Other Voices

James Meade, after graduating from Guilderland High School, Hamilton College, and Northwestern University — with a Ph. D. in English — wrote several novels, all rejected by publishers. He thinks it’s important not to self-publish but to write for money, and built a career writing nonfiction books, over 30 of them, including five in the well-known Dummies series. His favorite book is “The Answer to...

Abby Maslin, a former Helderberg Hiltons resident, talks about her new book, "Love You Hard." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tim O’Shea, a musician from Killarney in southwest Ireland, says he doesn’t charge to play at weddings or funerals but, rather, is honored to be the soundtrack for the parts of a person’s life on the edge of emotions. O’Shea, along with his bodhrán, an Irish drum, and guitar, his form of the harp, was brought to The Enterprise by his cousin, Dennis Sullivan, who writes our monthly “Field notes” co...

Lisa Dougherty first became interested in genealogy as a teenager in the 1970s when she helped her father find relatives in Ireland. She pursued genealogy again as an adult when, after her father died, her mother gave her a folder with the papers they had assembled. Back then, records were obtained the old-fashioned way, by writing letters and receiving documents. The internet along with genetic t...

Sonal Swain, a senior at Guilderland High School, is studying the difference, and the reasoning, behind the special-education system in the United States and India. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David McDonald, a filmmaker who lives in Hudson, has written a screenplay about Ella Fitzgerald’s early life. Her mother died when she was 15. The elegant Queen of Jazz, he says, was then abused by her mother’s boyfriend and ended up living on the streets of Harlem where she took a job as a lookout for a bordello. After her arrest, she suffered abuse at the Training School for Girls in Hudson and...

Joan McGrath, an award-winning business teacher from Guilderland High School, draws on her 15 years working for KeyCorp to guide her students in real-world lessons. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Vic DiSanto lay in a hospital bed with a painful back injury when he received a visit from a therapy dog, which lifted his spirits. He decided to adopt a dog from the Mohawk Hudson Humane Society. When DiSanto worked as overseer of the John Brown Farm Historic Site in the Adirondacks, he took a ride on Mirror Lake with John Houghton’s Thunder Mountain dog sled team and now is a musher himself. He...

Anna Capuano, a Guilderland High School senior, discusses E4G2, engineering for girls and guys, a club she started at her school. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Theresa A. Schillaci, who coordinates the Safe Harbour program for the Albany County Department of Children, Youth and Families, speaks in the week’s Enterprise podcast about child sex trafficking in our midst. According to data from Safe Harbour reported in 2017 by 25 counties statewide — the safety next is to be extended eventually to all 62 counties, Schillaci says — 2,366 youth were identified...

Cormac DeBarra, a Celtic harper, talks about the music that has taken him all over the world. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ken Harris, executive director of the charitable Albany Guardian Society, discusses his work and the worldwide village movement. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Don Rittner, who teaches, has made a film, and written many books — including one underway about the Altamont Fair — says you can't understand where you are if you don't know where you've been. He believes history is important and has helped build a replica of a 1600s Dutch ship, the Onrust; served as the city of Albany's archaeologist; and a half-century ago pushed for the preservation of the Pin...

Enterprise reporters Elizabeth Floyd Mair, H. Rose Schneider, and Sean Mulkerrin talk with editor Melissa Hale-Spencer about local news in 2018. Reporters reviewed their favorite stories they covered, ranging from a fatally-ill child's wish for a backyard to dairy farming in the Hilltowns. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bill Frake, sketching vignettes from World War II — Dec. 27, 2018 by The Altamont Enterprise & Albany County Post Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ed Ackroyd left Berne-Knox-Westerlo’s high school when he was 17 to join the military. He enjoyed seeing the world until he was sent to Vietnam in 1969 and 1970. He got a Purple Heart after shrapnel wounded his leg, from which he recovered, but has spent a lifetime plagued with the effects of Agent Orange — skin inflammation, cancer, a heart attack. He’s also spent a lifetime advocating for vetera...

Sujatha Sarath discusses teaching Indian dance. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Greg Oliver Bodine will be breaking the fourth wall — directly addressing the audience — when he performs, using many accents to play different parts, his original version of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" on Dec. 8 at Conkling Hall in Rensselaerville. Bodine speaks to The Enterprise from New York City, where he lives. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joe Betzwieser has heard the sound of black holes merging — which happened 1.3 billion years ago when the Earth contained only simple multicellular life — and you can hear it, too, on this podcast. A major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 theory of relativity was confirmed over a century later through cutting-edge technology. The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to researchers at Louisiana S...

Chi Walthery, an artist herself, discusses building confidence in her art students. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bill Howard talks about his new book on an early Civil War battle, at Ball’s Bluff, that served as a rude awakening to the eager Union volunteers — many of them Harvard men who later wrote literary accounts — to the horrors of war. “How should they dream that Death in a rosy clime/ Would come to thin their shining throng?” asked Herman Melville in a poem on the sad legacy of Ball’s Bluff. Hosted o...

Alan Wang, a junior at Guilderland High School, won a State Archives award for his paper on the relationship between Lewis Morgan, known as the father of American Anthropology, the last Grand Sachem of the Iroquois, and their influence on Karl Marx Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“The Place Just Right” is a largely silent film about a post-pandemic world where dialogue occurs only in flashbacks. The lead actors, Meg Affonso and Joe Murphy — who also wrote, directed, and filmed the movie mainly in the Clarksville area — talk about the years-in-the-making project and their passion for art. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Bayne talks from his laboratory on Peebles Island about projects he’s involved in, from Colonial restoration to furniture he’s recreating from Frank Lloyd Wright's original plans. He offers insights both practical and philosophical on the joining of art, science, and craft in this week’s podcast at altamontenterprise.com/podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joe Oszust, a local arborist, talks about treating sick trees and the invasive species coming into the area that plague them, from the spotted lanternfly, with its sticky honeydew, to the emerald ash borer that leaves D-shaped holes in a tree. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.