SHARON – Family histories are inherently complicated, but few more so than Ian Gill’s. On the snowy afternoon of Sunday, April 19, the Manila, Philippines-based writer brought that dramatic lineage from —the subject of his 2024 book “Searching for Billie” —from the bygone days of early 20th century China into the warm interior of the Hotchkiss Library.
Over the course of an hour, Gill demonstrated to an eager audience of 20 that with a little digging – or rather several decades of it, in his case – the stories of our mothers, fathers and the ancestors before them can reveal startling truths about ourselves.
“You were two sons rolled into one,” Gill told the audience his mother, the Billie of his book’s title, had said to him long ago. “I didn’t know what that meant, and it took me 40 years to figure that out,” he recalled.
The story revolves primarily around Billie Newman, an orphaned child raised by a Chinese-born white British father and Chinese mother who showed up in a basket one day at the couple’s doorstep. Billie went on to work for influential magazine T’ien Hsia Monthly, then as a wartime radio broadcaster, then for top government advisors, and ultimately ran the Secretariat of the United Nations Disarmament Conference until her retirement, for which she was awarded a Member of the British Empire award. This was all despite pressures from the Sino-Japanese War, family tragedy, single motherhood and racism, Gill emphasized.
But the history also carries with it Gill’s own journey of self-discovery, which began with his first visit to Hong Kong with his mother in 1975, when he was a 29-year-old journalist based in New Zealand. That trip, he recalled during a cozy reception for the event hosted by his friend and Sharon local Bill Cowie Sunday evening, “lifted the curtain” not only on his mother’s vast life story, but on the “vanished” China of yesteryear and, crucially, on himself.
“Her story is my story,” he said, “including finding my father at the end – the other half of the genetic jigsaw.”
Billie, pictured right with young Ian Gill, became close with influential journalist and writer Emily Hahn, left, when she worked for T'ien Hsia Monthly in the 1930s and reunited after the war.Photo provided by Gill Archives
The centerpiece of Gill’s book, and of Sunday’s presentation, is the tragic drowning of Billie’s first son, Brian, and subsequent conception of Ian himself, all of which took place during four brutal years living in an internment camp while Hong Kong was occupied by the Japanese between 1941 and 1945.
Brian’s father, an Irishman serving in the British Army, had since left the picture, and Billie spent her years on the internment camp as a single mother.
Gill told the audience that conditions were dismal, with up to 50 people sharing just a few rooms. “The worst thing though were the rations,” he said. “Hunger was a constant problem.”
After Brian’s death, a “cynical journalist,” per Gill’s description, named George Giffen comforted Billie, and eventually she became pregnant again. “Their relations had deepened,” Gill put it wryly.
Gill recounted that his mother revealed an illuminating memory of the grief period to him when he was well into adulthood: “All I could think of was to replace my loss.” Thus, Ian became the two sons rolled into one.
At the end of the war, Giffen returned to a previous marriage in Canada, and Gill would not see him until he was 40 years old, having tracked him down to a remote island in British Columbia. Despite the circumstances, Gill said he and his father grew close for the remainder of Giffen’s life.
Back at Cowie’s home high in the Sharon hills, Gill said that he and his old university friend – the two had met in England over 60 years ago – only realized the previous evening that both had met their dads as adults. Cowie reunited with his father at 21 after not seeing him since early childhood.
“Two boys, him and me, looking for our fathers” was how this story of faraway countries and timelines connects to Sharon, Gill said, since Cowie was the reason he had come to Sharon to tell his story.
Aside from his immediate family, Gill’s research reveals fascinating tales from other pockets of his ancestry, such as his great-grandmother who hailed from a country parish in western England and eventually became a hotelier in a Chinese resort town, and her son, Billie’s adopted father, who developed postal routes in remote parts of China and broke social customs by marrying a Chinese woman. He eventually left her, and the family, for an affair with a Russian woman stuck in China following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
The rest of the details are in the book, Gill said with a smile.
“Searching for Billie: A journalist’s quest to understand his mother’s past leads him to discover a vanished China,” was published by Hong Kong English-language company Blacksmith Books and is distributed in the U.S. by Simon & Schuster. It’s available for purchase online via Amazon and other retailers.
The Edgewood Restaurant, a beloved Amenia roadside restaurant run by George and Anne Phillips, pictured during its peak years in the 1950s and ’60s.
It began as a former gas station and tavern called The Narrows, on the road to Sharon, around a switchback east of Troutbeck. It became a roadhouse restaurant for weddings, bar mitzvahs, proms, graduations, birthdays and holidays with relatives. At Easter, New Year’s and Christmas, George and Anne served the food free — customers only paid for drinks as a thank-you for another good year.
It was a different time. Amenia was an isolated dairy farming community, and two large state psychiatric hospitals employed 4,000 potential diners. People needed a friendly neighborhood restaurant run by a local couple who knew everybody. They offered special-occasion favorites: fried chicken, meatloaf, sliced turkey with gravy, pork chops from nearby farms, and fresh white bread baked at 4 a.m. by George.
There was no maître d’. Waitresses, many still teenagers, greeted guests and helped them find a table. Cloth napkins and sturdy white plates sat in a knotty pine dining room that felt more like a family home than a formal restaurant. Large tables down the center accommodated families. George and Anne fed the staff before opening, and everyone ate the same meals served to customers. Everything was homemade classics of the 1950s and ’60s: cold shrimp and cocktail sauce, stuffed mushrooms, veal parmesan, King crab, clams and oysters on the half shell, chopped hamburger steak, French onion soup, fried chicken and pumpkin pie.
George was a tough but fair boss with a quirky sense of humor. Former employee Kevin Rooney, who worked there as a teenager, recalled being served a hot fudge sundae on a sweltering day — only to discover the “ice cream” was Crisco. Revenge came later in the form of a Coke spiked with Tabasco sauce.
George also kept a series of German shepherds — Rinny, Schultz and Dooley — named after a Jonathan Winters routine featuring talking beer steins. The dogs were locked inside at night for security. Tony Robert, another former employee, remembered coming in one day to find Schultz with the seat of someone’s pants in her jaws. When kids tried to sneak into a dance through the bathroom window after the fire marshal had closed the overcrowded place, George put Rinny in the restroom. Problem solved.
Anne also ran a no-nonsense operation. She marked liquor bottles at night so no one would sneak a drink, though the cleanup crew found ways around it, sipping the blackberry liquer instead. Along with cooking and baking everything from scratch, she raised their children in a life closely tied to the restaurant. The bus dropped their daughters off there after school, and one recalled doing homework while the family spent more time in the restaurant than in their nearby home.
George Phillips bakes fresh bread in the early morning hours at the Edgewood Restaurant.Provided
After 23 years of long hours — often more than 100 a week — George began stepping back, at times closing the restaurant to recover. He later moved into real estate and Anne opened a successful craft store.
George sold the place in 1972. At one point, it became a lively beer joint and concert venue, featuring local bands, such as Random Concept, Little Village and Good Friend Coyote. When New York lowered its drinking age to 18 — while it remained 21 just across the state line — it drew crowds from Connecticut. Locals called them “Connecticut Rags,” kids with fancy cars who came to dance, drink and sometimes fight, rocking the floors so hard they bounced like a trampoline and shook dust from the rafters.
At closing time, they had to dodge police waiting across the state line. Sometimes Jack Rooney, Kevin’s father and the bartender, drove them home. One morning, Betty Rooney got a call from a worried mother asking if her son was there. “If he’s wearing red tennis shoes,” she said, “he’s asleep on my front lawn.”
The Edgewood also drew actors from the Sharon Playhouse and notable visitors, including Paul Newman, Cole Porter and even Supreme Court justices. George showed silent movies on a sheet in the dining room, and guests could dance to the Les Schulman Orchestra or to George and his brothers, who had their own band.
It served as a gathering place for groups such as the Eastern Artificial Insemination Cooperative and for events like the Knights of Columbus Communion breakfast. Families marked milestones there — including one that celebrated five birthdays at a Palm Sunday brunch in 1970.
Christmas dinner cost $3 and included stuffed olives, roast pig, prime rib, Virginia ham, deep-sea scallops, Long Island duck, creamed onions and, of course, crème de menthe parfait. On New Year’s Eve 1959, dinner was $15 a couple — $7.50 each for all the champagne you could drink.
The venue came to an end when the building burned to the ground in 1985.
The building is gone, but not the memories — the laughter, the music, the meals, and George carving steaks by hand. He lived a century, but the Edgewood, for those who knew it, was timeless.
Next time you’re driving to Sharon and pass the empty, weedy lot with a rusty electric meter, imagine calling George’s old number to make a reservation for a place that lives on in memory.
Minimalist works by Agnes Martin on display at Dia:Beacon.
Martin, the Canadian-born New York and New Mexico resident who died in 2004, made the kind of ambiguous abstract art that inspires countless imitators and interpreters.
At first glance, most of the pieces in the new show, “Painting Is Not the Act of Painting,” (on display until June 22) are variations on simple lines and grids painstakingly applied by the artist’s own hand using paint and pencil.
Despite their relative simplicity, it took Martin years of rejecting her own artwork to reach this level of pure abstraction. She would often take knives to paintings she didn’t like, literally slashing work that didn’t live up to her expectations. It wasn’t until she was in her 50s that she began making the work she would become known for.
That evolution is reflected in the exhibition’s 24 works.
Dia:Beacon seems like a perfect place for them. The museum is a monument to simplicity. Even the most complicated pieces are abstractions in their own ways. A straight, unpainted plywood wall with diagonal backing by Donald Judd suggests a room under construction. Michael Heizer’s singular ovoid boulder embedded into a gallery wall strikes unease into visitors.
Subtle grids and softly layered lines by Agnes Martin draw the eye at Dia:BeaconD.H. Callahan
Martin’s pieces feel at home here. In the context of such visual, if not conceptual, simplicity, her art seems louder than it might in almost any other setting. Faint blue and peach stripes gain vibrancy when compared with the all-white canvases of Robert Ryman or the large gray mirrors of Gerhard Richter, both a few rooms away. By comparison, the visibly human-drawn lines of pencil or etched-out paint seem almost complicated, and technically masterful.
It’s enough to make you ponder the name of the exhibition, “Painting Is Not the Act of Painting,” pulled from a quote by Martin: “Painting is not making paintings; it is a development of awareness. And with this awareness, your work changes, but very slowly.”
In a world where studio assistants and fabricators contribute to the output of many artists, Martin relished the act of painting. She painted nearly every day of her adult life. For her, the process was an integral part of the work, and it’s hard to look at these pieces without appreciating her hand.
This repetitive study is also demonstrated across the hall in a gallery dedicated to a single work by Andy Warhol. The piece, “Shadows,” is a study of variations on a single subject. Warhol took photos of shadows in his office and, using a silkscreen process, painted them 102 times on identically sized canvases.
Walking into the room, it may seem like the same image repeated. On closer inspection, the canvases vary widely in color and composition. The work suggests that repetition can produce unexpected forms.
Agnes Martin has become enshrined as one of the leaders of the minimalist movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Her work and artistic philosophies have inspired countless admirers. This exhibition displays a selection of important pieces from nearly 50 years of practice.
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