Other Voices

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 t...

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 pod...

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...

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, sh...

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-grand...

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 Co...

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 n...

“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...

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...

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...

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 judge...

“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...

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 in...

“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...

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...

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-ve...

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 Ha...

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,...

“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 re...

GUILDERLAND — Bill Batt is a man of ideas — big ideas. Right now, he’s organizing the annual Council of Georgist Organizations conference to be held this year in Albany, from July 15 to 17. Batt’s signature sign-off on his emails is a line from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, “The fox knows many things — the hedgehog one big one.” “I tend to see things in very global perspectives,” says Batt i...

The four track-and-field athletes who were named All Americans at a national competition this month most often used the word “love” — not “pain” or “discipline” — to describe their relationship to their sport. Sophomore Kendall Barnhart and senior Kate Sclanlan both used the phrase “falling in love” when they described the joy of track. “When I was younger, I was forced to run by my parents,” said...

Trevor Burnside knows that doing the small things right leads to doing the big things better. In this week’s Enterprise podcast, Burnside describes the sound of each member of a platoon pulling forward the bolt on their rifles at the exact same time. “You can only hear one sound … It is awesome,” he said. Burnside recently competed with the Shock Platoon of Norwich University at the Mardi Gras Dri...

Patricia C. Bischof, as an adult, sat in a room in her mother’s house, crying, as she listened to the story of her mother’s life — a story she had never heard before. Her mother, Ruth, was being filmed in the next room in an interview, which Bischof had set up, for the Shoah Foundation. Bischof has spent her life trying to piece together her parents’ past and has spent 10 years writing a book abou...

“The United States has denied the existence of its own empire,” says Ryan Irwin. Irwin is an associate professor of history at the University at Albany and has written books about the shifting world order. “Gordian Knot: Aparthied and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order” explores how African independence altered the international system at the height of the Cold War, and “Vast External Realm:...

Beth Davis has fulfilled a lifetime dream. She was one of just eight school librarians from across the United States to serve on the William C. Morris Young Adult Debut Award Committee for 2022. When she applied for the post, Davis thought she wouldn’t be chosen, reasoning, “Nobody’s going to pick … a librarian from a small library and I haven’t done anything so phenomenal.” Many would beg to diff...