Other Voices

Erick McCandless is returning to the place where he started.  He grew up in Slingerlands, was trained in forestry, and now — after a sometimes far-flung career in environmentalism — he is the new project manager for the Bender Melon Farm Preserve. McCandless says a bullet was dodged when a grassroots uprising prevented a mega-mall from being built on the rural land, which is now undergoing de...

In 2015, John Haluska took it upon himself to start sprucing up Guilderland’s historic markers. His work caused a bit of a stir when the late Guilderland town historian, Alice Begley, learned that Haluska had already painted 22 markers when she saw a photo of him posing before a half-painted sign in the Sept. 8, 2016 Altamont Enterprise. Begley had been, said Town Supervisor Peter Barber at the ti...

Jessica Perrin Barcomb was in her twenties, she fell through a stairwell and landed on her head. She was in a coma and had to be resuscitated several times. It made her angry then when people told her that things happen for a reason. But now she realizes she learned so much, especially on the road to recovery. Barcomb has just published her first novel, which opens with the description of a terrib...

Terrice Bassler, a leadership coach, says that, when she is coaching someone, “I look for the red thread. I look for that thread that runs through somebody’s life story, even if it looks a little disconnected and wild.” Bassler’s own red thread may be providing service to others. Raised in the Helderberg Hilltowns, where both sides of her family had lived for generations, she says, “I was the firs...

Cheryl Vallee believes in the kindness of volunteers and the power of information to transform lives. Vallee is the director of the Center for Community Justice , based in Schenectady, which has just launched a new Legal Hand call-in program, an access-to-justice initiative, free for residents of Albany and Schenectady counties. In this week’s Enterprise podcast, Vallee shares several personal nar...

At the close of this week’s Enterprise podcast, through tears, Jason Houck gave a shout-out to his two daughters. “I love you both and hope to see you again someday,” he said. Houck of East Berne chairs the New York Affiliate of the National Parents Organization . His organization is pushing for changes in state law that would make it more likely, after parents divorce or separate, to have their c...

Curling, says Kathy Bentley, is like playing chess on ice. The ancient Scottish game is not just about technique and precision, but also about strategy. Bentley ought to know. Two years ago, she was a United States Women’s Curling Association Senior champion along with teammates Marilyn Goldstein, Martha Naber, and Wendy Berger. The four women had been curling together for 15 years. They competed...

Following our annual tradition, for this week’s podcast, Enterprise reporters look back at some of the most important stories for 2021. Noah Zweifel discussed how social-media accounts can vary from facts. He spoke of several stories he wrote this year — notably one involving dishonest posts meant to slur a candidate before elections — where finding and reporting the truth was essential in setting...

Jessyka and Keven Brunk are perfectly matched — both as a couple and as creators of fantasy gingerbread marvels. “Jessyka went to school for painting and art, and so she’s always been very involved with that,” says Keven in this week’s Enterprise podcast. Keven went to Syracuse University for mechanical engineering so he designs their gingerbread creations, starting with building half-scale models...

When Pastor Kyle Delhagen writes his sermon every week, he has a prayer on his lips: Lord, your words, not mine. “I’m in love with words,” Delhagen says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. He was installed in late October as the pastor at Hamilton Union Presbyterian Church, established in Guilderland in 1824. Although Delhagen grew up in a pastor’s family, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be pastor or r...

Will Gibney, at 17, has written a book about the dog that changed his life. “Toshi is my service dog,” says Will in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “He means so much to me because for years he’s been by my side.” Once Will, at age 12, was matched with Toshi, he began to produce the antibodies he needed to fight infections. “Toshi has been life-changing for me,” says Will, explaining why he wanted...

Kayleigh Reynolds-Flynn has been riding horses since she was born. Her mother grew up riding horses, too. “My favorite picture I have is of me when I was probably about three or four months old with my mom sitting on our old horse, Bandy,” Reynolds-Flynn says in this week’s podcast. Her mother would take her on trail rides as a baby and she would fall asleep in her mother’s arms on the back of a h...

Eric Reimer is a pastor who tweets. He is the new pastor at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Altamont. “The word of God …,” said Reimer, “needs to be proclaimed wherever people are. The Lutheran movement itself exists largely because of changes in the way people communicate.” Martin Luther’s ideas in the 1500s had been expressed before by other theologians, but Luther was able to print th...

The longtime head of Youth and Family Services at the Voorheesville library, Gail Brown has just been named Public Librarian of the Year by the New York State Library Association. Her goal is to create a community of learners. While she focuses on kids, her tendrils reach to nurture their parents and grandparents, too, as well as into the community at large. In one library project, Brown paired ki...

Merton D. Simpson has always had a sense of his African ancestry and his Blackness. He was born in Charleston, South Carolina and raised in Brooklyn so he says he’s always known the deep divisions in the United States. “My mother has just turned 89 years old and she’s a master teacher,” says Simpson in this week’s podcast. As a first-born son, he has his father’s name. “My father was one of the fo...

What began as a path traveled by Native Americans became a plank road for European settlers and now is suburban Guilderland’s major thoroughfare — Route 20. Route 20 seemed long to Bryan Farr when he was kid, traveling with his family every summer from the Fingers Lakes where they lived to the Darien Lake, an amusement park near Buffalo. But, as a young man, he embraced the entire length of the hi...

Gary Kleppel is a sheep farmer who likes coyotes. He is perpetually aware of the ecological balance of which he is a part. Every morning, Kleppel and his border collie bring their 30 sheep from barn to pasture and then, every night, return them to the barn. Overnight, coyotes eat all the vermin in the pasture. There are no rats in the Kleppels’ barn. In ecology, Kleppel explains in this week’s pod...

In 1914, John Daniels wrote “ In Freedom’s Birthplace; a Study of the Boston Negroes .” Eighty-five years later, his son, Jack Daniels, wrote “Discovering the Forgotten History of African Americans in Schoharie County.” The language like the location had changed, but the mission was the same: To uncover and tell a largely unwritten part of American history. Jack Daniels writes in the introduction...

Two creative men from Altamont have gathered ghost stories from village residents and surrounding areas into a book. Neither is a stranger to imagination and yet they have labeled these stories as true. Tom Capuano, a retired professor, once wrote a book-length narrative poem on the founding of Altamont, grounded in history but with imaginative creation of characters. He raises sheep now in an 18t...

“The cool thing is agriculture is everywhere,” says Michaela Kehrer. She has been teaching about agriculture and its many related subjects at Berne-Knox-Westerlo’s secondary school since 2017 . That year, she also founded a chapter of Future Farmers of America in the rural community. Now, Kehrer has been named Outstanding Agriculture Educator for the FFA Region VI National Association of Agricultu...

Donald Hyman brings history to life by portraying people from the past. Albany hotelier Adam Black Jr.; James Matthews, the state’s first African-American judge; and James Dickson, a New Scotland native and general manager for the Slingerland family, will be reborn on Oct. 5 for those attending the New Scotland Historical Association meeting.  “They come back to me like I’m listening to lyric...

“We’ve only got one planet,” says Edna Litten. “We’ve got to take care of it.” Litten, who grew up in Queens and lives now in Altamont, remembers going to a teach-in for the first Earth Day in 1970. Since then, over the last half-century, she has hung her laundry out to dry; she’s never owned a clothes dryer. Litten is part of a local group focusing on the dangers of synthetic turf.  As The E...

Kristopher Williams is now in his third career, as the coordinator for the Capital Region PRISM , Partnership for Regional Invasive Species. Monitoring species that don’t belong is “a never-ending job,” he says, but worthwhile. “This is the greatest threat to endangered species and our ecosystem as we know it today,” said Williams on this week's podcast. The Capital Region PRISM, hosted by the Cor...

“We try to protect our little neighborhood,” says Ellen Manning, president of the McKownville Improvement Association. The association, which is almost a century old, is on the brink of achieving a new form of protection —  having part of McKownville listed on the state and national registers of historic places. Manning hypothesizes in this week’s podcast that what has kept the association ac...

Matthew Pinchinat was recently named as the director for diversity, equity, and inclusion — a new post for the Guilderland school district.  Diversity, explains Pinchinat in this week’s podcast at AltamontEnterprise.com/podcasts, means recognizing people not from our background, and includes differences in thought as well. Now, he will be shifting his influence from just the students in his c...