“A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can just be a small part of one of the most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people — harnessing the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.” President Jimmy Carter, June 20, 1979
NORFOLK — In 1979, at the height of a national energy crisis when OPEC countries limited the flow of oil to the West, U.S. President Jimmy Carter began a federal initiative to jumpstart the development and use of alternative energy. The goal of “Solar America” was that 20% of America’s energy would be renewable by the year 2000. Carter had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House to heat the water used in the West Wing.
Norfolk’s Tom Strumolo was on the original team that installed the 32 solar panels. He was part of a band of young, long-haired New England solar energy mavericks who made history.
As a recent Yale graduate, Strumolo was working in the new Energy Department in Hartford where he met Gordon Priess from Mystic, Connecticut. He was “a heat transfer guy who designed water heaters, and became chief engineer of the White House project,” according to Strumolo. They learned the White House was taking bids for a big solar installation, and their $50,000 bid was accepted.
Ed Butler, a Connecticut native, joined the crew. Butler and his partner Rick Schwolsky founded Sunrise Solar Services in Vermont in 1976. They gathered friends with skills necessary for the project. Students from a Groton, Connecticut, technical school welded the steel framework. They transported it to DC on a flatbed truck. The General Services Agency (GSA) installed 1” plywood to protect the entire White House lawn. A massive crane rolled in to lift the entire structure to the roof of the West Wing.
Strumolo laughed, recalling that security was very tight. “Our Secret Service detail told us ‘We shoot to kill,’ so we did not mess around.” They had sniffer dogs checking them out each day. When President and First Lady Rosalynn Carter climbed to the roof for an official photograph, Strumolo warned the President the paint was still wet on the metal. Carter said, “I am not going to mess up your paintjob!” Strumolo was more concerned about the President’s suit.
President Ronald Reagan had the solar panels removed from the White House in 1981. The parts were stored for years in a warehouse. The Reagan Administration reduced Carter’s renewable energy program by 90%. Half of the White House solar panels were moved to Unity College in Maine where they heated the water in the dining hall for 12 years. Some of the original solar panels reside in the Carter Museum and the National Museum of American History.
Tom Strumolo of Norfolk, founder Energy General LLC, was on the crew that installed solar panels on the roof of the White House for President Jimmy Carter in 1979.Jennifer Almquist
Jody Bronson, forester emeritus of Norfolk’s Great Mountain Forest (GMF), recalled, “Ed Butler’s team installed the solar panels on the White House for Jimmy Carter. My wife Jean and I have three of the panels that were supposedly installed on the White House. We can’t confirm this. In 1990 they were installed on our home in Falls Village by Ed Butler. The panels are still functional and have provided all the domestic hot water for our house for 35 years! If more households in our area had done this 30 or 40 years ago, think about how much energy they could have saved.” Bronson said there is a treasured can of “Billy Beer” in the Forestry Office at GMF.
Butler reminisced, “I was really excited when we won the bid to work on the solar project at President Jimmy Carter’s White House. It was such a great opportunity for a relatively small New England solar company. It was something I believed so strongly in and was proud to have been a part of it. Since 1976, we have done several hundred solar jobs in New England.”
Strumolo remains committed to “creating adequate and equitable responses to our changing climate.” He wrote “Decentralizing Energy Production” (Yale Press, 1983) and was a driving force behind the recently installed 13-acre solar array at the town’s transfer station. His energy audits have been used in thousands of buildings. After fifty years Strumolo is “still working, still on the path Carter inspired me to follow. There is so much work left to be done.” In 2008, artists from the Kunsthaus in Zurich created a film, “A Road Not Taken”, which will be shown at the Norfolk Library Feb. 15.
In the words of the late President Jimmy Carter, “Pessimism did not build America, it was built with vision, faith, and hard work. It is time to pull ourselves out of our national doldrums, to recognize our great untapped potential and resources, to build a more prosperous, self-reliant future.” Had the original solar panels remained in use on the White House they could have saved 20,000 gallons of heating oil.
First Lady Rosalynn Carter, Jim Butler (blue shirt), Ron Chick (with the hat), President Carter, Warren Herlein (with beard), Tom Strumolo (yellow shirt), Gordon Priess (sunglasses) with the newly installed solar panels on the roof of the White House in 1979.Photo provided by Tom Strumolo
Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens at home in front of one of Plagens’s paintings.
“He was doing critiques with everyone,” Fendrich said of Plagens. “We met at one of those sessions and, well, what can I say. We fell in love instantly.”
Fendrich speaks candidly about the pressures that shaped her early life choices. “We both married the first time at 21, which a good number of women of my generation did without much thought.” Her first husband was a good guy, she says, but “we weren’t suited for each other at all, even though he suited my parents perfectly.” Her decision to get a divorce was seismic. “My mother didn’t speak to me for a year.” Time softened the rupture. “One day she told me, ‘I see now why you left.’”
Fendrich had a rigorous liberal arts education at Mount Holyoke. “I studied painting and drawing, but I also got interested in political philosophy. Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli — Rousseau was my big guy — Tocqueville, everybody. And I still read them.” Plagens’s path was less formal. “I went to USC at 17,” he said, “and declared English as my major. It was a frat school, and I was in one for the first two years. Then I started doing the cartoons for the Daily Trojan, took a couple art classes, and thought, ‘Wait a minute, I like this.’”
Culturally, they diverged just as sharply. “I came from a fairly puritanical family that didn’t even go to the movies,” Fendrich said. Plagens, by contrast, grew up immersed in pop culture. “My father was an omnivorous reader,” he said, “and a jazz fan, and he shared these passions with me.” In 1966, Plagens walked into Artforum’s LA office and said, “I want to write reviews.” He was paid five dollars per piece. “Gasoline was 23 cents a gallon, so it went a long way.”
Over time, the couple slowly fused their educations. “He taught me jazz, I taught him Mozart,” Fendrich said with a laugh. “I’ve had a movie education from him; he read Jane Austen because of me.”
Plagens and Fendrich at home in front of some of Fendrich’s paintings. Natalia Zukerman
During their early years in LA, Plagens taught at USC, and Fendrich at Art Center College of Design. In 1985, they decided “our kind of abstraction would do better in New York,” as Fendrich put it. “So, we up and moved to Tribeca with $10,000 and a toddler.”
Both artists grounded their artistic careers in teaching and writing. “Teaching, which I loved, gave me the financial stability to be an artist,” Fendrich said, reflecting on her 27 years as a professor at Hofstra. “It meant that being an artist didn’t require I make money from every show. I didn’t start writing until 1999, but though I write for publication frequently, I make hardly any money at it.”
Artistically, they guard each other’s independence. “We have unspoken rules,” Plagens said. “You don’t comment on someone’s work while they’re in the middle of creating it.” Critique comes by invitation only. “He’s not mean, just direct,” said Fendrich. Over time, their aesthetics have subtly converged. “My work has gotten cleaner from looking at his,” she said. “He’s gotten more colorful because of me.”
The two have had several two-person exhibitions. At a recent duo show at the Texas Gallery in Houston “Laurie’s paintings flew off the wall,” Plagens recalled. “Me, well, not so much.”
Plagens’s parallel career in journalism shaped their lives in tangible ways. He worked as art critic at Newsweek from 1989 until 2003 and currently contributes reviews of museum exhibitions to The Wall Street Journal. “Being at Newsweek was one of the luckiest breaks I ever had,” he said. “They paid me to see things I would gladly pay to see.”
Their creative processes mirror their personalities. “I start with a specific idea,” Fendrich said, “and then modify things as I paint.” Plagens laughed. “I start with complete mush, just blurting it out and spending the rest of the time fixing it.”
In 2019, they made what Fendrich calls “a decision of contraction.” They left the TriBeCa loft they had lived in for three decades, sold their Catskills home with its large studio, and moved full-time to a former auto repair shop in Lakeville, now a house where each has a studio, and the ground floor retains the open feel of a loft.
What sustains them in life, art and love, decades in, are endless conversations — and arguments — about art, history, exhibitions, books and movies. That exchange, ongoing and rigorous, may just be the masterpiece of their shared life.
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Exterior of the Linde Center for Music and Learning.
“We have been thrilled and humbled to see the Tanglewood Learning Institute embraced as a year-round destination for a breadth of exceptional programming, including classical, jazz and family-friendly events,” said BSO President and CEO Chad Smith. “Our 2025–26 fall, winter and spring season reflects our deepening commitment to engaging the vibrant, year-round Berkshires community and to fully exploring the potential of TLI as a space where BSO programs make thought-provoking connections between music, art and society.”
TLI is once again presenting its Chamber Concerts series on Sunday afternoons, with small ensembles of BSO musicians performing familiar favorites and classic mainstays, as well as new music by contemporary composers. There are upcoming chamber concerts scheduled for Feb. 22, March 8 and March 15.
Interior of the Linde Center for Music and Learning.Hilary Scott, courtesy of the BSO
New this season is the TLI Jazz series, which continues March 20 with the Sullivan Fortner Trio, led by Grammy Award-winning artist and educator Sullivan Fortner, whose eponymous ensemble won the 2024 DownBeat Critics Poll for Rising Jazz Group. “Soul-sax sensation” Nick Hemp brings his free-blowing blend of “barroom excitement and modern jazz finesse” for a rousing night of soul jazz April 10. Rounding out the jazz series, and back by popular demand, is Grammy Award-winning trumpeter and singer Jumaane Smith, who brings his repertoire of jazz and American Songbook standards to the Linde Center on May 9.
Another season highlight comes April 12 with an animated live concert screening of the 3D stop-motion adventure film “Magic Piano.” Produced by the Academy Award-winning BreakThru Films production company in Poland, the film will be accompanied by a screening of “The Chopin Shorts,” a collection of animated films set to Chopin’s etudes, performed by pianist Derek Wang.
All performances take place in Studio E, the Linde Center’s 4,000-square-foot multiuse room that serves as TLI’s main performance and event space. It features retractable seating, acoustic and technical systems, flexible configurations, and is accessible and comfortable for all patrons.
The entire Linde Center for Music and Learning is worth a visit in itself. The complex, which also includes the informal Cindy’s Cafe (seasonal) for a quick bite, is conceived not as a single building but as a cluster of pavilion-like spaces connected by an outdoor covered walkway and arranged around a century-old red oak tree. The center promotes a welcoming and serene sense of place and continuity with the rolling Tanglewood lawn and surrounding woodlands.
Smith said, “This ongoing work is also a passion project for our musicians, who form deep ties to the area and are eager to remain active in the Berkshires beyond the summer months. We look forward to welcoming new and returning audiences to experience all that TLI offers — all year long.”
The Tanglewood Learning Institute is located at 3 W. Hawthorne Road, Lenox, Mass. For more information and to purchase tickets,
visit bso.org/tli.
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