Our motto here at “The Freeman’s Journal” and “Hometown Oneonta” is “putting the community back into the newspaper.” Whether you read our hard-copy newspapers or subscribe to our website, AllOtsego.com, we believe it is important to not only cover the news of Otsego County, but also to provide a forum by which its residents can contribute their own views and expertise.…
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terry berkson
We left the city to take the Taconic Parkway to the “Rip Fan Vinkle Buddige” as Aunt Ruta called it. Later, we passed through Middleburg and Cobleskill and smaller towns like Preston Hollow and Lawyersville. I’d been making this trip so often that the Corvette almost knew its way by heart.…
When Aboud arrived in New York, he couldn’t speak a word of English. He’d enter an eatery and cluck like a chicken in order to get a plate of scrambled eggs. Life was rough, but much better than back in Aleppo.…
We lived in Bensonhurst, in a 12-room Victorian that had been divided into apartments. I occupied the second floor with my dad, while Chickie and his wife and two babies lived on the first floor and my Aunt Edna and Uncle Dave and their sons Leo and Charlie lived on the attic floor. There was also Mr. Bilideau, the boarder, who was a leftover from the time when my grandmother had rented rooms. There had once been a Mr. Yumtov…
I was a late starter at deer hunting because I moved back to Brooklyn just before I turned 16. It was while in the Army and reading Hemingway and Faulkner that I got the bug to hunt whitetails on Panther Mountain with my old friend Gerard in Richfield Springs.…
I have a tremendous resistance to change. I guess that’s why, in my 50s, I had the same bicycle for 43 years, the same power lawn mower for 40 years and the same old Chevy convertible for more than 30 years. Alice, my wife of 27 years at that time, must have felt pretty secure knowing my propensity for maintaining the status quo.…
Once a year, Dad would let the Buick down and get it started, not without a lot of trouble. It was always a group effort. Roger’s father and a couple of other guys on the block would help push it out onto the driveway. They’d inflate the tires and trickle gas into the carburetor.…
For several years, my wife Alice and I have been attending a summer concert that takes place at the Windfall Dutch Barn in Salt Springville, New York. There’s always a different group that comes to entertain, but musician and composer Carlton Clay usually enthusiastically presides over the event. One year, conductor and pianist Charles Schneider, accompanied by four singers, came to explain and then demonstrate how Leonard Bernstein almost mathematically put together “West Side Story”—not to mention words by Stephen…
I knew they didn’t like American soldiers in Germany, but I didn’t encounter unfriendly vibes from the French until attending the Running of the Bulls in July of 1966 in Pamplona, Spain. I am a Francophile, due to my maternal grandmother’s origin being a French mountain village in the province of Auvergne.…
Iron String Press is the sole remaining independent and locally owned newspaper publishing enterprise in Otsego County. Through its print publications and its digital counterpart, AllOtsego.com, Otsego County households have the benefit of local news in local hands at a time when the U.S. is losing an average of more than two community newspapers each week.…