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Generation Monthly July 2012 17

were finding for sale back then,” Glaser recalls. “That was a beginning…”

It was a turning point in history and Glaser knew he was in the middle of a cultural revolution.

Yet when asked about his design history, the story this continuously creative man recounts dates to when he was still a Bronx kid proud of having been admitted to the fa-mous Manhattan High School of Music and Art.

“I was drawing a portrait of my mother at the kitchen

table. I looked at her and realized I had no idea what she looked like,” he says, looking back. “Only through my in-ternal decision to draw her could I understand what I was looking at. And so I then expanded that idea in my mind to say that to myself that what I’d discovered was a purpose of art: to make one understand what you are seeing. What I was uncovering was the difference between looking and seeing.” Later, after speaking of that teenage epiphany, he talked about how he’s always kept a distance between his

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Now into his 80s, master designer Milton Glaser still considers constant work to be his greatest strength and ally.

18 July 2012 Generation Monthly

professional life and interest in art. To a point.“From time to time I have created art within my profes-

sion,” he adds. “It is possible to do so outside the ‘official’ presence of art. You look at an awful lot of paintings, after all, that are not art…”

Glaser, smart as a whip and not given to the sufferance of fools, or petty ideas, notes how hard it has become to discuss art. Anything without a clear definition of terminolo-gy, he says, makes for “nothing but mischievous dialogue.” He adds that he himself didn’t gain a real understanding of what it was all about, other than to entertain vague objec-tives and parameters, until he was into his 70s.

“To summarize, what I have ended up with as a defini-tion now is that first off, art is a successful mechanism that our species has come up with — and a device we use — to determine what is real,” Glaser states, matter-of-factly.

I ask how he views today’s art scene, with its splashy fairs, blockbuster shows, high prices and young superstars that are only known in their own circles. “There’s all this dissonance,” he says. “You see it in Congress, in France

and Greece now. There’s a ... lack of coherent agreement on many things, and a predominance of people seeking advantage in many situations. The lack of common ground is overwhelming. There’s a change in the technology and a great deal of opportunistic capitalism … I see it as a sad moment.”

He goes on to discuss his pessimistic view of art’s cur-rent contribution to the world. “The arts are not playing a very significant role right now, Glaser says. “They’ve not found a common purpose drawing people back towards what is beautiful … there’s nothing being created for every-one to gel around. Nothing is that forceful or vital just now. Everything that purports to be new sounds old and there’s no sense of where a new beginning will emerge.”

After a pause, Glaser returns to his past and he speaks of his mentor, Giorgio Morandi. While a Fulbright Scholar in Bologna Glaser he had the good fortune of studying with the noted Italian painter. “I knew him for his etch-

Milton Glaser designed his share of posters, including this one that bridged the gap between pop and fine art.

The first issue of New York magazine, which was founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker, as a demonstra-

tion of how the magazine world could modernize.


ing, which is what I wanted to study. It was a great, great, time,” he recalls. “He was in his late 50s, teaching a class of high school stu-dents and serving as something of a bureau-crat so he could spend his evenings painting and etching. What I learned was the need for a total dedication and passion for the work. And that’s what I’ve practiced, and passed on ever since.”

We both go quiet for a moment. Here in the surroundings of Glaser’s New York City space are new, emerging, and past creative projects; designs for a host of commercial and non-commercial entities. But this impressive body of work doesn’t begin to get at the heart of who Milton Glaser is, which beats only in his Woodstock studio.

I ask if he sees change all around when he

travels to his mountain home. “The old Wood-stock, I feel, has always maintained a consider-able part of its identity in the new Woodstock,” he notes. “The town has a characteristic of re-maining isolated. It’s really not that sociable a town … it can feel discriminating to outsiders. And yet I’ve loved it now for a long time…” And Woodstock has certainly benefited from that affection. “It’s a strange moment,” he con-cludes. And Milton Glaser still feels part of it. He is still a major contributor to the world he inhab-its... a master of his craft. n

Glaser modified his I Love NY logo after 9/11, adding the black spot to represent the Trade Center Site and the words "More Than Ever." Below, "Twiggy", a 1966 Holiday Magazine

illustration.

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Cellular Pioneers Marty Cooper and Arlene Harris

Meet Challenges with Simplicity

✦ By Paul Smart ✦

What did the world’s first cell phone call sound like? According to Marty Cooper, now in his 80s, the con-nection he got on his two pound, ten-by-three inch

brick-shaped Dyna-Tac phone, made on April 3, 1973, was impeccable.

“It was actually better quality than a land line,” Cooper said of the reception he got on what his staffers at Motorola had nicknamed “the shoe phone.” “There were no other channels interfering with the one I was on; and I was the only user in the world at that point. The quality was abso-lutely perfect.”

Cooper was not a well-known figure in the world of emerging technologies at the time. His work has helped push Motorola from an Illinois-based company that made walkie-talkies during World War II into one of the power-

houses of the cellular and smart phone age, but no one suspected at the time just how much we’d eventually come to rely on hand-held devices. Or that Cooper, with his long-time business partner and wife Arlene Harris, would later pioneer a user-friendly version of his earlier invention called the Jitterbug for seniors.

Harris, nearly 20 years her husband’s junior, grew up in the same world Cooper helped invent. Her parents ran the first mobile network of car phones in Los Angeles… back when they still went through a switchboard. And through that switchboard a 12-year old Arlene overheard some not-so-private Hollywood calls. Moreover, it gave her the impe-tus to start her own career as an electronics pioneer.

“You always have to have a dream. Mine had to do with the fact that we’ve all become fundamentally mobile, and must

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be able to carry our connections with us… which means things have to be small and light,” Cooper said of what drove him throughout his 29 years of research at Motorola and be-yond. “There was a point where many of the technologies were available for commercial users, and we realized it was time to go further… to do something dazzling.”

Marty Cooper talked of earlier times when monopolies such as AT&T, which owned Bell Labs, could hold back progress out of fear of competition. After AT&T and similar behemoths were broken up, a host of cellular items in de-velopment for years, or awaiting commercial applications, suddenly emerged like a maelstrom of modernity.

“World War II shifted the way we think about communi-cations,” Cooper explained of a progression of inventions that evolved from military to corporate uses, through pub-lic safety applications to general use… much like the Inter-net. “Years later, we applied this same way of thinking to the Jitterbug, which started its life as Arlene’s concept of unreached constituencies.”

Harris talked about all the changes she has seen over her 63 years, from the advent of touch tone phones in the late 1970s to pagers and beepers, to the opening up of new bandwidths in the 1990s, and the revolution experi-enced when usage contracts came into existence, and the revolution brought about by expanding cellular markets.

“Marty was in the middle of it all,” she says fondly of her husband, who she met when he visited to see what she was doing with his invention on a business level.

Harris’ first breakthrough came when she was figuring out logistics for the airline industry. Within a few years she was applying what she learned to her family’s wire-less business, keeping track of car phones, pagers and other devices. She began to lobby for the opening up of the FCC spectrum for cellular use. She built the first pre-paid phone systems… and always looked for ways to “buck the establishment” while simultaneously speaking its language.

She was the one who first noticed that the cellular in-dustry was overlooking seniors as “low value” customers, realized those customers weren’t going to be chatting it up on a plane or in a restaurant, and needed cellular phones more for safety and “just in case” situations. .

She and Marty then created technology that could tran-

sition well between carriers. They built their own voice mail systems, and made a phone that worked in simple ways while offering better coverage than any competitor—with greater reliability.

The resulting Jitterbug phone and its GreatCall system have won kudos and awards for their fun use of dial tones, simple interfaces with yes or no options, live operators, and special customer features including regular check-in calls, medication reminders, wellness calls, and the ability to con-tact real nurses with speed dial.

“We figured we all want to live well and be less stressed, and offer something that worked right out of the box,” Har-ris said. “Marty understands how things work, I know what their benefits are, and we figured there’s a lot of important technology out there that needs re-purposing”

“Jitterbug was a labor of love,” Cooper added. “I worked on it the way I work on all things… If you want to solve a prob-lem, you can’t understand it intellectually. You have to live the problem. You have to get inside the customer’s mind.”

When asked about what was now taking up time in his laboratory, outside of the many boards and panels he serves on, Marty spoke about his fascination with social network-ing… and finding ways to increase its ability as a means of efficiently coordinating people and projects while somehow getting past difficult issues with privacy and information har-vesting.

Good Technology is Invisible“You have to always keep in mind that good technology is invisible, transparent, intuitive. If it’s good, you don’t have to learn something to use it. It helps you,” Cooper said. “We’ve gotten into some bad habits, however, where folks like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were trying to turn us all into engi-neers. I think it’s more important to simplify things so every-one, even the technophobes amongst us, can have the same access to whatever’s available.”

So what are Marty Cooper and his wife Arlene Harris now working on? Something big, they tell me but not yet ready for prime time.

Cooper added that he’s an advisor to the Secretary of Commerce, and working on ways to enlarge the radio spec-trum. He’s as adamant as he’s always been about breaking monopolies wherever he sees them. n

Marty Cooper talked of earlier times when monopolies such as AT&T, which owned Bell Labs, could hold back

progress out of fear of competition.


Powerhouse Theater’s Founders Look Back On Their Baby

B y E l i s a b e t h H e n r y

T he summer night is like a perfection of thought,” said Wallace Stevens, and that is especially so at The Powerhouse Theater, a collaboration of New York Stage and Film and Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, marking its 28th year of pure creativity this summer.

Powerhouse is the brainchild of Mark Linn-Baker, Leslie Urdang, and Max Mayer, friends since their college days at Yale and The University of Pennsylvania. But what began as an experiment put together by young theater professionals looking to expand their mark and boost their careers has become a stalwart of the regional theater scene, and one of the nurturing centers for Broadway.

So how did this dream come true when so many similar ones faltered? What explains the over-whelming success of a project that, at the outset, seemed to be little more than a collection of vague, albeit sincere, intentions? Location, location, location. Linn-Baker, Urdang, and Mayer had the foresight and fortune to bring their idea—to put together a summer theatre workshop away from the self-concious glare of New York City—to one of the most time-honored centers of learning in the United States. Putting Powerhouse together with Vassar College was like putting Elvis on Ed Sullivan – it created a sensation.

And what makes Vassar’s location so perfect? First, it’s located close enough to the City to make it a reasonable destination for theater professionals and theater lovers, but far enough away from

Actor Mark Linn-Baker was one of the founders of Powerhouse Theater.

Smiles For These Summer Nights

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the glaring eyes of New York City critics. Second, it’s an enclave where theater professionals can focus on pro-cess. The 150-year old college’s campus is comprised of 1,000 bucolic acres — including a designated arboretum, plant preserve, and ecological preserve — upon which rest historic buildings designed by some of this country’s most prominent architects. And there are several theaters, among them, the Powerhouse, which was built in 1912 to house the huge generators needed when the college went from gas to electric power, and was converted to a theater in 1973. Later, even newer theaters were built to accomo-date the Powerhouse-In-Residency program each summer.

The partnership between the two entities, however, has not always gone smoothly. Like any relationship, money is often the cause of trouble. Powerhouse and Vassar had to learn that despite two separate sets of financial priorities, they were now sharing a budget. And there were also two differing sets of loyalties. One, an established group dedi-cated to the values of the tried and the true; the other, a vibrant group, fewer in number but mighty in their mission, itching to explore the truth, bounce it around, turn it inside

out, and maybe set it to music… How did it turn out so well? Luck certainly played a role,

and part of that luck came in the person of Beth Fargis-Lancaster, who came to the fledgling project with a history of success as a professional who had run many theater pro-grams throughout the region. And in addition to her power-ful love of theater, she loved Vassar and her home town of Poughkeepsie.

“The community is very proud of Vassar, and very proud of The Powerhouse Theater. They feel very included,” says Fargis-Lancaster.

Besides luck, there was, and is, tenacity. All the players were united in their love of good theater, and like tectonic plates coming together, they not only set off interesting and dynamic interactions, they created a great foundation.

“It started strong, and has grown steadily. We started with good instincts, and stayed true to that,” says Linn-Bak-er, founder and one of the Producing Directors of Power-house, who came up with the idea for the theater labora-tory in between his first success in the film My Favorite Year and his hit television show, Perfect Strangers.

Each year, Powerhouse provides a forum for established theater professionals to come together with emerging young actors.

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But how does a maturing arts organization maintain such youthful energy, curiosity, and commitment to innovation? Through a constant infusion of new blood.

Every year, established theater professionals come to-gether with emerging artists fresh from college and reper-tory companies. In the Powerhouse apprentice program, some of those artists are as young as 16. And they all meet and end up working together in an idyllic setting that both promotes and protects risk. They take on new work, unhindered by the glare of the New York cultural establish-ment and free to give the new plays and musicals being written for them their best shot. So what if they sometimes fall? Like kids in a sandlot, the players always get to play, and happily they often get to first base. And sometimes there is a home run like the Broadway hits, Tru, Side Man, A Steady Rain, and Doubt.

While the new kids on the block account for some of the mojo, many well-known names, like Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Edie Falco, Chris Cooper, Lucy Liu, and Timothy Hutton have participated over the years.

But everyone agrees there’s another essential ingredient in making Powerhouse click, and that is the audience. “The audience is genius,” says John Patrick Shanley, author of the Broadway hit, Doubt and other notable theater works, as well as the Academy Award-winning screenplay for Moonstruck. Shanley was one of the very first playwrights to bring work to The Powerhouse. His play, Savage in Limbo, was the first mainstage production there. “They know everything, and you just have to listen to them,” Shanley continues.

“One of my fondest memories,” chuckles Fargis-Lancast-er, “is taking the apprentices out to the ampitheater, where they work beside the Hudson giving voice to Shakespeare against the sound of jet skis!”

How does the audience respond? Fiercely. Get your tick-ets early.

“The audience component started accidentally in the community, and we learned the value of that,” remarks Linn-Baker. “When we first began the project 28 years ago we were eager to present work to an audience but not concerned with the audience reaction; we were young and brash and interested only in what interested us in terms of the work we were doing. Because of that, we accidentally developed an audience whose interests coincided with our own. We developed an audience interested in process, in-terested in new work, interested in seeing what worked and what did not. And as a further result, we began to un-derstand what an essential role our audience played in the development of the work, and how essential our audience’s perception was to the further articulation of the work.”

I asked Linn-Baker and Fargis-Lancaster if there was a watershed moment they could relate, when the experi-ment became a proving, and then proven ground.

“For me, it was the audience reaction to Tru,” says Fargis-Lancaster, “it was wildly received, and that was heavenly, to be in that house, that night... You just knew it was fabulous.”

Tru is a one man show by Jay Presson Allen, set in Tru-man Capote’s New York City apartment, in 1975. It depicts

From Strength To Strength ... A Powerhouse History1 9 8 5

Daniel DeRaey & Olympia Dukakis in Better Living by

George F. Walker. Photo by Adam Newman,

directed by Max Mayer

TRU written and directed by Jay Presson Allen

Mary McDonnell in Savage in Limbo by John Patrick Shanley. Photo by Adam

Newman, directed by Mark Linn-Baker

Amelia Campbell and Estelle Parsons in My

Mother Said I Never Should by Charlotte Keatley. Directed by Ken Olin

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the writer’s life after Esquire publishes an excerpt from his unfinished book, Answered Prayers, which leaves him alone and shunned by the “Beautiful People” who courted him in his salad days. The play was first mounted at The Powerhouse in 1989, and premiered on Broadway at The Booth Theater that same year.

The list of remarkable work to come out of The Power-house is long, but how does the new work get there? They do a lot of outreach, contacting graduate writing programs, literary managers, and playwrights with whom they have a close rapport. And then they read a lot of plays.

“We look for work that will be well served by us, and like-wise, work that will serve us well,” says Joanna Pfaelzer, Artistic Director for New York Stage and Film, the project’s umbrella organization. “What matters is that the work is fresh and new, whether it comes from an established play-wright or someone completely unknown.”

It’s lilac time when I visit the Vassar campus and meet the returning Powerhouse crew, setting up for the sum-mer to come. The deciduous trees are fully leaved out, and apple blossoms and mowed grass add their perfume to the air. The songbirds are back, ducklings are on the pond, and spotted fawns follow as their mothers glide ghost-like be-tween the trees in the surrounding forest. Nature presents us with its pageantry of renewal. And it seems only fitting that we humans have something to bring to the table… this Powerhouse, aging ever so gracefully by staying for-ever young. n

Meryl Streep in Honour by Joanna Murray-Smith,

directed by Ulu Grosbard

Noah Emmerich in Fault Lines by Stephen

Belber. Photo by Kerry Long, directed by

David Schwimmer

Wilderness of Mirrors by Charles Evered. Photo by

Dixie Sheridan, directed by Liev Schreiber

There are two Mainstage productions at Powerhouse this summer season, which lasts June 22 through July 29. Emmy nominated Stephen Belber returns to the theater after several years of television work with The Power of Duff, about a newscaster who has a spiritual awakening on live TV. Abigail/1702 starts ten years after the harrowing witch trials of Arthur Miller’s McCarthy-era parable, The Crucible, with award-winning playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa noting how he’s worked to make, “the humor and romance as important as the spooky stuff.” The character of Abigail, condemned as a witch but now free after her tormentors own hangings, is strug-gling with her new life when a mysterious stranger arrives. “It’s for that person who has done something wrong and wishes to take it back, or fix it,” Aguirre-Sacasa says of his intermission-less play. In addition, there will be two musical workshops: The Fortress of Solitude by Itamar Moses and Mi-chael Friedman, and Murder Ballad by Julia Jordan and Juliana Nash; developmental play workshops and ten new works will be offered as readings. Offsetting all the new work are performances of Shakespearean classics at the Outdoor Amphithe-ater, and Powerhouse Theater Apprentice Company performances by students aged 16 to 24 from around the globe.For further information, call Powerhouse at 845-437-5907 or visit http://powerhouse.vassar.edu/.

This Season...

Frances McDormand and David Strathairn in Dark

Rapture by Eric Overmyer. Photo by Dixie Sheridan, directed by Max Mayer

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The State’s Oldest &

One of the Youngest

Senators Talk Reform

By Jim Gordon

If I had my way we would institute term limits and we would eliminate both parties,” says state Senator Greg Ball, a Conservative and Republican representing the 40th Senate district in the lower –to-mid Hudson Valley.

Born in 1977 almost exactly 200 years after the creation of the State Senate, he is currently one of the legislative body’s youngest members.

He believes things have drastically deteriorated from those idealistic days when, as the Revolutionary War waged, the New York State Senate held its first session in the Kingston home of a middle-class merchant. There the group of political refugees, chased from Manhattan by Brit-ish troops, worked to formalize a new state government. What they put together is still in effect today.

And what a long way from the disrepute the entire state legislature has fallen into of late. It is in such a state, in fact, that Ball has called for ending the two party system and allowing citizens to get on ballots without any party affiliation.

“The system itself is corrupted and those with the power have the access and the rest of us do not,” Ball said. “If you eliminated both parties and allowed people to run on their own merit, that would eliminate the corrupted power structure.”

State Senator William Larkin, 84, who represents the39th district and is the oldest state Senator currently in office, agrees that the system is corrupt but insists he is not. “I am not corrupt!” thunders Larkin. A convenient distinction, Ball feels, from someone who has been part

of that system for such a long time. Larkin has said he would be happy to discuss the mat-

ter with his fellow Hudson Valley Conservative-Republican when they meet again in Albany. A retired Lieutenant Col-onel and combat veteran, Larkin first won election to the state Assembly in 1979, when Senator Ball was two years old, and was elected to the Senate in 1990. He is up for re-election in November.

A Governor We Can Work WithAsked for his ideas on how to improve the state legisla-ture, Larkin says it’s working pretty well, only needing more transparency in the Democratic-controlled Assembly. “I think the Senate now is better than it was 22 years ago be-cause we started paying more attention,” said Larkin. “We have a governor we can work with right now; we have a governor that understands what we are talking about.”

Senator Ball, who was elected to his first Senate term in 2010 after one term in the state Assembly, is also an appar-ent political prodigy.

At the US Air Force Academy, Ball studied political sci-ence and graduated in 2001 with a Bachelor of Science de-gree. His website says that he did graduate work at George-town University; as a Fellow in the Center for the Study of the Presidency, from 2002 to 2003. Then, on active duty, “Greg served as an Air Force Protocol Officer in the 11th Wing, working protocol for many four-star generals, includ-ing the Secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force Chief of Staff.” He was honorably discharged in 2005.

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State Senators Greg Ball and William Larkin, 35 and 84 respectively.

As a political operative Ball, who attributes his interest in politics to Ross Perot, has twice bested incumbent Republi-cans in primaries. And he is serious about his reform proposal.

“We’re working on it now,” the Senator said, without specifying when a bill might be introduced. “When it comes out, I think it will get some attention.”

Revolutionary? Maybe. But Senator Ball also pays fealty to party power. He joined his fellow Republicans in ignoring proposals from Democrats that would have created a non-partisan commission to draw new district lines, potentially

making New York’s 2012 legislative races more equitable. The theory was that a nonpartisan body could draw com-pact, contiguous districts because it would not seek to pro-tect incumbents the way New York’s gerrymandered district maps now do.

Senator Ball says the Democratic proposals were slanted toward their party interests. “If anyone is vested in seeing a better process, I am, but the appointment of members to an independent body becomes inherently political,” he said. “I haven’t seen a solution that avoids the political process.”


Instead, the Legislature cut a deal with Governor Cuomo that might set up a non-partisan commission on the matter in 2022, and that immediately adds a 63rd State Senate seat which is thought to be considered a safe GOP seat.

Back in 1777, the State Senate and Assembly were chased from Kingston by the British Army, which torched the town that October to punish its residents for their support of the rebels. The legislators ultimately settled in Albany and over-saw the burgeoning of New York into the Empire State.

But as with many empires, the governance eventually calcified into dysfunctional politics. Gerrymandering, that artful science of drawing political districts to protect incum-bents, became standard practice. By the end of World War II, the state legislature was all but officially divided into par-ty fiefdoms, with a Democratic-controlled state Assembly and a Republican-controlled state Senate.

“There is a saying here in New York that you are more likely to be indicted or die then to get voted out,” said Bar-bara Bartoletti, legislative director for the New York State League of Women Voters, who has spent some three de-cades working in Albany. She ruefully noted that the jest is literally true, with some 15 former legislators under indict-ment or in jail.

And it is no surprise that these politicians want to pro-tect their job security. State legislators are in session four to six months of the year, and get paid $79,500 annually, plus thousands more in benefits and perks. Yet for years the state legislature was largely unable to pass a budget by April 1 of each year, practically their only constitutional obligation.

In 2008, demographic changes allowed Democrats to gain control of the Senate; but their 32-30 majority splin-tered when four conservative Senate Democrats began to play both sides against the middle, threatening to caucus with one party or the other. It is worth noting that one of those Senators subsequently resigned in 2011 after receiv-ing a felony conviction, while two others faced criminal or ethical probes.

“As far as workings of the Senate itself, it was seen as a joke,” said Bartoletti, pointing out how the legislative body was ordered to have its internet service shut down, lights turned off and the Senate chamber locked as part of one

man’s attempt to retain majority-leader status. And at the height of the acrimony, two separate Pledge of Allegiances were recited in the divided chamber.

“It was just nasty and I’m not sure a lot of that has gone away,” she added. “It is really not a very nice place any-more.”

“We were a national laughing stock,” said Ball, a minority backbencher in the state Assembly at the time who then joined the new 32-30 Republican majority in 2010, now at 32-29.

Ball said things are better now. “If you look at what has been accomplished with our Republican majority work-ing with a Democratic governor, it shows government can work,” he said, citing two consecutive balanced budgets “that were on time and did not raise taxes,”

Ball also lauded what he called a, “comprehensive eth-ics reform that makes sure politicians convicted of a crime won’t get their pensions.”

That’s sounds like progress, but according to the New York Times, the ethics legislation as a whole, “is clearly driv-en by the aim of protecting those in office.”

For the first time, it requires that legislators publicly reveal earnings from outside business interests and the names of their clients and customers doing any business with the state. But the new 14-member commission to monitor pub-lic officials, legislators, and lobbyists, is so deeply flawed in its structure “as to be wholly ineffective,” the Times con-cludes. “It would essentially give legislative leaders the abil-ity to squelch any investigation or even any public release of the allegations.”

Along with Bartoletti, the Times editorial noted how the state Legislature again failed to reform campaign finance laws and adopt public campaign financing.

Bill Larkin, however, scoffs at the critics. “People want campaign financing? Wrong! Why should my taxes go to support candidates that I don’t support?” he asked, rhetori-cally. “They say it gives everybody a chance. You know what gives everybody a chance? Get off your backside and run!”

For his part, Senator Ball said that the time for non-parti-san elections will come, eventually. “I may be alone on this now, but I believe in my heart that this is what is going to happen within a few generations,” Ball noted. n

“If you look what has been accomplished with our

Republican majority working with a Democratic governor,

it shows government can work.”

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came down to the Sled Hill, to drink “go faster” cocktails and play the house piano. Rick was profoundly cheerful; I can still see him bobbing among his admirers. Richard was the sweetest of men. He was self-effacing, lived hard and behaved softly.

The years flew by and suddenly it was the 2000s. I was demoted from bartender to town supervisor of Woodstock, and the idea was hatched in 2006 to declare a Levon Helm Day. Levon was recuperating from a round of fighting the cancer that would eventually kill him. He was frail looking, and the coat he wore that fine day in May, a day almost as bright and green and carefree as that one in ’68 when I first caught sight of him, nearly swallowed him up.

Before he arrived a teenage girl, who had made her fa-

ther drive from Long Island because she was madly in love with Levon’s music, told me that she was going to die right there if she didn’t meet him. When Levon arrived, we shook hands — a surprisingly firm grip, I remember — and I mentioned the girl. Talk about Southern charm! He walked across the Village Green, took her by the hand and thanked her graciously for her kind attention. She stood wide eyed until finally able to breathe. Then Helm was presented an exquisite mandolin-shaped Key to the Town, and there we were grinning for a few moments, all boys again.

After that I went to two Rambles. The performances transported me back to the Avalon Ballroom in San Fran-cisco, to that era when the music was sacredly ours, strummed and sung and pounded out just ten feet away.

Levon at Gill Corn Farm, Hurley, New York, October 2011

“I happened to be at the Ramble when the birth

of Levon’s first grandchild was announced.

His expression during the whole show told you

everything about the man.”


Nick and Carrie Haddad consider themselves custodi-ans; of the environment, the City of Hudson, and the circa 1805 house they’ve lovingly restored. It was in

that home that we sat one evening in May discussing the 25 years they’ve spent cre-ating and recreating their lives.

“We’re all just stewards here. It’s not our city, or [even] our house. It’s tempo-rary,” says Carrie, “We want to make sure this town stays and that the beauty of the Hudson River, that we have now stays—that the environment improves and that historic buildings aren’t demolished.”

Delving deeper into the idea, she explained that in a house built in the early 1800s “a lot of people have been here be-fore and a lot of people will be living here afterwards.” We sat in an expansive dining room filled with antiques and con-temporary art, the sounds of our voices echoing and mixing with the twittering of the Haddads’ pet birds. The magnifi-

cent home stood in contrast to the couple’s lack of preten-sion. They renovated it from the ground up over the course of several years, and I realized the house, like much of their lives,

was a labor of love. Nick had recently run for mayor of

Hudson and lost by a handful of votes. He was now the First Ward Alderman, a position Carrie had once held.

“You have to be participatory in your community,” Nick told me. “We’ve vol-unteered for years.” Nick was on Hud-son’s Historic Preservation Committee for five years, and Carrie has served

on a number of local non-profit boards, from the Columbia County Council on the Arts to the Berkshire Taconic Commu-nity Foundation. She is also a certified mediator and through local organization Common Ground helps people settle dis-putes with the help of a third party.

The couple is passionate about Hudson in general, from the city’s residents to the architecture.

“I love the diversity,” says Carrie, mentioning the large local African American and Bangladeshi commu-nities, as well as a growing Hispanic population. “You don’t see that any-where else in Columbia County.”

Although they have only officially been residents for six years, they have lived in the county for more than 25 and have had business ties to the Hudson since the 1980s.

Nick and Carrie met in New York City through a mutual friend. Car-rie moved there from her native San Francisco when she was 19 and was working as a professional dancer, ac-tress and model. Nick, who earned both bachelor’s and graduate degrees from Columbia University, was work-ing for a global construction firm in Saudi Arabia and in New York.

N i c k & c a r r i e H a d d a d :

Stewards of the New Hudson✦ By Andrew Amelinckx ✦

Jane Bloodgood-Abrams, Transmigration, 2008

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“They were doing big jobs like building the air-port and highways,” Carrie says.

In the mid-1980s the couple, now with two small children, decided to move back to the Hudson Valley where Nick grew up.

“We moved to Clermont in 1985,” says Carrie. “It was such a huge change. I loved living in New York City but it was weird having small children and going to Washington Square Park and having to sift through the sandbox to get the syringes out before they could play.”

“It was so clean and nice,” she recalled; “a won-derful place to raise your family.”

Nick worked with his father in the family electrical supply business. His father had started the compa-ny in 1973 and in 1987 opened a branch in Hudson.

“We’ve seen Hudson change quite considerably in the last 25 years,” says Carrie. “People aban-doned downtown. It was pretty empty.”

“Like many of the cities of the Valley, Hudson had com-pressed slightly,” adds Nick. “There wasn’t that much eco-nomic activity.”

It was very different from the Hudson Nick recalled from his childhood when he would come up from Red Hook with his parents to go shopping on Warren Street, the road flush with department stores and five-and-dimes. “They had some very nice stores in the day,” recalled Nick, mentioning Town Fair by name.

In 1991 Carrie opened Hudson’s first art gallery. “I was friends with a lot of artists and there were no art galleries in Hudson,” she tells me. “It was a collective. There were 12 or 15 artists and they all paid $30 a month and when I sold their work I would get a 10 percent commission the first year and everyone got a solo show.”

In the mid 1990s she and a few others initiated a tradition in Hudson that remains to this day; ArtsWalk is an annual arts festival put on by the Columbia County Council on the Arts. Carrie headed it up for more than a decade. She also went back to school and earned a sociology degree from Bard College.

Now both in their late 50s, the Haddads are as enthusias-tic about their city as they have ever been.

“It’s really exciting to be in the town now, there’s so much happening with the new music scene and the con-tinuing art scene,” says Carrie. She rattled off some of the city’s cultural highlights, from the Hudson Book Fair — started a few years ago by Hudson City School District employees and now the biggest event of its type in the

state — to the Hudson Opera House, which produces hundreds of community programs yearly, and the Hud-son Music Festival, launched last year.

“The business community and community in general are very creative and amazing,” says Carrie.

Nick plans to continue in politics. “I’m an alderman now, we’ll see what happens after that,” he says. “I’m enjoying my experience on the common council.”

“If you work to positively change the city things are go-ing to get better,” says Carrie with a conviction backed by her years of experience. n

Nancy Rutter, Golden Maze, 2011.

Art & Culture, Hudson-StyleHudson began as a whaling port populated by a pre-dominance of Quakers. Later it became known for its brothels, created to service nearby Albany’s political scene. Since the 1980s it has become known as one of America’s key antiques centers, home to over 70 busi-nesses up and down the nine blocks of Warren Street and its surrounding area. And ever since Carrie Haddad first figured out how to sell contemporary paintings, sculpture and photography to the same crowds buying fancy antiques, the small city by the river has become home to several dozen enterprising art galleries … as well as the Hudson Valley’s only annual art fair, NADA, which takes place in early July. For more information on all things Hudsonic, visit http://www.hudsonan-tiques.net or http://artinhudson.org.


Cause & effeCt

four aCtivists share their stories

how does someone move from one cause to another, creating a life

of action … or activism? And how does devoting oneself in this man-

ner—no matter what the particular cause—shape and strengthen

one’s life? Four activists from four counties discuss their causes, their

lives, and how the two intersect. ➤

✦ By Lynn Woods ✦


Illus

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by P

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Malisoff also foundered the International Dinner, an annual feast held at the First Presbyterian Church. “We celebrate our diversity,” Malisoff said, not-ing that attendees include Latinos, East Asians, African-Americans, and Muslims. For over a decade, Malisoff has been interested

in corporate control of the media. She got involved with the Columbia County Green Party and hosted a

weekly talk show for three years on WRPI, the Troy-based college radio station, covering politics and featuring guests from the local community as well as nationally and interna-tionally known activists. “I don’t separate the local from the international,” Malisoff said. “I’m a citizen of the world. What happens in a little village in Afghanistan means something to me here in Hudson.” Malisoff, who works part time and has been battling can-cer for the last seven years, now hosts the weekly Tell It Like It Is on WGXC, a community radio station broadcast-ing in Columbia and Greene counties. Recent guests have included human rights activist Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink, and Paul Mossman and Kira Pospesel, com-missioners of social services for Columbia and Greene counties. In early May, Malisoff broadcast a recording she made of a teach-in at Occupy Wall Street. “It’s direct par-ticipatory democracy, which can be allied to a radio station, food coop, or bank,” she said. “In the capitalist world deci-sions are made for us. It infantilizes people. It’s important we participate ourselves.” Malisoff says that even as a young child, growing up in a working-class family in New York City, she was aware of in-equalities and injustice. “My political activity comes from a moral imperative, that this wrong cannot happen anymore.” She was also exposed to wildly different belief systems: “My mother was a deeply believing Roman Catholic and my father was a leftist and atheist. That dialectic set up a lot of questions.” She sees activism as similar; even with the best intentions factions develop which impede progress. “It gets stressful and at times you have to pull in. I don’t have the luxury of a lot of money and time.” But not even illness has slowed her down. “I was on the air, bald, with a surgical site leaking… still doing my show. I decided that was the most direct, best use of my time.” She doesn’t know whether her activities have changed people’s lives; the impetus behind her actions is tied to an inner sense of justice. “When I know one person is going hungry in this world I can’t totally enjoy myself.” On the plus side, there is “tremendous satisfaction in do-ing something something real,” she added “that’s important to me.”

When Christina Malisoff moved to Hud-son in the early 1990s, the city was on the verge of collapse. Super-markets and stores were closing in the face of the development of strip malls, and jobs dwindled as

the last factories shut down, further marginal-izing the mostly impoverished population. Walking to work every morning at Columbia Memorial Hos-pital, where she was a registered nurse, Malisoff passed a burned-out lot filled with trash. “I went to the Common Council and said, ‘this is a mess. When you let an area crumble, it leads to more decay. It would be great to put in a community garden.’ ”One of the council members put her in touch with Amy Cox, and together the women went to work, picking up garbage and recruiting other people in the community to clean, sow, and plant. An “ex Black Panther

named Neil brought over a tractor and plowed up the land”, she recalled. A local economic development agency contrib-uted a fence, and soon Hudson’s first community garden was up and running. “We tried to offer classes and maintain organic principles,” Malisoff said. Over the years, the care of the garden was passed to different groups; today it is culti-vated by several transplanted Bangladeshi families.

“It’s a revolutionary act to grow your own food, because you’re thinking outside the corporate, capitalist sys-tem,” said the 53-year-old Malisoff. “We’re so brainwashed we think there’s only one way to acquire our food. We get on this treadmill … the idea is to think outside the box. It’s empowering to find out how much power you actually have.” In the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq War, Malisoff helped or-ganize a peace march across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge and a series of lectures at First Presbyterian Church in nearby Chatham. She became involved in the cause of Ansar Mah-mood, a young Pakistani from the Hudson community who was arrested while innocently snapping scenic photos, sent to a detention center for a year and a half, and later deported.

Christina Malisoff, activist & radio host/Producer

✦

✦


42 July 2012 Generation Monthly 42 July 2012 Generation Monthly

in 1991, Alan Rosa was supervisor of the Town of Middletown when new land use regulations aimed at ensuring the purity of New York City’s drinking water—which comes primarily from the Catskills region—began a long journey through the legislative process. The regulations were seen as un-

duly restrictive by local residents and Rosa, with the help of WCBS weatherman Frank Fields, planting flags on a Delaware County farm to show how even so small an encum-brance would make it impossible to grow corn or hay on traditional croplands.

Realizing that the only way for small townships to be effective was to unite, Rosa worked to form the Coali-tion of Watershed Towns with other elected officials in 35 towns, spanning five counties.

“We’re okay with protecting water quality, but we want-ed to have the right to live here. The city’s [need for] a filtra-tion system shouldn’t be put on our backs,” he said.

The coalition raised money to support their cause through chicken barbeques and pancake suppers. They hired top lawyers and sued New York City, forcing the city to negoti-ate with the coalition and other involved groups. On January 17, 1997, the landmark Watershed Memorandum of Agree-ment between city, state, and environmental entities and local municipalities represented by the Coalition of Water-shed Towns was signed at the state capitol. The agreement provided Catskills municipalities with approximately $180 million to fund septic system upgrades, municipal sewage treatment facilities, storm water run-off infrastructure, and storage facilities for road salt. It also paid for maintenance of streams and loans and grants to assist local businesses, as well as educational programs.

The Catskill Watershed Corp. was founded to manage these funds and programs, and Rosa became its director in 1999.

Rosa said one indication of the agreement’s effective-ness was that nobody was really satisfied. He said being a good negotiator “takes a lot of patience. You have to be able to listen to all sides. Even though you want to jump in and say something when someone is talking because you don’t agree you have to respect them. You find out they’re human. And there’s a good side you come away with after the negotiations: It produces hope.”

Born in Margaretville, Rosa is descended from six gen-erations of farmers and trappers. An avid fly fisherman and hunter, the 59-year-old lives on a 100-acre parcel he and his brothers own, surrounded by state land on three sides. For many years he worked as a bookkeeper and assistant man-ager, later serving as auditor for the parent company of the A&P corporation, in Margaretville, and traveling throughout the state. He eventually opened an electronics business. A town-wide tax revaluation prompted him to enter politics,

running for office in 1989. He gave up his business entirely after becoming engaged with the area’s

recovery from a devastating flood in 1996.Rosa says anti-New York City emotions are

high in Delaware County due to the construc-tion of the Cannonsville reservoir. However,

he acknowledges improvement in relations re-cently, largely due to the opening up of city lands

for recreational purposes, including boating on the reservoirs.

Rosa is saddened, however, by many of the changes that have occurred in his community since he was a boy.

“We lost our farms. The global economy has really hurt the area. The Wal-marts have impacted the small towns. The small hardware store can’t make it on Main Street,” he notes. He points out how cauliflower and Brussels sprouts were once giant crops and that tourism supported numerous rural hotels, motels, and boarding houses. “They’ve gone by the wayside,” Rosa said, replaced by second homes.

While acknowledging that the region’s “weekenders” contribute by paying school taxes and fueling the local economy, they “don’t contribute to the fabric of the com-munity, don’t keep the churches and fire department going. We need more opportunities for young people.” Rosa said that he and his board have “wrestled with how to keep the community whole. We know that capitalizing on tourism and natural resources could be huge.”

Despite the challenges, Rosa loves his community and job. “The rewarding part is when you do help someone and see people appreciate it, especially after this last flood. We were the first ones to come out and aid businesses.”

alan rosa, executive Director,

Catskill Watershed Corporation

✦

✦


When Carl Chipman was first elected supervisor in 2007, the Ulster County Town of Rochester was a divided community. Newcomers were pitted against natives, progressives against conservatives. One plan in the works all but highlighted a

divide between second-home owners who wanted new restrictions on property-owner behavior and locals who felt as though they were being pushed out. Chipman listened carefully to both sides and discovered that ev-eryone wanted the same thing. Zoning laws were changed to accommodate both sides—preserving the town’s local character and agricultural heritage while allow-ing for some development in existing hamlets.

The 52-year-old father of two is a lifelong resident of the area and graduate of SUNY New Paltz. Having coached youth basketball and soccer and served on the school board, he feels like not just a resident, but a real part of the community. After becoming supervisor, “I made prom-ises and I kept them. I brought everyone to the table and I listened to them. Most of our town board votes 5-0 be-cause of this.” Nominally a Republican, Chipman describes himself as a Jeffersonian capitalist. He believes the rich should help the poor, that less government is best, and that people should be responsible for their actions.

Rochester has only 7,300 people, but even in so insular an environment Chipman shuns nepotism. “We look for the best people for the best things,” he says. He prides himself on his ability to admit his mistakes.

There were 150 dairy farms in Ulster County when Chip-man was a boy; now there are just a handful. Businesses in Ellenville that were once the region’s envy have closed or moved away. Second-home owners now account for 40 percent of the population—when they are present.

While Rochester was once the fastest-growing munici-pality in Ulster County, that growth has ground to a halt since the 2008 economic collapse. Chipman lost his job as general manager of a car dealership when General Motors went bankrupt in 2009. He was then diagnosed with lung cancer, leading him to “spin my wheels less...I appreciate life more as a gift, not a given.”

Perhaps the biggest issue currently confronting his

town, Chipman says, is hydraulic fracking, a controversial natural gas drilling technique that has become an interna-tional issue. After researching the industry and determining

it would not benefit the Town of Rochester, Chipman and his board passed their own moratorium on

hydro-fracking earlier this year. But since their ban lacks the strength of law, he has also pro-posed anti-fracking-focused legislation declaring the constitutional right of the town to protect

the health of its citizens. Another immediate challenge, the supervisor

says, is the skyrocketing cost of state mandates. As a result of the two percent property tax cap implemented by Governor Cuomo, Chipman has had to cut services from town’s budget even while taking on responsibility for servic-es previously paid for by the state and county. The salaries of non-union employees have been frozen.

Over four years, the town’s cost for Safety Net, a state re-lief program for the poor, has ballooned from $35,000 annu-ally to an estimated $150,000. There have been unexpected election charges for new voting machines. And the annual cost of his 32 employees’ New York State Retirement Plan soared from $90,000 in 2010-11 to $154,000 in 2011-12. Chip-man says that because towns, unlike school districts, are unable to raise taxes to fund capital projects, he lacks the funds to repair aging bridges and other infrastructure, which he worries will ultimately put his town’s residents at risk.

Chipman would like to spend more time with his family.His meeting schedule and the recurring need to get out of bed on winter nights to supply kerosene heat to a Safety Net recipient, however, makes that unlikely. Public service has its sacrifices. Yet he relishes the opportunity to serve his town.

“People come to my office all the time,” Chipman said. “This is the closest government can get to the people.”

Looking toward the future, Chipman advocates a regional approach to stimulate the growth of industry and energy de-velopment in small cities like Ellenville and Poughkeepsie, while preserving the farmland of rural areas. As vice chair of the Shawangunk Scenic Byway, an organization repre-senting 11 municipalities, Chipman is actively contributing to that regional dialog.

✦ Carl Chipman, town of rochester supervisor ✦



When Fran Dunwell was growing up in Poughkeepsie in the 1960s, the Hudson River was best experienced at arm’s length. The river was barricaded behind a waterfront given way to landfills, low-income housing projects, and prisons; it had long been a dumping ground

for raw sewage and industrial chemicals. Still, her memories of feeding the geese with her family at a rural cemetery nestled between Victorian build-ings overlooking the river in the days before urban renewal left a deep impression. In her teens, Dunwell became aware of the activism of the era; especially envi-ronmental rights. This came into focus when Dunwell attended a festival organized by Clearwater, the organization Pete Seeger named for his famous Hudson River sloop. After college she took a class on the natural history of the Hudson River estuary.

“That really exposed me to the issues and concerns of the Hudson,” Dunwell says. After meeting Hudson River activist John Cronin, who was organizing a watchdog entity to ensure compli-ance with the nation’s new Clean Water Act, she became director of the Center for the Hudson River Valley, then earned a master’s degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Stud-ies. She wrote two books, The Hudson River Highlands and The Hudson: America’s River. Finally, she began a career at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) which hired her to head its Hudson River Estuary Program.

Relative to fisheries—one aspect of the Estuary Program—Dunwell says her department “is gaining a more sophisticated understanding of species’ habitats, their migration paths, and the food webs that support them.” For example, the DEC has been tagging various species of fish, which are then tracked with GPS and other digital tools. The findings have been revelatory; among the department’s recent discoveries are a previously-unknown spawning habitat for the endangered Atlantic sturgeon and the finding that American shad travel as much as 40 miles up or down river in a day.

Hudson River water quality has improved dramatically since the 1970s, thanks to environmental laws requiring the treat-ment of raw sewage and prohibitions on dumping chemicals into waterways. But Dunwell says new problems loom, such as the need to upgrade municipal wastewater treatment facilities, many of which have exceeded their capacity and are outdated.

The public’s disconnect with nature is even more of a challenge. People spend much of their time indoors,

in front of televisions or computers. These people “don’t make the connection that rain is essen-

tial for sustaining the water they drink,” Dun-well says. Her focus is on bringing people back to the river through more access and events, such as planting trees along streams, counting frogs and salamanders

during breeding season, monitoring water quality in their neighborhood, and encourag-

ing schools to study the Hudson in their curricula. “Nature makes an incredible contribution to human well being, by providing us with water to drink, clean air, and other necessary things,” Dunwell says. “If our growth patterns disrupt those services, then not only is the eco-system at risk, but so are the people who live here.”

Climate change is also of particular concern. “The Hud-son River is six inches higher than when I was a teenager. It’s important for people to understand that the things [that have been long] predicted are happening,” she not-ed. “There’s more storms, flooding, droughts, rising sea levels. The Hudson Valley needs to invest in itself, know-ing the future will be different.”

Dunwell said she believes this region is ahead of many communities “which just ignore this”. As people respond positively to the changes, “this will continue to be a great place to live. But everybody has to do their part”.

She recently installed solar power panels in the back-yard of her house in New Paltz. And whenever possible, Dunwell goes out on the water. “I just love the Hudson River,” she said. “I feel very privileged to be able to de-vote my life and career to managing this incredible eco-system. It doesn’t get any better than this.” n

✦ fran Dunwell, Coordinator, hudson river estuary Program, NYs DeC ✦

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