Other Voices

Sandra Stempel was raised, one of six children, by a father, Rudolph Valentino Stempel, who taught her the value of perseverance, and by a mother, Sheila Catherine Stempel, who flew solo as a young woman and wrote a poem for every one of her children’s birthdays. Words are important to Stempel. She writes a weekly Enterprise column for the Berne Library, under her married name, Sandra Kisselback,...

Bill Combs Jr., a nature photographer based in Cobleskill, talks about bald eagles he has photographed as if they were family. He helped create the Schoharie County Eagle Trail (online at SCEagleTrail.com) and spends hours every day observing the birds — sometimes as he and his wife sit on their porch at home, other times as he visits their favorite haunts. In the early 1970s, New York State had j...

Peter Lindemann, who lives in Schoharie County, is immersed in its history, documented in several books he has researched and written. Lindemann likes looking at big, national pieces of the past through a local lens. As a boy, he was fascinated with Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. His sister, who grew up to become a teacher, gave him a book on the subject. He memorized the Gettysburg Address as...

Major David Erickson, of Knox, retired from a career in the military that taught him “we’re all much more alike than we are different.” He was stationed in Germany when the Berlin wall came down and soon after visited Prague. A Czech he met there was a boy when the Americans liberated Prague but told him the Russians rewrote the history books, removing the Americans’ role. “I never forgot,” said t...

Jennifer Bashant of Guilderland, who has worked in a mental-health clinic, in a county jail, as a school social worker, and as a research scientist for the state’s Office of Mental Health, now runs a business called Building Better Futures. She combines her expertise from academic degrees with a hands-on approach to help teachers, parents, and businesses navigate challenges. During the pandemic, h...

Lora Ricketts consults a cookbook, with her rolling pin and measuring cup at the ready. At 83, she still lives on the Hilltown farm where she settled well over a half-century ago after a peripatetic childhood. She finished eighth-grade in a one-room schoolhouse, then went on to high school in Woodstock, Vermont. She fell in love at 17 with Raymond Ricketts. He managed a neighboring farm in Vermont...

Tom Capuano, who grew up in Altamont, has a strong sense of place and the importance of history. Capuano founded Historic Altamont to spread that love, he says on this week’s podcast. The not-for-profit group has started a cemetery preservation project and would like to learn of area cemeteries that are now nearly forgotten. Capuano discovered a list of cemeteries made in the 1940s by the late Gui...

Clare Gaffey is pictured in October in the Arctic on board the Norseman II, a converted king crab boat, holding a bottle with a water sample that would eventually be analyzed as part of a project studying the effects of global warming. Sometimes she worked 24 hours with no sleep but the camaraderie with other scientists on board the ship was sustaining, she said. Gaffey is now back at Clark Univer...

Enterprise staff reflected on the year in local news stories. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jim Gardner, the former long-time owner of The Altamont Enterprise, was raised in a large family in Guilderland. As a boy, he fished in the Black Creek and hunted pheasants and rabbits, squirrels and partridges along Siver Road. “We were born into it,” he says in this week’s podcast at AltamontEnterprise.com/podcasts, of hunting for game. “We never wasted it … If you shot it, you prepared it for t...

Dennis Sullivan begins our Christmas Day podcast by reading from one of his Christmas columns on his naïve search as a child for the Star of Bethlehem, which became a lifelong journey to finally find it. Sullivan has compiled 62 of his Enterprise columns into a just-released book, “Homeward Bound.” He took the cover photo of the rail trail after rain had cleared it of people, leaving a green leafy...

Jennifer H. Dorsey, now known as Mother Jen, was ordained as a priest on Sunday by William H. Love, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Albany, at St. Boniface Episcopal Church in Guilderland. “Mystical” is how Dorsey describes the ceremony, in this week’s podcast, as other clergy lay hands on her and prayed God would descend upon her and make her a priest. As a child in northern New Jersey, Dorsey...

Robert Porter is currently renovating the first floor of his duplex in Albany to accommodate handicapped veterans, whom he feels are often not well provided for by the government. Porter himself served in the Marine Corps for 21 years, 4 months, and 19 days. At Christmas time, Porter dons a scarlet uniform with brass buttons and a chestful of medals to become “Gunny Claus,” helping with the Marine...

Judy Carey Nevin, right, says kindness and compassion are important to her. “Kindness is so easy and it’s free,” she says on this week’s podcast. Over the last three years, Nevin has written four children’s books — the latest is called “All Kinds of Kindness.” The book’s series of 11 couplets uses simple words to express profound thoughts. In her eight years working as an editor at Viking, Nevin l...

Rebecca Platel is looking at similarities, rather than differences, as she studies rural-urban connections. Platel, the Sustainable Communities program manager at the Carey Institute for Global Good in Rensselaerville, received with the town a $10,000 grant from the Hudson River Valley Greenway Community Grants Program to sustain her work. She says about half of Albany County is urban and about ha...

Dennis Cyr owns Mountainview Prosthetics on Maple Avenue in Altamont. A Republican, he has long flown a Trump flag under the American flag outside of his shop. Now the front yard of his shop has 13 red Trump signs arrayed on the lawn. In this week’s podcast, Cyr explains that each of those signs is for someone who stopped by his shop to voice their support for Donald Trump. In a liberal place like...

Ed Biittig, who is 72, has been in recovery from alcoholism for over 46 years. He started drinking at age 13 and by the time he was 26 had totaled five cars in drunk-driving crashes — yet was never arrested. For one of those crashes, Biittig says in this week’s podcast, “I had my 3-year-old son in my car. That crash, I could have killed my own son.” Biittig was finally arrested for driving while i...

Helen Marie Lounsbury and Walter Galicki , pictured here on their wedding day, Dec. 21, 2019, combined their movie collections as well as their households when they married. As Galicki was organizing the collection, he came upon a DVD of a film of typical Hilltown scenes made in 1950 by Ray Morrow. Through “computer wizardry,” he paired the images with music of the era. Galicki, who grew up in Bro...

Brian Barr, a social worker who lives in Westmere, speaks in this week’s podcast in what he calls the “afterglow of an incredible experience.” Thirty-six years ago, Barr, who directed the clinical program at the LaSalle School, came up with an idea for his Rotary Club, which, like other community organizations, had been showering awards on the high school students who were “the cream of the crop.”...

John Arrighi lives in an historic Rensselaerville church and, as president of the Friends of Conkling Hall, is helping to improve another one, which serves as a community meeting space. Arrighi is seated on the edge of the stage at Conkling Hall. The hall, on Methodist Hill Road, was built as a church in 1839 and changed to a community center in the early 1900s. Arrighi, who was born in Brooklyn,...

Marcy Forti, in her 2018 Berne-Knox-Westerlo valedictory address, used a phrase from Southern African philosophy, Ubuntu, often translated as “I am because we are,” which she felt spoke to the way she was raised in the close-knit, rural Hilltown community. The BKW superintendent, Timothy Mundell, has modified the phrase to “They are because we are” to use as the school district’s motto. “I was rea...

Inga Boudreau grew up on a farm in Westerlo, the daughter of German artisans. Her mother, a sculptress, could recreate a Chanel outfit by looking at a picture and she told stories that came from the heart. Her father heeded Will Rogers’ words — “Buy land; they’re not making it anymore — and in 1932, sight unseen, bought a 200-acre farm in Westerlo for about $300. Inga and her sister attended the g...

A year ago, story time at the Altamont library took on a new meaning when residents gathered to share memories from generations' past. This week's podcast is a rerun of that session in honor of the Altamont Free Library, under the direction of Joe Burke, winning the Program of the Year Award from the Upper Hudson Library System. Three women with the longest memories — Carol Dubrin; Jean Hungerford...

Timothy Rau, mallet in hand, stands in front of the post-and-beam barn he built for his wedding. He learned how to make mortise-and-tenon joints from his grandfather, the late Everett Rau, to create a timber frame for a sign that announces the name of their Guilderland farm. He’s hardly stopped since, and now owns the New World Barn Company, which both restores ancient structures and builds new on...

Katherine Hill Brown of Berne has written a coming-of-age novel, “The Summer Girl,” that is more like Anne Frank’s diary than a Nancy Drew mystery although the novel refers to and has elements of each. Her novel tells the story of two girls from different cultures who become fast friends despite prejudice from both of their families. Ruthie Rosenthal, an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, spends the summ...