Baby Blog

BEST OF SENIORS (students, not retirees).  In Catskill High School’s graduating class of 135 students, 44 received special awards.  At a ceremony Tuesday night, they collected a total of 94 awards for scholarship, for sports, for music, for improvement, and for a variety of services.  The top recipient, as it happens, also is this year’s top student: Valedictorian Sierra Rocco, whose nine prizes attested to a broad range of achievements.  Also outstanding in terms of versatility of achievements were Caitlin Coughlin (eight awards), Mike Cothren (seven), and Paul Sira and Lauren Mansey (five apiece).

JUST OUT:  historian Regina W. Daly’s compilation of GreeneLand newspaper coverage of the early days of the Civil War.  First item in Reports to the Homefront.  A sesquicentennial commemoration of Civil War journalism in Greene County, N.Y., November 1860-December 1861 is a Windham Journal paragraph reporting Abraham Lincoln’s election as President:

Never…has a political battle been more closely contested,and never before has the tide of victory swept with such force. [In Greene County, Lincoln did not carry the day, but] the usual Democratic majority was reduced from 700 to some 400.

Final item is a Catskill-based Examiner story entitled “Christmas and the Contrabands.”  The latter term refers to Negroes who escaped Southern masters long before the Emancipation Proclamation.  Under then-existing Federal law they would have been subject to return as fugitive slaves, except that their Northern classification as war “contraband” supplied a pretext for making wholesale exceptions.  According to the Examiner’s story,

  The day before Christmas the children of the Colored Sabbath School, of this village, were gathered in the room of the Young Men’s Christian Association to receive the presents annually prepared for them by the teachers and friends of the school.  A Christmas tree, whose top touched the ceiling, was loaded with bright and comfortable, and beautiful and toothsome things….

Fifty or sixty children neatly dressed and so well  behaved as to set an example we should be glad to see imitated by some other children we know, filled the benches.[After singing by the children, and by the children and adults, followed by]three short addresses by clergymen of the village[and more singing,]Three presents…were given to each scholar,--something to wear, something to show, and something to eat.

      The book, compiled and edited in cooperation with the Greene County Historical Society, is priced at $13 (including tax). Copies are available at the Society’s Vedder Library in Coxsackie, and will be available at Civil War remembrance events later in the summer. All proceeds, says Ms Daly, will go for conservation of the flag of the 120^th New York regiment of volunteers, in which 300 Greene County men served.

NEW PRO.  Chris DeForest, grandson of the late Jim DeForest (former president and long-time staunch supporter of Catskill Golf Club) and of Dorothy DeForest (resident of Jefferson Heights), and son of John DeForest (professional at Rondout Golf Club), having just graduated from the University of Illinois (where he starred on that school’s NCAA Division 1 golf team), and having just turned professional, has qualified, by way of a three-man playoff last week, to compete, starting on Thursday, at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda MD, in the United States Open, against the best golfers in the world. (They come from 24 countries).  He won that playoff, incidentally, by hitting a 415-yard drive (repeat: 415), then a lob wedge, setting up a short  eagle putt.  For a video interview with the lad, see       http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110613/MEDIA02/110619923

MANHUNT by a posse of State and local police, plus Sheriff’s deputies, plus State Department of Environmental Conservation sleuths, plus dogs, for one Joe Taylor, plural offender, who fled from police after being detained in Catskill Village last Sunday, has been fruitless so far.  [But on Tuesday morning, after the posting of the blog, he was found in an abandoned car in the vicinity, according to The Daily Mail, of Prospect and Liberty streets]  But it has yielded some memorable local reporting:

 A search by [all those people] were unable to locate Taylor.

At one point, to no avail, the dogs used a white T-shirt the suspect had allegedly discarded in the woods in an attempt to pick up his scent.    

RECOVERED from an overdose of sunflower seeds: Kalli, pet goat of GreeneLand’s Kurt Andernach.  Kalli fell into the sunflower seed bin and, well, pigged out.  Rushed to the emergency veterinary clinic in Kingston, he survived the pump out. They were well acquainted with Mr Andernach down there, what with foolish encounters, in his deeply wooded property, of his dogs with porcupines.  As for Kalli, he was rejected by his mother soon after birth, because he was blind.  But with tender nursing and an excellent daily diet, says Mr Andernach, “his deformed eyes regenerated, and now he can see!”

DISFIGURATIVELY SPEAKING.  “The planets are lined up in a way that the brass ring is ready for us to reclaim City Hall,” says Andi Turco-Levin, freshly endorsed as the Kingston Republican Party committee’s candidate for mayor. (Quoted in Daily Freeman, 6/8/11).