We bought the “Husk House” in Beaverkill in 1964 and came for our first weekend in May, when our daughter, Kate, was only twelve days old. We bought the house with our friends Brenda and Jim Moorman, and none of us really knew much about what we were doing – including taking care of a new baby. But we were confident and enthusiastic, putting Kate in a bureau drawer in the pantry while Brenda and I tried to make chicken and dumplings on the little potbellied stove in the kitchen. Jim and John drew water bucket by bucket from the well and we all tried to figure out how this would work. (The chicken never got cooked and the dumplings were blobs of flour, but the water was cool and delicious).

The water system was primitive; there was no cooking range and no central heat – only kerosene heaters with great pools of spilled fuel around them. The woodwork was painted with mahogany colored deck paint and the floor and shelves were covered with brick patterned linoleum. The house was very dark.

Jim and Brenda spent August painting the siding and shutters, and John and I spent September putting in a hot air furnace. Actually, John spent that month crawling around under the house on his belly, avoiding the animal skeletons while he put in the pipes and vents. I took Kate into the woods behind the house to nurse and watch a little green snake that would appear almost every day.

But all was not work. We had many guests, cooked lots of spaghetti, swam in the river and hiked around the valley where we met our new neighbors.

Ethel Osborn

One of the first people to greet us was Ethel Osborn. She was a widow who spent summers here and made her exodus to Florida right after Election Day in November. Ethel had retired to Beaverkill in the early ’50s with her husband, Kenneth. He had been a US Customs attorney and she had been a teacher for children with heart disease in the Bronx. I still have a manila folder with Ethel’s handwriting on it stating, “Full Time Life in Beaverkill Begins.” I have kept it because it is so emblematic of Ethel – full of optimism and enthusiasm for the future.

Unfortunately, their full time life in Beaverkill did not last very long. In 1956, Ethel awoke one morning to find Kenneth so still beside her that, in her panic, she called her own number over and over to get help before she realized what she was doing. When help arrived, Kenneth was dead of a heart attack.

Although I never met Kenneth Osborn, I often felt his presence beside Ethel, and I know she adored him. She told many loving stories about him – and these stories were always touched with Ethel’s particular sense of humor. Ethel liked to refer to her husband and his friends as the “bad boys”. They played golf down at the Trout Valley Inn golf course and then came back for “Happy Hour” with mixed cocktails served on brightly colored trays and napkins decorated with floating bubbles and other designs suggesting good times. There were invariably little jars of “Saucy Shrimp”, which Ethel continued to serve as long as we knew her. With her own practice of recycling, Ethel gave those jars to neighbors and I still have one which serves as a perfect juice glass.

Ethel was pleased to have a young family living next door. Although she had no children, she was wonderful with kids. Every summer she would organize a peanut hunt, which she gave with her sister Florence, a retired schoolteacher, who spent August with Ethel. The children also soon recognized that she was an easy touch and would pick green beans from my garden and sell them to her for a nickel apiece.

Ethel and Florence had many stories about growing up in the Bronx, and Ethel always went back to Wanamakers in Manhattan to buy her nylon stockings and hairnets. Ethel would drive down to the City in her red convertible, leave it in the Bronx, take the subway into Manhattan to do her errands, and then return to the Bronx, collect her car, and drive home to Beaverkill. These trips continued well into her eighties and whenever we saw her, Ethel was dressed up, complete with high heels, jewelry and makeup.

Ethel loved to go to the Antrim for their “Blue Plate” luncheon special. She often invited me to join her when I was in Beaverkill for the summer, even though I had two small children at the time. I would take them, and they would soon be crawling under the table, restlessly looking for ways to get into mischief. Ethel never once criticized them or me, but always insisted she loved having them around.

She was quite hard of hearing and one day, John Hamilton, my son, was tired and restless so I took him up in my lap.

A friend of Ethel’s who was married to the painter Edgar Whitney, once told me the following story about Ethel. She, the friend, was having trouble with her somewhat temperamental husband and she was pouring her heart out to Ethel.

She was never shocked. We got to know her when she was well into her seventies. Ethel was with us for dinner one night when we had numerous guests from New York. Somehow the conversation turned to the new phenomenon, Topless Bars. The conversation got lively, and finally John, beginning to feel a bit uncomfortable with Ethel sitting quietly beside him as the conversation became more and more graphic, said, “Well, Ethel – all this talk about topless bars and things like that. It’s just a fad – I’m sure there were fads when you were young.”

Larry Vogel tells the story of taking Ethel to Mac and Ross Francis’ for dinner, and when Mac served her favorite, gin and tonic, he said jovially.

“Ethel, here’s a drink that will knock you on your a---!”

Without a moment’s hesitation, and without the least look of disapproval, Ethel looked up at Mac and said:

Ethel often went to church with Mary Cammer, Frank Kinch’s daughter, who lived with Frank and Ike for a few years before she died. Mary made wonderful pies, and saved goose eggs for us – which I never had the courage to eat, except baked in a cake. Frank Kinch, then in his early nineties, referred to them as ‘the girls.’

Ethel told us about Elsie Husk, who lived with her mother in the first house we bought. (We subsequently bought Lucy Ackerly’s big house, where we now live.) Elsie was unmarried and was still quite beholden to her mother even though she was in her fifties. Ethel recounted that when she invited Elsie over for a cocktail, it would not be long before her mother was in the back yard, calling her back. When her mother died, neighbors thought that at last Elsie could have a life of her own. But Elsie became sick with both mental and physical problems and died within a year of her mother.

Over a period of a few years, three young men who were visiting us at different times, insisted they woke up in the downstairs bedroom and saw a woman standing at the foot of their bed. This “ghost” never appeared to me, nor to any female who stayed there. I always wondered if it was Elsie, happy to finally have a man in the house.

Over the twenty years we knew Ethel, she aged gracefully and with good humor. But it was impossible to be sure about her age. A conversation she had with a number of us went:

Ethel Osborn was delightfully humorous, always generous and a joy to have as a neighbor and friend. Her nephew, Daniel Osborn, wrote a poem about her shortly after she died in 1984.

Frank and Ike Kinch

Frank Kinch 1947

We knew Mary Cammer (Mr. Kinch’s daughter) only briefly before she died, but we remained friends with Mr. Kinch (we never called him Frank) and his son Ike. We all knew that Ike kept his special supply of drink in the barn and that was usually where we saw him, but there was no doubt that he kept good care of his very elderly father. We would see Mr. Kinch outside, chipping kindling or checking on things, but often he was in the kitchen. The kitchen was always warmed by the old cook stove and Mr. Kinch spent a great deal of time on a chaise lounge by the window. He had an unplugged refrigerator full of hard candy which he offered guests. He loved to tell stories of how he was asked more than once to pull a car out of a ditch with his trusty workhorses.

In 1966 there was a tremendous snowstorm, starting on Christmas Eve and continuing through Christmas Day. We had twenty six inches of snow. Rudi Mayer was spending the holiday with us and on Christmas morning we walked from our house to Johnson Hill road, which was plowed, and there we met our nephew who drove us to Roscoe. We celebrated Christmas with John’s parents and family and assuming our road had been plowed by then, we left about five o’clock for home.

Our road had not been plowed but we figured we could walk down through the snow to our house, so we started out. John carried Kate, who was two and a half, and I carried John Hamilton, who was two months old. Rudi was wearing some boots I loaned him because he had not brought heavy shoes with him. The snow was thigh deep and still blowing. It was bitterly cold. I felt like we were on the steppes of Russia. We hadn’t gone 200 feet when Rudi fell into the snow with severe leg cramps from wearing the ill fitting boots. John was already exhausted from trying to make a path as he carried Kate.

We saw the lights of the Kinch kitchen, and knew we had found a port in this storm. We struggled to get there, Rudi taking off his boots and walking in stocking feet through the snow. John left us with Ike and Mr. Kinch in the kitchen as he plowed his way to our house to get a toboggan. Rudi, the children and I enjoyed candy and the warmth of the kitchen while we talked about the terrible snowstorm and our adventures. Mr. Kinch nodded and smiled, but didn’t seem too impressed.

When John returned with the toboggan we said good night and thanked Ike and Mr. Kinch profusely for “saving our lives.”

Waving as we left, Mr. Kinch called out from his chaise lounge:

Lucy Ackerly

Another neighbor was Lucy Ackerly. She worked for many years in Liberty for a lawyer and then decided she wanted to open a store. She turned the dining room in the big house into the first “Shop in the Valley”. When we bought her house in 1969, the dining room still had pegboard walls to hang displays. By then Lucy had moved her store to Roscoe. She was living in what had been the dairy on the original farm and had made it into a garage apartment. She lived there alone, and I sometimes saw her light burning as early as 4 a.m. Lucy would be in her kitchen, doing crossword puzzles. Her theory was that you must get up when you wake up, no matter what time it was. If you fall back asleep, you will be groggy all day.

Once this theory worked in her disfavor. It was winter, with long nights. One day when she got home after closing her shop in Roscoe, she fell asleep on the couch. When she woke, she saw it was eight o’clock. She quickly changed clothes and jumped into her little VW “Bug” to get to Roscoe in time to open the store. Only when she got there did she realize it was 8 pm, not 8 am, as she had thought.

She was an independent, feisty woman who had lived by her wits for many years. She inherited her father Andrew Ackerly’s farm and although she did not continue to farm, she knew she had to make use of the land in order to survive financially. Over the years, she sold pieces of the fields behind her house to the Krauses, the Burkitts, the Campbells and finally to the Lawrences, who now own all of the back fields.

Roger Lawrence’s father Phil first came to the Catskills with his family in the early 1900s to spend the summer at the Smith family farm in Dunraven, which is near Margaretville. At that time the Smiths were running a huge boarding house. The Lawrences would take the steamer in Yonkers, sail up the Hudson to Kingston where they would take the train to Arkville. In Arkville someone from the Smith family would pick them up.

As a teenager Phil Lawrence had been sickly and one year he stayed on in Dunraven after his family returned to Yonkers. The Smiths had 12 children, one of whom was Selwyn Smith, later known as Doc after he had become a dentist. Phil Lawrence and Doc Smith became life-long friends. One summer they drove together across the United States in a car that they had jerry-built out of parts that they scrounged up. The car required repair almost every day. When they got to California it died. To get home they signed on as crew on a freighter bound for NY through the Panama Canal. Phil painted decks while Doc worked in the kitchen.

It was because he had known the general area as an adolescent that Phil decided to bring his family to Beaverkill for the summer in the early ’40s. At that time Roger was about 6. His family ended up renting various cabins from the Woelfles for three summers. Roger remembers going down to watch Andrew Ackerly milk his cows and make butter.

The fact that Doc Smith and Lucy Ackerly became constant companions in the ’60s had nothing to do with the fact that Phil Lawrence had known the Ackerly family in the ’40s. However, Doc did know that the Lawrences had spent summers in Beaverkill and when Lucy decided to sell one of her cabins in summer of 1967, Doc called Roger’s father, Phil. Phil was not interested, but Roger and Ginny were, and they drove up the very next Saturday to have a look. The cabin in question had been built by the Civilian Conservation Corps and in 1939 had been hauled from the campsite through the covered bridge and deposited in Andrew Ackerly’s field. Dick Fischer and his family had stayed in it for many summers. The asking price for the cabin, which included about half an acre of land, was $2000 – prices in 1967 not being what they are today! (Also in 1967 what is now the Beaverkill Valley Inn was on the market for $60,000 – and the price included about 100 acres of land.)

Lizzie, Teddy, and Tommy one year later in 1968

For Roger and Ginny the only problem with the cabin was, in fact, the cost. But by dinner time they told Lucy they wanted to buy, on Tuesday evening she called them in the city to say the cabin was theirs, and on Friday Ginny, Roger, Lizzie (2) and Tommy (6 months) moved in. Lucy, with her typical generosity and tact, never chose to mention that people don’t usually move into a house before the closing. Instead, she invited Ginny to look around the big house and take whatever furniture she needed. The cabin was small, but Ginny chose two bureaus from the house. The closing, which took place in Lucy’s kitchen, didn’t occur until the end of August, by which time Ginny had already spent many summer evenings playing Scrabble with Lucy, and the children had bonded with Lucy’s dog, Teddy.

The Lawrence cabin had electricity but no running water. Providentially, the Campbells and the Burkitts immediately invited Roger and Ginny to hook up to their water line. But the water was only for the summer, and in any case there was no heating system, not even a woodstove for a couple of years. Once they started coming up in the winter, Ginny and the kids would visit with Lucy every Friday evening, while Roger pulled water and supplies by sled up to the cabin and got the fires going in the woodstove. Lucy by this time had moved out of the big house into the apartment above the garage. For Ginny and the kids this was a warmer alternative than hiking up to the cold cabin. They would stay with Lucy for about two hours, the kids playing all over the house while Ginny and Lucy sat in the kitchen, drank scotch and talked.

During the summer time, Doc liked to surprise the Lawrences with his instant barbeque. He would drive into their yard, often as late as 9 p.m., take a grill out of his trunk, fill it with charcoal, pour on some lighter fluid and plop two big steaks on to cook. He wouldn’t take no for an answer – not even if the Lawrences had already gone to bed! The steaks were on, and it would soon be time to eat.

In the same field with the Lawrences were the Burkitts and the Campbells and the Krauses. The Krauses (from Liberty) had the corner lot just above the campsite where they had built a little cabin. The Burkitts and the Campbells each had a trailer. John Burkitt had been a Fire Chief in New York City and John Campbell had been one of his firemen. They had decided to buy up the entire field (excluding the Krause corner) to prevent its being parceled off. John Campbell chose an acre along the river edge, where the big pine tree now stands, and John Burkitt took the rest of the field. Ultimately, over a period of about 20 years, the Lawrences bought up the entire field from their neighbors. The original Krause cabin is still standing, but the trailers were sold in the end. The Burkitt trailer now has a home below Lake Muskoday and is occupied full time. As for the Lawrence “cabin”, a house has grown up around it. But the CCC cabin is still inside.

Lucy’s dog, Teddy, lived to be a ripe old age. She never tied him up or even left him inside when she was away, and he would roam around the neighborhood and get handouts. But, unfortunately, he also liked to go down to the campsite where he had learned to expertly grab a steak right off a grill and run with it.

Once, when Lucy was sitting out on her back porch enjoying her afternoon cocktail, an irate man drove onto her lawn and started shouting at her.

Just then Teddy decided to go out and greet the irate camper, tottering a bit on his old legs.

It was Lucy Ackerly who helped start the traditional Christmas Eve service. When Larry Vogel came to her with the idea of opening the church for a carol sing, she immediately gave him the keys, thrilled that the “newcomers” wanted to use the church. Because of Lucy, residents of the community, whether they were members of the church or not, were welcome to have christenings, weddings and funeral services there. Lucy helped establish the church as a true community institution.

Jessica Foote

Another neighbor was Jessica Foote, who we always called Mrs. Foote. Jim Moorman discovered her one afternoon on a walk.

Mrs. Foote became a good friend to us all. She was very interested in our young children and would invite us for tea in front of her large fireplace. We usually had Ritz crackers with jelly and delicious English tea served in chipped, but elegant china cups. She would show her wonderful music box to the children who were always enthralled with the intricate wheels and tines resonating with melody. She gave Kate her first piano lessons one summer.

Mrs. Foote had a way of seeing the world in her own particular frame of reference, as when she commented that the red overalls our two year old son John Hamilton was wearing looked just like the red used in one of her favorite paintings at the Frick museum.

She gave me interesting presents; a gold lame “picture dress”, a beautifully smocked gown for our new son, Ramsay, and a set of very old lampshades which we had fitted for our wall lights in our 19th century NYC apartment.

She also loved her gardens, and said it was a great joy to look out every window and see where she had either thrown or planted flower seeds. Rudi Mayer worked with her in her flower gardens for a couple of summers. I would bring our children over in the late afternoon and she and Rudi, who she always called Mr. Mayer, would both seem very happy as he trimmed and transplanted and she stood beside him, in her pith helmet, giving instructions. We would then all go swimming in Clear Lake, where she continued wearing her pith helmet. A slight gust of wind or a bird flying or a ripple on the water would remind her of a poem. She would look at the children and say a line such as, “ ‘Come!’ said the wind, ‘Come play with me!’ ” and the children would immediately fall silent and listen to her as she recited the whole poem. She fascinated them.

I was finishing up my undergraduate degree at NYU and was taking a course in contemporary English Literature and Mrs. Foote was curious about what students were reading. It did not seem appropriate to give her Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange” with its violence and sexuality, but it was wonderful to get her opinion (not very high) of Evelyn Waugh.

Mrs. Foote was proud of her frugality, and showed me how to boil corn cobs to make a broth and how to take a hard peach and put it near the pilot light on the stove so it would be ripe and soft by morning.

She was a very real presence in our early years here in Beaverkill, and we treasured the time we spent with her.

Rudi Mayer

Rudi with his harmonica and "The Molly"

Another neighbor Jim Moorman discovered while he was traipsing through the woods was Rudolf Mayer, who lived up in Laraway Hollow. For a long time we called him “Mr. Bear”, as we didn’t understand him well with his strong Austrian accent. In the end, however, we came to know him as Rudi.

Rudi began to visit us often after Jim “found” him, always bringing something from his garden. The first zucchini I ever saw were from Rudi. They were the size of baseball bats, and the only way I could get anyone to eat them was to stuff them with tomatoes and mozzarella cheese so they tasted like pizza. It was only later when I saw the small ones that I realized you could sauté them for a couple of minutes, rather than bake them in the oven for an hour.

Outside of “the good water” in Beaverkill, Rudi’s two favorite things were blueberries and plum dumplings. Every summer he would take us somewhere in Debruce where there were high meadows of blueberries. We would pick while the children played hide-and-seek among the bushes.

Plum dumplings came in the fall, when Rudi’s plum trees were full of small sweet plums. He invited John and me for a plum dumpling lunch one warm September day, and at the last minute John was unable to come. Rudi had no phone, so I knew I had to go and try to do justice to the plum dumplings. He had been up early, built a fire in his wood cook stove and had spent hours preparing the dumplings.

When I got there they were ready to be dropped in the water – all twenty-six of them. He said he could eat twelve at a sitting, so he had made plenty for me and John. These were made from potatoes and flour, so they weren’t exactly light. I knew I had to do Rudi’s hard work justice, but after two plum dumplings, I was full. I was also six month’s pregnant, which actually worked to my advantage. I HAD to do something with all those dumplings, so I tucked about four into my maternity blouse, which had elastic around the bottom. The rest, Rudi packed up for John to eat, although he insisted plum dumplings completely lost their taste if you didn’t eat them as soon as they came out of the water. I lumbered back down the hill with about a dozen plum dumplings on my person.

He told stories of growing up on a hardscrabble farm in Austria, where his parents took produce to the market on Saturdays with a dog cart. His parents died when he was young, and his older sister took care of the family, while she worked in a factory. He told me that the only time she got angry with him was when he forgot to build a fire so she could cook dinner because he was chasing after a fire engine. After working for a time on a farm where he slept in the barn and was given little to eat, he came to America and found work in a bakery on Pleasant Avenue in the Bronx. He bought the Laraway Hollow house with his brother and sister-in-law, and they made valiant efforts to create electricity from water power, but when we met Rudi the house was much the same as it had been for a hundred years. After his relatives died he lived there alone.

One day Rudi appeared and announced he had sold his house. We were dismayed, but he said he was sure he had had a heart attack and he didn’t want to live alone any more. He also needed money for dental work, so he had sold his property. This was in the fall, and by the next spring, we had asked Rudi to come on back to Beaverkill and live with us for the summer, which he did.

He was wonderful to all of us. Our youngest son, Ramsay, was always special to Rudi and he spent much time holding him on his lap while he played his harmonica. He left the harmonica to Ramsay when he died.

We had two new dogs that summer, a highly strung but beautiful vizsla and a calm but deer chasing English shepherd. They adored Rudi. He referred to them as “The Molly” and “The Huckleberry” and they rarely left his side.

He established our vegetable garden for us, moving tons of rocks and trapping endless woodchucks. We lived like kings with all the produce from his garden, the wonderful music he played and the true kindness and good will that he brought with him.

During one of my last visits with him, when he was very sick, I said, “Rudi, you’re going to pull out of this – you always do. You know what you say about the ‘good water’ in Beaverkill. Drinking that water all those years has made you strong.”

Rudi’s eyes brightened and he said, “Yes, the good water. And the good blueberries!”

Our neighbors from those early years in Beaverkill were an essential part of our life. So much of their spirit and generosity lives on in our gardens, our homes, the church and in the good will that permeates this valley.