Other Voices

One of her goals in writing the book, Linda Bakst said, is for people who are not Jewish to read it. “People may have a picture, a fairly stereotypical picture of what a Jewish person is,” she said, “and there’s a whole range of the way it’s expressed.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gerard Wallace, who grew up in Brooklyn, suffered as a child and so devoted his career to ending childhood suffering.Retired now, he lives in the rural Helderbergs and believes some of the worst suffering happens in rural areas.Wallace, a lawyer who advocated for kinship family rights, had a hand in creating a dozen laws in New York state that gives grandmothers and other kin rights in caring for children whose parents are unfit.“Why I got into kinship care and meeting grandparents raising kids is that my home was really a broken home,” Wallace says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “My father was an alcoholic, worked on the waterfront. He was a good person but, when he drank, it was a nightmare …. We grew up in a state of toxic stress.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Emma Treadwell Thacher Nature Center is being reimagined so that kids will be able to crawl into a giant honeycomb or tree to learn about meadows and forests or “dig” for fossils to learn about the Devonian sea. The Friends of Thacher State Park are helping to fund the transformation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bob Flynn has written a book — titled “Tork’s Hill & Mead’s Pond” — about two Voorheesville men who used their private property to create what he terms “winter wonderlands” where he and his friends could gather. Flynn’s book captures an earlier time when kids played outside — even in cold winters — and when there was a sense of community, a sense of place, and a sense of trust. Read more at altamontenterprise.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Each box includes a note she wrote. Sharath read one to The Enterprise: “Even in difficult times, hope can be a light in darkness. Know that you are deserving of support, compassion, and a better tomorrow. Stay safe, take care of yourself, and never forget that you matter.” Read more at altamontenterprise.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Anna Judge and Louisa Matthew realize they live in an ageist and sexist society — but, with generous spirits, they are paddling against the current.The mother-daughter duo together coach a crew of dragon boat paddlers.Matthew, the mother, is an art professor at Union College. Judge, her daughter, is a certified personal trainer who led her mother into the sport.“A dragon boat is a 40-foot long, very narrow racing boat,” explains Matthew in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “That became standardized in the 20th Century but it’s based on a thousands-year-old Chinese tradition of racing the big rivers in China.”A dragon boat has 20 paddlers, two to a seat, with a person in the stern who steers and a person in the bow signaling directions, traditionally by drumming.“It’s the national sport of China,” said Judge “so it’s quite big in Asia and has subsequently spread to Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.”It came to the United States through Canada, she said, citing the work of a doctor in British Columbia who changed prevailing medical opinion on exercise for breast-cancer survivors. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Holly Cameron loves her church.She has been the pastor of the New Scotland Presbyterian Church for 25 years.“The church is a place to try to understand what is something larger than myself, both within that community of people, and with God,” she says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.She describes her becoming a pastor as a journey.Cameron grew up in Alabama, in a time and place where women weren’t ministers. That time is not necessarily distant as this month delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting voted to amend their constitution to say their churches must have “only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Fritze Jr. is a dedicated ham radio operator and a third-generation jeweler. He is passionate about both his avocation and his vocation — and on the cutting edge of each.Hams have a saying as they try to inform the public that amateur radio operators use the latest technology: “We like to say, ‘It’s not your grandpa’s hobby anymore,’” says Fritze in this week’s Enterprise podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When Scott Abraham read about farmers committing suicide, he decided to do something about it.He read about families that had owned their farms for generations but couldn’t carry on. “It was just too tough … They can’t find help,” he says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.He started a farmers’ market in Guilderland, near where he lived, and has a second market in Albany.It’s a vital need for the community, Abraham says, to support local farmers while getting fresh produce and knowing where your food comes from.He opened the original Guilderland market in 2018. Five years later, Abraham is starting a new venture: Meet Your Neighbors Open Market started this month and will run every Sunday in June from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. as a “test run,” he said. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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In the way most of us breathe air — an essential intake to sustain life — Leonard A. Slade Jr. breathes poetry.He inhales the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and Langston Hughes, and breathes life into their words as he recites them as naturally as if he were exhaling. Their words, entwined in his thoughts, his very identity, flow naturally in conversation.Slade writes his own poetry, reams of it, imbued with what he has learned from a lifetime of reading literature but uniquely and personally his. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Anita Martin talks to horses.As a certified equine sports massage therapist, she helps horses in pain.“When horses are in pain,” she says, “they need help. They can’t tell us with words, but they certainly tell us with body language and action,” which can include biting, bucking, and kicking.Martin has been familiar with horses since before she was born. Both of her parents rode horses. And, Martin’s mother rode horseback when she was pregnant with Martin, which she says made her comfortable in utero with the rhythm of riding.In her book, “The Horse Less Traveled,” Martin writes that horses were the glue that kept her family together.She describes her father as a “real hillbilly” who did trick riding at a mountain resort for city folk, which is how her parents met.“My mother’s obsession for horses and my father’s rebellious James Dean personality. It was a perfect match!”As a very young child, Martin writes, she would spend hours quietly observing horses. “There was something going on very deep inside me, as if I could hear them, as if I knew their thoughts. This was a connection that was very personal. This was a window that they allowed me to see into their world.”As she grew older, Martin rode her pony, Candy, everywhere. “Being a quiet little girl my pony gave me courage and confidence,” Martin writes. With Candy, she felt secure, and that’s how people knew her as she traveled her neighborhood on horseback.“I always felt like even my own feet were foreign to me,” Martin says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “But being on top of a horse was more natural and comfortable. I was fascinated by them.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When is a coat a work of art? When is a coat the center of a play?When it is Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.The character Joseph wears his coat in this weekend’s school production in Voorheesville — where it takes on a life of its own, swirling in its many-splendored colors.“It definitely has a stage presence,” says the woman who created the coat, Megan Viscio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jill Rifkin is a sort of Robin Hood for musical instruments.She collects them from often well-off kids who don’t use them and redistributes them to children who can’t afford them.Rifkin was hooked, she says, by a little boy from the Caribbean.“He didn’t speak much English, was desperate to play the violin, and his school did not have enough violins to give him … He was lonely,” Rifkin says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A new widow had never driven. She had no license. She did, however, have her husband’s car. But, without a driver’s license, she couldn’t register the car to park it on the street.A neighbor said, “Hey, if you title it to me, I can register it in my name and I can then park it.”The widow didn’t know where to turn. She thought maybe she should have a contract with the neighbor.She called 518-400-5544. That is the number for the Legal Hand Call-In Center. Any Schenectady or Albany county resident seeking help can call that number or email [email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joan Mckeon had an awakening as she mowed her lawn — a job she hated.“It smelled bad, it was noisy, and the little creatures would run for their lives,” she says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.The less lawn she mowed, the more native plants grew up. “They would bloom and then they’d be covered with bees,” she said.Similarly, plants in her garden beds had been purchased at a garden center and came from other parts of the world.Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/02032023/mckeon-says-nurturing-nature-native-plants-something-everyone-can-do Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Emily Vincent is carrying on a legacy.A sheep farmer in Berne, Vincent had a brain tumor removed in January of 2020.“After I got out of my surgery, I had just the most horrendous vertigo that you could ever have,” recalls Vincent in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “It was really hard.”Vincent, a registered nurse, had regularly commuted to New York City where she worked in intensive-care units.Now, she couldn’t stand up for long. “When I stood up, I was teetering. I looked like I was perpetually drunk. I couldn’t drive, so I couldn’t get down to my job in New York City.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Julia Young, a student at Clayton A. Bouton High School, is one of 25 seniors in New York State nominated as a Presidential Scholar, a recognition the Regents chancellor called “the pinnacle” — and yet Julia Young is humble.The day after the nominations were announced, Young told The Enterprise she was surprised by the accolade.“I like being challenged,” she says in this week’s Enterprise podcast of what motivates her. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Christine Galvin helps abused and neglected children who have fled their homelands in hopes of building a better life in the United States.She has spent up to a thousand hours each year for more than five years working, for free, to help them.Asked why, Galvin says simply, “They all need help.”Pressed further, she says, “Because I speak Spanish and because I’m a lawyer, it’s a perfect set of skills to do this kind of work. So how could I not?”Galvin, who lives in New Scotland, has responded to prejudice against immigrants, undocumented workers, writing in a letter to the Enterprise editor, “Undocumented immigrants are contributing members of our society and deserve to be treated as such.”She says in this week’s Enterprise podcast of the kids she represents, “They work hard and they do jobs nobody wants to do.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rudy Pitcher calls his wife, Connie, his “combat buddy.”It’s not an exaggeration.Pitcher, now retired from his Army career, was stationed in Tehran in 1978. His wife and their three young children — ages 5, 7, and 9 — were with him.Pitcher had spent a year learning Persian-Farsi before he left. At first, life was peaceful, with the shah’s pro golfer teaching Pitcher’s two young sons to golf.But everything changed in a matter of months. That’s when the Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Khomeini threw out the pro-Western shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, ending the historical monarchy. Pitcher was the provost marshal in charge of security — and had eight installations overrun in 48 hours.“We got captured … They weren’t killing us or our families, which was good,” says Pitcher in this week’s Enterprise podcast.Find more at altamontenterprise.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul Steinkamp wishes that, when he was a child, someone had taught him how to fold a piece of paper in half.As he talks about the art and science of origami, which he came to late in life, he sounds like a poet.“The greatest gift you could ever give a child, as far as I’m concerned, is to introduce them to folding paper ….,” he says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “You can fold paper for the rest of your life and you will still have some discovery … It’s a river. It reminds you you have a brain and you have fingers … It’s something that no other living thing can do.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alexandra Fasulo last month published her first book and calls it “my favorite thing I’ve ever done.”She has done a lot while still in her 20s.She owns the weekly gig economy newsletter, the Forum, as well as Fortuna Forum, a suite of online financial resources; she is a CNBC contributor; and she hosts the Freelance Fairytales podcast. She says she has over 900,000 followers across social media.Fasulo describes her book, “Freelance Your Way to Freedom: How to Free Yourself From the Corporate World and Build the Life of Your Dreams,” published by John Wyle & Sons, as “a generic freelancing Bible.”She had such fun writing the book, she says she has a running list of 20 other titles ready to go right now. Ten of them are business topics, including side hustles, freelancing, the business of want, and virtual assistants.She also loves philosophy and writing poetry and, noting there are many books about dogs, wants to write about her Siamese cat who was her constant companion for 20-and-a-half years but died last summer.Fasulo spoke to The Enterprise from the United Kingdom, where she is traveling through England and Scotland, which has inspired her to want to write fiction or fantasies, Fasulo said. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Peggy Filkins Warner says she learned to be independent from her grandfather.“That’s where I got my attitude,” she said of her father and his father.She was born in the Filkins farmhouse on Joslyn School Road in 1930, in an era when not a lot of women were involved in politics.Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/11252022/peggy-warner-says-our-country-gives-people-right-choose Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Penny Shaw Bartley has always loved to sing and entertain people.It started when she was a kid growing up on a farm in Michigan. She and her siblings worked in the fields, “hoeing out weeds and driving the tractor and feeding the animals,” says Shaw in this week’s Enterprise podcast.Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/11172022/delving-her-familys-history-shaw-creates-goosen-musical Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Rodney Miller describes himself as an 85-year-old pacifist.He says, though, that he has been in a war of one kind or another for most of his life and cites his time in the Peace Corps, which he terms “war on war”; his role in the Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty; and in the war on racism, working with a state Commission on Human rights.Miller, who lives now in New Scotland, was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and raised, with three brothers, on a farm in a small town on the outskirts of the city. It was a “very, very poor area,” Miller says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.Read more at https://altamontenterprise.com/11132022/life-time-pacifist-takes-children-seriously Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sandra Dollard, a woman known for her warmth and sense of style, ran Evoke Style, a women’s fashion boutique, in Stuyvesant Plaza for more than a decade.“I had cancer and I got myself through chemo and I wanted to help other people,” Dollard says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “When I closed my business, I wanted to find someplace to help somebody run their business.”She found that place at the Guilderland Chamber of Commerce. Dollard is the chamber’s new executive director.Read more at https://altamontenterprise.com/11042022/chamber-leader-dollard-creating-connections Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last week, John McDonnell, who directs the Guilderland Food Pantry, talked to a woman in her early seventies who had been retired for about five years.He recounts their conversation in this week’s Enterprise podcast.“She said, ‘You know, I worked my entire life. And now I don’t have enough. And I don’t know what to do.’”McDonnell said, “It breaks my heart.”He knows what it feels like to need help.When McDonnell started his career at Veterans Affairs, he was a full-time government worker, married with two kids. “And I qualified for WIC,” he said of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. “I qualified for reduced lunches at school and I missed qualifying for food stamps by $25 a week.“The first time I had to walk into WIC …,” he said, “‘Humbled’ is probably not even the word for it … It sucks, honestly.”He wants Guilderland residents to know they will be welcomed at the food pantry. “If they’re hungry, they’re not going to leave that way …. One person at a time, we can change the world.”Read more at https://altamontenterprise.com/10282022/guilderland-food-pantry-director-says-if-you-need-us-were-here Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wendy Dwyer is a lifelong activist who is going to take her commitment to recycling and fighting pollutants all the way to the grave. Literally.She has signed up for a green burial.“I’m going to go in… a totally biodegradable wool blanket and plant flowers on me. No chemicals. No embalming fluid …. That’s what we’re supposed to do,” says Dwyer, a registered nurse, in this week’s Enterprise podcast.Dwyer was raised in Guilderland Center by a mother, a nursing professor, who “was a big follower of Rachel Carson and ‘Silent Spring,’” she said, referencing the 1962 book that documented the harm caused by pesticides and sparked the modern environmental movement.Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/10272022/wendy-dwyer-holds-hope-she-fights-against-all-odds-better-world Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mildred and Alan Zuk are consummate givers.Constant in their commitments, they have been married for 50 years.Throughout that half-century, Alan has been involved either driving school buses for Berne-Knox-Westerlo or supervising the transportation department.He has also served Berne as supervisor and as a town justice.Millie taught elementary school children for 35 years, along with coaching cross-country and track, and then went on to earn certification as an emergency medical technician to help with the Helderberg Ambulance squad.Alan says he can pinpoint the event that made him get involved in community service. In 1977, as members of the Berne Reformed Church — another long-time commitment for the couple — the Zuks were involved in an activity at the church hall when the fire siren sounded.“Basically, every man left our activity to go fight the fire except me …,” Alan recalls in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “That’s when I joined the fire company.”Read more at https://altamontenterprise.com/10072022/millie-and-alan-zuk-lifelong-care-community Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nadia Raza was visiting family in Pakistan this summer when the floods came.“We didn’t even know. I woke up one morning and I had text messages and Facebook messages from the entire Altamont community,” said Raza who owns a Pakistani restaurant in the village.Heavier monsoon rains and melting glaciers combined to put half of Pakistan under water, affecting 33 million people and causing losses of over $40 billion.“We woke up watching the news and realizing that a third of the country was wiped away …,” Raza says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “We were seeing millions, millions of people had become homeless, lost their homes, lost their lives.”Raza’s family, living in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, were safe. But news videos brought the horror into their homes.“Flocks of people just walking in these big bodies of water … and the one guy I remember saying, you know, we’ve been walking for ten, 12 hours … and one of the kids is bound to get tired,” said Raza, describing the news clips. “And I’m thinking in my head, ‘Oh, my God, how are they going to get through this? You know, if somebody gets tired and there’s water all the way to their knees, how are they going to sleep?’”Raza contacted The Enterprise in hopes of raising public awareness about the need for aid. “I don’t think that it’s getting the amount of publicity and the amount of help that they should be getting,” she said.Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/09292022/nadia-raza-follows-her-passions-fashion-pakistani-food-and-helping-after-her-homeland-was Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When Sarah Walsh was working with indigenous people in Canada, she experienced a national Thanksgiving address.“It is a way of acknowledging every piece of the Earth … and to center yourself in your role as a human being in the Earth, not on the Earth, but in the Earth, and how it influences who you are and how life happens,” she says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.Walsh is now the associate director of the Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy where she oversees an initiative to honor the indigenous history of the Bozen Kill Conservation Corridor. On Friday, a ceremony was held to celebrate new kiosk signs at the Bozen Kill and Wolf Creek Falls Preserves to inform visitors of the land’s history.https://altamontenterprise.com/09252022/indigenous-ways-knowing-are-totem-sarah-walsh Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bernard Melewski has spent most of his life working as an environmental lobbyist, and eight years writing a book about it.“Inside the Green Lobby: The Fight to Save the Adirondack Park” has just been published by the State University of New York Press.Melewski, who grew up in Halfmoon, has an abiding love for the Adirondacks and continues to be vitally interested in the park’s welfare.“I was very fortunate to have an opportunity to have an outsized influence for one individual …,” he says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “I often describe myself as a political scientist with a law degree and, as a political scientist, to be able to be at the front lines of influence and change over a long period of time, especially on things that are important to all of us, like the environment, I just couldn’t possibly imagine a better career outcome for me.” One of his important contributions, detailed in the book, was to help end, or at least limit, the acid rain that was killing Adirondack wildlife. Read the full story at Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Life and art are often intertwined for Chris Howard.She sees communication as a common thread in her life, taking her from parts she played in the school productions of her childhood through a career as a speech and language pathologist, to a never-ending passion for community theater and now founding a company to make a documentary about local activists.Howard first trod the boards as a Voorheesville Elementary School fifth-grader, playing the part of Alice in “Alice in Wonderland” — her mother made her costume.Before she graduated from high school, Howard had directed Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit” and donated the proceeds to the Heldeberg Workshop.Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/09122022/chris-howard-documenting-stories-world-needs-hear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Laura Barry is like a modern-day Johnny Appleseed.Except, instead of planting apple trees, which originated in Asia, she is planting native trees.“I planted about 15 trees this year, little saplings and things all over the place secretly,” she says, improving open land.Barry explains in this week’s Enterprise podcast that she was removing a friend’s Oriental bittersweet, which kills trees “because it strangles them,” when she discovered the maple saplings.“I’m growing them so I can go get more next year …,” she said. “Oh, it's fun!”Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/09062022/laura-barry-plants-hope-along-native-trees Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Karen Williams, Linda Zell, and Megan Connolly consider themselves to be sisters.“The bond is that strong,” said Connolly in this week’s Enterprise podcast.The three women are not related by blood. Rather, they are part of what they describe as a “church family.”They belong to St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year.Williams, who does academic advising at the University at Albany, came to the church when her daughter was a baby — she’s a teenager now. But Williams still calls herself a “newbie.”That’s because Zell, who recently retired from Tax and Finance, and Connolly, a stay-at-home mom who works now at Bella Fleur in the village, have each spent a lifetime in the church. Both of them were baptized at St. John’s and married in the church.Zell’s father was a member of the church and so was her grandmother. Connolly, who has four children and seven grandchildren, says her children who live elsewhere have come back with their babies to have them baptized at St. John’s.Read more at https://altamontenterprise.com/08262022/st-johns-celebrates-150-years-community-caring-and-cooking Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gianluca Russo became a journalist because he likes telling stories.He has just published his first book, “The Power of Plus: Inside Fashion’s Size-Inclusivity Revolution.”The book is “For the women who changed my life and the people who saved it.”“I wanted to dedicate it to the women the book is about,” Russo said of the plus-size models he interviewed, explaining the first line of the dedication.“But then I really stepped back and I thought … What’s the purpose here? I had gone through such a difficult period in life, from age 18 until I was about 21, where I felt like I had no purpose, where I felt I was lost.”Talking to the courageous women who shared their stories, Russo said, helped heal his own wounds.Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/08222022/power-plus-russo-was-healed-telling-stories-courageous-women Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.