In Their Own Words: Telling Dutchess County History -- 2019 Vol. 089

IN THEIR Own Words

TELLING DUTCHESS COUNTY HISTORY

In Their Own Words Telling Dutchess County History

DCHS Year Book • Volume 89 (2010)

DUTCH ESS COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY YEAR BOOK 2010

In Their Own Words Telling Dutchess County History

Edited by Holly Wahlberg

Dutchess County Historical Society

DUTCH ESS COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY YEAR BOOK 2010 Volume 89 • Published annually since 1915 Copyright © 2010 by Dutchess County Historical Society All rights reserved.

Published by Dutchess County Historical Society Clinton House: 549 Main Street, Poughkeepsie, New York Mailing Address: DCHS, P.O. Box 88, Poughkeepsie, New York 12602 dchistorical@verizon.net; www.dutchesscountyhistoricalsociety.org Individual copies of the Year Book may be purchased through the Historical Society. Selected earlier Year Books are also available for purchase.

ISSN 0739-8565 ISBN 978-0-944733-05-9

Manufactured in the United States of America

Dutchess County Historical Society Headquarters: Clinton House, 549 Main St., Poughkeepsie, NY Mailing Address: P.O. Box 88, Poughkeepsie, NY 12602 Phone: 845.471.1630 Email: dchistorical@verizon.net Web: www.dutchesscountyhistoricalsociety.org Executive Director: Betsy Kopstein Officers: President: Candace Lewis, Vice-President: Mary Bagley, Secretary: David Dengel, Treasurer: James Smith Trustees: Jon Altschuler, Marguerite Berger, Verna Carr, Ellen Chase, Julius Gude, Jeh Johnson, Edward Pittman, Denise VanBuren, Holly Wahlberg Founded in 1914, Dutchess County Historical Society is a research, archival and educational organization dedicated to the discovery, preservation and dissemination of the history of Dutchess County. As the only county-wide agency of its kind, the Historical Society is an active leader in the collection and safe-keeping of artifacts, manuscripts and other priceless treasures of the past.

The Historical Society has been instrumental in the preservation and continuing management of two Revolutionary era landmarks, the Clinton House and Glebe House in the City of Poughkeepsie. In addition, it operates the Franklin A. Butts Research Library as well as publishing a newsletter, annual book and special journals.

The Historical Society also maintains photograph and object collections, mounts changing exhibits and sponsors historical trips, lectures, seminars, house tours, history awards, and books sales as well as providing leadership and support for many other collaborative heritage and history education projects.

CONTENTS Marching with Sherman: Dutchess County's 150th Regiment Miss Lyman of Vassar College

18

The Legacy of Maple Grove

26

Ice Yachting: Describing the Ride of a Lifetime Dr. J. Wilson Poucher: Medical Pioneer

54

Telling the News: An Editor's Story John Burroughs —Neighbor Guarding the Roosevelts

40

66 72

80

There Was Bustle but No Hustle

88

Prowlers, Deleriums, the Pest House Held No Fears James A. Hughes Recalls Early Vassar Hospital They're Just "Boys" at Vassar

Bridge of Dreams

103

109

Wise Voices, Plain Speaking: 20th Century Griots Billy Name and the Warhol Era

94

118

134

165

The Art of Pastry: Frank Cordaro's La Deliziosa

181

1

Acknowledgments Special thanks to: Annon Adams, Polly Adema, Wint Aldrich, Tim Allred, Black History Committee of the Dutchess County Historical Society, Ginny Buechele, Ellie Charwat, Frank Cordaro, Nan Fogel, John Garrity, Helen Grady, Ginny Hancock, Elizabeth Hart, Eileen Hayden, Sarah Johnstone, Candy Lewis, Billy Linich, Ed Loedy, Steve Lynch, Stephanie Mauri, Jennifer McEvoy-Riley, John Mylod, Walter Patrice, Chris Pryslopski, Lorraine Roberts, Dean Rogers, Barry Rothfeld, MaryJo Russell, Jason Schaaf, David Shankbone, Stu Shinske, Willa Skinner, Ken Snodgrass, Jill Stein, Ken Toole, and Michelle Willson.

Call for Articles: 2011 Year Book As part of the federal government's "Great Outdoors Initiative" (a national dialogue about improving the outdoor experiences of American citizens), the 2011 Year Book will investigate the history of Dutchess County's outdoor heritage. Articles should explore the history of a special outdoor space in Dutchess County. Outdoor spaces can include rivers, waterways, landscapes, farms, forests, parks, trails, beaches, scenic vistas, or a particular area of wildlife habitat or plant life. America's Great Outdoors Inititative is a national effort to reconnect Americans with outdoor experiences, conservation efforts and the history of special local places. Deadline for submission is May 1, 2011.

Articles should be in Microsoft Word format between 2,000 and 10,000 words in length. Authors are encouraged to provide illustrations with their text. Electronic submissions of photos or other illustrations are welcome in JPEG format at a minimum of 300 dpi. Images should be accompanied by detailed captions. All permissions to publish images are the responsibility of the author. Please include 3-4 sentences of biographical information for the list of contributors. Acceptance for publication is at the discretion of the editor and the DCHS Publications Committee. Authors should send: 1 double spaced typescript paper copy (please remember to also include photo captions and a 3-4 sentence author biography) and 1 CD-R containing article, captions and biographical information as a MS Word document (please also include JPEG's of illustrations or photos at a minimum of 300 dpi). Please mail to: Year Book Editor, Dutchess County Historical Society, P.O. Box 88, Poughkeepsie, NY 12602.

To recover some of our ancestor's real thoughts and feelings is the hardest, subtlest and most educated function the historian can perform. —Theodore Roosevelt

Marching with Sherman: Dutchess County's 150th Regiment In 1900 and 1901, the Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle published Reverend Edward 0. Bartlett's first person account of his experiences as a Civil War chaplain serving in Dutchess County's 150th Regiment. Portions of Bartlett's narrative cover the dramatic events from May of 1864 to May of 1865 when the 150th Dutchess County Regiment served in Sherman's legendary "march to the sea" before turning northward to secure the surrender of North Carolina, South Carolina and the Confederate capitol of Richmond, Virginia.

In April of 1864, as Sherman readied his army of 98,797 men for the march to take Atlanta, Bartlett was invited to accompany an officer paying a call on General Sherman.

Edward 0. Bartlett: [Chattanooga, Tennessee] "I had never seen Sherman, not even his picture. I had heard of him as the hero in many hard fought battles, and so was not prepared to see a most gaudily dressed soldier. He was arrayed in a brand new suit that looked so bright and blue in contrast with his immense white vest, that I thought he was 'ragged out,' as the college boys used to say, for some special occasion. It was the first and only time during the war that I saw an officer disfigured by a white vest.

His form, not his face, was not unlike Abraham Lincoln. I think they must have been very nearly the same height, and their clothes had very much the same style, or want of style, as though their tailor had cut their garments by looking at their shadows and then had stood at a distance and thrown them on. Sherman was ten years the junior of the president, who at that time was fifty-five. Thus Sherman was forty-five when he began the march to the sea.

He was six feet or over in height, angular, slightly stooping. Whenever I saw him afterwards he was on horseback, riding in a very careless way, his head and body making a seesaw motion opposite to that of the horse 1

and looked like anything but the commander of a great army.

His face was full of wrinkles, strongly indicative of intensity and nervous power, and his dark brown eyes had a deep, piercing glance that made one feel that he had a good deal of 'mad' in him.

Having heard that he had said a chaplain in the army was like a fifth wheel to a coach, I did not feel over comfortable while in his presence, though I am not certain whether he took me for a chaplain, or the colonel's servant, for he did not notice me in the slightest particular. The colonel he greeted in the most hearty manner.

Major General W T Sherman wearing the 'immense white vest" Bartlett considered so unusual.

Library of Congress.

The next day was the 4th of May and we passed over the Chickamauga battle field and river, fitly named 'river of death.' It was eight months since the battle and in many places the rains had washed the earth partially off from the bodies that had been hastily buried. Sometimes it would be a long line of toes sticking out of the ground, then the knees, bent as though they had been thrown out by a muscular contraction. In places, hideous, grinning heads were just peering above the surface and nailed to a tree would be a little board with something like this: 'Here 116 of the 69th Ohio were killed.' A little further on another sign, '54 of the 17th Indiana fell here.' So all around in the woods and by the side of the road showing how hot and dreadful the contest must have been.. .

We were early in camp, and as the day had been exceedingly sultry, a bath in the river was very tempting, especially as a large number were enjoying it and the water was quite warm. I ventured in on the sandy bank of a beautiful bend in the river, but I could not rid myself of that dreadful battlefield. I imagined that the water had something of the odor that a few miles back had been almost suffocating...And when I found that the water for our coffee that afternoon was taken from this same river, I got up and took a long walk through the immense camp trying to direct my thoughts from the horrors of the field of death."

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A few days after the march began, the 150th heard rumors that it was about to be ordered forward to assault the Rebel works at Buzzard's Roost. This was Chaplain Bartlett's first experience ministering to men about to face battle.

"One hundred and twenty wounded men passed through our camp and our division, it was rumored, would be ordered in on the morrow. It was a prayer meeting on the eve of battle by men who expected in a few hours to storm the enemy's works. I never had listened to such prayers, and I never expect to again. It seemed as though a cloud of spiritual influences hovered over us that could be felt. It was like a second day of Pentecost. Men prayed that in the expected battle, only those should fall who had made their peace with God. After service, men came to my tent for further conversation. One said, 'Oh if I only had a firm hope of heaven how willingly I would offer my life for my country.' Another said, 'I can not understand this joy of you Christians. I know what it is to get exhilarated and happy through strong drink, but I can find no enjoyment only depression and fear in thinking of death and the beyond.' ..."

After nearly a week of preparations for moving up to the Confederate line, Bartlett and the 150th regiment joined the dreadful Battle of Reseca on May 14, 1864. (As non-combatants, chaplains and surgeons were among those ordered to the rear when battle loomed, although Bartlett often positioned himself so that he could observe the action from nearby.)

"Fall in! Non-combatants to the rear!' was the signal that hot work was near at hand. To the rear did not mean much in the Georgia campaign.

Taking it in too literal a sense meant to get lost or to be gobbled up as a straggler, so that the point was never to lose the trail of the regiment no matter how threatening affairs at the front might appear.... ...at the end [of a sheltering hill] was an open plain, swept by a Rebel battery. Over this plain the division marched in two lines of battle..., and several Rebel shells were exploded in their midst doing how much harm I did not learn, only where the shells fell I could see a great swaying backwards and forwards, but when the lines were formed the whole line of six thousand men moved magnificently across the plain to the right, leaving the 150th still on the extreme left. After another half hour's delay, carefully spying out the land, I concluded to cross the plain to the hill held by the regiment. I passed over rapidly hearing an occasional 3

bullet singing through the air. Reaching the regiment, I found the Colonel looking through a field glass at a Rebel sharpshooter in a distant tree on the edge of the woods beyond. He offered me the instrument. I put it to my eyes, but could not get the focus, indeed it was all a blur, my hands trembled so.. .A little later he came to me and said, 'Chaplain you better go to the rear, this is a dangerous place.' ...I went, holding in my hand an ear of southern corn, breaking off the kernels and giving half a dozen to a man here and there. This seems to me now very strange, but there had been no chance to eat since an early breakfast, and I remember distinctly of being surprised at the sweetness of the corn when thoroughly masticated, and telling the soldiers that if they would chew it long enough they would find raw corn, such as is fed to horses, very palatable...My lecture, however lasted a little too long. The Rebel charge came sooner than was expected. A terrific yell, then a shower of bullets, like the sudden rain of a thunderstorm.

"Sherman s' March to the Sea "by Alexander Hay Ritchie, engraver (c. 1868). Librag of Congress.

...Soon, as usual, during or after a battle, it began to rain. We put on our rubber coats, when an intense darkness settled down and as the wounded were brought out, we could only find our men by calling out, 'Wounded from the 150th, stop here.' As yet no hospital had been established and the only thing to do was to spread out the blankets where they had any and let them lie down in the rain. Toward midnight our pack animals came up and we put up some shelter tents for those most seriously wounded. It was a most dreary night, but it was only the commencement 4

of a succession of dreary nights and agonizing days. ...The work of amputating limbs and dressing wounds commenced early, but there was only one table and only a few cases received attention, most went over to the third day, by this time maggots had made their appearance on the wounded and bloody parts and there by the pine table the amputated hands, feet, legs, fingers were piled up in a festering mass.

These were the most dreadful days of my service..."

In early June, the Northern Army settled into a month long siege of Confederate positions in the mountains above Marietta, Georgia. Bartlett's regiment was located near Pine Hill where night attacks and shelling from Confederate batteries were common occurences. "...The Confederates now held the three mountains above Marietta, Lost Mountain, Pine Hill and Kenesaw...Here for a month the Union Army battled in the rain, mud and darkness. The firing was almost incessant and scarcely a night passed that I did not hear the Rebel yell, either in a feint or a real charge. I slept in a shelter tent with Major Smith, and at first got up at every alarm, saddled my horse, rolled up my blankets, all ready for an advance or a retreat. After a while, I became so confident of the vigilance and ability of our men to repel a night charge that I did not leave my tent, only slipped on my overcoat and listened... ...A few days later the regiment was moved a mile and a half to the left coming within easy range of a battery located on Pine Hill about a mile distant...As the command 'Break ranks' was given, a shell from the Rebel battery burst about fifty feet from where I was standing, mortally wounding Corporal Harry Stone, a fragment of the shell passing through his stomach.

He was carried to the foot of a tree, where we spread out his blanket on the wet grass. It was raining at the time, and a strong dose of whisky was given him. He shrieked as the fiery liquid reached the torn and bleeding tissues. It had the effect, however, to bring him to consciousness, and as the comrades gathered around him he said, 'Boys, I die in the service of my country.' I knelt by his side and asked him if he would like to have me pray. 'Yes, pray to the Blessed Virgin.'

Calling to a Catholic soldier, I said, 'He wants you to pray with him.'

I have since been sorry that I did not do it myself, but I was filled with 5

admiration for the noble man, and I did not feel that it was quite right for me to take the place of a priest, when there was a friend of his own persuasion nearby. As the Colonel came up, the dying soldier lifted up his eyes and said, 'Colonel, have I not done my duty?"Yes, my brave boy,' was the prompt reply and with a smile his head fell back as his noble spirit passed away.

We laid him out tenderly for the night, and buried him early the next morning (Sunday) before breakfast, during a drenching rain, a few feet from the spot where he was killed. The bark from a large oak tree had been peeled off for his coffin, and a small board marked with his name was placed at the head of his grave and there we left him..."

On July 20, 1864, the Confederates' daring new general, John Hood made a sudden and violent frontal attack on Bartlett's regiment at the Battle of Peach Tree Creek. "... No breast works had been erected, we had only halted for our noon meal taking a longer time than usual on account of the long and toilsome march of the morning. It was near 3 o'clock in the afternoon. Our regiment was in a small ravine and the men scattered all about on either side lounging, smoking here and there as though off duty in camp. The Colonel, Major and myself had just finished our last cup of coffee, our horses had not been unsaddled, but were browsing on the green bushes and where they could find it, on the meager forest grass, when without the slightest warning came the roar of the Rebel yell and the whistling bullets of the enemy.

In less time than it takes to tell it, the men were in line of battle advancing to the front and I was in my saddle advancing to the rearward. The retreat of the non-combatants and the tin pan brigade was a wild and yet ludicrous scene. For a mile we went pell mell over a meadow, kettles flying in every direction, making almost as good time as the mounted surgeons and chaplains. ...Reaching a group of surgeons on a rising bank, I looked back and on the left of the meadow, about a mile of our line of battle was in plain view, the muskets gleaming and sparkling in the western light, as they were raised to fire and lowered to be reloaded.

I did not know then, but I know now that division was commanded by General Benjamin Harrison, afterwards President of the United States. ...there occurred one of the most fierce and bloody contests of the war.

6

Officers were everywhere conspicuous for their gallantry. Every adjutant in the first brigade was either killed or wounded. In our 3rd brigade Col. Colgrove of the 27th Indiana was dangerously wounded, a shell passing between his arm and body throwing him fully three feet in the air. Capt.

Sawyer of the 2nd Mass. was mortally wounded. Major Baldwin of the 157th NY was shot through the eye, the ball fracturing the skull. Lieutenants Van Keuren and Barlow, of our regiment, were severely wounded, and Capt. Bennett of the 107th Topographical Engineers was struck by a ball, cutting the scalp and forehead, and his coolness was discovered on returning to consciousness by the remark, 'Rather rough treatment for a non-combatant.'

Lieut. Van Keuren of our regiment was carried to the rear, the bullet had passed through the thigh of one leg and lodged in the other. I held his head and stroked his forehead while Dr. Campbell extracted the ball. He felt quite jolly at first, but as the doctor pressed the flesh to force the lead out, the lieutenant screamed as though trying to imitate the Rebel yell, but in a moment the pain was over, and from that time forward there was no complaint, but abundant thanks for everything done for him.

After the repulse of General Hood at Peach Tree Creek, the Union Army made its way to within musket shot of Atlanta where Bartlett's division remained for eight weeks until the fall of Atlanta on September 2, 1864. .. .The city had many beautiful houses and fine wide streets lined with large brick blocks of stores and warehouses and factory buildings. But everywhere was visible the sad work of the Union shells, which for two months had been bursting day and night over the beleaguered city. At the depot I saw the charred remains of what was estimated at 17 million dollars worth of ammunition burned and exploded the night before. A shell usually struck the roof of a house, plunging through at an angle of less than 45 degrees wrecking everything in its course as though the building had been struck by a terrible earthquake.

The city was surrounded by huge earthworks from fifteen to twenty feet high, and in almost every door yard was a hole dug in the earth with a bank in front where the family took refuge during the shelling. Generally, the inhabitants professed to be very glad to see our soldiers, and brought out tobacco in large quantities which was eagerly bought by men who used the filthy weed. Several bakeries were open and did a 7

brisk business asking a dollar for a medium size loaf of bread, and same for a pie with crust like shoe leather. This continued however, only for a day or two. Our men took possession of the bake houses and everything was sold at a fair price and of a fair quality. ...Just before dinner, Gen. Sherman rode by with his staff. He was a miserable rider, and with a segar in his mouth looked like a western cow boy.

Among the prisoners taken at Jonesboro were three Confederate chaplains confined several days with other prisoners near our camp. Selecting as nice and as large a lot of provisions as our mess could afford, I obtained permission to visit them. Their uniform was that of a Confederate Captain, gray trimmed with blue and three gold laced stripes on the standing collar of the coat. All three were young men, college graduates and very prepossessing. Their faith in the final success of their side was very firm. They had great faith that Hood would destroy our railroad communications and Sherman's army would either retreat or starve.

When I told them of the large reinforcements coming forward, they seemed much disheartened. I asked what compensation there was in the independence of the Confederate states for the loss of the most powerful government in the world and the confession to Europe that a Republican form of government was a failure in as much as it would not hold together. 'Well,' said one, 'I must confess I was not in favor of disruption at first. I could not see then and do not see now the great advantage to be gained, but when your president called out 75,000 men with the intention of coercing the South, I thought it was time to resist and now if we were to submit and sign Lincoln's proclamation, why I must write over my brother's grave who fell at Resaca, "Traitor to his Country," and we should all go down in history as Rebels, the meanest and most wicked of all men. Death is preferable to that and we would rather die fighting than to formally submit and confess to you Yankees that we are wrong.' ...I came away fully satisfied that the only way was to fight it out... ...A joyful event was in store for us, the U.S. paymaster had come with his iron safe. It was eight months since the regiment had been paid, and his appearance was most welcome. My share was $927.25 after deducting a little more than $25 income tax. I owed nearly three hundred dollars for my two horses and military equipment. Retaining $100 for pocket money, I sent the balance home.

8

It was rumored that the Chaplain would receive leave of absence and be sent North with the remittances of the regiment to Dutchess County, amounting to about $30,000 but it would have been a perilous journey with that amount of greenbacks about my person, through Nashville, Louisville and many Northern cities, so it was finally decided to trust it to Adams Express. I was greatly relieved for the pleasures and honor to be gained bore no comparison to evils that would have followed failure to reach Old Dutchess in safety. ...After a week's delay we are now surely to abandon Atlanta [November 9, 1864]. The city is to be burned and what cannot be burned, blown up. ...We left the city about dusk and encamped about two miles beyond the limits. As we went into camp a heavy mist was hanging over our heads. Fires were lighted in every direction. A rubber blanket spread on the ground with a cup and tin plate at each corner furnished Major Smith, Adjutant Cruger, Dr. Campbell and the Chaplain a hearty meal.

By this time the air was filled with a dense smoke from the numerous fires made of wet pine brush. This, the fog and dense woods, prevented [the smoke] from rising or being blown away and our eyes became literally 'fountains of tears.' It was almost suffocating and the only relief was to lie flat on the ground, and so get a breath of air. Dr. Campbell and myself spread a rubber blanket on the ground, then a woolen blanket, and with a bag of corn for a pillow, covered ourselves with our remaining blankets. In the morning the upper one was soaking wet, not from rain but from the heavy dew and fog.

But the great march was not yet to begin. There was a delay of nearly a week. Sherman seemed to be exercising his army as a skillful athlete on a 'diamond field,' making various feints, as if unloosening his muscles before sending the ball with tremendous swiftness to its goal.

It was November the sixteenth at 6 o'clock before the last reveille was heard in Atlanta. A dark pall of smoke, like a vast mourning garment, hung over the desolated and half burned city as long columns of troops moved out on every road to the eastward with the long swinging step at a 'right shoulder shift' singing: 'John Brown's body lies mou'dering in the grave, But his soul is marching on."

After leaving Atlanta, Shernnan's army began its "march to the sea" foraging off the land to supply the immense needs of the conquering army and destroying whatever was not consumed as the army marched toward Savannah and the sea.

9

"...Nov. 25 crossed Buffalo Creek, where six bridges, over as many streams and swamps, had been burned by a Georgia planter and for which everything on his place was ordered to be burned. Indeed our march now became a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. ...it was easy to mark our road by the pillars of smoke rising from cotton gins and barns for miles in our rear and advance. . . .Toward night we came on to firm ground and passed Senator Johnson's house. It was a palatial residence, but nevertheless was given up to pillage. In the garden five barrels of crockery were exhumed and large quantities of clothing, salt and smoked meat and even silver ware. In an out house were twenty five barrels of sorghum and one hundred and twenty barrels of flour. The soldiers took all they could carry and destroyed the remainder. All through this region the inhabitants had buried their household effects, hurrying their horses and cattle into the woods, but the slaves led our men to the hiding places and nearly everything was secured or destroyed. This was where the plantations had been deserted. Where the white people remained such protection was given as was possible under the circumstances.

While for the most part the inhabitants fled on the approach of the Union Army, occasional instances of undaunted courage were met. With these our soldiers had many spicy word battles. ...a soldier found a lot of dried apples, having nothing to carry them in he picked up a bonnet and proceeded to fill that with the dried fruit. The woman, indignant at the sacrilege exclaimed, 'I hope they will swell after you have eaten them til you burst as Judas did after he was hung.'

On a piazza as we passed along stood a bevy of young ladies, the center one, a very tall spinster, had wrapped a secession flag around her spindling form and one of our men called out, 'Say, boys, I have seen a good many flag staffs, but I never saw a bean pole used for one before.' The shout that went up from the line was too much for the defiant Southerner and she retreated inside out of sight of the saucy Yanks.

The colored people furnished an unceasing fund of information and instruction. We had now entered the Black Belt of Southern Georgia, the region of cotton and rice, and the slaves came in by [the] thousands.

Fairly lining our march on both sides with long black lines. They walked along the ranks, carried the guns, haversacks and luggage of the soldiers.

For a time every private in the ranks seemed to have a servant. ...As 10

we advanced the black stream began to swell to monstrous proportions.

Men, women, children and babies flanked our march day and night.

"Richmond Ladies Going to Receive Government Rations "(Sketch by A.R. Waud, 1865) Caption: One woman saying to another "Don't you think that Yankee must feel like shrinking into his boots before such high-toned Southern ladies as we!" as they walk by a Union soldier and the ruins of Richmond Harper's Weekly, 1865.

Tuesday, November 30th, we halted for dinner at the Blake plantation.

It was a strange scene. It excelled the most exaggerated descriptions of the degradations of the lowest forms of slavery. The owner was a Spaniard and this was his breeding plant, where he raised laborers for his rice plantations further down the river. There were a dozen women for every man and I should say eight or ten children for every woman. I saw the mother of three children who was said to be not more than fourteen years old...Altogether it was not unlike an immense hog pen. I was glad to get away.

And so closed the famous March to the Sea. It brought great glory and fame to Sherman but he never regarded it as great or wonderful, merely in his own language, 'the shift of base.' No great battle was fought, nothing more serious impeded our march than broad swamps, burned bridges and a few cavalry that were brushed away as easily as cobwebs by the irresistible skirmishers of the Yankee Army."

In January of 1865, Bartlett received a furlough home to Dutchess 11

General Sherman and Staff between 1860 and 1865. Library of Congress.

County. Despite passing unharmed through extreme wartime dangers, it was here at home that he nearly lost his life on the Hudson River one snowy night. "...My leave of absence covered twenty days giving me about two weeks in Poughkeepsie, during which time I visited many of the families of the officers and soldiers in the city and county. Near the close of my vacation I was a guest at the home of our Adjutant Cruger on Cruger Island near Rhinebeck. The dinner hour was six o'clock and the train we were to take back to Poughkeepsie left the Rhinebeck station near 8pm. We were through dinner in ample time, but Mrs. Cruger was so anxious to learn all the details concerning the wounding of her son at Resaca that my brother and I did not get away till a few minutes of train time and Mr. Cruger told the coachman to drive directly across the river, which was frozen and not to try to go around by the causeway by which the distance was much longer.

We had hardly left the house before there came up a blinding snow storm.

We wrapped ourselves up in the large fur robes and were quite comfortable but after riding fifteen or twenty minutes began to wonder why we did not reach the station. Throwing up the furs we could see nothing and asked the driver where we were. He said he did not know. He was a 12

stranger here, had been in Mr. Cruger's employ only a few days, and did not know the landmarks, could any be seen.

My brother and I undertook to direct him, but strangely enough we were directly opposed in our sensations of directions. He was sure we were going north. I was equally confident the horses were headed south.

However, near the horizon we could detect a dark line, concluded it was the railroad track and started for that. Before long we saw a light and drove toward that. But before long we lost sight of that. However, in about ten minutes we were gladdened by another bright light. Our joy was momentary for soon that disappeared. Like a will o the wisp. Four times we were thus allured for how many miles I do not know. We knew afterwards that we were following headlights of locomotives. The night freight trains on the Hudson River Road ran in sections four to each train ten or fifteen minutes apart.

For nearly an hour we followed these moving lights, getting further and further away from the point we wished to reach. We heard the roar of cataract and began to debate whether it was safe to go any further, and if we had not better just camp down and wait for morning. Just then another locomotive headlight showed up. We were now close to the shore and the light revealed that we were on a ledge of ice five or six feet above a stream that came tumbling down the river bank into the Hudson.

We were almost paralysed with fear. Few feet further and we must have plunged headlong into the icy gorge.

After the locomotive had passed we saw the lone flicker of a light, and leaving the horses with us, the coachman went for it. He found a switchman with his lantern, who came and slowly led the way to the bank. We then found we were four or five miles above the station we started for, and it was near midnight. We had been on the ice nearly four hours.

The switchman said though he was acquainted with the river, $500 would not induce him to run the risks we had. Icemen were busy cutting ice, and had made large openings on the river into which we might have plunged horses and all, disappearing under the ice, carried by the strong current no one could tell where.

During my furlough many were the strange and curious questions asked concerning army life. How and where we lived and marched and slept, one bank president wanted to know if the army stretched itself out in one 13

immense line and marched shoulder to shoulder over fields and valleys and hills and mountains.

No, I told him during the march through Georgia, as a rule, the army marched in four columns on roads as nearly parallel as possible—the extreme columns sometimes forty miles apart, but converging again after several days marching. When any obstruction was found and the enemy was supposed to be near, a line of battle, usually a double line, was at once formed, skirmishers thrown out, and this line did often stretch miles across the country, through the fields and woods, men shoulder to shoulder, the artillery posted at intervals usually on the brow of some hill, while the cavalry scoured the country on the flanks to prevent any turning movement or an attack on any unguarded point by the enemy."

On April 19, 1865 while encamped at Raleigh, North Carolina, Bartlett's regiment received news of Lincoln's assassination. "...on the 19th of April we received the terrible tidings of President Lincoln's assassination. Officers were called to Headquarters and informed in a whisper that an unconfirmed report had been received that the President of the United States had been shot, and that for the present we were to say nothing about it. But it is strange how intelligence will percolate through an army. The countenance of every soldier plainly indicated the possession of a terrible secret.

It was not long in finding expression in a fierce hope that peace negotiations would now fail and the opportunity would soon come to show southern chivalry, who would turn honorable warfare into savage assassination, what punishment would be dealt out to them. The punishment to the Carolinas and Georgia was mild indeed in comparison to what should now be meted out to those responsible for the death of the noblest, truest hearted and most generous of Presidents. This intense determination for a terrible retribution calmed down greatly when it was learned that the dastardly act of the assassin was almost as bitterly condemned and sincerely regretted by the Confederates as by ourselves.

On the 30th of April, with exultant hearts we took up our line of march from the capital of North Carolina for the capital of Virginia. The bands played and the men took up the strain, 'Home sweet home, Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.' The route was about 25 or 30 miles west of the railroad 14

connecting Raleigh and Richmond, through one of the most fertile sections of the state.

Many people came out on the road to see the army as it passed. All pronounced themselves glad the war was over and the kindliest feeling was expressed. Every night some of Lee's men on their homeward journey, came into camp and were fed most generously by the Union soldiers, who in fact lived on half rations because they made such liberal contributions from their haversacks to the many visiting Confederates to feed them and give them a few meals on their journey. The forager's occupation was now gone. ...not a house or field was invaded, nor a goose nor chicken disturbed."

After Northern troops marched into Richmond on May 13, 1865, Bartlett filed out with a number of officers and had dinner at the Spotswood Hotel.

"We had a 'right smart' meal, and to cap it off I drank a large tumbler of iced milk...Riding leisurely around the city, about the capitol, which was an unfinished building of white marble, we struck out for the regiment.

After a ride of two or three miles, we came to a small field of oats or rye nearly full grown, and as we had had so good a time it was suggested we stop and feast our horses.

Dismounting we unsaddled the animals and turned them in while we wandered about examining the zig zag earthenworks. The trees were shot riddled but most ghastly of all were thousands of unburied skeletons lying thickly as they fell before some breast work where they told Collecting remains of the dead, April 1865. the story of desperate charges. We John Reekie, photographer. Library of Conwere somewhat horrified at seeing gress. some of the army surgeons gathering up skulls by the bag full. It was said over eight hundred skeletons lay in one pine grove in an area of a few acres."

On May 23, 1865, the victorious Union troops marched into Washington for a Grand Review down Pennsylvania Avenue before being released 15

from military service.

GrandReview near the Treasury on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C., May 1865. Matthew Brady, photographer Library of Congress.

"...All through the division now was the unwonted exercise of blacking shoes, polishing arms and a general cleaning up preparatory for the grand review on the ever memorable 23rd day of May. Reveille sounded at 3 am and at day break the regiment crossed the long bridge over the Potomac, formerly the wooden aqueduct of the Chesapeake and Ohio canal. It was near 9 o'clock when the 150th regiment passed in review around the capitol up Pennsylvania Avenue.

The scene was inspiring. Thousands of cheering multitudes from all over the Union filled the side walks and far out into the broad streets, while every window, balcony and house top was filled with wild, enthusiastic spectators waving flags, handkerchiefs, clapping hands, shouting and in every possible way making demonstration of the hearty welcome this 16

great nation extended to its brave and heroic defenders.

Near the capitol was a great banner, with the inscription, 'We welcome the heroes of the country.' The battle flags of the regiments tattered and in shreds were applauded by the thousands as they passed. When the treasury building was reached General Sherman looking back down the avenue upon his compact column, with its glittering muskets and bayonets, declared it was 'the most magnificent army in existence' sixty-five thousand men in splendid physique who had just completed a march of nearly 2,000 miles in a hostile country, in good drill and who realized that they were being closely scrutinized by thousands of their fellow countrymen and by foreigners.

Division after division passed, each commander of an army corps or division coming on the stand during the passing of his command, to be presented to the President, cabinet and other distinguished spectators.

For six hours and a half the strong tread of the 'army of the West,' that had swept through the South like a tornado, resounded upon Pennsylvania Avenue."

(The above excerpts were taken from Bartlett's "The 150th Regiment" printed in the Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle: January 2, 1901; January 9, 1901; January 16, 1901; January 23, 1901; January 30, 1901; February 6, 1901; February 13, 1901; February 20, 1901; February 27, 1901; March 6, 1901; March 13, 1901; March 20, 1901. For more about the 150th Regiment see: The Dutchess County Regiment in the Civil War, Its Story as Told by its Members. Edited by: S.G. Cook and Charles E. Benton. Danbury, CT: Danbury Medical Print Company, 1907.)

Edward 0. Bartlett (1835-1909) grew up in Poughkeepsie where his father and later his brother operated the Poughkeepsie Cracker Bakery, manufacturer of the once widely popular "Poughkeepsie Cream" and "Dutchess No. 1" crackers. Bartlett graduated from the Poughkeepsie Collegiate School and Union College before being drafted into the army in 1863. After the war he served as a Congregational minister in several Massachusetts and Rhode Island churches, settling finally in Providence with his wife and seven children.

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Miss Lyman of Vassar College First-hand accounts of the earliest days of Vassar College vividly demonstrate how a deeply felt sense of having lived through something momentous can motivate the recording of history. In her 1915 memoir, The Golden Age of Vassar, former student Mary Harriott Norris (class of 1870) describes the deep obligation she felt to record her recollections of the opening years of Vassar College. By telling this history, Norris was fulfilling what she perceived to be her duty to future generations who might otherwise never understand that a college education for women was once considered little more than a dubious experiment.

Norris' work memorializes many of Vassar's first administrators and faculty as a small band of carefully selected and quite extraordinary individuals—all of whom shared with Vassar's first students an awareness both thrilling and daunting of being participants in an experiment that was being watched by the entire world.

The new college for women, however, had no choice but to begin by building upon the existing norms of the traditional girls "finishing school." These older traditions were memorably embodied in Vassar's first "Lady Principal," the redoubtable Miss Hannah Lyman who used the tremendous force of her character to shape Vassar girls into true Victorian "ladies" even as a new and more modern concept of "womanhood" was being born.

Mary Harriott Norris: "...Perhaps, just here, it is well to describe Hannah W. Lyman of sacred memory. ...A spirit of the most intense loyalty prevails among the older alumnae to the memory of Miss Lyman. ...I am sure the first alumnae rejoice in the vision of Miss Lyman that memory paints of her. It was a delight to see her walk in her stately fashion down one of our long corridors. She usually wore, in the morning, a purple or lavender gown, the skirt hanging in unbroken straight lines. Her hair was snowy white and very fine and arranged in graduated curls on either side of her face. Her eyes were brilliant, penetrating and very blue, the seat of a high intelligence, a lofty will. Her complexion was fair and colorless, her features large, handsome and usually softened by a smile such as would become a queen.

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...After the frequent fashion of those days, she wore a cap, or rather 'head-dress.' These were imported and of the finest real lace, and still further enhanced her appearance of extreme refinement. Her lace collar matched in quality her head-dress, and was fastened by a small, oval hair brooch set in gold. Her goldrimmed eye-glasses hung from a gold chain, and were effective when she would lift them, place them with calm deliberation and then scan some youthful visitor in 'office-hours' with a searching scrutiny out of the illuminated depths of her clear and beautiful blue eyes. Many a girl at once feared her to the limit, resisted Miss Lyman, Vassar's first Lady Principal. Arher with petulant dislike, and chives and Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries. adored from afar the elegance, the majesty of Vassar's first and unique Lady Principal.

[In the dining hall] A tall, three winged wicker screen, lined with red, protected her chair from draughts, and added to her regal appearance.

When she tapped her bell, we lowered our heads for the blessing she asked in clear, distinct tones. On entering the dining room all were obliged to pass her table, and all dreaded the ordeal, fearing lest her imperial glance should discover some defect. She was as awful to the guilty or the timid as an absolute monarch...Sometimes an unexpected lull would occur in the general conversation, which was unrestricted, to be succeeded by an absolute silence, impressive by contrast with the previous babel of sound. Such a silence would follow whenever Miss Lyman tapped her bell before rising to make an announcement. Occasionally it would be broken by a number of girls moistening the rims of their tumblers and rubbing till a clear, bell-toned ringing filled the great echoing hall. Miss Lyman forbade this music, but it would recur time and again. ...To facilitate the work of the day, students were allowed to leave the breakfast table as soon as they had finished, but excuses from dinner or supper were seldom granted.

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She knew how to surround herself with the paraphernalia of a great lady, and this was an excellent thing for young Vassarites while the college was still an experiment. As part of her equipment for office, she was allowed three large rooms, one of which was her bedroom, another her parlor, and the remaining one her library and office. These were appointed with her own furniture, which was handsome and substantial, with excellent paintings adorning the walls of her parlor, while her wellstocked library included many books by eminent theologians.

She brought her maid with her from Montreal. Winnie loved her, took devoted care of her and guarded her privacy with the vigilance and firmness of a Praetorian guard. No girl dared enter Miss Lyman's presence without an invitation, or summons, except during 'office-hours.' ...A large handsome, fearless girl who cherished a chronic displeasure with the menu, wrote to Miss Lyman for a special interview. It was granted at an unusual hour, and when she appeared, Miss Lyman surveyed her ample proportions in wordless dignity, before inquiring, 'Well, Miss ,what have you to say?'

'I desire to enter a complaint about the table. We do not have enough to eat.'

'What change would you suggest? What particular article of food for instance, do you personally crave?'

Nonplussed with such a direct inquiry, this young girl, as I remember the story told by herself, said, 'I couldn't think of a thing I did want, then, but said, "ham."

'Ham! You want ham?'

A severe silence followed on both sides, a glance from Miss Lyman of summarizing observation implying a perception of the grossest materialism.

'Very well, I will report your need,' whereupon the complaintant withdrew, 'never so glad,' as she said, 'to escape from a horrible situation.'

The Lady Principal's ideas concerning dress, which would now seem extravagantly puritanical, were held by many in her day. She considered 20

certain fashions not so much immoral as unmoral, and issued stringent regulations concerning bodices. Low neck and short sleeves were prohibited, although most young girls then wore afternoon or party gowns made in this fashion. Frequently a girl would obey the letter and evade the spirit. At the evening concerts given by the musical department, the soloists would advance to the front of the rostrum, their arms covered with sleeves of such transparent net, that at a short distance they could deceive the sharpest vision.

The receptions, of rather frequent occurrence, as a training in good manners, were given by throwing the parlors of the President, the college parlors, and the wide hall connecting these two suites, into one immense room. Here we were formally presented to the various college dignitaries, and even tried to talk with one another on a plane of courtesy and formality above our usual level. At one of these receptions, a student wore for the first time a gown which had just been sent to her from home, and made, as she discovered, with the customary low neck and short sleeves.

Vassar 's Senior Astronomy Class, 1868. Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries.

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But her fear of Miss Lyman was so great, that while daring to wear it, she spent most of the evening in slipping out of each room as Miss Lyman appeared in it. Things progressed finely till a late hour, when suddenly, the fatal juxtaposition occurred. The Lady Principal greeted her with the greatest affability and sweetness, presently inviting her to share a divan; there they talked, and apparently Miss Lyman did not even notice the pretty new gown. Her young companion was allowed to withdraw, charmed with the situation. The next day, Winnie [Miss Lyman's maid] was the bearer of a note containing an order from Miss Lyman to appear at 'office-hour.'

Miss Lyman gave us weekly talks, directly after evening chapel...We were told at these talks that when we occupied the corner seats at chapel, we were never to lean our heads against the walls and make `Jelliby spots,' and this had its effect as everybody was a reader of Dickens in those days. We were warned when biting into a piece of bread, never to make a horse-shoe.

We were assured when we were in New York it would be the height of ill breeding to push our way into a street-car. 'Always stand comwhen posedly the car stops, and men, recognizing Poughkeepsie City and Wappingers Falls trolley arriving at Vassar you are a lady, College Gate Lodge (lodge demolished in 1913). Miss Lyman insisted will give you the her students use streetcars in a ladylike and dignified manner. Dutchess right of way, alCounty Ilistorial Society Collection. lowing you to enter with dignity.' How often I think of this obsolete advice when struggling up to a lofty platform or staggering forward as the conductor cries, 'step lively,' and I merge into a swaying, struggling crowd of men and women hanging to the straps.

There was no detail in dress or deportment, in fact, on which Miss Lyman did not speak to us in her familiar talks, and I am sure to many, many girls her hints and advice were invaluable.

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The first classes that graduated underwent an ordeal as characteristic of Miss Lyman as it was amusing. My own class numbered thirty-four.

When we were dressed in our Commencement gowns, and preliminary to the summons to march to the chapel where the Commencement exercises were to be held, we assembled in Miss Lyman's bedroom. Beside a big round table stood a stepladder, and Winnie, with thread and needle, scissors and pins. Miss Lyman received us graciously, although with calm observation of each one, very summarizing. One by one we mounted the steps to the table, while Miss Lyman and Winnie, at a distance, surveyed the hang of our skirts, as well as the length, to see if there would be too great an exposure of feet from the rostrum. Those were the days, it must be remembered, when it was considered vulgar for a young lady to cross her feet in a parlor. In several cases, Winnie ripped here and pinned there, or sewed a reef, all being done with incredible skill and swiftness. Finally, a young girl in elbow sleeves mounted. Miss Lyman's clear, stern eyes noticed them instantly. `Winnie, see if you can lengthen those sleeves.'

Over and over we were told never to appear at supper without having changed the gown we had worn through the day... 'It does not matter, young ladies, how limited your wardrobe is, even if it but contains two calico frocks.

Keep one for afternoon.' Sometimes, on the very threshold of the dining room, girls were ordered to their rooms to change their gowns.

While Miss Lyman exercised a ceaseless Vassar 's Main Building, Northeast View (1860s). Archives and vigilance concerning Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries. our habits of cleanliness, dress and manner, her influence was always in favor of simplicity. Multiplicity of gowns for minors was her abhorrence. She herself always presented an appearance of dignity and simple elegance. She was our leader, our superior, our standard. I think she never forgot her 23

responsibility in this respect. It would seem to me that even at this remote day, when the oldest among the alumnae may be considering what is worthwhile, what is most essential, in what general manner, in short they should try to dress, pictures of Miss Lyman, harmonies of physique, manner, costume, blended in one impressive whole, must at least stir their ideals...

The students were divided numerically into half corridors, the corridors being five hundred feet long, and each half corridor was under the supervision of a teacher. Every Monday evening they were required to meet their corridor teacher, the teachers in their turn submitting their reports to Miss Lyman. At these weekly meetings the girls were not only expected to tell whether they had taken two tub baths, but also, one by one, give a synopsis of the sermon preached the previous Sunday morning.

This was something of an ordeal and hung like a millstone around many a youthful neck till the agony was suspended for another week...

Just before the first Hallowe'en, Miss Lyman assembled us for a special talk. We were told of the origin of Hallowe'en, how popular it was among folk of a simple sort, unlettered and superstitious, and how very sure she was that no Vassar girl would be tempted to practice the foolish rites of such a custom, however amusing to our inferiors. With one of her gracious convincing smiles, and the reminder that the rule to be in bed by ten o'clock was to be more rigidly enforced, we were dismissed with an excess of affability.

There was a tremendous stirring, even among the dry bones, that evening. A wide double staircase ascended from the basement to the top floor. At midnight on this main staircase, as well as the side ones, girls were descending backwards, looking into mirrors, while others with candles were walking three times around the outer walls of the College. At the foot of one of the staircases stood President Raymond, and overwhelming was the girl's terror in whose mirror his face was reflected. At morning chapel, which she conducted, Miss Lyman read among other items, 'All young ladies out of bed at a minute after ten o'clock last night will come to my office at seven o'clock this evening.' As the hour appointed grew near, the corridors began to darken with the gathering crowds, and when Miss Lyman opened her library door at seven, to right and left, in curious and amused suspense flocked a majority of the students. She looked over the multitude in astonished silence. It was a dramatic moment.

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'Withdraw to the chapel. I will talk to you there.'

Her religious talks to the students were beautiful and impressive. Indeed, as long as her connection with the College continued, and this ended only with her valuable life [Miss Lyman died in 1871 at age 55], a religious atmosphere prevailed. 'Silent hour,' initiated by her was a characteristic feature. Twice a day, morning and evening, twenty minutes were set aside for silent hour. A place was provided whither each girl could retire alone for this interval spent, supposedly, in prayer, religious reading or meditation. Many girls employed the time in study, but very many, also, scrupulously filled it with their devotions.

In addition to the corridor meetings on Monday evening, and the silent hour, there were weekly prayer-meetings, morning and evening prayers in the chapel, Sunday morning service, all these being obligatory, and finally Sunday Bible classes. The Bible classes were conducted by the professors between morning prayers and the regular service...The Sunday morning sermons delivered in the chapel were a liberal education...

Ministers of all denominations, both from Poughkeepsie and a distance were invited to preach to us...There was a young minister from Poughkeepsie, who in the usual local rotation preached several times. He could not have been greatly our senior, but every time he appeared, he included himself and us in prayer or sermon under the epithet of 'the dew of youth.' On a Saturday preceding his advent, when one girl would ask another who was to preach, the reply would be, 'the dew of youth.'..." (from The Golden Age of Vassar by Mary Harriott Norris, published by Vassar College, 1915)

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The Legacy of Maple Grove In 1982, Scenic Hudson's Ken Toole conducted an oral history interview of 88-year-old Miss Elise Kinkead, owner of the Maple Grove and Southwood estates located along Poughkeepsie's South Road (Route 9).

By the early 1980s, increasing pressure from strip mall commercial development along with Miss Kinkead's advanced age and lack of direct descendants, presented the urgent need to capture the history of this threatened landscape and way of life.

Maple Grove. Rendes Collection, Maple Grove Archive.

Much of Maple Grove's history is really the story of two brothers from Kentucky, John and Henry Kinkead, who fell in love with and married two elegant and spirited sisters from Poughkeepsie, Elise and Edith Hamilton of Maple Grove. The lives of these two couples, along with their parents, children and step children, were intertwined even by geography as they settled side by side along the then stately South Road at the neighboring estates of Maple Grove and Southwood. Their family history presents a remarkable picture of three generations of devotion to a landscape and way of life that is now all but forgotten.

In this interview, Miss Kinkead describes the acquisition and occupancy of Maple Grove by her grandparents during the period from 1870 to 1891 followed by the tenure at Maple Grove of her aunt and uncle, Dr. John and Elise S. H. Kinkead who particularly cherished and enjoyed

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the family home —until they in turn passed the estate to those they thought most likely to ensure its survival, their nieces Jennie and Elise H. Kinkead, who lived across the road at the estate known as Southwood.

Southwood in 1908. Rendes Collection, Maple Grove Archive.

Although Southwood was demolished by Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery in 1989, Maple Grove survives and is undergoing a gradual restoration with the goal of one day finding a new use for this gracious 19th century mansion which was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001. The following interview represents the last voice of the last generation to have owned and loved Maple Grove as a family home in an era when Route 9 was a bucolic thoroughfare lined with country estates and gentlemen's farms.

Ken Toole: The easiest thing is probably to start at the beginning. How Maple Grove first came into the family.

Elise Kinkead: More details?

KT: Well...

EK: My grandparents lived in New Orleans at the time my mother and aunt were born. ...And when the Civil War came along, my grandfa27

ther [Adolphus Hamilton] was from New York and Connecticut and my grandmother [Matilda Hamilton] was from Wilmington originally. Delaware. And so....business had taken them down to New Orleans. And they felt very unhappy there with the Civil War. My grandmother was very emphatic about her faith that there shouldn't have been a Civil War. That it was politics. It wasn't slavery. That it was politics. And Mr. Lincoln could have prevented it. And she couldn't bear the whole thing.

And they had five children. Two of the boys were from my grandmother's former marriage. And the three children from my grandfather and grandmother's together. And they decided the best thing for them to do was to go abroad and give the children the benefit of the languages. And my grandmother who had been left after the death of her first husband following a long illness, she'd been left very financially limited and had a hard time. She said if they went abroad, she was going to try and learn from those European women how to live on a shoe string...and not run into the expenses that she had had to look after when she was alone. So she had that in mind and languages for the children.

My grandfather had to come back and forth on business, but he established them with a tutor for the boys who he thought was good. He [the tutor] was a very well-educated man, and he was trained for the priesthood. But he developed a violent temper, though my grandfather was unaware of it, and grandmother too to a certain extent. He [the tutor] was vicious and mean to the three boys. Very, very mean with them. And struck them and bamboozled them pretty well to get them subjugated.

But...the family didn't know that until much later. ...I think they went over there [to Europe] in [18]62 perhaps and came back in [18]69, something like that.

And [when they came back] they tried living in New York City and had a house that had access to a park. You had to get a key to the gate. They could let themselves in and out, and they could walk in the park and tread on the grass if they had a mind to. But the children rebelled at that.

They were used to the outdoors and freedom, and they hated it.

And my grandfather found that in seven or eight years, that he'd been away from New York, social things had changed a great deal. And there was a tolerance for things he didn't think there should be any tolerance for, so (laughter) though his brother wanted him to stay there [in New 28

York], he and grandmother and the children listened to [Samuel F.B.] Morse's persuasion that there was a place in Poughkeepsie that was for sale near them and with excellent schools available within just a short walking distance.

Well, children now might feel a little imposed on if they had to walk back and forth from Maple Grove to Cannon Street every day, twice a day. But it was just what they needed. So these children grew up at Maple Grove. They bought the place, and that was in 1870. They'd come back to this country in 1869.

Restoration of Maple Grove's westfacade was completed in 2005.

At that time [in 1869], it [Maple Grove] belonged to a family named Sweetser. And when my grandfather and grandmother were looking at it, Mrs. Sweetser was feeling that the place was very difficult for the Sweetser family to hold on to. Her daughter preferred being in the city where she could walk on the stone sidewalks. So they had put in that little stone walk from the kitchen door to the drive and over to the back door of the house and out to the drive again. So the daughter, when she got dressed for the afternoon, could walk on city streets (laughter).

And when grandmother said, "Mrs.Sweetser, this drive is so pretty. It's 29

a long drive and all those little maple trees are so nice." And Mrs. Sweetser said in a plaintive voice, that my mother and I always imitated, "Well, it looks all right now. But in the fall, all the leaves have to be raked up." Because in those days, although the drive was a quarter mile long, it was raked up every week. Once a week, and those leaves had to be raked up. So Mrs. Sweetser was glad when she moved off the place, and grandmother and grandfather were glad when they moved in.

And they [her grandparents] had the garden just as nearly as my aunt could Maple lined drive at Maple Grove. Rendes Collection, Makeep it, just the way it is plc Grove Archive. now. And my grandfather had the greenhouse that he was very fond of. And one part of it was just for grapes. Those big black Hamburg grapes or something. And that whole section of the greenhouse was grapes. And they had a tank in the back part for water, so water was accessible. And they had that filled with water and lovely greens and goldfish which delighted Jen [Elise Kinkead's sister] and me when we were children. Oh, those goldfish were lovely in the greenhouse!

So they [Elise Kinkkead's grandparents] moved in [to Maple Grove] and they ran it until my grandmother's death probably in 18.. .maybe 1890?

Maybe 1891? My grandmother died. My grandfather had died before then. And my mother and father were married and living in Kentucky at that time. My aunt was the second wife of Dr. John Kinkead...he was raised in Kentucky of course, and his sister went to Vassar and was a roommate of Cornelia Annie Dodge, one of the early Vassar graduates.

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(short discussion of discomfort of speaking into a tape recorder) KT: You were talking about the Dodges. How the Kinkeads and Dodges met.

EK: Well, it was through the Vassar College association. My uncle [John Kinkead] who was practicing eye, ear, nose, and throat work in New York City, I believe, that's how he met his first wife whose home was in Poughkeepsie. She was Annie Dodge. They lived on Academy Street. But my mother and father lived in Kentucky. ...After my grandmother's death, my aunt, who was at that time Dr John Kinkead Rendes Collection, Maple Grove Archive.

Mrs. John Kinkead, had said she would love best of all to put that money [her inheritance] into Maple Grove instead of having it [Maple Grove] divided among all the family; she would like to do that because she lived here, and she loved the place so. So she did. ...My grandfather's executors made it possible for my aunt and uncle to put the money that my aunt inherited from my grandmother into buying the house from the estate. ...she said she'd rather have that than anything. So she bought that. And my mother and father built a house in Lexington, Kentucky out of what my grandmother left my mother. ...You see my mother and aunt were sisters; my father and uncle were brothers. So the relation was very close.

KT: Well now, are you talking about a period before Southwood was bought by your family?

EK: Yes. KT: I see.

EK: I was born in [18194 in Lexington, Kentucky. And I was born in January. And in June or July, I think, we were probably up here. Came up every year. To see Auntie and Uncle. And we just LOVED it. Just 31

loved Maple Grove. Grew up loving Maple Grove. ...Uncle had the orchard.. .had a beautiful orchard. When he retired from medicine, from his doctoring, I think it was probably about 19.. .maybe 1902 or 1903, something like that. And he put his loving attention on looking after a little orchard he had at Maple Grove. He had an apple orchard. And a little pear and peach orchard. And he had grapes. And he loved his bees.

Crazy about bees. They were what killed him. [Dr. John Kinkead died on July 4, 1909 after suffering a heart attack while working among his bees.] He was very fond of those. Very much interested in them. He had them right back of the main house. The orchard was perhaps about an acre. Some few trees left there now...And the pear orchard was to the north of the stable drive. Pears and peaches in there. And the pears down to the lawn. He followed my grandfather's habit of coming home from the office and putting on his farm clothes and helping with the hay or anything like that that was going on...

Maw Elise Kinkead with her nieces Jennie (left) and Elise (right) on the front steps of Maple Grove.

Rendes Collection, Maple Grove Archive.

KT: Were there animals then?

EK: Oh, we had animals there. They had...they had a pair of carriage horses. They had more horses in my grandparent's day. But in the days that I remember, when we were away in the wintertime, my uncle and 32

aunt had a pair of carriage horses and in the summertime, farm horses.

Sometimes they bought the new farm horses every spring and let them go in the fall. I don't remember how they always did that, but I can remember their doing that sometimes.

And they had a coachman who lived over the stable, over the carriage house. And they had a gardener who lived in the two story house. And the house that the Rendes' use [the Rendes family were Maple Grove caretakers] was turned around a little differently, and that was the ice house....And over the ice house, my uncle had his shop with all his bee things in it...

They had the man that lived at the gatehouse. And the cows down there... in the summertime. And in the wintertime, when they didn't need the pasture, they had them up back of the carriage house...And where St. Simeon's is now [St. Simeon's Senior Apartments], part of that was our place. And part of it belonged to old Miss Thompson who lived across the road. [The Thompson mansion, once part of an estate known as "The Wilderness," survives on Beechwood Avenue, across from St. Simeon's.]

And [she] wouldn't let my aunt in and out of there...on to Beechwood Avenue (laughter). Wasn't that a funny thing? And this funny old lady would get herself up and get her coachman and her horses, everything out and come over once or twice a year to call on my aunt. To do it, she had to go through Beechwood Avenue, down South Road and up the long drive to Maple Grove. And all she had to do was just go across fifty of her own feet. But she could not part with that land. My aunt tried to buy it. My aunt and uncle tried to buy it when Cornelia Kinkead, my cousin, was at Vassar because it would have made it so much simpler.

The big hill was pretty slippery in the wintertime for horses. And ...it took a long time to get out that way. Took about six or eight miles. So... nothing doing. And every so often my aunt would get her carriage out, get her horses all harnessed up and the man in livery, and she would drive the six miles over to pay Mrs. Thompson a call (laughter). Isn't that strange?

KT: Well, then who were the last people who lived in the house?

EK: In our house?

KT: In Maple Grove. Was it Cornelia? Or. . .

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EK: Oh, after my aunt died?

KT: Yeah.

EK: Well, that was a thing that was very much criticized...because people didn't understand it. Cornelia and George were the children of my uncle's first marriage.

KT: Oh, I see.

EK: And when my aunt and uncle were married, they had no children, which was a source of great regret. But Cornelia and George were getting along. Cornelia, I think was about seven and George was probably about four [when their widowed father, John Kinkead remarried to Elise Hamilton of Maple Grove]. And they had been brought up to a certain point by my uncle's father and uncle's sister who came up from Kentucky to take care of the children [in Poughkeepsie] when their grandmother died.

So when my grandmother died and Auntie and Uncle were moving to Maple Grove, Cornelia and George had lost their mother... so they were definitely with Auntie and Uncle. And the grandfather [Leroy Dodge] was still living, and he hated to give them [his grandchildren, George and Cornelia] up because they'd been living with him on Academy Street [in Poughkeepsie]. And he couldn't bear giving them up. Especially George, because George he thought was just perfection, and George felt the same of him.

So Auntie, when she was first married, went to live with him...with Grandpa Dodge and the children [on Academy Street in Poughkeepsie]. Then when they 34

George and Cornelia Kinkead.

Rendes Collection, Maple Grove Archive.

bought Maple Grove, the tie was very close with him too. So it was arranged that he would very happily go down and live at Maple Grove.

And they arranged those two rooms at the end of the house. I think they were going to be his two rooms; at the south end of the house overlooking the garden. ...And the family were just devoted to him. Apparently, he was devoted to the family. And he. . .he had quite a long illness and he appreciated so much the care my aunt gave of him which was just as if it was her own father. So that...I don't think I've quite answered your question. I can't remember just what...

KT: Well, what I was going to add.. .the last people who lived there... were George and Cornelia?

EK: My aunt had a home out in California that she and uncle built before he died. He died before it was finished. And, uh, my cousin, Cornelia was a very brilliant mind. She went to Vassar, I think, when she was sixteen or something like that. And she was very young when she graduated. She was very bright. She had been shifted around a great deal in the family. First her mother for three years, and then after her mother's death, uh...her grandmother, then her aunt taking care of her, and she had been shifted around. Her great resource was reading; she loved reading more than anything else.

When my aunt was married, my aunt felt as if something had to be done that would have her see more people, more of her own age. And she didn't like that very much. Well, anyway, she gradually came around.

George and Cornelia Kinkead. Rendes Collection, Maple Grove Archive.

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And when we went out to California, she blossomed out, and became very dependent on people, began loving people. And people loving her because they could see what she was. ...she seemed to be constantly on the go there and very happy. So my aunt was going to give her this house she had in Santa Barbara which was a lovely house....But before my aunt died, Cornelia said one day that she would probably never go back to California again and Auntie said, "Well, Cornelia, do you mean that you don't want the house out there?" and she said, "Nope, not interested."

You know, people have changes...

KT: Oh, sure.

EK: So Auntie said, "Well, you want to sell it? You know, it's yours to do anything you want with." So she sold it.

Then my aunt was feeling terribly. She said, "Cornelia and George don't want to take any responsibility for anything, real estate or anything like that. And they'll never take any care of Maple Grove; they'll never take care of it." And she really was terribly downKinkead, her mother Edith, her sister Jennie, and an cast about it. Because it Elise unidentified friend. Rendes Collection, Maple Grove Armeant so much to her. chive.

She had worked hard on it herself and grown up there.

So my sister was there one day when she was feeling this.. .depression.

And Jennie said, "Now Auntie, don't worry about that at all. No use in your worrying about it. Just give it [Maple Grove] to Elise and me and we will do with it as nearly as possible what we think you would like us to do." And she said, "I would like it to be Cornelia and George's home 36

if they wanted it." And Jennie said, "Well then, it will be Cornelia and George's home if they want it. And we will make it as nearly their home, except in title. So if you're worried about their selling it, then it won't be sold." So that's how she happened to give it to us. And that was a good while before she died. I don't mean many years, but some years.

And people in town criticized that very much. They criticized my aunt for giving it to us when we had this home [the Southwood estate located across Route 9 from Maple Grove]. They shouldn't have, because there was no justification for any criticism because they [Cornelia and George] would have sold it.

Rustic gazebo at Maple Grove. Rendes Collection, Maple Grove Archive.

KT: But what really we've always talked about is carrying on that tradition...in the future.

EK: And that's why I don't want it to get in the wrong hands. Because it was almost like a CHILD to my aunt. She loved that place so. And we gave her our word that we'd do the best we could to help her have it. ...

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KT: And they [Elise's step-cousins, George and Cornelia Kinkead] lived into the 1940s, I guess?

EK: Oh...19...I think Cornelia died in '49. And I think that George probably died a few years after that. I don't remember what year. My aunt, I think, died in '45...'44... '45, just before the war ended. [The "Auntie" that Elise was named after died in 1944. Cornelia Kinkead died in 1949, and Cornelia's brother George (the last resident of Maple Grove) died in 1955.]

But George and Cornelia both had traveled a great deal, and they loved traveling. And my aunt said, "They won't do a thing to fill this place except sell this place, and by and by, they'll spend the money traveling.

And I have loved it so much," she said, "And I've worked over it so hard." And she had, and I think that it would have been sad for her to feel that it was going to just be torn down. So we've done the best we could with it.

Interior of Maple Grove. Rendes Collection, Maple Grove Archive.

And I can't think of anything that would be wiser or more what she would have because it isn't practical to have it as a home anymore—a private home.

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[After George and Cornelia's deaths, their cousins Jennie and Elise refused to sell Maple Grove. Instead they continued to live across the road from Maple Grove at their Southwood estate and used Maple Grove for daily lunch, Sunday dinners and charity functions. The Rendes family continued to act as Maple Grove's caretakers. This arrangement continued for over 30 years. As her own death drew nearer, Elise Kinkead discussed with Scenic Hudson and others what to do with Maple Grove.]

KT: So. . . it's really to preserve it in the tradition as it always operated. (complains she can't hear very well—laughter) KT: Well, I was just going to say what we've always talked about is to preserve it in that same tradition...

EK: YES! KT: So that it will be a small farm operation.

EK: I don't see why it couldn't be preserved and to good effect for the whole district. Because as I've seen on the map of the district and the location of so many homes in little dots all over the map, there's practically no open space in Poughkeepsie now except the river going through it.

KT: The nice thing about the property is.. .1 talk to other people about it...when you talk about its open space, and people really do love it.

They loved seeing the cows there when you had the cows.

EK: I miss having those cows myself, but I can put back some. ...And what I think my aunt would love would be to have that little pond put back [the pond was destroyed by the widening of Route 9 in 1955].

Wouldn't be much trouble. And it was such a pretty little pond. Children could skate on it in the wintertime. Of course, that wouldn't be safe near the road. But when they had it, it was a very pretty little pond...

39

Ice Yachting: Describing the Ride of a Lifetime With its intoxicating combination of danger, beauty and unpredictability, ice yachting on the Hudson held a powerful public fascination particularly in the days before ice clearing for year-round shipping made much of the Hudson largely unsuited for the sport. At its peak in the 1880s and 1890s, ice yachting seemed proof that human daring could triumph over industrial technology as depicted in popular newspaper and magazine illustrations of impromptu races between ice boats and the steam locomotives that ran along both banks of the Hudson.

The mystique of ice yachting was partially due to its unpredictable occurrence. Sailing conditions were so dependent on a complex set of variables (ice thickness and consistency, air temperature and precipitation, wind speed and direction) that some years offered only one or two suitable racing days in an entire season. The sport's fickle nature required lavish patience but also added to its intriguing appeal.

When the much anticipated sailing conditions were finally right, the community seemed to sense it. As many as 2,000 spectators would appear along the banks of the Hudson in New Hamburg, Hyde Park or Poughkeepsie to watch the ice yacht races. Few could help but wonder what it would be like to hang over the ice face down clinging to plank rails while sailing at speeds faster than the wind itself.

Those who actually experienced it tried hard to satisfy the curiosity of others with first person accounts of their adventures. Wealthy ice yachtsmen like John A. Roosevelt and Archibald Rogers of Hyde Park and Norman "Cap" Wright of Poughkeepsie were interviewed about their experiences or wrote their own descriptions for sportsmen's magazines. Reporters—whether getting the ride of a lifetime or merely observing the colorful scenery —tried to capture for their readers as best they could the magic of this thrilling winter pastime along the Hudson.

The following first person account published in Outing Magazine in February of 1899 was written by Poughkeepsie ice yachtsman and sculler, Norman Wright (1847-1935). Wright became interested in rowing while

40

attending to business interests in Minnesota where he founded the Minnesota Boat Club in 1870 and became its champion sculler.

In Poughkeepsie, Wright was a founding member of the Apokeepsing Boat Club in 1879. By 1922, Wright held the record for having rowed more miles on the Hudson than any other person in the county —in excess of 10,000 miles. On most days, Wright could be found either rowing or cycling long distances or playing whist, bridge or billiards at the gentlemen's Amrita Club where he was considered the club expert in all three games. In winter, Wright proved himself a highly skilled ice yachtsman, twice winning the American championship. In his later years, Wright regularly showed up at Roosevelt Point in Hyde Park to give young helmsmen "pointers" on ice sailing. At age 88, despondent over losing his eyesight and no longer able to take to the river, "Captain" Wright committed suicide in 1935.

Norman Wright: "...Many years ago 'Tom' Parish established the reputation of being the most fearless and reckless ice-yachtsman on the Hudson River. Nothing daunted him; snow hummocks and jagged masses of heavy ice were jumped or smashed into, until his boat was torn and splintered, as if raked by shrapnel. His favorite amusement was to take out for a sail any unsuspecting visitors from the metropolis, and, if there was not wind enough to enable him to capsize, or by a sudden turn fling them sprawling and helpless from the yacht, he would deliberately sail into the nearest air-hole or ferry track.

Dick Night came next, with his rare ability to handle the tiller in many winning races, until he became so aggressive as to disregard the rules governing the course.

Since the building of ice-yachts of 600 square feet of canvas and over [John A. Roosevelt's mammothIcicle carried 1,070 square feet in 1886], there have been so many narrow escapes from collisions that the number of entries for challenge races have been by common consent very much limited.

In the old days a fleet of twelve to eighteen yachts cutting diagonal on the river was a great sight for spectators. Of late the H.R.I.Y.C. [Hudson River Ice Yacht Club] seldom enters more than four or five to defend the flag that indicates supremacy of the world. Even with this small 41

number of competitors, the great majority of spectators prudently stay ashore. It is not always safe to watch the vagaries of ice-boats. Sometimes they take the bit, run away, and dash themselves to pieces. One of these accidents was remarkable. A fierce northwest gale of many flaws and variations started the Jack Frost from her anchorage. Commodore Rogers, standing near by, jumped after her, but only caught the end of the boom, from whence he was quickly flung. The yacht, with a guiding runner all on a swing, rushed toward a bunch of skaters and onlookers, and finally, at terrific speed, made directly for them. She barely missed them, dashing between two yachts directly against the rocky shore, a complete wreck.

The Avalanche, an enormous lateen of 841 square feet, weighing 3,008 pounds, ran away with E. Harrison Sanford, owner, finally tossing him out; then, after several uncertain turns, as if satisfied with the scare to her helmsman, came up into the wind and stopped. Sanford had enough of the lateen model, and at once had her dismantled and turned into a sloop....Dr. J.C. Barron's yacht Northern Light, although one of the swiftest, is unquestionably the most dangerous of all boats, as if possessed of an evil spirit that too frequently threatens her helmsman or anyone within her range.

When in some of her tantrums, the rudder loses its grip and she flies

&•%okt:

•,.

• q-t

Northern Light turning the stake at Poughkeepsie in the race for the Ice Yacht Challenge Pennant of America (February 14, 1887). FDR Library and Archives.

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hither and thither, where'er she listeth, sometimes making directly for another yacht, and again, attempting to smash the fleet at anchor.

One day, when the wind was comparatively steady, as she was about to cross a crack, on the edge of which a man was standing to indicate the only safe place, a sudden puff made her veer and make directly at him.

Boys often take chances with recklessness. One unfortunate boy I knew was being towed on his sled by a rope from an ice-yacht when another yacht came up so fast on another tack that the helmsman did not see him till it was too late, and ran over him, badly crushing the unfortunate boy's legs.

The ferry track at Poughkeepsie is a source of frequent involuntary icewater baths. ...Late in the season—if the ferry has been frozen up—she takes advantage of each warm day to buck the ice and cut out a channel across the river. Sometimes she gets a third or a half way across, and then a cold night will stiffen up the main ice too hard for the next day's breaking up, and leave a thin coat of glare ice to cover the previous day's work.

This always catches the unwary. Once, however, when there was about sixty feet of open water, a party from Marlborough, going at a rate of a mile a minute, flew directly into this dangerous place. The velocity of their yacht carried them to the farther edge, where a bordering of thin ice prevented rescuers from coming to them. Two of the crew, who could swim, managed to break through this to safety; the third, mostly immersed in the freezing water, clung to the boat, moaning like some wounded beast, utterly helpless from terror. When, after seemingly unconscionable delay, a rope was brought he could barely get the loop over his shoulder to enable his rescuers to drag him through the water to safety. He was never seen on an ice-yacht again.

Jumping cracks is always risky. The owner of the Aeolus, with a friend, once took a memorable trip up to Rondout. The ice was safe and wind strong, so they went ashore and spent some time at lunch. Meanwhile the wind increased, but the sun's rays had caused the ice to expand until some back cracks had opened. On the return trip the yachtsmen, unaware of anything serious, and uttering unsuppressible yells of exhilaration at each startling burst of speed, were suddenly paralyzed to see a long reach of water, about twenty feet across, directly ahead!

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Before their course could be altered, splash went the yacht, the runner plank throwing a sheeted mass of water as high as the gaff. The sudden stop, as the rudder caught the farther edge, tossed the man from the runner-plank into a grand somersault, landing him many feet away, whilst the grip of the helmsman was not strong enough to prevent his sliding forward into the water and partly under the box. He was wet from above and below, but neither party suffered any broken bones nor subsequent illness, whilst the wet clothing immediately formed an icy coat.

The Jack Frost had a similar experience whilst sailing in the race at New Hamburg, February 1883. She ran into a large area of water, which had formed where the ice had cracked. She went into it like lightning, dashing up a wall of water as she flew along to clear ice beyond, completely dousing the clothing of the crew; and right off they were covered with icicles from head to foot.

There have been many collisions and many more narrow escapes, wrecking the yachts and bruising the crews. They are generally caused by sudden squalls lifting the windward runner so high that the rudder loses its grip on the ice, and the yacht immediately veers from her course. If another yacht is approaching on another tack and is near by, as is frequently the case, there's a good chance for trouble...

So great a speed is attained by ice yachts that they are sometimes lifted from the ice and fairly fly for yards. An incident of this kind happened last year. A large yacht of the New Hamburg Club went scudding down the river in the direction of Newburg[h]. It was the owner's intention to go to West Point, if possible. He sailed there, but nothing could induce him to make the trip again. Everything went smoothly for a time, so it is related, the wind sending the skeleton craft along at forty miles an hour.

Just above Newburg[h] a gale struck the sails and the yacht attained a terrific speed, clouds of ice spray whirling in her wake; she reared and screeched like a mad thing broken loose. The sailor's eyes were pointed ahead, but a film covered them and almost blinded him.

Suddenly he heard a whistle blow right behind him, and as he looked back he saw that he had crossed the Newburg[h] and Fishkill ferry cut, and that he had crossed just in front of the steam boat. His hair stood on end and fairly turned gray. He landed at West Point, transacted his business, took his boat apart and shipped it home, having had enough for that season.

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But one more incident, a sample of the gyrations of the Quick as a Wink, well named. One squally day, a bystander on skates, who never had a ride on an ice-yacht, was taken for a whirl. A swift flight of two miles was capped by a fierce puff, that caused the yacht to rear and suddenly snap about so sharp and quick that the two sailors were flung from her with such force that the skates were torn from their feet. Jaws snapped and hair rose, as each, while helplessly skating over the ice, feared the yacht would turn and finish them.

Fortunately she went off to the shore near by. The stranger, on getting to his feet, exclaimed in a painful voice: 'Say, Mister, is that the way you stop them?"

FDR's uncle, John A. Roosevelt (1840-1909) was one of the three best known ice yachtsmen on the Hudson and owner of the celebrated boat Icicle, headquartered at Roosevelt's estate of Rosedale in Hyde Park. At 68 feet, 11 inches long and weighing 2,400 pounds with 1,070 square feet of sail, the Icicle was the world's largest ice yacht. Roosevelt's daughter, Ellen was a celebrated sportswoman in her own right as the American women's singles tennis champion. Her cousin, FDR was an avid sailor of his own ice yacht, the Hawk.

John A. Roosevelt: "My daughter has frequently beaten me when I have been sailing the Icicle and she has had a smaller boat, such as Franklin Roosevelt's Hawk, which is not supposed to be so fast. My daughter understands the rules of our club governing the sailing of yachts both in races and for pleasure, and she has learned the science of getting speed out of the boat. It is hard to explain how to sail an ice-boat, and but few men know how to make a yacht give the best speed she is capable of.

Indeed, I think I can count on one hand, those who would be considered first class steersmen.

After using up the first speed few know how to make it up and use the same wind over again. This is a thing that is hard to make clear, but when it is understood and mastered it is possible to make a yacht travel much faster than the wind.

Incredible as it may seem, I have seen a yacht travelling three times faster than the wind was blowing.

What more exciting sport can you imagine? I know of nothing that is 45

attended by so much excitement. Fancy yourself on a boat running over the ice, with one runner perhaps in the air, racing against a railroad train, and then imagine the satisfaction as you perceive your boat gaining on the swiftly moving train, the passengers of which wave you a salute with their handkerchiefs.

Col. Rogers tells a story of an engineer who raced an ice-yacht for the first time. The engineer was running the Empire State Express, when his eyes became fixed on an ice-yacht sailing parallel to the railroad. So interested did he become that he thought that his train had stopped, and believing that something had happened to the engine, took his oil can in hand, got down from his cab, walked around in front of his engine to see what was the matter and was killed.

Unless you accept that incident, I do not remember any loss of life ever having resulted from ice-boating in this section. Perils? They are nothing when there is a good man at the helm. The greatest danger is from collisions, because a boat can easily become unmanageable. For that reason, the expert likes to know who is sailing the other boats when he goes out for a spin, and the novice at steering may be pretty sure of having all the room he wants for his evolutions.

There isn't much danger from breaking through the ice, because the frame of the boat will almost always sustain it if one or both runners go through. I have gone in myself four times in one day and never got my feet wet but once. That was an occasion when the yacht got in the ferry track and then I got wet up to my neck. I have never known of a person being drowned from ice-boating.

It [traveling a mile a minute] is frequently done here on the Hudson and on Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota; they had a race last winter, I believe over a measured course of five and three quarter miles in length in which the time for three races were 4 minutes 20 seconds, 4 minutes 15 seconds and 4 minutes flat." ("As to Ice Yachting," Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle, January 29, 1903) At his estate, Crumwold, in Hyde Park, veteran ice yachtsman, Archibald Rogers (1852-1928) maintained the largest of the Hudson's ice yacht fleets. His magnificent ice boat, Jack Frost was a keen rival to Roosevelt's Icicle in the coveted "Ice Yacht Challenge Pennant of America" race.

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Ice yacht sailing called for the mastery of instantaneous decision making under constantly changing conditions—a particularly appealing combination to wealthy sportsmen like Rogers. Rogers' other hobbies, such as big game hunting and polo, also involved skillful split second decision making in an unpredictable setting.

Archibald Rogers: "...Many persons not acquainted with the sport, and reading exaggerated accounts of accidents in the papers, have supposed that ice-yachting is a highly dangerous one. As a matter of fact, I believe it to be singularly free from danger. There have been comparatively few serious accidents; the men who sail have considerable experience, and the yacht being, as a rule, under such marvelous control there is little liability of injury, unless the helmsman is grossly careless or incompetent.

We have had a few legs broken and a few abraded knees from being thrown out on the ice, but beyond this and occasional duckings in very cold water, nothing serious has occurred. It is worthy of note that bystanders and people skating on the ice are being educated to the point that the safest thing for them to do when they see an ice-yacht approaching is to remain perfectly still, in order to give the helmsman an opportunity to decide what course to steer.

Advice is cheap, as they say, but I can well remember a certain ten minutes in a large ice-yacht during which I had advice of the strongest kind and in the most emphatic language from the late Jacob Buckhout [Buckhout was the celebrated Poughkeepsie boat builder who designed and built boats for many of the sport's most famous participants]. I think that I learned more during those ten minutes [with Buckhout] than I had in years of sailing. Advice, of course, must be of the right kind, and it should come from a professor in the art.

Many men I have known can sail an ice-yacht passably well. Some of them are excellent helmsmen when it comes to a racing or cruising yacht on water, but somehow or other they do not seem to get the knack of sailing an ice-yacht properly...

A hearty laugh has arisen from teasing some novice into taking out a small ice-yacht. We say the wind is not too strong, and that it is from the north, and he is told to get aboard and sail up the river for a mile or so and then turn around and come back. We tell him, with absolute truth, that he will have no difficulty in sailing. We remark casually that per47

Boat building shop of celebrated ice yacht builder Jacob Buckhout (left) with John A. Roosevelt (seated at right). FDR Library and Archives.

haps he won't come back so very fast, but he will get up there all right; and true enough he will. He will have no difficulty at all in going up to windward, and this naturally gives him confidence and he says to himself: 'This is very easy; anybody can sail an ice-yacht.'

He reaches the place where he should turn around and come back to receive the congratulations of his friends, who are awaiting with much pleasure his return. Up goes his helm and immediately the boat he thought was so easy to sail, starts off at a terrific rate of speed and he begins to lose a little confidence. His first impulse is to stop, especially if he sees himself rapidly approaching the opposite shore. He luffs up into the wind, but as she does not stop, he goes on the other tack. He gets out into the middle of the river, and says, 'I will just turn and come back,' so he pays her off again, when the same performance recurs. She immediately develops a high rate of speed; he is running toward the other shore much too much for pleasure...So by this time, having gone far beyond the point at which he desired to turn around, he starts very slowly....

Things don't look quite so easy as they did...One minute he is tearing along 40 miles an hour, and the next minute is not sailing at all, until finally we see him strip off his coat, get down to his shirt sleeves, and with perspiration rolling down his face, ignominiously push his yacht 48

toward home, where he knows he is sure to meet his jeering and smiling friends.

This is not an exaggerated picture at all. It has happened repeatedly, and that is why, although almost anyone can sail to windward, sailing before the wind requires a special education.. .

The Hudson in a freezing mood is capricious, and often in early winter will present us with four or five miles of beautiful ice, perfectly smooth and even, and then, owing to the drifting down of some broken up ice fields which have become jammed and frozen fast, we may be cut off for a mile or more by execrable ice, the surface of which is a mass of jagged hummocks, some of them several feet in height and running either in ridges from shore to shore or scattered about in great uneven masses, or both. Interspersed amidst all these Arctic conditions will be found patches and lanes of more or less smooth ice.

Now no ice-yachtsman worthy of the name ever hesitates at trouble or work if sailing is to be had anywhere near him. He sees with envy his friends above or below him having the time of their lives (and a good day's ice-yachting is always the time of one's life). So up go the sails on "old trusty" and a try is made to sail over the intervening rough ice.

It takes sometimes a lot of time, skill and patience with a frequent use of a sharp steel chisel bar to cut a passage through some of the ridges. If these are too wide and too rough the boat is shoved by hand, or if the ice is strong enough very often a pair of horses and a tow rope are requisitioned until all obstacles are surmounted.

If cracks have to be passed (cracks come from the rise and fall of the tide, or from the expansion of the ice) two timbers must be laid in position spanning the opening, and then the boat shoved over.. .But where the ice is smooth and not rotten, quite a wide distance may be crossed under the yacht's own momentum and without the timbers being placed in position, provided enough speed can be attained just before reaching the crack. ...The clearing of a distance of 21 feet, 6 inches by an ice-yacht is the widest I know of. This I did in Jack Frost. The measurement was taken with a steel tape from the point where the runners left the ice to where they first landed. (Outing Magazine, March 1907) Although more familiar with the Hudson than the national reporters sent to cover ice yacht races, local reporters felt just as keenly the icy 49

drama of speed and skill occurring in their own backyard. George W. Davids, Jr., Managing Editor of the Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle recorded his part in one of the famous races between ice yachts and riverside trains.

George W. Davids, Jr.: "I recall an incident when the Empire State Express was first put on the route between New York and Chicago and newspapers printed wonderful stories of its speed. On that day, me and Archibald Rogers sat in the cockpit of his famous Jack Frost and the wind was howling from the west. Our conversation drifted to the stories about the Empire State Express and Colonel Rogers suggested that the Empire might be fast but could not cope with an ice yacht. I suggested it might be tried out some time and the Colonel was quick to take up the idea, with the result that we started from Hyde Park for Poughkeepsie in the Jack Frost to await the arrival of the Empire on its way to Albany.

When the train was sighted, Colonel Rogers rounded the Jack Frost once or twice until he got on an even terms with the Empire. This was just north of the present Dutton Company wharf and the train and ice yacht were soon moving up the river. Passengers on the train looked out of the windows and waved handkerchiefs as if to say good-bye as the train drew away. But we hadn't yet got into the wind. Presently when the Colonel got the Frost properly headed and the west wind veered slightly to southward, the Jack Frost fairly hummed over the clear ice and we were on even terms with the train. Under perfect conditions, the ice yacht gradually drew away from the Empire and at Esopus Island where we stopped, we were a good quarter of a mile ahead of the train. When the passengers saw us they gave us another wave of handkerchiefs and even the engineer gave us three friendly toots of the whistle." (Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle: September 22, 1928) Under the pen name "Carl Keepsie," a local journalist describes his ride on John A. Roosevelt's ice yacht Vixen in 1892: "Nearly six inches of solid ice on the Hudson River greeted the eyes and gladdened the hearts of yachtsmen hereabouts yesterday. It was the first day of this season that gave the lovers of ice boating the sort of encouragement that awakens enthusiasm and leads up to racing over the frozen river. Of all the health giving, exciting winter sports, ice yachting is the most delightful. I speak advisedly, for I went ice yachting no later than yesterday, and among the legacies to be handed down to my yet unborn 50

admirers is the fact that I had one of the first ice yacht rides of 1892, after all the prophets had settled down for an open river all winter.

It was about the middle of the afternoon when I turned in from the North Road through the open gate of John A. Roosevelt's place. I followed a picturesque road over which tall cedars touched their green boughs very lovingly, considering that it was a zero day, down to the river side.

From the shore, about two miles north of Poughkeepsie, the scene was enchanting. The bleakness and complete cheerlessness that one would expect to find at a point of the river so far from the city were not there.

Why? Simply because the ice yachts were out. Vixen, Ariel, Flash, and Quick as a Wink were there, John A. Roosevelt, Archibald Rogers — Norman Wright and C.H. Gallup, respectively, being in charge of the ice yachts. It was the first day of ice yachting this season...

The river is covered with a splendid field of ice directly in front of Mr. Roosevelt's place. Yesterday the ice had an enameled surface, not so fast as smooth ice, they say, but infinitely more comforting to the amateur yachtsman who is in doubt about the sharpness of the runners. Somehow the amateur always allows such irrelevant things to interfere with his sport. The wind was from the northwest when it was at all. It was not a steady wind. It came in chunks. Some of the chunks were large, others larger. I was on the Vixen, through the kindness of Mr. Roosevelt, when one of the largest chunks came bounding along the river. The Vixen, always steady and reliable, lost her temper when this particular blast took such liberties with her sail; at least I so fancied, she made such a fuss. I was sure that she did not care for the company of the blast. This I concluded from the manner in which she hurried on, as if to get away from it entirely. She finally did get away. Then she came to a slow, rational movement.

'The wind has left us,' said the man at the tiller.

I thought it was the other way, but said nothing.

The blast and the sail met again, presently, and what a time they did have. I thought I must lose my life before the thing was over. I found when it was over that I had lost several things, among others the grip, a small case of dyspepsia, a headache, and a notion that I knew a whole lot about handling an ice boat. If you have such things among your possessions and want to keep them forever, don't go ice yachting.

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When my trip on the Vixen ended, Mr. Roosevelt said to me, 'That young man who handled the Vixen I consider the most competent on the ice.

He is cool and exercises good judgment. He always wins. He is a nice young man, too. His name is William Smith.' I was glad to hear Mr. Roosevelt speak thus of an employee. There are men in the world who never do such things..." ("Carl on an Ice Boat: The First Day of Ice Yachting Hereabouts," Poughkeepsie News-Telegraph, January 23, 1892)

"Thomas Scott, Robert Gibson and Willie Smith—Ye Sturdy Crew" (The ice yacht crew ofJohn A. Roosevelt, March 1888). FDR Libra))) and Archives.

A reporter in January of 1899 describes his "glorious" ride on an ice yacht for the Poughkeepsie News-Telegraph: "Did you ever ride on an ice yacht? Ever know the thrilling experience of riding over a mile wide field of ice, a good stiff breeze from the north filling a great white sail above your head, and with only a plank between your prostrate arm and the black, smooth surface, while you held on for life, and for pleasure? Did you ever get rightly acquainted with the clear, cold air which ice yachtsmen come to love as topers love sparkling wine?

It is found between the hills and along the ice covered river on a biting winter day. It gets into your lungs and causes your blood to tingle and 52

your cheeks to glow, it frees the system from entanglements, and clears the brain in its own thorough way. Such air, and so much of it, your lungs will never know and your blood will never respond to in leaps and floods, unless you lie flat on an ice yacht on a cold winter day, seize hold of the planks with both hands, snuggle down your head, make an act of explicit faith in the yachtsman at the tiller, forget danger, troubles and responsibilities and, in the language of the boy, `Let'er go.'

I took a ride on Lewis D. Buckhout's ice yacht Tuesday. There were four others on the yacht when it shot away from Main Street like an object caught up by a gust of wind and whisked along an open channel. The first sweep of the piercing cold made the moment one of anxiety. The sail was filled to a proud size, and the little runners cut along eagerly.

The wind was from the north and the course of the ice yacht was south.

The sail was a straight one and as may be imagined a swift one. Mr. Buckout was at the tiller. He wore big mittens, but no covering on his ears. Why his ears didn't freeze and drop off was a mystery which, in the speed, and general whizzing of the moment, I had no time to study.

My own ears were closed to the world, with all its works and sounds save only the sound of the keen cutting of the ice, and the creaking of the little mast.

The scenery of the noble Hudson was transformed. The browned and snow touched hills on either side seemed to come together just ahead of him, and the river banks seemed streaks of snow, with dark spots here and there. The other occupants of the ice yacht were silent, 'scared stiff,' as one of them afterwards said. Their heads were buried in fur, and their bodies wrapped in cumbersome overcoats—but nobody complained of being warm. But who shall describe the feeling—the new health, the fascinating joy of a sail ahead of the wind on an ice yacht? ...The trip was to New Hamburg, a distance of four miles, and it was made in seven minutes.

The river was not given exclusively to ice yachting, for hundreds, despite the low temperature, were on skates and holding huge skate sails, became human ice boats. Some took trains up the river as far as Rhinecliff and then with a blowing breeze at their backs almost bade defiance to steam power."

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Dr. J. Wilson Poucher: Medical Pioneer The memoirs of Poughkeepsie physician John Wilson Poucher (18591948) capture the dramatic changes that swept American medicine at the turn of the 20th century. The excerpts reprinted here from Dr. Poucher's Reminiscences Personal and Professional (1859-1938) reveal a young surgeon of unusual skill boldly practicing modern techniques in what was literally still a "horse and buggy" era. Dr. Poucher's narrative is imbued with a sense of amazement at the transformation of American medical care during his lifetime.

Dr. Poucher grew up in the Berkshire hills John Wilson Poucher, where he recalled learning early on to "revel in the growth of mountain laurel, arbutus and pinxster blossoms." His childhood on the family farm instilled in him a passion for the outdoors, most especially for wildflowers—a subject about which Dr. Poucher wrote and lectured frequently, though lamenting his failure to write "with the pen of a Burroughs or a Thoreau." His other significant interest was the study of local history where he excelled both alone and in partnerships with others to create an impressive legacy of scholarship still in use today. Particularly notable was his work transcribing over 40,000 gravestones in Dutchess and Ulster counties—many on the verge of becoming illegible. His medical career in Dutchess County began in 1887 and continued until his retirement in the mid-1930s.

J. Wilson Poucher: "I had always been a country boy and the country had a permanent hold on me that I could not shake off. Poughkeepsie, in 1887, was both city and country and now, after more than half a century, I have never a minute's regret that I made that decision [to practice medicine in Poughkeepsie]. After making a short survey of the city, I found a two-room office at 18 Garden Street. The front room, as a waiting room, for patients if any came, and a rather nice rear room for a consultation and living room. Here I installed my few belongings, a book case, a desk

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and a folding couch, which I used for a bed by night and a lounge by day.

Here I remained just one year. I bought a fine little horse and a buggy. Of course, I didn't have a lot to do at first but soon patients began to come...

I found a very good place, just next door to get my meals; dear old Mrs. Fraleigh was my close friend for many years, until her death. She kept a boarding house for Eastman College students and had a house full. I believe they were my first Poughkeepsie patients...

Vassar Brothers Hospital, a fine new institution, had just been opened and a full visiting staff appointed but very soon several of the older staff members began to ask me to take care of their service cases. It was not long before I was doing more in the hospital than any of the staff members. Modern surgical work was just beginning and quite soon I was doing practically all, especially abdominal work, which was new to the local profession.

One case occurred in Dr. Campbell's service which he turned over to me—a fractured skull, where a portion of the skull was entirely broken loose and where a part of the brain was running down over the patient's face. When this man entirely recovered, my reputation was begun. Everything was not so smooth, however, as it might have been. Some of the older surgeons openly opposed any operations for appendicitis and I was obliged to work against their advice in many of my cases. I had

Early photo of Vassar Brothers Hospital founded in 1887. Dutchess County Historical Society Collection.

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early recognized the fact that these cases should be operated before the patient became toxic. The cause of mortality, in so many of these operations, was not the operation but the blood poison which had been allowed to progress too far before operation. Several appendix cases sent to the hospital for operation were told, when they entered that they would surely die if operated and I can remember at least three patients who refused operation when I was ready to operate. Every one of them died in a day or two. They might have been saved by early operation.

I remember my first interval operation.

That means an operation between attacks.

This was a child who had a series of three or four attacks of appendicitis at short intervals. I had advised the parents the safest time was when the boy was well. It happened that his mother took him on a visit to Denver and while there he had a severe attack and again she 1913 Operating Room, Vassar Brothers Hospital. Vassar Brothers Medical Center Archive. had to stop over in Minneapolis while he recovered from another. The doctor there advised her as I had, to have the appendix removed as soon as she arrived home.

When she returned, I was summoned and took him to the hospital next day. As I always tried to show my friend, Dr. , Superintendent and Chief of Staff, all the courtesy possible, I invited him to assist me. Of course, the operation was short and simple. The little fellow was sent to bed in fine condition, minus his appendix. The doctor had said nothing during the operation but, while we were washing up, he turned to me with the remark, 'If that child dies, this is murder.' Such were some of the difficulties that we had to overcome in those early days of surgery or, I should say, modern surgery....

During those early years in Poughkeepsie, my experience increased in every branch of surgery. I was obliged to do every kind of operation.

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I did cataract operations and all sorts of eye, ear, nose, and throat surgery as there was no one else to do them. One day, during an epidemic of diphtheria, I found a little patient suffocating and did a successful tracheotomy and from that time on, did many. I remember going early one morning to Rhinebeck to settle a dispute between two of my doctor friends in the diagnosis of a case of suspected diphtheria. When we three arrived at the little patient's home, we found a little two year old girl, black in the face, unable to breathe. I had no instruments but, with a sharp pocket knife of Dr. Van Etten's, opened the child's trachea through which she could breathe, until one of the doctor's boys rushed to the Rhinebeck Hospital for a tracheotomy tube. We left the little patient comfortable and she made a nice recovery. I was calling on a patient in Poughkeepsie, one day many years afterward, when a young lady entered the room, 'Florence, I want you to meet Doctor Poucher, my daughter-in-law, doctor.' The doctor ought to know me. I have his mark on my neck,' as she pulled down her collar, displaying the scar on her throat....

What a difference there is in the practice of medicine between those horse and buggy days when I began in Poughkeepsie and what it is at the present time! Only a few blocks of Main and Market Streets were paved at all, and those with cobblestones. Many of the streets were almost impassable, especially in Spring, even with a horse and buggy. I can remember, one evening, coming down Smith Street, only a block from Main, getting into a sink hole, when both my horse and buggy had to be pulled out by a team of horses. As my practice was largely consulting and extended practically all over Dutchess and Ulster Counties, it is not difficult to imagine what times I used to have getting through the country roads. I remember, one day, when I had to go to New Paltz, Staatsburg and Millbrook, besides my city calls, and then in the evening when I and my two horses were practically used up from wallowing through the muddy country roads, we were obliged to start, in a hurry, to relieve an old gentlemen of a strangulated hernia from which he had been suffering for several days. The trip took me back to Stanfordville and used up most of my night.

I well remember a little child that was very ill, in one of my very best families, at Hyde Park. It being early Spring, the road to Hyde Park was practically impassable and my friends, the parents, insisted on my seeing the patient twice a day. After a day or two, I adopted the plan of going up there in the evening, after my day's work was done, having 57

my horse taken care of, remaining over night and coming home in the morning,—a plan that was very satisfactory all around.

Probably one of my experiences, most indelibly impressed on my memory, was that of the great blizzard of 1888. I went around the city all the morning with horse and buggy but, as there was quite a snow fall during the forenoon, I went out for my afternoon calls with horse and sleigh. Quite late that afternoon, I found myself about three miles from home where I had gone to visit an old lady, very sick with pneumonia.

Although the snow had been coming down very fast all afternoon, I had not given it a thought but when I started for home the wind had come up and the snow, in many places, was up to the shoulders of my little horse. If she hadn't been the snappiest little beast ever in a harness, we would surely have been snowed under, on the road. The only way she could get through the deep snow was to hop along, rabbit-fashion. But we made it and we arrived at her stables much to everybody's surprise.

Let me tell you, she got a good rubbing down and a rest in a box stall for the next several days. She had proved that she had been properly named.

Her name was Fury.

One of the hardships in those early days of my practice in Poughkeepsie, came from a habit which many patients had of waiting until night to send for the doctor. If a child, or any member of the family, was sick, the idea seemed to be, 'If she isn't any better by tonight, she must have the doctor.' It took a long time and drastic measures to break up this habit.

One measure was to charge a double fee for night calls. The fees, when I came to Poughkeepsie, were one dollar for house calls and half a dollar for office calls, the doctor furnishing medicines. I well remember, one evening, a man calling on me and when, after examining him, found I did not have just the medicine I wanted for him, gave him a prescription.

'What does that cost me?' he asked. When I told him the usual fee of half a dollar, 'What! Fifty cents for that piece of paper? I guess not.' He then threw it down on my desk and went out in a huff. Prescription writing, I soon found out, was not at all common among the older doctors. During my four years of association with Doctor Robert K. Tuthill who was one of, if not the leading physician in the city, I don't remember his ever writing a prescription for a patient.

The horse and buggy days are long since gone. Automobiles have taken their place. I loved my horses and missed them for a long time...With our concrete and macadam roads of today, we can hardly realize that not 58

much more than thirty years ago our Post Road and even eastern Main Street were, about half the year, just mire holes.

As I had taken a special training course in obstetrics and had attended over one hundred cases in the outside service of the Berlin Women's Hospital, I came to Poughkeepsie thoroughly equipped for that work and believe I have had my share of it as my record book shows over twenty-two hundred deliveries. Of these, one hundred and five were Caesarians.

One morning, during my first year in Poughkeepsie, when I had delivered a young woman of her first baby, I remarked, 'There! You got rid of that big tumor pretty easily.' The lady who lived in the flat below and who had been lending a helping hand, remarked, 'Wish I could get rid Vassar Brothers Hospital Nursery, 1941. Vassar Brothers Medical Center Archive. of my tumor so easily.'

She then told me that she had been told by two prominent physicians that she had a rapidly growing abdominal tumor and must have an operation. As she was a woman nearing forty, the tumor age, I thought it very likely they were right. When I saw her again next day, she said she had heard that I knew a lot about such things and would I examine her and advise her what to do about it. We went down to her rooms. When I had finished my examination, she wanted to know what I thought about her case. I smiled and answered, 'Just wait a few months and you will get rid of your tumor just as easily as Mrs. W. did hers.' As she had a family of four children, all nearly grown up, she could hardly believe it. But she did and I delivered her not only that time but twice afterward.

Just one more obstetric tale. One evening, after a strenuous day, three obstetric patients were on the wire, almost at once. All three were special friends and I must try to take care of them myself One was a young 59

woman whom I had helped into the world about twenty years before and who had come all the way from her married home in Ohio to be attended by me and have her mother's care. The other two were old patients whom I had attended several times before. One of the patients was a farmer's wife about three miles from town. I went, two or three times, from one to the other of the city patients, finally delivered one and then dashed out to see my country case. When I entered the house, I was saluted, 'Hurry doctor! I have waited hours for you but can't wait another minute.' She didn't. I had arrived just at the right moment. When I got back to my third patient, I had very nearly the same experience.

In my early days in Poughkeepsie there were no specialists in the sense that we look upon them at the present day. There was an eye specialist but he did only refraction work, fitted glasses and so forth. One day, when a lady patient from out of town called on me with cataract of both eyes, which were on long standing—a proper case for operation, I sent her to Vassar Hospital and then called Dr. K., who was on the hospital staff as eye specialist and told him about the patient. His answer was, 'They have no facilities at Vassar for such operations. Send her to New York.' As I had all the facilities required and although I had never done a cataract operation, I decided to operate myself, which I did, assisted

by Dr. Bayley and with a very satisfactory result. From that time I did several eye operations that came to me but after Dr. William G. Dobson became established here, turned all eye work over to him. ...But what changes have taken place since those early days of my practice of medicine and surgery, when I used to do most of my operating in the homes of the patients—when all the babies were born in their mothers' homes. Hospitals were only thought of as places for emergency cases, accidents or for people who had no homes where they could be cared for. The training of a medical student was two or three short terms in a medical college and a three years registration with a licensed physician brought him a diploma. It is only comparatively a few years ago that a law requiring a higher general education for students of medicine was adopted.

Training schools for nurses had hardly been thought of. For many years of my early practice, we hadn't a single trained nurse in Poughkeepse and several times I can remember when it took two or three days to get one from New York. How the idea had grown! In 1887, when Vassar Brothers Hospital was opened, it had not one single room for private pa60

tients and no place for obstetric patients. Look at the change in just one generation. Practically all surgical work is done in our hospitals. Every hospital of any pretension has its training school for nurses. The profession of medicine and surgery is divided into many specialties. ...I well remember my first Caesarian operation. Driving around town, one day, visiting patients, I met one of my doctor-friends, Dr. John S. Wilson. 'Looking for you.' I went with him to see a patient who then had been sixty hours in severe labor, trying to give birth to a child. There were two other doctors already there when we reached the house. I very soon found an obstructed, deformed pelvis and no chance for either mother or child except by a Caesarian operation. We took her to my private hospital and in a few minutes (Dr. Wilson says nineteen minutes), delivered a fine baby boy. Both mother and babe did finely. That was my first, the first ever done in this vicinity,—the first of my series of one hundred and five.

How I did wish, that day, that I had time to go to my library and just have five minutes to look up the technique of that operation. I had never seen the operation performed and had to follow my own ideas of just where and how to operate and how to close the wound, afterward.

That evening, when I found time, I looked over several authors and found that I had an altogether different technique, both in my incision and my suture material. I, however, liked my own plan so well that I always followed it in all my operations. Two or three years later, I was asked to read a paper, on my Caesarians, at the District Branch Medical Society held at Yonkers, where I reported eleven operations, done up to that time, and told my experience and results from having done a somewhat difJohn Wilson Poucher; MD. ferent operation. When I had finished, I expected a lot of criticism. Who should stand up but my friend, Doctor Asa B. Davis, Chief in the New York Woman's Hospital, whose only complaint was that I had adopted the 'high' incision about three 61

months ahead of him, so I had done, what he was calling his operation, before he had, himself.

It was not long before, through the few friends I had known when I came to the city, I could count among my friends and acquaintances many of the finest people and could spend all the time I could spare from my professional duties, enjoying myself with the young people. I was invited to join their assemblies, parties and clubs. As I had spent two winters in Germany, where skating is a favorite outdoor pastime and exercise, I especially enjoyed the skating parties in winter and tennis in summer.

One afternoon, while playing tennis on a private lawn with one of the young ladies, we were driven to a shelter on the house porch by a severe thunder storm. During our conversation, the lady remarked that we should have a tennis club like other towns in our vicinity. We finally agreed to call a meeting and broach the subject. A list of desirable people was invited to meet and the Poughkeepsie Tennis Club was the result.

That was fifty years ago and this club has prospered. At the present time

Poughkeepsie Tennis Club courts, Northeast corner of Market and Montgomery Streets in Poughkeepsie (cu-ca 1892). Dutchess County Historical Society Collection.

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it is a popular resort for all our young people. .[By 1914] I had been spending my vacations, for the past year or two, in a work that greatly interested me—copying old tombstone inscriptions throughout Dutchess County...

This work of preserving old tombstone inscriptions began in 1911 when, one Sunday afternoon, Miss Helen W. Reynolds, in one of our historical talks, mentioned the old family burying ground of the Livingston family, in the Livingston Woods, and what a pity it was that the stones were being scattered and destroyed. We finally got into my buggy, drove down and copied the inscriptions.

Then we decided to copy all the old grave yards in the City and Town of Poughkeepsie and later the rest Livingston Woods (1886). Dutchess County Historical Society of Dutchess County Collection. (Once part of the Livingston estate of "Linlithgow" was added to our (south of Shipyard Point in Poughkeepsie), Livingston Woods task. The result was was that part of the Livingston estate cut offfrom the Hudson River by railroad tracks. It contained the ruins of the Livingston a large book of over family burial grounds which inspired Dr Poucher and historian 19,000 tombstone in- Helen Wilkinson Reynolds to begin their work recording graveinscriptions. For many years, Livingston Woods served as scriptions. This was, stone an unofficial public park.) a few years later, followed by another book of 25,000 inscriptions from the older County of Ulster. These collections can now be found in many of the libraries in the country and will become more valuable as the years pass by and the old tombstones are destroyed or become illegible.

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In the early days of my student life, in my profession, I adopted the motto—Believe in Your Job And Then Give Yourself Up To It—and whatever degree of success I have achieved has come from living as closely to it as possible.

I have always found some time to spare for my two hobbies, acquired in my early childhood—my love for the wild flowers and all things that grow in the fields and my weakness for the study of history. During all the years of Mayflowers, also known as Trailing Arbutus—a parmy professional life, most of ticular favorite of Dr Poucher who spent the last the hours that I could spare years of his life trying to raise public awareness about the impending local extinction of these plants have been spent among my and other vulnerable wildflowers. little friends, in the woods and fields of Dutchess County and in trying to protect them from extermination by writing and working in their behalf. Much of my exercise in late years, has been working in my wild flower garden, which has given me both the exercise I needed and great pleasure.

Many years ago, a party of my friends met, one evening, to discuss the idea of a local historical society. The result of this discussion was the formation of the Dutchess County Historical Society which, I believe, has been a great success and has ranked high among the local historical societies in the country and state. It has brought together many of our citizens who are interested in knowing how our county has developed from the days when their ancestors first came here.

Our Year Book, edited by Helen Wilkinson Reynolds, has contained many items relating to the history of our county and our ancestors, which are not only of interest to us but will interest posterity. This society has honored me, for many years, by electing me as its secretary.

Several years ago, I was honored by being appointed City Historian of Poughkeepsie.

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When my dear wife died, leaving me alone in my home, as both my son and daughter were happily married and living in homes of their own, I decided that as four score years were creeping upon me, to retire from my professional work. I have greatly enjoyed these past two or three years that I have devoted to working in my flowers, writing historical sketches and attending to a few other duties which I enjoy. One of my most enjoyable past times is the time I can spend at the happy homes of my son and daughter and their children—three wonderful grandchildren. What a blessed pleasure, for which I cannot be too thankful, to have them to care for and to care for me."

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Telling the News: An Editor's Story In the era before radio, television and internet, newspapers were a key link between a small town and the outside world. Many communities had multiple papers and competition among them was fierce. In the following first person account written in 1928 by Poughkeepsie EagleNews editor George W. Davids Jr., we see how the rivalry among Poughkeepsie newspapers to outwit and "scoop" each other was as much a part of daily journalism as the news itself. During Davids' years as a journalist, there were five other papers in Poughkeepsie besides his own (The Evening Enterprise, The Evening Star, The News-Telegraph, The News-Press, and the Sunday Courier). Years after the blockbuster stories Davids covered had lost their gripping power, his remembrances of how he got the stories and how the public hungered to read them retain a vibrant immediacy.

George W. Davids, Jr. (1871-1962) was the son of Poughkeepsie's legendary newsman George W. Davids, Sr. who joined the staff of The Eagle the day Fort Sumter was fired on in 1861. Together, father and son served a combined total of 55 years with the Daily Eagle and its successor the Eagle-News. George W. Davids Jr. started his newspaper career shortly after his father's death in 1894 and continued as a reporter and then editor until resigning in 1919 to become General Manager of the Bardavon Theatres Corporation.

George W. Davids, Jr.: "Any newspaper prides itselfin giving to its readers items of news or importance, especially if that paper can 'scoop,' as the newspapermen say, its rivals in the field. ...This was especially noted when the battleship Maine was sunk in Havana harbor. The event inaugurated the outbreak between this country and Spain in the SpanishAmerican war.

On this occasion the night force of The Eagle was preparing to close the wire and send the paper to press. In fact the operator had been given the `30,' the good night signal and was on his way home when the editor got an Associated Press phone call telling him of the rumor that the Maine had been blown up and asking him to recall the operator. It was about

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three o'clock in the morning when the first news of the incident began to trickle over the wire and into The Eagle office. All members of the night force were recalled, some of them having reached their homes and beds.

The front page form had been called back to the composing room and every branch of the mechanical department was pushed to the limit to get the story into type and into the paper for the early morning readers.

When the paper got onto the street, The Eagle office was swamped with telephone calls for additional news of the event because of the fact that no other newspaper that reached Poughkeepsie that morning had contained a single line about the catastrophe.

As additional news reached The Eagle during the morning, bulletins were printed and placed at the corner of Main and Liberty Streets and were read by thousands.

It was a good stroke of newspaper work and The Eagle came in for praise from all parts of the county.

Of course the Spanish-Amer- Remains of the U.S.S. Maine (1895-1898), the American battleship which sank following a massive explosion killing 254 sailors in Haican war and its vana Harbor in 1898. "Remember the Maine, To Hell with Spain!" outcome proved became the rallying cry afew months later when America declared war the sole topic on Spain. Library of Congress. of conversation on the streets for weeks to come. Immediately followed the declaration of war, preparations by the country and the massing of troops to be rushed to Cuba. The reported sailing of the Spanish Armada to meet the 67

United States fleet held everybody in tense expectations. Poughkeepsie was much interested in this coming clash because a well known Poughkeepsian, Captain Robley D. Evans, known as 'Fighting Bob' was in command of one of the battleships. The outcome of this battle and the complete victory of the American navy was greeted with much satisfaction and every movement was printed on Eagle bulletins and posted at Main and Liberty Streets at all hours of the day and night.

It was four o'clock in the morning when the news came of the destruction of the Spanish fleet, and when this news was bulletined it was read by crowds, which had waited through the night. The night editor of The Eagle, with paint pot and brush, posted fully a thousand bulletins during this war and there were as many as eight and ten bulletin boards at the corner of Main and Liberty Streets at one time....

Crowd gathered outside the offices of the Eagle's competitor, the Evening Star on Market Street in Poughkeepsie waiting for the results of the first WWI draft picks, July 20, 1917. Dutchess County Historical Society Collection.

The Eagle also demonstrated its efficiency in giving its readers late and exclusive news during the great San Francisco earthquake. When the news of the first quake was received shortly before midnight, the night editor of The Eagle was attending a dinner at Smith Brothers restaurant being given in his honor by Davy Crockett Hook and Ladder Company.

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Just before the dinner closed, a messenger summoned him to the office where he was greeted by the first news of the quake. Needless to say, every part of the mechanical department in the office was given over to earthquake news, and readers were horrified to learn of the quake in the morning. The news came in such volume and there were so many new developments after the regular paper went to press that The Eagle put an extra on the street before noon, giving columns of additional details and all during this time, the night editor was working in a full dress suit and enjoyed a nine o'clock breakfast of rolls and hot coffee on the imposing stones in the composing rooms with the members of the mechanical department.

Late fires always called for a hustle on the part of reporters and the whole office equipment in order to give the paper's readers the best story in the morning. Noted late fires were those that destroyed the old Poughkeepsie glass works, the Lower Furnace property at the upper landing, the explosion and fire in the old gas house on Laurel Street where several were killed, and the fire that threatened the entire village of Milton in Ulster county. I remember the Milton fire, when it was necessary to write my story on one of the desks saved from the school, the desks standing in the middle of a field and the only light available being that from the flames of the burning village. It was then two o'clock in the morning and as no ferry boats were running, I was rowed across the river to Camelot, where I succeeded in getting a farmer to hitch up his horse and drive me to The Eagle Office. The story soon was rushed into print and the paper appeared at the usual hour on the streets the next morning with all details.

The fire which destroyed the old Morgan House also called for rush work and proved one of the most spectacular fires that ever visited Poughkeepsie. It seemed that nearly everybody in Poughkeepsie had turned out to witness the destruction of the old hotel and at half past four o'clock in the morning while the fire was still under way, newsboys were selling to the spectators copies of the morning Eagle containing a complete story of the fire, together with the amount of the loss and insurance...

Railroad wrecks always called for fast work on the part of the newspapermen, especially morning paper reporters, when the wrecks occurred at night. I remember well the famous Garrison wreck when nearly a score of Chinese were drowned when the coach from Montreal ran off the rails and into the river.

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The Eagle reporter had the first interview given out by General Superintendent Toucey probably because of the fact that Superintendent Toucey was a personal friend of the reporter and had given him a yearly pass on the New York Central good on any train or work train and even on light locomotives. In fact the Eagle reporter went to the Garrison wreck early in the morning on a work train engine. When he jumped up on the engine as it was leaving the Poughkeepsie yard, the engineer yelled, 'Hey, where do you think you're goin'? You've got no right up here, son.' But when the reporter exhibited the pass issued by Superintendent Toucey, the engineer replied, 'Oh, that's all right. Get up on the firemen's seat.' and The Eagle reporter was the first newspaper man at the scene of the wreck. It was on a Sunday morning and as no paper was issued that day, the reporter bulletined all the details and posted the bulletin boards at Main and Liberty Streets...

In the old days of news gathering when there were but few reporters in Poughkeepsie,—not more than one on each paper—every news gatherer was watched for his every move by his rival for fear that one or the other would score a beat, or a 'scoop' as it is known in newspaper parlance.

Then, too, the art of copying news from your neighbor was very much in vogue and finally the city editors got tired of the whole thing and made an effort to stop it.

I remember how one of the Poughkeepsie papers printed in its society column one day an item to the effect that "Count Sweneht Reflipew" was a visitor in Poughkeepsie the day before. Another paper copied the item and the next day the paper that originally carried the mention explained that it had been stolen. In fact it was explained that the Count's name when spelled backwards read "We pilfer the news" and the laugh was on the rival sheet.

But the greatest newspaper stunt to stop stealing news in Poughkeepsie was 'pulled off' by the night editor of The Eagle News many years ago, probably twenty five years or more ago [circa 1900], when the old Dutchess County Telephone Company was in operation. The Eagle's night editor had noticed on various occasions that many of the important news items that came to him over the Dutchess County Telephone invariably appeared in the other Poughkeepsie morning paper, the NewsPress. The practice became so persistent that plans were laid to put a stop to the thefts once and for all and this is what was done. Shortly before two o'clock one morning, the night editor hurriedly ran off on his

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typewriter a short story to the effect that a large barn near Salt Point had been burned to the ground early that morning, destroying a large amount of hay and a number of horses and heads of cattle. The story, which was made up of whole cloth and did not contain a single trace of truth, also stated that a strange man was seen running away from the burning barn and it was evident that he had set fire to the building.

The night editor gave this typewritten story to the night foreman, Lewis E. Lansing, with instructions to go to Travis Brothers livery stable on upper Main Street and phone the story into The Eagle over the Dutchess County Telephone. In less than a half hour, The Eagle phone tinkled and the night editor was getting his own framed up story over the phone. In order that the operator in central might get the whole story, the night editor asked Mr. Lansing to repeat practically every statement over the wire. The editor thanked the informant for the 'big news item' and hung up.

That same morning the Eagle's rival, the News-Press, appeared on the streets with a big front page headline telling of the great fire near Salt Point and adding that the glow from the big fire could be plainly seen from Poughkeepsie. The central operator in the office of the telephone company had stolen the item word for word and immediately turned it over to the News-Press. The morning after the appearance of the story in the News-Press, the Eagle exposed the whole matter under a one-word heading—' Stung!' There was a hurried conference that day of the officials of the telephone company, the operator was discharged and 'stung' was a by-word in the Poughkeepsie newspaper field for a long time." ("Former Managing Editor Recalls Famous Beats Scored by The Eagle" and "How News Stealing Was Ended" by George W. Davids, Poughkeepsie Eagle, September 22, 1928)

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John Burroughs

Neighbor

There is a long history in Dutchess County of having famous people as neighbors. But few have shared this experience as charmingly as writer Leonora Sill Ashton. In 1951, at the age of 73, Ashton wrote the following recollection of her girlhood years spent studying the natural world alongside her neighbor, the celebrated naturalist John Burroughs (1837-1921). By the time Ashton met Burroughs, his rustic West Park retreat "Slabsides" had already become a pilgrimage destination for nature lovers from around the world. But as the daughter of the Rector of St. James Church in Hyde Park, Ashton knew Burroughs as a neighbor from across the river who travelled via the local steamship line just like everyone else. Her desire to capture and publish her own personal history with Burroughs reflects her awareness of the unique contribution her first person account would make to our understanding of Burroughs' life.

Leonora Sill Ashton: "Much has been written about John Burroughs by those who traveled to visit him at Slabsides and Riverby, near West Park, New York. They have given us interesting memories of this famous man, but to my family, who lived at Hyde Park directly across the Hudson River from West Park, John Burroughs was known as one of the friendly neighbors of everyday life, and that is the way we like best to remember him.

My first sight of Mr. Burroughs was on board the Robert Main, a small steamboat which made two trips each day up and down the Hudson River between Rondout, New York and Poughkeepsie.

Standing with my father on the Hyde Park dock, I had watched the puffing little craft stop at the West Park landing across the river, then turn to plow its way across the stream to where we were waiting to climb aboard. Once on the boat, my father without delay entered into conversation with an old man who was sitting on the deck.

I wish I knew what the two men talked about that afternoon, but I was a child at the time, and I was absorbed by the face of this stranger with the snowy beard. That face was shadowed by an old felt hat pulled forward above the brow, but not far enough to hide a pair of keen, squinting eyes.

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Why did the stranger squint like that? We were all three on the shady side of the boat and the sky was overcast.

There was no glare.

The day was not far distant when I was to learn that the lines in his brow were caused by those eyes scanning the heights of blazing noonday skies, the depths of woodland thickets, the blinding surfaces of snow and ice, in search of fleeting glimpses of the flash of bright wings through the air, or the long, patient gaze at movements of furtive feathered creatures hovering near their nests and eggs.

John Burroughs. Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Library of Congress.

'Who was that old man you talked to on the boat'?' I asked my father later.

'That was John Burroughs,' he replied. 'He with John James Audubon and Henry David Thoreau comprise our greatest American naturalists.

In years to come, remember you had him for a neighbor.'

Following that first sight of our distinguished neighbor I was to see and talk to John Burroughs many times. Often this would be in our study at Hyde Park. Mr. Burroughs always asked to sit in that room when he came to see us. He said he liked to see the books lining the walls. Besides, outside the door on top of one of the vine-hung posts of the study piazza was a wren's nest. It had been there many years. Peaked with snow in the winter, the birds would come to it every spring. Season after season a brood of nestlings was hatched there, among the purple blooms of the wisteria.

John Burroughs was always interested to hear the tales we young people had to tell him. He was especially pleased one day with a story about 73

the large darning needle from my mother's work basket, which was lost, searched for, and finally discovered clinging to its own thread of cotton which had been neatly woven in and out of the many fibred elements of a Baltimore Oriole's nest. The long, shiny thing hung like a pendant from the bottom of the gray pocket swaying on a bough.

John Burroughs. Photo by Clifton Johnson.

He was also pleased with the tale about our watching a honey bee open several blossoms of a closed gentian, disappear in the blue depths one by one and then come out and fly off, leaving the petals open to the sun and sky.

The days of those visits of John Burroughs to our house were red letter ones, but the trips we made to see him at Slabsides held wonder hours for us. The first time we went, he met us at the West Park dock and led us up the now familiar trail to Slabsides. This was during the month of May, and as we started off past Riverby with its vineyards, shad blow was in bloom, white among the still brown trees, and bloodroot and hepatica were flowering on the ground. The way took us over half a mile along a country road. This was followed by a mile of climbing up a rough mountain pathway winding through the trees.

There was only one real pause on that first trail to Slabsides. That was beside a meadow, lying along the road. John Burroughs stood still and pointed to the field. 'That is the place where I saw and heard the English skylark,' he told us. 'Where he went eventually, I do not know, but there 74

he was one day, a year ago this coming June, soaring up from the grass, as though his throat would burst with happiness.'

Later we were to learn that a resident of West Park had brought a skylark home from Europe and reared it in captivity. This was doubtless the one John Burroughs saw, but the prosaic explanation of the unexpected appearance of the bird stole nothing from the magic which he brought to the telling of his story. After this, there was little loitering on that climb.

Slowly, steadily, we traveled until we came upon a break in the woods, and there it was—Slabsides!

The picture of the comfortable, rustic building as we saw it during its owner's lifetime is still bright in my mind. Also, the rugged cliffs and the hemlock woods which shut it in on one side. What a perfect background that was for the birds as they flitted in and out among the green boughs!

In the preface of John Burroughs' life of Audubon he writes that we have had many scientific ornithologists in America but never one who had Audubon's 'poetic fervour' in the study of birds. He apparently did not realize what a close kinship he and the great birdman had in this respect.

To John Burroughs, birds were ever the unfailingly changeless objects in a changing world. Friends might move to distant places, he reasoned; events of life move relentlessly on, but year after year, in garden or orchard, one heard the birds of one's youth giving the same calls, singing the same songs.

There were many birds at Slabsides on that day of our first visit. Orioles were singing in the trees, goldfinches called and John Burroughs' own wrens that had a perpetual home on one of the cedar posts, warbled, and warbled again. A catbird sang nearby, and an indigo bunting just once, flashed his blue wings through the evergreens.

'The birds were not here when I first came,' John Burroughs explained.

'They followed me here. Birds are sociable beings. They like human companionship as much as they like berries to eat. That is why they flock to gardens where there are flowers, shrubs, vines and—people.'

Up the steps to the door of Slabsides he paused, holding the latch string in his hand. Above it, acting as a door knob we saw a gnarled, curiously twisted piece of the root of a tree. 'That,' he said, 'is a queer piece of 75

root that I found when we were digging up stumps for the celery garden.

When the girls from Vassar come to see me, I tell them it is the Japanese emblem for "Slabsides." 'And,' here he pointed to some unmistakable holes in the slabs surrounding the door, 'there is where some woodpeckers have been tapping at my house. They must think they have discovered a new kind of tree where a giant woodpecker has come to live.'

In the Slabsides sitting room, familiar to so many visitors, both famed and unknown, my sister and I plied John Burroughs with questions.

'Which would he rather write about, literary subjects, or birds and trees and flowers?'

The answer was not long in coming. 'If you had asked me which was easier to write about I would have said birds, Noon Meditations at Slabsides c. 1901. Library of Congress. trees and flowers,' he told us. 'When I write about the natural world, I know just what I want to say. I see its objects before me, or am able to picture them in my memory. It is not difficult to put my thoughts about them into words, but when I want to write about the world of literature—even the work of one man— such a vast expanse of material opens in my mind that it bewilders me. I must sift and sort and choose, from the subject matter, what seem the salient facts to deal with before I put pen to paper. But then,' he added after an instant's pause, 'I never can write about anything, unless the idea of doing so brings a warm feeling around my heart.'

He told us many tales of birds and other wildlife around Slabsides in the days that followed that first visit. We heard of the partridge that built her nest in an overgrown path of the woods near the house; of John Burroughs' loneliness on winter days there; of the silence and remoteness 76

which would have weighed heavily upon his sociable nature had it not been for the presence of the winter wren, the juncos and chickadees; of finding the tracks of quail in the snow and hearing crows and bluejays screaming in the trees.

We learned that when the winter waned, John Burroughs took trips through the surrounding woods for the express purpose of collecting pieces of dead trees in which woodpeckers had made their nests. Later these were set up in the trees around Slabsides for the wrens and bluebirds to build in.

My sister and I were rabid bird hunters in those days. How we gloated over the lists of those which John Burroughs named as having seen around the cabin in the woods. In June, he told us the rubycrowned kinglet would come, the purple finch, 'one of our finest songsters,' the goldencrowned thrush, the wood thrush, the red and whiteeyed vireos, the Blackburnian warbler.

The warblers, with John Burroughs picking wildflowers. Photo by Clifton Johnson. the dates of their arrival along the Hudson, were as familiar to John Burroughs as the arrival of robins are to most of us. There was one great quest of his which, up to that time, I don't believe he had ever realized. That was the discovery of a hummingbird's nest—the discovery with his own eyes of one 77

of those miniature circles of fern wool and plant down, shingled with lichens, matching in color the bark of the tree on which it was built.

One day when we visited Slabsides we found two of these small miracles in the cabin. They had been brought to Mr. Burroughs by friends who had found them and treasured them for him. Of course, they were given a place of high honor on the cabin shelf. I can picture him now as he stood, pointing those two nests out to us, touching them with a gentle finger, and his plaintive voice still seems to sound in my memory, when he said, 'Perhaps I have hunted too hard for them.'

One day, out by the cool waters of the spring where miterwort and foam flower were blossoming, John Burroughs cut a willow branch and made whistles for us, conscientiously trying each separate one to see if it would 'blow.' Then again, he cut penholders from the stems of cat-onine-tails, and fitted some of his famous stub pen points—which he used alternately with his quill pen in the straight line shafts.

Such are the memories—and there are many more—of John Burroughs which emerge from those of our youthful years spent on the banks of the Hudson River. Since leaving our home there, we have often asked ourselves, 'How did this busy grape and celery farmer, this essayist of penetrating literary analysis, this composer in poetry, as well as prose, of narrative gems of the American countryside, find time to spend hours and days as the ungrudging host of all those who came to visit him?'

The answer to the question might be that, like the birds he loved, John Burroughs was intrinsically sociable, but we believe the reason lies deeper.

In one of his 'Journals,' Thoreau writes that in the spring of the year the note of the meadowlark leaks up from the field as if 'its bill had been thawed by the warm sun.' From a long acquaintance with John Burroughs it appears to us that his entire intercourse with people was that of a man in whom the frozen, restrictive attributes, common to a greater or less degree in the mind of humans, had been thawed away in the warmth of intense friendly interest in his fellow beings, a warmth which flowed forth as freely and spontaneously as that from the sunlight itself. This is the picture our family holds in its memory of our one-time neighbor, John Burroughs."

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(Reprinted by permission of Audubon magazine. This article appeared in the 1951 March-April issue of Audubon.)

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Guarding the Roosevelts National Park Service security guard Gilbert Calhoun began his employment at the FDR Historic Site in February of 1946 less than a year after FDR's death in April, 1945. Thirty-three years later in 1978, Calhoun was interviewed by FDR Library oral historian Emily Williams about his experiences keeping vigil over FDR's grave at a time when grieving citizens from around the nation were making pilgrimages to FDR's Hyde Park home. During the 14 years Calhoun served with the National Park Service in Hyde Park, he also frequently protected Eleanor Roosevelt during her visits to the FDR Home and Library. Thanks to the recording of oral histories, the unusual perspectives and surprising insights of people like Calhoun are no longer lost to history.

Gilbert Calhoun: When I first reported for duty it was early February of 1946...Our biggest problem was trying to keep the general public from coming into the home grounds and around the gravesite which was closed to the public in those days. There were no barriers at the gravesite to keep the public out. During nights we were instructed to turn people back that would be walking all the way from Route 9 after the FDR Library entrance gates were closed. Many infiltrated the grounds, and were asked to leave...

We did have some problems with people by their sheer numbers trying to push their way over the guards on duty to get to the gravesite.

There was an opening in the hemlock hedge between the library and the home at the northeasterly portion of the grave. Many persons would push their way to the gravesite at that point, and we would have to turn them around. People would trample the rose beds that we were trying to get in shape for the opening date [of FDR's home as a historic site]...

April the 12th, 1946, President Harry Truman was here for the official dedication...One thing very amusing, that kind of distracted from the dedication ceremony, was the appearance of Frank Sinatra. The women and all the young people screaming and shouting veered away from the ceremonies to see Frank Sinatra. We had some difficulty getting him out of the scene off to one side so the dedication ceremony could continue.

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Eleanor Roosevelt with the March of Dimes Poster Child laying a wreath on FDR's grave, January 30, 1956. FDR Library and Archives. (This ceremony was part of the annual observance of FDR's birthday. In her January 30, 1954 "My Day" newspaper column, Mrs. Roosevelt noted: "Saturday morning Igo to Hyde Parkfor the usual ceremonies at my husband's grave at 11:30 a.m. The March of Dimes Poster Child always comes up to lay a wreath on my husband's grave and the President also sends a wreath which is laid by the Commandantfrom West Point, Major General Irving. The group usually comes to my cottage afterwards. ')

Emily Williams: Most of the people who were trying to get in before the site was open to the public, were they mostly curiosity seekers, or were they Roosevelt worshippers?

GC: Well, I would say a combination of both. You know, right after the president's death and knowing he was buried here in Hyde Park, there were very, very many highly emotional people who were Roosevelt fans trying to enter the grounds. It was not unusual when turning these people back at the entrance gate along Route 9 they would be crying and very emotionally upset. We did the best we could to explain the circumstances and apologize to them that it couldn't be open for various reasons.

When we found that the site would be open to the public April 12th, very shortly, it did help to console some of the people but not those who had travelled clear across the United States and some from foreign countries that happened to be in this area.

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EW: You had spoken to me earlier that you had one very important visitor before the site was open to the public.

GC: Yes. I was quite surprised. It was the later part of February, and I happened to be on day-duty at the gravesite and in the general vicinity. The gravesite could not be left unattended in those days. We had a small, temporary shelter that we occupied during inclement weather on the west end of the path at the gravesite. Someone had to be near the gravesite at all times so the stone wouldn't be damaged by souvenir seekers if they infiltrated and got near the grave.

When I was on duty at the grave we received word that Winston Churchill was going to visit to pay his respects at the gravesite, and a little later that day a special contingent was let in through the home site gate, not through the FDR Library entrance gate.. .1 was quite surprised to see prime minister Churchill coming to the grave. All I can recall about the prime minister at that time—he appeared to be feeble, had to be assisted and used a cane, and he had in his mouth a large black cigar that used to be identified with him in those days. It was a very quiet time at the grave.

He stood with his head bowed for a short period of time, and then the party went to the home and of course let him go into the home perhaps to reminisce on previous visits to the area when the president had him at Hyde Park as his guest...

EW: When Mrs. Roosevelt came into the grave that time with Churchill, was that the first time you had ever seen her?

GC: That is, I believe the first time I did see Mrs. Roosevelt in person— and then many, many times later. She was just a wonderful woman. We used to have minor parking problems with Johnny and Franklin [sons of Eleanor Roosevelt and FDR]. When a special person would visit here, such as Trygve Lie (head of the United Nations), or some ambassador or diplomat, I would be with Mrs. Roosevelt, waiting for the official party to arrive. We had space for several sedans and limousines to park, and Johnny and one of the other boys would arrive also with guests in their cars. The guard on duty in the parking lot would tell them where to park, but they would come on up and park pretty much where they'd like to park. Mrs. Roosevelt could detect something was out of line by the expression on our faces and some of the conversation going on. She would ask me, "Is there something wrong, Mr. Calhoun?" I said, "Well, we're going to have a little problem because that area has been reserved 82

for the official party, and I think Johnny's parked in the wrong place."

She said, "I'll handle Johnny." And then Johnny'd come over, "Mother?"

And she would say, "The first thing you do, John, is move your car right now, and you park where you're told to park." The usual reply was, "Yes, Mother." We learned to handle the boys through Mrs. Roosevelt. It made it much easier for us...

EW: She [Eleanor Roosevelt] didn't like, when she was in the White House, having secret service protection. How did she react to the kind of protection that was being furnished here?

GC: I don't think we provided that same degree of protection. Our instructions were from the beginning that Mrs. Roosevelt is NEVER to be left unattended at any time on the grounds. We did work out an arrangement with the staff, later with Mr. Linada, who was the first chauffeur working for Mrs. Roosevelt over there in the Val-Kill area, and later with Tubby Cuman and the staff over at Val-Kill that any time Mrs. Roosevelt left to come to the home we wanted them to call us and let us know so we could be prepared. We'd pass the word around. And it was our position to be with her at all times.

Many times she did come unannounced. The first person who spotted her would call, and ANYONE would stop what they were doing and stay with her for her protection because people, in trying to meet and greet her, would probably rush and push and mob her. ...I spent many a time with her on these occasions, and she didn't like any roughhousing or grabbing people or pushing them aside. We made that a practice that we would try to convince the people, maybe thrust an arm up, but not push them, just to let them know they couldn't get any closer. I think she accepted that. In fact, I would say in the later years, when Mrs. Roosevelt found it a little more difficult to get around, she objected less at our actions to control the crowds around her...

EW: Did you ever get the feeling maybe she was a little wistful or unhappy in any way at coming for a public occasion to what had been her home?

GC: No, I didn't get that impression at all.

EW: You'd think it might be a natural reaction.

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GC: Personally I had heard Mrs. Roosevelt say to some visitor, "You must remember this was Sara's home," and she has said more than once to different people, "This was Mama's home." I think that she impressed upon all of us that up until the death of Sara Roosevelt, this had been her mother-in-law's home, and of course, the family lived with her. No, I don't think Mrs. Roosevelt ever was wistful about visiting the home at

Mrs. Roosevelt used to bring Fala with her over to the home, of course on a leash. I remember one day she forgot the leash in the car, and she was carrying Fala in her arms for some reason. As she came up the front door to go into the house, she wanted to know if she could put Fala down. As she set him down, Fala just scurried up the steps and ran all the way down to FDR's bedroom. That's where we found him. He had jumped up on the foot of the president's bed up there, and evidently the dog had run under the gates in the hallway near Mrs. E. Roosevelt's

Eleanor Roosevelt with her two Scotties, Fala and Fala s' grandson Tamas in 1951. FDR Library and Archives. (Mn. Roosevelt wrote of her Scotties, "Tamas can make his grandfather dash around the house and upset all the rugs better than half a dozen children. They remind me very much of people—they have so many traits that wefind in ourselves. When I'm up in the country 1 take them walking three times a day—once before breakfast, once in the morning, and again in the afternoon." "My Day" column: March 5, 1948)

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bedroom and come around and jumped right up on the bed. I believe it was after I left Hyde Park that Fala died—no, it was before. Fala's gravesite is right behind the president's stone. I do remember when Mrs. Roosevelt came over for that quiet little ceremony.

EW: One of the sons reports of that ceremony, he said, "Mother didn't cry at father's funeral, but she cried when they buried Fala."

GC: Yes. I really think Fala was a great comfort to her. She'd come over, and Fala would always be with her...Once in a while, when she wanted to do something, one of us would be dog-tender for her. We didn't mind that a bit. We'd take Fala out into the kitchen of the home, which was closed to the public at that time, and keep him out there with us while she went on through the home. Later she'd come and reclaim Fala again and take off for Val-Kill...

I still look back over that fourteen years I spent here in Hyde Park in what I call the peak years of the area. It was an experience I'll never forget—all our associations with the State Department so we'd be better able to serve the national groups and State Department guests, VIPs and dignitaries. I believe one thing the National Park Service may be proud of [was] we handled many of these incidents with NO great problems at all. We did it with the staff here on site, augmented by the state police and other local law enforcement entities to meet our overall responsibilities. We didn't have to bring in droves of federal police to help with all these security problems. That's quite an accomplishment. I think Mrs. Roosevelt knew that.

She didn't like the security thing, shoulder to shoulder, back to back, nightsticks and all that. That just wasn't the style that would please her, but she knew that if anything happened somebody'd be right at her side whom she could rely on at all times. I think she gave us a different perspective into what security can be. She would make known many times, "I'd rather not see this," or not that. I think we profited by our association with her, too. Even today, I look back and see that we did things then through her help and her points of view that we still practice today in different areas of the service, so the association at Hyde Park has been all good. I've seen a lot of days when I wished the crowds would go home; we were outnumbered ten to one. But just to be around Mrs. Roosevelt and work with her was very pleasant. I've seen some days when I wished she hadn't come over (on a busy day). We were having other problems, 85

but nevertheless when she was here it seemed like everything went fine.

[There were] two small occasions when we did have some really fresh, pushy people where we had to take direct action. I don't think these type people really intended her any harm; [they were] just very emotionally charged. They just practically worshipped her and in trying to approach

Security guards and dignitaries follow Mrs. Roosevelt and Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev during his visit to the FDR Library and Home in September of 1959. FDR Library and Archives. (Mrs. Roosevelt described the visit matter of factly: "Mr. Khrushchev explained to me that he had not come here to Hyde Parkfor pleasure, but hadfelt it was his duty to pay his respects to my husbands memory. As he had told me before, hefelt that my husband understood the needs and aspirations of the Soviet Union. There were a good many people who wanted a glimpse of this man who to most Americans symbolizes something which is certainly not very good. But, nevertheless, they are curious about him and about his country and even about the economic and ideological beliefs that he holds." "My Day" column: September 19, 1959)

her they could really cause some problems. They are the ones we had to tone down. I call it, the step up plan, where one must take a little more drastic action, nothing violent, but be more forceful for her protection.

EW: I really appreciate your relating this for us.

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History in the Papers Newspaper publishers have long understood that oral history and first hand news accounts have a valuable place in local journalism. Interviewing community legends as they look back on "days gone by" or drawing "pen pictures" of venerable community institutions has traditionally been the province of the local newspaper's "feature writer."

Both journalists and oral historians must develop the highest levels of skill in the art of interviewing. And though their purposes, techniques and standards differ, journalists and oral historians search for truth with a similar set of tools. Articles like the following from Poughkeepsie New Yorker reporter Helen Myers demonstrate the considerable contributions journalists can make to the recording of local history.

Four samples of Myers' work from the 1940s and 1950s are included here in honor of the Poughkeepsie Journal's 225th anniversary in 2010.

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There Was Bustle But No Hustle

by Helen Myers (Poughkeepsie New Yorker, May 9, 1948) Merchants who talk about the good old days of 40 years ago must see the past through a rosy haze, Edward F. Cary of 24 Garfield Place says.

It's a far cry from the dingy shops of 1911 to the brilliant places of today, from the 60 hour week to 40 hours, from secret cost marks to plain and honest price tags...

"Just consider our hours," Mr. Cary said. "We used to begin work at 6 or 6:15 or 6:20. Monday night we worked until 9. Saturday night until any time after 10. With us it was theoretically a 59-hour week. Most of them had a 60-hour week."

Mr. Cary retired as vice president of Luckey Platt and Company in February [of 1948]. He began work there July 1, 1911, as buyer of first floor merchandise, helping the buyers and managers of various departments.

All the Main Street stores were constructed by genial architects of their period in 20 or 22 foot sections, about 80 feet deep, Mr. Cary said. Most of the stores used half of their frontage for a display window in 1911, the other half for an entrance.

"Of course the display windows were smaller than they are now," he said. "There wasn't the emphasis on display or advertising that there is now. No one thinks anything today of two pages of advertising. At that time, if you had two columns you had a lot. A four-column ad was really big."

"For your window decorations you made a T stand and draped your goods on that. Or you had a form with a head that could be screwed on.

By my time they had pretty good forms, anatomically good. The faces were well-made."

"There are styles in display figures just as there are in everything else...

About eight or ten years ago Katharine Hepburn became famous. Pretty

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soon all the display figures had a Hepburn nose. A girl would go to the movies and admire Hepburn. Then she would see a dress on a display figure that looked like the girl she had admired on the screen, so she would buy the dress. Modern advertising and window display are examples of better understanding of psychology."

When he began work at Luckey Platt and Company, the store already had one large window in front of three of the typical 20 foot sections that it had remodeled as one unit. It also had two smaller windows in front of two additional sections.

On the inside, pillars were used instead of walls in the remodeled section but that part was still separated from the remainder of the store by partial walls. It wasn't until 1926, when the firm bought three additional sections, that the store was given its present appearance. Then all the dividing windows were removed and a new front and side were built.

Luckey's, like other city stores of the period, was dimly lighted in 1911.

There were very few glass cases, so comparatively little goods were on display. Clerks brought out the goods, on request, and showed them on wooden counters. An overhead change trolley was then in use.

"We had electric light," Mr. Cary said, "but the old gas fixtures were still in place, too, for use in an emergency. We thought we were very good to have four foot-candles. Now you have to have 15 or it's just too bad, and some stores have 18 or 20."

He explained that store lighting is measured by foot-candles, the amount of light that reaches a counter. This is in direct relationship to the number of feet that counter is from the source of light. If a 25 or 40 watt bulb is used, you will have about four foot-candles of light at the counter.

When a clerk made a sale in 1911, she put the customer's money and a sales ticket in a little box that she placed on a constantly moving rope.

This rope carried the box to the third floor where George Smith made change and sent the box back.

"That system was supposed to be very marvelous when the store put it in," Mr. Cary said. "Luckey's was always having the latest. It saved having eight cash boys, one of whom was Casper Koenig who's still in the store. If you bought a pair of stockings, one of these boys would take your money to the back of the store, 80 feet back, and set the change at 89

Luckey Platt Department Store, founded in 1869. Numerous expansions saw the store swallow up several surrounding buildings in a drive to become the handsomest and most comprehensive department store between Albany and New York. Dutchess County Historical Society Collection.

a wicket very much like a teller's window in a bank. That was before my time. I thought the overhead trolley was pretty punk. It was replaced about three or four years after I came with the tube system."

90

—

A. Atka KEYt-PI, A/7 & CO

UCKE; t. PLS

• ,01(

tot

pc .

(Above) Luckey s' before and (below) Luckey s' after its final expansion in 1923 designed by architect Edward C. Smith.

"In 1911, Mr. Webster Knickerbocker kept all the silks wrapped in reddish brown paper, so that the light wouldn't fade them, on the shelves back of his counter, with three bolts to a shelf. When a customer asked to see these silks, Mr. Knickerbocker would seat her, then unfold bolt after bolt. Perhaps she wanted silk for a skirt," Mr. Cary said.

"She would pay $3 a yard. Skirts were then five ve yards around the bottom. She would buy six, seven or eight yards, depending on the number of furbelows she wanted. The swing skirts that the youngsters think are so new are based on those of 1911."

"You could buy a very good pair of stockings in those days for 29 cents.

Lisle ones, of course. Shoes came up to here," Mr. Cary said, touching the top of his ankle, and skirts down to there, touching the ankle bone, "so there was no point in having anything but utility in stockings. These 91

stockings were usually black, although some women, for the sake of cleanliness or purity, wore white stockings with their white petticoats.

Ball shoes might be colored, but street shoes were black and buttoned."

"Hats were all made individually," Mr. Cary said, "and $25 was a popular price. Such a hat was really a creation. A milliner was an artiste, a prima donna. She was one of the best paid people in the store, and worth it, too. When a woman came in for a hat," he said, "the milliner would seat her, then try on various shapes until one was found that suited the taste of the customer and the milliner. Then the milliner would try various ribbons until one was selected and its arrangement agreed upon. After that there was the problem of flowers or feathers and...position."

"It wasn't a matter of rush for style," he said. "People didn't copy the movie queens. There weren't any movie queens to copy. The milliner and the individual worked out the best shape and trimming for the particular woman who would wear the hat. It was a matter of an hour and a half or two hours to make the selections, and when you had a hat like that it lasted two or three years. Yes, it must have been fun to make such a hat. It was fun to wear one too. When you went to church with a creation like that you made AN IMPRINT." "Although Luckey Platt and company didn't, many stores of that period used secret cost or price marks," he said. "A triangle might indicate three, a square four. Or a code word such as Washington might be used, because it has 10 letters. In that case, ' wh l' would indicate that the price of the article was $1.45. Only the clerks were supposed to know that."

He used to have a book with 10 secret cost marks in it, he said. He'd go from store to store to see which they were using. Sometimes a store would use one secret mark one year and another the next, to fool the public still more. Secret cost marks were used in several stores as late 92

as 1920.

But the changes aren't all on the credit side of the ledger. "The stores had lots of lovely things in 1911," he said, "genuine things. Real silk.

Lovely damask tablecloths in six standard patterns. Nice jewelry, such as beautiful cameo brooches instead of costume jewelry. Lovely glass and china. Fine carpets."

"A store expected to carry 15 or 20 standard patterns of china," he said.

"If a lady broke a cup, she could walk in and replace it. This was English bone china, bone because it was fired so heavily it was brittle as a bone.

Of course, it was a terrific investment for a store."

"But you could plan on selling 1,000 sets of china or glassware, sit down leisurely with the manufacturer, select his patterns, schedule deliveries during the next two years, and kilow that you would receive unbroken merchandise on the agreed on dates."

"That seems fantastic in 1948," he said. "Mexican ware, domestic china and earthen ware have taken the place of English bone china. You buy whatever you can, wherever you can. Orders are frequently given for half as much again as you expect to receive. The date of shipment, sometimes the price is optional with the manufacturer. Breakage in transit is disgraceful and the quality-price relationship is constantly changing."

"Then take carpets. In 1911, people had pride in their carpets. They believed that a nice carpet was fundamental as the beautiful foundation for a room. Now they get along with a few throw rugs. If they have a 9 by 12 rug in their living room, they think it's wonderful."

"What use are carpets in a five room house?" he asked. "It's linoleum in the kitchen, linoleum in the bath, maybe linoleum in the dining room so a rug won't be spoiled if the children drop something. We're getting smaller and poorer all the tme. Grandeur and richness can't exist at our economic level. It all goes back to the waste and haste of war, two wars in our generation. Impatience, lack of continuity have gotten into our character. We don't want things that are fine and lasting any more. We want what's new and fashionable..."

(Helen Myers' work is reprinted by permission of the Poughkeepsie Journal.)

93

Prowlers, Deliriums, the Pest House Held No Fears

by Helen Myers (Poughkeepsie New Yorker, December 10, 1950) It was very, very early, and time to make rounds again, one spring morning in 1892. Most of the 30 odd patients of Vassar Hospital's four wards were sleeping. Seventeen-year-old Martha Karnofski, a first-year student and the only nurse on duty, stood fearfully in the doorway of the women's surgical ward with a lighted candle in her hand.

She peered anxiously down the corridor that separated the men's and women's surgical wards. That corridor was dimly lighted at either end with a gas jet that was turned way down. The middle section was a dark cavern, and it was that part that she feared, specifically the area nearest the pharmacy and its silent occupant.

She moved down the corridor just enough to be out of sight of any wakeful patients in the women's ward. Then she gathered her sweeping uniform skirt and stiffly starched petticoat in her free hand, lifted her candle, and ran as fast as she could. Just before she reached the doorway of the men's surgical ward she dropped her skirts and walked in with the dignity befitting a nurse. She didn't want any of the patients to know that she had run past the pharmacy.

Young Martha Karnofski is now Mrs. Robert Ogden, a resident of the Old Ladies' Home. When members of the staff of Vassar Hospital want to know anything about the old days at the hospital they ask Mrs. Ogden or Mrs. Robert C. Workman of 10 Vassar View Road. Mrs. Ogden was graduated in the class of '94, the second at the hospital, and Mrs. Workman a year later. She was then Mary Jane Blass, the first Pine Plains girl to become a trained nurse.

There were just nine student nurses when Mrs. Ogden began training, three in the class of '93 and six in hers. Miss Gertrude Deyo, a graduate of Orange Memorial Hospital in Orange, N.J. was "head nurse" and the only graduate on the staff. There were no interns or orderlies. In fact, the students had never heard of an intern.

94

Although paying patients who were too ill to be moved to a New York City hospital were occasionally admitted at Vassar, it was a free hospital for Poughkeepsie's poor. There were 40 beds in the four wards. The men's and women's surgical wards were on the first floor, the men's and women's medical wards on the second. The original hospital building is now the west end of the Main building.

Construction of Vassar Brothers Hospital, designed by architect Frederick Clark Withers, began in 1884. The hospital opened in April of 1887. The last surviving part of the original main building was demolished in 1982. Dutchess County Historical Society Collection.

About 100 or 150 feet from the hospital there was a two-room building, "the pest house." Patients with contagious diseases such as scarlet fever, diptheria or typhoid were treated there. The patient used one room and the nurse who was assigned to care for him the other. The two remained alone in the building until the patient recovered or died.

During the first year and a half of Mrs. Ogden's two-year course of training just one student nurse was on duty each night unless some very sick patient required the services of a "floater." Each student was assigned to a month of night duty every three months.

Once every hour she was expected to make the rounds of the entire hospital to make certain that all was well. If a real emergency arose, she could telephone to Dr. Bayley who had a home on the grounds. Otherwise, she was on her own.

In those days, if a patient died after lOpm, he was taken to the pharmacy until morning. Young Martha Karnofski, "Miss Kay" to the hospital staff and the patients, wasn't afraid to be on duty alone at night, although Liv95

ingston's Woods then grew almost to the doors.

She wasn't afraid of prowlers. She wasn't afraid of delirious patients, even of those with delirium tremens. She wasn't afraid of an assignment in the pest house. But during her first months of training, she had a great and unreasoning fear of the dead, and Miss Deyo was determined to break her of that fear.

Someone must have told her how 17-year-old "Miss Kay" ran down the hall past the pharmacy when there was an occupant there at night.

One day, Miss Deyo called the girl into the pharmacy and told her she

Vassar Hospital nursing students in their blue gingham blouses with stiff clerical collars. Dutchess County Historical Society Collection.

96

was going to lock the student there with the very next patient that died.

"Miss Kay" would be required to wash the body and prepare it for the undertaker.

Dr. Bayley happened to walk in and hear that conversation and he "put his foot down." He wouldn't permit Miss Deyo to lock the student in the pharmacy but in some way the threat cleared the air. "Miss Kay" was never again afraid of the dead, never again gathered up her skirts to run past the pharmacy door. "I don't think she intended to be cruel," Mrs. Ogden said. "She was just very strict, but strict as she was, we loved her."

"It's hard to put it into words," Mrs. Workman said, "But Dr. Bayley and Miss Deyo were like a father and mother to us. You felt their constant care. They looked after our manners and our morals. They were particular about our training. He was especially particular about our eating habits. He'd check with Miss Deyo to make sure that we were eating as we should, especially if we were eating rare roast beef. If we didn't like it, we had to learn to like it. In winter we had to wear flannels, long drawers, long-sleeved shirts, and flannel petticoats. Every winter, Dr. and Mrs. Bayley took us sleighing in their cutter. They'd take one or two of us at a time until everybody had had a ride. Before we went on such a ride Miss Deyo had to check to make sure we were wearing our long underwear and flannel petticoats. That was one of her duties."

Mrs. Ogden doesn't remember Dr. Bayley's emphasis on rare roast beef, but she does remember that the meals at the hospital were excellent. The cook was Swedish and everything she prepared was delicious. The food must have been good. "Miss Kay" grew two inches while she was in training. One day she told Miss Deyo that she couldn't understand why her uniforms had shrunk when those of the other nurses hadn't. "It isn't your uniforms. It's you," the head nurse told her. "Don't you realize that you're growing?"

The nurses used to have fruit, oatmeal with pure cream, bacon and eggs, toast and coffee for breakfast. The other meals were as abundant except when you were on night duty. Then you were expected to work from 7pm until 6am on perhaps three prunes and a couple of slices of bread.

The nurses could make tea if they wanted it, but not coffee since it was believed that the aroma of coffee would disturb the patients.

97

"But I used to beat them to it," Mrs. Ogden said. "I ate before breakfast.

Milk from Dr. Bayley's herd was delivered very early in the morning in big cans. When it came I'd go down and have an elegant time drinking milk and cream."

One night she had a real feast, two ears of corn. She ate it without butter, salt or pepper but corn never tasted better. That was during the last six months of her training when two nurses were on duty every night.

Dr. Bayley had insisted on the two nurses, although Miss Deyo thought one was enough. In the end she had to submit to his superior authority, but she "was very much provoked" and made a new set of rules for the nurses who shared each night's work. She drew a chalk line down the center of each corridor. One nurse was responsible for the two wards west of those lines, the other for those on the east. The two weren't to cross those chalked lines for any reason, and they weren't to talk.

"One night I was working on ward 1, men's surgical," Mrs. Ogden said, "and Althea Mackey was on duty on women's surgical. She came out and whistled to me. Then she put a plate with two ears of corn on a broom and shoved it across the line. My, they tasted good. She's still living in town, in Montgomery Street."

"I've often wondered why we had such skimpy meals at night. No, I don't think it was because Dr. Bayley didn't believe in eating late at night. I doubt if he ever knew about those night meals. He was the most wonderful man I ever met. He'd defend you to the last ditch if you got in trouble—as I did quite often. I was sick for six months while I was in training, sick right at the hospital. He had a greenhouse on the grounds.

He used to bring me a spray of flowers every day when he came to see me. I was so grateful I actually cried. I hadn't had many attentions. I don't think many men would have been so thoughtful."

Both Martha Kay and Mary Jane Blass were girls who had to make their own way in the world. "Miss Kay's" parents died when she was 11. Five years later she was living with Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Brown in Mill Street. A young doctor who had recently come from New Paltz, J. Wilson Poucher, boarded with the Browns.

"One day he was sick," Mrs. Ogden said. "I must have done something for him. I know he told Mrs. Brown, 'That girl is going into the hospital 98

Mefs '

Vassar Hospital's grounds overlooking the Hudson. Dutchess County Historical Society Collection.

(A visitor in 1891 observed: "A pair of handsome pet peacocks and several fan tail doves strut about the tastefully kept grounds. The place is beautifulfor situation, while there is a cool breeze blowing at night, and no din arisesfrom the railroad that runs along at thefoot of the hill to disturb the invalids." Daily Eagle: May 26, 1891)

if I have anything to say about it.' He talked and he talked to me. I was scared to death at first, but he calmed me down, and I finally went. I've loved Vassar hospital ever since."

Mary Jane Blass was 16 and the eldest of six children when her father died and she had to go to work. All Pine Plains was shocked when she turned down a job as teacher at a little school on Stissing Mountain, a job that paid five dollars a week. She was expected to pay three dollars of the five dollars for board. Mary Jane would regret turning down such a good job, the wiseacres said.

But Mary Jane didn't. She obtained another as companion to a woman who lived in Pawling. When her employer's husband became very ill she acted as nurse until Samantha Briggs came to Pawling. Miss Briggs was a trained nurse, a member of the first class that graduated at the hospital for New York City's Poor on Blackwell Island and the first trained nurse to work in Pawling. "Some of the Pawling people were quite shocked when they heard that she had given her patient a bath," Mrs. Workman 99

said. "They didn't think she could be quite nice."

It proved to be a long case, the patient was ill for eight months. During all that time, Miss Briggs was day nurse and Mary Jane Blass was night nurse. And whenever the two talked Miss Briggs urged the girl to enter training.

During her days as an undergraduate, Mrs. Workman said, the girls had separate rooms all over the hospital. Each room was equipped with a washbowl and pitcher, but they all used the same bathroom. That was in the center of the first floor. Each ward had its own bathroom for the patients.

The hospital's first class of nursing students graduated in 1890. In its annual report of 1903, the hospital noted that its nursing school candidates "must be able to read aloud well, to write legibly and accurately, to understand arithmetic as jar as fractions and percent, and to take notes at lectures." The Nursing School closed in 1972. Dutchess County Historical Society Collection.

"We had lots of fun," she said. "Of course, there were no movies then, and there wasn't any particular recreation for us, but we had fun together.

We were like sisters. We'd gather in one another's rooms to study and talk. We'd squabble then we'd make it up again. There was a lot of work, and it wasn't an exciting life, but it was a happy one. I do think that every nurse in the school loved her work."

Only two nurses could be off duty at the same time, Mrs. Ogden remem-

100

bered. If they went to the Opera House, Miss Deyo insisted that they should be accompanied to the hospital door by a uniformed policeman.

She insisted on that uniformed policeman if the girls stayed out after 9 pm for any reason.

"Our beaux not enough escort?" she asked. "Beaux? We weren't allowed to have any. I think Miss Deyo would have died on the spot if any of us had had one. I remember there was a boy of about 19 on ward 1. He was convalescing, up and around. When I went down the corridor he waved to me and I waved back."

"I didn't know that Miss Deyo was right behind me. She called me into the pharmacy—that's where she always took you if anything went wrong and gave me the greatest lecture on flirting."

Mrs. Workman's first private duty case was with a typhoid patient in New Paltz. She was paid the usual rate $16 a week. When she had finished she returned to Pine Plains for a short vacation. Her old friends were still skeptical about her choice of a profession until she told them what she received for her work. Then they were 'overcome.' "Why you're doing even better than the teachers," one of her former critics said. "Apparently you weren't so foolish after all." The girls who had started teaching when she was offered the Stissing Mountain School were making $8 a week.

Both Mrs. Workman and Mrs. Ogden followed their profession for many years, and both finished their working years at the Vassar College infirmary. Mrs. Ogden was there for six years, Mrs. Workman for 10—the last seven as supervisor. Both have been retired for several years.

The training she received at Vassar hospital was quite different from the training the girls receive now, Mrs. Ogden said. They studied, but there was less study than there is now. The emphasis was on bedside nursing, and that emphasis gave you assurance.

"I've been in a good many hospitals," Mrs. Workman said, "and I've never seen patients anywhere, even private patients, receive the care that ours did in Vassar when everything was free. One woman had an operation. She was so ill that she was put in one of the small rooms that were usually used as patient's sitting rooms at the head of each ward. That one woman had the care of three nurses. Then her husband came to the 101

hospital. With all the free service he had received, he was angry because he has to pay to have a barber come to the hospital and shave him. He thought the nurses should do it. And he shouldn't have been there anyway. He was far from poor. When he died he left $24,000, but not one cent to the hospital. I don't know whether Dr. Bayley ever did anything about it or not. Yes, the man was doing a neat chisel. There are people like that anywhere when things are free."

(Helen Myers' work is reprinted by permission of the Poughkeepsie Journal.)

102

James A. Hughes Recalls Early Vassar Hospital

by Helen Myers (Poughkeepsie New Yorker, April 1, 1945) Several years ago, the late Dr. William A. Krieger had a bronze tablet put in one of the student nurses' classrooms at Vassar Hospital. It reads: "To James, in appreciation of faithful service since 1895." The tablet honors James A. Hughes who began work at the hospital exactly 50 years ago today, and is still on the job.

"James" or "Jimmy" to everyone at Vassar, from student nurses to staff doctors, Mr. Hughes has worked under all the hospital's superintendents: Dr. Guy C. Bayley, Dr. Henry G. Bugbee, Dr. James T. Harrington, Benjamin Fowler, Alexander Candlish, Sidney Barnes, and Joseph Weber.

When he began his long service eight or ten patients was the average in summer, 18 or 20 in winter and he has seen the time when Vassar had only one patient for a full week. People didn't have much confidence in hospitals in those days, he says.

"When I first came, it was good for a column in the front page of the newspapers when a prominent man came here," he says with a grin.

"People thought he was as good as dead." True, he adds soberly and proudly. "We have 260 patients or something like that now, and Vassar has always been classed as a number one hospital as long as I have known it."

Mr. Hughes was born in Walden, Orange County, June 23, 1860. He remembers hearing his father read items about the Civil War soldiers parade on the race track at Goshen, near his home.

When he was five or six he moved with his family to New London, Connecticut. His first job was as a farmer in Connecticut. He later went to New York to learn the plumbing trade, but gave it up because it was too dirty. He didn't like the jobs he had to do right after breakfast, he says with a characteristic grin.

103

So he went to Newburgh to work as a porter in the United States Hotel.

When James A. Griggs, the proprietor bought the old Morgan House in Poughkeepsie, he came here in 1882 to do the same work. He later worked for the New York Central railroad and the old Buckeye mowing machine works that had a river front plant where the Moline Plow company was located later.

Mr. Hughes didn't like machine shop work any better than he had plumbing, porter's work and railroading. His next job was at Locust Bluff, the Red Oaks Mill home of F. J. Allen. Here he took care of the property and the four horses that Mr. Allen left in the country during the winter. Mr. Allen was the proprietor of the old Astor House in New York City, that was way down town, at Chambers Street and Broadway, Mr. Hughes thinks.

"Mr. Allen knew all the presidents," he recalls. "They all used to stop at the Astor House when they came to New York. There weren't any big uptown hotels then. Why did I leave him?" His blue eyes snap. "Because he used to come in around 10 or 11 o'clock at night with a big gang and want to start a party. You can't work night and day too. I knew the gardener here, William Millbank. That's how I got the job."

Vassar had opened in 1887, and still had 40 beds when he went to work there April 1, 1895. The original brick building is still in use, the west section of the present hospital. Dr. Bayley was resident physician as well as superintendent in 1895 and seven other doctors were on the staff.

"Miss Gertie Deyo" of New Paltz was head nurse and the other nine nurses were all students taking the two year training course.

"They didn't accept money from patients at first," Mr. Hughes says, watching for your reaction of surprise. "Oh, maybe some of them paid, but when the others offered to pay, they'd say, 'We don't want your money. We just want your thanks."

When the patients were well enough to be up and around, they used to help the nurses do the ward work—wash dishes, sweep the floor, anything they were asked to do. There were signs hanging up saying that patients were to do those things where they were able. Of course, you couldn't get some of them to do any work, and the others were willing to do anything they could.

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,

Jimmy Hughes at the Vassar Brothers Hospital barn. Dutchess County Historical Society Collection.

"Sure. The nurses used to do just like housework on the wards then.

They washed dishes and swept and dusted. There was just one ward maid. She'd come around and mop the floors after the nurses had swept them. There weren't so many patients for them to look after in those days. Sometimes ward 4—that's the women's medical ward—would be shut up for six months at a time."

Mr. Hughes "did everything" during his first years at the hospital. His primary job was building maintenance. He did carpentry work, took care of the plumbing and boilers, made certain that everything in the building was kept in order. Until the addition was built in 1922, he was responsible for all building maintenance and still works in the hospital shop.

In the early days he also had a variety of other duties. He helped with amputations, helped set legs and served as orderly. This included helping get patients off of the operating table to their rooms and in bed. Since there was no elevator, patients were carried up stairs.

"We had to carry them this way," he illustrates, holding his hands above his head. "Sure, I helped with the women as well as the men. Sometimes they were heavier than the men."

105

He wasn't called upon to carry patients from the operating room very often since there were only two or three operations a month, sometimes none in the early days. None was performed at night. Just the same, operations made everyone uneasy, since the hospital was lighted by gas until the early 1900s and artificial light was needed even for day time operations. "It was pretty dangerous when the doctors were using ether," he recalls. "They didn't like to do it, but they did. They'd leave a window open or something."

The ether cone that was first used was made of red composition rubber, slotted at regular intervals. Gauze was laced through the slots. After the cone was in position on a patient's face, ether was poured on the gauze.

After an operation, the cone was washed, gauze and all and put on a window sill to dry.

"The dust would blow on it, but they'd use it, with the same gauze on the next patient," he says."I used to wonder about it sometimes. But I never said anything."

There was no instrument sterilizer in the 90s. Instruments were cleaned, then put in a dish of alcohol. The day before an operation, water that was to be used on a patient in the operating room was boiled for about half an hour. The next morning it would be heated up just before it was used.

"I remember when they'd just learned how to do appendicitis operations," he says. "One year five or six school teachers came to the hospital to have their appendixes out. During summer vacation. The first one died, so the others packed their grips and got right out without their operations."

During his first years at the hospital, the horse drawn ambulance was kept on the grounds in a shed near the present laundry, Mr. Hughes says.

The horses were stabled at Pye's back of the old Poughkeepsie hotel that stood where the head of New Market Street is today. That meant that when the ambulance was needed the hospital sent uptown to the horses, which were brought down, harnessed to the ambulance then sent back uptown to pick up the patient. When he says the hospital "sent" for the horses, Mr. Hughes means telephoned. He points with pride to the hospital's low number, 24. It has had that number as long as he has been there.

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From 1895 until 1907, Mr. Hughes worked 12 hours a day, from 6 until 6, and if some of his work was unfinished at 6 o'clock, he stayed until it was done. But in spite of his manifold duties inside the hospital, they accounted for only an hour or so some days. The rest of the day he worked outside helping the gardener.

Mr. Hughes remembers facts about the hospital buildings and grounds that most of us never heard. For example the stone wall that encloses the property is made of bastard granite. Each stone was numbered to go in its exact place when it arrived from Vermont. It took nearly two years to lay the wall with a hand derrick in the mid 90s.

Iron gates to the hospital; Designed in 1897 by Hendrik Van Ingen, son of Vassar College Art Professor Henry Van Ingen. Dutchess County Historical Society Collection.

Then the bell that hangs in the archway overlooking the river, it once hung in a mission in Cuba. The Vassars used to sell "lots of beer" in southern countries, because it was the only kind that would keep without ice. When the mission was destroyed by "fire or something," the Vassars brought the bell to Poughkeepsie on a sailing ship. At one time it hung in the brewery, and was rung whenever there was a fire in the neighborhood. "It's a pretty old bell, and it has a nice sound to it," Mr. Hughes says. "The date it was cast is on it. I don't recall exactly what it is, but I do know that the bell is over a couple of hundred years old."

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Mr. Hughes doesn't belong to any clubs or lodges. Since his wife's death he has lived as well as worked at the hospital. Although he doesn't put in full time now, he does plenty. "I like to work," he says, "but I don't like to do the same thing day after day. Here there are so many different things to fix. I'm always learning something."

(Helen Myers' work is reprinted by permission of the Poughkeepsie Journal.)

108

They're Just "Boys" at Vassar

by Helen Myers (Poughkeepsie New Yorker, December 17, 1944)

"This is their home," Ada B. Willett said. "They came of their own free will. No one put them here, and no one can take them out. Sometimes they don't tell their families that they're coming until the very last minute to avoid an argument. Dr. Charles Lane used to say that after they'd been here a month they added ten years to their lives because they knew they had security. You know Dr. Lane was our physician for a great many years, 25 or 30."

The matron of Vassar Home for Aged Men was telling of the home and "the family" in the L-shaped living room that she shares with Blanche Stoutenburgh, assistant matron on the second floor of the institution at Main and Vassar Streets. Since the room is in one of the building's many wings, it has windows on three sides. It is furnished in old mahogany, most of it heirloom pieces.

Miss Willet was very outspoken about her dislike of the home's traditional nickname "The Old Men's Home." "Our official name is Vassar Home for Aged Men," she said, "But I just say Vassar home. I think that's better, don't you? There's no need of talking about how old we are.

I'm really rude when people say 'the Old Men's Home'—it's a name that implies 'Oh, the poor old things'—and the men are even ruder. One man was asked if he lived at the Old Men's Home and he said, 'No.' Just that with no explanation. His questioner was surprised and asked him again, and he said, 'No' again. Then the questioner asked where he did live and he said, 'Vassar Home.' That's the way they feel about it."

Throughout the interview Miss Willett referred to the home's residents as "The men," "The family," and very frequently, "The boys." "That's probably a swing of the pendulum from 'old men' she said, but they love it. When I use it to them they say 'Oh, yes, the BOYS' and dance a jig.

They like to think of themselves as a little younger than they are rather than older, but that's a usual attitude, don't you think so?"

Miss Willett explained that the home was established by Matthew Vas-

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sar Jr. and John Guy Vassar, nephews of Matthew Vassar Sr., the founder of the college, on the site of the uncle's home. It opened May 6, 1881, with six men. The next entered two years later. A total of 172 men have lived there, and there are 21 now and two vacancies. Vacancies are never open very long, she said.

"The family" now has representatives from several walks of life. There are former farmers, a carriage maker, a dairyman, a newspaper reporter, several carpenters, painters, an architect, business men, salesmen, janitors, a cabinet maker, and a hoe maker.

"You'd be surprised at the number who come here who never thought they'd enter a home," Miss Willet said. "Usually a long illness—most often the wife's— has eaten up all their reserve."

Dining Room at Vassar Home jor Aged Men. Dutchess County Historical Society Collection.

When the home opened only elderly Protestants from the city of Poughkeepsie were eligible for admission, the matron said. Some four years ago the rules were amended so that county men could enter too. Although the minimum age is 65, exceptions are sometimes made by the board of trustees...

The home also has a board of lady managers. Mrs. B. Abbott Easton is president of this board, which is composed of 42 women, six from each of the seven Protestant denominations of the city...Although a man must be in reasonably good health for admission to the home, there is no upward age limit. One of the family's newest members recently entered at the age of 94.

"That was really fun," Miss Willet said. "For a long time our oldest inhabitant was 88, and he was rather conscious of the honor. The next oldest was born in '58. Then this new one who is 94, came with us. One of the first days he was here he went out for a walk. When 88 hears 94 was 110

Vassar Home for Aged Men (1881-1974). In 1975, the building was renamed and redeveloped as the Cunneen-Hackett Cultural Center. Dutchess County Historical Society Collection.

going, he came to me and said, 'You certainly aren't going to let him go, are you?' I said, 'Why not? He's able to take care of himself. Anyway, he's gone.' So 88 got dressed and went out to overtake 94, but he didn't.

He missed him because 94 had gone up the hill the other way. Most of them go through Vassar street, then up Lafayette Place. The hill is easier that way."

The entrance fee for admission to the home is $500. Each man is also expected to bring a year's supply of clothing. Although it is understood that any other estate a man may have is turned over to the home when he enters, there are exceptions, Miss Willet said. According to the rules, any inheritance a man may receive after he enters also automatically belongs to the home, unless he cares to withdraw. Once he is a member of the family, the home meets all his expenses and gives him a small monthly allowance.

"That inheritance clause is in the by-laws," Miss Willet said, "But in the 15 years I've been here none of the men has ever inherited anything that 111

we know of. We're supported by our endowment. That was enough, but since investments aren't bringing in what they did, we haven't as much to do with as we used to. We don't get any allowance from the state or the county or the city, and we've had very few Benefits. I can remember only two. Several years ago, we gave a card party when we wanted to upholster some furniture, and last year we had another to finance recreation for the boys."

"We've had some gifts, but not many. I think we might have had more if people had realized how well we could use them. I know of one of our men, who used to have everything, said that it made him too cross to think that he had never given the home anything. He would have been glad to give $10—he did to other local organizations—but he simply never thought about giving it here."

The home has a resident nurse, Mrs. Edith Browne, who is on call 24 hours a day. There are also four other full time workers on the staff and one part time employee, Miss Willett said. All have been there for several years, one for 26. Of Mrs. Browne and her work the matron said: "She has a real job. She has given transfusions. She always has things to do. Then sometimes, she has more things to do."

Dr. Howard Townsend, the home's physician, calls there instead of expecting the men to go to his office, Miss Willett said. If one of the family must make an office call at a specialist's he is sent in a taxi. When Miss Willett was asked who paid for the taxi she answered, "We do. We take care of our boys. If they have to go to a hospital, we pay for that too— room, board, medicines, treatment, everything. After they pay their $500, there's nothing more for them to pay for unless they want to."

Breakfast is at 8 at the home, dinner at 1 and supper at 5:30. The men have no duties unless they care to assume them, Miss Willett said. Several of them make their own beds and one man just fixed a toaster that morning. There is usually one man who likes to help with such work, and that particular man does a lot around the home, the matron said.

Then, too, the men like to trim their own Christmas tree. That will be done the Friday before Christmas this year.

"We have very few rules and regulations," Miss Willett said. "Their lives here aren't much different from what they would be at home,—except that they aren't nagged at. Of course, if a man plans to be out for a meal, 112

he is expected to tell me as an act of courtesy, just as he should in his own home. And they are expected to ask for a key if they stay out after 10 o'clock. We used to have a rule that they had to be in by 10, but they had a way of getting in later. The matron's ears were too sharp for that, so we started the key system. I don't think there's a night when one of them isn't out, to a friend's home or a lodge meeting or something of the sort, and in the six or seven years since the keys were made, not one has been lost."

"Smoke? Of course they can but not in their own rooms. That involves too much fire hazard and we haven't the help to clean up the ashes, but there's a place provided for smoking on each floor. They have a carpenter shop right under this room. It isn't used very much as a shop except by one man, but they go there to smoke. Then there's a smoking room in the basement, and in the case of illness, they can use a room on this floor.

They can smoke in the infirmary too."

Life runs very smoothly at the home, Miss Willet said, and months will go by when there is no necessity for her to speak to any of the family about anything. Then it is usually enough for her to point out that they are hurting their own home, she said.

We don't have bickering and we don't have friction either, Miss Willett said. One man may say, 'Oh, don't bother about him,' but that's about all you ever hear. It's like a college or any other place where different types are thrown together. Those who have something in common form friendships. They may play Chinese checkers or dominos or cards together. Or they may go to the pictures together. Then the carpenter shop is a center of interest for a few. But they never get very friendly with one another."

Going to the movies is one of the "the boys" principal diversions, Miss Willet said. Through the courtesy of the Stratford and Bardavon theaters they are allowed to go any afternoon except Sunday. They don't have passes. They simply go. One of the old inhabitants takes a new member of the family the first time. After that he too, is admitted without question to the somewhat cynical comment that it is remarkable that the men haven't abused this privilege by introducing so many friends who aren't residents of the home that another system would be necessary.

Miss Willet answered, I never even thought of that. They're all honest men. They're the town's and the county's men. They're a nice group.

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They stand for honesty."

Stratford Theater, 33-37 Cannon Street, Poughkeepsie where residents of the Vassar Home attended movies forfive. Dutchess County Historical Society Collection.

Another favorite diversion is listening to the radio. There is a radio for general use in the living room, and almost every man has his own in his own room. When the first man asked to have a radio she said, no, it would annoy too many people, Miss Willet recounted. But the man promised that it would never bother anyone, so she gave her consent.

"We have about 20 radios now, but we never have bedlam," the matron said. "Of course, one will sometimes get a little loud. Then it's the poor matron's job to mention it. The man usually gets cross and turns it off entirely—for a few minutes."

The men also like to gather around the piano in the living room and sing old time songs, whenever anyone comes who can play for them.

Two religious services are also held in the living room every month. A pastor sent by the Dutchess County ministerial association conducts a service there at 3 o'clock the second Sunday of every month, and Chaplain William Shepherd directs a vesper service there the fourth Sunday

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each month. Some member of the Music Appreciation Club provides the music for this service.

In a short tour of the home, Miss Willett first showed the mens' rooms on the second floor. Each has one large window, one corner room has two—a single bed covered with a white spread, a stand and one or two chairs. Some of the rooms were furnished by the men who occupy them, Miss Willett said. She added that it's a standing joke that every man has the best room in the house. Whenever a vacancy occurs, if a desirable room is made available, it is offered to one of the men. They usually ask if they "have to move." When they are assured that they don't, they stay where they are.

Main living room (nicknamed "Little Amrita Club" by the Home's residents). Dutchess County Historical Society Collection.

On the third floor the matron showed "our so-called infirmary," a corner room with two beds next to the rooms of the nurse. Although the men are moved here for convenience in the case of illness, the room hasn't the equipment of an infirmary, Miss Willett pointed out.

She took the elevator to the first floor and led the way down the center hall toward the living room, really a double room that extends across the entire front of the house. There is a black marble fire place in each part, and a pair of girandoles on each mantel. The girandoles, the old mahogany tables and fiddle back chairs all came from Vassar homes, Miss Willet said.

The north and south reception rooms, two smaller rooms, fronting on Vassar Street, are also furnished with beautiful old time mahogany.

There are several fiddle back chairs, an old secretary, slim tables and an oil portrait of Matthew Vassar Jr. as a young man hangs on the wall of the north reception room and there is also a pair of charming old china vases on the black marble mantle of this room.

"The college would like to have some of our furniture," Miss Willet said.

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That is easy to believe.

After another elevator trip, this time to the basement, Miss Willett first showed the big kitchen at the east end of the front of the house and the dining room on the southwest. Although technically a basement, the windows are full length. In the dining room five tables were set with white cloths, one for Miss Willett and Miss Stoutenburgh, four for the men. An old glass fruit dish with a standard was on one of the men's tables. Miss Willett said that she didn't know where it had come from; it had been in the house as long as she had been there. Directly back of the dining room is the reading room. Since it is in a wing, it has windows fronting both Main and Vassar Streets.

This room is endowed, Miss Willett said. Money was given for the furnishings and a small amount is available every Resident's bedroom, Vassar Home for Aged Men. Dutchess County Historical Society Collection. year for upkeep.

Magazines were piled on the large center table and a rack filled with books stood against one wall.

"We have quite a library and the men read a lot," Miss Willet said. "One man said that he had wanted to read all his life, but he never had a chance before he came here. He didn't have the time."

The matron also showed the smoking room, directly back of the reading room and the barber shop with windows on the west and north. Upstairs, she showed the colored lithograph of the Matthew Vassar Sr. home that hangs on the wall of the hall near the entrance door. Dated 1831, the delicately colored print shows a narrow three story white frame house fronting Main Street. The entrance door is at the east, two windows on the west. A small conservatory is in the wing on the west. A carriage house and a bit of the brewery that financed so many of F'oughkeepsie's improvements also appears at the west.

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As she rehung the picture Miss Willet said, "This is their home, and I think you have seen it all. The boys are free to come and go as they please. Two weeks before Thanksgiving one of the men came to me and said that he had taken down the pictures in his room and put things away because he was ready to go for a visit just as he always does this time of year. He's visiting his daughter in the west. His room is locked—we always lock a man's room if he goes to the infirmary or the hospital and will be cleaned while he's gone. About February we'll get a card from him telling us when he's coming home—unless he decides to stay until March."

"The men can have their friends and relatives here any time. Morning, afternoon, or evening, they're always welcome. But not for meals. We wish we could, but we can't afford that. We simply haven't the funds."

(Helen Myers' work is reprinted by permission of The Poughkeepsie Journal.)

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Wise Voices, Plain Speaking: Twentieth Century Griots

by Lorraine M. Roberts and Eileen M. Hayden

In recent decades, preserving and interpreting the stories of everyday people has gained increasing credibility and recognition among historians as a vital history gathering tool. Local historian Helen Wilkinson Reynolds, working in the first half of the 20th century, noted "that it was not the kings, queens and prime ministers who shaped history, but the everyday man and woman at the base of the pyramid who provided the stimulus to affect great decisions." She could well have been foreshadowing Dutchess County Historical Society's Black History Committee oral history project.

Recognizing the need for a closer, more focused look at Black history in Dutchess County, the Black History Committee has worked since the early 1980s documenting the lives and events of generations of people of color. In keeping with the committee's mission to inform the community of the rich heritage and contributions made by Black people in Dutchess County, a variety of programs—including oral history interviewing—have provided an opportunity to expand such knowledge.

One of the earliest programs of the Black History Committee was a lecture on genealogy by David A. G. Johnson of the Schomburg Center for Research and Culture. In a lecture entitled "Routes to Roots," Johnson sparked the interest of a diverse audience —an interest which increased steadily following several planning meetings and a compelling talk entitled "Echoes of the Past" by Dr. Albert Williams-Myers of SUNY New Paltz. Williams-Myers spoke of Biblical accounts in Genesis as being, at one level, the oral history of families passed from one generation to the next. The keeper of the official memory, also known in Black culture as the "Griot," was a deeply honored person whose role was to help perpetuate the history and spiritual values of African culture.

As a result of Dr. Williams-Myers' lecture, the Black History Committee participated in a "how to" session on oral history led by author and Bard College professor, Dr. Myra Young Armstead. Using this training in

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oral history methodology, a questionnaire was developed to gather personal information from each interviewee as well as information on their education, employment and community life. A question at the end of the interview offered a chance for a final comment or reflection on any areas not covered in the questioning. Some interviews were considerably longer than others, but most took about an hour.

The committee's goal was to collect oral histories from four major areas of Dutchess County, beginning with the Beacon/Fishkill area. Two meetings, first at the Howland Library and then at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center, advanced the idea to African-American community leaders. An after-school group component was added. With the aid of Social Studies teacher Frank White, interested students in the Beacon High School Diversity Club joined the five oral history training sessions, although only one student was actually available on interview day. The sessions included interviewing techniques, operation of recording equipment and practice interviews.

Interviews of approximately 15 people were then conducted in 1995 at the Springfield Baptist Church in Beacon. The team of interviewers consisted of Dorothy Edwards, Robert Hancock, Eileen Hayden, Carmen McGill, Bertha Merriett, Lorraine Roberts, and Frank White. A high priority was given to the transcription of the tape recorded Beacon interviews, and an IBM grant was obtained by Black History Committee member Walter Patrice to fund tape transcriptions by Patricia Robins.

Participants interviewed ranged in age from 42 to 82 and lived in Fishkill, Beacon, Chelsea, and Poughkeepsie. The parents of some of the participants had come to the Hudson Valley from the south in the early 20th century, drawn by employment opportunities in southern Dutchess farms and brickyards. Others were the children of longtime Dutchess County residents.

Interviews detail employment patterns from the 1930s to 1970—covering a wide spectrum of opportunities depending on both personal circumstances and socio-economic climate. Broadly speaking, many recalled their parents working in service related occupations —as waiters, maids, chauffeurs, farmers, and teamsters. Professional occupations — teachers, lawyers, physicians, dentists—are increasingly represented later in the 20th century.

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As political conditions changed in these four decades, so too did job "choice" become increasingly evident in African American employment patterns. Initially, the Depression years offered few choices for employment, regardless of education. Often, Black college students came to Poughkeepsie in the summer for work in local hotels. Throughout World War II and in the years following, Blacks with blue-collar and professional skills became an active presence in the Dutchess County work force. Many of those interviewed demonstrated an uncanny reverence for "self" and the determination to overcome barriers in spite of difficult circumstances.

These oral histories reflect our long national struggle for political, economic and social equality. Federal legislation affecting education, voting rights, housing, and employment were the result of countless individual struggles like those represented here—bearing out local historian Helen Wilkinson Reynolds' belief that everyday lives do indeed shape larger events.

JULIA HILL ANDERSON grew up in the West End section of Beacon, where her mother worked as a laundress. Her father lived in Newburgh and she knew little of him. During her childhood, telephones were a luxury item and communication generally meant "yelling out the window or knocking on the wall." After school, there was back yard play, bicycle riding, roller skating, and baseball. When she was a young teen, there were "chippie joints."

"We had a chippie joint where we could go and dance. One was owned

by Mr. Horton. The Hortons are still in the area. He let younger kids come in until about 10 [pm] and older ones came in later. There was another one across the street, Beacon Street...Charlie's chippie joint. He had a garage, but I don't think he ever had a car in it. But he let us come in and [he] had a juke box there."

SUSAN (SUDIE) BARKSDALE was born in North Carolina and came to Chelsea when she was 17. Her father was a construction worker on the railroad. She eventually owned a beauty salon in Poughkeepsie. Barksdale, too, remembered chippie joints: [Chippie joints were a place] "where teenagers and some others would come in to dance and have food and good clean fun. It wasn't like now.

There was also the Blue Bird Inn owned by Mr. Horton and the Grayson 120

Lodge, where if you didn't want to walk by the bar, you could go in the side door. I remember we went to a dance up there once. We went up by trolley car. I kept scaring everyone on the car. I said, 'What if the cable breaks.We'll end up in Newburgh!' (laughter)... Somebody had waxed the floor, and it was just like glass. You couldn't stand up (laughter). We were trying to dance and everybody was holding each other up.

A lot of blacks tried [to run for office], but they never really won, except for Mr. Tucker. He is on the school board [in 1995], and he is running again."

Walter Patrice

WALTER N. PATRICE, one of nine siblings, was born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1919.

His mother was born in Dutchess County in 1889 and died at age 100. His father, born in St. Lucia in the West Indies, was employed as a merchant seaman with ports of call from New York City to Houston. Every other Tuesday, he returned to Poughkeepsie to be with his family. After leaving seafaring work, Patrice's father was employed by the Hudson-Essex auto dealership on Academy Street in Poughkeepsie.

Walter Patrice attended the Poughkeepsie public schools, graduating from Poughkeepsie High School in 1939 and matriculating at Johnson C. Smith and Howard Universities. Beginning in 1943, he served as a First Lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers for 21/2 years. Patrice was employed at IBM for 33 years from 1952 until his retirement in 1985.

Community service is a hallmark of Patrice's legacy with numerous leadership roles in not-for-profit and governmental entities including the Poughkeepsie Planning Board, the Poughkeepsie Recreation Commission (where he served as president), and Catharine Street Community Center (where he served as interim director). As the church historian of AME Zion in Poughkeepsie, Patrice spearheaded the church's nomination to the National and State Registers of Historic Places in 1992. He has been honored by both the Dutchess County Historical Society and the US Colored Troops Institute for Local History and Family Research at Hartwick College; in 2009, Patrice was inducted into the Sports Museum of Dutchess County's Hall of Fame.

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[Responding to an inquiry about particularly memorable Black citizens:] "Yes. there was a young lady who came to Poughkeepsie in 1936, maybe. Her name was Lucy Graves. Lucy Graves was the Executive Director of Catharine Street Center [the Center's 3rd director]. Lucy was the kind of woman that would say to a group of young fellows — 'Listen, let me tell you something. You have to respect your women, even if they're prostitutes; you have to respect them because they're females.' She was a fighter, a teacher.

Eleanor Roosevelt at the Catharine Street Community Center, 1940. The Center's director Lucy Graves (3rdfrom the left) stands next to Mrs. Roosevelt.

I have personally met people like Langston Hughes...Langston Hughes was the pre-eminent black poet in the history of the U.S. She [Lucy Graves] brought him to Poughkeepsie. These guys would come up from New York by train. We'd take a silver offering. It's the best you could do, take up a silver offering. They'd take your silver offering. They'd go back to New York.

These were leaders in the country—not only in New York. These guys were internationally known. Langston Hughes, Channing Tobias—all the big people in New York, she brought to Poughkeepsie as speakers.

They came because she asked them...She was outstanding. She wanted to teach school, but they wouldn't hire her...she was from Hunter College.

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The most political affiliation Blacks had was the two dollars that the ward head gave them. I have no idea what party. I have no idea who they voted for. All I know is a white guy would come around with a big roll of bills. A bribe? I don't think so, but people did take the money. Or they would come into a bar and buy two or three bottles of Scotch.. .to pass around...I don't vote party...The whole period [the 1960s1 was traumatic to a lot of people. Bobby Kennedy, Jack Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr....This was a tragic era to a lot of people.

Church was the place to go when I was a kid. As a teenager, you went to church because the girls were there. We had a nice size organization called Christian Endeavor that was like 6 to 7:30 on Sunday evening, and that's when you all congregated. You had a lot of fun before you went in, and you came out, and it was good clean fim....Church was fun...

Every April...they would have what they called the 'Annual Fair' and it lasted all week. The downstairs of the church was partitioned off in booths. They had a grocery store; they had an ice cream store; they had a soda store; they had a wishing well; they had used clothes; they had baked goods. Even the whole basement was lined with booths, flowers, the flower shop; and every evening another church came in to put on the program, a visiting church...they did singing, they did instrumental solos and you were upstairs and you enjoyed it...every week it was a different church and a different bunch or girls. It was fun.

I started off in the [IBM] plant in 1952. In 1969, I went to East Fishkill when it was one building [the Personnel Department]. [I] stayed in Fishkill 'tit 1984. Came back to Poughkeepsie, and I taught Management Development from '84 to '85, and I retired. ...the older black community didn't work for IBM because they didn't have that many entry level people. They talk about equal opportunity, well up 'til 1952, IBM had a quota system of 1% for minorities...The field is never gonna be level without equal opportunity...it isn't gonna be level unless they have it [affirmative action] in place and furthermore, I think everybody should have an equal shot at making money that the government is providing corporations...IBM was a government subsidized company...if you have a government contract and you have over 50 people, you have to live the equal rights or equal opportunity laws...

It [IBM] got better because there were better opportunities, and it got better because there was outside pressure to do better."

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ROBERT H. HANCOCK was born in Pleasant Valley in 1914. He graduated in 1931 from Millbrook Memorial High School (the building now known as Thorne Memorial Building). Each day, Hancock walked about 8 miles round trip between his home in Verbank and his school in Millbrook. His parents, originally from Charlotte County, Virginia, came to Dutchess County seeking farm jobs in what was then a strong dairy farming region. Hancock's earliest recollections are of being raised on the Webster farm in Clinton Corners where he lived for 12 years. After graduating from high school, he got a job on the Hasbrouck Farm in Salt Point.

"They used to call it the Herrick Farm because it came from the Herrick family on Mrs. Hasbrouck's side, and she married a Hasbrouck and then it got to be known as the Hasbrouck Farm...They were not high paying jobs, but you had a subsistence...When I was working on a farm in 1936, there was a check given to me for $35 and a check for $15 for my board. ...I got $35 and he [Hasbrouck] got $15...that's $50 for a month's pay.

You didn't have much choice [about where you wanted to work].. .that was what was available. When I got out of school, again in the 30s, which was called the Depression era, you took what you could get. I cut cord wood, worked on a farm, stuff like that." [During these years, it was Hancock's dream to build houses. After he got out of the service in 1946, he bought 7 acres of land on Friendly Lane in Poughkeepsie where he built his home and two others and sold several lots.]

LEVI DANIEL HORTON was born in LaGrangeville in 1931. He was reared on Fishkill's Academy Street in a home where there was no running water or electricity. "We used a kerosene lamp for light and carried water from a neighbor." Horton went to Fishkill Union Free School (grades K — 6) in the 1930s when there were only three black children in the school: his sister, Marie Horton Karatz; a cousin, Reggie Henderson; and himself. At age 16, he moved to Baxtertown Road in Fishkill.

His first experience with discrimination came in 1949 during his junior year of high school in Wappingers, when despite being the first Black student named to play on the varsity basketball team, his coach never picked him to play. Horton quit the team after six games on the bench, later learning that the coach had never intended to let a Black athlete play in any of the games; later in his high school career, he played varsity football with no problems. Levi Horton graduated from high school 124

in 1950; in his class of 113 students, four were Black.

After graduation, Horton enlisted in the Marines where he served for five years. In 1955 he came home and sought employment at IBM, where he worked for 36 years, retiring in 1991.

Horton was particularly noted as a Dutchess County umpire, refereeing high school, college, and Little League baseball games for over 45 years. During his interview, Horton looked out Levi Horton a restaurant window facing a large Wal-Mart and Sam's Club shopping complex while painting a vivid picture in words of Blodgett's string bean farms.

[The following is from an interview of Levi Horton published in the Fishkill Historical Society's newsletter, The Van Wyck Dispatch (July 2008), edited by Steve Lynch] "I remember that Mr. Stephen Blodgett was a string bean farmer—his string beam farms were the biggest industry of the Fishkill area....They extended west from Main Street in the Village of Fishkill...westward beyond where 1-84 now cuts through Fishkill. Mr. Blodgett had an airport runway (dirt) in his string bean fields located southwest of the Village, and customers could fly in on small planes and check his crops and arrange to purchase large quantities of his string beans. He also trucked in about 600 Black migrant workers from Florida each summer to pick his string beans during the harvest season. They stayed in wooden barracks built on his farms near Fishkill Creek southwest of the Village— the creek provided their water supply.

On Route 9, south of the village, Mr. Blodgett's string bean farms extended from around Elm Street, or just south of the railroad tracks, all the way down Route 9 on both sides. Today his farm lands are all gone— Dutchess Mall, several restaurants and motels, the Gap center, WalMart, Sam's Club, and recent developments all along Merritt Blvd—Van 125

Wyck Glen and Van Wyck Meadows Condos & Town houses—have all been built on Mr. Blodgett's string bean farm lands.

While I was in high school, I worked each summer picking string beans at Fishkill Farms owned by Mr. Morgenthau. I was paid 10 cents per bushel and could make as much as $4 per day—but it was really hard work in the hot sun in July and August. We worked from 5am to 4pm with an hour lunch break....1 also picked cucumbers for "Pickle Suzie" in Wicoppee for 5 cents per bushel, and I also picked potatoes for 5 cents per bush for Mr. Morgenthau." [At the end of the working season, migrant workers paid their transportation to and from Florida as well as their bills for housing and sustenance, returning home with nothing or very little. This system was in operation for many summers during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.]

CECELIA BOSTIC MAGILL was a Poughkeepsie native born in 1918. Her mother was a native of Dutchess County and her father hailed from Augusta, Georgia. Magill went to the Poughkeepsie public schools and also completed various training courses offered through the Hudson River Psychiatric Center.

Magill noted that during her early years, most Black people in Poughkeepsie were employed in service businesses. She remembered Blacks from the south who ultimately settled in Poughkeepsie and others who came up during the summer; some were colCecelia Magill lege graduates who worked in local hotels. Her father came up from Augusta, Georgia —first stopping in New York then coming to Poughkeepsie. In 1942, Magill was a victim of racial discrimination at Poughkeepsie's Schatz Federal Bearing Company, which at the time had government contracts requiring equal employment opportunity.

"I walked three months, five days a week, in all kinds of snow and ice; I did it. I said 'Mom, I can't do this' and she said, 'Yes, you are.' In the meantime, Lucy Graves was head of a community center [Catharine Street Community Center in Poughkeepsie]—that was around 1940; and 126

she had good people down there in D.C. And she'd call the Man. She knew who he was and said they had two places, and they got to open up. But we need some help from you, and they won't let the kids in to have jobs. So, she [Graves] came up and told him: 'It's been passed now [the equal opportunity employment law]; you can't keep these people out. If you do, you aren't going to do one thing for the Army or the Navy or anybody.' [On July 15, 1942, Cecelia Magill received the following telegram: "You are requested to be present at 1:30 PM Tuesday July 21 1942 at 1406 G Street BNW WashingLucy Graves ton DC Room 319 to testify in matter of alleged discrimination by Schatz Manufacturing Company and Federal Bearing Company STOP Transportation is being mailed and subsistence expenses will be paid by government on voucher STOP If possible conference with you desired at same place." On July 18, 1942, Magill received a second telegram: "Schatz case postponed on promise of company immediately to employ without regard to race STOP Your presence therefore not required on July twenty first as previously requested = Lawrence W. Cramer."]

So, Dutchess Manufacturing opened up; Federal Bearings opened up; and from then on, everything opened up, and people had jobs." [Magill was employed at Hudson River Psychiatric Center and retired after 31 years of service in 1981.]

LILLIAN HUSBAND DRAKE was born in 1925 in Durham, North Carolina and settled in Hughsonville after marrying Alexander Drake of Beacon. Lillian Drake graduated from Winston Salem Teachers College and taught school for 14 years before her marriage. "...It was unheard of to have a Black teacher 35 years ago [at Beacon High School around 1960]. They told me they weren't going to hire me and told me to get a job at Matteawan. I said 'What's Matteawan?' They said, 'Prison.' ...I went down to the Beacon superintendent's office. He was nice; he let me come in, and we talked. He wrote down some things 127

I said about myself. Well, it started raining. It happened that I had my umbrella, and I was putting on my coat. As I was putting on my coat, I saw him take the paper that he had written on about me and put it in the [waste] basket. So, I knew I wouldn't hear from that.

I went on to South Street [Beacon Elementary School] and talked to the principal there. She told me she would put my name down as a substitute. I went to Wappingers and wrote them several times and called them. I got a letter from them asking me to come there and to be there at 8 o'clock because they were having a meeting and I could meet the principal and I had the job. Well, when I showed myself...I saw the secretary talking to them at the meeting...and when the meeting was over, they came out and said the principal had re-hired the teacher that had been here. I knew she [the secretary] went [in] there and told them I was Black.

[At the Dutchess County Girl Scouts' "Camp Foster," Drake met a member of the Beacon Board of Education who arranged for her to meet with a Beacon school principal. The principal said:] 'I'd like to know why so many of you all come up here from down south.' I said that I didn't know; I came up here because I got married. I finished college to be a teacher, and now I'm looking for a teaching job. She [the principal] said: 'Well, we get a whole lot of them up here, and they don't know nothing.' So, I said, 'You must be talking about the people who travel with the seasonal work; they come to pick apples, and as the seasons change, they move on up and they go back. But my people didn't travel around like that. Most of my relatives were teachers, and there are some doctors in the family, and that's why I'm seeking a job.' So she told me she would call me.

Well, by the time she decided to call me, I was working over in Newburgh...and I was teaching school for the last couple of years." [Lillian Drake retired from the Newburgh Enlarged School District after more than 35 years as an elementary school teacher.]

ETHEL GREEN VAUGHN was the oldest individual interviewed. Vaughn was born in 1913, approximately 40 years after the New York State Legislature abolished segregation in the public schools. What the legislature did in 1874 commenced the very slow process of school desegregation and the beginning of racial understanding and tolerance.

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Vaughn was proud to say that she was born on Pershing Avenue in Poughkeepsie on July 4, 1913.

When Vaughn was three years old, her father, Homer Green, moved the family to Poughkeepsie's Arlington area in back of Friendly Lane (which Vaughn described as "a swamp" at the time she lived there). Her father worked in the Arlington Brickyard as a teamster. Her older sister went to school in Arlington; however, Ethel Vaughn the family eventually moved back to Poughkeepsie on Cottage Street. Her husband's father [Benjamin Vaughn] was a lawyer who worked in the office of Judge Morschauser.

According to Vaughn, her father-in-law died shortly after he became a lawyer.

"I went to school in Poughkeepsie—Warring School, Smith School and Poughkeepsie High School. I graduated 8th Grade from W.W. Smith in 1924. Let me go back and say.. .1 had a chance in my last year [of high school] to get a job so I left school, took the job so I could earn some money. Then I went back and took an equivalency test, so I have my New York State Diploma.

[After a stint working at the Nelson House Hotel running the elevator and marrying in 1936, Vaughn's life changed.] I started to try to improve myself. I went to Poughkeepsie College Center, Spencerian Business College in Newburgh. I took additional courses at Dutchess Community College, SUNY, and seminars in planning and renewal. I also took courses at Marist College...I worked in [for] the Board of Education [in Poughkeepsie] from 1939 to 1978; I was a licensed assistant teacher, guidance assistant for junior high and middle school, media center assistant at the Middle School, acting media supervisor at the Middle School, lunch program and recreational program supervisor at Warring Elementary School and Morse School.

In 1974, they had problems at the Poughkeepsie High. And Ed Hunger, the superintendent, sent me over there with Jim Dodd and Jim Clark on a Task Force...we were to see what the problems were...if it was just the children or the teachers. We delved into different areas. We didn't 129

go back to the public to tell what we did, but we solved the problem.

Well, some of it was a tension that existed between the children and the teachers...teachers' attitude toward the children. Some of it was children's fault and some was teachers'. And that was some of the things we tried to correct. I worked in the Dean's office. [Dorothy Stanley was the dean.]

[Vaughn noted that she faced prejudice and discrimination mostly in adulthood.] That's when we found things that just didn't work with one another together. And it seemed so funny since we had always been such good friends before. It wasn't that they weren't friendly. It was that the people who had the jobs just didn't give them to us."

DOROTHY L. EDWARDS was born in 1920 and came to Poughkeepsie at the age of two from New Haven, Connecticut. She lived in Poughkeepsie for over 75 years. Her father was a chauffeur, and her mother was a cook and housekeeper for a doctor's family. Catharine Street Community Center was an important part of her early life.

"At the Center, I belonged to what was known as the High Tribe Club.

Dorothy Edwards We played basketball and did other things at the Center. There were arts and crafts and teaching younger children how to put on their jackets—that sort of thing.

My parents were Republicans, and I have always been inclined toward the Democratic Party. My father once made a statement at the dinner table. Being a smart mouth, I asked him why, since he had always been a Republican, did that mean that he had to continue to be one without discussing the issues. I said, 'You know, that's tantamount to having an outhouse in the yard and a bathroom in the house that you would continue to go to the outhouse 'cause you had always gone there.' He said I was a Communist. I told him he shouldn't say that.

My feeling is they [Blacks] were aligned with the Republican Party because they were paid for their votes...cash money. At voting time, you 130

know, they would knock on doors and say 'Vote and we'll take care of you.' As a kid I heard this. I couldn't understand that something that was your inalienable right should have to be paid for.

[Jobs in] businesses were [closed to Blacks], of course. But that, I think, was primarily due to the lack of their education. They [Blacks] probably didn't even look for positions other than what they were used to. ...I went to Morse School, which is now a magnet school on Mansion Street, and I went to Poughkeepsie High School and graduated from there.

[Edwards graduated from high school in 1938. That same year, for 6 months, she attended Wood-Puriont Secretarial School as the only Black student.] I. . . left there to go into nurse's training...and that was a threeyear course. I actually wanted to go into physical education. And I had applied, and I was told that there were not many jobs available to Blacks in that area. So then my second choice was nursing. And that's why I went into nursing. I married before I went into nurse's training. ...My parents wouldn't have sent me to nursing school if my husband had said that he didn't want me to go. But he was good about it, and I was able to go.

My parents were very education-oriented. I was the only one in my family to go beyond high school. The only discrimination I encountered was when I came back to Poughkeepsie as a graduate nurse and went to Vassar Hospital...in 1941. I applied at Vassar, and there was a director of nursing...who felt that since I was the only Black nurse who had ever applied, the nurses wouldn't want to work with me. My answer to her was that they went to high school with me. I don't know why there would be a problem. She wanted to know if I could get someone to vouch for me.

I said that I didn't think I needed anyone. I had my own credentials. So I was hired anyway."

[Edwards graduated from Columbia with a Master's degree and became a teacher and unit chief at Bellevue Hospital. She later served as the deputy director at Willowbrook State Developmental Center on Staten Island. Edwards was a local community activist and became the first Black president of the Poughkeepsie YWCA board.]

AUDREY MYRICK STEWART was delivered at birth by a Polish mid-wife in Chelsea on July 3, 1932. Her mother, Lessie Booten Myrick, moved to Dutchess County from Virginia when Stewart was 9 months old.

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"[My father, Ryland Myrick] left Baltimore...He was following work... working in 'transportation' they called it. That is the word they used when they traveled looking for a job...They heard about a job at Castle Point....1 don't know how they heard about it down south, but they came up here. [Mr. Myrick worked at Castle Point for about 40 years.] ...he started as an orderly...took a test...became a practical nurse...he was very good at that. A patient fell off the stretcher [at Castle Point], and my father invented this thing that you put on a stretcher to keep the patient from rolling off. ...He said,`They are using my invention [without giving me credit].'

Audrey Stewart

He [Stewart's father] had gladiolas, sweet potatoes, cabbage, lettuce... and the seedless watermelon...He had his garden, and the nurses from the hospital would come down to our house; take things from his garden and take them to the fair [Dutchess County Fair]...and come back with all these ribbons...blue ribbons, red ribbons, white ribbons.

I went to school at Brockway School [starting in 1937]. It was a school that was built for the children of the workers at the Brockway brickyard [in Beacon]. That school was built specifically for the people who worked in that area and since I was in that area, I went to school there [until 8th grade]. Children who lived on North Road [in the area of today's Dutchess Stadium]...went. I was six years old. [Brockway School was a] three room school and an assembly. It had two bathrooms. Grades 1 — 3 were taught by Ann Hayden. Grades 4 — 6 were taught by Mrs. [Florence] Gilbert. Grades 7 and 8 were taught by Margaret Dolan.

After they [the three teachers] left, we had this old couple...and they were the end of the line teachers. They came from Hyde Park or somewhere, and they came down to teach...they would teach us as if we were `pickin ninnies' on the farm. That's the kind of attitude they had. Recess wasn't like 'let's play ball.' He would take us down in the bushes and pull skunk cabbage...but anyway we learned a lot. [All the teachers at the Brockway school were white, and three white children attended the 132

school.] [Describing requirements for going to high school:] "We had to take a general exam to go from 8th Grade to 9th Grade, but a Regents exam to go to the high school. ...You had to have a certain number [of students] in order to have the Regents exam [in the school building], and we didn't have enough. So my class had to go to the Glenham School to take the Regents exam...They called it a Regents exam...to go to Beacon High School. There were only four of us [Blacks in the Beacon class of 1951]: Eugene Simms, Leonard Morgan, Dorothy Reed, and myself."

[Audrey Myrick Stewart retired from IBM in 1991; in 1993, she opened Audrey's Flowers, a Beacon floral shop which she operated for a number of years.]

End Notes: This material is provided courtesy of Dutchess County Historical Society's Black History Committee (BHC) and its 1995 oral history project. The BHC interview with Levi Horton was done in 2008. Our thanks to Steve Lynch and the Fishkill Historical Society for use of material relating to Levi Horton. All BHC materials are part of the Dutchess County Historical Society archives and are available for research purposes. Portions of additional interviews conducted through Dr. Myra Armstead and Bard College have been included in this article. Full transcriptions of Bard materials are also available at DCHS.

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Billy Name and the Warhol Era

by Nan Fogel The Pop Art Movement of the 1960s and 70s had its origins in the wealth of images in print and electronic media after World War II. Years of frugality during the Depression and WWII gave way to a profusion of commercial products and a new affluence to afford them. At the same time, American society was in upheaval. The 60s were marked by the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Civil Rights Movement, a series of devastating assassinations, the beginning of the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, race riots, and protests for gay and women's rights. Rebellious artists turned away from traditional art and its latest style of abstract expressionism to create a new kind of realism,"Pop Art —characterized by a focus on popular culture and its symbols, consumer objects and media stars. Bold colors, repetition, and techniques more commonly used in the advertising and publishing industries replaced traditional methods of painting. Of all the artists painting in this shocking new style, none was more famous (or infamous) than Andy Warhol.

Warhol's subject matter included commonplace objects of popular culture: Campbell Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles and rolls of money. Using techniques of mass production he also made repetitive images of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy. By 1964 he was a major figure in the art world, sometimes referred to as "the Pope of Pop." Although he never stopped painting completely, Warhol turned to film in 1964, making some sixty avant garde films between 1963 and 1968.

Warhol's studio in New York became the "in" place for the underground arts community and the rich and famous celebrities Warhol so admired.

The studio's decor was created by Poughkeepsie native and lighting designer, Billy Name (born Billy Linich) whose startling work with silver paint and aluminum foil first caught Warhol's eye when he visited Name's East Village apartment. Warhol was so taken with the effect of this decor that he invited Name to create a silver installation at Warhol's new studio, an old hat factory on East 47th Street which became known as the "Silver Factory."

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So began their creative relationship as Name moved into the Factory, transforming it with silver, then staying on as a sort of foreman or manager who oversaw the day-to-day operations and provided support for Warhol. When Warhol turned to making films, he designated Name as the official photographer at the Factory. Another member of the Factory circle, author and music promoter Danny Fields later described Billy Name's tremendous influence on Andy Warhol: Billy Linich was for many years the artistic power behind the throne. He was brilliant and had extraordinary taste...He had incredible influence on Andy...Andy respected him enormously and Andy knew how profound Billy's sensibilities were...'

Billy Name left the Factory in early 1970 and now lives in Poughkeepsie.

Nan Fogel writes about history and the arts. She has written for The Conservationist magazine and the Dutchess County Historical Society Year Book, and recently published a book about her great grandparents: A Life in India, James and Mary Barr. She lives in Poughkeepsie.

Nancy Fogel: I'm talking today [April 17, 2010] with Billy Linich, 74 Albany Street, Poughkeepsie. Billy Name is the professional name used

by Linich, who was a friend and associate of artist Andy Warhol and the official photographer at Warhol's "Silver Factory" in New York during the 1960s.

Billy Name: It's pronounced "Linick." My grandfather was from Hamburg, Germany. His name originally had two N's in it—Linnich—but when he crossed over to America they somehow dropped an "n." His wife was Fanny Jonker from Berlin, definitely German. On my mother's side, I am Italian. Her father came from Sicily; his name was Jacomo Gusmano, and her mother, Lucie Reivello, was from Naples. They were founding members of Mount Carmel Church. So I'm German and Italian, which was sort of dangerous to be when I was born, around World War II. They were the Western enemies but I was really so young I didn't know what was going on. There were some strange things going on. It was a real war. It wasn't like these little wars they have nowadays that last for years. If we had lost we would have been enslaved as workers.

The war wouldn't just have been over and we'd go back to business as usual, because the Nazis and the Japanese were like termites—dictators —who would have enslaved everyone.

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NF: ...I understand you were born and grew up in Poughkeepsie—in the 1940s and 50s.

BN: I was born at Vassar Hospital on February 22, 1940. I went to Arlington schools—the grade school on Raymond Avenue and Arlington High School just at the end of Main Street. They were beautiful schools.

They were made of oak wood and had real slate blackboards, sort of semi-Colonial styling, very beautiful schools and they remain today.

NF: Yes, they're still nice schools. What was Poughkeepsie like then?

Tell me a little bit about your early life here.

BN: Well, Poughkeepsie was the center of the Hudson Valley. It was the shopping center, as Luckey Platt always reminded us with the mileage markers outside Poughkeepsie that would say so many miles to Luckey Platt & Co. Do you remember them?

NF: I do. I'd forgotten about them.

BN: We were the center of the Hudson Valley market and it was very modern in the sense of post-war, lots of new things—new cars, refrigerators—all the things we were denied during the war because of the metal shortage and everything was confiscated, were brought out anew after the war, like refrigerators. They started making cars again, because they didn't make them during the war, and things improved a lot. Everyone became more prosperous with the resurgence of American industry, so it was a very modern, medium-size city. And then IBM came in and built their big plant down on the South Road and almost every other person worked for IBM for a while there. All your friends in school were IBM'ers. We could go with our friends to the IBM Country Club and go swimming. That lasted for a while, for quite a number of years.

Then there was a big change, a change in the overall economy. Poughkeepsie was a nice place to live. There were good neighborhoods, nice schools and good business going on. You could always get a job. When I was a teenager I got a job at the Whelan's drugstore on Main Street and Liberty Street. First I started out as a soda jerk, just like in the movies, and transferred over to the cigarette counter after a while as I became more mature (laughs) in my position. It was fun working at Whelan's.

You got to see everybody. It was like, almost like a Judy Garland movie—everyone was nice and life was sweet and great (laughs).

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NF: You were eighteen when you left Poughkeepsie for New York [City]. What did you want to do there?

BN: Well, before I graduated high school, I and a friend would go down to Manhattan on weekends and we'd go to Washington Square Park where there's a big circular fountain and people gather to play guitars and bongo drums. It was pretty hippy—it was the end of the Beatnik Era. ...When I did move down there I wanted to join into that culture— the arts culture and the music culture, and it was very exciting because of the freedom it expressed. You're no longer inhibited by the standards and the mores of ordinary culture. You're in a more free world. Not that life is really different, but you're not being bound by all those restrictions. You don't have in mind all the time that I shouldn't do this because so and so would look at me askance. All the thiligs you see in the old movies that I think are funny and inhibiting and restricting and they were. People like me would go to New York to experience the freedom of it.

"Billy Name Hooded" Photo by David Shankbone; GNU Free Documentation License (commons. wikimedia.org)

NF: Did you feel yourself an artist as you were growing up? Did you gravitate toward that?

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BN: I did gravitate toward it. I was president of the dramatics club at Arlington High School. I didn't really study art courses. I did well in the one course you are required to take. I was more in that line of thinking.

NF: What did you want to do in the city? What did you think you might do?

BN: Well, it wasn't really thought of in that way because first of all you just want to get there. You want to get out of the small town. And when you get there you start to make connections with people. You develop friendships and then you find out what they are doing and you tend to go into the same lines that they are working in— and if they are working in theater, you start working in theater also. You start working backstage as a stage manager, you know. There were also a lot of contemporary musicians making experimental music, learning new modes, new fashions, and the whole fashion world overlapped with that too. And with photography and photographing models and fashions, because it was an art with the set and the model and the camera and learning the camera; so there were a number of ways you could express yourself if you didn't have a pre-decision of what kind of artist you were.

NF: So is that what you did?

BN: Yes, and then I met these people from a college in North Carolina called Black Mountain College. It had closed and most of the people came to New York, and some from San Francisco, but I met a whole group of them who came to New York and one of them was a lighting designer for the avant-garde dance companies and off-Broadway theaters, so he sort of started teaching me how to do lighting design. And in a sense I became his apprentice and I learned the trade and then I went on to do it on my own. And that was really my first line of work— career, what have you—as a theatrical lighting designer.

NF: You were a close associate of Andy Warhol's in the early 60s. How did that come about?

BN: Well, as I was a lighting designer, there was a church in Washington Square Park called the Judson Memorial Church which sponsored theatrical productions in its open spaces, and they did not only theater, but they did dance and poetry, what have you, and I was doing lighting there for the various productions. And Andy Warhol came there because it was 138

starting to become a very well known arena for experimental art, searching for new forms, what have you. And I was the lighting designer for the Judson Dance Company which became very well known. So artists would come there for performances and we met.

NF: So you were immersed in the world of art early.

BN: Yes. NF: I think I read somewhere that Andy Warhol had come to your apartment one time and he'd seen how you had decorated it.

BN: Yeah, I had an apartment on the lower East Side, and I had covered it all in foil and painted what I hadn't covered in silver, so it was a total silver apartment. I was used to working in spaces and this was called an installation. Instead of a minimal artwork it was a maximal artwork. It was maximal in that it used the whole space in a singular tone, so it was a maximal installation of silver. Andy had just gotten a new loft on East 47th Street and he asked me if I would come up and look at it and see if I could do the same thing to his loft as I had done to my apartment. So I agreed to do that and I went up and looked and it was really a decrepit place.

The walls were cement and it was crumbling. The floor was cement. It was previously a hat factory. So I said all right, I'll give it a try. I got all my supplies, the foil and the spray cans of silver paint, buckets of silver paint, and I started hanging the foil along the walls and spraying other areas and painting other areas, and it started to look very elegant and very beautiful, so I continued working on it until I finished it off and it took several months. During that working time, I had to go from my apartment on the lower East side up to East 47th Street and it was getting very tedious to do and it was breaking up my work schedule so I asked Andy for a key so I could work at nighttime and during the early morning hours if necessary. And he gave me a key, so eventually I just moved in and left my apartment. It was his studio which we came to call "The Factory."

NF: How did it get that name?

BN: Well, we were talking one day—Andy and Ondine and I—and we were saying we're not going to call it The Studio or Andy's Studio so 139

The Silver Factory. Photo by Billy Name. ("Pop Art isfor everyone. I don't think art should be only for the select few. I think it should be for the mass of American people and they usually accept it anyway. I think Pop Art is a legitimateform of art like any other, Impressionism, etc. it not just a put-on." —Andy Warhol)

we were wondering what we could call it—The Lodge?—No, and then one or the other of us said the Factory because it had been a factory, but

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we all agreed on point, that's what it is. It's the Factory and we came to call it "The Silver Factory."

NF: I like the silver. It's perfect for the photography, a great metaphor.

BN: It certainly is, and it's a great reflective element for Andy to work with also in his silk screening and painting; and then eventually it was very good for the filmmaking as well.

NF: I have read that you were inspired by the painting of the Mid-Hudson, now the FDR, Bridge that was painted with aluminum industrial paint and that was what you used at the Factory. Is that right?

BN: Yes. At my apartment I started out experimenting with different cans of colored scraping, trying to see how I would convert my apartment into an art piece. And I tried the blue—Krylon was the brand of the cans that were available—and after going through all the colors I got a can of the silver spray and when I used it, it just looked so stunning and beautiful and complete that I decided not to use colors any more but I'll just use this chrome that includes all the colors and did, went toward the silver and used it exclusively, and up at the Factory I did get the gallons of industrial paint, in fact I did the entire floor in silver as well.

NF: And the walls would be the aluminum foil? You would have to keep doing that?

BN: Yeah, periodically. And even the freight elevator that came up to our floor, I did that totally. And the bathroom. And so anyone who came into the building had to use the silver elevator, whatever floor they were going to. It became our trademark.

NF: That was a good advertisement. And then you became more involved with Andy Warhol, who was into everything at that point—the paintings and the prints and the films...?

BN: Yes. It started out because of my technical skills in electricity from working as a lighting designer in the theater. I knew all about electrical outlets and how to wire the whole place; and when he moved in, there were only sockets on the ceiling with the wires hanging out. There were no lights at all. I had to go to the hardware store and get fixtures and install them all. I installed the sound system for good sound.

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NF: And these are all things you taught yourself?

BN: Yes, because I never went to school or had training for any of this except for the lighting. I was apprenticed to Nick Cernovitch who was from Black Mountain College, so I learned from him how to set up and design the lighting show for dance or theater but otherwise I had the knowledge therefore of electricity and how it works in the various poles so I didn't kill myself with all these things. But it was all experiential, my learning and training, yes. It was like, you might say, in the old world...

NF: When you worked at the Silver Factory, after the painting was done, what was your role?

BN: Well, more or less, I was the foreman of the Factory. Because Andy was busy doing his silk screening and he had gotten a movie camera and was just starting to make films, he was totally occupied with his artwork.

I had made this space for him as the area for him to work in; so in the first place, I had to maintain it. And in the second place, I had to run it and that had mostly to do with the other people who came in. To see that they were not going to interfere with Andy when he was working, that they were relatively controlled, that they were not damaging anything, or each other, or what have you.

I became the foreman of the Factory. It was like I'd had the apprentice years with Nick Cernovitch and the lighting. Here I had what I would call my journeyman years. I was in charge of the place but it wasn't my place. It was Andy's place, it was his studio. But I had to see that everything ran well. So it wasn't a specific duty, it was everything that made the place run well—whether it had to do with having music playing or the lights in the various situations, or the furniture. I had gotten quite a number of pieces of furniture from here and there. In the basement of that building, which was a 6-story building I think, there was a lot of office furniture, old wooden-type office furniture that other tenants had left when they went bankrupt or whatever.

So I started bringing it up—three beautiful big office desks made of beautiful wood and I sprayed them all silver and I got a really big work table for Andy that was just the perfect size, brought it up and sprayed it silver, and chairs, you know the old curved wood office chairs. And I found some things—a beautiful big sofa—out on the street. It happened 142

to have castors on it so I just wheeled it into the elevator and up to the Factory. So I was furnishing the place in a working way so that it could be available for people to use.

I would go out buying things with Andy when he bought paints. We bought a big copy machine, one of the first ones. It was called a thermofax machine, made by 3M. It was a heat process. You would pass paper through it with your copy thing on top in layers and then you'd get the image out on new paper, but we used it to experiment—for making silk screens for Andy's paintings, like the flower paintings he did, the first series. He gave me the cover of a magazine that had these images on the cover and told me to run it through several times so it became very high contrast because he didn't want it to look like the image he was using.

He just wanted the outline of the flowers. We would experiment with other things on that machine, and there are other things but I don't remember because it was so long ago. I no doubt will skip a few things.

But when he was making films, I would set up the lighting and the sets and coordinate the people, and he would work the camera. His directing style, as you may have heard was non-existent (laughs), which he learned from—there was another filmmaker named Jack Smith. He did a number of underground films, and we were on the set of Jack's making his film and Andy learned from this very creative person, but who was also non-conventional, that you don't really have to stand there and tell people what to do and direct them in that sense. But you can imply an aesthetic and a whole scenic style simply by choosing the people you are going to have in the film who will be attuned to that and then having them around in the area so they will be free to perform. You don't have to direct them.

NF: Did you give them a story line?

BN: Not usually. We started out without that and then developed into using a script actually. And then developed from using black and white into color films and then into two and three hour color films and we actually did a 24-hour film and the most famous one, Chelsea Girls was...I think like 6 reels on each side of the screen, some in black and white and some in color, some without the sound on and some with, so that they ran simultaneously. Each one was a room in the Chelsea Hotel.

NF: I read about that. That was your idea.

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BN: It was all of our idea. You know, we worked very much together in our mentation about what we were going to do. Each one of us would have intuitions or think of things that were so cool and so neat that everybody would join and say, yes, that's perfect. But I wasn't the only idea person. It was a collaborative process. And then Andy would agree and that's what we would do. It was a very striking presentation, Chelsea Girls, and all of the top papers, like the Times and what have you, reviewed it, and so did Newsweek. And Time Magazine wrote about it, and it was quite a sensation at the time and the first time we made any money with the films.

NF: Are these films still being shown?

BN: They are being catalogued by the Museum of Modern Art or being restored. They were catalogued by a person at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a friend of mine, Sally Angel, and she brought out a book of all the screen tests that Andy did. And they are now looking for a publisher for the second volume which is all of the feature films, and it will be a really big book because there are a lot of feature films.

NF: What were the "screen tests" all about?

BN: I'll show you the book. (Pause) When Andy got his camera to start making films, he didn't like the old hand-held, action film-type thing that he was making because it looked like any underground film that anyone could do—the camera would jiggle and people would make believe they were doing things, so he got a tripod. So in our cultural-smart sense— when people would come over to visit—Andy would say, Oh, let us do a screen test of you, like sort of mimicking the Hollywood screen test of an actor or actress. So here's what they would do. They would sit before the camera with a background of photo paper and we would just film them for three minutes and not direct them. And they would say, What should I do, what do you want me to do? (Here he stopped to look at a book of his photographs of Andy making films.) That's my photo over here—these are all my photos. I have a bunch of photos in there of actually doing the filming.

NF: Yes, I saw them in the book you are giving to the historical society.

[Billy Name donated the book Billy Name, Stills from the Warhol Films

by Debra Miller to the Dutchess County Historical Society Library.]

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BN: That whole book was my work, and it was mostly of Andy working and the people in the films. Well, it was all from the films, stills from the Warhol films. And so the screen tests were people sitting before the camera and I've forgotten how many hundreds there are in that book, but that's the initial type of work that Andy was doing. In a sense it was very paradoxical in that it was a film, a motion picture still-life (laughs), having a still life in motion.

We worked with very basic principles like that because we wanted to find out how things worked, and you don't just jump into complexity.

You start with your basics. What does the camera do and you learn about the f-stops and timing and film speed and all that and you find out what do people do. Some people will just sit before the camera—if you tell them you sit before the camera and have a screen test made—where other people will start to do things and wander and have various tools and things, whatever. That's how that started.

Then we moved into coupling people or having groups of people and then we moved into...instead of simply having a stylistic set, we would move into having concepts of what they were doing and tell them and

Andy Warhol. Photo by Billy Name. ("I was trying to think the other day about what you do now in America i[you want to be successful. Before, you were dependable and wore a good suit. Looking around, I guess that today you have to do all the same things but not wear a good suit. I guess that's all it is. Think rich. Look Poor" —Andy Warhol)

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that moved into having scripted scenes. So it was simply progression from deciding you're not just going to do hand-held films, you're going to find out what all the tools are about.

NF: Was there a lot of underground filmmaking going on at the time?

BN: Yes, there was a whole underground filmmaking world with known filmmakers, and I had known a lot of them before Andy when I worked with Nick because he lived in that world. Nick Cernovitch knew everybody in the avant-garde cultural world in New York. And so we would go to different filmmakers' studios or lofts—Stan Van Der Beek, Stan Brakhage and Jack Smith. And so when I was working with Andy I had the opportunity to introduce him to these filmmakers so that he could find out when he got his camera what it was all about and how it worked.

Filming became throughout the 60s his prime modus operandi. This was after he had become famous as a painter with his silk screens, and he became more interested in making films. He still did paintings when people would commission him to do one because he needed the income.

And he enjoyed painting too, but eventually he stopped filmmaking— when he got shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968, when we moved into the second Factory on Union Square.

It was such a trauma, and it was very painful. We thought he was going to die in the hospital. There was another person—a gallery dealer who was at the Factory when Andy got shot—and he also was grazed in the back by a bullet and he was awake with Andy in the emergency room.

There were a couple of doctors standing over Andy saying, well, the bullet went through and bounced around the ribs and into the liver, the spleen, the stomach, and everything. This guy is DOA. So they were letting him die, because it would be too complex for him to survive that.

So the other guy the gallery dealer—sat up on his bed and said you can't let him die. He's a famous artist and he's rich. So they called in a specialist who he came in with a team of doctors and saved him. It took hours to save him. The bullet had gone through every organ but his heart. And so, because that one guy was there with Andy and spoke up, they saved him.

After that Andy never wanted to go to hospitals. When we told him the story that they had actually let him die and that he had to be revived, he wanted nothing to do with hospitals from then on. And eventually when 146

he did die, it was because he needed gall bladder surgery. He had gall stones that weren't passing, and he wouldn't go to the hospital. He'd go to Chinese acupuncture doctors and others. But finally the pain got so great he was convinced by people he was working with that he had to go to the hospital.

So he went in and they hired a private nurse who didn't really attend to him after the operation, which was successful. During the early morning hours she didn't change his fluids, he got dehydrated and died in the morning of a heart attack from dehydration. So there was some kind of jinx going on there with hospitals. First time they let him die but revived him, this time they just let him die. Now if they hadn't hired a private nurse he would have had the regular staff nurses who would have, during their rounds, changed his fluids and taken care of him. So it's not always a good idea to get a private nurse (laughs). It's not always a good idea to go to a hospital.

NF: If you can help it...And did you remain as the main photographer?

Andy Warhol and Tennessee Williams. Photo by James Kavallines, 1967. Library of Congress.

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BN: Oh, I did. I remained as the anchor in the Factory. A lot of times they would travel and I would stay there, to protect the works for one thing. But I was more of a behind the scenes type of person and I stayed behind and took care of the place and the people continued to come...

NF: Well, how many people would be there at any one time?

BN: Well, occasionally we'd have a party. We had a party for Judy Garland one night. So there were 75 or 100 people there for Judy. Actually, there was a guy named Lester Persky, who worked in television producing ads, and he was a friend of Tennessee Williams so he became a friend of Andy's also, and they decided that, I guess Judy had a birthday coming up and why don't we have a party at the Factory for Judy.

They came about 7 o'clock to the Factory and, you know, people don't expect anything to happen until ten or eleven or twelve so they came up on the freight elevator and Andy and I were standing by his work table and hearing the elevator coming up and the door opened and there were Lester Persky and Tennessee Williams with their hands formed in a cradle with Judy Garland sitting on top of that cradle. And they walked into the Factory like everyone was supposed to applaud but there was no one there yet (laughs). So they just put her down quickly and acted like nothing happened. That was the first time we had alcohol at the Factory because Judy drank highballs, so we had to have a set-up for her there near the couch on a little table...

NF: Was Andy working while all these people were milling around?

BN: No, he was just socializing then. But on a regular day we could have a half a dozen people over, never really more than that in the daytime, a half dozen guests who would be actors in the films or friends or business people, someone who wanted to make a deal with Andy or what have you.

NF: Some of the subjects for his artwork were electric chairs, automobile accidents, knives, and skulls.

BN: This was called the Death and Disaster series.

NF: Why did he choose those?

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BN: After he did the earliest pop art imagery, the icons like the Campbell Soup cans, and Marilyn Monroe and the Brillo boxes, he was talking to Henry Geldzahler—they talked a lot together—they were very close friends—and Andy would say, Oh, Henry, I'm getting tired of doing popular images, what should I do next? Henry took it very seriously and said, "You have to take a very deep move because you've been on the surface of American culture. Now you have to go deeper into American culture and do a death and disaster series." So there were the electric chairs, the automobile accidents, people jumping off buildings committing suicide, and race riots in the South, etc. So he did that type of work for quite a while, but it was a special series.

NF: But it was someone else's idea.

BN: Well, frequently things were someone else's idea because Andy would always ask other people, Oh, what should I do, what should I do?

NF: I find that interesting.

BN: Well, a lot of people do because it's so unauthentic of art and artists to do that and the previous set of American artists would never think of doing that. They'd be embarrassed if somebody found out they did that.

But Andy always asked people things like that—it was his natural habit.

He grew up like that, saying, oh, what should I do next, what would be good? (laughs) So he made a conspiracy out of it with whoever he was working with.

NF: I also read that he was obsessed with fame and making money. Is that accurate?

BN: I really don't think that obsessed is the correct word. I think he was driven to make money because of necessity. He had a town house down on Lexington Avenue which, if it wasn't all paid for, I don't know, would have meant a mortgage and other expenses, and all of the paintings— those big silk screens cost lots of money to make. So in order to continue to do what he wanted to do creatively, he had to make money. It was more of a necessity than an obsession. He knew he had to make money to continue his creative style and his lifestyle. Now, the fame part was just a dream. It's an all-American dream. All Americans dream of one day being famous, and he lived it as a lifestyle. It's like his subconscious 149

thought all the time. And once it started to happen, it just drove on and became bigger and bigger and bigger like it was a natural thing that he should become famous (laughs).

NF: And he did.

BN: He did (laughs). He became more famous than his work. He became the famous artist, and a lot of people didn't know what his artwork was. But he enjoyed fame and he knew that, unless it came to someone accidentally, he knew it came from being wealthy, or having money to operate with. And secondly, it came from power. Because there was a glamour associated with money and power. For instance, Hollywood movie stars, he always admired them because they had so much glamour it was like a magic. It could make people fall in love with them or do anything they asked them to do.

He was very rich in the sense of creating glamour in his paintings. Using icons like Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy and all these famous people, attracted people to his paintings as well. But it was some magic that he had because anybody could paint a picture of Marilyn Monroe or Jackie Kennedy and wouldn't necessarily become famous. But Andy had a magic, wizard thing about him that seems to have come from his family. They were from Ruthenia, which is part of Czechoslovakia.

They came here; they were very poor. His father worked in coal mines in Pittsburgh and other similar labor things, and the mother when they were so poor, she would save empty tin cans and make flowers from them and sell them in the neighborhood. She took care of Andy when he was sick, when he had St. Vitus Dance, a neurological disease. She took close care of him and got him coloring books, and she was making her various art things.

Somehow, from his family and their original country, he became a wizard and he had this magic sense, literally, I'm talking about. Why did he become the number one famous artist, why did his paintings become so...like the last sale was $100,000,000 for a Serial Elvis? One hundred million dollars! It has to do with Andy's magic.

NF: How would you define that magic?

BN: It's very difficult to do. The attempt to define him and what he does has been so ambiguous to people that they've tried and haven't sue150

ceeded because you can't really write about the magical spirit. All I can tell you is that it was there. There was a magical spirit that influenced people to come under his spell. And his work had that too and I've never seen it in anyone else. I've never heard of anyone else, it's like a...who is the guy in Russia who had the Czarina under his spell? Rasputin. It's like a Rasputin-type of thing in that he doesn't really exercise it or work magic—it happens from within him. The magic happens, and people become spellbound.

NF: That's so interesting.

10041016 9.444,

Soup can pillars on the exterior of the Royal Scottish Academy marking the 20th anniversary of Warhol's death in 2007. Photo by Tom Rolfe. Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike License. (creativecommons.org)

BN: That's why I stayed with him so long—he was just magic.

NF: I've seen him on the American Masters Series. I saw you too. Sometimes he looks like a little boy, with his fingers in his mouth...he didn't focus...But what you're saying is that he was intuitive...

BN: Oh, he was totally intuitive. He was not at all articulate in an intel151

lectual way. He was totally intuitive, and he delighted in what he was doing. He absolutely loved what he was doing in his creative work, whether it was painting, film or what have you. He was aware that things were happening that he wasn't directing to happen. Just like in his films.

He would tell the people he was going to start the camera and then he would walk away and the film would be being made by the camera.

NF: A lot of people couldn't be that open.

BN: I know. He was very unusual. I can't explain where it comes from other than the inward thing, inward spiritual...As far as his making the icons—of the soup cans, of the movie stars, of the supermarket boxes, and in his screen tests he made people into icons—stems from...Well, he went to church every Sunday. ...I went to his church in Pittsburgh. There are icons all over the place, and I think that's where he got his ideas from—as icons, because that's what he saw as he was growing up, every Sunday, all through his childhood, the middle years, and that became what art should be to him so that's what he reproduced creatively— everything would be an icon.

NF: So maybe the Church and his mother...

BN: The Roman Church sponsored a mass for him at St. Patrick's Cathedral after he died and all these famous people went, so even the Roman Church sponsored him even though he had all these strange things attributed to him through his life—of all the sexual things he had in his films, rock & roll music, all these things that you wouldn't think Rome would sanction. But because he was Andy Warhol, they had the mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral. It had to be that spiritual magic that was inside of him. We could go on and continue to talk about it but it would be pointless because if you haven't experienced it, you only hear what someone is saying about it. It was a real spirit magic thing, where he could enrapture anyone or anything or whole cultures.

NF: Do you think that is peculiar to artists in general?

BN: No, I think it was peculiar to Andy. I never saw it in other artists. I saw the capacity to inspire people in other artists, but never to enchant or enrapture people and whole cultures.

NF: Did you say someone has written about this quality in Andy?

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BN: I can't think of anyone specific who wrote at any length. They may have mentioned it.

NF: Why don't you?

BN: I'm not a writer. People always tell me I should write a narrative of my life and I always say, well, find someone who will do it and they can do it. I am definitely not a writer. I try to write things and I feel like I'm in school again and have to turn in the paper and I get so wrought up about it—it's all scrambled up. It's just not for me.

NF: Well, you have a lot of other talents.

BN: I'm very articulate, and I can explain things and I can talk well.

NF: That's what surprises me when you say you can't write.

BN: I know, I know. It's probably because I learned most of what I know on my own. I learned what you learn in high school but it wasn't very challenging, so after I got out of high school I continued to read books, go to the libraries. My mind was like...look at the books here on my table that I'm reading. I'm just a voracious reader, and that's how I learn but I never write it.

NF: Plus your hands-on learning.

BN: I'm an absorber (laughs).

NF: Is that what you call it? (laughs) I think I've asked you what life was like at the Factory because it sounded so chaotic to me.

BN: Well, it was a lot of the time. And there was a woman who was one of our film stars—her name was Mary Woronov. She did other movies like in Rock and Roll High School, she was the high school principal.

She did a number of films, but when she wrote one of her biographicaltype books, it was called Swimming Underground, and I did the photos in it and she referred to me at the Factory as the "Keeper of the Chaos" (laughs). So I dealt with it all the time but it was part of my life too, so it wasn't unusual or strange to me in the sense that I lived that same way.

I had the skills that enabled me to keep it stable, keep it going, and to have things happen rather than for the chaos to just fall apart. So I see the 153

chaos as a living factor that you simply continue to live in that realm...

NF: I wanted to ask you about the pop art movement in general. The pop art movement was shocking to a lot of people. Was that, do you think, in part a reaction to elitist art?

BN: No, I don't think it was a reaction against elitist art. I think the cultural situation in that period in the early and mid-60s--was a breaking open into an American art period. Now the previous major movement in the art world was Abstract Expressionism. It was all abstract strokes, colors, textures, paints and the paint itself as the art. So what pop art did and became was a neo-realism. It wasn't real realism but it was a neo-realism in the sense that, for instance in Warhol's paintings you don't have all abstract strokes in the beginning years. You have a tin can of soup, you know. It's very realistic but it's painted so it's like a neo-realism. ...all these artists [Rauschenberg, Johns, Oldenberg] were the second generation of America...and they didn't heed the Eurocentric thing at all—they completely disregarded it—painted what was in their subconscious or conscious or what appealed to them or what they thought was wonderful or marvelous. There were all these different styles, like Rauschenberg and Johns were the transition from the expressionists' mode into the pop mode because they had elements of both. They had beer cans, they had goats, tires, industrials, street cones, as well as paint as simply expression. So they were the transition.

And then Warhol and Lichtenstein, people who tended to be more in the cartoon world and then Warhol into the iconography world. They were totally independent in their own mind, but they also didn't follow anyone. They weren't being impressed by a leader of a group of artists like Picasso was or became in his later years when he became a marketing factor also. So the new pop art is simply popping out of the subconscious of young American artists. You know they were raised on reading cartoons and comic books. They were raised with movie stars and singers and Elvis and all that. All the imagery that was in their psyches came forward and they began to paint all these things, and that's where pop art came from—the second generation of America on their own turf.

NF: But surrounded by commercialism or a materialistic society they would choose objects to...

BN: They would choose what they were bombarded with all their lives.

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NF: It wasn't a criticism then of the cotnmercial?

BN: No, no, it was more a glamorizing of it, and saying hey, this is what we've known all our lives, what we've seen, what's in our brains, our minds. And when we start to think of an idea, a supermarket box comes out—Kellogg's or something—so we might as well glamorize these things. Specifically with Andy, in the old Eurocentric the artist turned his back on commercial culture because it was considered surface, had no value and you didn't pay any attention to it.

That did a complete 180, turned totally around with Warhol doing Campbell soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, where he would, say, instead of turning his back on the—what do you call the culture, ordinary culture?— turning his back on ordinary culture he would look at it and say, this stuff is crazy and it's irrational and strange. Why don't we take it over? So instead of turning back on ordinary culture, the young American artists appropriated it. Now appropriation art was at a certain time something that was very popular, where people would take what other artists had done and simply appropriate it and put it into their venues. But Warhol was the number one appropriation artist. He appropriated Brillo boxes, Campbell soup cans, movie stars, what have you. Anything that's way out there, far out, they'll jump on and do it until it's done excellently.

NF: He wanted to be known as a fine artist, didn't he, rather than as an illustrator and yet he used the illustrator's mode.

BN: Yes, right. He also had to succeed as an illustrator for his financial security.

NF: And he did.

BN: He did. Enough to buy a town house on Lexington Avenue, you know. And so, having secured himself financially, he moved on to secure his career as a fine artist. He already had very good connections in the New York cultural world, having worked for newspapers and magazines doing commercial ads. So he was well connected in the syndicate, so to speak, and he had studied art at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh. He knew the art world and what it was, how to make it and make art and all. So he doesn't just jump from commercial art into the fine arts. He continued to do commercial art throughout the beginning of his fine art career. He didn't disdain it and say, oh, now I can finally get rid of it, you know, 155

which was that Eurocentric attitude toward what's beneath you or not as good as you. He kept both of them. He always did this. He took care of everything he involved himself in and didn't burn any bridges. He kept them up...

NF: ...You've spoken about...how Andy almost died...

BN: Yes. NF: Did that change him?

BN: It changed the whole Factory. He became more of a cardboard Andy. You know when you have a new movie opening and you have a cardboard figure of the star outside the theater with something holding it up. Well, Andy, I feel, became more of a cardboard Andy. The trauma was so intense and he did die and had to be brought back.

NF: His heart did stop?

BN: Yes, he literally did die and had to be brought back. So it was a real trauma for his physical and mental and spiritual body. I loved him, and I was very close to him so I was totally traumatized. And that's the reason why I eventually left The Factory because it didn't go back to what it was. It was mostly an artist's scene, but it became more of cardboard Andy in the sense of doing commercials and commercial work, reinventing commercial work in terms of art work and commissions like Mercedes-Benz. They commissioned him to do a whole series of cars.

NF: More of a focus on business and not art?

BN: Yes, and Andy would be saying, business is the greatest art. But I didn't feel it was really an art scene for me to work out in as it had been previously. It was becoming more commercialized so I became more alienated from it and only came out at night, out of the darkroom.

NF: Really?

BN: Oh, I did a couple things, like the album covers for the Velvet Underground albums but mostly I stayed in. And so in 1970, I said I'm so saturated with the Factory, I have to go out and see what's going on in the rest of the world. And I did. I left a note on the door of the darkroom: 156

"Dear Andy, I am not here anymore but I am fine. Love, Billy."

NF: And what did you do then?

BN: Well, I went out into the world. I lived on the streets in New York, in the Village and the East Village. And then I went down south and I worked on a farm that a group of Black people were starting up—a working farm situation. They asked people to volunteer and come down and help.

NF: This was when the Civil Rights movement was still going on?

BN: Still going on, the Vietnam War was going on, the various sexual revolutions, the gay revolution, the women's revolution, the Black revolution and the general sexual revolution were all going on concurrently.

Civil rights and political revolution were going on. It was a revolutionary period. And it was culturally rich, and it was exciting in that it was authentic. Whoever was part of the revolution felt deeply about it. They weren't just espousing a cause; they were living it. So it was a very exciting and real time.

After the farmers in Georgia, I went on to New Orleans and stayed there for a whole summer with people who had a house. I don't know what you would call it because they weren't hippies. Hippies are really a West Coast phenomenon, but I guess it went all through the culture, didn't it? But I guess you could call them hippies. I was older than that. I was born pre-World War II. I'm not a baby boomer. I'm a pre-war baby so all of that stuff was younger than me. Everything that was happening in that social wave is something I was older then, so I mostly viewed and experienced those things. But I stayed with those people and it was very interesting. And there were a lot of magicians and magic people, all within the drug culture and the music culture.

I went on to Boulder, Colorado. I was hitchhiking all the time, with no money to cross the United States. I was picked up by people going to Boulder and that's where I was going. They took me to their house and had me stay overnight with them and in the morning gave me breakfast and took me to church with them and then I went on my way.

And one time when I was going through Utah, I'd just entered a small town and the sheriff there picked me up and told me I couldn't hitchhike 157

through his town. It was getting dark and he said he would put me up overnight in the jail if I wanted to do that, and I did because otherwise I'd be sleeping outside. He said he had to lock it because those were the rules (laughs). So I slept in the jail overnight. And then in the morning he got me out and took me to a diner and bought me this wonderful breakfast and drove me out of their town lines and let me go.

NF: That was nice, wasn't it?

BN: Yeah, there are some wonderful people who are willing to help other people, but there are other people who are mean and nasty and like snakes.

NF: You met a few of them then?

BN: Yeah, they're just happy to step on your toes and make jokes out of you and you're a fool or a bum, or you're no good. So you fight your way through the world, the good and the bad. And I finally ended up in San Francisco. I was looking for a friend of mine from New York who had become a Zen master at the Zen Center.

NF: Were you interested in that?

BN: Oh, I was interested in Buddhism since my late teenage years.

NF: Really?

BN: Yes, I had always read Buddhist literature and felt an attunement there because I always felt I could be in the Buddhist line because I totally, intellectually, agreed with it and what it espoused,—which is basically clarity, not getting involved in thought processes that would make me neurotic, and worrying, and all these things that were irrelevant to real life. It's a very clear way of being and I'm still a Buddhist today.

You can see my statue of Buddha here.

NF: I see.

BN: I also wanted to find Diane di Prima, who was one of the Beat Poets and lived in San Francisco. So I found both of them and didn't feel I was really attuned to what they were doing. And I didn't want to just forge my way into their scene, so I went back out and lived in the streets. And I 158

lived in a hotel. I had numerous episodes which are anywhere from brilliant and marvelous to tragic and sinister, but that's another story—the San Francisco story. There was this old TV show called "The Streets of San Francisco." So I said, this must be San Francisco because I'm living out in the streets.

NF: Did you pick up jobs now and then?

BN: I don't remember—probably, possibly. It was all so mysterious.

So finally I did decide to come back...I felt the Hudson Valley pulling me like a big magnet—to go back home. I called my family and asked

"Billy Name in his Kitchen Discussing Astrology." Photo by David Shankbone. GNU Free Distribution License (commons.wikimedia.mg)

them if it was okay to come back home and they said, sure, I was always welcome. So I came back to Poughkeepsie.

NF: When was that?

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BN: July 7, 1977. 7-7-77 (laughs). I was surprised when I got here that it was that consistent number thing. I've always had a good arrangement with numbers. When I look at a clock it will be 11:11 (laughs) or it's 12:12. So when I got back here and found a place to live, I got involved in community activism and I also worked with the Clearwater. For a couple summers I was on the boat all summer with the teaching crew.

One weekend I went from the South Street Seaport all the way up to Albany. We didn't pick up anybody. The boat was down in New York and we had to get it to Albany, so we did the whole Hudson River in those two beautiful days. And it was sunny and gorgeous both days, and I got to steer the boat and I went under every bridge on the Hudson River. It was a thrilling thing to do. What a wonderful thing to experience in your life —a beautiful weekend with the whole Hudson River.

NF: I would love to do that.

BN: It wasn't scheduled. I just happened to be on the boat at the time.

I got involved with the Dutchess County Community Action Agency. I always found out who my representatives were in local government and I would ask them—for those agencies I was interested in working for I would ask them to appoint me to the board. Because I knew, having started out doing those things, if you work for a not-for-profit agency and you are not on the board, you're just someone who is told what to do. And I wasn't going to settle for that because I wanted to do policy and all this other stuff. I went back to college, at Dutchess Community College, and got a degree in business administration so I knew how to do management, budgeting and all these financial things you need to know to be on a board....

Eventually I became the chairman of the community development board and was doing that for a while. I had spent a couple of years with the Clearwater and the Community Action Agency, so I had a full plate of public service which I hadn't performed previously. Well, I actually did it from 1980 to 1995, and I told myself it was my public service time.

But I was finding out that it was so intransigent, so unrewarding...

Oh, and the Community Action Agency had an office on Catharine Street too, and there we were trying to find homes for people and food for people and we didn't find anything....Finding homes for families and people was opposed by the Common Council because they didn't want more 160

poor people moving into Poughkeepsie and being supported. They literally said they didn't want more people coming up here from Westchester because they hear they can get free housing and food. They just didn't want a big wave of people because they were providing public services.

We weren't doing anything that extravagant. We were just trying to find homes for homeless families. ...So I learned a lesson. ...I always had the feeling that everyone should have the opportunity to give public service.

But then when I learned that people knock other people down and don't even allow them to get there, that was a new lesson for me.

I'm always generally optimistic and pretty fair-minded, so when these things happen then I have to take into account the factor that people aren't even going to have the chance to serve on the board—they get knocked off before they get on it. So that was a whole learning experience. Things like that and not being able to find homes for people and the discontinuation of the food program, made me say, well, I've had my stint of public service. I see it's incorrigible and I'm not going to make any headway. And I'm not going to drive myself to the wall anymore and wear myself out because it's fruitless. ...So I said I might as well go back into the art world. After all, it's still there. Andy had died and people had started reading books about him. And they started seeing about me and that I was in these books and asking me if I knew Edie Sedgwick.

NF: Did you ever see Andy again, between the time you left the Factory and the time he died?

BN: No, but I talked to him on the phone a number of times...

NF: I wanted to ask you what Andy Warhol was like. Was he a good friend, someone you could be close to?

BN: I was close to him and he was a good friend. I think we got closest to what he was like when we talked about the spirit magic thing. You can just make a note that I said he was a good friend and I was very close to him and I was really traumatized when he was shot. And that's why I left the Factory.

NF: What have you been doing the last ten years?

BN: I've been in a number of art shows around the world... So life goes on...

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NF: That's exciting. Could you have imagined all this?

BN: No, not originally because you know I go places, and I have to sign autographs. And the first time someone asked me to sign my autograph it was like, wow, this is cool, man (laughs). In my life I've achieved the status where I have to sign autographs. I thought it was great. Boy, I've really accomplished something in this life. So it's great to be...I'm not really famous, I'm infamous in the art world, you know. I'm known throughout the art world as having created The Silver Factory for Warhol and as a photographer, and as being a very nice guy too.

NF: I would agree with that.

BN: Yeah, I have a reputation of being a very cool guy and somebody who is worth knowing, you know. "Oh, you'll really like Billy when you meet him," people tell people that. So because I'm not trying to be like that, I feel sort of proud of it because I'm naturally like that. So I don't have to figure out how to do it.

NF: Are you still photographing? I wondered about that.

BN: Oh, yes, yes...1 spent thirty-five years in film photography and now I'm ready to explore this type of photography [digital].

NF: What type of photography do you do now? I mean, what is your subject matter?

BN: Well, I do architecture somewhat, but I still do people. I do portraits and for instance on May 2 at the Chelsea Hotel I have a set-up where I'm going to be doing portraits of people who have signed up with my agent to have a portrait done. It's called a Billy Name Pop Portrait. And so we're starting out at a very modest fee of $400...

NF: That's a lot.

BN: ...to have your portrait done. I mean it's more than Olin Mills (laughs) but as far as my photo work goes, it's a very modest price because I sell a print for a minimum of $1500.

NF: Really?

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BN: Yes, so we want to build up a portrait business, just to have a regular income assured in a sense. So I do mostly portraiture, either posed or during live action, at art galleries or events.

NF: I think it was Ondine speaking in a book Patrick Smith wrote about different people who had been at the Factory, who spoke about how you and Andy Warhol had a kind of simpatico relationship working together.

BN: We were very well synchronized. Well, during the whole first year at the Factory, we mostly worked alone together. Maybe Gerard was there sometimes cleaning silk screens, and Ondine started to come visiting either that year or the next year. But in the beginning we were synchronized so well that we spent all the time working. We loved it. It was such a wonderful experience because when you're creating things and it comes out exactly the way it should, there's a certain moment when you see it and it clicks, it happens. The art piece becomes a creative, wonderful expression. It's just thrilling.

NF: It must be satisfying.

BN: You know it. When your work comes out consistently just as you expected it and hoped for...and it does, you don't have to hope anymore—it just comes out great. Same thing with photography. Well, with film, when you are developing a print and you put it in a tray of chemistry—and then you see the image come out and you see it's exactly what you wanted to create and you know it's your baby. You had that child and nobody else did and it looks like yours. It's just great. Art is a wonderful feeling.

NF: Well thank you, Billy, for talking to us.

BN: You're very welcome. The Dutchess County Historical Society is my own county society. And I love my home and I love the Hudson Valley.

End Notes: Patrick S. Smith, Warhol, Conversations About the Artist. Ann Arbor,

MI: UMI Research Press, 1988.

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Other Sources: Andy Warhol, Touchstone of American Culture. PBS American Masters Series, 2006.

Morera, Daniela. The Andy Warhol Show. Triennale di Milano, 22 settembre 2004-8 gennaio 2005. (Curated by Gianni Mercurio and Daniela Morera) Skira: 2004.

Lippard, Lucy R. Pop Art. New York: F. A. Praeger, 1966.

Umland, Anne. Pop Art, Selections from The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1998.

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Bridge of Dreams In 2008 and 2009, volunteers at Marist College's Hudson River Valley Institute conducted approximately 35 oral history interviews on the topic of the Poughkeepsie-Highland Railroad Bridge and its rebirth in 2009 as the Walkway Over the Hudson State Historic Park. These recollections and observations, gathered from a diverse group of area residents and others associated with the bridge, now form an important archive of living history. The following interview of architect Ed Loedy conducted by Jason Schaaf provides a lively sample of the many treasures in this archive awaiting future generations of historians, researchers and Walkway visitors.

Jason Schaaf: How long have you been in the Hudson Valley?

Ed Loedy: I came to the Hudson Valley in 1953, so that's...I am not sure about how many years. Must be about fifty something years.

JS: And what is your overall feeling of the Hudson Valley?

EL: Good Question. I love this valley, and I have traveled a bit because most people like where they have been or where they were brought up.

And I have traveled a bit, and I keep coming back here because this is a terrific place to be. It's beautiful. The river's beautiful. The whole place is beautiful.

JS: Anything in particular sticks out about the Hudson Valley?

EL: I can't say anything particular except I like the topography and for instance, compared to Florida (which is rather flat and boring), this is interesting topographically driving over hills, going over and underneath things. The river obviously is a big attraction to the Hudson Valley.

I love the river. I lived close to it as a kid. I've been on it a lot.

JS: So can you describe for me what it was like the first time you came across the bridge?

EL: ...Well, actually the first time I came over a bridge to Poughkeepsie 165

was when I moved here in 1953. And back then the approach of the bridge was different. There was a road much closer to the river, and you took a sharp left turn to get on to the bridge so when you finally saw the bridge it was [snaps his fingers] in front of you like this; and I never to this day forget. And every time I come back to Poughkeepsie from the other side of the river, I imagine that it's almost like the first time I went over it. ...then I have another view in mind of the railroad bridge, which [was] when I was about fifteen or so when I came here near the river. And I used to look up...at this bridge, and it's 200 some feet above the ground. And I remember seeing a small train. It traveled slowly across the bridge because the bridge was designed to support trains.

But the impact of a train increases as it speeds up so the trains had to go slowly. And this train basically crawled over, in my mind, crawled over the bridge. And it was filled—a lot of flat cars filled with construction equipment painted orange and yellow— backhoes, front end loaders, track hoes. And I still to this From a stereograph image of the Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge. Dutchess County Historical Society Colday have a picture in my lection. mind about that.

JS: Great. So what brought about inspiration for you in some of your designs for the bridge?

EL: Well, I really only have one design, and there was only one particular inspiration. I also remember that very well. It was in 1978, back thirty years ago that I, for some reason, happened to be down by the river and happened to look up at the bridge. And by that time, it had already been defunct for four years. There had been a fire on that bridge in 1974.

Again, I'm looking up at the bridge and saying to myself, "It's a shame, this bridge. I don't see my little train over it anymore. There's nothing 166

going on, on this bridge."And bingo [snaps his fingers], a light went off like in the cartoons. (The thing about the light over the head, you know it's the perfect icon or description of what it means to get an inspirational thought.) And I didn't see a defunct bridge anymore. I didn't see a bridge that was half destroyed or on its way to its makers. I saw a building half built. I saw a building (don't forget I am an architect). I am thinking the foundation is here, the site is here, everything is here. We just have to add the floors, the walls and the lights—whatever. We have the building half done, and that got me to hustle back to my office and make a drawing which has been kicking around now for thirty years of what I pictured this could have been...

JS: ...Could you walk me through that design a little bit?

EL: Well, I came up with that idea thirty years ago, and I took a photograph of it. ...I ran back up to my office. I think I got a Polaroid camera which, back in those days, was the instant camera of the day. And I took a picture and it went zzzzzz [sound effect], and [the photo] would come out. I put it in my pocket, and it would get nice and warm and about a minute later, you would peel it off and have a picture. And I took that picture and had it enlarged...but at first, I just took a small picture and sketched my idea over top of it.

I came up with the idea that this could be basically almost a city over this bridge, that would have housing on it...it would have businesses on it, museums, sporting facilities, ability to get some boats [docked]. The idea [also included] putting an extra train stop after Poughkeepsie train station so you could get off the train—not only at Poughkeepsie but at 'Poughkeepsie North' as they have at White Plains, and that would take you right up to this bridge. I saw a complete self-enabling structural entity that would support housing, businesses, entertainment areas, restaurants, bars, you name it. Anything, frankly. You can do anything you want with it—even today. The mixture of uses there really does vary over time. So could the visual picture of it vary.

JS: Imagine if this thing was complete. How do you think this thing would impact Poughkeepsie, the Hudson Valley?

EL: ...My idea all along was to make a feasibility study that we would study the structure—legally, environmentally, economically, any which way—and if the study would permit (the outcome of the study was that 167

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Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge (above) and Loedy's remaking of the bridge (below). Loedy:s design called .for encasing the bridge in a low maintenance "skin" holding offices, shops, recreational facilities, and housing. A train also moves across the bridge (upper right). Courtesy of Ed Loedy.

it made sense to do it), then you would have the people there willing to finance it. That's how this made sense to do it. ...That's how this all works. So based on a study that says this will work, you would execute this idea.

I think it would be just a wonder of the world. People would come here, the same as if they go to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower, they go to India to see the Taj Mahal, they go to Rio De Janeiro to see Sugarloaf with the Christ statue on top. If you ever saw a picture of that, that thing is about 600 feet up in the air. These are the kind of things that people are willing to talk about even if they've never been there, and most of them 168

don't get to see these things. But they somehow...they get the human beings excited about things that are extra-ordinary. So that's what I think. I think this would have put the Hudson Valley on the world map—not on the New York State map on the world map.

JS: How was your design received by the business, political communities?

EL: Okay, that's a good question....at the time, the Poughkeepsie Journal carried some articles, and the basic attitude was that this was something that was too big. Nobody could grasp it. I mean, who needs to go shopping up on a bridge when we have plenty of shopping centers down on Route 9, and who would want to live up there? So it was not well received. Now among many of my friends who were just talking to me on the side, they would say, "Ed, this is a crazy and fantastic idea" and so on. ...It was probably received kind of like the Eiffel Tower when, by the way, it [the Eiffel Tower] was built as part of an exhibition and when the decision came along to keep it after the exposition was over, then how was that idea received? Everybody in Paris went nuts. "You're going to keep this thing here? You got to knock this thing down. This was the ugliest thing built in Paris." And I do not know the details on how it ended up staying, but it stayed. A hundred years later, it was the greatest thing ever to happen to Paris. But that's how humans are, you know.

Change is difficult for most humans, and if something has been around long enough, guess what? Then it's a good thing...

JS: Great. Can you tell me some of the benefits that would come if your design was considered?

EL: Well, I go back to what I said earlier...I realized (because I have one foot solid, maybe more than one foot solid in the business world as an architect), I realize that you just can't build something like this without understanding the financial and economic impacts. Would this had come to fruition, as I said earlier, it would be a fantastic thing here. There are thousands of people who would have jobs. This would be a fantastic tourist attraction...I mean, it's just a fantastic place. You could have windmills on it to generate power. You could have underwater turbines that would take advantage of the tides that go in and out, because the Hudson River is half a river and half a fjord, if you know what a fjord 1 69

is...there are a lot of ways to capture energy.

This could be fantastic, by the way; a completely self-supporting place to live. You could anchor...what I am going to say...a couple of warships.

I don't know your feelings about war or not war, but there are plenty of extra warships around. You could put one there as a museum...you could have regular boat trips down to New York like they used to have in the old days, or when I was a kid. You could get on to one of these boats to New York and back.

You could have bungee jumping contests. People would say to me,

Historic View: Poughkeepsiefrom the Railroad Bridge (date unknown). Dutchess County Historical Society Collection.

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"Loedy, you're crazy. What's with this bungee jumping?" ...What's so different about bungee jumping from.. .for instance, speed skating or downhill skiing?...downhill skiing has been around for a long time.

Somehow prestige accrued. Why? Because it's been around for a long time; bungee jumping hasn't been around for a long [time]...but is it any crazier than coming down a goddamn mountain at 80 miles per hour on a pair of wooden sticks, then jumping off?...Frankly, I think it's safer to come off the bridge, because at least you know you are going to stop.

So this could have been fantastic, and by the way, I don't rule it out all together yet. The Walkway is in the works right now, but I suggest that it is possible that the Walkway people will find out something I have said all along: the most expensive part of that bridge is the maintaining of the structural integrity which requires its continuous painting which I checked just recently with the New York Bridge Authority.

And I was told (and they told me not to quote them), but they said 30 million dollars just to paint this bridge. That would need to be done on a continuous basis. How do you pay for that? You charge the average person who walks across with their family. "Yes sir, that's $615 for your ticket, and the kids go half price. That's $312 for those two kids a piece" and so on. You can't do that. So who is going to pay for painting this bridge? The taxpayers are going to pay. Now my idea called for no taxes. The idea was this was a business where everybody had to carry his or her weight.

So I am thinking if this Walkway takes off, that's terrific. But it might just happen that at both ends, maybe even along the Walkway, someone's going to say, "Listen, I will pay you guys $200 a week if I can put a hot dog stand here." Or McDonald's says, "I tell you what. I'll pay one million a year to put a McDonald's down there." And Marriott might say, "I'll lease this spot here for 18 million a year to put this hotel here." So before you know it, you have my ideas on the two ends subsidizing the Walkway and then in some fashion, this thing might start crawling all over the bridge and end up looking something like I had in mind. It's not to be ruled out because that will pay for it all. Otherwise we all, as taxpayers, will have to pay for it all.

JS: The other thing you mentioned yesterday, that would be advantageous to your design, related to the concrete and steel. Could you kind of talk to me about it as well?

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EL: The maintenance of the structure as it stands right now requires continuous painting. Now painting sounds easy. You just get a brush and you go like this. Not in today's time, when you have to be so careful about polluting things, and God forbid a little speck of dust falls off the bridge and you gotta catch it and all that now. So if you ever watch how things are painted on the bridge now, if any of you have driven over bridges, you've seen these gigantic machines on the side. You get these big ducts and as you go by, it goes [sound effect]. What are they like?

Gigantic vacuum cleaners on wheels and anything they do—brushing, scraping—goes straight into a vacuum cleaner. So when you scrape that bridge, you can't have any dust fall into the river. God forbid some fish is going to swallow that. ...Before you know, you're cooking this fish, you're going to have a brown spot on your face because you ate that piece of rust, whatever. But the idea is that you can't paint bridges like you used to. You have to go through the process of protecting the environment...So my idea of building this structure was to use the existing bridge structure to support it all, but it would be totally encased...So the existing steel and concrete isn't exposed to the weather any more.

Consequently, you do not need to continuously maintain it, because this would be a big savings...

JS: Great...Okay, I want to switch a little bit and start going into talking about the process of meeting up with the different people, and then getting up to a point where you eventually had to travel a little bit. So could you talk about the first time you started pursuing this vision.

EL: ...for about ten years, I simply viewed myself as the idea guy, and I frankly did nothing else about it. And that's the thing. People said, "Ed, that's a neat idea." And I said, "Yeah." I was waiting for someone to maybe pick up this idea. About ten years after that, I was down on the beach—down in the Bahamas on vacation with my family and my 18-year-old boy. And I was on the beach, and I am trying to teach him lessons about life that he was about to confront. And I said, "You know, if you want to do something, the way you go about that is that you put that in your head. That I'm going to be a movie maker. I'm going to become a concert violinist. I am going to be whatever. And you put it in here [points to his head], and you focus on that, and you just stay with that. And that's something you really want to do. You just say to yourself, 'I'm going to do it,' and you will end up doing it."

So the kid, in all his brightness as an 18-year-old kid, turns the tables on 172

me and says, "Oh, yeah, Dad. That's all there is to it. Why didn't you do this bridge already?" So I said, "Well, that's a good point." But I said, "This is a big deal. This is not just becoming a violinist." He said, "Yeah, but you said 'whatever it was!" So I said, "Okay."

So by the time I got back from that vacation, I made up my mind to do just that. I said ten years had gone by, and nothing had happened, and nobody seems to be interested. I think still it's a good idea. So I will do it.

So I started calling the owner, a fellow named Gordon, I think, Schreiber Miller. And I had met him once before, but I knew he was difficult to get a hold of. I made up my mind I would take my good old time, be patient.

Call them once a week...I called them for months. The lady always answered the phone with the same thing: "Sorry, he's not here." I was very apologetic to bother him. I would like to speak to him, tell him if he gets a chance. I was playing my game. I knew sooner or later, I would get to her, and I did.

After a while, I started to become her friend, and she started to feel bad that Gordon wouldn't talk to me. As it turns out later, she was his lady friend, so I had an excellent in. She finally arranged for me to meet Gordon, and I met with him because clearly, the thing I had to do is have a right to that bridge in some fashion. I might not have to own it; if I had the right to develop, it was another thing. If! was a partner with him to do things, that would have been another thing. Even if I had a limited time to do something [based] on some agreement, I had a right to that bridge. I needed that in order to basically make my idea stick with the people I wanted to talk to. Because, you know, what could I say to you?

"I want to paint the Eiffel Tower pink." And you would say to me, "Yeah, so what, Ed. You got any other good stories?" But if I told you that, "You know, we just acquired rights to the Eiffel Tower, and we were going to paint it pink or were thinking about it." They're going to say, "Oh, you have rights here." So yeah, that is a different story.

So anyway, I tried to convince him and tried to persuade him to make some kind of a deal. He had this bridge for ten years already, and hadn't done diddly squat with this bridge. He collected about ten thousand dollars a month for two years from Central Hudson because they had lines over the bridge, power lines. They caught on to his deal quick, and they put their lines underwater so that fell through.

So after that he had no income. So I said, "Well Gordon, maybe you 173

think my idea is a little pie in the sky" (which he always said). But I said, "What ideas do you have?" And he didn't have any. Well, he wouldn't make any kind of deal with me, and I became frustrated so I said, "Okay, there are other ways." By the way, there are always other ways.

And so I came back [from Pennsylvania where Gordon Schreiber Miller lived], and he hadn't paid his taxes, had been totally delinquent. He wouldn't even bother keeping up the navigational lights on the bridge which were a safety matter. So I made an arrangement with the County through my attorneys. We formed a corporation called Sky Track Incorporated...and we made a deal with the County so they would foreclose on the bridge, and then we would be assigned the County's rights. In effect, this would give us control over the bridge.

Now interestingly enough—you wouldn't ask, but I will tell you—we're only taking half the bridge because the County [Dutchess County] stops right in the middle of the river. I had that going, so I agreed. So I went across the river and made my same plea speech to Ulster County. Well, they listened politely, and they entertained some letters from my attorneys. But they didn't act on that. So now I had half of the bridge...this was about fifteen years ago, and there were some tough economic times.

And I had so many things on my plate that I had to deal with economically and financially, and frankly, even domestically with my family.

This had to go a little bit on the back burner. And during that time was when the County was proceeding ahead with the foreclosure on the bridge. And when the newspaper got a hold of that, of course, everyone got nervous: Who's buying this bridge? (my name wasn't connected) Who's Sky Track? What's this mysterious firm? And little by little, this [snow]balled up into something. The County felt the pressure and did renege on the deal with us. We had the right to sue the County, but I never pursued that. So there was my second chance of getting hold of the bridge.

So a little time went by, maybe a couple of years. Then I was remarried.

A completely separate matter here. But during that time I had a great advocate, my second and present wife. She found out about this, and she said, "Why don't we talk to this guy Gordon?" "Well," I said, "I already talked to this guy Gordon." "Well, let's talk to him again." I said, "Okay." So we started this process again. Making phone calls and so on.

Which was easier this time, and I was able to get a hold of Gordon this time.

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We went down to see Gordon, had a meeting with him. And lo and behold, would you believe, he agrees to a deal? Yep, I forget the details, but we had a deal. We had the right to develop or at least go through the process of doing all the due diligence. All the analysis that was required to see if this whole idea made any sense at all, which I was not going to bother to do without having a right to the bridge. Because an analysis like this is more than if you had enough money in your pocket to go get pizza that night. So he said, "Fine."

We come back here. I instructed my attorneys to prepare a contract to send it to him. They did, and I never heard from Gordon again. And you know, by this time, we are 22 years into this thing, and I'm getting a little tired. So I actually, at this point, stopped putting energy into this. [I] found out that he handed the rights over to a Vito Moreno. Vito Moreno was a partner of his, but had nothing to do with the bridge itself.

Vito was given the bridge so Gordon could get away from under the deal with the Coast Guard, who was now breathing down his neck to make sure he [Gordon] put the proper lighting on it, and who knows whatever other requirement. I heard there were some 150,000 dollars in fines involved, and Gordon's way of dealing with this...he bought it for a dollar and now Vito had it, and Vito was his straw man. He made it clear that he could control Vito. And Vito now, Vito was hiding this bridge.

Vito did call me at one time and [he] needed some help from me because a local disc-jockey wanted to hang bras from one end of the bridge to the other to deal with some kind of breast cancer thing. Which I think the idea was fine, but I was getting to the point where I wasn't going to be involved anymore and all the local attitude was, "You guys are crazy nuts.

All you bridge people are nuts; this bra thing is the last thing we want to deal with." So I declined to assist, and then the next part of the story is interesting. Vito, for unknown reasons, decided to give the bridge to Bill Sepe who was counting all along to put a Walkway on it. And he [Vito Moreno] did do that, after which Schreiber [Gordon Schreiber Miller] calls me up and says, "Ed, I need your help. Vito gave my bridge away." (chuckles). I said to Schreiber, in so many words, "It's too late now."

Twenty years I have been dealing with this. Maybe more. I said, "I don't care what happens now." I said, "My ideas aren't coming on, and I'm out of it now." So that is how Bill Sepe ended up with it, and that basically describes my attempts to get a hold of the bridge, and my inability ultimately to be able to get a hold of it.

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Texas firm pions to demolish

Pouahkeepsie Railroad Bridge Firm plans to explode rail bridge Conrail finds buyer for RR bridge Headlines in 1983 and 1984 announced Conrail, owner of the Railroad Bridge, had hired Jet Research Center ofArlington, Texas to cut the bridge into sections then "use explosives to drop it into the Hudson River" Estimated cost of demolition was seven million dollars. In November of 1984, Conrail instead sold the bridge for one dollar to a mysterious entrepreneur from Pennsylvania named Gordon Schreiber Miller

JS: Just for purposes of color, would you describe what Gordon Schreiber [Miller] was like on a personal level, one to one level?

EL: He was a very interesting guy. I actually only had two really good meetings with him, and each one was at restaurants down in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Each lunch was probably two, three hours long.

And we ate and drank, and it was just a wonderful meeting. As for meetings [puts his thumb up], they were perfect meetings. But as far as results, no good.

He was an older fellow, and I say older, I mean at that time I thought he was older. But he was colorful in that sense, but I didn't have a whole lot to do with him. He had written me some letters. For somebody who was claiming to be involved in big deals like buying this bridge from Conrail and having investors to deal with, his letters were always handwritten, very scribbled all over the place...a little difficult to read, but I can't say a whole lot more. He was a fun guy to have lunch with though.

JS: Do you have an opinion why he might have gone towards Vito Moreno, rather than stick with you?

EL: I really don't know. I think I will venture this guess. Vito Moreno was in his pocket so by giving this to Vito, he felt he didn't give it away.

Vito very much surprised him. Vito then gave it away. That's when he called me, and he got all upset and wanted me to help get it back. I, on the other hand, wasn't in his pocket. He and I disagreed all along. My plan was, I think, too big for him. He was forever looking to make a 176

buck there, and I think his version of making a buck was—can we rent it to someone to run wires across it, can we hang bras across it, can we get bungee jumping off of it. If he was here, he might say something completely different. I don't know. But he and I did not see eye to eye, and that's why we couldn't make a deal.

JS: Can you tell me about your relationship with Sepe?

EL: Yeah, Sepe and I met first time probably 25 years ago. He came into my office...and he said, "I would like to talk to you about this bridge."

So I've been the bridge guy for five years at least by now, and he explained to me his idea of a Walkway. And you know to me, doing a walkway there [slight pause]....I would compare if you had the New York Philharmonic at your disposal. Would you ask them to play "Happy Birthday" or one of Beethoven's symphonies? So I didn't think he was taking advantage of the opportunity that was there, and I basically explained to him. And he was nice...! said, "Why don't we join up, and I will design you a Walkway that you can't even imagine?" Because the Walkway being proposed is fine, and by the way, I have nothing against this Walkway...But this Walkway, as you get on one end, if you have seen any visual renditions of this (nowadays [it] is very easy to do with a computer), it's almost as if you were a bowling ball sitting in a bowling lane. And you look down like this [arms and hands make a point], and that's it. Now obviously that's not where you want to be looking, because the views are fantastic any which way. But you just keep walking and after a while the views...I don't know, I haven't walked over that....the idea to me wasn't enough.

Look, I'll design you a bridge that will go through and come out the other side, go up and down, you could stop for a hot dog, you could go to the movies. You might be so busy, you'll never get to the other end the first day. Well, this did not entice Bill Sepe. As far as he was concerned,! was crazy. And frankly, [he] did not want to talk to me a whole lot about anything....

JS: You told me an anecdote story about the bridge yesterday that concerned your father—about this bridge back in Hungary, as I believe it was.

EL: Well, my uncle was an engineer in Budapest, and he came to visit here in the 60s. And at that time, I was aware of the bridge, but I had not 177

[had] my idea. And he enlightened me about the bridge. He said, "Do you realize that this bridge is world famous?" I said, "No." He says, "We studied this in engineering school in Budapest; this was the longest and biggest bridge that was built at that time in the whole world." And so that was just an interesting little story that 25 years, 20 years later (whenever I had my idea), I realized that here's another little treat that goes into this story—about my uncle who knew all about this bridge but he never knew about my idea. He passed on by that time. But that, I thought, was a very little interesting story. That's why I told you the other day about it.

JS: That's great. Is there anything else you would like to tell me about the bridge or your experience with the bridge?

EL: ...Okay, there is one little thing that maybe we should add. After I had come up with this idea, I realized there was a thing such as the London Bridge. Now London Bridge back in the 19....no, 1750s. They literally built a bridge across the Thames, and they made it into a city

Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge. Detroit Publishing Company, Library of Congress.

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block. They didn't just build a bridge to travel over. They built houses and stores. I am talking five, six story buildings. And this was actually a complete city block, so there was really like a city within a city on a bridge.

There also are other bridges around—the Ponte Vecchio, which is in Italy, is a three-story high bridge which has residences and businesses on it. And so recently, I read someplace: somebody, somewhere wanted to encourage the idea of using bridges for more than what we use them for. That while building all that infrastructure (which is just dramatically expensive just to accommodate vehicles and traffic), you might as well go on and for a minor additional cost, add the shops and the dwellings and all that to it and use these bridges for other things. And frankly, down the future, I think these things are going to happen. So I think that is an important thing to do, to think about. To put this idea of mine into perspective, I guess over thirty years, I have had so many people tell me I'm crazy that I'm looking for things (chuckles) to kind of shore up my idea.

JS: Just a couple of final things. You've done a fantastic, great interview.

EL: You just want me to buy you a beer after this (laughter) which we're going to do...

JS: Let me ask you, what do you see is going to be the future of the bridge?

EL: Very interesting question because I have a little picture...I see the future. I hope this is going to happen. Frankly, the future I see right now is with the Dyson Foundation behind it, with the New York State Parks Department behind it, I think it's possible that this bridge will be saved and will at least be used for a Walkway. So I see that as an immediate possibility for the future...I have a limited number of prints of this bridge in color, that I have (on a very selective basis) given away on occasion.

Somebody offers to buy one, but when I give them away I usually make them very personalized and I have, for instance, a friend of mine who owns BTM here in Dutchess County or Herb Redl who owns businesses.

I have given them drawings of the bridge which I have personalized by making it look like it was their headquarters: "Red! World Headquarters," "World Headquarters of BTM"...so they have it hanging in their 179

office for, like a fun thing, you know. I'm their friend and it's something to look at and frankly, I think one day there might be a group of people who, before I kick the bucket, maybe I will give away another thirty to fifty of them and maybe they'll get together on some occasion and compare their pictures. That would be a fun thing for them.

JS: One other question. Yesterday you kind of showed me a couple of other designs that you had, a colonial one. Could you talk about that one?

EL: Well, I showed you a little sketch of an alternate visual image. So this bridge, the whole idea behind that, Jason, is that my concept isn't really rooted in that particular drawing. It doesn't have to look like that.

It's as if you took a beautiful woman, and you said there are 20 gowns you could put on her; so any one of those gowns can be put on that woman or any of those she could wear. So this [the bridge] could look any number of different ways. If you gave this project to 20 good architects, and you gave the basic part we want to use (this structure) to support your plan, they're going to come up with 20 different things. They're all going to look different, but not for a moment does it take away from the basic idea. So that little sketch I had was meant to illustrate that this idea did not really depend on architectural language.

JS: Excellent work. Thank you very much.

EL: Glad you like it.

(Funding for the Walkway Oral History Project was provided by the Dyson Foundation in cooperation with Walkway Over the Hudson. This interview transcript was reprinted courtesy of Ed Loedy, Walkway Over the Hudson and the Hudson River Valley Institute.)

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The Art of Pastry: Frank Cordaro's La Deliziosa The following interview was conducted in 2002 as part of a Dutchess County Arts Council Folk Arts Program project documenting ethnic bakeries in the region. The project explored the role of ethnic bakeries in sustaining cultural traditions—not only through the creation of traditional baked goods—but also through providing centers for community life and viable business opportunities for some immigrant communities. Using these interviews, folklorist Jean Crandall and Folk Arts Program intern Jill Stein created displays about the area's ethnic bakeries and their traditional pastries for the 2002 One River, Many Streams Folk Festival.

The Dutchess County Arts Council Folk Arts Program researches and presents the cultural heritage of diverse communities through educational public programs that explore and interpret the traditions of ethnic, occupational and religious groups in the Mid-Hudson Valley.

The work of the Folks Arts Program demonstrates how oral history can emerge from many sources in the community. Project goals may vary by individual organization, but the overall results ultimately enrich our knowledge and awareness of local history and traditions.

Jill Stein: ...You told me last week a little bit about the history of the shop [La Deliziosa Pastry Shoppe, 10 Mount Carmel Place, Poughkeepsie]. But if I could get the official story of how this shop began...

Frank Cordaro: Okay, let's see. In 1974, the shop was opened. Prior to that, the owner, Mike Buonaiuto...

JS: How do you spell that?

FC: BUONAIUT

O. Which means "good help."

JS: Was he? (laughs)

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FC: Oh, yeah. He trained me. He was working at Caffe Aurora, I believe 17 years, and never really planned on making permanent roots here in America. He learned from his dad—who learned from his dad. And he had a villa in Naples. And really...his heart was there. He really didn't want to come back [to America]. He just came here because his wife was from here, and his kids started growing up here...[but] his heart was there [in Naples]. And he felt that they would be happy there. So they moved, they packed up, sold their house...he was our neighbor. So our houses were right next to each other, and that's how we knew them...

JS: Was it in this area?

FC: It was uptown.When uptown was uptown. So they sold their house, they moved back to Naples. And I believe five or six months later, they moved back [to Poughkeepsie]. The kids couldn't take it. So he decided if he was gonna be here, he was gonna open a business. And he opened this place-1974.

JS: Had he been in a baking family in Italy?

FC: Yes. JS: Okay.

FC: His father, I believe his father. I know it's definitely two generations before him. So, I mean...when they made their sponge cake, they whipped it by hand. It was very—Good morning, afternoon! (customers walk in)—there was very little machinery. I mean when they made cakes, they made two or three a day. Where we would make like 15, 20, 30, 40...depending on what's going on. So you couldn't possibly do what we do, and how much we produce, in the old-fashioned way.

And, you know, the copper pot when they made meringue, [it] was just hand-whipped, half an hour. [Today] it's like, turn the machine on and walk away (laughs). We are spoiled. So he opened up in 1974. I started working here...

JS: So he was doing things that way back then, when he opened the store in the 70s?

FC: No, no. They already modernized. We already had three Hobart machines, which are mixers...The oven we had then we still have now. I 182

La Deliziosa Italian Pastry Shoppe on Mt. Cannel Place in Poughkeepsie

still have not bought another oven. It's what we call a two-stack Hobart, which is just two small ovens. They only fit four pans each, and we do all our baking out of that. So it's a lot of planning and organizing. We're used to it now, but it would be nice to have another oven.

JS: So then you started working here...

FC: Then I started working here when I was 13. Actually, it was just before my 14th birthday.

JS: So you were friends with their family? You were neighbors?

FC: Yes, and I just decided...It's funny. I had just started high school, and I was planning on getting a job, and there was a drugstore up around the corner on Washington Street. And I was going to apply for a job as a stock boy, and they had just hired one. Because someone had told me they were looking. I walked down the street, uh, Verrazano, which has Caffe Aurora one block to the left and here, La Deliziosa, one block to the right.

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JS: Yeah.

FC: And I was at the corner...crossroads of my life...deciding whether I should go to Caffe first, which I knew them very well, or come here first.

JS: Right (laughs).

FC: I swear, like it was yesterday, I remember standing at the corner, looking to the left, looking to the right, which way should I go. And I decided to come here, and I started working that day. I never told my parents...

JS: I guess they needed help.

FC: Yeah, it was just two bakers.

JS: So what did you start doing?

FC: Cleaning (laughs). And I remember, just right from the first day, I went into the kitchen. Everything was like odd and foreign because, you know, I'd never been in a kitchen before, a professional kitchen.

JS: Um, hmm.

FC: And it was really interesting. I started out as a pot washer and graduated from there. I was here about two months before I touched my first pastry. Today we get people right in, people that I'm training in the kitchen...no time waste. You're gonna learn, you're gonna learn fast.

Most people...

JS: But they're not thirteen years old!

FC: No, no, of course not. That's true, that's a good point. And I remember it was two months after I was here, my first pastry. It must have taken me 45 minutes to make six pastry, which now takes about three, four minutes.

JS: Do you remember what you made?

FC: Yeah, Cannoli Neapolitan. It's one of the simpler pastries, but I re184

member I was just trying to make them perfect. Now I don't even think twice about it, but it's very interesting.

JS: So how did you learn from that point forward?

FC: Hands-on. I worked every day after school, Saturday and Sunday.

I was doing probably about 30 hours a week, and then up to 80 during a holiday...but then I wasn't in school. I learned the hard way.

JS: So he would just sort of show you how to do things, or you would watch?

FC: Yeah, just hands-on. There was no watching, there was just...

JS: Doing.

FC: Well, there was. Yeah, he was just, "Try this...0kay, you can't do this yet. Go do something else." And then we always made our creams by hand, which we still do. I just have a machine that mixes it now. But there was always young people working here. He trained a lot, and a lot of people come back, and...0h, I remember this. He had a very strong Italian accent. He used to always have jokes about certain words and then, when we'd see someone, we'd just say a few words and just start having a good time with that. It's very funny.

JS: He would laugh at that also?

FC: No, he didn't! (laughs). We wouldn't say it when he was in the room.

JS: I see...So at what point did you take over the business?

FC: I worked for him for ten years and in 1984, with my folks' help, we purchased it. My mom worked in the front, I worked in the back, and up until two years ago...my mom stopped working here. She passed away last year, and that's it. And I feel very fortunate that I came here, that I got an education, and I got paid.

JS: Yeah...that's a good deal.

FC: And I didn't expect then, when I first started working here, baking 185

wasn't considered a profession. It was considered menial labor. And a lot of things have changed in the country, where, you know, a little bit of Emeril—and Julia Child really pushed. But that was more the French line [of] cooking then; but now more the pastry arts. With Culinary's [The Culinary Institute's] help, really makes people realize that it is an art form.

JS: Urn, hmm.

FC: And I don't know half of it.

JS: It seems like you know a lot (pointing to bakery cases).

FC: I know a lot of this line, but there's so much to learn. I'd really love to work with sugar. To do, learn, pull sugar and that type of thing. .

JS: What is that for...for candies?

FC: Uh, no.. .pulled sugar, if you've ever seen—they make roses out of them. They make animals. It's just endless what can be done.

It's along the lines of how [in] ice carving, you create shapes and things with it. Ice, sugar, sugar sculptures. Also, butter sculptures. I've done butter sculptures. Where you literally take a specific type of butter—it's not your regular kitchen Frank Cordaro butter—there's ones that can sit out. And I've done like Mickey Mouse carvings; and I did a butter sculpture—well, butter and candy sculpture—out at the entrance to the South Hills mall, when they had their—not South Hills, Galleria Mall—when they had their second anniversary. You know, it's just...

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JS: It's just for decoration.

FC: Yeah. It's definitely not an edible (laughs). Well, you could eat the sugar but it's just pure sugar. It's not something you...

JS: Sounds good to me.

FC: It's just for beauty.

JS: Well, tell me about the kinds of things you do make, especially that would be considered traditional Italian?

FC: Okay. One of our popular things that people come in for is Biscotti.

JS: Okay.

FC: Biscotti traditionally is what is known as "twice baked." A lot of our items are twice baked, and then some are in their own natural state very crunchy. So they're known as Biscotti, but they're not really a Biscotti by its true nature. The true nature is...

JS: But they're still called that.

FC: But they are still considered a Biscotti. Like, your Anise Toast and the Chocolate Chip Toast there, they are the type where you normally see. They're baked in a loaf, sliced and then toasted, laid on their side and then re-baked. So they have the toast, the toasted look.

JS: Uh, huh.

FC: Like the Quaresimali, the almond and filbert cookies there. They, after they're baked, they air dry; and they get extremely crunchy. We never say "hard" here...everything's crunchy.

JS: Okay (laughs). But those are not twice-baked.

FC: They're not twice baked. Actually, the Chocolate Chip Toast, the Anise Toast we do. Oh, the Angel and Devil there—the almond and the pecan—and the Biscotti Neapolitan are the only ones in there [in the display case]...I do a cranberry, cranberry-walnut also, just on the holidays.

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But that's the only true Biscotti. Other than that, I think they're mostly considered traditional favorites.

JS: And those would be just year-round?

FC: Yeah. I almost always have these. Another thing, the Cuccidari are...

JS: The second ones from the left?

FC: Yes, the sign's not on there. They are a fig-filled cookie.

JS: How do you spell those?

I. Now Cuccidari is what today everyone FC: CUCCIDAR knows as a Fig Newton. It's a pastry. It's, you know, like a cookie pastry on the outside and a fig filling. But I think someone that made Cuccidari said, "Let's mass-produce." And I believe Fig Newton was born that way. I don't know that for a fact. But it is the same concept. So I really think that somewhere along the lines, some Italian said, "Hey, let's get rich!" (laughs) JS: There's some money to be made here!

FC: I have a few ideas of my own, but I don't seem to move on them.

The pignoli cookies and the sugar macaroons are traditionally known as Amaretti.

JS: Both of those are?

FC: Yes, they're different versions of the same cookie.

JS: Because there's like almond in them?

FC: Yes, the dough is made with the almond paste—that's AM A R E T T I—Amaretti. They're flourless. So I have a lot of people that come in looking for flourless cookies. Also the cookies over there, the Coconoli the white and the chocolate. They're known as "Brutti ma Buoni," which is "Ugly but Good."

JS: (laughs) Okay...

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FC: We've gotten it down, so they always look nice. But they used to always break or they'd puff to left and right, they'd crack, they'd always look terrible.

JS: Do people actually call them that, or is that just...?

FC: They just point at them and say, "Can I have those?"...I don't know if their traditional name is "Brutti ma Buoni," but I do know that the real name is Coconoli. I don't know if...different regions...

JS: Right.

FC: You can have one cookie and have seventeen names.

JS: Right.

FC: There are so many regions, so...

JS: That was my other question. Do you have things from a particular region or is it all...?

Pastry ease at La Deliziosa

FC: Certain things, in the pastry, you can tell regions a lot more easily.

Custards tend to be more northern, and Naples—a lot of our pastries 189

that I know are from Naples because the man I learned from was from Naples. The Cannoli everyone knows, with or without the filling, is a Sicilian Cannoli.

JS: Right.

FC: And then we have a Cannoli Napolitan, which is a cookie-shell log with a little bit of sponge cake soaked with rum in the center and custard on the outside dipped in chocolate. That's a Cannoli Napolitan. See, I don't know where their origins are. I don't know all the origins. But I do know that we make a Baba Rum, which is a sweet yeast bread soaked in rum, and the custard one is mainly from Naples; where the Cannoli-filling one comes from Sicily. Sicilians are farmers, a lot of dairy, ricotta...I was in Sicily before I started working here—the summer before I started working here, so I was thirteen. And I had no idea that I would be going into the bakeries...because I remember about four bakeries in my mom's home town. I remember walking by there every day, 'cause I used to play outside and stuff...but I never, actually going in, looking around, trying to talk to the baker—my Italian isn't that good.

JS: You didn't know at that point...So you were born here.

FC: I was born here, yeah. Born and raised in the U.S.A.! (laughs) JS: Are both your parents from Italy?

FC: Both my parents were born in the same hometown in Sicily.

JS: Okay. What town was that?

FC: San Giovanni Gemini...

JS: So when did they come over to the U.S.?

FC: Oh, geez. Let's see, my grandmother was born here.

JS: Okay...

FC: Well, let me backtrack quick. My grandfather was born in Sicily, on my dad's side. And my grandmother, her parents came here...turn of the century, I believe. And my grandmother was born here and her mom 190

had gotten sick. And the doctor said go back, she misses her country, and that's why she's sick.

JS: Right.

FC: So, she was two when she went back to Sicily.

JS: Your grandmother was two.

FC: My grandmother was two. My grandmother was a citizen, a United States citizen. So when the war [broke out], my dad was like, I'm going, I'm going to America. We had a lot of family still here. He's like, I'm not fighting for the Italian army. I'm going to America.

JS: So your grandmother got married in Sicily, and raised her family there...

FC: My grandmother got married in Italy. My grandfather had a HUGE farm, and he grew all kinds of nuts. He had nut trees, and he had a lot of fruit trees. So he had a huge farm. And my dad decided, he was the first one to come here out of everyone that was living there. He came here for about a year. My sister was born in Italy, and my mom and my sister stayed there. And then they came back [to America]. My dad and my mom...my mom and dad got married. My mom was 16, my dad was 17. Crazy!

JS: Wow. FC: Happily married.

JS: So I'm wondering about the kinds of things you make that might be seasonal, for Italian celebrations.

FC: Uh, let's see. What I've found....I'm getting it more and more every year: People that buy things for holidays strengthen what their past holidays were—with their grandparents that have passed away. And today's society, where they don't have the time or the inclination—they definitely don't have the desire to do them [baking traditional pastries]—but they still want them in their life. So they're like, "Oh, can you make this? Oh, my grandmother used to make it. I don't know how to make it. I have the recipe, but I have absolutely no idea...I can't even read it."

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You know, that type of thing.

JS: Right, right.

FC: So they're like, "Oh, do you make this?" "Yes." Like the Angel Wings, they're a fried dough.

JS: Urn, limmm.

FC: We make the Honey Balls, which are deep-fried dough. And we roll it in honey and cinnamon and orange peel.

JS: Is that for a certain time of year?

FC: Yeah, that's traditionally Christmas, but we tend to make it for Thanksgiving...Our three main holidays are Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter. But there's holidays going all along. St. Joseph's Day is a big holiday that most of the Italians celebrate, that a lot of Americans don't know of. But we're trying to spread the word.

JS: Is that in the Spring?

FC: That is two days after St. Patty's...So it's the 19th. And this year, we had St. Patty's Day—and we make a mean Irish soda bread—Maria's half Irish, that works in back, and she's got a family recipe, so... St. Patty's Day, then two days later was St. Joseph's. And then...that was Friday...and then three days later was Palm Sunday, and then a week later was Easter.

JS: Oh, so you were really busy...

FC: It was a killer. It was tough this year. We mold chocolate for Easter as well. We do about five or six hundred pounds of milk, semi-sweet, and white chocolate. We have old, antique molds that we mold and decorate. It's another tradition people have here. I have people coming...it makes me feel old. "Oh, when I was a kid..." You know, these grown men... "When I was a kid, I used to come here to get my candies, and now I'm getting it for my kids." I'm like, oh my god!

JS: (laughs) That's funny. So what kinds of things, what do you make for St. Joseph's Day? 192

FC: St. Joseph's, yeah. We have two pastry. One's called Zeppole—Z EPPOL E. And that is from Naples. The St. Joseph's pastry from Naples, which is custard and cherry—it has a filling. And the doughs are the same, but they're prepared a little differently. ...If you've ever seen a French Cruller...

JS: Urn, hnun.

FC: That's what Zeppole look like. Sliced in half, put a little custard and cherry in it, and then you top it with a little more custard. Sfinge is...looks like a baked potato. The best way to describe it is it looks like an Idaho potato. It's hollow. We squoosh it, fill it with cannoli cream or ricotta, and you top it with candied fruit. And it's supposed to be shaved chocolate, but we use chocolate sprinkles. It's easier.

JS: Yeah. And you only make those for that time of year?

FC: We make them again for holidays. It used to only be for St. Joseph's, but people tend to... "Oh, please, make them...." So, we make them for Christmas and sometimes for [unintelligible]. We have them from St. Joseph's straight through to Easter. And, uh, they're tasty. Again, they're fried. They're a fried dough also. So, people tend to not pay attention to cholesterol when...

JS: During the holidays (laughs).

FC: When it's the holidays, yes (laughs).

JS: Do you know much about the history [of the neighborhood]? I mean, it used to be predominantly Italian, and I don't know if it is anymore, and how that's shifted.

FC: No, no. Because everybody's moving. My family's all over the country now, so... When I was a kid, I remember some of the stores...

Aiena's was here. I used to go to Mt. Carmel [Church], right across the street. And I remember Aiena's. Actually Aiena's was on this corner. Sardi's and...there was another deli, another little store down the street. Now these places were wood floors, dark and dingy, shelves...you walked in...

JS: The real Old Style.

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FC: It was like scary. It was like real Old World.

JS: Like, where am I? FC: That's the way it was.. .Just thinking back...like you would see a picture of an old store, a picture from maybe sixty, seventy years ago. And that's the way it was, oh, probably about twenty-five years ago. Well, thirty years ago. I'm getting older!

JS: (laughs) FC: I keep thinking, it's not that long ago, but it is! (laughs) JS: I guess there wasn't a need as much any more, because people had moved away.

FC: Well, when so many people lived in the area, no one had cars. There was a fish market. This used to be a meat market. So we had a meat market, a fish market, there was about four or five grocers. There used to be a gas pump, right in front of the pizzeria. So, what did you, I mean, you didn't need to leave the neighborhood.

JS: Right.

FC: There was a tailor up the street. Anything you can think of was probably here. Anything you needed.

JS: Let me just ask you one more thing. What do you think is the community that you serve now? Is it predominantly Italian-American families, or is it just people who want Italian pastries? Plus...

FC: Well, I think that there's a little Italian in everybody.

JS: Yeah (laughs), that's true.

FC: I don't even know now who's Italian when they come in. When I first opened the store, I always had the little Italian ladies coming in.

Now the little old ladies that are coming in, I don't know if they're Italian anymore, because you can't tell. A lot of people have lost their accents, and you know, it's a strong mix now... .1 can remember a time, when if a Black person came into the store, it was like, "Whoa..."

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La Deliziosa has been in business at the same location in the Mt. Cannel neighborhood since 1974.

JS: It was rare.

FC: You know, now it's like very common, which is great, because people like sweets...if you like a cannoli, you like a cannoli. You don't have to be Italian to enjoy it.

JS: Have you changed your products at all based on...?

FC: We've reduced the amount of sugar in a lot of our products.

JS: Urn, hmm.

FC: The way I could describe it is a lot of the stuff we used to make, a lot of the [unintelligible] was throat-sweet. As soon as you tasted it,

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you would almost need a drink of water because it was so sweet. But that's how it was, that's the way it used to be. I don't like it that way, and my other chef Maria, we used to be like, "Well, how can we make it a little less...a little more palatable," you know. So we changed a lot of the recipes. Just enough, but we've also made them so they last a little more...I've probably doubled the product list.

JS: Um, hmm.

FC: When we made cookies years ago, we made like three batches of cookies, and that was all our cookies. Now we make maybe 10 or 12 batches. Now, when I say one batch, there might be like eight different cookies out of that one batch. [I] Make cut-out dough...it might be half-moons, it might be chocolate-chips that are oval, with peanut butter chips, and we do sandwich cookies, and that's all just that one type. ...We make real fruit ones...the strawberries, the grapes, the pistachio, the orange, the lemon. Mocha, and then we do them with the walnuts on it. So butter cookies, or what we call our dip and fill type. So we make like all sandwich cookies with them, and we make ones that are like shells and dip them and sprinkle them with chocolate.

JS: So those are new things that you've added.

FC: Yeah. We've really strengthened the variety...With the miniature pastries, we've done different things. If we found something wasn't selling, we'd change it all. And the strong rule of thumb is: if it's not selling, add chocolate.

JS: (laughs) FC: ...We used to throw a lot of a particular pastry away. It wouldn't sell. You know, we'd make it every morning, it wouldn't sell. So we'd throw it away. Well, we stopped eating them...because there's only so much you can eat. That's why I don't make Croissants any more, because they wouldn't sell, and I just kept eating them.

JS: (laughs) FC: So one particular pastry, we changed the filling a little. We just made it a little lighter, put chocolate on top...I can't keep it in the store.

It's much better than throwing them out.

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JS: Oh, yeah.

FC: And a lot of them are more Americanized. Like our Napoleans.

There used to be a way we made them before. Now we make them like the traditional way the French do. Like the Bavarian. It's very light, and the icing on top. Where before, it used to be powdered sugar. So it's definitely more...whatever the customer wants.

JS: Where do you get your recipes from?

FC: Anywhere. I've picked up recipes in magazines. I do research. I go to Barnes and Nobles and just look through, and if something looks good...Some people, you know, [say], "I had this. I'd really like to see if you can make it for me." Alright, and it's a family recipe, and it's good.

It's mine now! (laughs) Why not?

JS: Do you still make any of the stuff that you learned when you first started here?

FC: The majority, the majority. All the Biscotti. Like the Bow Ties we made always, but we added Chocolate Bow Ties to it. The Chocolate Chip Toast is a spin-off of the Anise Toast. We drop the anise flavor and we add chocolate chips. Cranberry Toast, same thing. So we take one particular recipe and...

JS: Innovate?

FC: ...we spin on [it]. Yeah, we get bored! I've been doing this 28 years.

JS: Yeah, keep it interesting.

FC: I've been doing this 28 years. Chocolate Quaresimali was an original...we just added the cinnamon.

JS: Do you have one thing that you think is like your specialty?

FC: Cannoli tends to be the big, most popular, most known. . .it's like a slice of pizza. Everybody knows a Cannoli.

JS: Right. And everyone loves a Cannoli!

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(This interview transcript was reprinted courtesy of Frank Cordaro and the Dutchess County Arts Council Folk Arts Program.)

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INDEX Aeolus 43 Allen, F.J. 104 Anderson, Julia Hill 120 Ariel 51 Ashton, Leonora Sill 72-78 Astor House 104 Avalanche 42 Bailey, Dr. Guy C. 95, 97, 98, 102, 103, 104 Barksdale, Susan (Sudie) 120121 Baron, Dr. J.C. 42 Bartlett, Edward 0. 17 Black History Committee of Dutchess County Historical Society 118-119 Blacks chippie joints 120-121; church life 123; discrimination 123, 124, 126-128, 129-130, 131, 132; education 127-128, 129130, 131, 132-133; employment 123, 131, 132; farm jobs 124, 125,-126; migrant workers 125-126, 128; politics 121, 122-123, 130-131 Blass, Mary Jane (see also Mrs. Robert C. Workman) 94, 98, 99, 100 Blizzard of 1888 58 Blodgett, Stephen 125-126 Blodgett's Farm 125-126 Briggs, Samantha 99-100 Brown, Samuel 98 Browne, Edith 112

Buckhout, Jacob 47, 48 Buckhout, Lewis D. 53 Buonaiuto, Mike 181, 182, 183, 185 Burroughs, John 72-79 Caesarians (see Medical) Caffe Aurora 182, 183, 184 Calhoun, Gilbert 80-86 Cary, Edward F. 88-93 Churchill, Winston 82 Civil War army formations 14; Atlanta 7-9; casualties 4-6; Chicamauga 2; Confederate attitudes 8, 10-11, 14, 15; the dead 2, 15; families of soldiers in Dutchess County 12-14; Grand Review of troops 15-16; Lincoln's assassination 14; Marietta, seige of 5; noncombatants 3, 6, 7; Peach Tree Creek, Battle of 6-7; Pine Hill, Battle of 5; prayer meetings 3; Reseca, Battle of 3-5, 12; Richmond, taking of 14-15; salary of soldiers 8-9; slaves 10-11; Union attitudes 8, 11, 14, 16-17 Clearwater 160 Cordaro, Frank 181-197 Crumwold 46 Cuman, Tubby 83 Davids, George W. Jr. 49, 66-71 Davids, George W. Sr. 66 Davy Crockett Hook and Ladder 68 Deliziosa (see La Deliziosa)

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Deyo, Gertrude 94, 96, 97, 98, 101, 104 Dobson, Dr. William G. 60 Dodge, Cornelia Annie 30, 34 Dodge, LeRoy 34-35 Drake, Lillian Husband 127-128 Dutchess Community Action Agency 160 Dutchess County Folk Arts Program 181 Dutchess County Historical Society, history of 64 Earthquake of San Francisco 68-69 Edwards, Dorothy L. 130-131 Evans, Robley D. 68 Fala 85-86 FDR 45 FDR gravesite 80-83 Fishkill Farms 126 Flash 51 Gallup, C.H. 51 Garrison Train Wreck 69 Gibson, Robert 52 Graves, Lucy 122, 126-127 Gravestone inscriptions 63 Griggs, James A. 104 Hamilton, Adolphus 27, 30, 32 Hamilton, Matilda 27, 30, 31 Hancock, Robert H. 124 Hawk 45 Hood, General John 6, 7, 8 Horton, Levi Daniel 124-125 Hudson River 12-13, 49, 53 (see also Ice Yachting) Hudson River Ice Yacht Club 41 Hudson River Valley Institute 165 Hughes, James A. 103-108 IBM 123, 125, 136 Ice Yachting accidents 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47; boats (see Icicle, Jack Frost,

200

Avalanche, Northern Light, Aeolus, Quick as a Wink, Hawk, Vixen, Ariel, Flash); challenge pennant of America race 41, 42, 46; ; ice conditions 49; ice cracks 43-44, 49; Minnesota yachts 46; racing trains 40, 46, 50, 53; sailing conditions 40; sailing techniques 45, 47-49; spectators 40, 42, 43, 47, 53; speed 44, 45, 46, 48; size of races 41 Icicle 41, 45, 46 Jack Frost 42, 44, 46, 49, 50 Journalism scooping competitors 69-70; stealing stories 70-71 Karnofski, Martha (see also Mrs. Robert Ogden) 94, 95, 96, 97, 98 Kinkead, Cornelia 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39 Kinkead, Elise Stewart Hamilton 26, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36-38, 39 Kinkead, Dr. John 26, 30-32, 34, 35 Kinkead, Elise 26-39 Kinkead, George 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39 Kinkead, Jennie 27, 30, 32, 36-37, 39 Knickerbocker, Webster 91 Koenig, Caspar 89 Krieger, Dr. William A. 103 Krushchev, Nikita 86 La Deliziosa Pastry Shoppe 181-197; baker's training 184, 185, 186; baking methods 182, 183, 186; traditional baked goods 187-190, 191-193, 195-197

Lane, Dr. Charles 109 Lansing, Lewis E. 71 Linich, Billy (see Billy Name, Andy Warhol) Linlithgow 63 Livingston Woods 63, 96 Locust Bluff 104 Loedy, Ed 165-180 Luckey Platt 136 Luckey Platt and Company additions and expansions 89; advertising 88, 89; carpets 93; china dishes 93; display windows 88, 89; lighting 89; making change for customers 89-90; mannequins 88-89; merchandise 91-92, 93; price codes 92; store design 88; work hours 88 Lyman, Hannah 18-25 Mackey, Althea 98 Magill, Cecelia Bostic 126 Maine 66-68 Maple Grove 26-39 (see also Kinkeads) Mayflowers 64 Medical caesarians 59, 61-62; geographical territory in a physician's practice 57; house calls 60; night calls 58; nurses training 60-61, 95-102; physicians training 60; prescriptions 58; specialist practices 60, 61; surgery 55-57, 106; (see also Vassar Brothers Hospital) Mid-Hudson Bridge 141, 166 Millbank, William 104 Miller, Gordon Schreiber 173177 Milton fire 69

Moreno, Vito 175-176 Morgan House 104 Morgan House fire 69 Morse, S.F.B. 29 Mt. Carmel Church 135 Mt. Carmel Neighborhood 193195 "My Day" column by Eleanor Roosevelt 81, 84, 86 Myers, Helen 87 Myrick, Ryland 132 Name, Billy (aka Billy Linich) artistic process 143, 144, 149, 163; early life in Poughkeepsie 135-136, 138; filmmaking 134, 143-146; leaving the Factory 156-161; life in the 1960s 157159; life in Poughkeepsie as an adult 160-163; meeting Andy Warhol 138-139; role at the Factory 135, 141-143, 148, 153-154, 163 (see also Andy Warhol) New Hamburg Ice Yacht Club 44 Newspaper reporting (see journalism, George W. Davids Jr.) Night, Dick 41 Northern Light 42-43 Nurses (see Medical) Ogden, Mrs. Robert (see also Martha Karnofski) 94, 979, 98, 101 Old Men's Home (see Vassar Home for Aged Men) Parish, Tom 41 Patrice, Walter 121-123 Pest House (see also Vassar Brothers Hospital) 95, 96 Physicians (see Medical) Pop Art 134 (see also Billy Name, Andy Warhol) Poucher, Dr. J. Wilson 54-65, 98-99 (see also Medical, Vassar 201

Brothers Hospital) Poughkeepsie Cracker Bakery 17 Poughkeepsie Journal 87 (see also Journalism) Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge foreclosure by Dutchess County 174; redesigning and reusing 167-171, 179, 180 (see also Ed Loedy, Gordon Schreiber Miller, Vito Moreno, Bill Sepe, Walkway over the Hudson) Quick as a Wink 45, 51 Rendes family 33, 39 (see also Maple Grove, Kinkeads) Reynolds, Helen Wilkinson 63, 64, 118, 120 Rhinebeck Hospital 57 Riverby 72, 74 Roads: travelling by horse and buggy 57-58, 59 Robert Main 72 Rogers, Archibald 42, 46-49, 50 (see also Ice Yachting) Roosevelt Johnny 82-83 Roosevelt Point 41 (see also Ice Yachting) Roosevelt, Eleanor 81, 82-86, 122 (see also "My Day" column) Roosevelt, Ellen 45 Roosevelt, Franklin Jr. 82-83 Roosevelt, John A. 41, 45-46, 48, 50, 51 (see also Ice Yachting) Roosevelt, Sara 84 Rosedale 45, 51 Sanford, E. Harrison 42 Schatz Federal Bearing Company 126-127 Scott, Thomas 52 Sepe, Bill 175, 177 Sherman, General W.T. 1-2, 8, 9, 11, 17 202

Sherman's March to the Sea 1, 9-11, 17 Shipyard Point 63 Silver Factory (see Billy Name, Andy Warhol) Sinatra, Frank 80 Slabsides 72, 74, 75-77, 78 Slavery (see Civil War) Smith Brothers Restaurant 68 Smith, Edward C. 91 Smith, William 52 Southwood 26, 27, 31, 37, 39 Spanish American War 66-68 St. James Church, Hyde Park 72 St. Simeon's Senior Apartments 33 Stewart, Audrey Myrick 131-133 Stone, Corporal Harry 5-6 Stoutenburgh, Blanche 109, 116 Stratford Theater 113-114 Sweetser family 29-30 Tamas, Fala's grandson 84 Tennis Club 62 Thompson mansion 33 Townsend, Dr. Howard 112 Trailing Arbutus 64 Travel, by horse and buggy (see Roads) Truman, Harry 80 Tuthill, Dr. Robert K. 58 Van Ingen, Henrik 107 Van Ingen, Henry 107 Van Keuren Lieutenant 7 Vassar Brothers Hospital 55, 60, 61, 94-102, 103-108, 131; ambulance 106; gate 107; Pest House 95, 96; retaining wall 107; (see also Medical) Vassar College Bible classes 25; chapel 22, 24, 25; Commencement 23;

dining hall 19-20, 23; dress 19, 21-22, 23; gate lodge 22; Main Building 23; Silent Hour 25 Vassar Home for Aged Men 109-117 Vassar, Matthew Sr., home of 110, 116 Vaughn, Benjamin 129 Vaughn, Ethel Green 128-130 Vixen 50, 51, 52 Walkway Over the Hudson 165, 177, 179 Warhol, Andy artistic and personal power 150-153; artistic subject matter 134, 148-149, 152,154-156; attitude toward fame 149-150; death of 147; Silver Factory daily life 148, 163; Silver Factory decor 134, 139-141, 142-143; shooting of 146, 156 (see also Billy Name) Wilderness estate 33 wildflowers 54, 64 Willett, Ada B. 109-117 Williams, Tennessee 147, 148 Wilson, Dr. John S. 61 Withers, Frederick Clark 95 Workman, Mrs. Robert C. (see also Mary Jane Blass) 94, 97, 99, 101 Wright, Norman 40-45, 51 (see also Ice Yachting)

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Historical Societies of Dutchess County Amenia Historical Society P.O. Box 22 Amenia, NY 12501 Beacon Historical Society P.O. Box 89 Beacon, NY 12508 Clinton Historical Society P.O. Box 122 Clinton Corners, NY 12514 Dover Historical Society N. Nellie Hill Road Dover Plains, NY 12522 East Fishkill Historical Society P.O. Box 245 Hopewell Junction, NY 12533

Pleasant Valley Historical Society P.O. Box 309 Pleasant Valley, NY 12569 Egbert Benson Historical Society of Red Hook P.O. Box 1813 Red Hook, NY 12571 Rhinebeck Historical Society P.O. Box 291 Rhinebeck, NY 12572 Museum of Rhinebeck History P.O. Box 816 Rhinebeck, NY 12572

Fishkill Historical Society P.O. Box 133 Fishkill, NY 12524

Roosevelt/Vanderbilt Historical Association P.O. Box 235 Hyde Park, NY 12538

Hyde Park Historical Society P.O. Box 182 Hyde Park, NY 12538

Stanford Historical Society P.O. Box 552 Bangall, NY 12506

LaGrange Historical Society P.O. Box 112 LaGrangeville, NY 12540

Union Vale Historical Society P.O. Box 100 Verbank, NY 12585

Little Nine Partners Historical Society P.O. Box 243 Pine Plains, NY 12567

Wappingers Historical Society P.O. Box 974 Wappingers Falls, NY 1259

North East Historical Society P.O. Box 727 Millerton, NY 12546 Historical Society of Quaker Hill and Pawling, Inc. P.O. Box 99 Pawling, NY 12546

Town of Washington Historical Society 551 Route 343 Mil!brook, NY 12545

Municipal Historians of Dutchess County County Historian: Vacant City Historians: Beacon: Robert Murphy, 1 Municipal Plaza, Beacon 12508 Poughkeepsie: George Lukacs, 62 Civic Ctr. Plaza, Poughkeepsie 12601 Village and Town Historians: Amenia: Arlene Pettersen, 82 Separate Rd., Amenia 12501 ameniahistorian@mac.com • Beekman: Thom Usher, 96 Hillside Road, Poughquag 12570 beekmanhistory@aol.com • Clinton: Craig Marshall, 1375 Centre Road, Rhinebeck 12572 • Dover: Donna Hearn, 126 E. Duncan Hill Rd., Dover Plains 12522 historian@townofdoverus • East Fishkill: Dave Koehler, 330 Rte.376, Hopewell Jct. 12533 • Fishkill (Town): Willa Skinner, 807 Rte. 52, Fishkill 12524 • Fishkill (Village): Karen Hitt, 91 Main Street, Fishkill 12524 • Hyde Park: Carney Rhinevault, 4383 Albany Post Road, Hyde Park 12538 • LaGrange: Georgia HerringTrott, 120 Stringham Rd., LaGrangeville 12540 • Milan: Patrick Higgins, Milan Town Hall, 20 Wilcox Circle, Milan 12571 • Millbrook: David Greenwood, 510 Sharon Turnpike, Millbrook, 12545 • Millerton (Town and Village): North East Historical Society, PO Box 727, Millerton 12546 • North East: North East Historical Society, PO Box 727, Millerton 12546 • Pawling (Town): Robert Reilly, 160 Charles Colman Blvd., Pawling 12564 • Pawling (Village): Drew Nicholson, 18 Valley Drive, Pawling 12564 • Pine Plains: Little Nine Partners Historical Society, PO Box 243 Pine Plains 12567 • Pleasant Valley: Fred Schaeffer, Town Hall, Route 44, Pleasant Valley 12569 • Poughkeepsie (Town): Jean Murphy, 1 Overocker Rd., Poughkeepsie 12603 • Red Hook (Town): J. Winthrop Aldrich, 109 S. Broadway, Red Hook 12571 • Red Hook (Village) Richard Coon, 34 Garden St., Red Hook 12571 • Rhinebeck (Town and Village): Nancy Kelly, 80 E. Market St., Rhinebeck 12572 • Stanford: Dorothy Burdick, 26 Town Hall Road, Stanfordville 12581 • Tivoli: Bernie Tieger, 96 Broadway, Tivoli 12583 village-books@webjoggernet • Unionvale: Fran Wallin, 249 Duncan Rd., LaGrangeville 12540 • Wappingers Falls (Town): Vacant • Wappingers Falls (Village): Brenda Von Berg, Town Hall, 2 South Avenue, Wappingers Falls, 12590 • Washington: David Greenwood, 10 Reservoir Drive, Millbrook 12545

The real life voices in this collection of oral histories and first person narratives recall Dutchess County's past with observations and perceptions both vivid and direct. Many of those who tell their stories here bear witness to having lived through an extraordinary national event or momentous cultural shift. Others share their sense of privilege at having known and loved a unique Hudson Valley landscape or celebrity. Some give voice to hardship and discrimination in testimony that once would have been routinely excluded from mainstream historical accounts. These are the voices of history, speaking to us in their own words—building our community's history one story at a time.

Dutchess County Historical Soctety

Dutchess County Historical Society P.O. Box 88, Poughkeepsie, NY 12602 www.dutchesscountyhistoricalsociety.org

$15.00

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