Other Voices

Chris Claus — a retired Guilderland teacher — grew up in Gallupville and lives there still, right next to a historic 1872 building, the Gallupville House. It was built as a hotel and, in Claus’s youth, served as a Grange Hall. He has fond memories of the secret rituals and the plays he participated in there as a boy, which he describes with verve in this week’s podcast. With the nation’s Bicentenn...

Thom Breitenbach built, with his own hands, the castle where he lives on the shoulder of the escarpment. He wrested Helderberg bluestone from his land and forged its iron hardware. Born in Queens, he had moved to the outskirts of Altamont when he was 10 and revelled in the natural surroundings — collecting insects and rocks, identifying flora and fauna from field guides. As a teenager, he built gr...

Bethany Mazura has some advice: “Find a thing you love to do and don’t be afraid to put it out into the world because you never know who’s going to come calling and end up in your life.” Mazura found something she loves to do — running. She started when she was depressed after a miscarriage. Her first experience running the Freihofer’s 5K was not a good one. She tried again when she was going thro...

Karen Magnuson Beil has always been fascinated by names. Her latest book, “What Linnaeus Saw: A Scientist’s Quest to Name Every Living Thing,” is an insightful look at the life of the 18th-Century Swede who developed the modern system of naming organisms. Carl Linnaeus — mocked by one of his critics as “a second Adam” — lived at a time when Europeans’ view of the world and their place in it was ra...

Jean Lee Hungerford Krull moved with her family to Altamont when she was 5 years old. She is 96 now and says she is glad current residents are fighting to retain the village’s historic Victorian buildings. Krull went through all 12 grades in the single building that was Altamont High School, since demolished. She recalls on this week’s podcast at AltamontEnterprise.com/podcasts when the village wa...

Laurel Tormey Cole says a goldfinch is what led her to garden with native plants. Her cosmos, she explains, were too tall to deadhead. One day, she noticed a goldfinch eating the seeds from the spent flowers she’d been unable to pinch off. Now her garden in Knox is almost entirely native plants and she organizes a yearly sale at the Emma Treadwell Thacher Nature Center to share with others the vir...

Jenevieve Lussier was born 22 years ago as Jared Lussier. She and her twin brother, John, were well known in the Helderberg Hilltowns and beyond for their beautiful singing voices, with harmonies reminiscent of the Everly Brothers. They sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Berne-Knox-Westerlo games in a way it had never been heard before. All along, Jenna has been on a quiet, sometimes difficult jou...

Alicia Stenard believes that a topic percolating just below the consciousness of the American public — school lockdowns — needs to be addressed. As a longtime Albany teacher, she worried about the effects lockdown drills had on her students’ psyches. Not only did the drills distract from learning but they could leave lasting scars, leading kids not to trust school as a safe place. Still, Stenard c...

Lisa Campo-Engelstein, Ph. D. of Altamont was chosen by the BBC as one of “100 inspiring and influential women from around the world for 2019.” She teaches students at Albany Medical College about the human side of being a doctor. In this week’s podcast, Campo-Engelstein talks with passion about her work as a feminist bioethicist. She reports that half of all pregnancies in the United States are u...

Mary Jo Batters was, as she puts it, “cloistered” for six years, caring for her mother who had dementia. She learned some important life lessons in those years, such as the way the core of a person remains. Her mother, who was a nurse, cared about people up until the very end. Batters also learned how to reassess her mother’s needs and her own challenges every day so that she could get through eac...

Sue McDonough began her career as a New York State Trooper in 1978, specializing in animal cruelty cases. McDonough worked as a wildlife rehabilitator for 15 years and believes wild animals are better protected — in a program where rehabilitators are licensed and their facilities inspected — than domestic animals. She is now associated with the New York State Humane Association. Since the state’s...

The Enterprise experts in local news looked back at some of their most important stories for 2019.Noah Zweifel, who reports on the Helderberg Hilltowns, focuses on the Multi-Use Residential District proposed by Knox Supervisor Vasilios Lefkaditis to encourage business in the rural town. The two Democrats on the town board voted against the MRD because many of the people in the proposed district di...

Cathy Light is a rambler. In her six decades on this Earth, she has been an art teacher, a businesswoman, a marketer, a minister with a degree from Yale Divinity School, and is now a Guilderland school bus driver. She uses skills from all those professions in her new business, renting vintage campers. She has restored the campers — one plucked from a dump and named, after her mother, “Tin Can Anni...

After Charlotte Palmeri was diagnosed with cancer in 2013, she thought, “I wonder how long until I can help someone.” Inspired by a verse in Ecclesiastes, about how farmers who wait for perfect weather never plant, Palmeri founded a support and prayer group for women with cancer in 2015. She named it In His Presence. The group this month moved from meeting at Hamilton Union Presbyterian Church, wh...

Charles Gehring who lives in New Scotland goes each day to work at the New York State Library in Albany where he travels back in time several hundred years. His life’s work has been translating the records of New Netherland, which the English claimed at the fort in New Amsterdam when they took over from the Dutch in 1664. “The embryo of certain ideals we have as Americans,” says Gehring, including...

Everyone with a cell phone thinks they are a photographer, says Rich Schreibstein. “A phone doesn’t make you a photographer anymore than it makes you an orator,” says Schreibstein. “What you are is a picture-taker.” Schreibstein, of Altamont, takes his photography seriously. He is president of the Schenectady Photographic Society, founded in 1931, which he says is the oldest continuous photography...

The Enterprise — Marcello Iaia Michael Vincent talks turkey for our Thanksgiving podcast. Here, he sounds a turkey call he made himself. He shares memories of hunting all the way back to his boyhood on his grandparents’ farm on Pleasant Valley Road in Knox. There, he hunted on the land for food which they ate. He also shot woodchucks for safety on the farm, preventing holes that could blow tractor...

Teresa Gil was named after Mother Teresa, the saint of Calcutta, who was a lifetime friend of Gil’s aunt, Catholic journalist Eileen Egan. Gil, one of nine children of immigrant parents, activists in peace movements and in helping the poor, says her life of service was preordained by her upbringing. A professor and psychotherapist, Gil has published a book, “Women Who Were Sexually Abused as Child...

Mike Moak of Guilderland Center describes himself as competitive. He says his high school wrestling coach at Voorheesville, the late Dick Leach, inspired that in him. Last month, Moak reached his goal of running a marathon in every state. But it wasn’t enough for him to just complete those marathons; he had to do it in under four hours. Moak is one of only 126 runners — members of the 50sub4 Club...

Damion Coppedge is a poet, a chess teacher, a Buddhist. He honed these aspects of his life during the 22 years he spent in prison. He is now making his way in the world, living in a half-way house in the Bronx since his release on July 31. He appeared in The Enterprise six years ago in a chess column written by the late Clarksville lawyer and activist, Peter Henner. They played chess by mail. Copp...

Zach Appio is a storyteller. When he and his brother, Frank, were both seniors at RPI five years ago, they produced a prize-winning psychological thriller, “The Baby Monitor.” Now, Zach has found new ways to tell stories — through comics and music. From his fertile imagination — he taps ideas into his computer and jots on notebooks around his home, even next to his bed — have sprung three comics....

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 the second half of the lively story swap that took place on the eve of the village's first Founders Day last Saturday. Among the tales are a few of high-spirited hijinks on Halloween. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“I Remember Altamont”: Villagers with long memories gathered at the Altamont Free Library last Friday night, on the eve of the village’s first Founders Day, to share memories and swap stories. Joe Burke, who directs the library and hosted the event, started off with a story about the late Ev Rau remembering his first visit, at age 5, to the train station that now houses the library. He and his gra...

Corrina Goutos has this advice for parents, “Let your kids dream so big. Be their safety net.” Goutos, who grew up in Altamont, said her parents did just that for her. Since childhood, she had a love of beauty and a gut need to fight for what is right. She combines both in her art. Goutos lives in Germany now and the jewelry she designs and creates is shown internationally and has won many awards,...

This year, 2019, is the centennial of a law that created the post of local government historian for each city, town, or village in the state; New York was the first state to do so. Christopher Philippo, on this week’s podcast, talks about his work for a former state historian, collating and cataloging the annual reports of local government historians, the cruel irony being that decades of reports...