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The Departed: Phyllis, Fran & Vinny

2015-05-03T15:29:18-04:00

Phyllis Herbert was not one to go gentle into that good night. Living out the last decade of her life in Hudson, she could be at times, well, ornery.

As memory failed her, she was prone to frustration with both herself and her interlocutors. She loved conversation, dropping by my office almost every weekday for years. Though her mind was full of both probing questions and lively anecdotes, as the fight got busier and busier I often had to instruct my staff not to let her know I was working downstairs, since such conversations could prove difficult to wind up.

In saying so, I am not trying to tarnish Phyllis’ memory, but to conjure up her intense sense of self and willpower. She prided herself on her independence of mind and lifestyle. To the last, she could be seen chugging up Warren Street in practical sneakers and a long jean skirt, pursuing some errand she insisted on completing herself even after driving a car became impossible. She resisted many attempts by worried relations to move her to assisted living, and finally succeeded in her effort to die at home in Hudson.

She could try the patience and generosity of friends who did their best to help with housework and repairs around the small home she bought in 1998 in the 100 block of Warren Street, after a bitter divorce from her longtime husband. (I discovered, after we’d known each other for a time, that they had lived next-door to my grandparents on Grove Street in the West Village. That explained a lot to me about her character and interests—she brought to Hudson a whiff of old Village contrarianism.)

She was an excellent cook, but could be the victim of her own perfectionism. During the period of the cement controversy, those of us living in “The Flatlands”—the level blocks at the end of Warren—would take turns hosting impromptu neighborhood potluck picnics. Phyllis was invariably too ambitious in her choice of a dish—preparing, say, an elaborate potroast. Wanting to get it just right, she would miscalculate the prep time necessary. Arriving very late to the cookout, bearing a delicious dish which no one had any more room to eat (having already finished dessert), she could become furious at both her neighbors and herself.

Phyllis was smart, warm and cynically humorous when she wanted to be. She had an extensive collection of discarded (often academic) books she had picked up at library sales and thrift stores, and had clearly paid a lot of attention to the theories of Jane Jacobs, another Villager. Among those she loaned me was a 1958 tome called “Small Town in Mass Society: Class, Power, and Religion in a Rural Community.” She thought it might provide some insight into how local officials and their constituents view issues like the St. Lawrence Cement proposal, and she was right. In particular, the book helped crystallize for me how going-along-to-get-along is a powerful force in local decisionmaking, and helped me see ways to break down that predictable dynamic which favors the status quo.

Phyllis contributed to the cement struggle in other unexpected ways. She was something of a hoarder, so a neighbor and my part-time employee Maiysha Kramer tried to help tame this vast collection of books and papers. Her habit of never throwing anything away turned out to have an unexpected benefit: the little house (which is now the Davis-Orton Gallery) contained virtually every issue of the Register-Star and Independent from the day she arrived in Hudson.

In a time when few papers were digitized, this had a great value to our opposition research against St. Lawrence, since one of our favorite strategies was to catch the company contradicting its past claims. So Phyllis—despairing of ever sorting through the entire informal archive—agreed to donate it to the cause. This was turned into a sort of reference library at my office, and it proved helpful time and time again.

Two neighbors who tried their best to help Phyllis manage things were Fran and Vinny DeGrazia, a not-quite-as-elderly couple who lived directly across the street. Fran had been a stewardess, and Vinny a musician and bartender. For a brief time, they kept an antique shop—a tchotchke shop, really—several doors upstreet from their two-story house. They loved yardsaling, and it kept them busy in retirement.

They loved jazz, and carried around with them an oldschool vibe of the Ratpack days. One could easily imagine them taking in a Dean Martin or Sammy Davis, Jr. show in Atlantic City, and dancing up a storm. (Occasionally, that oldschool vibe would include some salty or outmoded language, the latter which I took as testament to the ingrained, inherited prejudices of their generation than any mean-spritedness, especially given the diversity of their neighbors and circle of friends. The 100 block of Warren was unusually close-knit back then, but virtually every house has changed owners in the 17 years I’ve been here.)

I remember Fran and Vinny as among the very most reliable volunteers for the cement cause. Putting labels on 5,000-piece mailings was a frequent task, and the two of them never failed to show up to help. Vinny also consistently donated his bartending services to Stop the Plant fundraising events, often working in tandem with Bob Mechling. They died within a relatively short time of each other, and it was indeed hard to imagine one without the other.

Phyllis, Fran and Vinny taught me, among other things, that it takes all kinds of people and personalities for a community to beat back a multinational corporation. As did each of the 4,000 members of the group that prevailed against SLC ten years ago, these three friends and neighbors contributed in their own idiosyncratic and surprising ways... the point of these remembrances not being canonization, but to be as true as possible to their presences.

The Departed: John Flynn

2015-04-27T11:33:54-04:00

Fifth entry in a series about people who have passed
away in the decade since The Plant was Stopped

Oddly enough, John Flynn and Charlie Butterworth both died last month, within a couple of weeks of each other. I say oddly, because John preceded Charlie as the engineer for the City of Hudson.

John was a Hudson native who graduated from St. Mary’s Academy in the 1940s before studying at Harvard. He later worked for General Electric in Schenectady, and on nuclear submarines. In the late 1960s, he negotiated with the remnants of the Lone Star Cement company for the City to buy its quarries on the east side of Newman Road, with the intention of them serving as a backup water supply.

The sale went through, but John was later chagrined that Charlie never hooked these up to the City water system. Every time there was a water alert in Hudson, John would remind me of this inaction by his successor—who he believed to have done work early in his career for the Colarusso gravel mine next door. His suspicions only deepened when then-Mayor Rick Scalera made a long-term lease-to-own deal with Colarusso to mine around the quarry lake, eliminating any realistic possibility of using it to keep the City wet.

His history of negotiating with Lone Star, as well as his memories of the dirty brown snow that would rain down from that plant and the old Atlas, made John a skeptic about the St. Lawrence Cement proposal. (Butterworth, by contrast, made every effort to grease the skids for SLC, for example by making sure the Hudson Waterfront Committee took no action that would jeopardize the company’s plans.)

John also had no use for the company’s divide-and-conquer strategy of trying to pit neighbors against each other based on their backgrounds and lifestyles. He once commented at a public meeting about one of Holcim’s p.r. flacks, Phil Pepe, who was caught ghostwriting letters-to-the-editor in favor of his client, and the local newspaper which gullibly printed them:

The Swiss cement company has retained a propaganda outfit. Their representative is Pepi Le Pue—or that's what I call him, anyway. He writes these letters for others to sign. And there's a recurrent theme through the whole thing that these “newcomers” are the ones who oppose this wonderful plant. In quotation marks: these awful “newcomers.”

I was born here in 1931. My mother was born here in 1893, and my grandfather was born in Saugerties in 1853, eight years before the Civil War began. So we've been around for a while.

I leave my feathers at home, but I consider myself a native.

So who are the newcomers?

Certainly, a Swiss cement company.

And certainly, the present owners of the Register-Star, who support the Swiss cement company to the very best of their ability. They’re owned by the Johnson Publishing Company, which is in upper New York state near the Canadian border. So they're pretty safe.

John then expanded his critique to the bigger picture, of how a foreign-owned corporation proposed to exploit local residents’ health for their own profit:

The Swiss engage in one thing, and have one primary interest, and that is making money. That is what they propose to do here. All of those letters saying that, “Oh, we need the employment and we need this and we need that.” Of course, there will be no new employment.

The reason for the Swiss proposing to construct this plant is that it will be at least three-and-a-third times larger than the plant they have in Cementon with the same number of people.

So they will decrease their production costs by at least 70 percent. There will be 70 percent less work input per ton of cement produced. And if anyone considers that my categorizing the Swiss as being interested in money, well, this is history.

When the Nazis invaded Denmark they issued and edict that all Jews were to wear a Star of David on their clothing. The next day Christian X, the King of Denmark appeared in public with the Star of David on his coat and all the days followed suit. And Denmark, of all the occupied countries in Europe, the Jews survived the best.

Now when Jews fled Germany and came to the Swiss border, if they made it, if they didn't have enough money on them the Swiss turned them back. And those who were admitted to Switzerland land when their money ran out the Swiss sold them back to the Nazis to be exterminated.

These are the people who have our interest at heart and propose to operate in Columbia County. Thank you.

As you can see, Mr. Flynn pulled no punches. That is not automatically a virtue, if such outspokenness is not combined with good sense. But combined with his long memory and fierce intelligence, it made John a valuable ally and sounding board. I miss seeing him with his pal Larry Marinelli, who videotaped many of the cement plant meetings, and was a great friend to John in his later years.

ENDNOTE: Though Charlie Butterworth and I were often on opposite sides of local issues, our relationship always remained cordial and straightforward. We debated many topics intensely, but not bitterly.

When, for example, it was decided to have the City sidewalks redone (by Colarusso, natch), there was an uproar about all the mature black locust trees which would be uprooted from Warren Street. Almost all of these were lost, but a few residents were able to negotiate with him to save their tree.

In my case, I approached Charlie with a different idea, since the roots of the locusts in front of Curtiss House had pretty severely pushed up the existing sidewalks and could not be salvaged. I asked Charlie how much he intended to spend on the two replacement trees, which were going to be a generic form of flowering pear or the like—the type of tree one sees in mall parking lots.

When he gave the amount, I asked if Charlie would object if I spent that money plus some of my own on a different, more distinctive tree. He agreed, and I instead had two 10-foot-tall sycamore saplings installed by Windy Hill Nursery. I since sold 32 Warren, but the sycamores—a classic and stately New York tree, well-suited for urban environments—reamain, and have tripled their height. Arguments about one controversy did not prevent Charlie from being open to reasonable solutions to another.

The Departed: Cassandra Danz

2015-04-24T17:55:26-04:00

To get a sense of Cassandra Danz’s sense of humor, one need look no farther than her comments to a judge at a public hearing on the St. Lawrence Cement proposal:

“I am a garden writer and sometimes a lecturer. I was led to believe that we could come here tonight and talk about how this plant would impact our lives. Well, it's impacted my life tremendously. I have always had a dream about Hudson because when I came here all the stores were closed and everything was shut up, but now it's all coming back to life. And my dream for Hudson was to start a school of horticulture here in town in my retirement. And I always thought that was possible because we had a clean environment but now it seems that that dream may come to an end.

“So what I'd like to do is also I want to tell you also that my garden gets a clear view of that 40 story smokestack giving me the finger out my kitchen window every morning. And I'm exactly downwind of that smokestack, so that on a still day—I'm less than a mile away—on a still day that is going to come down right on my head and on my garden. And in fact my garden was so affected by the previous cement plant many years ago that I cannot grow plants that like acid soil like pine trees and plants like that, because my soil is so basic from having lime rained on it all those years. And that was from a small cement plant.

“Now look, it seems to me that Hudson can go two ways: Either we will go the way of international corporation coming in and treating us like—I mean, what are we Bulgaria back in 1934 that people come in and burn coal? That to me is absolutely outrageous. So what I'm saying is either we can go that way, or we can go the way we have been going, which is to grow as naturally and grow into a beautiful, healthy community that we have begun to do. Thank you very much.”

Also known as Mrs. Greenthumbs, Cassandra was a comedienne who performed with the likes of Bill Murray as a Second City cast member, then wen ton on to become a bestselling garden writer. She adopted Hudson as her hometown in the mid-1980s, long before it was a blip on the New York Times’ radar. (In fact, according to the Times, her Mrs. Greenthumbs character was created for a performance at the Ancram Opera House.)

Gelman, who recruited Cassandra for the Regis & Kathie Lee show, had this to say about her when she was profiled in People Magazine: “The audience loves her. She's always game for a sight gag, and she's always there with a fast comeback.”

A 1987 New York Magazine notice for Cassandra’s troupe, The High Heeled Women

Though she appeared regularly on national TV, she was approachable and generous with her time locally, hosting many free lectures on gardening, and opening to the public the lush yard surrounding her Carpenter Gothic cottage on Union Street, which she had bought with her husband Walter Brett.

Her hilariously useful advice was peppered with wry jabs at the corny and silly things people do to ruin their yards and gardens, and laden with innuendo—often about her lust for her “handsome” husband:

“My husband chopped the bamboo down using a machete he bought from Soldier of Fortune magazine. I remember the sweat glistening on his torso. I felt like Ava Gardner in Mogambo. In a tropical frame of mind, I put on my muumuu and quickly mixed some Mai Tai cocktails. We sat on the porch, looking at the bamboo stumps, waiting for the elephants to stampede.”

The blogger and fan who found that excerpt said this of the Mrs. Greenthumbs persona:

“I love her because she was fearless and funny and culturally clued-in, and a gust of enthusiasm comes off every word she ever put to paper... When I learned that Mrs. Greenthumbs died of cancer in 2002, I took it peculiarly hard, as if she were a good friend I hadn't yet met. ”

Cassandra died far too young. After her death, some well-meaning residents took up a collection to honor Cassandra’s memory with a local horticultural project, which received many contributions.

One of the dread whiskey barrels, ready for the landfill

Some contributors, however, were mortified when the committee handling the funds used them to buy corny whiskey-barrel style planters. These were filled mostly with run-of-the-mill ornamental cabbages, marigolds and the like, then positioned on corners and in front of businesses all up and down Warren Street—giving Hudson’s main drag a canned, Ye Olde feel. As I griped at the time, this was just the kind of thing which Cassandra would have gently but firmly mocked in her Mrs. Greenthumbs character. Fortunately, most of these planters have by now been removed or fallen into disuse.

Few who met Cassandra failed to get a dose of her wit and candor. She was not one to hold back an opinion, but was able to couch a barb in terms which left the targets wiser but not wounded. Her books are still widely available, and her strong Brooklyn accent comes through even on the printed page, and is still heard by readers.

The Departed: Jeff Bagnall, a/k/a Sweeps

2015-04-22T16:07:45-04:00

A visit to Jeff Bagnall’s second-floor office above Sweeps Vacuums involved more layers of security than most government buildings.

First, his wife Patti would go in back to see if he was available. Jeff would amble out in his usual fedora-and-pocketed-vest attire. After a gum-chewing grin and a firm handshake, he’d offer a visitor a coffee from his machine. (Declining was not an option.) If you were deemed trustworthy enough, next came a short trip upstairs in a small, keyed elevator that he’d installed in his 700-block shop.

At last, you reached the inner sanctum: A moderate-sized office crammed with video monitors showing various views of the interior and sidewalk. My understanding was that he was also able to monitor the sound both inside and out of the shop. Before he sold his vacuum domain names—website addresses which he’d cornered in the 1990s—a computer screen kept careful track of web traffic and online sales. (At one point, he was reputedly the largest web retailer of vacuums, but eventually Jeff concluded that it was better to take a lump-sum payment for the domains than to bother with fulfilling electronic sales.)

Jeff was also an aficionado of portable surveillance gear, having a drawer full of handheld and disguised recording devices which could be slipped into a pocket. Even in the protected confines of this command center, Jeff spoke in hushed tones, as if suspicious that his interlocutor might be wearing a wire. He likewise was constantly armed, a precaution which came in handy when a well-known local lunatic randomly slashed him with a knife in front of his store: Jeff drew his gun and held the attacker in place until the HPD arrived to make an arrest. Until his health prevented it, he was fond of venturing across the alley behind Sweeps to the Iron Horse, where he was a regular.

Jeff’s humorous side

A retired police Captain who ran the huge Nassau County department for two decades, in the first years of this new century Jeff also was a Freemason, and served as Hudson’s Police Commissioner. Unlike many holders of this appointed position, Jeff was proud to have faced down repeated attempts to politically influence his management of the Department. His tenure was marked, among other things, by the scandal-ridden “retirement” of the then-police chief, whom Jeff had investigated for charging the force for time spent on personal matters—specifically, time spent with a woman not his wife, in a love nest next-door to the station. It was during his time that the police finally began to crawl out from its bad reputation earned in the 1980s and ’90s. One of his Nassau County colleagues wrote at the time of his death that “Jeff was a great guy and would give you the shirt off his back.”

Jeff was mindful that opponents of St. Lawrence Cement had many concerns about the safety of their persons and property, and took steps behind the scenes to reassure those seeking to “stop the plant” that the HPD would look after everyone, regardless of their position on the proposal. When we organized a massive march in Hudson in 2001, Jeff made sure that there was a subtle yet obvious law-enforcement presence: not to intimidate the protestors, but to let us know that they weren’t going to allow the marchers to be harassed.

Jeff prided himself on his integrity as well as his deeply-held skepticism of politicians. He was not afraid to take public stands and back people he believed in. He knew—and kept—a lot of local secrets, while quietly aiding more people than anyone knew. He was someone I felt comfortable turning to whenever I had a big decision to make.

Jeff also seemed to have an endless supply of jokes, many of them unprintable here. (On the more printable side, his storefront for many years featured a straw broom labeled “Economy Model.”)

To this day I expect to turn and see one of his giant SUVs crawling up Warren Street, festooned with spotlights and radar and antennae. Often when he spotted a friend, he would pull over and summon them to a hushed conference in the passenger seat. His steady and unwavering presence is much missed—not to mention having a local place to buy Miele bags or fix an old Electrolux.

The Departed: Mary Davidson

2015-04-21T09:16:37-04:00

Mary Davidson, participating in the Stop the Plant polaroid project

June 21st, 2001, was an uncomfortable day by any standard. The temperature around Hudson reached 90 degrees, and humidity averaged 87%—running all the way up to 100% at its peak. The afternoon was punctuated by downpours and thunderstorms, literal and figurative.

This was also the day that an estimated 1,000 citizens turned out for a public hearing on the St. Lawrence Cement proposal. It began at 10 am in the gymnasium of Columbia-Greene Community College, which had no air conditioning. Administrative Law Judge Helene Goldberger finally closed the session nearly 15 hours later, at 12:40 am.

Concerned—correctly—that it would be outnumbered at the hearing, the cement company set up an operation to bus folks to its headquarters on Route 9, offering them a free meal and a t-shirt in exchange for appearing at the hearing. Many did not realize that they were expected to speak on the company’s behalf. Though they were also provided with magazines (labeled “property of St. Lawrence Cement”), most of those shanghaied to Columbia-Greene left long before their names were called.

Not so with plant opponents, many of whom waited all day for a chance to be heard.

In the evening, one of the late speakers was Mary Davidson. She had signed up to speak at 3 o’clock, and waited through many sweltering hours to be called to the microphone. Unlike most of the attendees, Davidson was not a stranger to the venue: A professor at Columbia-Greene, her office was not far away. Here is what she said to Judge Goldberger:

MARY DAVIDSON: I'll be brief because much of what I was going to say has already been said by other people. I expected to talk about three this afternoon.

I am a taxpayer in the town of Claverack. I've lived here since 1977, and I'm on the faculty of this beloved institution for 24 years. But let me make my point clear. I do not speak for this institution, but I do speak as an educator on the faculty.

I teach social sciences, classes—psychology, sociology and social work. I'm currently teaching a social problems class focusing on the environment, which I’ve designed specifically around the areas of St. Lawrence Cement, Athens Generating and the dredging of the Hudson River.

As a concerned social scientist, I recognize the need that people have for well paying, quality jobs. Indeed, it pains me to look out amongst the audience today and see many friends and workers that I know in this community who are so desperate for decent employment that they are supporting this cement plant.

This company is not going to provide in the long run well-paying jobs for a number of people; not even in the short run.

But even if they were, why must it pay at the expense of our health in order for that to take place? If the local elected officials in this community were doing their job, we should be able to have decent employment without work ruining our health.

I’m a mother and also a grandmother and I would like my grandchildren to grow up to be healthy. What a choice we have, to be able to have well-paying jobs at the expense of our health, or be able to have good health at the expense of not having any jobs?

It’s time for this community to wake up. Are we not able to trust the testimony of our very own local hospital officials who have adamantly stated over and over and over that this plant is going to ruin the lives and health of all of us?

I’m going to cut it here, I think. I just wanted to go on record as saying I’m a opposed to this plant for the sake of the health and well-being of all of us and future generations to come. Thank you very much.

A native of Buffalo and graduate of SUNY New Paltz, Mary taught Human Services for 30 years at Columbia-Greene. Indeed, she was among the original faculty at the college when it opened in Greenport. At her memorial in 2011, her daughter noted that she “was an activist her whole life for woman’s rights and social justice.”

What I remembered most about Mary’s involvement in the cement battle was her tenaciousness. As the Polaroid photo above shows, she not just determined, but also confident, that justice would prevail. An email she sent in 2003 to a group of activists said: “The world needs more people who are willing to sacrifice to do the right thing.”

The Departed: Milt Meisner

2015-04-20T12:45:49-04:00

First installment in a series

The phone rang one afternoon in 1999 at my makeshift Stop the Plant office—a third-floor walkup in the back, donated by realtor Steve Kingsley. On the other end was a gravelly, well-measured voice: “This is Milt Meisner. You got my wife all riled up at some meeting last weekend in Claverack. Meet me at the diner in Hudson at 8 am tomorrow.” Click.

Image: Hudson Farmer’s Market

Oh jeez, I thought, here we go. Fearing the worst from the tone of his phone call, I braced myself for an earful of pro-SLC slogans, which were then saturating all local media: full-page print ads, radio ads, and hokey TV spots. (One of these featured a 1950s-style housewife removing a sheet of chocolate chip cookies from the oven, saying to her kids in a sing-song voice, “I just don’t know how anyone could be against it!”)

By now I was getting used to meetings where I’d have to shoot down a litany of company lines: about how “the plant” was supposedly going to create lots of new jobs, be squeaky-clean, and hidden from public view. Each claim was easily debunked with facts straight from SLC’s own application—except that the company’s misleading p.r. had firmly lodged these ideas deeply in many residents’ consciousness.

All I knew about Meisner at that point was that he had farmed in the area for a long time, had a farmstand on 9H&23 in Greenport, and that his wife Rosalyn had been at a meeting that weekend in the home of Irma Brownfield and Frederick Rostock on Route 23B.

The 20 people crammed into the living room heard a presentation from me and Dr. Ira Marks—who had delivered a large percentage of the babies born in Columbia Memorial Hospital for several generations—about the health effects of the proposed coal-fired St. Lawrence Cement plant. The pollution, we’d noted, would largely move from west to east, directly over Claverack.

So the next morning, we drank coffee in a booth the Columbia Diner, which was then run by a cook with the unusual nickname of Chewie. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Milt was already deeply skeptical of the cement company’s claims. “Roz” had relayed much of the content of the meeting in detail, and he simply wanted to hear some of the details firsthand, and quiz me in more depth. I learned, among other things, that at one point he had worked some of the scarce tillable land on Becraft Mountain adjoining the former Atlas Cement quarries—and that he was considered by many to have been the first organic farmer in the County.

According to his Register-Star obituary in 2010, Milt was actively involved in NOFA, Agway, the Cooperative Extension, the Dairy League, and helped found the Hudson Farmer’s Market. Born in Hudson in the 1920s, and a graduate of Hudson High, Milt wore a number of other hats besides farmer, including realtor, co-owner of a car dealership. His seemingly gruff demeanor—which usually included a well-worn baseball cap and tinted glasses, reflecting many hours spent outside in his fields—belied his warm commitment to his community, including involvement in both the Greenport synagogue and Meals on Wheels.

Meeting Milt in this way reminded me to never judge a neighbor by their demeanor or demographic profile. People from all walks of life either already doubted the cement company, or could be convinced to abandon their support, if they could just get more accurate and balanced information than was available in the local media. He and Ros were steadfast supporters of our cause from start to finish, and their involvement gave many others the courage to get involved.

Note: My remembrance of Ira Marks, who himself died in 2011, can be found here.