For me personally, I’m glad Christmas has evolved into a festivity with a wider reach than simply making sure my kid gets a lot of toys. Growing up in the 1960s, I, like almost all the kids in our overwhelmingly white, predominately Protestant New Jersey suburb, had a fanatical attachment to Christmas, and it had everything to do with the stuff we got.
Peg Leg Bates, the one-legged vaudevillian and dancer born in 1907 to a South Carolina sharecropper, performed all over the country. But when the show was over, Bates—despite the fact he was nationally famous–had to struggle to find accommodations, since African Americans were barred from booking rooms in white-owned hotels or eating meals in white-owned restaurants. Having experienced personally the hassles blacks had to endure when traveling, he opened the Peg Leg Bates Country Club in Kerhonksen in 1951, which was one of the first resorts for blacks in the Catskills.
It’s a Saturday night in August, and in a field outside Lowville, cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks are lined up in ragged rows facing the giant screen at the Valley Brook Drive In. Tonight’s featured film, the animation Ice Age: Collision Course, is solid family fare; groups of kids sit on blankets laid out on the grass or dangle their legs outside the backs of station wagons, tailgate style.
After 34 years on the bench, Justice Karen Peters, who was the first woman to be appointed Presiding Justice of New York State’s Appellate Division of the Third Department, is retiring. Prior to her appointment to the Third Department (which encompasses 28 counties, including Ulster) by Governor Mario Cuomo in 1994 (she was subsequently appointed presiding justice by Mario’s son, Governor Andrew Cuomo, in 2012), Justice Peters was the first woman elected to the Supreme Court in the Third Department, in 1992.
Due to a wrong turn on the country roads that connect Kingston to North Adams, not far from the Massachusetts state line, I arrive late for the press briefing about the new, 120,000-square-foot building opening May 28 at MASS MoCA.