In October of 1956 my grandfather Des Nichols, a life-long resident of Rockton himself, attended an auction at the homestead of a Rockton pioneer family, the old Clizbe place at the corner of Clizbe Avenue on Upper Church Street. While bachelor George Clizbe and his spinster sister Clara were still alive, both were of advanced age and no longer ( Read more... )

First day of the new traffic pattern in downtown Amsterdam. All is not well. These excerpts were all made within a one hour period.

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During yesterday's opening day massacre of the Yankees by the Red Sox, the YES network guys were forced to do a lot of back-filling to prevent three and a half hours of dead air, and at one point reached back into franchise history and mentioned "Happy Jack" Chesbro, who played with the New York Highlanders back in the olden days and later entered ( Read more... )

On or about August 28, 1943, with World War II raging and most of the younger reporters off in the service of their country, the Amsterdam Evening Recorder's Hugh P. Donlon sat down with nonagenarian Millard Parker and talked about the olden days with Amsterdam's last surviving veteran of the Indian Wars:


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At least I got to talk to a couple of the guys who are in my forthcoming book, and one of them was Frankie Marcellino. I sat next to him on a stool at the South Side Coffee shop a couple of years ago and thanked him for his service to our country. And what service.

From Where Do We Find Such Men:

Frankie Marcellino won a lot of fights in his day ( Read more... )

Petrus Groot was born in what is now Cranesville on March 3, 1744, into the family which founded the place. His grandfather, Symon Groot,  had survived the Indian massacre of Schenectady in 1690, so this Dutch family's roots in the Mohawk Valley run deep ( Read more... )

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Excerpt from Where Do We Find Such Men? (to be published someday):

On the second day of September, 1945, Seaman 1/c Richard Wawrzonek could not have had a better station, aboard the battleship Missouri, where General of the Army Douglas MacArthur presided over the colorful formal surrender ceremony, punctuated by the flyover of 500 superforts and ( Read more... )

D-Day, June 6, 1944. The greatest armada in the history of the world descends on the beaches of Normandy ( Read more... )

[Gavin "Guy" Murdoch, grandfather of our school board member-elect, wrote the following to the members of the Bigelow-Sanford Uniteds Soccer Club around the world back in 1944.]Tuesday, June 6th, 1944 will go down in history as D-Day. Owing to the five hour difference in our time from Greenwich time, we here in Amsterdam learned of the invasion of ( Read more... )