Other Voices

Jill Rifkin is a sort of Robin Hood for musical instruments. She collects them from often well-off kids who don’t use them and redistributes them to children who can’t afford them. Rifkin was hooked, she says, by a little boy from the Caribbean. “He didn’t speak much English, was desperate to play the violin, and his school did not have enough violins to give him … He was lonely,” Rifkin says in t...

A new widow had never driven. She had no license. She did, however, have her husband’s car. But, without a driver’s license, she couldn’t register the car to park it on the street. A neighbor said, “Hey, if you title it to me, I can register it in my name and I can then park it.” The widow didn’t know where to turn. She thought maybe she should have a contract with the neighbor. She called 518-400...

Joan Mckeon had an awakening as she mowed her lawn — a job she hated.“It smelled bad, it was noisy, and the little creatures would run for their lives,” she says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. The less lawn she mowed, the more native plants grew up. “They would bloom and then they’d be covered with bees,” she said. Similarly, plants in her garden beds had been purchased at a garden center and...

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Emily Vincent is carrying on a legacy. A sheep farmer in Berne, Vincent had a brain tumor removed in January of 2020. “After I got out of my surgery, I had just the most horrendous vertigo that you could ever have,” recalls Vincent in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “It was really hard.” Vincent, a registered nurse, had regularly commuted to New York City where she worked in intensive-care units....

Julia Young, a student at Clayton A. Bouton High School, is one of 25 seniors in New York State nominated as a Presidential Scholar, a recognition the Regents chancellor called “the pinnacle” — and yet Julia Young is humble. The day after the nominations were announced , Young told The Enterprise she was surprised by the accolade. “I like being challenged,” she says in this week’s Enterprise podca...

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Christine Galvin helps abused and neglected children who have fled their homelands in hopes of building a better life in the United States. She has spent up to a thousand hours each year for more than five years working, for free, to help them. Asked why, Galvin says simply, “They all need help.” Pressed further, she says, “Because I speak Spanish and because I’m a lawyer, it’s a perfect set of sk...

Rudy Pitcher calls his wife, Connie, his “combat buddy.” It’s not an exaggeration. Pitcher, now retired from his Army career, was stationed in Tehran in 1978. His wife and their three young children — ages 5, 7, and 9 — were with him. Pitcher had spent a year learning Persian-Farsi before he left. At first, life was peaceful, with the shah’s pro golfer teaching Pitcher’s two young sons to golf. Bu...

Paul Steinkamp wishes that, when he was a child, someone had taught him how to fold a piece of paper in half. As he talks about the art and science of origami, which he came to late in life, he sounds like a poet. “The greatest gift you could ever give a child, as far as I’m concerned, is to introduce them to folding paper ….,” he says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “You can fold paper for the...

Alexandra Fasulo last month published her first book and calls it “my favorite thing I’ve ever done.” She has done a lot while still in her 20s. She owns the weekly gig economy newsletter, the Forum, as well as Fortuna Forum, a suite of online financial resources; she is a CNBC contributor; and she hosts the Freelance Fairytales podcast. She says she has over 900,000 followers across social media....

Peggy Filkins Warner says she learned to be independent from her grandfather.“That’s where I got my attitude,” she said of her father and his father. She was born in the Filkins farmhouse on Joslyn School Road in 1930, in an era when not a lot of women were involved in politics. Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/11252022/peggy-warner-says-our-country-gives-people-right-choose H...

Penny Shaw Bartley has always loved to sing and entertain people. It started when she was a kid growing up on a farm in Michigan. She and her siblings worked in the fields, “hoeing out weeds and driving the tractor and feeding the animals,” says Shaw in this week’s Enterprise podcast. Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/11172022/delving-her-familys-history-shaw-creates-goosen-mus...

David Rodney Miller describes himself as an 85-year-old pacifist. He says, though, that he has been in a war of one kind or another for most of his life and cites his time in the Peace Corps, which he terms “war on war”; his role in the Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty; and in the war on racism, working with a state Commission on Human rights. Miller, who lives now in New Scotland, was born in Tuls...

Sandra Dollard, a woman known for her warmth and sense of style, ran Evoke Style, a women’s fashion boutique, in Stuyvesant Plaza for more than a decade. “I had cancer and I got myself through chemo and I wanted to help other people,” Dollard says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “When I closed my business, I wanted to find someplace to help somebody run their business.” She found that place at...

Last week, John McDonnell, who directs the Guilderland Food Pantry, talked to a woman in her early seventies who had been retired for about five years. He recounts their conversation in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “She said, ‘You know, I worked my entire life. And now I don’t have enough. And I don’t know what to do.’” McDonnell said, “It breaks my heart.” He knows what it feels like to need h...

Wendy Dwyer is a lifelong activist who is going to take her commitment to recycling and fighting pollutants all the way to the grave. Literally. She has signed up for a green burial. “I’m going to go in… a totally biodegradable wool blanket and plant flowers on me. No chemicals. No embalming fluid …. That’s what we’re supposed to do,” says Dwyer, a registered nurse, in this week’s Enterprise podca...

Mildred and Alan Zuk are consummate givers. Constant in their commitments, they have been married for 50 years. Throughout that half-century, Alan has been involved either driving school buses for Berne-Knox-Westerlo or supervising the transportation department. He has also served Berne as supervisor and as a town justice. Millie taught elementary school children for 35 years, along with coaching...

Nadia Raza was visiting family in Pakistan this summer when the floods came. “We didn’t even know. I woke up one morning and I had text messages and Facebook messages from the entire Altamont community,” said Raza who owns a Pakistani restaurant in the village. Heavier monsoon rains and melting glaciers combined to put half of Pakistan under water, affecting 33 million people and causing losses of...

When Sarah Walsh was working with indigenous people in Canada, she experienced a national Thanksgiving address. “It is a way of acknowledging every piece of the Earth … and to center yourself in your role as a human being in the Earth, not on the Earth, but in the Earth, and how it influences who you are and how life happens,” she says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. Walsh is now the associate...

Bernard Melewski has spent most of his life working as an environmental lobbyist, and eight years writing a book about it. “Inside the Green Lobby: The Fight to Save the Adirondack Park” has just been published by the State University of New York Press. Melewski, who grew up in Halfmoon, has an abiding love for the Adirondacks and continues to be vitally interested in the park’s welfare. “I was ve...

Life and art are often intertwined for Chris Howard. She sees communication as a common thread in her life, taking her from parts she played in the school productions of her childhood through a career as a speech and language pathologist, to a never-ending passion for community theater and now founding a company to make a documentary about local activists. Howard first trod the boards as a Voorhee...

Laura Barry is like a modern-day Johnny Appleseed. Except, instead of planting apple trees, which originated in Asia, she is planting native trees. “I planted about 15 trees this year, little saplings and things all over the place secretly,” she says, improving open land. Barry explains in this week’s Enterprise podcast that she was removing a friend’s Oriental bittersweet, which kills trees “beca...

Karen Williams, Linda Zell, and Megan Connolly consider themselves to be sisters. “The bond is that strong,” said Connolly in this week’s Enterprise podcast. The three women are not related by blood. Rather, they are part of what they describe as a “church family.” They belong to St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. Williams, who does academ...

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 dedicat...