as a barn door stoop on an historic property in Guilderland and James’s stone, in pieces, was edging a garden in Glenmont. Now the repaired gravestones stand side by side in Guilderland’s Prospect Hill Cemetery. Philippo was adopted and, in searching for the identity of his biological parents, has become an activist. In this week’s podcast, he gives the history of legislation in New York preventing adoptees from learning their origins and tells how, over the last two decades, he has lobbied for a law that would give adoptees the right to access their birth certificates. That bill has been passed by both the State Assembly and State Senate and awaits the governor’s signature.

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Suzannah Lessard signs her book, “The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape,” on Saturday after reading from it at the Rensselaerville Library. “Once the world was wide,” she read. “Now we live in collapsed space: the chip in our pocket.” Lessard wrote much of her book in her Rensselaerville cottage and considers the meaning of its landscape and how that sense of place has changed. Lessard said she “went all over in random ways” — to a southern slave cabin, to the McDonald ranch house in New Mexico where the first nuclear weapon was assembled — and thought that would be her book, but the journey turned out to be her education. This week’s podcast records her reading — sometimes poetic; other times, philosophical — and her many-layered answers to questions from the score of listeners as she shares the way she is reimagining our world.

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Perry Ground wears his regalia — a purple shirt for the color of wampum, turtles for his clan, and two eagle feathers among the goose feathers on his head dress to show he’s an Onondaga man — for this week’s podcast. The setting is the Iroquois Indian Museum in Howes Cave, where Ground had his first job, fresh from Cornell University, as an educator. The museum, with both historic artifacts and contemporary art, is built to resemble the traditional longhouse of the Haudenosaunee people. Ground criss-crosses the state — he told stories at Clarksville Heritage Day last weekend —sharing Native American tales with children and adults alike, finding commonalities among the stories from different tribes, and serving as an ambassador for Native American culture.

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Tim Albright, who has worked at Indian Ladder Farms for 40 years and is now a manager, used to know each of the large old-fashioned apple trees as individuals. The small, modern rows of trees — which are more efficiently maintained — lack personality, he says. Albright, who grew up playing on the cliffs and in the caves of the Helderberg escarpment, knows the history as well as the topography of the land. At age 13, he researched New Scotland’s history and designed the town seal still used today. In this week’s podcast, he talks of the century-old local postcards he collects from which he gleans history in words and pictures. Albright and his wife live in an early 19th-Century schoolhouse they’ve restored, surrounded by a parklike yard punctuated with antique tractors, displayed like sculptures.

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