Felix Carroll

Felix Carroll: The wondrous, benevolent nation known as Paddy Wagon

2022-12-30T07:43:00.000-05:00

This article first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle.

By Felix Carroll

GREAT BARRINGTON — Since high culture cannot be the top priority, he must share this space with a panel marked "High Voltage." Its attendant knobs, fuses and switches take up room that, one could argue, might be put to better use for coffee cups, CDs and words to live by. But it's a balancing act here in this 24-square-foot stucco hut, isn't it?

The Jim Jarmusch-quoting flower farmer who stewards this puny plug of real estate in the cold months blows warm air into his cold hands. It's 7 a.m. on a dim and chilly Saturday at Ski Butternut. From all points on the compass, sleepy-eyed skiers are stuffed into SUVs right now and closing in. Here at the hut, the daily setup rituals have begun, starting with the hanging of a Norwegian flag in honor of a man named Einar Aas and setting out a portable stereo upon a makeshift shelf suspended by shoestrings.

He presses play. An accordion sighs. A Frenchman sings, presumably of love, longing and leaving.

If, as they say, a ski resort is a world unto itself, step this way to the wondrous, benevolent nation known as Paddy Wagon, the beginner chairlift at the bunny hop. This is where one Will Ketchum has served as operator, impresario, educator, DJ, philosopher and object of affection for 14 years.

Paddy Wagon, the lift, is an Italian-manufactured number installed half a century ago. It consists of a series of 24 chairs that whip stiffly around a bull wheel at seven-second intervals, scooping up skiers and snowboarders by the rump and depositing them a few hundred feet up the far end of a gentle incline.

Paddy Wagon, the nation, conducts its most pressing affairs at the return terminal, beside the hut and beneath that bull wheel, which spins suspended from a hinged parallelogram of steel girders. When it's running, that wheel and those steel girders rock and rattle like a clothes dryer chomping at a wet pair of work boots.

But not so loud that you can't hear a Frenchman's heart break.

"It loves to run and run and run," says maintenance man Paul Domotor, who gives Paddy Wagon its morning dose of loving in the form of adjustments made with a giant iron wrench straight out of the Flintstones. "It loves to run, just like Will loves to run and run and run."

Paddy Wagon, the nation, has as its primary role teaching skiers how to ride a chairlift and how to feel good about themselves in the process. This falls upon Ketchum, 69, a man with a cow-catcher mustache and blessed with the exceptional grace of being comfortable in his own skin.

He owns no phone. In summers, he sleeps with his flowers in a field in Stockbridge. In winter, he sometimes visits those fields because, devoid of color, it's like visiting the netherworld.

The fresh coffee he perpetually has on hand he decants from a dented thermos that resembles a chunk of space debris. He keeps tiny ceramic coffee cups warm upon the hut's space heater.

"You want coffee?" he says.

Chalk marked on the hut's inside doorway like an Epiphany house blessing are the Spanish words, "Eres el major," which means "You are the best." That was the parting note to Ketchum from a Peruvian student who worked Paddy Wagon with him for a couple of seasons.

"He's probably the only lift operator around here who gets cards and letters to the main office from skiers who have had such a great experience here because of him," Domotor says.

This is no wonder. The day before, Ketchum spied Kristy Mills and her young daughter, Sawyer, from Stamford, Conn., in line for Paddy Wagon. Having previously learned to his delight that Sawyer was named for "Tom Sawyer," Ketchum was prepared.

"Wait!" he told them, and pulled them out of the line.

He disappeared into the hut and reappeared with a favorite quote he had printed and prepared for Sawyer from "Huckleberry Finn." He crouched down and read the quote to her: " for what you want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody to be satisfied, and feel right and kind towards the others."

"See," he told Sawyer, "every moment of life we're on a raft. When you're on the chairlift, you're on a raft. When you're driving home with your mom, you're on a raft. Get that right, and you get an A-plus."

He folded the paper and stuffed it into Sawyer's coat and hurried back to the lift, to the next wobbly set of skiers.

Amid orphaned goggles and gloves, he keeps a full-bodied miniature cutout of Kurt Vonnegut in the hut.

"I remember one year, a drought year, I woke up and read this article by him in Harper's where he tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope, and she says, `You know, you have money now. Why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?'

"But he explains to her how he's going to have a great time in the process of going out and buying one envelope. The moral of the story is `We're here on Earth to fart around' — that `We're dancing animals.' I read that, and it made me feel like I wasn't a crazy person."
A GE kid raised on a farm on the Richmond-Pittsfield line, Ketchum learned to ski at Bousquet Mountain — "a brown bag ski area, GE kids coming at 5 o'clock and beating it up," he says. "Oh, I love to ski. It's beautiful. It's like, you know, you can't fly, but you can ski. We see birds and animals moving much faster than we do, and skiing allows us to be like them."

He worked the lifts at Bousquet for 25 years, but couldn't bear to watch as the hill got blinged out with luxury townhouses. He signed on at Butternut in 2004, joining with one of his heroes, the late ski instructor Einar Aas of Norway. An elegant skier, an aficionado of crappy red wine, Aas was fond of telling students, "You looked very graceful as you fell on your face."

And legend has it that it was Aas who named Paddy Wagon — to highlight its prime clientele, newbie-skiers on drunkard legs.
"The best thing he ever said to me, and I'll never forget, was `You're a people person,'" Ketchum says. "It made me feel so good, you know? I'm really not, but in this job right here, it seems to bring it out."

It's coming upon 8 a.m. Ketchum flicks the switches and Paddy Wagon groans to life. A rendition of "Hey Jude" on steel drums blares from the boombox.

A young boy in a blue coat steps up to the gate and hesitates. Ketchum walks up, greets him and takes him by the hand. "Ready, steady, walk," he says, escorting the boy to the red line as chair No. 12 comes bearing down upon them both.

"It's OK," Ketchum says. "Turn to your right and grab it, grab it hard and lean back, lean back."

Ketchum flips the safety bar down and steps out of the path like a bullfighter.

The boy is packaged and gone. Another special delivery from the beating heart of Butternut.

Felix Carroll: With Cove for sale, let's take a trip down memory lanes

2022-11-28T10:26:00.000-05:00

This article first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle:

By Felix Carroll

GREAT BARRINGTON — Cove Bowling Lanes, for sale? Nah, not the Cove! What are you talking about?

Step inside this revered bowling alley, and it's business as usual. Just a regular Thursday afternoon. The Monument Mountain High School Bowling Club has just arrived. Look at that: a dozen of them — enough for a varsity and junior varsity team, just like the old days.

Bowling's bright future includes Tom Hankey Jr., three-time national bowling champion who once kissed a trophy on national television.

But, but — the place is for sale, right?

Listed on the market in June for $4.5 million? Yes. The price was just dropped to $3.9 million. A 26,012-square-foot "commercial space" (not "bowling alley," but "commercial space") billed as either a teardown or redevelopment opportunity.

The owner, Tom Hankey Sr., isn't talking about it. The only standings the Cove is going public with are league team standings: Anselmini Painting running neck and neck with We Got Wood and Lost Our Squirt.

But what about the future of the Cove?

"Anything can happen. That's all I'm going to say about that," Hankey says.

In other words, bowlers of Great Barrington: Live in the moment.

That's what bowling coach John "The Moleman" Anthony is choosing to do. The team has its first tournament in two weeks, and some of the younger players, new to the sport, are heaving the ball warily, like the thumb holes are filled with a family of angry hornets.

He'll fix that.

Each little sidebar Anthony has with each young player can easily turn into a mini-TED Talk on things like gyroscopic precession and kinetic theory.

"As is gets to the outside and hits some dryer lane," he says, "the friction takes over and it slows down, and the weight block says, `I think I can take over,' and it wants to right itself, and the weight block will actually pick up spin and "

The way he says it sounds like beat poetry, delivered in a deep, gravelly, benevolent bark, as if his voice box has been distressed with blows from a tow chain.

Come to think of it, Anthony — pierced, tattooed, goateed — did once give a TED Talk, and you'd be forgiven for assuming he spoke on bowling and physics. He spoke, in fact, about boomerangs, because Anthony is also a world champion thrower of boomerangs.

Point being: The Cove is a place where you'll discover a bowling coach who once gave a TED Talk. And it wasn't even about bowling; it was about boomerangs.

The Cove: With its wall of heroes, the framed photos of those who've come before, who sprang from dust, lived to bowl a perfect 300, and returned to dust once more.

There are characters from the Cove creation story still around today: Joe Storti, ninth picture down. He's been bowling here since the place first opened, Nov. 1, 1960, when, at 9 p.m. sharp, they held a drawing and someone went home with a $750 mink stole. He still hosts a tournament here.

The Cove, for sale?

Live in the moment!

Easier said than done.

The Cove: 24 lanes, arcade, cocktail lounge, snack shop, pro shop, also home to a large, oddball, indoor miniature golf course — deeply, but not gently, adored — built by longtime former owner Gordon "Red" McIntyre. Red considered the Cove a community unto itself and he its mayor — and chaplain.

He was known to command the microphone in the evenings. Occasionally, to the delight of the crowd, he'd click off the lights for a round of "moonlight bowling" to an entire generation whose future obituaries would include "league bowler at the Cove" among the pertinent details defining a lifetime, right up there with "daily communicant at Corpus Christi."

And all the fundraising tournaments — for the Kiwanis, for Rotary, for the local girl who underwent open heart surgery. And all those birthday parties, bumpers down.

It's the Cove — where one night in 1964, around 1 a.m., a man with dark hair, wearing a blue suit, stepped out of a light-colored Cadillac, approached the counter, pulled out a gun and made off with $5,000, back when newspapers described armed robbers as "armed bandits."

And, hey, wait: Didn't the great Norm Duke step through these doors one cold day in 2012 and perform some trick shots? Why, yes, he did.

And the story goes that when Joel and Ethan Coen (aka, the Coen brothers) were students at nearby Simon's Rock, they hung out at the Cove, soaking in the atmosphere, only to re-create it later in their cult classic film "The Big Lebowski." That may or may not be true, but it's an awesome story anyway, so let's continue to spread it because, well — we're talking about the Cove!

But here's an awesome story you can believe. It stands at about 5 feet 7 inches tall and goes by the name of Tom Hankey Jr., 17, son of the current owner and bowler of 26 perfect games and counting. That's what practicing six or seven days a week for two or three hours gets you. What else it gets you is enough scholarship money to pay for nearly three years' worth of college. He'll be attending the bowling juggernaut Webber International University in Florida next fall, and who among today's youth even knows there are college-level bowling juggernauts?

Well, his teammates on Monument now know, that's for sure.

There's young Tom over there on lane 24. While his teammates practice, he's firing up the machine that applies oil to the lanes, making them shiny-nice because it's Thursday, league night.

And someday maybe Jackson Smith will be among the league players, yes? A freshman at Monument, he's learning to throw two-handed, in the style of the great Jason Belmonte.

But where will the young Jackson bowl in a year from now, in six months from now, if the unspeakable occurs?

When you don't ask, when you instead live in the moment at the Cove, you get the delight of listening to Anthony describe his favorite sound in the world. It sounds something like this: RrrrrrrrrrrPWOCKrrrrrrr!

He can explain: "From that desk there, I can reset all 24 lanes at once. So the sweep comes down and knocks down the pins on 24 lanes. RrrrrrrrrrPWOCKrrrrrrr! It's awesome. I used to do it all the time at night when there was nobody in here."

Anthony, whose bowling ball looks like planet Earth, steps up to the line — slower than normal and without his typical follow-through, because of the 15 screws and two plates keeping his pelvis together (different story, worthy of a TED Talk). He lets her roll. And there it is: Planet Earth spinning and revolving down the lane, drifting toward the gutter. Drifting, drifting — but look at that! Planet Earth rights itself at the last moment and proceeds to plunge into the pocket: rrrPWOCK! Strike!

He turns and smiles.

His ball pops up in the ball return, ready for more, ready for more.

And don't you know it begs the question: At the Cove, how many more such happy returns?

Felix Carroll: Today's question — What's on the mind of Frederick Havill's cows?

2022-11-02T11:23:00.000-04:00

Felix Carroll photos

This article first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle:

By Felix Carroll

TYRINGHAM — What do all these cows think of this man? In short, choppy, Charlie Chaplin strides, he moves this way and that, all day, nearly all the night, stopping every 12 hours to feel for their unmentionables. They turn away as a stainless steel bucket fills with the miracle of milk.

What do they think of him as they spend these cold days and nights out of the weather, tethered in their tie stalls, heads bowed, quiet as nuns in Adoration?

With their front lips, they pull upon the heaps of sweet hay he places before them. They chew, swallow, regurgitate, chew some more and swallow again. They blink their long, pretty eyelashes and watch him move about.

Their tails twitch, tasked with shooing away flies that have managed to find this haven, this barn, kept toasty warm by bovine body heat alone.

Under bare lightbulbs hung from the rafters, this man cleans their muck, lays down sawdust and makes things tidy again. Day in, day out, repeat, repeat, repeat.

What do all these cows think of this man? Compressed into a body that stands no more than 5 feet 7 inches tall, he carries their scent with him to the bank twice a month, to the barbershop twice a year. He would carry their scent to choir practice.

One evening he said nothing when a young lady, a choir member, inquired as to why the room smelled like a horse barn. Why would he say anything? He doesn't have a horse barn. He has a cow barn, an island of light at night, tucked in the willow-frilly folds of Tyringham Valley.

Can these cows understand malice — how this man, a former farmhand who decided to throw off all restraints and set off on his own, was told by his peers some 40 years ago that he'd never make it as a dairy farmer, that he was too "stupid?"

That's what they said. Some 40 years later, Frederick G. Havill, the "Hav" of Hav's Dairy Farm on Jerusalem Road, has survived colon and rectal cancer. He survived so much chemo that the callouses on his hands peeled off like wax. He survived a freakish bulldozer accident. It landed on top of him, crushing bones and filling his lungs with blood.

There was a hip replacement along the way, too, after he got himself flattened between a cow and a steel I-beam. He survived a house fire — and the rising costs of everything other than the price of milk itself.

He's still here, 76 years old. Half a ton of milk from 50-plus cows fills that refrigerated tank every day. And where are the doubters? Where'd they all go? Every other day, a huge tanker comes and hauls this milk away to be eventually bottled under the Ronny Brook Farm label. Twice a month he receives a check, and of course, it's never enough. If he were still 50 years old, maybe he'd weep. But he's not 50. He's 76, thankful to be working, graced with the ability to get happily lost in all that's familiar.

The cows hear him talking. They hear him declare, "We'll all be even someday, I suppose."

What do these cows think of this man who sleeps only three to five hours each night, sometimes less, sometimes in the house, sometimes in the hay?

These cows — can they understand temperance? While they conspicuously consume 100 pounds of food a day each, this man chooses to eat lunch and dinner simultaneously, at 5 p.m., to save money and time.

And he doesn't drink alcohol either. He worked with a dairy crew when he was in his 20s. They'd spend their evenings at the tavern and their mornings not remembering what they did the night before. Havill decided he wouldn't touch the bottle because he wanted to remember what he did the night before. He drinks milk, half a gallon a day.

They chew, these cows, transfixed by nothing or everything, as the man tells of going with a friend to Suffolk Downs years ago and correctly picking the winners of the first six races. On the seventh race, Havill placed his first bet. His horse won. He collected $22 and never won another red penny in his life because he never bet another red penny in his life.

What do these cows think of this man who lives with the heavy heart of having not visited sick friends before they died? Could these cows understand remorse?

Remorse is what explains what made Havill finally subscribe to the newspaper. His power had gone out in his barn one evening, during a storm. Cows needed to be milked. So he made an emergency, odd-hour phone call to the home of his electrician, George Comalli. George's wife answered. She had to inform Havill that George had died a few months previous. Because Havill never again wants to make that same shameful mistake, he decided it best to devote a few minutes each day scanning the obituaries.

When the waterlines break, the cows watch the man in his one-piece jumpsuit hauling hoses and buckets and scurrying this way and that. When they push down a fence and take a stroll down the valley, they stop in their tracks at the sound of him calling, "Come-in-girls!" Redirected, clop-clopping across pavement, they follow him home.

And why wouldn't they? It's him, their guy, the man who lets the barn cats use his leg for a scratch post; the man who shuts his eyes when he smiles; the man who makes sure the country music station plays 24/7 from a radio buried in spiderwebs. The radio keeps the cows company. Those disjointed voices inoculate them from getting spooked when strangers walk into the barn.

And when strangers walk into the barn, there's that man, crouched amid a canyon of cows, the bill of his hat pressed against quivering hide. He's feeling his way for teats, the spigots that have allowed he and his wife, Dawn, on land they lease, to raise seven children, none of whom are interested in running a dairy, but he loves them anyway.

These contented cows, napping amid the hum of the wall fans and the prattle of the country music station while two Guinea fowl roost in the rafters.

Two calves were born the evening before while their man busied himself in the barn, listening for sounds that would warrant him intervening. He wrapped them in warm red sweaters, then he went to bed.

These cows, they hear him saying things — farmer-wisdom-type things, like, "I'll tell you why I do this: Because God put these animals on the Earth and asked me to take care of them, and I'm not going to let Him or them down."

They hear him speculate about what cows might be thinking.

"Oh," he says, "well, they're probably thinking about food, is my guess."

Summertime, you shyster

2022-09-07T14:38:00.000-04:00

By Felix Carroll

Summertime, you mesmerized us by your patter. You appeared in June from under an apple tree and glad-handed us like a barker in an old-time medicine show. You made promises you couldn’t keep. You’re nothing but a season of deceitful amenities with a short shelf life. Sunshine, you say. Freedom, you say. Bare feet, you say. We can have it all!

We were weak. We stepped right up for your miracle cure. We swallowed it down with a lemonade chaser and waited for you to take effect.

Fools, we are. Fools, I tell you.

“Yes,” we said, airing out our arms and legs on a cool evening under an ice-cream-scoop-of-a-moon, “I do believe it’s working. I do believe I feel better. I do believe this here ‘Summertime’ clears my head, loosens me up, and makes me easier to be around. I feel as though I could jump into a lake and then towel off and barbecue a hotdog.”

“You need to try this,” we proselytized to friends and family who remained muddled in a mid-winter mindset with their hands reflexively turning the thermostat clockwise. “No, I’m serious. Try it! It’s called ‘Summertime.’ It’ll blow your friggin' mind!”

Colors! Jeez, look at those colors! Green never looked so — what’s the word? — GREEN! And time — it warps! The days stay long. They don’t tuck their elbows in like they did in March or February or November. The days are full, chest puffed out.

We pushed, we pushed, we pushed as pushers push till we saw friends and family hooked and out back, skull dancing to Bob Marley.

Summertime, you caused us to do things we wouldn’t normally do. Like publicly display our twig-like pale limbs. Like set 20 tomato plants in the soil and wish we had planted 20 more. Like desert a perfectly weather tight house to camp in a tent.

Now here we are: Labor Day. Suntanned junkies wanting more, demanding you bear the weight of our impossible dreams. And where are you? Hello? Where are you?

“He was just here,” we tell the children as we strap brand new shoes to their feet and wrestle book bags to their backs. “I don’t know where he went. He was here, and now he’s not here, and I’m just as confused as you. Now go to school and I’ll look into it.”

We shoo them out the door. As we try to regain our wits, we hear a banging. We rush to the back door only to discover 400 yellow squash demanding entry into our kitchen.

“Where did all you guys come from?” we say. They don’t talk. They just shout. We have a hazy memory of promiscuous behavior back when Summertime first took effect. “Yes, I remember the tomato plants, but —.”

Finally, “I remember now. I was brushing my teeth, getting ready for work. It was a fine, soft morning, and I looked out the window and thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll go ahead and just plant some yellow squash, too. You know, keep the tomatoes company.’ Couldn’t hurt.”

We remember now how we went out in our pajamas and plugged squash seed after squash seed into our soil. We were high on Summertime. We were going to dig a root cellar and eat squash all winter. But the moment we put spade to earth we uncovered earthworms. And Summertime, you make us do weird things, so we decided to perpetuate the myth to our shoeless children of how when we cut earthworms in half we get two live earthworms.

“See?” we say to them, our eyes bugged out. “Two of them wiggling. Crazy, huh? Now come on, let’s play badminton!”

Now here we are, without a root cellar, and a backyard deck filled with angry gourds that are prepared to pelt our house with 40,000 fresh tomatoes.

We should have seen it all coming. Summertime’s dangerous side effects revealed themselves in early August when we started rocking on the balls of our feet bumming everyone out that the supply of Summertime was running thin. Though it was still four whole weeks till Labor Day, we said, “Jeez, it’s only four weeks till Labor Day.”

The skull dancing came to a pause, and everyone nodded solemnly.

“I’m sorry,” we say this weekend to friends and family. “I got a little out of hand, and I dragged you guys into it, too. I didn’t realize Summertime was so addictive. I thought I could handle it, and I made a fool out of myself and of you, too.”

You know what I want? I'll tell you: All I want now is to return to my old life when I didn't expect so much out of life, when I wore flannel and went to bed early. That's all I want. Really it is. Burn the swim trunks. Dump the sunblock into the water supply.

Yeah, this Labor Day, as we defiantly toast to new beginnings, you, Summertime — your dastardly wares wrapped tightly to your wooden wagon — wobble past.

“Till next year,” you say with a tip of the hat and a sinister grin.

We turn our backs to Summertime. We cinch the zippers tight on our windbreakers and lower the needle down on some old Sinatra. Take it, Frank:

And guess who sighs his lullabies through nights that never end

My fickle friend, the summer wind …

“I just got outsmarted is all,” we say.

Friends and family solemnly nod. “We all did.”

On the many things they’d rather be thinking about

2022-08-04T17:33:00.000-04:00

“We would appreciate a little more support and sensitivity,” says Ingrid MacGillis, outside her home on Holmes Road.

The following first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle.

By Felix Carroll

PITTSFIELD — People, we have a little situation. Can we all listen up for a sec?

This is all very simple. And by the end of all this you’re going to be like, “Oh, that’s what those painted white X’s on Holmes Road are for? You’re kidding me! Sure, I won’t block them.”

Also you’re going to be like, “Yeah, I’ll drive slower and turn my radio volume down. And no, I absolutely didn’t realize how a simple lane closure has royally yanked the day-to-day life of some Holmes Road residents into something they barely recognize.”

Together we can be reasonable people.

And by the way, all the while please realize there are 400 gazillion things in the world that Holmes Road residents would rather be thinking about than lane closures and honking horns and middle fingers.

Hank Packard, for instance, would rather discuss things like the black Labrador puppy he rescued back in 1993 from inside the former Palace Theatre on North Street in the moments before the demolition crew knocked it all down. Did you know he did that? The crowd cheered. His mother brought the puppy home and named her Paley. Paley would fetch the newspaper and ring the doorbell.

Did you know Packard had a kidney transplant 10 years ago? He’s got great kidney transplant stories.

But for now he’s on the front porch of the home his father built in 1954, and he’s doing a play-by-play on the tedious topic of Holmes Road traffic. It’s the porch where his mother used to sit and knit things for Catholic aid organizations. He now lives here alone with his dog, Tess, who also fetches the newspaper.

“Watch this,” he says. “When the light turns green, all the cars will start moving, and then when it turns red, you’ll have about three more cars gunning it and blowing the red light. Watch.”

Have you been on Holmes Road recently? If so, you’ve noticed the bridge over the railroad tracks between Miss Hall’s School and the Herman Melville homestead has been squeezed down to one lane with a set of temporary stop lights. State inspectors this spring deemed the bridge structurally unfit for two-way traffic due to aging. On April 3, Ingrid MacGillis watched from her yard as a crew arrived with traffic lights and jersey barriers.

“You knew it wasn’t going to be good,” she says.

The state says the lane will be closed for at least a year. Residents have taken that to mean that the situation will likely remain as is for at least two years. For motorists, it’s just another traffic hassle. For residents closest to the bridge, it’s a breathtaking upheaval to peaceful existence when there are so many other things they’d rather be thinking about.

Like, get this: Did you know that for three whole days until she revealed her findings, Ingrid may have been the only person on the planet who knew that the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini had a German lover named Rosa? Ingrid deciphers old handwritten letters and manuscripts for dealers, collectors and scholars — writings by people like Kaiser Wilhelm II, Catherine the Great, and, yeah, Puccini, that naughty little doggie.

“It was clearly a carnal relationship,” she says.

Sinful, yes — and also 400 gazillion times more interesting than traffic woes on Holmes Road, which residents cannot help but talk about. You would, too, if you lived here. When the light is red, you can stand in front of the MacGillises at 654 Holmes Rd. and watch the cars stack up as far as the eye can see, radios blaring.

You can also see a painted white X in front of driveways. Few motorists understand the X means don’t stop there.

“The anger people express at you for just trying to get in and out of your own driveway,” says Ingrid, shaking her head.

Since the lane closure, the MacGillises, who have enjoyed entertaining friends at their home since 1975, no longer entertain here. That’s understandable. Try pulling in and out of their driveway a few times and you’d only choose to do so if you absolutely had to — like, for instance, if this was where you slept and kept your toiletries.

Don is a former editor for The Berkshire Eagle and serves today on the newspaper’s advisory board. The MacGillises try to cherish their pretty flower gardens. Their daughter Lucy’s landscape paintings are being shown this month at the Hoadley Gallery. And the weather, well —

“The weather’s been great — ,” Ingrid says and stops herself. “Now look at that, right there.”

A sedan, idling on her X.

Next door, Don and Sonya Daly would much rather be talking about their four grown children and all the happy moments they’ve shared over the years — the elaborate ice rinks Don would build out back and that giant snow dragon Sonya and the kids sculpted and painted with green food coloring.

Did you know that Don blows things up for a living? It’s true. He works at the Electric Power Research Institute off East New Lenox Road. So, for example, in order to prevent underground explosions, he helps create underground explosions to study them. Get this: One out of every 10,000 manholes will someday blow like a pressure cooker.

“Don’t ever stand on a manhole cover,” says Don.

As a man who pursues solutions, he’s got one for the hazardous area known as Holmes Road: The town needs to enforce the ban on heavy trucks with no business on the road. For one thing, such heavy loads are probably destroying what remains of the bridge in question.

“It’s a drag,” says Sonya.

“Yep,” Don says.

Back down the road, Packard continues the play by play.

“Look at this guy,” he says, pointing to an SUV stopped at the light on Packard’s X.

Think happy thoughts. Like this: Ten years ago, Packard was at his son’s stag party at Fenway Park watching the Red Sox shellac the Braves when his pager went off. It was his doctor. A matching kidney had become available. Packard had been waiting more than two years for this day.

His son and buddies promptly saw to it that the scoreboard above the right field bleachers post the words “Good luck, Hank!” for the whole park to see.

He’s got a photo of it somewhere.

“Wait here,” he says, “I’ll go find it.”

Felix Carroll can be reached at felixcarroll5@gmail.com.

A rite of spring: busting ice for the county

2022-04-02T20:13:00.000-04:00

Dan Kearns (right), rink manager for the Boys & Girls Club

of the Berkshires, and Officer Jon Fortier (center) of the

Berkshire County House of Correction, shovel ice out of the

building this past week, as another ice rink season comes to a close.

This article first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle.

By Felix Carroll

PITTSFIELD — When the Boys & Girls Club of the Berkshires first opened its improbable third floor ice rink back in 1962, the planners seemed to have thought of everything: a spacious lounge, a snack bar, and room for 800 spectators, all undergirded by beefy steel supports shouldering a slab of ice notably larger than that of Madison Square Garden’s.

Yep, they thought of everything — everything except for a drain. The ice rink has no drain.

“It’s one of the great mysteries of the Boys & Girls Club,” Dan Kearns, the rink manager, notes dryly.

Yet, had they installed a drain, it would’ve deprived Berkshire County of its most magnificent annual rites of spring — that of shoving an entire rink’s worth of ice, chunk by glorious chunk, out a third-story hole in the wall, such as occurred again this past week.

Skaters enjoy the season’s final public skate day on March 17.

Some 2,000 skaters in all made use of this inimitable ice rink this

season.

By the way, if you’re in the market for more-than-gently used ice, you may want to stop by Melville St. A whole Kryptonian heap, its sharp shards gleaming, presently sits beside Conrail train tracks in a back alley canyon of bruised brick. Bring a trailer. And hurry. It’s melting.

Each year as the sun makes its mad tick or tock north from the tropics, no one seems to lament the nonexistence of a boring old drain into which a melting ice rink could simply slip away by slow degrees. Not the group of inmates from the Berkshire County House of Correction brought in each year to help bust up the ice with the promise of fresh air and hot pizza from Liberty; and not the Club itself, for whom this whole forcible dismantlement somehow proves cathartic.

A drain would be too simplistic for a rink whose well pronounced idiosyncrasies are met with equal and opposite affection.

This is the rink that, due to a lack of a dehumidifier, turns into a veritable rain forest during winter warm spells, stalagmites mounding by the minute. And sometimes it leaks onto the basketball courts below because — yes — there are basketball courts directly below, a huge heated space just beneath an ice rink that, itself, needs to be maintained at 17 degrees.

This is the rink where two Januaries ago, when it came time to receive its new ice resurfacing machine, the Club had to hire a crane to hoist it to it’s third-story perch. That crane operator nudged it through a narrow opening in the brick all with a dexterity akin to opening a beer can using an onion hoe.

This is the rink presented to the people of Berkshire County back in December 1962, the county’s first indoor rink and our grandest Christmas gift to date. It was the girl-less Boys’ Club then, and a time when few people would have thought to put an ice rink on anything else but ground level.

Few people think to do so today, as well, by the way.

This is the Boys & Girls Club ice rink — yes, built without a drain (for some reason), but beloved just the same by some 2,000 skaters each year. It’s the home ice for hockey, figure skating, speed skating, and curling clubs, not to mention the hundreds of gold-medal fantasists endeavoring single axels during any number of the many public skate days.

Indeed, upon the end of each March, when it’s time for the Club to acquiesce to rising outdoor temperatures and shut off the rink compressors, it’s a “tear worthy” moment, admitted Ardell Arsenault, a staff member and ice guard who’s been skating here for 30-something years.

This year, six inmates from the House of Correction, all clad in matching yellows, were brought in to help do the deed. They each took two-by-fours and commenced pounding the ice, jack-hammer style, busting it into pieces. Kearns, along with Building Superintendent Kais Abderrahim, Sgt. Bruce Kruczkowski, and Officer Jon Fortier were all on hand with snow shovels to shepherd the chunks through the hole in the wall until it was all gone, three stories below — a micro, level-5 ice storm.

Chunk by chunk, Boys & Girls Club’s building

superintendent Kais Abderrahim says goodbye

to another ice rink season.

Bam, bam, bam! To the retirees in the courts below playing pickleball, it all sounded like the foul mood of Nordic hockey gods above erupting into a bench clearing brawl.

It took a full day of pounding and shoving until it was all gone, all that ice that helped make for yet another delightful Berkshire winter for those who prefer their water in the solid state.

Deposited from that three-story opening went the very ice upon which A.J. Roy, 54, of Pittsfield learned to speed skate, reaching wild-animal speeds of 25 mph on the curves by mid-January.

The very ice upon which the young Roshan Warriar completed a hat trick to lead the Berkshire Bruins Peewee Gold to victory over Bethlehem, N.Y., in the 48th Gib Kittredge Youth Hockey Tournament.

The very ice upon which Katie Malone-Smith, 40, of Hinsdale pulled off her first successful lutz since the tender age of 19.

The very ice upon which high schooler Daniella Santamarina of Pittsfield nailed down her first double jump with the Pittsfield Figure Skating Club.

The very ice upon which Bessie Reynolds, 53, of Pittsfield, weary of her own complaining about chilly Berkshire winters, strapped on skates for the first time and set off on shaky, newborn fawn legs to finally became a devoted ice skater, doggonit.

On a Friday in February, Edward LaBoursoliere, 7, of Holyoke, too, donned skates for the first time. Having fogged up the plexiglass, mesmerized by the ice resurfacing machine, he decided he wanted to be a Zamboni operator when he grows up.

And on an October day, on this very ice, a Minnesota man’s mouth was agape. Kevin Madsen, USA Curling’s lead arena ice technician, had never seen anything like this — an ice rink on a third floor. He was in town to give the Berkshire Curling Club pointers on the obscure art and science of ice surface preparation.

“Just think,” Madsen said, “there’s about 70 tons of frozen water on that third floor.”

But not anymore.

Not until next autumn, when Kearns and company again flick on the compressors and drag out the garden hoses.

Before they shut it all down this week, Arsenault herself donned her red skate guard vest for the season’s final public skate, on St. Patrick’s Day. The place was packed, the music pounding, the skaters dutifully circling the rink counterclockwise. Arsenault, stern when she has to be, stepped upon the ice and scanned for improperly tied skates.

For one last time on ice whose hours were numbered, she relished the moment when she could bring all skaters to a halt. For the benefit of underused muscle groups, she had them switch direction. Clockwise we go!

And indeed, the clock was ticking forward, the sun outside high and bright, and a tear-worthy moment forthcoming for ice angels like Arsenault, circling like water round a drain.

Felix Carroll can be reached at felixcarroll5@gmail.com.

Special deliverer: Meet the singing mail woman of Great Barrington

2022-03-16T08:32:00.000-04:00

This article first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle.

By Felix Carroll

GREAT BARRINGTON — Her arms outstretched as if to embrace life itself, a can of mace rattling against her canvas mailbag, Laurene Stang provides ample evidence why we should thank a postal worker on this very day, and maybe tomorrow and the next day as well. She sings:

More than the greatest love the world has known,
This is the love I give to you alone …

She’s on Pleasant Street, ensuring the street lives up to its name. From behind a COVID mask with blue, showgirl sparkles, she’s belting out a selected standard from the Laurene Stang songbook as she barrels through a foot-plus of snow without flinching.

Today is National Thank a Mail Carrier Day. So to all of you 644,000 postal employees working behind the scenes and out on the streets — thanks!

For 246 years, by an act of Congress, the United States Postal Service has been engaged in the daily miracle of uniting these rowdy states of America by means of physical, tangible, actual mail — glad and mad tidings from maternity wards and war zones, retail stores and bill collectors (all for a remarkably reasonable price, if you think about it).

But its sepia-tinged past can’t serve as a paperweight for the present. You need only to gaze into the back of any one of its bottle-nosed mail trucks to confront an ever-changing world. Namely, for now, floor-to-ceiling Amazon logos smirking at every delivery person as if to enquire, “What’s taking you so long, Cousin?”

“We gotta keep moving, gotta keep moving,” says Laurene, who closes her mental songbook for the moment to navigate her Merrells over a snowbank.

The thermometer on Main Street registers 32 degrees. Early morning downtown, a cacophony of reverse-warning alarms sound against the backdrop of blades scraping asphalt. The community is digging itself out from a February snowstorm. A plow truck on Pleasant Street, its headlights semi-blinded with the sleepyheads of uncleared snow, yields to the “singing mail woman” of Great Barrington, 01230: the great Laurene Stang.

Yes, she has a spectacular singing voice and she’s not afraid to use it. If she doesn’t sing, she might succumb.

Don’t you know it’s been a tough year for the mail service: unprecedented volumes of e-commerce orders; infamously late deliveries around Christmas; fallout from a shambled cost-cutting program introduced by the postmaster general; and high coronavirus cases among its understaffed workforce.

Yet each morning across the nation, the first signs of life typically are the loading dock lights of the local post office. A founding institution endures. The mission continues. Order will be upheld. And Laurene will sing.

Moving forward on River Street, she intones a pitch-perfect verse of “Please Mr. Postman.” She’s a modern-day Marvelette with a mailbag and a limp. (She has three screws in her left ankle and a new knee in her right leg.) Because Laurene does a lot of walking — six to seven miles a day — she also does a lot of thinking.

“I tell my daughters this: Any job you do, you can’t be talking to yourself and being miserable,” Laurene says. “You gotta go out happy, every day. Especially now with COVID. Now we need happy. We need normalcy, some kind of normalcy.”

Gotta keep moving. Gotta keep singing.

She and her three screws and new knee cover the downtown. That includes East Street, where the motorists drive like maniacs. Rosseter Street, where a German Shepherd once busted through a screen door to attack her and got a mouthful of mailbag. Pine Street, where a kindly woman recently presented her Swedish meatballs. Quarry Street, where a resident keeps her stocked on candy to keep her going. And, of course, Main Street, where the business owners have many song requests.

Did you ever notice that all those storefronts on Main Street each have upper floors? Laurene’s ankles and knees have noticed.

She climbs each creaky stairwell to stuff many ancient mailboxes. You would swear a hardboiled private eye is somewhere up behind one of those narrow, mysterious hallways working on a case involving a missing husband or a stolen heirloom. He keeps a fedora on standby.

Up one creaky wooden stairway, Laurene comes upon attorney Louis J. Oggiani.

“You want some water?” he asks.

“No, thank you, honey,” Laurene says.

“You sure? You doing OK?” he asks.

“Great,” she says “You?”

“Great.”

But Louis J. Oggiani’s mail carrier has to keep moving.

By the way, the singing mail woman used to be a “zero” — that is to say, an operator for the telephone company. Then she took the test for the postal service, scored an 87, and began work on Feb. 19, 1994, in East Northport, N.Y. 11731 before transferring to 01230 in 1997. She had met a Columbia County man named Barry at a Long Island laundromat.

Just like the fortune teller years ago predicted, she would live on a flat piece of land surrounded by trees. And just like the fortune teller predicted, she would give birth to three children, two of whom would be twins.

And sometimes when Laurene, the singing mail woman from Longuyland gets home from a long day, kicks her aching feet up and wonders if she’s about to die, her children make her dinner.

“I love my kids,” she says, tawking the tawk as she walks the walk up another creaky stairwell.

Her voice echoing off the high ceilings, she’s telling the story of how she once caught her son putting a stamp on the upper left-hand corner of an envelope.

“I almost had a heart attack,” she said.

Also by the way, the singing mail woman says she doesn’t need to be thanked, even on National Thank a Mail Carrier Day. She loves her job. She loves watching the kids along her route growing up. She loves being the unofficial wellness checker of downtown Great Barrington’s elderly citizens. She loves her fellow employees, all of whom work together and can rely on one another.

“I mean, I don’t have plans to take a trip to Hawaii, but it’s a good job,” she says.

She doesn’t need thanks, but she needs a new pair of orthopedics. She’ll take care of that.

Wait — she does have two request: After a snowstorm, please shovel a path to your mailbox. And to all you motorists, please slow down.

That’s all.

Just one more question for the singing mail woman: If she were on stage of Carnegie Hall, what would she sing?

“Ave Maria,” she says without hesitation.

She then stuffs a bank statement into a mailbox, one of an estimated 140 billion pieces of mail that will be delivered this year by the USPS.

She’s singing “Ave Maria” as she secures the mailbox flap.

Signed, sealed, deliverance.

Felix Carroll lives in Housatonic. He can be reached at felixcarroll5@gmail.com.

Felix Carroll: With many irons in fire, blacksmith forges on to make things right

2022-02-04T17:23:00.000-05:00

This column first ran in The Berkshire Eagle.

By Felix Carroll

MONTEREY — The metallic ping-ping-ping echoing these days across this village is the sound of rebellion. Follow the sound and you'll come upon a tall, lean, soot-smeared man set against a backdrop of a flaming forge, a whiff of sulfur in the air.

The man, Del Martin, hammering a red-hot clump of steel on an ancient anvil, is finally intent on shaping the world the way he sees fit.

In practical terms, he's a blacksmith, a maker of candle stands, knives, hinges, thumb latches, bottle openers, hearth tools, corkscrews, garden gates — rustic, functional, instant antiques, things that'll be dug out of the earth, intact, 500 years from now, if there's anyone left to do the digging. They'll brush them off, hold them up to the sunlight and declare, "Now, that is what you call a hinge."

In more philosophical terms, in the hinge of history, per se, the man has been inside the belly of the beast, the evil, evil beast, and he's in the process of inducing his own regurgitation.

To his mind, the beast comes in many forms. The usual suspects include the banking industry, the energy industry, the weapons industry and politics, to name a few. The clear commonality being that some people are making an obscene amount of money at the expense of many other people. Martin, 52, an auto mechanic, is most acquainted with the car industry beast. On most days, most of the time, most of his body could be found under the hood of a busted-up machine swallowing him whole.

"I've developed a keen dislike for cars," says Martin, who holds a master's degree in structural geology. "They are poorly built from an engineering and design standpoint. They're not built to last. They're built to make it through warranty, and it's all driven by corporate profits, and I don't want to be part of the industry anymore."

Until a year ago, the sign outside his shop said "Del Martin Automotive." That sign is gone now, and, to a certain degree, so is the man who first hung it nearly 19 years ago. Martin, a homesteader, a husband to a schoolteacher and a father of two, hung a new sign that now identifies his shop at 406 Main Road as "Knox Trail Forge," a nod to the history and rebellion that trundled past this spot one day a couple of centuries ago.

Main Road in Monterey represents a segment of the historic trail improbably traced by Colonel Henry Knox and his men, who were commissioned by Continental Army Commander George Washington in the winter of 1775-76 to transport cannons, mortars and howitzers from Lake Champlain in New York to the colonial army camped outside Boston.

Imagine that: A bunch of farmers, farriers and woodsmen — no doubt a tough bunch of exceptional troubleshooters — conscripted to haul artillery by the tonnage some 300 miles, including across the snowy Berkshire Hills, all in the successful effort to found a new nation.

The metallic ping-ping-ping echoing these days across this village summons the old spirits, the old ways, the better ways, pressed into service like a team of heavy-lidded, imperturbable oxen.

The haul now, like the haul then, happens to be forged iron or its equivalent. Heating it over a bed of coal until it's red hot and malleable and then pounding it and twisting it into useful objects is an endeavor that developed naturally from Martin's blessed "gadget habit — the disease to do everything myself." The symptoms are these: Instead of paying money to have something fixed or manufactured, he educates himself, buys the proper tools, does the deed and has the tools at the end of the project.

"I imagine most blacksmiths have that disease," says Martin, a captain on the Monterey Fire Company, an accomplished caver, Eagle Scout, farmer and woodsman who, over the span of the past nine years, has become an accomplished blacksmith as well. He's mostly self-taught. He's grateful for the generous advice given by fellow blacksmiths he has met through Instagram, a kindly subculture quick to take care of its own.

How did he get to become a man with so many irons in the stove? Martin's chopping-down-the-cherry tree moment came at age 6 or 7, when he took apart the family telephone. He wasn't able to put it back together again. His mom was angry. He has long since atoned for it. He has built computers, engines, barns, houses, tractor implements, even a meat smoker made from a steel file cabinet.

An off-the-gridder, having blinged his house out in the monochromatic plumage of photovoltaics, Martin raises his own hogs and chickens. He's the go-to guy in town when something — anything — is busted. And that's all fine with him. But these cursed automobiles — damn these automobiles.

He puts it this way: "You have someone who works hard and has a car and it's less than 10 years old. Outwardly, it's not a piece of crap, but then you put it on the lift and you see the rust and it's falling apart, and then you have to break the news to them. I was having no creativity — doing a good job, but people don't walk out of here saying how psyched they are to pay me $1,000. No one was leaving here psyched. And I'm not psyched. No one feels good about it. That's the nature of auto repair."

But you know what makes people happy? Hand-forged metal.

"Look at that," says Martin, holding out the base for a set of candle stands that have been sitting overnight in a basin of vinegar.

What he's saying is: "Way cooler than a brake job on a Subaru, right?"

Unquestionably.

In a logical world — one perhaps not controlled by bankers, big businesses and politicians — instead of fixing things that are shoddily made, Martin would be the maker of things that won't break to begin with. But it's not entirely a logical world. It's a broken world, and so Martin still repairs cars — just fewer of them.

You don't need to guess at his aspirations. A mini-revolution has been playing itself out on the floor of his shop these past couple of years. A full half of his two-bay garage has been annexed by the rebellion — the forge and all its ancillary accouterments, the anvils, hammers, tongs, vises, fly press and a small showroom that includes knives that will cut a tomato and knives that will disembowel a werewolf.

He has just fired up the forge to make bottle openers — stylish, tapered, little 7-inch steel twigs, with a whimsical curlicue on one end and an authoritative burr on the other. He's preparing for a series of craft shows, including the Made in Monterey Holiday Sale on Dec. 2, and the Shire City Sanctuary's annual Holiday Shindy on Dec. 9-10 in Pittsfield.

Can a fella make it as a blacksmith in age of cheaply priced, mass-produced crap, boxed and shipped from the belly of the beast?

"Well, I don't know yet," says Martin, who pins a red-hot piece of steel against the face of his anvil and prepares to pound it with a beat fit for a battle march.

Monterey without Ray Tryon? This will take time to settle in.

2022-02-01T07:09:00.003-05:00

Courtesy of Monterey Fire Company.

Ray Tryon (left), with his son, Leigh (right), and his crew back in 1982. “Ray always had something to say, and if you didn’t learn anything, you weren’t paying attention,” said Ray’s grandson, Shawn, who took over as Monterey’s fire chief upon Ray’s retirement in 2010. He joined the Monterey Fire Company in 1943, when he was 13 years old and most of the able-bodied males were away fighting World War II. “Back then, the fire company would take what they could get, and I was one of the ones they got,” Tryon said.

The following first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle.

By Felix Carroll

MONTEREY — Ray Tryon, born of human parents but who might as well have been carved from a mountain, has died.

He and his barrel chest, big head, and muscular hands, two fingers of which were mangled by machinery in separate incidents — the man is gone.

His voice that seemed to spin to life by means of a hand crank — it would whirl high-pitched, warped by the elements and sharp with splinters — has been silenced.

He’d point a stubby finger at you and begin each soliloquy with, “Well, you know —” and then proceed to expound upon things you most certainly didn’t know.

Safe to say that nearly every citizen of this tiny hill town had at one point or another entertained the notion that someday Ray Tryon would die, and how extraordinarily strange that would be.

He drew his last breath on Saturday, Nov. 16, at the age of 90. For the past month he had suffered from the effects of cancer. He lay in bed in the home his grandparents first kept, with his wife, June, in the other room, in the center of the village where Main Road slopes low behind its withers like the spine of a hard-ridden horse.

Upon this little dot on the map, Ray Tryon first drove a car when he was 6 years old. He built a front-end loader in his mid-teens before there were such things as front-end loaders. He heard the church bells ringing one afternoon in 1945 and learned the Japanese had surrendered.

“Good,” he said, before spinning on his boot heal to finish bailing hay, just another workday.

As chief of the Monterey Fire Company, he set the county’s gold standard for small-town fire departments whereby his crew would be paid for emergency calls; the equipment would be top rate; the training would be rigorous; and the voters would say yes to it all.

None of this should imply Ray Tryon was universally adored, nor that he gave a hoot what people thought of him. He was what you’d call a “complicated” man. But cool, Hollywood cool, the town’s unflappable fixed point. Maybe we can thank his asthma for that. He had learned from an early age that whenever he got worked up about anything, he’d have trouble getting the air out of his lungs, so he didn’t allow himself to get too emotional.

Upon this little dot on the map, Ray Tryon spent a lifetime never being wrong about a single thing, if you were to ask him.

The man was a giant.

And now his body has been reduced to ashes. They poured the ashes into an old brass fire nozzle, and capped it off. He’ll be buried in Corashire Cemetery, joining the remains of others from the Tryon tribe of clever scavengers who settled in Monterey in the mid-1800s, having followed the rivers and animal paths north from Connecticut.

Ray might have approved

But before his mortal remains were laid to rest, the townspeople gathered here at the fire station on Saturday for a memorial for the man who served as fire chief for 56 years and town constable for 65 years.

No speeches were given, and not a drop of beer could be found.

It wasn’t so much that Ray wouldn’t have wanted people giving speeches as it was a tacit admission on the part of the planners that Ray, a man of precision, wouldn’t trust anyone to get his story straight — so just skip it, and provide refreshments.

He built this fire house, self-mortgaged, in fact. It’s a dry fire house, per orders of Ray Tryon, with a few notable exceptions that did not include his own memorial service.

Beer was permitted on those winter evenings when he’d decide to drag in a 14-piece orchestra for his annual fireman’s ball. Ray may have been crotchety, but the man liked to dance. As chief, whenever a new prospective firefighter showed up at the door, Ray would inquire if they knew how to dance. If not, he would offer lessons. The offer was not to be mistaken for a mere suggestion.

To be a firefighter under Ray Tryon meant not only knowing the mechanics, the minutiae, of firefighting and emergency rescue. It meant not only understanding the science of smoke, heat and fuel loads, and the biological effects on the body when exposed to carbon monoxide. Or how to calculate friction loss on, say, a 100-foot section of 2 ½-inch hose line. Or the geographical differences between Monterey’s Lake Avenue, Lake Shore Lane, Lakeside Lane, and Lakeside Terrace (“Do you take a right out of the station or a left?” he’d quiz, pointing his stubby finger, pistol-like, at your very heart).

Indeed, to be a firefighter in Monterey also meant having a working command of the box step, Fox Trot, and Lindy. After all, Ray Tryon would not have his crew embarrassing him at his own ball, not with all his fancy ballroom dancer friends in attendance.

The fire crew on Saturday had big band recordings playing in the background. The fire engines were all parked out on the apron, their bumpers draped in purple cloth. Last week, they had gone into Ray’s old barn and pulled out a wagon he made that he used with the team of Percheron horses he once owned. The wagon was on display at the memorial service along with his white chief’s helmet, the nozzle with his ashes, his various badges, and photos of Ray throughout the years going all the way back to the olden days.

All in all, a classy affair. Firefighters from throughout the county came in their blue, Class-A uniforms. After about three hours, everyone was gone, having a beer elsewhere, the trucks back inside the station, everything put away nice and neat.

Ray probably would’ve approved. But how extraordinarily strange to not have the man here to critique the hidden particulars of his own memorial service.

What do you want to know?

His mind was still a marvelous thing up until a month before his death — “the gears still turning,” as his grandson, Shawn Tryon, put it.

Ray, born on Sept. 28, 1929, could still tell you about cutting across yards, playing cops and robbers as a kid and rushing home in time hear Tom Mix on the radio. He could tell you about putting a wee-bit of water into glass bottles, capping them off, sticking them into the stove and running off before they exploded. He could tell you about the moment he decided he would no longer cry when his mother paddled him for misbehaving.

He could tell you about being frightened to the bones throughout World War II that the Germans would start dropping bombs upon Monterey and there’d be nothing he could do about it. Maybe this is why he was attracted to the fire services — to emergencies, to things he could do something about. He responded to thousands of calls over the years.

He said, “I’d pull up. I wouldn’t have a plan. Then, flash: a plan.”

But bombs falling from the sky — there was nothing he could’ve done about that. Following the war, when it came time for him to report to the draft board, they turned him away after he had an asthma attack before their very eyes.

His marvelous mind could tell you about the young gals who, each summer, would come to town as camp counselors, and how he presented himself before them, a boy with a bicycle, a fine specimen, a Grade-A, Monterey-made country bumpkin.

He could tell you about his maternal grandfather, who quite literally kept the gears turning as a millwright in Lee; abouthis paternal grandfather, the first man in Monterey to own a car. He could tell you about cutting ice from Lake Garfield into 60 pound blocks; about his elementary school teacher, Ms. Emma Heath, who played piano decently enough.

“But the real education I got was right out there,” he’d say, sitting in his kitchen, pointing to the field behind his house.

His father, Albert Wallace Tryon, had a garage next door with a gas pump in front and a collection of broken down Model A’s and Model T’s in the back. With a hacksaw, screwdriver, plyers, cold chisel, monkey wrench, and a hammer, Ray as a teenager would chop up those old Fords and turn them into crude tractors. His front-end loader — with hydraulic arms and all — drew the attention of Caterpillar, so the story goes. He was offered a free ride to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, but he backed out. He was never good at classroom learning.

He stayed put in Monterey. He founded Tryon Construction. He shoved earth around. He got things done.

Now Ray Tryon has been reduced to ash. The surrounding hills shudder.

:::

Ray is survived by his wife, June; son Leigh; daughter Kathie; grandchildren Shawn and Christopher; great-grandchildren Ian, Phoebe and Owen; and extended family.

Some sister time, hold the sadness

2022-01-12T08:46:00.000-05:00

From left, the sisters Sofia Hughes and Felicitas and Crispina ffrench.

This article first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle.

By Felix Carroll

GREAT BARRINGTON — The lovely lady in room 201 has lately suggested to her sisters that she may have travel plans. The plans would entail her drawing a final breath and moving on to the next realm. No date has been set. Chances are it’ll all happen when she’s simply damn well ready.

For now, Felicitas ffrench may be working out a few existential details. What did that Jesuit priest tell her? And what’s that first law of thermodynamics — the one about energy never being destroyed?

But mostly she appears to live moment to moment because moments are what she has.

“Mind if I open the curtain?” her sister Crispina asks her as she enters the room for her weekly visit last Sunday. Not waiting for an answer, Crispina shoves aside the heavy drapes. In an instant, a gush of light anoints the gloomy room, rummaging until it finds what it seems to cherish: the smiling face of Felicitas ffrench in her bed, her body broken.

Felicitas first arrived in this nursing home 15 years ago, beaten by the effects of multiple sclerosis, furious and resentful. At the time, she was the youngest resident here by far at 39 years of age. She’s no longer the youngest, and the fury is long gone. That fact, the fury gone, is the miracle in all of this — the single miracle thus far bequeathed to the ffrench family of Stockbridge in a set of circumstances that Felicitas, herself, otherwise describes thusly: “Oh, this sucks.”

She laughs heartily at that. She laughs till her face turns red. As does Crispina, by her side. As does the third sister, Sofia, by her other side. Laughter, a miracle. Because yes, let’s be clear: This sucks.

After all, this is Felicitas ffrench, the girl who, by first grade, was already reading Agatha Christie. The nerdy, know-it-all who earned a perfect score on her SATs. Who graduated from Monument Mountain High School in 1981, a year ahead of her class. Who graduated from the University of California-Berkeley, then earned a scholarship to Stanford Law School.

This is Felicitas ffrench, remember? The fierce young woman determined to spend her life providing legal counsel to the poor and marginalized.

She was diagnosed with MS at age 20. For the next 15 years, her health would sputter. She’d temporarily lose the ability to control her left side. Her vision would temporarily turn kaleidoscopic. When she was 35, her frantic parents intervened. She was living in Oakland in a third-floor walk-up and could no longer climb stairs. For good measure, a boyfriend had recently ripped her off.

Just as she was preparing to take the bar exam, her parents sent a friend out to Oakland who brought their daughter home. She was enraged. They got her a wheelchair. They made some changes to the house. But after nearly four of living at home, Felicitas needed round-the-clock care. She wound up here, where she quite quickly, quite astonishingly did what intelligence and grace would prescribe given the circumstances: She surrendered. Just like that. A model patient, never complains. Who can explain it?

Felicitas ffrench is at peace in this place, in this room with three beds and a roommate behind a curtain who shouts out non sequiturs. She’s at peace in this place permeated by the odor of decay chased with cleaning solvents by a saintly staff who call her dear. They keep her covers pulled tight to her chin the way she likes it.

And when her sisters come to visit, her face lights up — the sisters whom she used to drive up the wall when they were all kids living on Main Street in Stockbridge. Like oil and water. Crispina and Sofia would be playing outside with the neighbor kids while Felicitas would ensconce herself inside reading Dickens. How annoying!

The three sisters together can now scavenge dark hilarity from the madness of a world in which Felicitas ffrench, the sassy, genius brainiac, can no longer even pick her own nose.

“Oh, God help us all,” Felicitas says, locking eyes with Crispina.

“I wish he would,” says Crispina.

Her short-term memory is shot. She doesn’t remember that her parents have died. That her father, John, no longer visits every single day, bringing with him a defiant attitude that all is well. She doesn’t recall how her mother, Primm, couldn’t hide her sorrow. She doesn’t recall a fellow resident here, Sue with the sunglasses, who died a couple months ago from cancer, or the beloved Pat, who adored fresh peaches and never had visitors.

But Felicitas remembers things from long ago. That super cute guy in Ireland — Sean or Seamus or something. She remembers sunny California. And the lyrics to Bob Marley songs. And her father shouting “Bloody hell!” in his Irish accent whenever she rammed her wheelchair into his door jams, scratching the paint.

Does she remember the people she helped in Harlem, the people she helped in Oakland?

“Remember?” Sofia asks. “Weren’t they people with — what? With AIDS? People who were losing their healthcare?”

“Yes,” Felicitas says, haltingly. “People that didn’t have representation, ever, which I thought was really important.”

She remembers her sisters. Sometimes she opens her eyes and they are there — Crispina knitting, and it all feels like home. They spoon-feed her SoCo Creamery ice cream, her favorite. They share wise cracks and belly laughs — or they don’t talk at all. Just sisters hanging out, delighted.

Crispina reports that Felicitas has lately confided that she sees her body as a trap from which she’s getting ready to free herself. The Jesuit priest, an old family friend, has specific ideas about what all would happen next, but the three sisters are not so sure. What they seem sure of is that the energy that is Felicitas ffrench won’t just — poof! — disappear. Once set free, maybe all that energy that yearned to care for society’s marginalized will lean hard against the levers of injustice. Maybe.

Whatever the case, Crispina and Sofia have decided to not be sad, because Felicitas is not sad.

And anyway, out of the blue, their eldest sister recently announced that this past year has been the best year of her life. So what do you do with that information?

You do what they’ve been doing. You visit, with ice cream. You fling open the curtains. You be a sister. And you take your leave with an “I love you” and an “Hasta luega, girl.” Goodbye, for now, to Felicitas ffrench, full of light.

Felix Carroll can be reached at felixcarroll5@gmail.com.

'Wizard of Oz' in 35 mm a 'reel' treat at Mahaiwe

2021-11-08T07:30:00.000-05:00

This article first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle.

by Felix Carroll

GREAT BARRINGTON — The packages arrived early last week in two blue, octagonal hard shell cases, postmarked Hollywood. Their contents contained a combined 1.7 linear miles of poppy fields, ruby slippers and flying monkeys — immortal images on the fragile medium of 35 mm film.

When Paul Kakley got word of their arrival, he went to inspect, as he does each year.

At a workbench in the projectionist booth high above the historic Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, he pulled the contents out of their cases. Holding the film to the light, detecting neither scratch nor nick, Kakley thought to himself, "Gorgeous, just gorgeous."

Each year, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, moviegoers pack into the Mahaiwe for a seminal event. The lights dim, the red curtain rises and a shaft of light cuts through the dusty air carrying with it the story of a girl named Dorothy and her dog named Toto on an expedition from the black-and-white flats of Kansas to the Technicolor outland of Oz — and then back again. High up in the booth in back, spying through the porthole, is Kakley, just as he was the year before and the year before that, dating back decades to when the Mahaiwe was mostly a movie house and projectionists were the last link in Hollywood's creative chain.

He's the man first responsible for making "The Wizard of Oz" an annual mainstay here, shown as it was intended, from the delicate coil of 35 mm motion picture reels.

Hollywood doesn't print films anymore in 35 mm, the medium of choice for filmmakers for more than 100 years, up until about a decade ago. Once those prints are gone, they're gone, which is why when Kakley declares the film sent from Warner Bros. "gorgeous;" it's a big deal to analog purists like himself, among the last ones standing in the citadel of celluloid orthodoxy.

Most all Hollywood films are shot in digital nowadays. Most all movie houses have shoved aside their old mechanical projectors and replaced them with their digital counterparts — souped-up computers that play files, not films.

That means no more projectionists — and all their idiosyncratic undertakings — except on rare occasions, like at the Mahaiwe, once a year with "The Wizard of Oz." Each year, up in that booth, the old rituals are rendered anew in the hands of Kakley.

The first step is taking the five reels sent by Warner Bros. and "building" them into two monster reels — each one to be laced into Mahaiwe's two projectors. That all requires a little surgery: attaching one strand of film to the next with Mylar tape and splicing film between frames with a mini guillotine under lamplight. It also means setting the changeover cues — those small white circles you sometimes notice on the upper right-hand corner of the screen — to mark when one reel is spilling empty and the next reel must be set into motion. Kakley must keep watch midfilm for those changeover cues so he knows when to make the perilous switch from one projector to the next.

Indeed, just like in Oz with that man behind the curtain, it's best to pay attention to that man up in that booth.

"Every year it becomes more rare that we are able to get a 35 millimeter print," says Kakley, about a half-hour before showtime Saturday. "This year is no exception."

In 1980, upon the Mahaiwe's 75th anniversary, the larger-than-life, mustachioed, card-playing, Jackie Gleason look-alike former manager, the late Al Schwartz, invited the staff to each pick a movie they'd like to see. Schwartz promised he would find it and screen it.

Kakley, one of Schwartz's staff projectionists, chose a film dating to 1939, "The Wizard of Oz," whose sound and Technicolor were state of the art in the day and remained legendary decades later.

"I watched every year growing up when they would show it on TV, but I had never seen it the way it was meant to be seen," Kakley says.

It was a huge hit at the Mahaiwe in 1980. Soon after, it became an annual event.

Kakley has been a Mahaiwe mainstay since 1970, after the death of his father, who was killed by a drunken driver. He was 13, and his mother moved her family from Springfield back to her hometown of Great Barrington. The Mahaiwe, with its heroes — on screen and in the front office — became like a second home for him.

After graduating from Monument Mountain Regional High School, Kakley took a job as the school's audio-visual instructor, a job he still holds. He worked nights and weekends in the projectionist booth beginning in 1976.

Peering through the window from the booth Saturday, Kakley watches as the theater fills up. The two big, steel projectors that he and Schwartz hunted down and procured together years ago (built by Century, "like brick houses, but so gentle on film," Kakley says) are locked and loaded with a combined 9,180 linear feet of gorgeous Hollywood magic, shot with a gargantuan camera now parked in the Smithsonian.

At 4:05 p.m., the house lights dim. The curtain rises. Kakley presses a green button. The lamp is lit, the projector whirs and the reels heave into motion. Upon the silver screen below, Dorothy is soon getting spirited away by a tornado to somewhere over the rainbow.

Kakley steps out of the booth and takes a moment to soak it all in from the back row.

"I mean, that's a beautiful picture," he whispers. "It's rock steady. Look how crisp it is."

He is back in the booth for the changeover, just when Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion enter Emerald City. From the appearance of those first white cues, Kakley has half a second to react and press the button that brings the second projector to life. If he has aligned the film properly — which, of course, he has — in eight seconds the changeover will seamlessly occur, which it does.

Kakley peers through the porthole once again at the goings-on of that girl, her dog and her three strange, new friends. She just wants to get back to Kansas. She's clicking those ruby slippers now because there's no place like home, no place like home.

Randy Dutton would like you to know when his birthday is

2021-10-11T07:54:00.000-04:00

This article first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle.

By Felix Carroll

GREAT BARRINGTON — Randy Dutton, man about town, maybe you know him. If you’ve crossed paths, he’s undoubtedly said hello to you. If you didn’t say hello back, no hard feelings because right up the road there are people who will. Rick at Carr Hardware. Natalie at Lee Bank. Cherri at Extra Special Teas.

Randy, 45, just another soul among us claiming a life of his own in these fair hills, is celebrating the wondrous day of Friday, which comes after the wondrous day of Thursday, which he also celebrates. ...

Tomorrow will be Saturday, the weekend, which is “party time” for a self-proclaimed “party animal.” And when Monday rolls back around, that’ll be pretty great, too, for many reasons — not least of which is that it brings Randy yet one day closer to his birthday, which is July 27, by the way.

He’d like it if the town would shoot off fireworks in celebration.

Again, July 27 is Randy Dutton’s birthday. There will be cake.

But let’s live in the moment, as Randy does. He awakes still propped against his “head-up” pillow, which helps him to breathe more easily. The sun rummages through the window of his second-floor apartment on Bridge Street, into a bedroom filled with medals. Randy is quite an athlete, despite what his friend Rick says.

“Randy cheats,” jokes Rick.

“No, I don’t,” Randy protests, smiling.

“Rick is a piece of work,” he says, shaking his head.

Also hanging on his wall is his certificate of completion from Wahconah Regional High School, class of 1994, and the 2017 Worker Achievement Award presented to him last fall at a banquet hosted by Berkshire County Arc. Randy commandeered the microphone and gave a speech.

“I have a hall of fame career,” he declared.

What else? The replica WWF champion belt that Rudy, the butcher, gave him. And the photo albums: There’s a picture of Jody, his best friend, who also earned lots of medals. Jody was staying at Randy’s apartment for a sleepover back in April 2015 when he didn’t wake up the next morning. Cars arrived. There was a lot of confusion. That’s Jody right there, smiling with his dear friend Randy. Jody, presently, is in heaven.

And there are photos of Randy with his roommate, Todd. The two are now celebrating their 13^thanniversary as roommates. They will take a trip later this year to Todd’s hometown of San Diego where they will spend a good portion of their time and money eating burritos.

For the record, Todd is also a piece of work. For a 13^th-anniversary-as-roommates present, Todd bought Randy an electric egg boiler. Randy loves eggs. He loves to make egg sandwiches slathered with ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise, despite the counsel from the culinary critics in his life who advise him of how disgusting that is.

Forty-three years ago Randy was out in his parent’s meadow in Becket when his mother saw him crawling dangerously close to the family’s Shetland pony.

“Randy!” she called out to him from the house.

He didn’t respond, so she went out, pulled him to safety and stood him up.

He smiled. She packed him up and took him to the doctor.

“I think he might be deaf,” she said.

After some tests, the doctor informed her and Randy’s father, Ted, that Randy’s hearing was OK. The issue, he said, is Randy, the third of their four children, has Down syndrome.

Pam recalls that at the time she didn’t exactly know what that meant. An uncle tried to clarify. Randy was a “mongoloid,” he said, using the now obsolete term. Randy should be put into a home, he said, suggesting a common course of action at that time.

“He is in a home,” Pam protested. “His home.”

“Why would we take a happy child and put him away?” she recalls thinking. “The Lord doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle.

“Plus,” she hastens to add, “he was so cute.”

In that speech he gave at the banquet last year, Randy thanked his mom before raising his arms up and shouting “Whoooot!”

What day is it? Oh, yes, Friday. Randy makes his breakfast, packs his lunch, washes up and puts on his Guido’s Fresh Marketplace shirt, just like he does on Wednesdays and Mondays.

Tuesdays are different. Tuesdays are Mom Day, when he takes the bus up to Lee. He and his mom have lunch together and then they catch a $6 movie at the mall — nothing violent. Randy hates when people fight. He’d prefer everyone to know each other on a first-name basis and then get down to the essential matters of life, which include friendship, bowling, dancing and his forthcoming birthday.

And Thursdays are Laundry Day, when he wheels his duffle bag up Bridge Street to the laundromat, just like Todd taught him. He puts in just the right amount of soap and just the right amount of quarters, just like Todd taught him. Then he takes a walk and visits everyone he knows downtown.

Fourteen years ago, Randy’s mom, recognizing she wasn’t getting any younger, decided it’d be best for Randy to live on his own. With the help of all those kind people at Berkshire County Arc, he had already proven he could hold down a job. And he had long ago proven he could handle himself in the world. In elementary school in Dalton, he would get teased — but to no affect.

“He was happy,” his mom says. “How can you keep teasing someone who’s happy?”

They met Todd, a certified nursing assistant, through the organization Pathlight, which matches people who have developmental disabilities with people willing to share living quarters and help integrate them into community life.

Today being Friday, the foremost thing on Randy’s mind as he prepares for work is a round-shaped baked good the size of a tea saucer and filled with M&Ms. When you’re Randy, your culinary joyrides come in pre-ordained portions. Friday is Cookie Day.

Richard, the bus driver for Berkshire Regional Transit Authority, knows that.

“Today is Cookie Day,” he says as Randy settles into his seat.

“Yes, it is!” Randy says.

Randy arrives for work at Guido’s at 9:30 a.m. to a sea of hellos, hugs and high-fives. In a gastro-intestinal equivalent of genuflection, he parks himself briefly in front of the display of fresh-baked cookies.

“That’s the one,” he says, pointing, before he moves along to the front of the store where he’s been bagging groceries for 15 years.

“Thank you,” his boss, Luke, says to Randy after they take care of a customer.

“No, thank you,” says Randy.

“No, you did it,” says Luke.

“No, you did,” says Randy.

Randy sets the tone in Guido’s, says Luke. “When Randy’s here, it brightens everyone’s spirits.”

At 1 p.m., Randy’s watch sounds an alarm, prompting him to punch out and rendezvous with his cookie, which he’ll save for lunch tomorrow because tomorrow will be the weekend and the weekends are party time. He hugs every human he can find, all of whom wish him a happy weekend.

With his warm coat on, and a cane that helps him with his hip dysplasia, Randy is back on the street and back on the bus that takes him to his downtown stop. On the sidewalk, he pulls out his flip phone and presses T, which connects him Todd. He tells his roommate he’s fine and that he’s heading to have a tea at the teashop, where, it turns out, the news couldn’t get any better. Cherri tells Randy she’s planning a party for her shop’s second-year anniversary on April 7. Randy, of course, is invited.

“Can I bring my mom?”

“Yes, you can,” Cherri says.

Randy pulls out a pocket calendar and carefully circles the number 7 in the month of April. He writes the letters RANDY MOM in the box below the number 7.

“My mom will come,” he says. “It’s going to be a good time.”

After a tea and some hugs, he steps back out onto the sidewalk and declares that he likes snow and winter and that he also likes spring, summer and fall, too.

With the town’s tender side before him, Randy makes his way home to tell Todd about a party whose invitees include one Randy Dutton, just another soul among us claiming a life of his own in these fair hills.

A 'simmering' village on the cusp ... of what?

2021-05-17T07:58:00.006-04:00

This article first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle.

By Felix Carroll

HOUSATONIC — Months before the pandemic hit last year, villagers here noticed the new signs taped to the windows of the shuttered commercial space that once housed the Housie Market, the former backbone of this community.

The signs in succession read, “Could it be?” … “Yes, it could” ... “Something’s coming” … “Something good.”

For the culturally astute — and Housatonic is filled with them — these words were familiar, taken from the musical “West Side Story,” famous for its themes about tough living, complicated affections, miscalculations, beauty, and heartbreak.

Most of the 700 or so souls who call this village home know these themes well.

Set between stately Stockbridge to the north and the increasingly exclusive downtown Great Barrington to the south, Housatonic had been given a technical “slum or blight” designation several years ago by the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community.

As surrounding Berkshire towns continued to flourish from a decades-long run as destination points for tourists, second homeowners and those otherwise escaping the duller pursuits of the lower lands, Housatonic’s dishonorable designation felt less like a mark of shame than a statement of baffling facts that, taken in larger context, didn’t quite add up.

After all, look at the place. Arranged in proper order along the banks of a particularly spirited stretch of the Housatonic River, the village — Great Barrington’s northern precinct — holds what many frustrated townspeople term “tremendous assets.” That includes comparatively affordable housing, walkable streets, hiking trails, majestic old architecture, and not a single chain store within binocular view.

Framed to the west by Tom Ball Mountain and to the east by Monument Mountain’s mighty derriere, known locally as Flag Rock, humble Housatonic cannot help but to measure itself first against its towering surroundings to the east and west rather than the monied inhabitants to its north and south.

From high atop Flag Rock, the village resembles a miniature model railroad town, with its iconic old rusty water tower, its churches, fire house, library, pub, bakery, auto shop, post office, and package store.

Roiling past the bruised brick, the river itself eventually slackens its sinews just north of the old Rising Paper Mill, as if rubber-necking to catch a glimpse of the village’s resident celebrity: a magnificent American Bald Eagle that dwells along the banks there in a nest the size of a kiddie pool. Beak clinched like a bent nail, the barrel-chested bird of prey conducts its errands above it all, stiff-winged and a bit jerky on the turns.

From high atop Flag Rock, you can see twice daily the pug-nosed Housatonic Railroad train thump through town like a feral cat on padded paws. Down below, the train shakes the village’s old fieldstone foundations, and then everything goes quiet once again.

Too quiet, for many.

“We need some vitality — that would be my wish,” says Helen Kuziemko, a town hall retiree who lives on Kirk Street in the home her husband, Matthew, grew up in.

“It’s simmering. There’s just a lot of untapped opportunities in Housatonic,” says Ellen Lahr of Pine Street, who raised two sons in the village and appreciates that Housatonic remains a place where the well off and those of middle and meager means coexist “and you can’t always discern the difference.”

Suzie Fowle, a former member of the Great Barrington Planning Board and an 18-year resident of Kirk Street, expresses her frustration in the form of a question: “Why have the potential opportunities remained ‘potential’ for so many decades?”

This village of former mills that once employed more than 500 people, most of whom lived within walking distance to work, was steadily discharged of its industrial purpose beginning more than six decades ago. The five and dime is long gone, as are the tiny taverns and family-run shops.

It’s safe to say most residents today cherish Housatonic while also allowing their minds to run on idle revelry for what could be.

A decade ago, the idle revelry revved into overdrive when a Miami developer, Stephen Muss, swooped into town presenting artist renderings of a riverside village center that included a river walk, pedestrian bridges, an amphitheater, specialty market, culinary school, office spaces, an inn, residential housing, galleries, and other manna from heaven. For various reasons, most of them acrimonious, he packed up his drawings and left, leaving behind a single renovatedmill building off Park Street that’s now in private use.

And so we go back to the former Housie Market, its windows still wrapped in anticipatory brown paper. As people begin to emerge from the pandemic, as the peepers this spring call like a chorus of loose leather fan belts in this village originally woven together by a united phalanx of textile looms, people cannot help but to remark upon the aged and sun-stained signs of things to come that haven’t yet come.

Turns out, a noodle eatery had intended to move into the former market. Those plans fell apart. Then, the pandemic came. The space remains vacant. Villagers can be forgiven for viewing those signs on the windows with a mixture of ambivalence and contempt.

After all, just up Pleasant Street a hundred yards or so is the dilapidated building that once housed Housatonic’s grammar school, shuttered 18 years ago. Some residents want the building removed and the land incorporated into a traditional town common, maybe with a bandstand. Others say razing the building would be a offense against the village’s social and architectural heritage. The only solid plans are decidedly drearisome: The town-owned building’s broken windows will soon to be boarded up and its leaking roof tarped over, a stopgap to slow nature’s takeover of the site.

Just to the north and across the tracks, the gargantuan former Monument Mills complex — 400,000-plus square feet — sits mostly unused and mostly dilapidated. When contacted by phone this week, Whitmore “Nick” Kelley, who has owned the property since the early 1980s, said he has no plans for the site.

“We’re waiting to get through this COVID situation and see how things unfold,” he said.

Just across the river, on Park Street, the former Cook’s Garage — a 15,000-square-foot brick building — too, sits abandoned and succumbing to gravity and the elements. The town took it over four years ago when the former owner couldn’t keep up with tax payments. The town is conducting an environmental assessment there in preparation for an eventual public discussion on what happens next.

If Housatonic feels it’s being held back, it’s not because local regulatory agencies stand in the way. Indeed, revitalizing the village is part of Great Barrington’s master plan. The town recently rezoned the area around the mills to allow for mixed-use redevelopment.

“The town is working to set the stage for redevelopment, but we can’t force the private sector to act,” says Chris Rembold, Great Barrington’s town planner. “All we can do is try to address the foundational things, the basic obstacles, and hope someone sees the assets and opportunities of a place.”

That said, there are some indications the long-secreted village is no longer a secret. During the pandemic, home sales have skyrocketed throughout the region, including here. For example, a 1,043-square-foot home on Kirk Street recently sold for $350,000. The original list price was $295,000. A real estate agency set up shop just last month on Park Street in a long-abandoned building.

“If a house goes on the market, it gets gobbled up,” says Tom Norton, who lives in the village’s western woods in a home he built on land his grandparents once owned. Norton leads the village’s annual spring clean-up of streets. His window trim is fashioned from repurposed planks ripped from the old Rising Paper Mill. He worries less about the lack of village vitality than he does a “takeover” by house flippers cashing in.

“If the question is, ‘Why doesn’t Housatonic ever change?’ then my question is, ‘Why change it?’”

The village, indeed, has plenty of things you wouldn’t wish to change. It’s home to Richard Bourdon’s Berkshire Mountain Bakery, recently featured in Michael Pollan’s four-part Netflix series “Cooked.” It’s home to Bettina Montano’s world-class dance and creative arts center, Berkshire Pulse. The former Country Curtains space off Park Street has recently changed hands to become MUSE, which provides rentable studios for artists and craftspeople. Across the street, the Brick House Pub anxiously awaits a full re-opening.

Around the corner, at John’s Garage, they still pump your gas and couldn’t be any nicer about it. On Depot Street, the package store Aberdale’s recently sold to Saaanvi Liquor, Inc., which runs the Spirit Shop in Williamstown. For the time being, Aberdale’s is still Aberdale’s, which means you can still purchase Polish sausage.

Up on Main Street, Will Schillinger has converted a former Methodist church into a musical sanctuary, Pilot Recording Studios. Down the street from him is arguably the Berkshires’ most imaginative eateries, Craig Bero’s Pleasant and Main. If you order take-out from Bero, he plates it on his own eclectic mix of china. If you fail to return the china, Bero doesn’t lose a minute of sleep.

Pleasant and Main, stuffed with books, old bottles, antiques, and whatever else Bero feels like stuffing it with, is located in the former Snyder & Race hardware store. The first thing Bero did before opening his eatery a few years ago was to go to the nearby cemetery, find the gravestones etched with Snyders and Races, and pay due respect. Then he got cooking.

He keeps canoes on hand and some 50 fishing rods in the front parlor. You want to go fishing? Here, he’ll lend you the equipment and tell you where to go.

“This is what Housatonic is,” says Bero, who grew up in Wisconsin, in a town that he says is a carbon copy of Housatonic. “Look at this environment. Look up at Flag Rock, that old native American ceremonial spot. It’s staggering what’s here.”

Further up Main Street, the town is finally installing a sidewalk connecting Route 41 to the village.

And speaking of sidewalks, Patrick Hollenbeck was standing upon the sidewalk in front of the former Housie Market last Sunday and talking about things to come. On a whim, Hollenbeck, a musician and president of the Board of Library Trustees who lives just around the corner, purchased the former market for $126,000 at a foreclosure auction in 2018 to protect it from “scumbags” who might have opened a pot shop there.

He said inquiries about renting the space have “reached kind of a feverish pitch.” He expects to have something to announce by June.

“I want people to be happy about this,” said the man responsible for those signs that borrow from “West Side Story.”

Coming straight from his mouth, it doesn’t sound like a bunch of song and dance.

Felix Carroll: A few questions for the mortician

2021-03-31T15:02:00.004-04:00

The following first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle.

By Felix Carroll

PITTSFIELD — If you were to set out on foot from the joyful, balloon-festooned rooms of Berkshire Medical Center's maternity ward, it would take about 15 minutes to reach the mourning-worn parlors of Dery Funeral Home on Bradford Street. This surely is a roundabout way of saying that life is short.

From Point A to Point B on this mythic journey, you'll pass a hardware store, pharmacy, grocery store, church, lawyer's office and apartment houses. You'll pass through the commotion of commerce and social interface, the ropes and pulleys that keep this city functioning — up to and including this funeral home, founded in 1937.

And that's a roundabout way of saying that funeral homes, including this one, would prefer to be viewed within the context of normal and necessary civic life. Like, say, a hardware store is. As it stands, we apply to funeral homes the role of public drying rack bearing the sum of society's hang-ups about death.

In all, 151,600 people die each day in the world. In the form of their earthly remains, many dozens make their way each year to this particular Point B on Bradford Street, where the man of the house is Fred Dery.

The portrait hanging on the wall in the lobby is not him. That would be his late grandfather, J. Edward Dery Sr., dapper like the grandson, perpetually peering over his progeny's shoulder as he tends to the needs of the living and the dead. The current man of the house is 56 years old, upbeat, with Hollywood good looks and a laugh that emerges somewhere down deep, maybe the pulp of the spleen.

Dery manages to overturn the archetype of the mortician. But while he's neither the stuffy, enigmatic recluse, he also prefers to stubbornly uphold the industry line of buttoning his lip to the more delicate matters of mortuary life.

For instance, even though you might know for a fact that, years ago, a Dery hearse caught fire somewhere in the swampy borderlands of West Stockbridge or thereabouts — that the driver had to pull out an occupied casket and drag it a safe distance and await a ride — Dery will give you nothing. He'll laugh, sure.

"Actually —" he'll say, then stop himself short.

When you deal day to day in death, the stories are plentiful and colorful, yes. But Dery isn't about to mumble a single one of them.

On a recent morning, new hire Ryan Hassett, a young kid from Housatonic, is polishing any and all wooden surfaces with furniture polish. The place smells like Pledge. There's a pleasant display of pumpkins in the lobby as the place gets spiffed up for a wake.

"So, there are actual dead people in this building right now?"

If you're innocent enough to ask that question, Dery will answer, "Yes, there are." But you may detect in his tone that your question is akin to asking the clerk at the hardware store, "So, there are there actual hammers in this store right now?"

Fair enough, but let's just be clear: Morticians are not like everyone else, simply because everyone else does not deal daily with dead bodies, grief-stricken survivors, the incisions and grim cosmetics, funeral and flower arrangements, and the ultimate unknowns in the echoes of hearts that no longer beat. And to this point, Dery is very well aware.

"We're not exactly the favorite people to have walk into a room," he says.

Meaning, for some in the community, Dery is and will always be a reminder of past and looming losses.

Ugh.

Ugh is right.

Meanwhile, he's just a regular guy, a skier, a hiker, a member of the Rotary Club.

He'd love to get through a single day without someone saying, "Boy, your customers must be dying to see you," or some variation on the theme.

Ugh and double ugh.

Indeed, to whom much death is given, much is expected. Really, what we want from our morticians is something they cannot give us. We want them to sit us down, take our hands in theirs and to tell us definitively that there is a God and that our dearly departed are in Heaven right now awaiting to FaceTime with us whenever we're ready. These funeral arrangements are awkward trifles compared with what we really want.

Turns out, that's too much to ask. And so, short of that, in our discomfort, we make morticians out to be oddballs.

Meanwhile, someone has to do it, and Dery chooses to do it, like his father did and his father's father before him. And anyway, business is good and always will be, because people are always dying. Moreover — and at least equally as important — Dery's vocation has never hurt his love life. He's got a girlfriend. He's rarely been without.

OK, has he ever scattered ashes from an airplane?

"Yes."

Has he ever climbed inside a coffin?

"No."

Is that question more annoying than someone telling him his customers must be dying to see him?

"Actually, no, because I did have a guy here making pre-arrangements for himself, buying a coffin, and he asked, `Do you mind if I try it?' and I said, `Not at all. Take your shoes off.' So he did. But I haven't."

Did he take the family hearse to the prom?

"No."

He pauses. His mind seems to be flipping through a Rolodex of memories.

"Actually —" he says, then stops himself short.

For the record, Dery, who was raised Catholic, says he believes in God. He believes we will be judged and that if we wish fair judgment upon ourselves, we should play fair while we're here on Earth.

Fair enough.

Does he think about his own death?

"No, as crazy as it sounds, I don't."

But he has thought about his own funeral arrangements, of course.

"I want a traditional service, which would entail calling hours and funeral service," he says. "I want people to be in more of a celebratory mood than anything that would be depressing. I want lots of music, and if people aren't going to sing at my funeral, they shouldn't be there."

It's coming upon noon, and Dery has to head out into that world between Points A and B — out where people, hopefully, are living full, rich lives, out where they're being kind to one another and not doing anything they might regret on their deathbeds.

A few fellow travelers on this journey are awaiting him at a Rotary luncheon. You see, Fred Dery is just another businessman keeping this city alive.

Our stars, ourselves, our dogs — unleashed

2021-03-27T05:27:00.005-04:00

The following was first published in the Albany Times-Union.

By Felix Carroll

A waning crescent moon casts dull light as if powered by nearly dead batteries — barely enough light to make heads or tails of the two heads and one tail toiling along the frozen, deep-rutted roadside at 10 p.m. on a week night.

It's a quiet, ancient evening, and crude words about bowel movements would seem a violation of something sacred. But here goes nothing:

"Come on: Poop!"

The command translates into cold puffs of disintegrating vapor. If ash trees could say "Shhh!" they would. But they can't, which is good because I'm in no mood for sanctimonious trees.

The tail belongs to a dog that presumably has to poop, but won't. Or can't. He's befuddled. We both are. This is new to us — these leashed excursions along the guardrail by our house. There are no sidewalks around these parts. And not enough streetlights to land a nocturnal housefly.

Here we are, the two of us. Until two weeks ago, he was a dog we could let out untethered. He'd do what he does, and he'd come back when called. For reasons maybe only the whispers of an ancient evening can explain, he has taken to running from home and not returning on his own recognizance.

"Just poop and be done with it!"

It's cold. Really cold. An all-star cast of constellations has arranged itself like Christmas lights entangled in the shrubbery of the cosmos. Look at all that — this huge, magnificent, expanding universe, speeding silently into the unknown and unknowable. We're but a fleck of a flick, aren't we? What does it all mean? How did it all begin?

Excuse me for a second.

"Go poop!"

Up until a mere two weeks ago, he could be relied upon to stay put on the property. He'd snooze on the front porch. Or chew a stick on the hill. Or admire earlier bowel movements. He'd exercise himself by doing laps around the house. Or not. He was there, within the boundaries, without us having to think twice. He'd push himself up with an oomph and set himself back down with a harrumph.

But last week I found myself tracing his paw prints through the snow, over a creek, into the yard of a cop who has "No Trespassing" signs posted. My tracks backtracked from there. We cased the roads by car. I found him trotting on Main Road heading east. He had a crazy grin.

Jeez, will you look at that sky. You can see the Milky Way. String theorists believe there is more than one universe. Did you know that? What the heck does that mean?

Pardon me again:

"Come on: Just poop! Concentrate!"

He's sniffing. That's what he does. He reads the world through the Braille of odor. He could sniff the varnish off an antique chest.

He was born to an abandoned mother somewhere down in Tennessee. Through a dog rescue outfit, Santa Claus brought him north three years ago and gave him to our boy for Christmas. His name is Gunther (the dog, not the boy). He's calico-colored and funny looking. He looks at us with love and gratitude (again, the dog not the boy). If it weren't for us, he'd still be in Tennessee, probably lurking around a Waffle House and barking in a Southern accent. You cannot explain this to him.

Despite all the stupid things I've done throughout the years — the time wasted, the wrong turns taken, the false starts — I'm a family man now. If I could only make the dog understand how good he and I have it, how life only gets worse beyond these boundary lines. There's food here. Lovely people. Warm beds. Decent views. Historically low 30-year-fixed interest rates. All I need him to do is to lay unleashed on the front porch like a paperweight helping me keep it all from blowing away.

Jeez, thank the Lord above for engineered, moisture-resistant breathable fabrics. It's cold out here. Funny thing: In ancient times, if Santa brought me a dog for Christmas, it would be for one purpose only: skinning him and wearing him. And I look good in calico. You cannot explain that to Gunther. I’ve tried.

"Poop! Now!"

"Just a sec," he says. "I'm in the middle of something."

When he finally gets into the kangaroo position to do his thing, he looks at me, humiliated. We're both humiliated.

"Ya moron," I say, looking the other way.

If there was a Big Bang, what existed before the Big Bang? And did ancient man ever wish upon a star? He discovered fire. He manipulated steel. He tamed the earth and planted crops. If he wished upon a star, at what point did he realize he could wish for three more wishes?

But that's the problem, isn't it? We want more than what we've got. We cross boundaries. We trespass.

The dog is tangled in the leash now. The stars are tangled in the cosmos. The universe is expanding, and if there's a boundary somewhere out there, then what's on the other side of that boundary? For reasons only an ancient evening could explain, we're pulled, always and everywhere. And there isn't a dog fence strong enough.

Yeah, I met Donald Trump

2021-01-10T08:13:00.007-05:00

Back when the president was merely The Donald, Felix Carroll (right) had a weird experience with him. Go figure. Scott Mullin photo.

This article first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle.

By Felix Carroll

Before I discuss the time I mistakenly thought Donald Trump had sent a guy named Vito over to break my legs, just a quick public service announcement:

America, it’s mortifying that this is the man at the center of our self-destruction. This man, Donald J. Trump: joyless windbag, counterfeit Christian, and weaver of easily debunked conspiracies. Of all people: him? To those out there believing his dark deceptions, to those heavily armed militias locking and loading, to those rending their garments and white-knuckling their rosary beads in the service of this man: Truly, he’s not worth it.

Thanks for listening!

With that out of the way, roll the tape back to Friday, Sept. 14, 2001. Yes that September 2001. I was running a rambunctious little New York newspaper at the time. On that particular morning, as I was flipping through our latest issue — filled with burning skyline, smoked-smudged faces, and stories of heartbreak, heroism, confusion, and death — my phone rang. It was Vito.

In his tough-guy-New-Yorker accent, Vito wanted it known he was angry. “Mr. Carroll, you blew us off. You never even called to cancel. That’s disrespectful. Mr. Trump is a busy man, and you left him waiting. Very disrespectful,” Vito told me.

So, yeah, fun fact: A mere 48 hours after terrorists flew commercial airplanes into the World Trade Center, the future 45^th president of the United States was in Trump Tower waiting for — um — me. And who was I? An undernourished newspaperman with a small fanbase consisting mostly of devotees of way-too-long articles about wetland buffers and side-yard setbacks, all written as if civilization itself depended upon it.

I was scheduled to meet with Trump to discuss his plans for “the greatest golf course in the history of the world” (not my words) on Seven Springs, an historic opulent Westchester estate.

The locals were not pleased with the scale of the plans, which called for the removal of more than 8,000 trees and 68,600 cubic yards of rock (mostly through blasting), on land 350 feet from the village public water supply. While the various permitting agencies did due diligence, Trump grew irritated with the process. So I asked for a meeting, which brings us back to Vito.

“Vito,” I said, “not to dwell on the obvious, but we scheduled that meeting before terrorists attacked our country. And in light of that attack, with all due respect, not a single person on this planet gives a [bleep] right now about Donald Trump’s proposed golf course in Westchester. No one.”

Either Vito hung up on me or I hung up on Vito. Skipping ahead about 18 months, Trump’s Seven Springs plans had encountered opposition on several fronts, and The Man was started to lose it. I again asked for a meeting, it was arranged, and I showed up this time.

Our photographer, Scott Mullin, and I took the elevator to the 26^th floor of Trump Tower where we were led back to the boss. He got out of his chair and welcomed us. Then, he gave us a moment to take it all in — the view of Central Park, the wall-to-wall photos mostly of himself, and of course him, live, in person, his famous hairdo whipped into a gravity defying meringue.

Then we got down to business. We spoke for an hour. I kept my questions to Seven Springs, and he talked like a crazy person. He made bombastic claims. He crafted unrealistic consequences to ungrateful neighbors and local permitting authorities if he didn’t get his way.

Mind you, in 2003 Trump was still merely a nutty New York narcissist, a liar, a cheat, a showman in a city filled with them. This was several years before he went fully, politically sinister — before Fox News, just for starters, gave him the bullhorn to spread his lie that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. This was several years before provable objective reality no longer mattered to a perilous proportion of the nation.

Following the interview, I went back to my office and wrote a fairly standard-issue article, quoting Trump, quoting his plans’ detractors and summarizing where the project stood. We put it on the front page that week with a photo of Trump.

Then something weird happened. That Friday, upon publication, readers and friends contacted me to congratulate me on taking Trump down. “Huh?” I thought. I knew I had written a balanced story.

Then, Monday, I arrived back in the office to a bunch of messages congratulating me for putting the screws to Trump. I reread the story and couldn’t understand what people were going on about. It was just a boring land-use story that happened to feature a famous crazy person whom I quoted verbatim.

Then, mid-morning, our office secretary came to my door to inform me that Trump was on the phone for me. While Monday mornings typically involved readers yelling at me on the phone, I wasn’t in the mood to be yelled at by Donald Trump. Surely, Vito was on his way over with a baseball bat.

I reluctantly picked up the phone, and this is what Trump said to me: “Felix, it’s Donald Trump. I just had to call and tell you: Wonderful job on the story! Absolutely terrific! Probably the greatest story anyone has ever written about me. Just incredible, absolutely incredible …”

He then told me he was good friends with so-and-so at The Daily News, and if I wanted a job he could make a call. And then he gave me the direct phone number to his assistant, Rhona. “If you need anything, call,” he said.

I hung up the phone seriously confused about whom in the universe pulls all the silly strings.

And so that’s it, folks. That’s my story about Donald Trump. Make of it what you will. The end. (The golf course never got built, by the way. Seven Springs is now at the center of tax fraud claims against Trump.)

The reason I share this now has to do with my mother’s death on Oct. 29. In the aftermath, we siblings undertook the task of sorting through her things. For each of us, she had saved treasured mementos that defined our lives from a mother’s perspective.

In my pile, amidst the sacred moments — photos from my First Holy Communion, my wedding, my son’s birth — I discovered a clipping she kept of my Trump article. It was jarring to come across it. Trump — who has since built a cultish, anti-democratic political constituency of muscle-bro know-nothings, crybabies, and snowflakes — doesn’t belong in my life’s pile of blessed moments.

But you know what does? My mom also kept a clipping of an article I wrote from the time Willie Nelson invited my wife and me onto his tour bus. We sat with Willie at his dinette in a Hyannis parking lot and spoke about beautiful things: about the pretty little town of Abbott, Texas, about Apollo 11, about adding Hank Williams to Mt. Rushmore.

I put the Willie Nelson story in my cardboard box to take home with me. I left the Trump story for the throwaway pile. The man needs to go.

Felix Carroll lives in Housatonic. He can be reached at felixcarroll5@gmail.com.

Martin Bookspan would like a few words

2020-03-01T08:13:00.001-05:00

This article first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle.

By Felix Carroll

From the other end of the phone line, from the other end of the eastern seaboard, the voice comes on with a hearty “Well, hello there.” That voice — grandfatherly, erudite, precise, kind — yep, it’s him all right: None other than Martin Bookspan.

Known by millions of melophiles who tuned their radio knobs toward humanity’s greater endeavors during the second half of the 20th century, his was the voice of Tanglewood, of the PBS series “Live from Lincoln Center,” of Boston’s famed WBMS and New York’s WQXR, among other outlets.

Now in his 15^th year of retirement, Bookspan, 95, and his famous voice are quite willing to have a phone chat, to fill the dead air in the culture wrought by COVID-19. That’s his domain — filling dead air. The man has stories to tell.

“Do you know about the time Rudolf Serkin broke the lyre?” he inquired, speaking in his distinctive timbre from his now full-time home in Aventura, Florida.

April, 1959, Bookspan had just introduced the live broadcast of the Boston Symphony Orchestra performing Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto with Charles Munch conducting.

“Then I did the one thing that I learned I should never do again: I left my broadcast booth,” Bookspan recalls. From high above Boston’s Symphony Hall, he climbed down the two flights back stage to discuss a matter with Aaron Copeland. But in the midst of conversation, when Symphony Hall should have been resonating with Serkin’s stormy piano playing, Bookspan realized with a shudder that the hall had gone quiet.

“I ran across the backstage and up the stairs, and en route picked up the news that there was a problem with the piano,” Bookspan says. “I got to the microphone and huffed and puffed my way through reporting ‘there was a problem with the piano and that as soon as I catch my breath, I’ll tell you what’s going on.’”

From that point, it took 18-and-a-half minutes to fix the piano. With no script, no notes, Bookspan filled the time speaking about the BSO and Brahms, Munch and Brahms, Serkin and Brahms, French composers — “anything that came to mind.”

Forget Serkin, and forget Munch. Bookspan’s performance that evening proved legendary.

“The next day, it was the front page of The New York Times,” he says.

Born on July 26, 1926 and raised in the shadows of Symphony Hall, Bookspan was the only child of music-loving parents. His father, an insurance agent, had a particular devotion to Jewish liturgical music. The family’s most cherished material possession, an Atwater Kent radio, anointed Bookspan’s childhood with the transcendent sounds of the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, among others.

“It opened up a world for me,” Bookspan says.

Then, one day, when he was 6 and home from school with the sniffles, he heard a knocking on the door. A man was selling music lessons. Hearing the man’s pitch, Bookspan said, “Ma, Ma, I want to play the violin!”

“This was during the depression,” he recalls. “It was a really difficult time, but somehow my parents managed to scrape together the 50 cents a week that the lessons cost.”

In 1938, at age 11, he heard the BSO live for the first time, at Symphony Hall. But it was his first exposure to renowned BSO Music Director Serge Koussevitzky in 1940 that set him “ablaze.”

“His performance of Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony lives with me to this day," Bookspan says.

He took two things from that experience. The first: He would never be good enough to make it as a career as a violinist. The second: “I knew I simply had to have a life in music, if I could,” he says.

Around that same time, he earned an honorable mention in a Musiquiz competition sponsored by The Boston Herald and the Boston Pops held at the Boston Garden. The co-winner was an up-and-coming young composer seven years his senior by the name of Leonard Bernstein. The two struck up what would become a lifelong friendship.

His associations with musical giants had only just begun. At age 18, a student at Harvard by then, Bookspan sought to secure a place for himself on the college radio station. He attended a lecture series by Aaron Copeland and afterwards summoned the courage to ask the celebrated composer and conductor if he’d be willing to be interviewed.

Yes, his first radio experience was interviewing Aaron Copeland. At one point Bookspan asked, “Mr. Copeland, what are you working on now?”

“Well,” Copeland responded, “Martha Graham has asked me to compose a score for a ballet that she’s working on, and I accepted.”

“To the best of my knowledge,” Bookspan says today, “that was the first public reference to what became ‘Appalachian Spring.’”

Even before graduating from Harvard (with a major in German literature), Bookspan had been named music director for Boston’s WBMS. A career that would span six decades had begun.

With a dynamic voice, centuries of music history in his head and a craftsman’s attention to detail, Bookspan would eventually be scooped up by WQXR, the nation’s leading classical station. He became a frequent contributor to NPR. He was host and commentator for the live broadcasts of the BSO, Boston Pops, and New York Philharmonic. He served as commentator for PBS’ “Live from Lincoln Center” telecasts. He authored books. He penned New York Times’ columns. He served as symphonic and concert activities coordinator for ASCAP.

He hosted the weekly “This Week at Tanglewood” series. Indeed, from 1947 to 2019, he had spent all but three summers at his home in Stockbridge.

Along the way, he fell madly in love with a singer name Janet. They met on a blind date in 1954 and married a few month later. Janet died in 2008. Their three children — Rachel, David and Debbie — still have homes in the Berkshires.

Bookspan, who suffered a stroke two years ago, apologizes for his voice, which he says is “a shadow of what it used to be.”

Today, he loves listening to old classical performances unearthed through YouTube that had never been released as commercial recordings.

He feels blessed to have had on-air conversations with more than 800 musical luminaries.

He’s pleased to share the inspiration that eventually made him the defining voice of classical music in the United States: professional sportscasters.

“Growing up in Boston, I was an ardent Red Sox fan,” he says. “What I wanted to accomplish was to make music the kind of exciting experience that going to the Red Sox game provided. I wanted what I was saying to be colorful, to be communicative and to be contagious. Hey — how about that: Three C’s!”

When asked about his favorite performance, he doesn’t hesitate. It was in the late 1940s, early 1950s: Bernstein conducting the BSO at Symphony Hall.

“Mahler’s Second Symphony,” he says. “It hit me like an earthquake. I had to go to a jazz club afterwards just to shake some of it loose.”

When things get out of hand

2019-12-04T15:22:00.003-05:00

The following first appeared in the Albany Times-Union.

By Felix Carroll

For review, the stages of evolutionary human:

We’ve allegedly progressed from something akin to a lobe-finned fish with pimped-out gills. We’ve inched out from the sea looking over our shoulders in the pre-dawn hours like a circus boss stealing off with the money.

We’ve been knuckle draggers, stooped as if searching for a lost wallet or something. Then, by means of supernatural block and tackle, our torsos have jutted upward like an open jackknife. Presently, we are vertical creatures, capable of walking from the country club and back with Madam Bovary balanced on our heads if we had to.

From here, our future remains an open debate. Those among us who either embrace the wondrous possibilities of slapstick or who consider themselves prescient, declare that our spines will eventually yield to the demands of gravity. We will become squinty-eyed readers of the small print of existence as our knuckles once again shamble against the ground like the suds-soaked swabs of a carwash. Our postures will take that great, downward-driving evolutionary escalator that returns us to slimy creatures. With wild memories in tow, we will say “Sayonora suckers!” and slip back into the sea like escapees from Alcatraz.

Or not.

But the hand of a child -- its palm, with its turkey-feather phalanges -- can get you thinking about these things. In its contact with a parent, it engages in a similar evolutionary bell curve. New to terra firma, it flails at the ground. Eventually, it flexes, pulls the torso to an upright position, brandishes itself with purpose, clasps the hand of a parent, and hangs on. Then, either gradually or abruptly, the hand of a child returns to a disinterested, boneless globule in your grip. It finally wiggles free and slips out with the current.

I can remember the first time I broke my mother’s heart. I was the youngest of four children. I was in first or second grade. Mine was the fourth and last set of tiny hand she could grasp with reciprocal firmness. One day while we were walking hand in hand heading to Kmart, the big release occurred. I was clueless of the metaphysics that explain how a tiny hand attached to a larger hand can uphold the weight-bearing load of a mother’s love.

She was holding firm. But my hand suddenly went limp. It had an inkling of a destiny separate and apart from that larger hand. So I went ahead and said it.

“Mom, would it be OK if we didn’t hold hands anymore?”

There was silence.

“OK,” she said after a moment. “That’s fine.”

She has since told me that moment was among the saddest in her life.

Still, this is what hands are duty bound to do under the laws of evolution. They disengage from the mother ship and father ship. They join their twin, and together the two hands disappear. They grip baseballs, shoelaces, tree limbs, handlebars, number 2 pencils, blow dryers, steering wheels, diplomas, job applications, the hand of spouse, and the hand of an offspring.

Speaking of our child’s hand, soon the damn thing is going to wiggle free.

We won’t panic. We’re prepared. Thanks to a pilot project recently initiated by my wife, she and I have already begun to repurpose our hands for a future that may very well revolutionize the evolutionary process. She either read about it or dreamt it or maybe God is speaking through her, but she has brought hand-holding back to our relationship. Mind you, not out of some Oprah-magazine-mandated plot to cloud-seed our skies with powdered sugar, but for practical purposes.

It’s like this: Say you and your spouse encounter a difficult situation that needs to be diffused quickly. Say money is tight. Say one of you (she) is still buying Legos by the tonnage. Say one of you is locked and loaded to verbalize something incredibly demeaning, thoughtless or hurtful. Maybe it’s a simple misunderstanding. These things happen.

But when they happen, do this: Reach out and hold each other’s hand or hands. I was skeptical at first. But you know what: It works! You can do this while driving, while eating, or with a frying pan clutched in one hand.

You’ll find that when hands are clasped, it’s very difficult for anger to spawn into a tsunami that sets you adrift in separate life rafts. Your heartbeats will fall into sync. Kissing may occur. I forget what I did the other day, but it was something, and she was ticked, and so I held her hand.

“Sorry,” I said.

“No, I’m sorry.”

“I love you.”

“I love you more.”

“Why won’t the boy hold our hands anymore?”

“Because he’s turned into a lobe-finned fish.”

“Bummer.”

“Yeah, tell me about it.”

“The heck with him.”

Photo by Wedding Dreamz on Unsplash

Welcome to the cosmic roar

2019-03-28T14:57:00.000-04:00

By Felix Carroll

Mallet in hand, one of about 50 gongs he owns before him, Ed Mann is sharing his own big bang theory.

The theory goes something like this: We are resonant beings living in a resonant world. And the gong, this Bronze Age marvel of efficiency and complexity, can serve as a profound teacher, a therapeutic tool, and a producer of some “really, really cool noise.”

It’s a theory that’s resonating in its own right. These days, Mann is a wanted man. He and his gongs. He gives gong seminars all over the country at business retreats, holistic healing centers, even homeless shelters.

He never expected to be doing this. But it doesn’t surprise him. Not much can surprise a person who for 10 years served as a percussionist and electronic sound designer for Frank Zappa. Indeed, Mann, who played in the marching band at Monument Mountain High School in Great Barrington and went on to study Karnatic music of southern India, became a layer unto himself in what he calls Zappa’s “sonic comedy-cake.”

But Mann, an accomplished vibraphonist who continues to make a living as a composer, producer and performer, is delighted by how his side fascination with gongs has slowly taken center stage in his life.

“I brought them into a homeless shelter in Pittsfield recently, and the people just closed their eyes and enjoyed the sound,” says Mann. “It’s as simple as that. It’s a not a belief system. There’s no dogma. There’s no right or wrong.”

In his home studio in Pittsfield, he demonstrates with a gong that has the circumference of a beach umbrella. Using a big, padded mallet, he strikes it softly at the center. The gong gives off a deep, mystical ker-ploosh. Then, with short, soft strokes he moves out toward the edge of the gong where the upper harmonics emerge like delicate, small footprints. Then, back toward the center. All the while a blend of low, mid and high tones blend and spill into one another like buckets of expensive champagne poured into a kiddy pool.

Mann holds back and lets it all fade slowly into the vanishing point. A minute goes by.

“For me,” he says, “it’s the cosmic roar. It’s a reminder of the infinite, a glimpse of something that if we tried to perceive in its entirety, we’d go mad.”

It’s still fading — all that sound. It’s as if the gong created brand new space, purified for silence.

In our culture, we tend to associate gongs with the wide-jowl inanity “Gong Show” or with the bombastic, encore implosions of a 1970s rock band.

Even when gongs first began appearing in Western civilization in the 1700s, they were used in orchestration for big effect and dramatic purposes. But in the East, for thousands of years, the gong has been “an orchestra unto itself,” says Mann, and has served as a centerpiece in rituals and meditation.

Today, acupuncturists, yoga instructors and holistic healers all over the world have embraced the gong as a therapeutic tool. Why? Simply put, says Mann, the sound of the gong can help “shake loose the tension of stress.”

More complexly put, “when the gong is sounded,” he says, “we are reminded of our physical connection in resonant wave energy … Irregularity and resistance are cleared and the mind and body are reset to a state of greater alignment.”

If this is all a bit too abstract, consider that a long line of Greek philosophers believed that the universe and everything in it are in harmony. Pythagoras, for one, is associated with the concept known as “music of the spheres” — that celestial bodies in orbit create an inaudible music that governs the rhythms of nature.

Gongs — like planetary systems, like cells, like atoms — are highly efficient circular systems of resonance in which energy flows outward from the center, says Mann.

That is to say, gongs allow us to experience this system as sound.

That is to say, the gong tolls for thee.

Still too abstract? Consider the Swiss scientist Hans Jenny (1904-1972) whose remarkable experiments made the link between sound and its effects on the physical world. Using sound waves set in accordance with one another, he was able to animate inert powders into symmetrical forms that mirrored patterns found throughout nature, such as flowers. Discordant sounds merely made a mess.

The great lesson of the gong, says Mann, “is that all is one, and that the path of least resistance is also the path to well being.”

Plus, he says, “there’s something about experiencing the sound of a gong, like maybe it’s a part of our cellular memory — that cellular remembrance of the big bang. For me, the gong is just the big bang played on a smaller instrument.”

He strikes the gong again and listens.

“The crash, the fading, the sustaining,” he says. “It’s like taking a billion years and condensing them into an experience that lasts a minute for a single stroke.”

He pauses again.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Those are just my theories. All’s I know is people like it, and I want to bring these sounds to other people because I dig them so much.”

Mann says music defined who he was probably as early as when he was 18 months old. “I always said I would be a musician when I grew up,” he says. “And I still say it. I never even considered anything else.”

In 1972, he left his conservatory upbringing in the east and headed to Los Angeles to attend the California Institute of the Arts. While there, he immersed himself in the complex music of the Far East with its poly-rhythms and poly-meters. He also embraced the chaotically euphoric experimental music of John Cage, Louis Harrison and Harry Partch.

This all served as suitable primer for that late night phone call in 1977, when Frank Zappa — whom he met a couple years prior — invited him to come over “right now.” So Mann did. It was about 1:30 a.m. Down in Zappa’s dimly lit basement with red velvet walls, Mann was given a try-out. It didn’t take long. Zappa said, “Great – you want to be in the band?” And that was that — for the next decade.

“It was a great time,” says Mann. “Frank really challenged you to be the best you could be as musicians in an environment that was very supportive of creativity and experimentation.”

Mann is done reminiscing. He takes a super ball that’s speared with a wooden skewer and rubs it across the gong. The noise is heavenly — what Pythagoras must’ve heard on his deathbed — an aural thrill ride that drops you off someplace you’ve never been before.

“It kind of clears your head, doesn’t it?” he says.

Felix Carroll: In the shadow of the shamrock

2019-03-17T10:08:00.000-04:00

The following was first published by the Albany Times-Union:

By Felix Carroll

Our perpetual novenas to St. Patrick lead to his feast day today that serves as an annual holy day of obligation to drink ourselves silly and get maudlin about the motherland. My oh my, what hyphenated American other than the Irish-American barks from behind his hyphen with such volume and self-possession?

Bartender, a beer. Hold the green, plastic hat.

Did you know the famed Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote of his brethren, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry"? I’m hoarse from quarreling with others this political season. Join me, fella. Bartender, pour this man a pint. On behalf of my fellow Irish-hyphenated-Americans, permit me to quarrel with myself. Stop me when I start crying.

I want to go home to the home of my forefathers. I want to roll in peat and swim the western sea on Christmas Day. I’m proud to be Irish because it relieves me from the burden of being American. Am I talking too loudly?

I hate these paper cutouts of shamrocks dangling from the ceiling, don’t you? And I don't care for corn beef and cabbage, either ... or leprechauns putting up their dukes. Do you think the Irish have grown weary of us Irish-Americans yet?

Just look at us. We demand our Irish to be cute, small, charming and mischievous. We want them dressed in impossibly bright shades of green. We want their roofs to be thatched. We want their leprechauns to show us where the treasure is buried. I’ve been to the Motherland, and, pal, not all her natives are cute. Some are uncute. Some are jerks. Some are as big as oxen. But you know what else? The treasure is never buried. They know that. Follow the tin whistle and the pounding of bodhran. Point your sights to heaven, and you’ll get earth thrown in. C.S. Lewis said something to that effect, or maybe I said that. I probably didn’t say that. Am I mumbling? You’d tell me, right?

Notice how all the other hyphenated Americans — Polish, Italians, Hispanics — can raise their glasses to their homelands, prepare their native foods, sing their native songs, but then can get on with being American. Why can’t we? We sit upon barstools and declare diplomatic immunity. I really hope the Irish aren't sick of us.

Baptized with spit, my grandparents were put on the coffin ship. They treaded lightly upon this land knowing they tread upon the dreams of their children. Have we let them down, I wonder — our grandparents. Have we taken the easy life for granted — this food, these shoes, these asphalt shingles, these dentists? And still with every passing year we grow more restless, right?

Bartender, get Ireland on the line. Hey, Ireland, I just want you to know a few things. Don’t believe what you hear. We sons of the Motherland never assimilated in America. We just “co-exist.” That’s right. And we stopped dating Italians a long time ago — after Olive Garden opened.

You need another pint, pal? I do. Another round for my friend and me.

Here’s my sadness: One cannot be a proud American anymore without it having political overtones — or undertones or undertows. I hear “proud American” and it just sounds like political trash talk. America’s shared experience has faded to sepia. We share nothing now but a suicide pact. “The ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Yep, Yeats again, see? Ireland, at least your passion and pain breed poetry. At least sweet-peat music slashes through your strata of mourning. Over here, we parse out our mourning through poll numbers and consumer confidence reports.

Take me back, Ireland. I'm a couple generations removed, but I can take a punch. I won't question your obsession with morning dew. I'll overlook the fact Galway now has great Indian restaurants and that wicked bankers have ruined your economy as well. And it’s not a deal breaker that Tommy Makem no longer holds a monopoly on your airwaves and that Shane MacGowan has a pub named after him in London.

So say, for instance, we paid you a little visit. Just a shoulder bag is all I’d bring. What would happen? Would you take me in? Has too much time gone by? Has my hyphen gotten in the way? Would you glance askance at me like I'm out of place — like feeding gazelles eye a Serengeti Range Rover? Would you still have portraits of the Pope and JFK on your mantle? Would you have an old letter in a tin box informing you of my birth? Yes, that’s a tear in my eye. Please tell me you have an old letter in a tin box informing you of my birth.

What was I saying? Yes — why does every stinkin’ Irish pub in America have television screens everywhere you look, staring you down till you blink? This isn’t a public house. This is a human storage facility. Pour me another pint, and get one for my pal. And no I haven't had too many. Not even close.

Ireland, I’m antsy. I’m on the wrong side of Greenland. I'm on tippy-toes, peering above my hyphen. I can hear your Angelus bells. Re-wrap me in your indomitable Irishry. "I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic's heart." Yeats again. With each verse — verse after verse after verse — I’ll put this coffin ship in reverse.

But my oh my, I know, I know:

It’s a long, long way to Tipperary.

At Greylock Snow Day, the forecast is for fun

2019-03-11T20:42:00.002-04:00

This article first ran in The Berkshire Eagle.

WILLIAMSTOWN — Wind wailing, temperature at 4 degrees Fahrenheit, who is that puffy creature encased in layers, the only biped on Spring Street with a bounce to his step?

Why it's none other than Blair Dils, a name you may not recognize. But if you're a student, a teacher, a parent or a superintendent of schools in Berkshire County, you likely read the words he typed into his computer the day prior.

In the toasty comfort of his own home, his boots by the door, some fresh cut oats on the stove, he typed, "Thursday MegaStorm: It's On." Then, he sat back and felt good — very good — about the universe and his place within it.
Self-proclaimed (and self-trained) "snowday-ologist," he's the guy — that guy — the creator of the blog Greylock Snow Day. He's the guy that's been predicting the odds of school snow days, late starts and early dismissals (with 90 percent accuracy, according to him — and we'll go with it) since the blog's founding on a blustery day in 2010.

In the process, greylocksnowday.blogspot.com has had 1.2 million page views and its Facebook equivalent has nearly 3,000 dedicated followers.

Now here he is on Spring Street on Jan. 5, ducking into Tunnel City Coffee, where he unsheathes himself down to an identifiable man: Trim, fit, blood not entirely circulating properly just yet to his face and hands.

"It's wild out there," he declares with an ebullience typically reserved to successful first-time parachutists.

It's more than just wild out there. More importantly, more precisely, it's it's it's — a snow day!
"It's an honor. It's a big deal. It's a happy day!" Dils says.
We should get this out in the open: The entire staff of Greylock Snow Day (which entirely consists of Dils alone) lives for the thrill of that prerecorded phone message from the superintendent at 5:45 a.m. That is to say, the entire staff of Greylock Snow Day is unabashedly "pro-snow day."

And that's because, with Rosebud-level wistfulness, the entire staff fondly recalls his own youth when he'd fog up his wintry bedroom window in Hamden, Conn., wondering, wishing and praying for snow days. For the entire staff of Greylock Snow Day, a weather-induced day off from school represents nothing less than abrupt, agreeable, authorized consent to shift one's gaze from the linoleum-lined hallways of logic to the soft, vast horizon of leisure.

The origin story of Greylock Snow Day stars the boy Blair Dils, who would consecrate his snow days through the useful purpose of sledding, playing hockey on a nearby pond and raising a hot cup of cocoa to the wondrous good fortune of living in a benevolent world.

But even back then, Dils felt inclined to try to instill some order to the unknown.

"The downside of the snow day, as we all know, is its unpredictability," he says. "Should you do your homework or not? Should you study for that bio test or risk it? Work on that outside reading book or throw caution to the wind?"

Beginning in grammar school, around the time of the vicious (yet "really awesome") Storm of '78, he took a stab at engaging such vexing questions with level-headed detachment. Namely, he and his buddy Jon Levy would make friendly wagers predicting the magnitude of upcoming storms and the chances of snow days. They continued this through high school.

Levy is decidedly out of the snow-predicting business, having recoiled to the cosseted climate of Georgia. But for Dils, snow day prediction has grown to proportions "larger than a side project," "more than a hobby" and, considering the people now counting on him, "kind of an obligation" at this point.

What we know as Greylock Snow Day began as mere chalk-rendered predictions on the upper corner of his blackboard at Mount Greylock Regional School, where he's been teaching English since 1998. Soon after going online, it became the go-to source for anyone with anything at stake regarding snow and ice and the customary functioning of civilized society in Berkshire County.

"If I suspect we might have some weather-related issues coming up, it's one of the first places I turn for information," says Patty Wallace, an English teacher at Pittsfield High School.

Wallace adds an interesting tidbit: "My superintendent's office sends emails to faculty as soon as he makes the decision, and the office then follows up with robocalls to all parents and teachers," she says. "But honestly, there are times I read on GSD that school in Pittsfield is canceled or delayed before I even get the notification from [Superintendent Jason 'Jake'] McCandless via email."

Hmmm. Very interesting.

The staff at Greylock Snow Day is a tad cagey when it comes to his pull with superintendents, only to say, "People think I have power that I don't have."

Still, there's no denying, Dils brings the forecasting skills to a county whose topography poses notorious challenges to weather diviners. He pores through maps and precipitation models from a series of sources from throughout the Northeast. When a storm is coming, you can expect a flurry of blog posts that are informative, well-crafted and ingeniously juvenile.

Blair condenses the information down to what he calls The True North Confidence Meter, which takes into account volume ("3 inches can be enough to cancel school some days, but generally speaking we're looking for 6-plus inches of the fluffy white stuff"); timing ("too early and the evil plows have their time to do their business; too late and we could be stuck sleeping in the gym with 600 of our closest friends"); ice ("ice is great for snow days"); and the, "X-factor," the psychology of each individual school superintendent ("a bad prediction on one storm can work against us for the next storm, and vice versa").

Science aside, the staff of Greylock Snow Day unabashedly endorses the time-honored, ritual overtures to Mother Nature, or Father Winter, or Sister Snowdrift to "conjure" snow days. That includes the hallowed tradition of wearing pajamas inside out the night before a potential snow day; placing a silver spoon under your pillow; opening the freezer and dancing the "Hokey Pokey;" and placing two cotton balls on the windowsill, just to name a few.

"Yes," Dils says, "we support those — highly."
Felix Carroll can be reached at felixcarroll5@gmail.com.

Felix Carroll: Welcome to this club's stamping grounds

2019-01-05T15:27:00.003-05:00

This story was first published in The Berkshire Eagle.

By Felix Carroll

PITTSFIELD — The man riding on cloud nine for reasons that will become obvious pulls into the Berkshire Mall parking lot just before 7 on a chilly Tuesday evening.

His head topped with a trilby, white puffs of hair spilling from the sides, he gets out and navigates through the slush on swift, scuffling, 91-year-old feet, until he's safely inside the food court. There, he takes a seat, puts a hand securely atop his briefcase and awaits the others.

His name is Edward Ptak (pronounced "Puh-tack"). He is of slight build, with a slight lisp, and indisputably huggable.

"Ptak is a four-letter word, and you're going to learn something Polish," he says. "Converted from Polish to English, it is still a four-letter word, and it comes out `B-i-r-d.' So now you know that."

He looks around. The place is nearly empty.

"Oh, I brought this to show you," he says.

He places a poster board onto the table. It contains a full-page spread from the April 16, 1932, issue of The Berkshire Evening Eagle with the headline, "Berkshires Plays Big Part in Growing Hobby of Stamp Collecting." It's all about the Berkshire Stamp Club and philately, the study of stamps, which the article calls "an absorbing hobby for rich and poor."

"Last year was my 90th year," Ptak says, "and this year is the club's 90th year."

As much as you might expect the Berkshire Stamp Club to meet at, say, a hallowed hall in the Berkshire Museum, or some wainscoted upper room at the Elks Club, or even a low-ceilinged cellar at the American Legion, it does not. For the past 17 years, it holds its twice-monthly meetings here at the Berkshire Mall, in the community room, down a narrow hallway off the food court. There's a guy who appears from nowhere to unlock the door.

"They don't charge us anything just so long as we behave ourselves," Ptak says.

Of the 30 or so members on the Berkshire Stamp Club's current mailing list, five are named Ed. There are also five Bobs. Ptak's younger brother is in the club, too. He goes by "Butch," though his birth name is Florian.

Butch is known for his collection of Einstein and Andrew Jackson stamps.

"He'll be here tonight," Ptak says. "I'll introduce you."

At the mall entrance, the others are arriving, a veritable shoal of stamp collectors, many of whom also carry hard-shell briefcases, but none containing anything as exciting as what Ptak has in his this evening.

Ed Flynn is the first to the table.

"Look at that: this famous man," says Flynn, patting Ptak on the shoulder.

Bob Cansilla, too, congratulates Ptak. "Great job," he says.

What's all the fuss?

Though Ptak would rather the matter wait until the meeting itself begins, he snaps open his briefcase. Amid folders in which he keeps tabs on the club's door prizes and petty cash fund, he digs out a magazine article wrapped in see-through plastic sheathing for safekeeping.

"See, I also belong to the American Philatelic Society," Ptak says. "They put out a magazine, a monthly, for members. This is the publication, American Philatelist, and it's a worldwide organization. Now look at this."

Yes, look at this — American Philatelist's January issue contains an article written by none other than Edward Ptak of Pittsfield, retired General Electric engineer and eldest member of this outfit.
"I'll give you a copy of it," he says. "All I did was give them an 8 1/2-by-11 piece of paper with my story on it, and they made it elaborate. Then, right here, they have my name."

"Let me show you a printing mistake," Flynn says, stepping up to the table. "Your name: They shouldn't have put it there, because it melds into the background and you can't read it."

"You can't read it because of the background," Ptak repeats, leaning in to look.

"You need to put black over a white background," explains Flynn, who retired from The Berkshire Eagle's pressroom in the early 1990s.

"But this isn't a newspaper," Ptak protests. "This is a stamp club article."

He looks around at the others.

Ptak puts the article back into his briefcase and saves it for the community room, for the meeting, which begins at 7:30 — precisely when the second hand on the wall clock points to 12.
Ten members are present, including two Bobs. Ptak is joined by another Ed, Dr. Ed Helitzer, a Pittsfield dentist, whose stamp collection, like those of the others, is both dear and vast. But his, more so than the others, happens to also be significantly valuable, which will become apparent momentarily.

After discussing old business (12 members attended the Christmas party at the Highland, and it was great fun) and new business (including plans for the annual spring stamp auction), the members devote the rest of the evening to a show-and-tell. That includes Cansilla, with his colorful stamped envelopes from overseas; Bob Janes, with his Project Mercury materials; Jack Andres and his planet stamps; and Helitzer with an extremely rare stamp illustrating Columbus' fleet of ships.

"You told me you had never seen a number 233A, which was a 4 cent stamp issued in 1893 in error," he says to Cansilla. "Here it is."

"Holy smoke," Cansilla says.

But the highlight of the evening is Ptak, who stands and shows everyone the article from American Philatelist.

"This is something I sent them over a year ago," he says. "I think they changed two words and left out one. Other than that, everything is exactly like I sent them."

The article tells of how Ptak, in 1939, when he was 12, discovered a stash of stamps stuffed into oatmeal and cigar boxes in the neighbor boy's chicken coop.

"But that's all I'm going to say. You have to read the story," Ptak says.

"It'll go into the drawer with all the other stuff I want to keep," Cansilla says.

The club has to vacate the community room by 9 p.m., and so the meeting is soon called to a close.

Back out in the parking lot on swift, shuffling feet, that poster board flapping against his side, Ptak says, "I don't think that stamp collecting will disappear forever, because there's always going to be some kid like me who decides, `Oh, I'd like to collect those.'"

He then stops in his tracks.

"Wait, one more story," he says. "When my youngest daughter was in fifth grade, the teacher was writing something on the board and said, `Does anybody know what I just wrote?' My daughter was the only one who held her hand up. The teacher was stunned.

"My daughter told her, `You wrote `Bulgaria' in the Cyrillic alphabet.' The teacher asked, `How do you know that?' and my daughter responded, `I'm a stamp collector with my dad.'

"That's a true story," Ptak says, "and now I've talked your ear off."

With that, he climbs back into his car and heads back home to his 2 million-plus stamps and a Mrs. Edward Ptak — Emily, also a member of the club, but not feeling so well lately.
She collects old stamped envelopes mailed from submarines.
Felix Carroll can be reached at felixcarroll5@gmail.com.

Some notes on the book 'Mama Sue' will someday write

2018-12-07T07:56:00.000-05:00

This article first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle.

By Felix Carroll

Susan Wingo wants to write a book about this man, her husband, her Avery. Maybe a movie.

How would it begin? Would it begin in the aftermath of her brutal rape when she was 19, how he made her feel like a human again, took her in his arms, married her and has doted over her ever since?

He's a black man. She's a white woman. Would it begin with the two of them being spit upon — her being called a "n— lover" — in those early years as they walked together in the streets of racially charged Missouri?

Would it begin at the beginning, with his birth May 10, 1946, just south of St. Louis, where his parents soon abandoned him and eventually each other? Or how about with him saying his prayers as a young boy in his grandmother's house, prayers that went something along the lines of, "Lord, please don't let me get into the position where I would ever have to kill a man. And, Lord, I don't ever want to have to go to jail."

So much to say — and of course, she doesn't know how it all ends. The doctors won't tell her.

"Myelodysplasia."

She had to look that word up five years ago when her husband, Avery Wingo, was first diagnosed. Myelodysplasia, a blood disorder that can lead to leukemia, has no cure except for a stem cell transplant, and that has been ruled out in Avery's case.

"Chemotherapy." She looked that up, too, this past summer, after Avery was rushed to a hospital with two swollen legs. He had lost 7 pints of blood by the time he arrived in the emergency room. He has had 27 blood transfusions since then.

He drives their battered Buick from their apartment in Great Barrington five consecutive days a month to Berkshire Medical Center's Cancer and Infusion Center in Pittsfield. There, he sits for an hour on the fourth floor as a bag full of Decitabine drips into a port placed under the skin by his collarbone.

If Avery is living on borrowed time, she would like to know how much more they can borrow. She'd gratefully go into hock.

Practically speaking, medical bills have, indeed, put them into hock. But that's not what she would write about. She would write instead about the people, their friends and family — from Lee on down the valley to Lakeville, Conn. — who have poured forth to help them since things took a turn for the worse in August.

"Mama Sue" and "Pops" Wingo — maybe you know them. He's an accomplished carpenter with a slow Missouri drawl and incapacity to speak ill of another. She's a quick-talking former mill worker, a self-described hothead but really a loving mush.

On karaoke nights at Bogie's in Great Barrington, she pretty much owns "Harper Valley PTA."

As she puts it, "Mama rocks it."

It'll all be in the book, or the movie.

As will be the day they married, in 1972.

It was just the two of them and two friends at the preacher's house. Family members on both sides couldn't abide the biracial nuptials. Only after the fact, when her father finally met Avery, relationships would form.

Her late father and mother loved Avery. The feeling was mutual.

Avery and Sue met in 1970, when she went out to Missouri from Lakeville to visit her sister-in-law. At 19, Sue had already lived a lifetime. Pregnant at 16, her parents forced her to give her baby away, she says. Her trip to Missouri was part of a ragged journey toward a new life.

At a nightclub in Crystal City, Avery asked her to dance. They went on a few dates. She was smitten. She would have to walk a few blocks out of the white section of town into the black section where it would be safe for the two to meet up.

One night, alone, having just gotten out of work, Sue saw a car pull up to the curb. Thinking it was a friend, she hopped in, closed the door tight behind her and turned to the driver's side. It was not her friend. She knew she was in trouble. She reached for the door. There was no handle. The man took her down a dirt road, held a jagged end of a broken beer bottle to her throat and proceeded to rape her.

The entire time, her inner voice pleaded, "Please just let me live, please let me live."

After it was over, all she wanted to do was to die.

In the story, she'll probably confine the rape to a few short paragraphs. People can fill in the blanks. Maybe she'll sum it up with something like: "There are beautiful things I've experienced in my life that I've forgotten, while this, I'll never forget. How fair is that?"

When Avery learned what happened, he invited her into his life, permanently.

"That man right there, he made me want to live," Sue says. "He had so many girls that wanted to be with him, and he chose me — after all that. He made me believe life is worth living."

"I just admire that she came through it and was able to be a mom and raise children and not hate anyone," he says.

The man who raped her was eventually brought to justice.

Of the many beautiful things she can't forget, what might be tops? Their children, their grandchildren, their great-grandchildren — yes. But it all begins with that man who now wears a surgical mask to protect his frail immune system. He used to snore at night. Since August, he sleeps quietly, so quietly that she finds herself wide awake, leaning in just to hear his breath.

On their 26th anniversary of marriage, he gave her the wedding she had always wanted — "in a church, before the eyes of God." By this time, they had moved the heck out of Missouri, where their mixed-race children were being teased in school. New England, too, has its racists, but they tend to rudely ignore you rather than aggressively confront you.

At the wedding, she wore white. Their son, Reggie, walked her down the aisle of her girlhood church in Lakeville. Avery couldn't take his eyes off her. When she reached him at the altar, he took her hands into his and he wept.

She had stashed away money for the honeymoon they hadn't had the first time around. They flew to Las Vegas, where Sue stuffed some quarters into a slot machine and out popped $2,500, just like that.

There will also have to be a chapter on the 70th birthday party she held for Avery last year at Bogie's. Everyone came, including the daughter she had when she was 16, with whom she has recently reunited. Mama Sue took the microphone and sang Miranda Lambert's "Holding on to You," which she dedicated to her husband, who sat there smiling like a king.

The other day, she called WSBS and requested "Holding on to You."

They played it, dedicated from Mama Sue to her beloved Pops.

Wonderful World Still Left

2018-12-06T12:07:00.000-05:00

Photo by Josh Calabrese

Here's this song I wrote. Listen:
Wonderful World Still Left

He's running through the night
the streets cold and grim
she placed a candle in the window
and prepared a place for him
if it's peace that you give,
is it peace you will get?
she's thinking to herself
is there a wonderful world still left?

Take off your gown of mourning
promise we'll never part
let me sway to the beat
of your sacred heart
you know where evil abounds
grace abounds more, you can bet
he's thinking to himself
is there a wonderful world still left?

Who's calling off the dogs now,
the rumors of war?
who will gather all these promises
we've broken before?
who are the dead who bury the dead?
is it the creditor or the debtor?
this blood ain't getting any warmer
but it looks a little redder
and where has that child gone to
we baptized with spit?
I'll ask the questions now,
and who built all this shit?

He's praying in the night:
Father, before you I will bow
just tell me who loved you first
and where are they now?
and give me one good reason
we haven't packed it all in yet
I await your reply
if there a wonderful world still left

Born with her mother's smile
she could have been a ballerina
she hears the gunfire getting closer now
hears them laughing like hyenas
she's gone before the day breaks
her baby to her breast
she thinks to herself
is there a wonderful world still left

Who's calling off the dogs now,
the rumors of war?
who will gather all these promises
we've broken before?
who are the dead who bury the dead?
is it the creditor or the debtor?
this blood ain't getting any warmer
but it looks a little redder
and where has that child gone to
who we baptized with spit?
I'll ask the questions now,
and who built all this shit?

She said we'll shed this old skin, love
I'll show you my charms
I'll close my eyes and fall backwards
into your loving arms
when he remembers her smile
he has to still catch his breath
and he thinks to himself
is there a wonderful world still left?

The holy dove ain't flying
not around here anyway
and if I were to leave
would you ask me to stay
till the wildflowers start blooming
till the stones weep with regret
till we sing to ourselves
there's a wonderful world still left.

Wonderful World Still Left

Written and performed by Felix Carroll

A beloved son steps up for supper

2018-11-25T20:10:00.005-05:00

This article first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle:

By Felix Carroll

PITTSFIELD — Hands jammed into his pockets, the young man's ruddy face was set deep within the shroud of a hooded sweatshirt.

Bouncing on his heels, he looks distractedly up and down North Street, chews at a fingernail and decidedly stays on this side of the iron fence, not that side.

On that side, they've set up the fold-out tables and chairs for their weekly little miracle.

On this side, the young man blows into his hands. It's 40 degrees out and falling.

On that side, they've set out the coffee, hot chocolate, a portable heater and a handmade wooden cross plugged into a stand with a little piece of cardboard jammed in there to keep it from wobbling.

On this side, he knows once they're done praying, food will be served, and he'll be welcome to it, like the others who choose to stay on this side of the iron fence.

On that side, each Sunday afternoon, no matter the weather, a bare lawn in front of St. Joseph's Catholic Church becomes the Cathedral of the Beloved — an outdoor, ecumenical service of prayer, singing, food and fellowship beginning at 2 p.m. By 3:30, it's gone, folded up and taken away, a bare lawn once again.

And so is he: gone for another week, down a side street, the hunger pangs abated. Maybe he'll have a place to sleep for the night. Maybe he won't.

This side of the iron fence is where this son of Pittsfield first tried heroin. He was in high school. At first, it was just "fun and games," he says. Then one morning he woke up sick, his body insisting upon more heroin and he obliging.

Between then and now, there was jail time, about six years total, he says. There was sobriety, a wife, the births of two daughters, a stable job, then marriage troubles and then the tapping upon his shoulder of an addiction that wasn't quite through with him yet.

On that side of the fence, about 30 people have gathered. Some came by car, most by foot, and they're passing a microphone around, offering prayers.

Someone's Uncle Dave is in the hospital in a coma. Someone's friend had to be airlifted to Albany Medical Center.

"I have an apartment. Yay! I'm moving in Dec. 1," says Jennifer Barrows, wrapped in a bright red Budweiser coat. She's been homeless for a year, since splitting up with her husband.

A woman named Maureen says, "I'm thankful my nephew had his baby boy."

"I'm thankful my brother is moving to Pittsfield," says Leon Reyome, whose brother, Emmett, raises his hand in acknowledgement.

A woman offers a prayer of thanksgiving for a new job she received at the local dollar store.

"And happy belated 66th birthday to Leon," Barrows says. "Gotcha! I didn't forget."

On this side, they listen in and wait. Some pick through the used clothing, blankets and boots for the taking that Pat Davenport, a volunteer from Peru, collected earlier in the week and has draped between the finials of the iron fence.

They listen to the words of the Rev. Jennifer Gregg, "Pastor Jenny," the Episcopal priest who began the Cathedral of the Beloved three years ago because of dire demographics. The generations of faithful churchgoers are dying off. For as many reasons as there are empty pews, fewer and fewer people are walking through the doors of these magnificent, noble churches of ours. So bring the church to the people. Put it right out there in the open. No walls. Make the church present — not as stones set in mortar, but as people set to the joyous task of serving others and judging no one.

Retell a good gospel story. Relate it to the present day. Build relationships. Invite clergy from throughout the community to participate, as the Rev. Joel Huntington, pastor of South Congregational Church, did this past Sunday.

And, by the way, it's perfectly fine with Pastor Jenny and the others that some people choose to stay in the periphery, out beyond that iron fence till the food is served. And besides, she wields a microphone connected to a speaker with a volume knob.

"It is our presence together that makes this place sacred," Pastor Jenny says into the microphone, upon lighting a candle to begin the service. "Let this gathering today be a sanctuary: a safe place from unkind and profane words or gestures, violent actions or intentions. Let this place be a safe haven where we can come wholly as we are, for fellowship, for assurance, for the hope that comes when we allow God's light to shine through all.

"All are welcome and all are worthy," she says. "Each and everyone is a beloved child of God. May our words and actions embody this truth."

"Amen," mouths the young man in the hoodie on the other side of the fence.

His name is Rich Daly. He's 34, tall, lean, red bearded, homeless for three months this time around, leading what he describes as "a tiring, worrisome life." He left Pittsfield for Texas several years ago to get away from the drugs and to live near his mother. The plan worked for a little while, then he returned.

"Nothing happened to me growing up. I wasn't abused or nothing. I had a good life," he says. "My parents split up, but there's no reason for me to be this way, except for I'm an addict."

His daughters, Kaylee and Kylie, 11 and 7 years old, now live with their grandmother in Texas. He's back in his old hometown, without a bed, without a plan, without a single form of ID, which he lost somewhere along the way.

"What do I want? I just want to live a normal life," he says. "Have a little place I can call my own: The simple things, but they're not that simple."

On that side of the fence, they're pulling out the food now — goulash provided by St. Stephen's Parish — served in a paper dish with an apple, a piece of bread and a baked treat. Pastor Jenny has everyone gather around the table, raise their hands out and bless the food with her.

The young man walks through the opening in the iron fence and steps up near the table with the others. Eyes closed, he joins the chorus, mouthing the words to the Lord's Prayer, which he learned back at Sacred Heart Parish on Elm Street, back when he was a little boy in his Sunday best.