CORNWALL — Donald R. “Pete” Hart Jr., beloved husband of Elvira “Vera” (Horvath) Hart, died April 17, 2011. He was 93. A lifelong resident of New Britain, Conn., until late in his retirement years, he was truly part of the “Greatest Generation.”He was the first-born child of Elise (Russell) and Donald R. Hart and grew up on Hart Street in New Britain. He was one of the first four graduates of Mooreland Hill School in Berlin, Conn., and then went on to graduate from Avon Old Farms School in Avon, Conn., and Amherst College in Massachusetts. He also took courses at the Sorbonne in Paris, France.Pete was multilingual, speaking more than 13 languages (nine of them fluently), and later taught French, German, Spanish and Latin after his graduation from Amherst. At one point he was head of the language department of Avon Old Farms School.It was his innate language abilities that helped shape his military career. Drafted early in World War II he was one of 250 Americans asked to volunteer to start the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, which later became the CIA). He served with distinction, handling French sabotage operations in occupied France, running a spy “transit station” and capturing Nazi collaborators in Paris after its liberation. He was especially pleased to receive the Legion of Honor medal from the French government for his efforts, the highest award they bestow on a non-French citizen. After discharge he served in the U.S. Army Reserve for a total service of 33 years, retiring as a colonel, with top secret clearance.His government service didn’t end there. Vera, whom he married in 1979, and Pete volunteered for the disaster relief program of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Being on call 24/7 they responded to more than 30 disasters between 1983 to 1999, earning nothing but expenses. From 1981 onward he was also a member of the National Defense Executive Reserve, a government organization set up to help the nation survive a nuclear attack. He was a true patriot.Pete loved the island of Martha’s Vineyard. The Hart family has had homes on the island since 1811 with most of them in the community of Hart Haven and Up-Island in Chilmark. It was there that Pete organized an annual family gathering over Labor Day.Relatives and friends from all over the island and mainland came to “The Bash” each year. His last island home was in Vineyard Haven.In addition to his devoted wife Vera, Pete is survived by a sister, Mary Jane Clark of Kent; a brother, Dr. David L. Hart of Oak Bluffs, Mass.; his three children(from a previous marriage), Peter R. Hart and his wife, Andrea, of New Britain, Christine H. Hart and her husband, William F. Morlock, of Brattleboro, Vt., and Philip D. Hart and his wife, Carol Gauthier, of Oakland, Maine; his six grandchildren, Brittany, Zachery, Ben, Alexis, Nicholas and Jennifer; and numerous cousins, nieces and nephews.He was predeceased by his brother Henry Russell Hart. Pete was a lifelong Episcopalian. A funeral service will be held at 11 a.m. on April 26 at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Salisbury. Interment with full military honors will take place on April 27 at 1 p.m. at the Bourne National Veterans Cemetery in Bourne, Mass., as per Colonel Hart’s request. In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to Sheriffs Meadow Foundation, Wakeman Conservation Center, 57 David Ave., Vineyard Haven, MA 02568, online at www.sheriffsmeadow.org, or The Family Council, Noble Horizons Retirement Community, 17 Cobble Road, Salisbury, CT 06068, online at www.noblehorizons.org. Arrangements have been made through the Newkirk-Palmer Funeral Home in North Canaan. Condolences may be sent to the funeral home or email bm2hart@msn.com.We close with a direct quote from Donald R. “Pete” Hart Jr. taken from a self obit he wrote a few years ago: “Now, you have read quite enough, and so I bid you all adieu.”
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Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton\u2019s Main Street in 1985.
Provided
For Hermans, the award has prompted some reflection about why he has spent so much of his life involved in community projects.
“I was thinking about it this morning: Why do I do what I do?” he said. “And I think no matter what I’ve done, whether it’s been school board or rail trail, I’m trying to be useful to the communities I’m associated with.”
Hermans is perhaps best known as the longtime co-founder and steward of Oblong Books in Millerton, a business that began almost by accident. He and his first wife, Holly Nelson, were living in Millerton and looking for something to do during the winter. They had been painting houses, including the Grange Hall in Millerton, a job Hermans got through his aunt, who belonged to the Grange.
At the time, Hermans was also working in insurance for his father, doing collections.
“It was fine except I was doing collections, and it really kind of left me cold,” he said.
He and Nelson began thinking about what they might do together. Nelson was an avid reader, while Hermans had studied journalism and had worked in a record store. They noticed a chain of book and record stores operating elsewhere in the Hudson Valley and decided to follow that model.
And so Oblong was born.
Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton’s Main Street in 1985.Provided
“We really learned it by the seat of our pants,” Hermans said.
The business would eventually become a beloved and integral part of Millerton’s commercial life. But although Hermans may have learned the book business as he went, his affinity for retail — and for the connections that happen across a counter — had begun much earlier.
As a child, his second-grade teacher operated a little cardboard pencil shop in the classroom, and Hermans still remembers the satisfaction of selling a pencil for a nickel.
“I really liked selling somebody a pencil for a nickel,” he recalled. “I can remember that experience, and it was so pleasant.”
Later, while living in Arizona, he helped establish a food co-op and worked at the counter.
“I kind of knew that I liked doing that kind of thing,” he said. “It’s a nice way to be pleasant with people, but without making too much commitment to them.”
His relationship with Millerton also predates Oblong. His grandparents lived in the village, and he first came to Millerton as a baby. Over the years, he has watched the town change through several generations.
He remembers a Millerton with a much broader array of businesses, when stores such as Delson’s, the Main Street department store that stood for nearly 40 years in what is now Millerton’s Antiques Center, seemed to carry almost everything a resident might need.
“You could find everything from a set of dishes to a shotgun,” he recalled.
The rise of shopping malls changed that kind of downtown retail, he said, but Millerton has remained a lively commercial village.
“For us, it’s been a great place to have business,” Hermans said. “It’s a busy village.”
For Hermans, running a store was never simply about selling books and records. It was a way of being part of a place.
Music has remained another constant. Hermans continues to sell music at Oblong and hosts the radio program “New Harmony” on WKZE. The business of selling music has changed dramatically over the years, particularly with the rise of streaming, but Hermans has adapted.
He was initially reluctant to bring vinyl records back into the store because of their expense. But about four or five years ago, he began stocking LPs again, and they have become the main form of music the store sells.
He finds that many of the customers buying them are reconnecting with music they loved years ago.
“I do best with classic albums that people may have had when they were young,” he said. “And now that they’re retired, they want to hear it again.”
Hermans still reviews between 700 and 1,200 new music releases each week through the store’s distributor, Alliance Entertainment, carefully deciding what belongs on Oblong’s shelves.
That same commitment to place has led Hermans into a wide range of community projects. His work with the Harlem Valley Rail Trail is among the efforts he mentions when reflecting on his years of civic involvement. He has also served on the school board and has been involved with the Millerton Business Alliance and the Irondale Schoolhouse. He is now involved with The New Pine Plains Herald, which he sees as complementary to the work of The Millerton News and The Lakeville Journal.
“I really think that the important thing about this award is that people understand what a newspaper does to connect them to their community,” he said. “And if that means anything to their lives, they gotta support it.”
Hermans knew Mary Lou and Robert Estabrook and remembers them as people who were deeply conscious of their responsibilities to the community.
“They were really nice folks,” he said. “They were very conscious of what their role in the community was.”
There is, in fact, still plenty on his plate. Hermans admits he needs to scale back because he has taken on more than his current abilities can comfortably accommodate.
“To be given this award is very special,” he added. “But I don’t feel like I’m done.”
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Adamah Farm crew members planning out the day’s tasks on a late September day.
Janna Siller
Over my 15 years of growing vegetables in Falls Village, I’ve exerted my will over all kinds of conditions, from drought to humidity to crows with a taste for cantaloupe. That’s what farming is all about. You zip around the field, hopping on and off tractors, moving hoses and chasing weeds, all in an effort to arrange conditions in favor of your crops. It is the crops’ job to gulp up sunlight and move water through their stems, to transform solar energy into your next pesto or ratatouille or butternut squash soup. It is the job of the farmer to irrigate just enough but not too much, to slice dandelion leaves without damaging delicate cabbage roots, to pander and pamper and stay in tune with what plants need to thrive.
The easy part of farming is trusting plants’ resilience. I have seen bright green shoots barrel ahead out of a plant torn to shreds by hail. I’ve watched wilty, heat-stressed seedlings turn rigid overnight and greet the next morning with vigor. The hard part is letting go of what you can’t control. As our crops lapped up Friday’s gentle sunshine and I considered the weekend forecast, I imagined roots holding tight to wet earth and branches supporting each other in sideways, pelting rain. I made sure all of our storage crops were already harvested and tucked away. I battened down the sides of our greenhouses and wished the remaining field crops good luck.
The nor’easter didn’t materialize too dramatically in our corner of New England. A few broken branches and debris blown about, nothing like the July Fourth storm that sent half a tree crashing onto the deer fence and left crates of fresh veggies in coolers without power.
Fall storage crop harvests amid soil building cover crops at Adamah Farm in Falls Village. Janna Siller
Farming is an exercise in acceptance. To do it well and return year after year, you have to balance hubris and humility. The prize can often be a certain equanimity, a training in the art of moving into the next day even when the last one scrambled all your plans.
Epic change is not always about the unexpected. It also comes like clockwork on the seasonal calendar. As I type, the last of summer’s watermelons wait naively on the vine for a few hot days to finish ripening. Broccoli are holding their leaves wide as they did in June and July, only to find that the hours of sunlight decrease with each earlier sunset. Plants can’t pick up and go south or call the manager to order a bonus round of sunshine. Their growth slows and they get a resigned look to the hue of their leaves, so different from the frenzied growth of summer.
The release of fall is not tragic or gloomy. It is not an ending because so many fall tasks are about setting up for the new beginnings in spring.
We turn the vines that yielded thousands of pounds of fruit into the soil, where healthy microbes feast on their rotting stems. Then we plant cover crops — a mix of cereal grains like rye and oats and legumes like peas, vetch and clover. Cover crops hold the soil and its nutrients in place over winter, feeding the soil food web and adding organic matter that next season’s crops will need to grow.
We sort sprinklers and repair hoses. We inventory tarps. We take notes about which plants did well where and how we might try a new approach for this or that. We stack crates of cured garlic and onions and winter squash in a cool, dark room.
We save seeds from tomatoes and beans and lettuce, carefully labeling each variety for next season’s long, sunny days.
Janna Siller is the farm director at Adamah, a community farm in Falls Village offering CSA shares, educational programs and a food access program.
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