The Historians

Tuba player struck up the band

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, Amsterdam Recorder 

     Amsterdam tuba player Herbert S. Breen was married twice.  His first wife, Maude Mosher, died in 1927, the year the Mohawk Mills Band was formed.  Two years later he married Carrie Wilbur. Breen said he met both women when he was playing in a band, “Must be that uniform that gets them.”

Born in Manchester, England, in 1879, Breen came to America at age six and his family settled in Amsterdam. Breen’s first job in 1896 was at John E. Larrabee’s, the city’s popular hardware store. He later opened his own plumbing and tinsmith shop. He also worked for Chuctanunda Gas and Light before returning to Larrabee’s, where he remained for 45 years. He serviced air conditioning units.

His passion though was music. According to a 1950 feature article in the Mohawk Carpet Mills publication Tomohawk, Breen started his musical journey playing an alto horn in the Rock City Silvertone Cornet Band, the same year he started working at Larrabee’s.

The musical group practiced in a grocery store at the corner of First Street and Forest Avenue in Amsterdam’s Rockton section.  Breen said the band could have been more successful, “People used to blow their lamps out if they thought we were going to play in front of their house.”

When the Rock City band broke up, Breen sometimes played in the Hagaman Citizens Band, Fort Hunter Military Band, Minch’s Military Band, Hagaman Boys Band and the popular 13th Brigade of the Knights of Pythias, a fraternal group. “As the band grows older,” Breen told Tomohawk, “it seems to me the boys go into a kind of a slump and have to start over again.”

Breen said the major “start over” in his musical life came in 1927 when the Mohawk Mills Band was formed, subsidized by the carpet mill owners, the Shuttleworth family. The band was led by a number of men but for many years one of the Musolff brothers—Edward, Harry or Frank---held the conductor’s baton.

Quite a few members worked for the mill but others, like Breen, did not. The band was in peak form in 1950 when Breen was interviewed for a company magazine article. He is pictured on the cover playing the tuba.

At age 70, Breen was the oldest member of the organization. The youngest was Amsterdam junior high school student George Guilbault, Jr., a percussionist. His father, George Guilbault, Sr., owned a supply business, was a snare drummer and persuaded his son to join.

Carpet weaver Al Pietro played clarinet. Finishing room worker John Carbonelli was a cornet player, as was weaver and charter member Arthur Cook.

Music store proprietor and former weaver Martin Dybas was a charter member and played clarinet, as did banker James McGibbon. Herm Bettine, who operated an auto repair garage, played bass drum.

Breen told Tomohawk that he didn’t consider himself “much of a musician” but said he had a “wonderful chance to do some clowning and have a few laughs.” In 1961 American Legion Post 701 took over sponsorship of the band from the carpet mill. Carpet production was now moving south.

Herb Breen died at Amsterdam Memorial Hospital in 1962 after a month-long illness. He was 82. His wife, one son, one step-son, one grandson and two great-grandchildren survived him.  He was buried at Hagaman Cemetery after a service conducted by Reverend Albert Brockway of First Methodist Church.

Members of the newly named Post 701 Band called to pay their respects. Breen had been named an honorary member of the Amsterdam Musicians Local. He was a charter member of the Hagaman Volunteer Fire Department

Bob Cudmore is a free lance writer.

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Helping Sam Stratton get elected

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History

         On one of Samuel Stratton’s early trips to Amsterdam as part of his first Congressional campaign there he luckily ran into an 11-year old entrepreneur.

East End native John Naple wrote, “If I was 12 years old I could get my working papers and then have my own paper route, but it was only 1958 so I had one more year to wait.  While I waited, Mike Sheridan from Kline Street hired me to deliver his route.” Sheridan had over one hundred Recorders to deliver from Marotta’s News across from St. Casimir’s Church to Degraff Street near Coessens Park.

It was a hot summer day and Naple still had half the papers to deliver, “Having some pocket change, I stopped at Frosty’s Ice Cream at the top of Elk Street.  A handsome, thin young man, with a sweaty wrinkled white shirt pulled a beat up station wagon into the parking lot.  He jumped out and started talking to the people in line.” He told them, “I’m the mayor of Schenectady, running for Congress and looking for your vote.” Stratton was 41 at the time. He had been awarded two bronze stars as an officer in Navy intelligence in World War II. Naple said Stratton was handing out small cards with this name and picture on them, “I introduced myself to him, while he was eating his ice cream.

“I was taken by the man and making an executive decision, offered to put his cards in my papers when I rolled them up.  I showed him how to roll the paper and tuck the card inside.  He gave it a try and did a fair job.  I could roll a paper in about two seconds.  I rolled about 50 of his cards into the papers in the dirty canvas bag that hung over my shoulder.”

Naple threw some rolled papers up on first and second story porches. Some went into milk boxes and others behind screen doors. “All those customers received the card of Sam Stratton,” Naple recalled. 

Stratton won the election in November and served 30 years in Congress, 1959 to 1989. Naple said, “Years later Stratton appointed two of my younger brothers to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. They both had distinguished naval careers. Did I help my brothers get their appointments by helping Sam get elected?”

John Naple went on to be a science teacher.  Now retired he is active in the community organizing Amsterdam Reads for the local library.

COUSINS

     Naple and his cousin Sharon DiMenno Menech now of Broadalbin grew up on Eagle Street.

Menech recalled, “In the neighborhood everyone got along, and all the adults sat out in front of our house and the kids played all kinds of games.”

Menech and Naple grew up on Eagle Street, across the street from where Kirk Douglas was born and raised.  She used to walk past old Amsterdam landmarks on her way to and from school: Shell’s Pharmacy, Johnny’s Seafood and the Mohawk, Tryon and Rialto theaters.

Menech said, “Friday nights there always was walking downtown. shopping and meeting friends at Brownie’s and sitting in tbe back booth.” Menech’s father worked at Bigelow-Sanford carpet mill and her mother worked third shift at Mohasco carpet mill.  When Bigelow-Sanford moved out in 1955 her father got a job at a Christmas tree factory. When Mohasco moved out, her mother found work at the Big N store deli on Route 30.

“The closing of the carper mills put many out of work,” Menech said. “But they usually found a job of one kind or another.”

Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer.

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The Sanfords and Hollywood

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, Recorder

Tuesday, January 20, 2025

     Director George Cukor’s 1938 movie Holiday, which starred Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, has three fictional characters based on members of the Sanford family of Amsterdam. 

The family founded Sanford & Sons, the first of Amsterdam’s two major carpet mills. The company merged with another firm to become Bigelow Sanford in 1929. Bigelow Sanford left Amsterdam in 1955.

John Sanford inherited an estate worth $40 million when his father, Stephen Sanford, died in 1913. That was a tremendous amount of money at the time.

Gertrude Sanford Legendre’s New York Times obituary said the three children of John and Ethel Sanford--Gertrude, Laddie and Sarah Jane--were the inspiration for the 1929 Philip Barry stage play Holiday, which became the basis of the movie. The movie character Linda Seton, played by Katharine Hepburn, is based on Gertrude.

Gertrude Sanford was born in 1902 in Aiken, South Carolina but spent time as a child with her siblings at the family’s Amsterdam mansion on Church Street, donated by the family for use as the City Hall in 1932.

According to the Times, Gertrude Sanford was in her teens when she took a hunting trip to the Grand Tetons of Wyoming and shot her first elk. For years, she pursued big game in Africa, India, Iran and Indochina, and contributed rare specimens to museums.

In World War II, Gertrude worked in France for America’s Office for Strategic Services, predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, until she was captured by the Germans.

The Times reported, “Held as a prisoner of war for six months, she escaped and went by train to Switzerland. The train stopped short of the border; as she dashed to the frontier, a German guard ordered her to halt or be shot. She continued, and reached the border.”

Her husband died in 1948; Gertrude lived until 2000, passing on at age 97. She made her home at Medway, a plantation near Charleston, South Carolina, where she held a New Year”s Eve costume ball for 50 years. She wrote two autobiographies, 'The Sands Ceased to Run'' (1947) and ''The Time of My Life'' (1987).

LADDIE AND SARAH JANE

     Laddie Sanford usually went by that nickname, but he was officially named Stephen after his grandfather. The Holiday character Ned Seton, portrayed by Lew Ayres, is loosely based on Laddie. More a playboy than industrialist, Laddie was born in 1899 and became an international polo playing star. The handsome horseman married actress Mary Duncan in 1933.

After their marriage, Mary retired from acting and the couple made their home in Palm Beach, Florida. Mary became the grande dame of Palm Beach society. She was friends with Rose Kennedy, who was a neighbor, and entertained the King and Queen of Jordan and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Laddie, who passed away in 1977, and Mary, who died in 1993, are both buried at Green Hill Cemetery in Amsterdam, adjacent to City Hall, the former Sanford mansion.

The Holiday film character Julia Seton, played by Doris Nolan, is based on Sarah Jane Sanford. Named for her grandmother, Sarah Jane was married in Palm Beach Florida in 1937 to an Italian diplomat, Mario Pansa. Sarah Jane and Mario lived in Italy during World War II but she returned to America after the war. Mario accidentally drowned in 1946 near Rome. Sarah Jane died in 1985 and is buried at Green Hill Cemetery.

Late University at Albany film history professor Rob Edelman, who lives\d in Amsterdam, said he regularly screened Holiday in class because of its star appeal and world view.

Edelman wrote, “Put forth in Holiday is the idea that money isn't everything.

“What matters in life is to live as you see fit. Do not be a slave to the almighty dollar. Life is short. Live, have fun, and keep the child alive within you.

You may contact Bob Cudmore at 518 346 6657 or [email protected]

The woman who was was the queen of Fonda

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, Amsterdam Recorder 

People called her Queen Libby  

      A formidable woman from Italy, Queen Libby literally stopped a train, saved a man from the electric chair and became a major property owner in Fonda. Elizabeth Luciano was born in Pietremalara near Naples, Italy in 1872.  She came to America alone when she was 15 and settled in Fonda to be near relatives who lived in Johnstown.

She married another Italian immigrant, James Cassell. They had three children before Cassell died at the age of 33. Libby then married Alfonso Mancini, who worked for the railroad, and had four more children.  

Libby and Alfonso returned to Italy for a time where Alfonso was a jailor. Libby returned to America by herself and Alfonso eventually followed her back to America. According to one of her grandchildren, Libby was a large woman who received her nickname when she knocked down a man who had used an ethnic slur about Italians. “The next time you see me, you bow,” Libby told the fallen man, leading him to refer to her as Queen Libby or Queen Lib.

Queen Libby ran a boarding house and grocery store in the west end of Fonda, where she fed, housed and cared for Italian immigrants who worked on the railroad. She had a good head for business and also purchased 16 two family houses in the village. Patsy Cassell, one of Libby’s sons, ran a popular Fonda tavern called Patsy’s for many years.

In 1923, one of Libby’s daughters, Eva Mancini Pepe, was about to give birth to her first child.  Eva had married Ralph Pepe, whose father Salvatore had founded Pepe’s Bakery, which was a family business on Amsterdam’s South Side.

According to a clipping from The Recorder from January 20th of 1923, Libby was informed by telephone that her daughter was about to have a rare Caesarean section at St. Mary’s Hospital in Amsterdam.

Libby secured a red flag at the Fonda train station and when an express came thundering in its usual way she waved the red flag, convincing the engineer to stop the train and take her to Amsterdam. Arriving at the hospital, she charged into the operating room.

Libby also made a phone call to the New York Central Railroad and demanded that the next possible train stop in Fonda to take her husband to Amsterdam. The headline from the newspaper clipping reads: “Flags train to reach daughter as stork comes: Fonda woman bossed the whole New York Central Railroad but got to Amsterdam hospital on time.”

The child born that day was Vincenza Pepe, who passed away in 2001.  Vincenza Pepe had seven children and the child she bore in 1924 was Salvatore Pepe of Amsterdam, who provided information for this story. “Queen Libby was strong-minded, tough but a gentle grandmother,” Salvatore Pepe said, recalling that Libby gave quarters to her grandchildren.

Ann Nardick Sherman of Amsterdam also claimed Queen Libby as a grandmother. Sherman’s mother was Constance Cassell, one of the children from Libby’s first marriage.

According to Sherman, Libby was an interpreter for Italians who could not speak English who were brought before the court in Fonda.  Libby once saved an innocent man from the electric chair. Libby called Italy where the real murderer had fled and had him sent back to the United States for trial. Governor Franklin Roosevelt was so impressed that he visited Fonda to commend Libby and a parade was held in her honor.

Queen Libby died in 1938 and her grandchildren said her funeral was the biggest funeral ever seen in Fonda.

Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer.

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Mary Anne Krupsak’s roots

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, Amsterdam Recorder 

     Long before Polish-American John Gomulka was elected mayor of Amsterdam in 1967, Michael J. Wytrwal, who never held elected office, was widely known as the city’s unofficial Polish mayor.

Wytrwal was born near Krakow, Poland in 1882 and immigrated to Scranton, Pennsylvania when he was fourteen with his mother Sophie, who then returned to their native land to retrieve another son. Sophie and her other son died in Poland.

Wytrwal worked in Scranton’s coal mines for six months then moved to Reid Hill, one of Amsterdam’s two Polish enclaves. There he started a candy and ice cream business.

Wytrwal married Mamie Brudzdowski in 1904 and sold life insurance. Mamie died two years later in childbirth. In 1907, Wytrwal married Mamie’s sister Josephine. He fathered seven children, the son from his first marriage plus five daughters and another son from the second marriage. The Wytrwals took up residence in the Brudzdowski’s two-family home at 26 Cornell Street.

Wytrwal became an entrepreneur. He founded a pharmacy in 1910, later operated by a daughter and son-in-law as Krupzak’s Pharmacy on Hibbard Street. Next door was Wytrwal’s Furniture, managed by one of Wytrwal’s sons. M.J. Wytrwal Coal and Oil, started in 1926, was on James Street.

He was a founder of what was known as the Polish bank and the local Polish National Alliance. He built homes in Amsterdam and was part owner of a Fort Plain knitting mill.

Local Polish people frequently approached Wytrwal for assistance getting work, even for help with personal problems.

In the Depression Wytrwal let it be known he enjoyed “welfare peanut butter” given out to the needy. He bought many jars of peanut butter from destitute friends who were too proud to ask for a handout.

In the 1933 mayoral election Wytrwal helped English native Arthur Carter win the race as a Democrat. President Franklin Roosevelt named Wytrwal to head National Recovery Act programs in Montgomery County. Carter served twelve years with Wytrwal’s support in the predominately Polish Fourth Ward.

One grandchild said Wytrwal was eloquent in both Polish and English and was a broker between the Polish-speaking community and the English-speaking power structure. The grandchildren remember Christmas Eves when the needy always found a seat at the family table.

Wytrwal doted on his fifteen grandchildren, one of whom drove him places when his failing eyesight made it impossible for him to drive himself.

He was a role model for granddaughter Mary Anne Krupsak, the trailblazing woman politician who was born in Schenectady and raised in Amsterdam.  Her parents operated Krupsak’s Pharmacy on Hibbard Street..     

Mary Anne Krupsak died December 28, 2024 at age 92 at her home on Seneca Lake, New York.   

Young Krupsak ate lunch at her grandparents’ home every day when she attended St. Stanislaus School nearby. She saw a constant parade of people seeking assistance from her grandfather.

Wytrwal’s wife Josephine died in 1956. Michael Wytrwal lived to see Krupsak sworn in as an Assemblywoman in January 1969.

When Wytrwal died January 21 of 1970, the Recorder editorialized that he was “likeable, friendly, considerate, a progressive in the finest sense of the word.”

After Wytrwal’s death, Krupsak won a State Senate seat. She was elected the state’s first woman Lieutenant Governor in 1974, running with Democrat Hugh Carey.  In 1978 she unsuccessfully challenged Carey for governor in a Democratic primary.

After leaving public life, Krupsak worked as an attorney encouraging startup companies. The work was similar to what her grandfather had done in Amsterdam, where he negotiated deals to help the community with nothing more than a handshake.

“People trusted him because of his honor,” Krupsak said.

Bob Cudmore is a free lance writer.

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Amsterdam sparkled in 1925 expo
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, Amsterdam Recorder

       America was prospering in 1925, one hundred years ago, and local businesses staged.Amsterdam’s Progress Exposition and Auto Show that year to show off that prosperity. “In the 1920s, that was the heyday here,” said anthropologist Susan Dauria. “The population was about 35,000, the biggest it’s ever been.” Dauria wrote her doctoral dissertation on the rise and decline of manufacturing in Amsterdam.

The Progress Exposition was organized by the Board of Trade, predecessor of the Fulton-Montgomery Chamber of Commerce. The event was held for eight days in September at Ross’s Flats in the East End.  Admission was 25 cents for adults and 10 cents for children.

The Recorder reported that on opening day people "stormed the entrance" which was dominated by a large windmill to emphasize Amsterdam's Dutch roots. Mayor Carl Salmon opened the festivities saying Amsterdam had "diversified industries" and it was time to show people what was "made and done here." State Senator William Byrne, who had a home in the nearby town of Florida, said it was time to put Amsterdam on the map.

The exposition had more than a hundred booths where manufacturers and businessmen showed their wares.  One mammoth tent was dedicated to the display of automobiles.  Socony (Standard Oil of New York) showed off a gasoline pump.
The carpet mills, Mohawk and Stephen Sanford & Sons. had booths in the Exposition, as did other manufacturers.

A Main Street parade preceded opening night. The Schenectady Gazette reported, “All the industrial concerns and stores in this city have been invited to have their old employees in point of service participate in the parade, as the parade will feature those who have had part in the building up of Amsterdam.”
Schenectady General Electric furnished floodlights.  There was a fashion show, baby contest and pet show. 

Main Street department store Holzheimer & Shaul occupied several booths that looked like store window displays.  A cardboard cutout of a young girl was behind a new Hoover vacuum cleaner, offered with “unusually easy terms.”  A female mannequin wearing an apron was placed amid a display of Glenwood gas and wood stoves.

One of the firm’s principals, P. Dater Shaul, was pictured at a planning session for the Exposition.  To tout the city’s role in making rugs, Holzheimer’s put a Sanford carpet on the sidewalk in front of its East Main Street store during the Exposition.

In Amsterdam since 1882, Fitzgerald’s Bottling Works offered ginger ale for five cents a bottle at the Exposition.  “The safest drinks--kills disease germs,” stated an advertising poster.

The Walter Elwood Museum in Amsterdam has a book of pictures of the Progress Exposition taken by photographer Emil Zillgitt for the Board of Trade.

One picture shows the booth of real estate agent Monroe Gray, selling suburban lots at Tribes Hill Heights, west of Amsterdam.   “A lot means a home and a home means a lot,” stated a poster.  Gray was seated, smartly dressed in a three-piece suit, holding a rolled up blueprint.
Another poster promised, “Invest now and double your money at Tribes Hill Heights.” Gray had blueprints of the lots and pictures of homes stacked on a table..

Zillgitt was born in Germany in 1883 and came to America when he was five..  He worked for photographer Fred Morse and bought Morse’s business.  

Amsterdam native Peter Betz said, ‘I have a picture of myself in a sailor suit taken at home by Zillgitt sometime around 1944.  I was about two years old and vaguely remember the gent because he was a very humorous man who knew how to get a nervous kid to sit for him. ‘

Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer. 

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Highlights of Focus on History columns in 2024

By Bob Cudmore

       The movie "South of Tahiti" was playing at the Strand Theatre on East Main Street in Amsterdam, when interrupted as the news broke that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.

Radio coverage was piped into the theater and dazed patrons left the building.

A soldier who grew up on Northampton Road in Amsterdam was among the 2390 Americans killed in the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941.  

William E. Hasenfuss, Jr., died when Japanese airplanes shot up the B-24 bomber Hasenfuss and his ground crew were working on at Hickam Air Field in Hawaii.

Amsterdam country music performer Dusty Miller, whose real name was Elmer Rossi, Sr/, had a band called the Colorado Wranglers. Miller’s day job was stocking cigarette and other vending machines. In later years he delivered medicines from John Tag’s Guy Park Avenue pharmacy to local customers.

The Colorado Wranglers had a long run at Amsterdam's Bob's Tavern.  Miller managed to fit an Amsterdam radio show into his schedule well into his eighties. "I like country music because it shows life as it is," Miller said.

When he died in 1998 Dusty Miller was buried in his colorful cowboy clothes. Stanley Silvernail was born in Otsego County in 1917.  He worked for the Amsterdam Recorder for 41 years. In 1970 he became managing editor and in 1978 editorial page editor.    He was a graduate of Syracuse University and a veteran of the U.S. Army Air Corps and U.S. Air Force.  He married Wilhelmina Anna Phillips.  They lived on Black Street in Vail Mills.  

Their son Jeff recalled, “We had a private line before anyone on Black Street because people were always calling for him usually with things that no one wanted to share on a party line.”

When Orsini’s Royal Restaurant at East Main and Liberty Streets in Amsterdam opened in the 1920s, there were curtains on the booths.  Customers who were not Italian didn’t know how to eat spaghetti. They closed the curtains when dining on pasta. The Board of Health ordered the curtains removed.

Anthony Orsini, an immigrant from Abruzzi, and his wife Julia Richitelli, born near Naples, started the restaurant, also known as the Royal Lunch. It was a family business. Anthony’s daughter Genevieve was a founder of a high school sorority for Italian girls.  After graduating, she worked as a waitress.

When Judge Robert Sise was a youngster he went to communion at St. Mary’s Church, then stopped at Orsini’s for breakfast before school. Sise’s parents told Genevieve to supervise. Sise wanted chocolate doughnuts but Genevieve made him have toast or oatmeal, “Bob was a little annoyed with me.” Amsterdam’s Fairview Cemetery was built on a 110-acre parcel of land once owned by Revolutionary War surgeon Dr. David Shepard on a hill overlooking the Mohawk River valley.

By the late 19th century the land was purchased by Warren K. Nibble of Troy. Nibble decided to use the land for a cemetery.

The project was laid out by landscape engineer G. Douglas Baltimore. The chapel and mausoleum were completed in 1901.  A gateway of stone and iron was erected on Steadwell Avenue as the entrance to the cemetery in 1902.

Many of Amsterdam’s prominent citizens were buried at Fairview: the Shuttleworth family, who founded the factory that became Mohawk Carpet Mills; the Chalmers family, who operated knitting and button mills; and manufacturer John R. Blood, among others.

In 2024, two historic roadside markers were placed at the front entrance on Steadwell Avenue. One marker is dedicated to Fairview Cemetery itself and the second is for the Admiral Dahlgren cannon, located in the Veterans Section.

Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer.

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Christmas in Amsterdam through the years

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History for Daily Gazette, Amsterdam Recorder

          Amsterdam retail sales records were broken in the 1902 Christmas shopping season.The post office, then at the corner of East Main and Church streets, was extremely busy. So many packages and letters crowded the postal facility that employees had problems finding places to stand to do their jobs.

One of the sights in Amsterdam during the heyday of carpet manufacturing was the lighted outline of a Christmas tree installed on the front of the Clock Building on Prospect Street. 

The Clock Building at the time was Amsterdam headquarters of Bigelow-Sanford. Carpets.During World War II Mohawk Carpets sent gift boxes to each of the mill’s soldiers. The 1943 box included candy, playing cards and a greeting card from company president, Howard Shuttleworth.

The city had a Christmas parade in 1947 featuring a balloon train.  A picture shows parade watchers spilling onto East Main Street to view the engine. The Mohawk Mills Chorus, predecessor of the Mohawk Valley Chorus, appeared on NBC television in 1949 singing Christmas tunes with vocalist Roberta Quinlan on her Mohawk Carpet Showroom program.

In the 1950s Amsterdam held a Christmas Festival at Coessens Park in the East End, organized by Mayor Thomas F. Gregg.   A Christmas village was built in the park and the festival lasted from early December through Christmas Day.

An estimated 35,000 attended the event.  Santa talked with children and animals were brought in from the Catskill Game Farm, including eight fallow deer posing as Santa’s reindeer.

The festival cost a couple thousand dollars more than was raised.  Although Mayor Gregg wanted to stage a festival the next year, that did not happen. Proprietor of a downtown butcher shop on Railroad Street, Gregg died in 1960.

In the 1950s Larrabee’s hardware store on Market Street sold Lionel and American Flyer model trains at Christmas. Each brand installed its own model railroad layout. The grandchildren of Polish American community leader Michael J. Wytrwal remember Christmas Eves when the needy found a seat at the family table on Cornell Street.

Albert “Kiddo” Zierak, tended bar Christmas Eve at Kiddo’s Tavern on Reid Street. He would send lonely people from the tavern to the house next door where his sisters lived, to enjoy the traditional Christmas Eve meal.

Alphonso and Catherine D'Alessandro owned the Gift & Hobby Shop at Lark and East Main Streets. On Christmas Eve Alphonso would stay late at the store, awaiting people coming to pick up their layaways.

At midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, all main lights at St. Casimir’s Roman Catholic Church then on East Main Street were turned off, smaller lights turned on.  A parishioner recalled that with the smaller lights and candles, the church looked magical.

The Christmas Eve service at St. Ann’s Episcopal Church on Division Street was so crowded years ago that ushers set up extra chairs in the center aisle to accommodate everyone.

The matrons at the Children’s Home orphanage on Guy Park Avenue years ago asked each child for a list of three things wanted for Christmas. One woman remembered getting paper dolls and white socks.

When high school social life was dominated by sororities and fraternities, a high point of the holidays was Phi Delta sorority’s Christmas formal.  In 1963 the dance was held at the Century Club on Guy Park Avenue. The girls of the sorority asked boys to attend.

Amsterdam wrapped up its bicentennial year in 2004 with City Hall display of a Christmas tree with ornaments made by students. Windmills on the tree paid tribute to Dutch heritage. One large windmill had holiday greetings in English, Italian, Polish and Spanish.

Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer.

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Family fun with the Recordio

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette and Recorder

      In the late 1940s my family had a machine called the Recordio to make 78 rpm records for our own amusement.

We often sent these homemade records to my Aunt Winifred and Uncle Albert Gulloni who, with Albert’s daughter Sylvia, had moved to Inverness, Florida after World War II. The Gullonis sent us Recordio Discs they had recorded in return.

First sold in 1939 in variously priced models, the Wilcox-Gay Recordio enabled consumers to make their own records using a microphone or recording audio from an embedded AM radio.

My uncle Al had operated a radio and television repair shop in Scotia and moved south to advance his career in retail. My hunch is my parents got a deal on the Recordio from Uncle Al. It might even have been a gift.

There is a fair amount of information online about the Recordio, manufactured in Charlotte, Michigan. Youtube has examples of recordings made on this system, which one online audiophile described as “decent.” It’s reported online that Johnny Cash and Les Paul used these player-recorders at some points in their early careers.

Wilcox-Gay sold Recordio Discs or blank records in two sizes. You also could play commercially produced 78 rpm records on the machine’s turntable.

Unlike later cassette tape recorders, you couldn’t record over a Recordio Disc once you created it.

That was a problem in our case in that as a spoiled young child I was a show-off, fond of off-color words.

My father would say, “Bob, say Merry Christmas to Aunt Winnie and Uncle Al.” I would sometimes respond by saying, “Poop!”

In my defense I knew this would get a laugh at home from my aunts and sister, if not from my mother and father. We no doubt mailed the off-color Recordio Disc to Florida anyway, where my potty mouth likely got more chuckles.

One family picture shows my father Clarence holding a vase of flowers, standing and singing or talking into the Recordio microphone on a floor stand in our living room in our flat on Pulaski Street.

In this picture the Recordio itself is on a coffee table to my father’s right. The recording arm does not look like it is on the turntable. Maybe my father was practicing.

The picture was taken in 1949 or so as I was a toddler on the floor playing with my aunt, my father’s youngest sibling, Vera Cudmore. My sister, the real singer in the family, may have taken the picture.

My mother and my father’s oldest sister, Gladys Morrell, are sitting on a couch smiling, enjoying whatever father is doing.

The photo was taken before we had a television set and a large, handsome console radio, separate from the Recordio, has a place of honor along the Pulaski Street living room wall.

The Recordio made the move when our family relocated up the hill to a home of our own on Amsterdam’s Peter Lane in 1957. A few years after that Wilcox-Gay went out of business. At some point, unfortunately, our Recordio was discarded along with our Recordio Discs.

My friend Warren Garling, known as Chris Warren on the radio, has been interviewing veteran radio announcers for a podcast series about their careers. Several of them had technical skills and first got into radio by building their own home radio stations as teenagers.

I worked in radio for a half century or so but did not build a home radio station when I was a teenager.

But I did have the family Recordio which helped me practice my speaking skills when I was a child.

Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer.

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Amsterdam goes to war

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History for Daily Gazette and Amsterdam Recorder

     The movie "South of Tahiti" was playing at the Strand Theatre on East Main Street in Amsterdam, when interrupted as the news broke that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.

Radio coverage was piped into the theater and dazed patrons left the building. A soldier from Amsterdam was among the 2390 Americans killed in the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941. William E. Hasenfuss, Jr. was from a family of nine on Northampton Road.

Hasenfuss had flown planes at an airfield in Perth before enlisting in the Army in 1939. According to research done by the late Bob Going, some 176 Amsterdamians were killed in World War II. Hasenfuss died when Japanese airplanes shot up the B-24 bomber Hasenfuss and his ground crew were working on at Hickam Air Field in Hawaii.

His mother Frieda, Amsterdam's first World War II Gold Star Mother, christened the light cruiser U.S.S. Amsterdam in 1944 at Newport News, Virginia. About twenty relatives and friends of the Hasenfuss family were at the ceremony along with Mayor Wilbur H. Lynch..

Mrs. Hasenfuss was overcome with emotion when shipyard workers gave her a diamond-studded wristwatch. Lynch said Amsterdam is “a splendid city” just as “the cruiser Amsterdam is a splendid ship.” "I was thinking of William when I smashed that bottle." she said as the vessel slid into the James River.

USS Amsterdam was among the American ships in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese surrendered in 1945. A model of USS Amsterdam was made by the late Albert M. Swager of Pennsylvania, a former crewman, who donated it to Amsterdam's Walter Elwood Museum.

George A. Tralka, 15, was at his family's James Street home in Amsterdam when he heard news about the attack on the radio.  At first Tralka thought Pearl Harbor was in Alaska. Tralka’s parents went ahead with plans to go out that day and to have Tralka watch his younger sisters.  The next day as Tralka delivered the Schenectady Gazette he heard President Roosevelt's "day of infamy" speech on the radio when at Reid Hill Pharmacy.

"It was a solemn moment in the drug store," Tralka wrote in his memoir, "Diary of a Replacement Soldier." As his senior year in high school drew to a close, Tralka enlisted in an Army training program.  His notice to report came a few days before his senior prom and he was so busy getting ready to go that he failed to notify his date that he couldn’t attend the prom.

Later his brother accepted Tralka’s high school diploma. Tralka survived the war and became a physician in the Washington, D.C. area.

James V. Hogg from Amsterdam was on a Navy ship somewhere in the Pacific when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. His niece Karen terHaar said, "In the months after Pearl Harbor, many ships in the area were ordered to maintain radio silence. The families of crew members did not know if their fathers, sons or brothers were dead or alive."

Hogg's parents, Frank and Mildred Hogg, were living on Grant Avenue in Amsterdam.

TerHaar wrote, "About four months after Pearl Harbor, Mom was sitting on the front porch when she heard the postman's voice. She saw him running down the sidewalk. He was waving a letter and yelling, 'Jimmy's alive! Jimmy's alive!'"

James Hogg became a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy and married a woman from Australia. He later lived in California. Mitsuo Fuchida was the Japanese pilot who led the first warplanes in the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the war Fuchida converted to Christianity and spent many years living in America, although he died in Japan at age 73.

Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer.

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