Other Voices

As newcomers move to Voorheesville and New Scotland, Alan Kowlowitz hopes they will embrace their heritage, not as a matter of genetics, a love of place handed down through family, but rather like the love that ties a marriage together. New Scotland is growing at a faster rate than any other municipality in Albany County, with a 5.8 percent increase in population over the last decade, according to...

Brian Barr of Guilderland was one of five people recently recognized as a Community Bridge Builder at the inaugural awards ceremony held by ALERT , the Albany Law Enforcement Resolution Team. The not-for-profit was founded by Pastor David Traynham in 2015 after Michael Brown Jr., a Black man, was shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Traynham felt it was just a matter of time befor...

Jennifer Black looks at a log and sees how it could become a bird or a lighthouse or a bear. With a chainsaw in her hands, she has a running conversation in her mind, changing what she creates as she carves. “My mind switches on me so quickly,” she says. Black will be creating her sculptures in front of onlookers next week at the Altamont Fair. What she does is both an art and a sport, says Black...

Lisa O’Sullivan and Quetta Duran share a passion for helping children. In their work for Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Capital Region, they see how mentors paired with children can transform lives. The program, based in Albany, serves four counties: Albany, Saratoga, Rensselaers, and Schenectady. Right now, 74 children are waiting for a Big Brother or Big Sister. Anyone who is 18 or older with a...

Meg Eckhardt has a soothing alto voice. “Music speaks to a person’s heart,” she says in this week’s podcast. Eckhardt, who lives in Guilderland now, grew up listening to her English mother sing everything from folk songs to bar songs as she bustled about the house, doing chores. “There was music in the house all the time,” she said. Eckhardt did the same, raising her own children. Singing, she say...

History is personal for Dennis Barber. He lives in a Civil War-era house on a farm that has been in his family for a century. In it, he has a trunk that came from Italy with all of the possessions of the Colucciello family when they immigrated from Fontanarosa, Italy in 1929. A decade-and-a-half later, Nicolina Colucciello, one of eight children, was at a square dance at Pat’s Ranch in Altamont wh...

Will Aubrey, who has led the Helderberg Escarpment Hawk Watch at Thacher Park for more than two decades, is passing the torch — or perhaps the binoculars — to John Loz, who just finished his term as chairman of the Audubon New York Council. Each September, about 3,000 birdwatchers come to Thacher to count the raptors on their annual migration to South America. Aubrey says teaching is in his blood...

Emma White, who grew up in Duanesburg, is now in Colorado Springs training for the Tokyo Olympics. She started her journey as a competitive road and cyclocross cyclist, following her older brother, Curtis. At 16, she made the junior boys’ team — those seven boys, now men, are still her best friends — and turned professional at 18. In 2018, she was invited to a Talent ID camp for USA Cycling. When...

Director Jim Milton says he was attracted to theater because, being raised as a Cathoic, he found this Biblical phrase profound: “The Word was made flesh.” “To me, words are sacred,” Milton says in this week’s podcast. “Words are almost living things.” Milton, who lives in Tannersville in the Catskills, has adapted Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”  and Henry James’s “The Turn of the Scre...

Joy Bennett says she felt like she was home when she discovered folk music. “The sharing of music touches part of you maybe you didn’t know existed,” Bennett says in this week’s podcast at AltamontEnterprise.com/podcasts. Bennett is the director of Old Songs Inc., taking the helm from founder Andy Spence in 2018.  The Old Songs Festival of Traditional Music and Dance, usually held annually at...

Aaron Mair of Guilderland is the new director of a wilderness campaign for the Adirondack Council. Following the lead of President Joe Biden, Forever Adirondacks will focus on enhancing carbon sinks in forested land to slow climate change. Mair, who retires this month as a public-health epidemiologist working for the state, will combine his skills in data analysis with his passion for preserving t...

Frank Beretz operates an antique machine once used to roll roads. It is one of hundreds of historic steam, gasoline, and oil engines that will be displayed along with antique trucks, cars, and military vehicles this weekend, June 12 and 13, and next weekend, June 19 and 20, each day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission to the Gas Up, at 130 Murphy Road in Schoharie, is free. The annual event — back th...

Activists Savanna Jiang, left, and Maxine Alpart, right, both Guilderland High School sophomores, organized a May 21 anti-hate rally at their school. In this week’s podcast, each reads the speech — powerful words about painful and true experiences — she gave at the rally and talks about the kind of change they believe is needed. “Our school likes to say stuff but doesn’t take action,” said Jiang....

Best friends: Faith Borkowski and Georgia Burtt play Jay Ungar’s “Ashokan Farewell” in this week’s podcast. Georgia has named her violin — made in Germany in the 1800s — Aphrodite and says it is her most prized possession. Faith’s violin originally belonged to her mother. Her father, too, is a violinist and she has enjoyed playing with him at nursing homes. The duo are Young Leaders in the Empire...

Jason Brinkman, who grew up in Guilderland, is the general manager and vice president of the Albany Dutchmen, one of 16 teams throughout New York State in the Perfect Game Baseball League. After being closed out last summer by pandemic restrictions, the team is moving to Dutchmen Field at Roger Keenholts Park in Guilderland this season. Brinkman, in this week’s podcast, calls the ballpark, with li...

Phil Teumim of Delmar creates art from recycled objects and music by drawing on past traditions and on personal experiences. He describes it as “contemporary folk” or “acoustic Americana” in this week’s podcast. “The songs are the keepers of the stories of the day. They are the compass rose that help us find our way,” say the lyrics to “Old Songs,” which Teumim wrote to benefit the local group tha...

Vaclav Sotola left Prague, Czechoslovakia with his mother, fleeing a politically constrained communist country before the fall of the Berlin wall. He experienced a recurring dream when he first arrived in the United States, via Yugoslavia and Austria: he would go for an evening walk in the woods until he heard steps behind him and large men were following to capture him, he would run, they would p...

Willard Martin, on the stage set at the Old Stone Church in Esperance, displays an album capturing scenes from an Hysterical Players’ production. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ed Chevrette, dressed in his pilot's clothes, relaxes in his Guilderland home. His Learjet lapel pin was earned, not bought. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Hughes of Altamont stands at the Aulanko Nature Reserve in Finland near Hameenlinna, a city north of Helsinki where he lives with his Finnish wife, Tuulikki. The couple met at an educational media conference in Honolulu — she was a college professor in Finland; he was a media producer for SUNY. Both are retired now. They married last April, in the midst of the pandemic, in front of the Guilde...

Alexis Pris, an Eagle Scout, proudly wears the shoulder patch of her patrol — the Dangerous Cupcakes. She is a founder of Boy Scouts of America Troop 1075G based in Delmar and the troop’s first girl to earn Boy Scouts’ highest rank. She and her patrol mates chose the name, Lexi says in this week’s podcast, to show their feminine side but also to show that they are strong, independent females. Host...

Carol Maslowsky has lived most of the history of her family’s century-old farm in Westerlo. Her late father, Clayton Barber, remembered moving from his home on West Woodstock Road to the farm on Woodstock Road on his third birthday, Dec. 6, 1920 — in a hay wagon pulled by a horse. Years later, his wife — a city girl from Schenectady who had studied French — would sit on the porch of the mid-19th C...

Gudrun Bellerjeau values cultures from around the world and has collected “quality-made” goods from far-flung places to sell in a 200-year-old barn she and her husband own in Knox — the Pleasant Valley Exquisitum. “You don’t have to buy junk stuff,” she says, adding, “The shop is really a psychology center … a place to get away from the hassles, from the phony stuff. You’re stepping into a differe...

The Voorheesville Dionysians have persevered with theater in the time of the coronavirus. In this week’s podcast the drama club’s president, Hannah Lewis; its vice president, Keira Woods; and the director of this year’s musical, Robert Whiteman, discuss the challenges and joys of producing a play in the midst of a pandemic. A year ago, their production of “Legally Blonde” came to a screeching halt...

Ellen Zunon of Guilderland was brought up on stories of her Dutch ancestors. Her father’s side of the family goes back to Cornelis Van Slijck who came to Fort Orange, now Albany, from the Netherlands in 1634. He married a Mohawk princess, the story goes, although now Zunon is “not so sure about the princess part,” she says in this week’s podcast. Bridging two worlds, van Slijck’s daughters became...