Backgammon lessons kicked off Wednesday, Aug. 13, at The Hotchkiss Library. Instructor Roger Lourie works with Pam Jarvis of Sharon, while his wife, Claude, assists at a second board with Janet Kaufman of Salisbury.
In light of rising local interest in the centuries-old game of Backgammon, Wednesday afternoon backgammon instruction and play sessions are being offered at The Hotchkiss Library of Sharon. The first such session was held on Wednesday, Aug. 13, attracting two enthusiastic participants, both of whom resolved to return for the weekly sessions.
Expert player and instructor Roger Lourie of Sharon, along with his equally expert wife, Claude, led the session, jumping right into the action of playing the game. Claude chose to pair with Janet Kaufman of Salisbury, a moderately experienced player looking to improve her skills, while Lourie teamed himself with Pam Jarvis of Sharon, who was new to the game.
In 2023, Lourie formed Backgammon of Northwestern Connecticut with two objectives: to promote the game in the northwest corner of the state and to teach it to children and adults interested in learning. In addition to the Wednesday sessions at The Hotchkiss Library, an informal, casual group meets at Le Gamin in Sharon every Saturday morning from 9 a.m. to noon.
Acting as co-chairman is Ed Corey who leads the Le Gamin sessions, offering advice and instruction. Both Corey and Lourie play competitively and have distinguished themselves by winning tournaments. There are no fees for participation at either Hotchkiss or Le Gamin. Children, ages 8 and up, are welcome to come and learn the game, along with adults of any experience level.
Lourie says that he can teach a person to play competitively in three lessons.
Sessions at The Hotchkiss Library will continue until the end of the year and perhaps beyond, depending on interest. Lourie will be the instructor until mid-November, when expert player Ed Corey will assume responsibility for the sessions at the Hotchkiss Library.
“We’re hoping for more people and also to see youngsters participating and learning the game,” Lourie said.
“The beginner can be the expert with the right dice,” said Lourie, explaining that it is a game combining chance and strategy. An understanding of mathematics and probability can be helpful.
Lourie summarized the randomness of dice and the strategy of poker. “I want to know the proper etiquette,” Kaufman offered, intent on knowing more about the proper moves, although her play indicated a credible level of skill.
Stopping in to observe the Hotchkiss session, executive director of the library, Gretchen Hachmeister said, “We know that people come to library game sessions. People love games, getting together to learn something new.”
Lourie learned the game under extremely unusual circumstances — as a detainee in a Soviet prison during the1960s missile crisis, while working in Naval Engineering to decipher code for the U.S. Office of Technological Security.
Imprisonment was not terrible, he said. There was predictable questioning by day when he repeated daily the details of his cover story. But at night, the guards — many the same age as the detainees — had finished their shifts and of interrogation.They unplugged the cameras to brew tea and the backgammon games would begin. That was how Lourie learned the game and became an expert.
Board games date back 5,000 years to ancient Mesopotamia. Modern backgammon goes back to 17th-century England, having evolved from a 16th-century game called “Irish.”It grew in popularity in the 1960s, leading to formation of a World Backgammon Club in Manhattan. And then in 2023, Backgammon of Northwestern Connecticut came to be.
To learn more about the Backgammon sessions at The Hotchkiss Library, visit: www.hotchkisslibraryofsharon.org or contact Lourie directly at Rlourie@gmail.com.
Richard Feiner And Annette Stover
May Castleberry at home in Lakeville.
Castleberry’s idea of happiness is “looking at a great painting.”
May Castleberry is a ball of sunshine and passion, though she grew up an introverted child, moving with her family from Alberta to Colorado to Texas, finding comfort in mountains, books and wide-open skies. Today, the former art book editor and museum curator has found a new home in Lakeville, where the natural beauty of the Northwest Corner continues to captivate her. Whether walking with friends, painting, reading or visiting beloved local libraries in Salisbury, Norfolk and Cornwall, Castleberry has embraced the region since making her move permanent in 2022, bringing with her a remarkable career shaped by a lifelong love of books and art.
Castleberry grew up in the world of books, and especially art books, and she credits her artist mother, an avid art book collector, with igniting her passions. Castleberry’s high school art teacher in Dallas understood how to teach students to channel their imaginations into books and art.
Castleberry and her husband, Michael FitzGerald, a professor of art history at Trinity College and research director of an art foundation based in Europe, first moved to Lakeville in 2013 when their son attended Hotchkiss.
In college in Texas and graduate school at Columbia and NYU, Castleberry learned every aspect of fine art book production, from paper and design to the quality of printed reproductions and original works.
“I studied printmaking, design, art history and the history of the book,” said Castleberry. “In college, I learned even more when I started work as an art librarian. I haunted antiquarian and art book shops every weekend in New York City and wherever I traveled and was shaped by what I saw. I also took courses in papermaking and printmaking in my spare time.”
Castleberry entered the museum world in 1980 when she joined the Whitney Museum as a librarian.
“At the time, it was an underfunded one-person library, so not an obvious prize, but it turned out to be a great place to grow.”
When asked to help raise funds for acquisitions, she proposed creating a publishing program and, over the next 17 years, conceived, edited and produced over 20 books as the editor of the Whitney’s Artists and Writers Series. Castleberry also curated exhibitions of books, prints and photographs, culminating in a large-scale show about photography and photobooks titled “Perpetual Mirage: Photographic Narratives of the Desert West” in 1996.
After 20 years at the Whitney, Castleberry moved to the Museum of Modern Art to develop an artist’s book program that would explore the art of the book and help support the museum’s archives and library. This program, the Library Council, continued until Castleberry retired from MoMA late last year. During that time, she also organized an exhibition at New York City’s AXA Gallery on photography of archeological sites in the Americas: “The New World’s Old World.”
Asked about favorite stories from her museum roles, Castleberry recounts “looking for several very different artists to commission to make prints for ‘The Magic Magic Book’ by sleight-of-hand artist, collector and historian of magic Ricky Jay, and approaching artist Tomás Saraceno about making a pop-up book about spiders.”
Shortly after moving to Lakeville permanently, Castleberry heard about a part-time job coordinating events at the Scoville Library. She expected her program at MoMA to be shut down by the pandemic and thought the opportunity would be a great way to get to know the library, its staff and the community.
“I invited the poet Sally Van Doren to start a monthly poetry workshop, and artist and teacher Lily Rand to teach bookbinding and other classes. I was thrilled to bring in the founder of the Brooklyn’s Dieu Donné Papermill — one of the great papermakers in the world — as well as paper marblers and others for a series of outdoor art classes.”
MoMA’s Library Council revived only a few months later, and Castleberry no longer had the time her Scoville work required.
“Happily, I was replaced by the amazing Karen Vrotsos,” said Castleberry of the library’s current head of adult programs. “I am still in close contact with Karen Goodell, the library director, the library staff and some of the trustees.”
Castleberry’s idea of happiness is “looking at a great painting.”
In the region, her favorite art museums are the Clark in Williamstown, Massachusetts — which she recently supported by donating nearly all the books she worked on at the Whitney and MoMA to its art library — as well as Connecticut’s Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford.
Now newly retired from her museum position, Castleberry has returned to her passion for drawing and painting. She’s also in the initial planning stage of a museum book project. Stay tuned for her next chapter.
Kerri-Lee Mayland
Sarah Blodgett has turned her passion for collecting into “something larger.”
There is something wonderfully disarming about walking into a space where nothing feels overly polished, overly planned or pulled from a catalog — a place where history lingers in the corners, where color is fearless, where the objects on the shelves have stories to tell and where, if you are lucky, a cat named Cinnamon may be supervising the entire operation.
That is the world of Sarah Blodgett.
Now part of the creative orbit inside Liz Macaire’s sprawling gallery in West Cornwall, Blodgett’s “Hoarding With Style,” tucked into the upstairs space, feels less like a shop and more like an unfolding conversation about aesthetics, storytelling and the art of living with things that matter.
Born in Manhattan, Blodgett spent weekends and much of her childhood in Gallatin, New York where her family owned a late-1700s farmhouse on a property that once housed an antique store, leaving the barns packed with treasures and forgotten finds.
“I was dusting off antiques instead of playing with toys as a child,” she said, laughing.
In sixth grade, she recruited friends to venture into an abandoned house, move things around, style found objects and create little vignettes while her mother supervised from a nearby chair. Looking back, it seems inevitable that Blodgett would eventually build a business rooted in collecting, storytelling and visual imagination.
Photography came first. Her father was a professional photographer in New York, and Blodgett followed him into the field, eventually building a career photographing wildlife, sports and portraits while simultaneously collecting antiques and pieces that fed her layered aesthetic.
For years, she joked about turning her passion into something larger. She trademarked the name “Hoarding With Style,” a process that took nearly two years. Once it finally came through, she laughed.
“Well, I guess I should use it.”
As photography rapidly changed in the age of cellphones and artificial intelligence, Blodgett began rethinking what creativity could look like moving forward.
“We also realized we had too much stuff,” she said. “So we started selling pieces on Facebook Marketplace.”
Only Blodgett could not help elevating even that process. Inside her Greek Revival home in West Cornwall, she created styled moments around the things she was selling. People responded not just to the objects, but to the feeling behind them.
Her philosophy is approachable, with affordability in mind. She believes homes should evolve slowly over time, layered with meaningful objects, history and personality rather than stripped down into sterile perfection.
“That’s what gives a home a soul,” she said.
Creativity runs throughout the family. Her husband, a German comedian and juggler, performs internationally, while their 22-year-old child, Badger, is heading to the Maryland Institute College of Art this fall. One of the couple’s four children in their blended family, Badger has even sold some of their own pieces through Sarah’s shop.
“My mom has been such a rock star at supporting me,” Badger said.
Working with clients, Blodgett describes herself as less decorator and more “creativity facilitator,” helping people uncover their own instincts through objects that already reflect who they are.
That is exactly what Sarah Blodgett does: She invites visitors not only to explore her journey, but perhaps to begin uncovering their own.
Hoarding With Style is located at 406 Goshen Turnpike, West Cornwall and is open Friday-Sunday 12 to 4 p.m. or by appointment.
Lakeville Journal
SHARON — Dr. Paul J. Fasano DDS, of Brewster, Massachusetts, passed away peacefully after a long illness on May 10, 2026, in Boston.
Born in Boston to Philip and Laura (Stolarsky) Fasano on Dec. 13, 1946, he grew up in Dorchester with his two brothers Philip and William.Paul attended the Boston Latin School and graduated from Boston College in 1968.He later completed Dental School at New York University in 1972.
He had a successful dental practice in Sharon, Connecticut and enjoyed coaching basketball at Housatonic Valley Regional H.S in Falls Village. After retiring to Brewster, he taught at the Dental Hygiene program at Cape Cod Community College.Paul was a passionate Boston College Eagles fan following all of their teams and his devotion to the Red Sox never faded. He delighted in coaching his three sons in basketball and cheering them on during their football games.
Paul leaves behind the love of his life, Judy, whom he married on Dec. 31, 1973.He is survived by his three sons; Christopher of Alexandria, Virginia, Peter of Orleans, Massachusetts, and Matthew of Kennebunk, Maine, along with his four grandchildren Jack, Lily, Zoey, and Chase whom he loved very much.
Visiting hours will be Wednesday, May 20, 2026, from 4:00-6:00 p.m. at Chapman Funerals & Cremations.678 Main Street Harwich, MA 02645.
A Mass of Christian Burial will be held on Thursday, May 21, 2026, at Our Lady of the Cape Church at 11:00 a.m, 468 Stony Brook Road Brewster, Massachusetts 02631.
In lieu of flowers, the Fasano family requests that a donation may be made to the Peter Frates ALS Foundation on Paul’s behalf, as well as his close friend and late brother-in law, Tom Kane.Peter Frates was a BC Baseball Player and founder of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.Donations can be made at www.petefrates.com.
Notes of comfort may be made to his family at www.chapmanfuneral.com.
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Lakeville Journal
KENT — David Niles Parker, 88, of Middletown, Connecticut, passed away at home on May 6, 2026.
Born January 20, 1938, in Wellesley, Massachusetts, the first child to Franklin and Katharine Niles Parker, David graduated from Wellesley High School, received his undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University, studied at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and earned his master’s in education from Harvard.
David met his future wife, Borngy Hammer, at a college mixer, and in 1962 they married at her family home in South Kent. Together they raised four children and were married nearly 64 years.
He taught English in the Boston public schools, and at the New Milford, Connecticut High School, and took on extra work as a stringer for the Waterbury Republican, covering Kent and Gaylordsville, thereby launching his lifelong career in journalism. In 1968 he took on the job of running a small-town paper, The Millbrook Round Table in Millbrook, New York, where he worked as a reporter, managing editor, photographer, circulation manager and ad sales representative and everything in between. He went on to work at the Lakeville Journal, the Waterbury Republican, the Litchfield County Times, the Torrington Register-Citizen, and the Kent Good Times Dispatch. He also taught journalism courses at UConn, Torrington and took on diverse freelance writing projects, including articles for the New York Times, and a biography of Revolutionary War figure, Dr. Thomas Young. During the Vietnam War he participated in peaceful protests with his fellow Teachers Against War.
Never one to speak of himself, his family would find out by other means of his many talents, awards, and accomplishments. He did not belong to a religion, and considered himself an agnostic, but was a most fine example of a moral, ethical, honest, humble, kind, and good human being; he truly treated every person he ever met with kindness and respect.
He was a great lover of poetry, including that of Richard Wilbur, William Yeatts, Dylan Thomas and Carl Sandburg. He was especially fond of reading aloud poems by A. E. Housman. Literature was such an integral part of his life, and he would often explain himself by quoting a passage or referencing a literary character.
He had a lifelong love of singing and enjoyed doing so for children when they were young. He was especially fond of folk and classical music. In his later years one of his pleasures was to remember and share songs he had learned many decades earlier. When his children were young—and not so-young, each night he would let his children choose the songs he’d sing them, many songs he learned from his father (which his children went on to sing to their children, and their children to sing to his great-grandchildren.)
He also sang in various choirs, including the Kent Singers of which he was a proud and a beloved member.
For eighty-seven years, he spent every summer at his beloved family’s cottage in West Falmouth, Massachusetts. Many summer mornings were spent reading the paper at West Falmouth Market, followed by swimming at Chapoquoit Beach. There he spent many evenings sitting on the porch, singing and looking out onto West Falmouth Harbor.
He was also known to many as an avid sports fan, closely following the Boston Red Sox and UConn Women’s Basketball, a passion that he closely shared with his daughter, Caitlin.
Family was very important and dear to him, and he is remembered fondly and in high regard by family, both close and extended.
David is survived by his wife Borgny of Middletown, his children Stephen of Brattleboro, Vermont; Rolf also of Brattleboro, Vermont; Abigail of Kent, Connecticut; and Caitlin of Durham, Connecticut; grandchildren Julia Holly of Portland, Oregon; Madeleine Holly of Salem, Connecticut; Lily DiTota of Falmouth, Massachusetts; Emma Bournival of Watertown, Connecticut; Allison Mullins of New Haven, Connecticut; Finn Bournival of Durham, Connecticut; and Morgen Parker-Houghton of Brattleboro, Vermont; and great grandchildren Klaus and Grant Schubel of Salem, Connecticut; siblings Anne Schmalz of Bedford, Massachusetts; Theodore Parker of Wellesley, Massachusetts; John Parker of Yarmouth, Massachusetts; as well as many nieces, nephews and family friends.
Services include a private burial at Bulls Bridge Cemetery, at 1 p.m. on May 31, which will be followed by a Celebration of Life at the Kent Community House at 2 p.m.
L. Tomaino
Artist Janet Andre Block in her studio in Salisbury.
What do Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s piano concertos and a quiet room have to do with Janet Andre Block’s work? They are among the many elements that shape how she paints, helping guide her into the layered, luminous worlds she creates on canvas.
Block makes layered oil paintings in rich, deep, misty colors. She developed her technique as an undergraduate at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and then at New York University, and also time spent in Venice earning a master’s degree in studio art.
Block speaks warmly of her printmaking teacher, the well-known artist Kiki Smith.
“She was incredibly kind and generous,” Block said. “What I learned in art school is what I want to do.”
During the pandemic, she painted in a world of swirling colors that suggest another world just within this one.
Block’s work will be on display at “Catching Light, 75,” at David M. Hunt Library from May 23-June 19. The opening reception will be Saturday, May 23, from 5 to 7 p.m. and she will give an artist talk Thursday, June 4, at 5:30 p.m.
The exhibit features 75 small paintings representing her varied painting modes.
“I’m offering these as a gift to the library,” she said. “Each donor who gives $75 can choose a painting.”
The paintings are 2-inch squares.
Janet Block discusses painting.L. Tomaino
Block has worked with nonprofit groups in the Northwest Corner for many years. She has been a volunteer for Project SAGE, the Lakeville-based organization committed to ending relationship violence, for many years. She has also served on Trade Secrets Underwriting Committee — the annual garden event that serves as Project SAGE’s largest fundraiser — for 25 years and remembers the first meeting around her dining room table. She served on the board of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation from 1991 to 2000 and was chair of the Fund for the Northwest Corner.
She has stepped back from her work with nonprofits to devote more time to painting, though she still helps where she can.
“I enjoy the early starts of anything. That’s why I like art, where I can start with a blank palette.”
“There is something about picking colors,” she said, describing it as “really a kind of creation — just the pleasure of mixing up a color, finding the next purple,” along with the immediacy of “the feeling of the brush on canvas.”
Block commends Hunt Library’s Art Wall team: Garth Kobal and Sergei and Zoe Fedorjaczenko.
“I think so highly of them,” she said. “I can’t say no to Garth, who is such a sincere, talented and generous person.”
Block is guided by the thought, “You are what you focus on,” and says this, along with the natural world and music, helps her bring herself to “light and beauty” through painting.
For more information about Block and the exhibit, visit huntlibrary.org and janetandreblock.com
Lakeville Journal
CORNWALL — Beloved and greatly respected Cornwall resident Huntington (“Hunt”) Williams, surrounded by family, died April 10, the result of an injury sustained from a fall. He was 95 years old and had lived in Cornwall, a town he loved deeply, for the last 45 years.
A memorial service will be held Sunday, May 31 at 1PM at the North Cornwall Meeting House, burial is private.
A full obituary may be found on https://www.kennyfuneralhomes.com/obi
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