Other Voices

Nick Yetto of Clarksville has published his first novel, “Sommelier of Deformity,” and is at work on another, to examine the meaning of truth, about a real-life con woman who “cured” people through radio waves. Yetto’s picaresque novel is narrated by Buddy Hayes — “a connoisseur of the unwanted, a sommelier of deformity, a coveter of the unloved” — who lives a solitary life in a run-down upstate N...

Fan Pen Chen started gardening, under her father’s tutelage, as a child in Taiwan. She later gardened in Libya and Canada. When she moved, in 2003, to an apartment in Guilderland — she teaches nearby at the University at Albany — she discovered the Guilderland Community Gardens and has been gardening there since. When Chen is gardening, she says in this week’s podcast, she doesn’t think about teac...

The cover of Dorothy Bremer Kohler’s book depicts the farmhouse in Gilboa — her Shangri-La, where she was raised — painted by her granddaughter, Jacklyn Kohler. Kohler, who is 89, wrote the stories of her life as part of a memoir group at the Voorheesville Public Library under the tutelage of Dennis Sullivan, who is also an Enterprise columnist. Kohler will read from her book and sign copies at th...

Edgar Tolmie wanted to make this podcast so his children and particularly his granddaughter Sarah would be able to hear his voice and be guided by his life’s philosophy when he dies. Although he is still in his 50s, he suffered a massive heart attack and is on a waiting list for a heart transplant. He talks about the meaning of courage, the importance of kindness, and the lessons he learned from p...

Laura Shore, the Georgia O'Keeffe of vegetables, has some of her artwork, in postcard form, before her. Part of the profits from her work goes to support open-space preservation. Shore, biographer of the late Ev Rau, a farming icon in Altamont, has now plunged into researching Lucie Cassidy — responsible for Altamont’s name as well as for the founding of St. Lucy’s Church — and her family, which w...

Christopher Philippo puts together pieces of the past in researching gravesites and in uncovering his own history. He recently reunited the 19th-Century headstones of Robert Matthews and his son, James, with their remains. Since at least the 1930s, Robert’s stone had served as a barn door stoop on an historic property in Guilderland and James’s stone, in pieces, was edging a garden in Glenmont. No...

Suzannah Lessard signs her book, “The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape,” on Saturday after reading from it at the Rensselaerville Library. “Once the world was wide,” she read. “Now we live in collapsed space: the chip in our pocket.” Lessard wrote much of her book in her Rensselaerville cottage and considers the meaning of its landscape and how that sense of place has changed. Lessa...

Perry Ground wears his regalia — a purple shirt for the color of wampum, turtles for his clan, and two eagle feathers among the goose feathers on his head dress to show he’s an Onondaga man — for this week’s podcast. The setting is the Iroquois Indian Museum in Howes Cave, where Ground had his first job, fresh from Cornell University, as an educator. The museum, with both historic artifacts and co...

Tim Albright, who has worked at Indian Ladder Farms for 40 years and is now a manager, used to know each of the large old-fashioned apple trees as individuals. The small, modern rows of trees — which are more efficiently maintained — lack personality, he says. Albright, who grew up playing on the cliffs and in the caves of the Helderberg escarpment, knows the history as well as the topography of t...

Roberta Villanova Nunn was not happy early in her teaching career that social studies textbooks portrayed African peoples as backwards. She had been to Morocco and understood the richness of its culture. Late in her teaching career — teaching children foreign languages at Berne-Knox-Westerlo — she felt like a hero as kids enjoyed her sombrero when she taught Spanish and her beret when she taught F...

Harold F. Greene is philosophical about the death of his son, a two-star Army general, shot in Afghanistan five years ago. His son, Harold J. Greene, who got good results working collegially in the Army, was there to train Afghan soldiers and to help the country develop training so it could carry on after the United States’ withdrawal. He chuckles as he remembers the happy times with his three son...

Nancy Lawton has kept the memory of her husband, Douglas, alive with an annual golf outing that celebrates him and raises funds for worthy causes. Douglas Lawton, who was raised in Guilderland Center, followed in his father’s footsteps, serving in the volunteer fire department there. His fellow firefighters, whom Nancy Lawton refers to as a “brotherhood,” suggested the tournament after he died in...

Chasity McGivern is the area representative for the American Scandinavia Student Exchange, known as ASSE, a not-for-profit organization that places foreign-exchange students around the world. Cameron Goss, left, from Australia, and Julia Solé, from Spain, were both high honor students at Berne-Knox-Westerlo this year. On this week’s podcast, the girls talk about the close bonds they’ve forged with...

Tom Smith is 87 now, although he notes with a grin that he may actually be 88 since one year, after crossing the international dateline, he celebrated two birthdays. Smith recently took an Honor Flight to Washington, D.C with other veterans to see the memorials there, including the life-like poncho-clad statues depicting American soldiers in Korea. “It was one of the best days of my life,” says Sm...

Susan E. Leath, Bethlehem’s town historian since 2007, is featured in this week’;s podcast. In those 12 years, she has informed residents of their town’s past — starting with the ancient Mohicans and Mohawks — which she feels is essential for its future. Leath has done this in traditional ways: putting together exhibits, giving talks, writing columns and books — the third just recently published....

Castina Charles is a poet and activist; both of her passions are fueled by her drive to educate, to make people understand different perspectives — including her own as a black woman in modern America. In this week’s podcast, she reads poems that are at once playful and pointed. She also talks about the Women’s Empowerment Conference and March she organized, which included Christine Ahn who led a...

Elizabeth Zunon, who grew up on the Ivory Coast in Africa and spent her teenage years in Guilderland, just published a book she wrote and illustrated, “Grandpa Cacao: A Tale of Chocolate From Farm to Family.” She is the little girl pictured on the cover of the book with the grandfather she knew through family stories but never met. Her book, dedicated to “all the Grandmas and Grandpas who broke th...

Andrew Schotz and Saranac Hale Spencer each started careers in journalism at The Altamont Enterprise. Schotz has gone on to report for and later edit a variety of publications in Maryland — daily and weekly newspapers, both family-owned and part of a chain, as well as an online news site. Spencer covered courts for The Legal Intelligencer in Philadelphia, then covered crime and education for The N...

Fabrice Liegeois was raised and shaped by the grandmother he adored, Jeannine Robert. A blonde beauty who looked like Marlene Dietrich and spoke five languages, she killed an SS officer who fell in love with her during the German occupation of France. She knifed him in order to save her best friend, a Jew. The young women fled to Paris. Robert used the copy of “Mein Kampf” that the Nazi officer ha...

Brendan Cushing, a University at Albany senior, is an activist, getting young people to vote. “Students know little to nothing about local and state government,” Cushing says in this week’s podcast. For example, the students his GenVote@UAlbany team surveyed didn’t know who the mayor of Albany was, or how a bill becomes law. Cushing termed this “rather frightening.” He thinks party polarization ha...

What will our world look like in 2030? Filmmakers Jon Cring, left, and Joe Murphy are making a short mockumentary — a humorous, pretend documentary — this summer in Voorheesville to bring home the effects of climate change: It’s a world where refugees are rampant, political rhetoric doesn’t square with reality, and kids have never seen a butterfly. In this week’s podcast, Cring and Murphy discuss...

Wayne Crounse has a Bible from the 1700s that lists, in fine German script, his ancestors. He plans to pass along the inherited tome — with the corners of the embossed leather cover so worn, they were reinforced with metal — to his son, who will pass it in turn to his grandson. The Bible belonged to Frederick Crounse, born in 1716, who came to the New World, from Germany, and settled with his wife...

“Love is not made of DNA,” Carol Caloro writes in her memoir, “My Father’s Daughter.” She speaks with reverence of her kind and loving father and of the difficulties of living with an emotionally abusive mother. Caloro often served as a stand-in mother for her five younger siblings. Her book has many Norman Rockwell-like moments of growing up just after World War II in a small town on the Hudson R...

Frank Dees and his older brother, Ricky, were both on their high school football team. One week, in 1964, the team played two games. In Tuesday’s game, Ricky made a tackle on a hard hit, and told Frank afterward that his head hurt. At Saturday’s game, Ricky got another blow to the head — and died. Ricky’s number, 54, was retired. Frank shared his story with The Enterprise in 2012 when the newspape...

Eric Brown and his wife, Linda, also a wildlife rehabilitator, have housed everything from owls and hawks to raccoons and foxes on the Duanesburg farm he inherited from his grandfather. Brown tells in this week’s podcast how he grew particularly fond of four coyotes that were taken from their mother’s uterus after she was shot; he calls them princesses. Nine months ago, three bobcat kittens were b...