In this issue we revive a column the News ran for a time in the late 90s called Neighbor to Neighbor. As the title implies, it’s a way for us to come to know the answer to the question the late, great Fred Rogers posed: who are the people in your neighborhood? We begin this month by introducing Genevieve Trono, who, with this issue, also becomes a TCN contributing writer.
In 1947, at the age of 17, Alice traveled to France with the Experiment in International Living on the S.S. Marine Tiger, a converted troop ship from WWII. She spent the summer as a counselor in southern France at a camp for boys whose fathers had been killed. Their assignment was to bring the boys back to health. The next year, she spent a summer hiking in Swedish Lapland and leading a climbing group near Annecy, France.
Barrie Dunsmore died on Sunday, Aug. 26, in Washington D.C. of congestive heart failure. He was 79 years old.
Full Belly Farm is a very important place to Becca Von Trapp. She has been farming there for the past seven years. Full Belly is a 400-acre, certified organic farm in the Capay Valley in Northern California (not to be confused with a farm with the same name in Hinesburg) that has produced organic fruits, vegetables, nuts and a variety of meats for over 30 years.
Michaela Flore has been a member of the Charlotte community all her life and thoroughly enjoyed growing up here as the oldest of three sisters. Her father, Josh Flore, is a Shelburne police officer. Michaela feels proud of her parents because they worked hard to give her and her sisters a good life. “Growing up in Charlotte made me proud of how hard my parents worked. I have respect for the farmers, too, growing up so close to them,” she says. Some of her favorite places in Charlotte are the library, the beach and the Charlotte Central School soccer fields.
“I like being a Selectboard member because I feel like I’m contributing to my community,” Fritz Tegatz said about his service on the Charlotte Selectboard. Tegatz has been elected to the Selectboard twice, in 2014 and in 2017.
Perhaps it was South Africa’s recent political history, or maybe it was the excitement of going to a place that I believed was the polar opposite of the small Vermont town I grew up in, but around Christmas of 2017, I found myself packing my bags to embark on a five-month study abroad program in Durban, South Africa.
Charlotte’s own impresario, Mel Kaplan, has proven to be just as indefatigable as ever. Once again he has put together a series of music jewels for the summer. It was almost 45 years ago when he founded the original Vermont Mozart Festival, and, after it ceased eight years ago, he formulated a new way of providing high-quality musical events every summer. This summer is no different, as he has assembled three chamber concerts presenting works spanning Mozart’s creative years of 1756-1791.
In his classic poem, “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost quotes his neighbor who says, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Well, that may have been true for those two, but my neighbor of several decades, the recently deceased John Sheehan, and I did not need a good fence to respect and enjoy our neighborliness.
On the morning of March 2, Helena Spear warmly welcomed me into her home to talk about her life in Charlotte, their family businesses and her husband, William Spear, or Bid, who died at home on February 19.
Charlotter Jim Hyde was recently was voted Comcast Vermont Mentor of the year for 2018. A retired college professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, Jim decided that he did not want to give up working with students and helping them learn, so he looked for a program in which he could put skills that he had used over the years to younger students’ benefit. Four years ago he discovered Charlotte Central School’s “Connecting Youth” mentoring program through its director, Wendy Bratt.