THE VILLAGE GREENDEDICATED TO THE BEAUTIFICATION OF NASSAU VILLAGE

on the web at www.Nassau12123.com Since 1990 Our 27th Year ***On-Line Since 2013*** March 2017

Village Reminders

The Village of Nassau Youth Committee is pleased to announce Ice Skating Parties at the Village Pond, Malden St. (located between Ben Stanley Park and the Village Hall). Scheduled for Fridays at 6 pm, ice-skates can be borrowed for the event. Because conditions of the pond can vary from week to week, it is suggested that you call first to find out if the pond is safe to skate on. Every Friday updated information for that night will be available by calling 518-522-2916.

The Nassau Free Library will again offer Beginner’s Yoga start-ing Saturday, March 11th, at 10am for 6 consecutive weeks at the Vil-lage Hall, 40 Malden Street. Suzan-nah Winn will introduce the ben-efits of Yoga and Pilates for health, mind, and spirit. Bring a yoga mat and blocks if you own them. Please RSVP the Library at 766-2715 if you plan to attend.

The Library is also the place to pick up free or reduced fee local Museum Passes for the Berkshire Museum, Olana State Historic Site, Hancock Shaker Village, U.S.S Slater and The Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute. You must have a Library Card, which is available for free. Stop by the Library and they will be happy to set you up.

The Village GreenNassau Village Beautification Committee

P.O. Box 130, Nassau, NY 12123Kurt Vincent, Editor - 766-2291 E-mail: info@nassau12123.com

Your Comments & Material Always Welcome

Copyright 2017. All rights reserved.

Seriously, I Can’t Have Chickens? Maybe not. A public hearing will be held Wednesday, March 8th, 6:45 p.m. prior to the monthly Village Board meeting at the Village Hall on Mal-den Street for the purpose of discussing this matter. Under consideration is an amendment to the existing local laws pertaining to the keeping of ani-mals that would prohibit “any horse, cattle, sheep, goat, swine or poultry to be housed or kept within Village limits.” If the Village Board votes to approve, backyard chicken will be a thing of the past in Nassau village.

Yes, Batteries Can Still be Brought to the Post Office - Sort of... Contrary to the signs located in the Post Office entry, you can still bring old batteries for safe dispos-al to the Nassau Post Office. This service provided by the Village for many years will continue via a 5-gallon bucket now located out-side of the building to the left of the entrance. Spent batteries contain a variety of materials that could be harmful to environment, pose po-tential fire risks and needlessly fill landfills. Next time you drop off your batteries say “hi” to the court-ing couple keeping an eye on things.

2017 Nassau Rural Run Scheduled The Town of Nassau Youth Committee is hosting the 2nd Rural Run on Sunday, May 21 at the Town Highway Dept., 399 Central Nassau Rd., East Nassau. Registration begins at 8:30am and the race starts at 10am. The fee is $15.00 for the 5k run and $12.00 for the 1 mile trail walk and includes a T-shirt. Early registration will start soon and with early registration you can pick your size T-shirt to be guaranteed a perfect fit! We’ll have more information in next month’s Village Green or you can check out the Town of Nassau Youth Facebook page or e-mail Fred Mc-Cagg at youth@townofnassauyouth.org. So get your sneakers laced up and plan to kick up your heels while helping to raise money for youth activities for the Town.

Library Community Room Renovation Completed This photograph shows a final look as workers completed their job of remodeling the downstairs Com-munity Room of the Nassau Free Library. Funded by a Construction Grant as part of the NYS Education De-partment support of local libraries, the room features new walls, ceil-ing, lights, flooring and built-in cabinets. The debut event was a 2-night festival of Academy Award nominated films in late February. The consensus of the audience was while the movies were OK, the new room was an award-winner!

Blue skies were a welcome sight for the end of February. Two Nor’easters dumped about 20 inches of snow that quickly melted in the record-breaking 70 degree days that followed.

All About NassauPeople, Buildings and Memories

by Kurt Vincent, Nassau Village Historian

A TODDLER’S WORLD WAR TWO - Part 2by Derek Van Loan

Our garbage can during the war was very small, only a little more than a foot in diameter and about a foot and a half tall. Mr. Belcher, the garbage man came along Elm Street once a week to empty our can along with those of our neighbors into his truck. I thought that he ate the garbage! Milk was delivered from Young's Dairy, in Nassau, and Breeze Hill Dairy in Chatham. It came in glass bottles that were washed and put out for the milk man to take back to the dairy after we emptied them. In the winter milk froze, expanded and forced the paper top up out of the bottle on a column of cream. The village baker made bread several times a week. There were no fresh vegetables in winter, and the mushrooms were shriv-eled and brown. My mother would make "Junket," a rennet custard for a treat. Another treat was milk beaten with a raw egg and molasses, flavored with imitation vanilla. My mother explained that the war was being fought in the jungles where the real vanilla beans were grown. I liked eating the marrow from inside the bone when we had meat. I also remember chewing on a leather watch cord when I was hungry. My Uncle Calvin Thayer was somewhere in North Africa. He sent us photos showing him with a pet cat in the desert. We sent him "V MAIL" letters. Later Uncle Calvin participated in the invasion of Italy. At the end of the war when he was expected home, his sisters and mother were waiting for him in their home in Ghent. The Freihofer man came to deliver bread in his uniform. Everyone rushed to the door to greet him, boy was he sur-prised! Later when Uncle Calvin arrived, having practiced their greeting on the bread man, the family made him really feel welcomed. People did not drive very much during the war. Many of the older auto-mobiles were "put up on blocks" in barns behind houses. Villages had most of what people needed within walking distance, and farms certainly had all the food they needed. It seemed that the only people were either young or old. Most of the dads had gone off to war. Many of the mothers did not drive in those days. Horses were still used on farms to pull wagons, plows, sickle bar hay cutters, hay rakes, and manure spreaders. There were junk men who came around with a horse and wagon crying, "Raags, bones, old iron stoves." They would take these items to their junk yard in the city. A sure sign of summer was the sound of an iron wheel grinding along the sidewalk, going "bump" at each crack. Old Mister Roth painted houses. He carried paints and tools in his wheelbarrow, there were racks 3 on the sides for his ladders. He always dressed in a suit-coat and tie, and changed into white coveralls and painter's cap at the job. Many people walked to

Last summer on a cross-country road trip along Route 20, Mr. Van Loan re-turned to Nassau for a visit. Now a resident of California, he provided Mr. Vincent with this recollection written several years ago of his early years growing up in Nassau during the 1940s.

A recent picture of Mr. Van Loan sitting in a small sailboat of his design and construction. In his early years in New York he learned the skills of sailing in Kinderhook Lake and along the Hudson River.

V-Mail was a process used during the Second World War as a secure method to correspond with soldiers stationed abroad. A V-mail letter would be censored, copied to film, and printed back to paper upon arrival at its destination.

work then, or to the bus near the center of the village which took them in to Albany. Also in the center of the village was the town pump. Under it was a cistern or well. Some houses still did not have water piped into them in those days. I remember looking out of our front room window to see a woman pumping pails of water to take home for washing her family laundry. From that same front-room window I saw convoys of olive-drab green army trucks roaring towards Boston. They did not stop when the light turned red. We heard stories of children in Europe who had no food. There bombs dropped from Nazi planes in the sky, and we knew that things were better here. "Kwik and Kwak," a story book for children, by Oscar Fabres was one of my favorite books. I still have it. Kwik and Kwak were good ducks whose home in Volendam was burned by bad, soldier ducks. After the war, grown-ups said, "everyone will have walkie-talkies and airplanes." Well everyone who wants one has a cell phone now, but the problems of personal aircraft for all have not yet been solved. One gray April day our President, Franklin Roosevelt died. Everyone was sad, the same song played on the radio often that day. It was, grown-ups said, a favorite of the President. I rather liked the dramatic "Warsaw Concerto," and "That Old Black Magic," but my favorite song was "Mersy Doats," it went, "Mersy doats and dosey doats and little lambsy divey..." Even with shortages of sugar and meat, we still enjoyed holidays, which were printed in big, red numbers on our calendar. Christmas was special. We opened our presents around the tree we had decorated the night before on Christmas morning. When I was four I got an orange tractor-trailer truck made of wood. I also had a toy Hudson River Dayline boat made of wood. Toy guns were made of hard, molded, black rubber. Every Christmas we drove to Chatham to have dinner with my grand-parents. Grandma Louise cooked roast chicken with stuffing, cranberry sauce, rutabagas, which I didn't like then, creamy mashed potatoes with gravy, boiled peas, creamed onions, and there were big goblets full of ice water, that was poured from a pewter pitcher, damp with condensation. And for dessert, pumpkin pie. Sometimes we drove to my Grandparents in Ghent. They lived on a farm that was part of the village. My Grandfather George Thayer, a railroad telegrapher, smoked Prince Albert pipe tobacco in his pipe. I walked with

From approximately 1938, Nas-sau ladies pose for a photo be-fore boarding the bus to Albany for a shopping trip.

From left to right:Maude White, unknown, Mrs. Roye, unknown child, Mable Allendorph, Fannie File, Edith Poyneer, Hattie Hermance, Florence Ettman, unknown.

him and Bonnie the sheep dog to the IGA store on the main street. With my aunts I would go to the tavern at Navarro House. I remember music from a juke box there. Fresh milk, warm from the cows was poured over our breakfast oatmeal. The huge wood furnace in the cellar kept the downstairs warm. There was no television, we heard programs on the radio. In the morning Charles John Stevenson, "The Chanticleer," read agriculture prod-uct prices on the farm report. Evenings we gathered around the round oak dining table, taking turns looking at stereopticon photos. These pictures, of places like Niagara Falls, seemed three dimensional, they had depth. Once, while I was staying with Grandpa George and Grandma Nell I was taken on the train to New York City for a day. It was just before Christ-mas, and we, my aunts Victoria and Yolanda and my Grandma, took the Harlem Division train into Grand Central,-ft,z,tispap. I remember the col-ored lights, blue and red when we entered the tunnel leading to the sta-tion. Everything was very noisy, I got cinders in my eyes from a gust of wind. There were piles of toys in the store windows. I especially remember a motorized display where a cardboard man repeatedly opened and closed a cardboard window. I never have figured out what this was supposed to make us buy! Kids and dogs, being lower to the ground, experience a different world than adults. Women's stockings in those days had seams up their backs. The odor of coal smoke and damp wool blew up the streets. Women's hats had veils, and woman's coats had pointy shoulder pads. My aunts wore white "bobby soxs," and "penny loafers," leather shoes with straps, each displaying a shiny copper penny. Not all pennies were copper then, the newer pennies were made of steel, with a dull silver finish. My aunts liked Frank Sinatra on the radio, the juke box, and on 78 RPM records. One spring day I heard people yelling on the street. I looked out, the window was open, it was warm, to see the intersection thronging with peo-ple. There was a woman in a green "Peter Pan" dress, its hems were lines of triangles. Everyone was happier than I had ever seen anyone. They were singing and dancing and hugging each other. It was the end of the war, except that it wasn't. We still had to win the war in Japan. VE Day, though, is still vivid in my mind. I remember about our later winning the war with Japan: a photo in Dad's paper of an atom bomb with a name something like "Little Boy," or "Fat Man." During the summer of 1945 we, my parents, my new baby brother, Howard, and I, moved into our new home at 8 Fairview Avenue, up on the "terrace," where we lived, moving to Chatham in 1956. Now I live in a village in California called Mill Valley. I enjoy village life, I can walk to the stores, and the bus to the city stops right in front of my house. Earlier this year (2005) my brother and I re-visited Nassau, Cha-tham and Ghent, the villages of our childhood. We were fortunate enough to meet the people who now own the house where I lived during World War Two, and to be able to test my memory of the apartment's floor plan. I had not been there since I had just turned five, as the war ended. I was able to successfully describe the apartment's layout and to confirm that, at least, this part of my memory was accurate.

If you would like to share your Nassau stories and/or pictures contact us at info@nassau12123.com or telephone Mr. Vincent at 766-2291. We would love to include your material in a future edition.

During World War 2 most Americans followed the progress of the war on radio. Long before Tweets, E-Mails and 24 hour news, local sta-tions like WGY and WOKO provided live broad-cast of entertainment, information and news programs. Particularly in rural areas, regular broadcasters were a familiar voice as the family gathered around the “wireless” for their connec-tion with the outside world.

All Nassau churches prominently displayed honor rolls of their members serving in the armed forces. This existing plaque, from the Grace Methodist Church, remains on display today on the Church’s “Wall of History” in their fellowship room. St. Mary’s Church published a news letter of what was going on in Nassau mailed to service personnel from Nassau, both church members and non-church members dur-ing the war.