Other Voices

Gianluca Russo became a journalist because he likes telling stories.

He has just published his first book, “The Power of Plus: Inside Fashion’s Size-Inclusivity Revolution.”

The book is “For the women who changed my life and the people who saved it.”

“I wanted to dedicate it to the women the book is about,” Russo said of the plus-size models he interviewed, explaining the first line of the dedication.

“But then I really stepped back and I thought … What’s the purpose here? I had gone through such a difficult period in life, from age 18 until I was about 21, where I felt like I had no purpose, where I felt I was lost.”

Talking to the courageous women who shared their stories, Russo said, helped heal his own wounds.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/08222022/power-plus-russo-was-healed-telling-stories-courageous-women

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John Charles Bielik is a teacher, a designer, an historian, and a preservationist.

He makes marbled paper — the sort of colorful patterned paper that you see in centuries-old books — the traditional way.

“It is a profession and I am a professional,” Bielik says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

He is also a performer, an entertainer.

“I’m an act,” he says.

Bielik will be, for the first time, at the Altamont Fair this week, making marbled paper.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/08152022/ringmaster-bieliks-show-about-preserving-historic-way-marbling-paper

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Shreya Sharath, at 13, has a passion for art.

So does Rachel, also 13, the central character in the book Shreya wrote, “The Hidden Realm.”

“I definitely do think that she has come from me,” said Shreya of the character she created. “I have been into art from the time I was super young. It’s always something I’ve been really passionate about.”

Creating art, Shreya says in this week’s Enterprise podcast, brings her peace and joy.

Read the full story at: https://altamontenterprise.com/08052022/what-happens-when-girl-loses-herself-her-artwork

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When Blanca Isabela Parker was 5 years old, someone described her as an old soul.

“I think that description has remained accurate over the years,” says Parker.

At age 17, she has graduated with honors from Hudson Valley Community College. 

Her applications to four-year colleges have gone well and Parker plans to start college next fall as a junior studying math with perhaps a second major in computer science.

“I have many different interests,” Parker says in this week’s Enterprise podcast, naming medicine, social sciences, and natural sciences among them.

Read the full article at https://altamontenterprise.com/08012022/parker-encourages-others-never-be-afraid-make-your-own-path

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Janine Tessarzik is proud of being a powerful woman.

At age 40, she was named world champion at the Scottish Masters Athletics International World Championships held last month in Moncton, New Brunswick in Canada.

Tessarzik is using her fame to help strong women feel good about themselves — through social media. At the same time that she is controlling the image of at least one woman in sports, she is also earning money from her posts that allow her to travel to far-flung competitions — and to support her as an athlete.

Tessarzik, who now lives in Ohio, grew up in Guilderland and remembers playing football, basketball, and pond hockey with “a bunch of boys” in the neighborhood.

Being tall and strong, she said, “I definitely didn’t get picked last, that’s for sure.”

Every year, her family would go to the Capital District Scottish Games, held at the Altamont fairgrounds. This year, she’ll be competing in those games on Labor Day weekend.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/07292022/fighting-patriarchy-one-throw-and-one-post-time

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Ashlyn Anne Hanley, who graduated in June from Berne-Knox-Westerlo, has put the life stories of nine Hilltown elders into a book she hopes kids at her school will read and learn from.

“There’s a lot of kids moving up to the Hilltowns that weren’t here before,” she says. “And I want them to know … how it’s changed.” She said of the stories in her book, “This may be like grandparents or great-grandparents of some of the kids because our community is so tight-knit up here.”

Her book is called, “Then and Now … Growing up a Hilltowner.”

Hanley, who was pursuing her Gold Award, Girl Scouts’ highest honor, was looking for something impactful and long-lasting that she could do for her Hilltown community.

“I talked to a bunch of people and history kept coming up …. That’s not something I know,” Hanley says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/07222022/ashlyn-hanley-learned-her-hilltown-elders-and-wrote-book-their-life-stories

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Historian Bruce Dearstyne has just published a book he hopes will be judged.

“The Crucible of Public Policy: New York Courts in the Progressive Era,” his latest book published by the State University of New York Press, examines cases heard by the state’s top court, the Court of Appeals, which Dearstyne posits was arguably the second most important in the nation, behind the United States Supreme Court.

In the early part of the 20th Century, the Court of Appeals served as a place of test or trial where forces interacted to cause change — a crucible.

Dearstyne’s book shows how the high court mediated among the competing rights of the legislature to regulate through laws, of business owners to manage their businesses without government interference, and of individual New Yorkers to exercise personal liberty.

What he strove to do in his book, Dearstyne says in the week’s Enterprise podcast, is “to present the evidence and say to people … read the decisions for yourself.”

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/07182022/go-back-source-urges-historian-dearstyne

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Growing up in New Salem, Ryan Conley and his friends built their own bikes with parts from the junkyard.

“As a kid, I remember building jumps on the side of the road …. We used to build little mountain-bike trails,” he said.

Now grown, Conley just hosted the first Helderberg Cliffhanger, a mountain-bike race that drew over 350 participants to Thacher Park on Father’s Day.

Conley came up with the name for the competition, a nod to the escarpment’s limestone cliffs as well as a reference to the suspense of racing. He also designed the race logo, which features mountains with a silhouetted cyclist hanging from a steep slope.

“I’m a builder,” said Conley, “so I like to build and design and create things.”

“The coolest part to me,” Conley says in this week’s Enterprise podcast, “is that 160 of those registered were kids from 3 years old on a strider bike to 8 years old in a mountain-bike group through high school.”

Conley himself has a 7-year-old son, Pierce, who raced and he also has a 5-year-old daughter, Charlize.

He promoted the race with Andy Ruiz, whom he called “a local cyclist legend.”

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/07122022/passion-cycling-led-conley-organize-first-helderberg-cliffhanger

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“You’re not alone,” says Keegan Prue to couples who are trying to have a child but can’t.

The most important first step, he says, “is just reach out to somebody.”

Prue and his wife, Olivia Cohen-Prue, struggled to start a family for five years — including three cycles of in vitro fertilization and two miscarriages — before their daughter, Eliza, was born.

To cope with the anxiety, Prue did massive amounts of research, and he wrote. The writing — a way to process what he was going through — was cathartic, Prue says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/06242022/keegan-prue-shares-his-struggles-starting-family-so-other-men-will-feel-less-alone

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History is all around us although few of us delve in, as Christopher Philippo does, to find it.

Take women’s suffrage for instance.

In 2017, as New York was celebrating its centennial for women’s suffrage, the William G. Pomeroy Foundation notified historical societies across the state about a grant program for markers.

At a Lansingburgh Historical Society meeting, Philippo recalled, the secretary mentioned the Pomeroy letter and said, “We didn’t have any suffragists here, so we’ll just move on to the next item on the agenda.

“And I said, ‘Wait a minute … Let me just look first.’”

Philippo discovered Lansingburgh, which is now part of Troy, had a significant suffragist, Caroline Gilkey Rogers.

She spoke at local and national women’s rights conventions and her home was nicknamed the Equal Rights Hotel because, whenever there were out-of-town suffragists visiting for conventions in the area, they would stay with Rogers, Philippo learned.

Rogers attempted to vote in Lansingburgh in 1885 and recounted the experience in remarks before a State Assembly Committee on Grievances. Philippo unearthed this account of her comments in an 1885 report in the Daily Saratogian:

“A short time ago a call was issued for all taxpaying inhabitants to come out and vote upon the question of introducing the water works into the village. Being very anxious for this measure to be carried I went with a lady friend to the polls, but our ballots were refused, and when I pointed out to the inspector that ‘all taxpaying inhabitants’ were urged to come, he said: ‘oh that does not mean women.’”

Philippo applied to the grant program and got a marker for Rogers.

Now a trustee of the Bethlehem Historical Association, Philippo had a similar experience when in 2020 he urged a museum exhibit to commemorate the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote nationwide.

The association president “didn’t think we really had much in the way of items that we could put together for an exhibit,” he recalled.

Philippo did the same thing he had for Lansingburgh, checking databases to look for suffrage activity in Bethlehem and its hamlets.

“I quickly found that, here again, there certainly was suffrage activity in Bethlehem,” he says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

Read the full story at altamontenterprise.com

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