The first person I ever voted for, former Congressman Peter Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, died May 23 at the age of 95. I don’t remember why I voted for him or who ran against him, but by all accounts, Frelinghuysen was a good choice. He was running for his first term then and he’d be re-elected for the next 20 years. His son occupies the seat now. But then as now, being a Frelinghuysen in New Jersey was quite an advantage. He was a member of a political dynasty that produced, since the 1790s, four United States senators as well as the two House members. One of the senators, Theodore Frelinghuysen, was Henry Clay’s running mate in 1844. They lost, despite their catchy campaign ditty, “Hurrah, Hurrah! The country’s risin’ for Henry Clay and Frelinghuysen.” Theodore was a Whig but my Frelinghuysen was a Republican in a very Republican district. He turned out to be a liberal Republican, a rare species then and practically extinct today. Alf Landon, the 1936 Republican presidential candidate, described them best when he said, “I believe a man can be a liberal without being a spendthrift.”Frelinghuysen was not only my first Republican vote, he was also my last, except for Lowell Weicker, who may have been a Republican one of the times I voted for him. Had 19-year-olds been allowed to vote in 1952, as they can now, Dwight Eisenhower would have been my first vote and first Republican because, having lived under only Democratic presidents in my lifetime, I figured it was time for a change. Besides, being for Eisenhower in Madison, N.J., was a liberal position. My parents and the neighbors supported Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican.”But I didn’t vote for Eisenhower or Democrat Adlai Stevenson four years later. I had just completed basic training at the time and had become disillusioned with both candidates because of the Hungarian Revolution, which broke out just weeks before the 1956 rerun between Eisenhower and Stevenson. When John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, urged the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe to revolt, I naively believed he was telling them the United States would help. And when both Ike and Adlai were silent on helping the Hungarian Freedom Fighters, I rejected both of them. My political thinking hadn’t extended to considering the advisability of getting into a world war at that point.I did support Frelinghuysen’s bid for a second term on my absentee ballot because shortly after his election in 1954, he became one of the first Republicans to speak out against the reprehensible Republican senator, Joe McCarthy.“By remaining silent we permit the public to believe that most Republicans condone the senator’s tactics,” he wrote. “By remaining silent we lend credence to the view that we prefer to risk losing our freedom than to offend a questionable ‘asset’ to our party.” That was heroic talk for a Republican then.Felinghuysen would also be among the Republicans supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He did oppose President Lyndon Johnson’s antipoverty programs, rightly fearing the Great Society would “spawn its own bureaucracy” and “duplicate existing federal programs,” according to his obituary in The New York Times. But unlike today’s Republicans, he offered an alternative, administering some of the same programs through existing agencies.Frelinghuysen’s monument is New Jersey’s Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. Had it not been for the congressman, the 10,000-acre refuge would today be the Great Swamp International Airport. The Port of New York Authority insisted no other site would do for a badly needed fourth Greater New York Airport in 1959, and that may have been true, as no fourth airport has been built in the ensuing 52 years.Had I remained in New Jersey, my voting record, at least for Congress, would have been more bipartisan, but I never found Republican House candidates like Frelinghuysen in the Connecticut districts where I lived and voted beginning in 1958. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, I didn’t leave the Republican Party, I left New Jersey. Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.
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Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.
“I was a library kid. I walked to the library after school,” she said.
For Sher, the library is as much about the people as it about the books.
“Part of the job I love so much is that running the library is such a community,” she said.
She treasures the relationships she has built, whether recommending books, celebrating accomplishments or helping patrons through difficult times.
“I am thankful that our community is so supportive of the library, unlike what is happening in some other places where librarians are villainized,” Sher said.
Sher takes pride in the Hunt Library’s reputation for being “open and welcoming to everyone. People come in and see things and get pulled into things they weren’t expecting. Our library is seen as a positive force.”
Sher came to Falls Village after being awarded a fellowship at Adamah Farm, then a program of the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center. She worked at pickling, in the greenhouse and later in the development office. She also worked as a nanny.
At the same time, “I was in the library all the time,” she recalled. “I’m a voracious reader. The library is where I met a lot of my first friends in Falls Village.”
She became assistant librarian at Hunt and worked in that position for almost a decade before becoming the executive director four years ago.
Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.L. Tomaino
Sher met her husband, Adam, while working at Adamah. They had their wedding there in 2012. He now emcees many events which she co-organizes with the Falls Village Recreation Commission.
Sher and her family live near the library.
“It’s an easy commute,” she said with a smile. “My kids run back and forth. I can go home to walk the dog if I need to.”
“My kids have grown up here.” Her oldest son, Eli, “loves volunteering. He helps with Augustfest and often helps set up chairs for ArtWall gatherings.” Her younger son, Noah, is often at events and was eager to taste cookies at last year’s holiday cookie swap.
When she is not at the library, Sher likes to hike with her family. Bella, their Portuguese water dog, often accompanies them.
Sher enjoys seeking out people to offer events at the library.
“I do a lot of different community programming. It is one of my favorite parts of the job.”
Augustfest, featuring food, music and an auction, is the library’s biggest fundraiser.
“This summer we had a record 152 attendees, which was pretty incredible.”
Yonah Sadeh, a filmmaker from Falls Village, inaugurated the VideoWall this year, Sher explained.
“I’ve known Yonah since he was two. It’s wonderful to work with him as an adult.”
The VideoWall complements the library’s ArtWall, which showcases a new artist each month. Sher praised the ArtWall committee for its work and highlighted December’s popular “12x12 Show,” featuring works by local artists, each measuring 12 by 12 inches and priced at $150.
Sher added that some of the artists who exhibit at the ArtWall offer workshops to students at Kellogg School, next door to the library. In September, artist Danielle Mailer worked with the children. Vincent Inconiglios taught a class last November.
Being next to the school, said Sher, is a great advantage.
“Kids are coming after school, to see friends, work on projects, find a great book. Kids that love the library end up using the library as grownups.”
This past year, in partnership with Adamah, the library and school created a garden, with excess produce made available at The Center on Main.
This year is Sher’s second year participating in the Troutbeck Symposium in Amenia with James King, director of the library at Salisbury School. The Troutbeck Symposium is “a gathering of a year of student historical inquiry across the region” in which students “uncover stories that have been overlooked, forgotten, or never recorded.”
Last year, Sher and King began a project with a group of students researching Irish immigrants in Falls Village, exploring ancestry and creating small magazines about their findings.
They continued this year, visiting St. Patrick’s Catholic Cemetery on Dublin Road, cleaning seven gravestones and even righting one with the help of stonemason and gravestone restoration expert Karl Munson. Paul Kozeazny, a representative of the Catholic archdiocese, helped secure access to the site.
A film documenting their activities will be shown at the symposium in spring 2027.
A full schedule of programs and events, ranging from tech help to ceramic mug-making, can be found on the library’s website.
Despite spending her days surrounded by books, and a busy schedule of programming, Sher still loves to settle in with a book at home.
For more information on library programs and events, visit huntlibrary.org
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Touré was born in northern Mali in 1981. His father, the renowned guitarist Ali Farka Touré, came from a family of soldiers and wanted his son to join the army. The younger Touré studied drums and the calabash and practiced guitar in secret. He earned his father’s blessing to pursue music shortly before Ali died in 2006, and they played two tracks together on Vieux’s debut album.
Touré is known for his deft, polyrhythmic playing, and his songs grow out of riffs that repeat and layer to hypnotic effect. He draws on rock, blues, Latin music and various African traditions. This distinctive blend builds on his father’s work adapting the sonic traditions of Mali’s arid north to the guitar.
Vieux’s album “Mon Pays” (“My Country,” 2013) honored Mali’s culture after Tuareg separatists and extremist groups seized the north in 2012. “Samba” (2017) was recorded before about 50 listeners in Woodstock, New York. In 2022 came “Les Racines” (“The Roots”), a return to his father’s desert blues, and “Ali,” on which he and the trio Khruangbin reworked eight of the elder Touré’s songs.
Touré leads the Ali Farka Touré Foundation, which focuses on cultural and educational work in Mali. Around the anniversary of Ali’s death, it holds a festival in Bamako, Mali’s capital. Bamako has been under blockade for much of the past year, besieged by JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate. Against this backdrop, Touré continues to carry the music of Mali to audiences abroad.
At the Nov. 5 concert, Touré’s desert blues will share the bill with Gnawa, the music LanGus plays, which developed in Morocco among West Africans who were brought north across the desert as enslaved people. Gnawa is religious music traditionally performed at all-night healing ceremonies called lila, intended to carry participants into trance.
Samir LanGusProvided
LanGus was born and raised outside Agadir, Morocco, and began learning Gnawa from its masters at age 8. He plays the sintir, a three-stringed bass lute made of wood and camel skin. The player strikes a low string with the thumb to create a deep, resonant pulse. Iron castanets clatter over the sintir’s bass line, and vocalists trade call-and-response refrains.
LanGus infuses the tradition with jazz and improvisation. In New York, he founded the ensemble Innov Gnawa. His first solo album, “Gnawa Love,” came out in February.
Touré and LanGus’s Nov. 5 concert is one of the last public events at Race Brook Lodge, which is for sale and ended full-service operations at the end of 2025. The lodge’s final scheduled event, on Nov. 6, is an evening of Rumi’s poetry with translator and vocalist Haleh Liza Gafori, cellist Isabel Castellvi and ceremonial bard James Bird.
For tickets, visit rblodge.com.
James FitzGerald is a student at Yale Law School, where he focuses on ecological restoration and international environmental cooperation. He splits his time between Lakeville and New Haven.
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