Other Voices

When she hears something that intrigues her, Ellen Howie takes action.

Early one Sunday morning, she heard a broadcast on National Public Radio about No Mow May.

“It captured my imagination,” says Howie in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “And I thought, ‘Well, that’s easy.’”

As she talked to The Enterprise last Friday, she likened her lawn to a prairie or to undulating ocean waves. Howie named the many wildflowers flourishing there and declared, “I just think it’s beautiful.”

Howie lives at the end of Prospect Terrace so her neighbors have not been bothered by her wild lawn, she says. She revels in seeing new flowers as she walks to her compost pile.

Her husband, Dick Howie, who died a year ago, on June 2, used to love to be outdoors, mowing their lawn. “He was quite a particular man and liked things orderly,” says Howie. “On the other hand, I’m not particular. I’m not very orderly …. I like the wild things.”

The Howies were happily married for 63 years. They met in the Ramsey High School band; she was a freshman, playing the French horn while he was a junior who sat nearby, playing the trombone.

No Mow May, which encourages people not to mow their lawns during the month of May so as to increase plant diversity as well as nectar for pollinators, was launched by the charity Plantlife in Great Britain in 2019. It has caught on in many places in the United States with some entire cities signing on.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/06132022/ellen-howie-understands-consequences-care

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When Emma Harbeck competed this past weekend for the Miss New York title in the Miss America competition, she sang the song “Reflection” from the ​​1998 Disney film based on the Chinese legend of Hua Mulan.

Mulan spares her grandfather by disguising herself as a boy so she can become a warrior in his stead.

“Somehow I cannot hide who I am, though I’ve tried,” Harbeck sang to the Miss America judges in Peekskill. “When will my reflection show who I am inside?”

“I think the whole point of the song is a girl talking about how she feels like she can’t be herself because she’s trying to please other people,” says Harbeck in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “And I think … that as girls in the organization, we’re obviously teens and we’re growing and we’re learning … I really wanted to have a piece that myself and other girls could relate to, so that’s why I chose that song.”

Harbeck, 17, is a Guilderland High School junior and Miss Capital Region Outstanding Teen. She has a passion for singing, she says, and sings in both the concert choir and the chamber choir at her school. She also played the part of Clarissa in the school musical last year, “Little Women.”

Read the full article: https://altamontenterprise.com/06062022/emma-harbeck-says-everyone-beautiful

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“Hate is not a mental illness,” says Dr. Stephen Giordano.

He notes that there is no diagnostic category for hate, and it is wrong “to assume that hateful people, whatever their color, creed, or stripe, must be mentally ill.”

People suffering with mental illness are more often the victims rather than the perpetrators of crime, he says.

As violent crimes are increasing not just in Albany County but across the nation, Giordano says, “The solution is not just going to be a mental-health solution …. If we are alienating and isolating and stigmatizing and discriminating against portions of our community, that’s going to come with a cost … One of those costs may very well be violence.”

Giordano also says, “I think people who cause other people pain are very likely in pain themselves.”

For 11 years, Giordano has served as the mental health commissioner for Albany County. It’s not an easy job. The work took on new dimensions over the last two years as the pandemic, with isolation-inducing restrictions, caused more mental-health problems.

Giordano, who grew up in New York City, and says his heart is still there, majored in philosophy as an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

“Some of the questions that are dealt with historically in philosophy are about how to live, what’s right, what’s fair, what does suffering mean,” says Giordano in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

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Jeff Perlee hopes that everyone in Altamont and its environs will research the history of their house.

“This is an activity about community,” says Perlee, a lawyer and Albany County legislator who describes himself as an amateur historian.

He has joined forces with Joe Burke, director of the Altamont Free Library, and Dan Barker, curator of the Altamont Archives, to help village residents delve into learning about their homes — regardless of the building’s age.

“The activity itself can help build community,” said Perlee, who worries that the decline of civic participation is bad for the state of our democracy.

“The Kiwanis clubs and local garden clubs and church memberships and the things that used to kind of bind people together aren’t as prevalent,” Perlee says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “People are much more inward.

“They’re much more tied to their own social media … They’re on their phones … People go to their respective silos and Democrats only talk to Democrats and Republicans only talk to Republicans.”

Perlee, a Republican, hopes the Every House project will bridge those gaps and let villagers see that they share a common history.

He’ll give a presentation on May 25 at 7 p.m. at the Altamont Free Library to provide “a common toolkit” to anyone who is interested. A Facebook page will be set up so those doing research on their homes can communicate with one another.

Read the full article at https://altamontenterprise.com/05222022/perlee-hopes-empower-villagers-tools-research-history-their-homes-and-so-build-community

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“I tilt at windmills a lot,” says Bonnie Kohl-Laub.

When she and her husband, Leonard Laub, moved to Westerlo, they immersed themselves in local issues and made a difference.

Now they have sold their historic farmhouse and are packing to move to southern France.

“We saw a wonderful community with wonderful people,” says Kohl-Laub of their move to Westerlo. “In this community, basically, it doesn’t matter what you have as long as you’re good. If you’re good folk, they like you. And it’s been wonderful living here.”

Among other commitments, Kohl-Laub chaired the first Republican committee in town in modern times, founded in 2008. Now, for the first time in decades, Westerlo has a Republican-dominated town board.

Kohl-Laub was also instrumental in securing a doctor for the rural Heldeberg Hilltown after the legendary Dr. Anna Perkins died.

Leonard Laub, worried that the town wasn’t protected from a developer’s land grab, his wife said, chaired Westerlo’s planning board. Laub said in 2007, when 160 of Albany county’s 400 farms were in Westerlo, “We are agricultural here.”

Laub also said then that agriculture was the economic, cultural, and aesthetic base for the town and would be the “keystone” for Westerlo’s first comprehensive land-use plan. A plan was, after several twists and turns, finally adopted last year by the current town board.

More recently, Laub served on a committee that secured $1.7 million from the federal government to lay down fiber-optic cable and greatly expand broadband access in Westerlo. He had seen all the cars parked at night near the Westerlo library, his wife said, realizing parents were there so their children could use the library’s internet to do their schoolwork.

In this week’s Enterprise podcast, Kohl-Laub said some people had wanted her husband to run for supervisor. “We could make a mistake and not know it because our bones aren’t here,” she said.

Read the full story here: https://altamontenterprise.com/05142022/she-packs-france-kohl-laub-reflects-life-change

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While many of us think of fire solely as a destructive force, Gifford understands that it is essential to enriching the ecosystem of a pitch pine barren.

Gifford, the conservation director for the Albany Pine Bush Preserve, got his first job at the preserve literally setting fires, controlled burns.

Fire, he explains in this week’s Enterprise podcast, recycles nutrients in a way that benefits rare plants.

“You can think of wild fire almost like instant decomposition,” he said, likening it to what happens in a compost pile — but almost instantly.

“Fire is taking nitrogen in particular, but also phosphorus, calcium, potassium, and other nutrients and releasing them into the soil and making them available for plant uptake,” he said.

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/05092022/neil-gifford-brings-back-birds-and-butterflies-brink-extinction

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Christine Rem, a nurse and retired Army colonel, talks about the way she built trust with Iraqis when she was stationed there and will now use those skills to build trust with homeless women veterans. She has set up a row house in Troy that had once belonged to her grandparents to be their home.

Read the full article at https://altamontenterprise.com/04292022/col-christine-rem-offers-home-women-vets-who-need-one

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Jessica Serfilippi started her groundbreaking and myth-busting research on Alexander Hamilton the way she thinks any historian should — with an open mind, she says.

She was “not looking one way or the other to find something, just seeing where the primary sources led me,” Serfilippi says. “And I cannot ignore where they were leading me.”

The primary sources — including letters and cash books in Hamilton’s own hand — led her to this conclusion: “When those sources are fully considered, a rarely acknowledged truth becomes inescapbly apparent: not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally.

“The denial and obscuration of these facts in nearly every major biography written about him over the past two centuries has erased the people he enslaved from history. It has also created and perpetuated a false and incomplete picture of Hamilton as a man and Founding Father.”

Serfilippi, who works as a historical interpreter at the state-run Schuyler Mansion in Albany, had those words published on the state’s website as part of her carefully researched 28-page paper, in the fall of 2020.

A firestorm followed.

Read the full article at https://altamontenterprise.com/04202022/serfilippi-upended-hero-hamilton-narrative-so-those-he-enslaved-could-take-their-place

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Robert C. Lawrence and his wife, Carol Ann, were kayaking on an Adirondack lake, watching some loons, when she asked him how the mountain looming over them, Blue Mountain, got its name.

Lawrence thought he’d buy a book on Adirondack place names at the Blue Mountain Museum to answer the question. But there was no such book.

So he wrote one.

He and his wife, both retired teachers, operate as a team, Lawrence says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “We just enjoy life,” he said — traveling cross-country in their camper, gardening, playing with their dachshund who is named Adirondack.

“What’s with Those Adirondack Mountain Names?” is Lawrence’s second book. His first book, “Sailor of the Stars,” takes students through the process of astronaut training — beginning with the application process and ending with a post-mission press conference.

Lawrence says, as a child of the sixties, he grew up on the space program, watching every space launch. He was a paperboy for the Watertown Daily Times in northern New York and “read every article on space.”

That also inspired him to be a writer, Lawrence said. He wrote for the Space Launch News and once involved his eight most gifted writing students in interviewing and writing about astronaut Eileen Collins and Albany Med doctor Heidi DeBlock, who monitored the hearts of astronauts when they landed at Kennedy Space Center.

“I was even able to interview my favorite folk singer,” Lawrence said. Judy Collins had written a song, “Beyond the Sky,” for Commander Collins and her crew before their launch in July 1999.

His current book starts with a song written by a friend and fellow teacher, Dale Wade-Keszey: “Marcy was some important guy,” go the lyrics. “But the rest, can you tell me why?”

Lawrence, who has retired from his career as a Guilderland teacher, taught fifth grade at three elementary schools — Lynnwood, the old Fort Hunter, and Guilderland — before teaching at Farnsworth Middle School. He’s stayed in touch with some of his students and next month is going to the wedding of a former sixth-grader of his.

Read the full article at https://altamontenterprise.com/04192022/retired-teacher-educates-others-adirondack-mountain-names

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“You go fishing and there’s an infinite possibility for surprise,” says Guilderland angler John Rowen.He’s fished trout streams in Rensselaer County that are no wider than a driveway and found 17-inch trout in them, “which is crazy,” he says with glee.

Rowen was fishing once after a tropical storm blew through the area and caught a beautiful rainbow trout. Another time, he was fishing when, he recalled, “All of a sudden, the stream bottom started to move and I looked closer … There was a snapping turtle about 15 feet upstream from where I was that was about the size of a manhole cover.”

Rowen finds the many encounters he has with fish and with nature very appealing.

In this week’s Enterprise podcast, recorded on April 1, the traditional opening day for trout season, Rowen provides a primer for would-be anglers.

Read the full article at https://altamontenterprise.com/04122022/after-lifetime-fishing-rowen-still-finds-surprises

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