“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
Jeremy Boviard, General Manager at the Moviehouse in Millerton.
That passion has made him the perfect steward of The Moviehouse in Millerton, where, as general manager, he has helped transform the nonprofit theater into a vibrant community gathering place.
“I like bringing people together to share something,” he said. “People come here to enjoy themselves, to learn about the world and themselves, and we’re here to facilitate and enhance that experience as much as possible.”
His path to The Moviehouse, however, wasn’t one he could have imagined.
Raised in Newton, Massachusetts, Boviard grew up immersed in musical theater and developed an early love of cinema. Some of his first memories involve movies. As a toddler, he insisted on watching “E.T.” before deciding the opening scenes were too scary. Today, it’s one of his all-time favorites. He also wore out a VHS recording of the television broadcast of “The Wizard of Oz,” commercials and all.
Cinema was a family affair. His mother, a preschool teacher, would even mail him Siskel and Ebert’s “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” movie reviews while he was away at summer camp, to keep him in the loop.
“I’ve always loved talking about movies,” he said.
After studying communications and media at Northeastern University, Boviard explored a variety of careers. Then, in 2016, his life took an unexpected turn.
He came to northwest Connecticut seeking treatment for alcoholism at Mountainside Treatment Center in Canaan, expecting to stay for only a month or two.
Instead, he found a new beginning.
Nearly a decade later, Boviard remains sober and speaks openly about the experience that changed his life.
“It’s a big part of my identity,” he said. “It’s more than not drinking or doing drugs; it’s about having integrity and being open to others.”
After completing treatment, he stayed in the area and joined the Mountainside staff, eventually becoming a client services lead during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The work was demanding, requiring compassion, flexibility and resilience.
“It helped me become — not the best version of myself, because I’m not perfect — but I feel stable and happy with my life in ways that 10 years ago I did not,” he said. “It’s the beginning of a lifelong journey.”
That same outlook shapes the way he approaches his work today.
When friends learned The Moviehouse was looking for a general manager after reopening in 2021, they immediately thought of Boviard. Running an independent movie theater had long been one of his dream jobs.
“It felt like a perfect fit,” he said, “and I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity that [Moviehouse Chair and Vice Chair] Chelsea Altman and David Maltby have given me.”
His days rarely look the same. He helps choose films, organizes special events, oversees fundraising and educational programs, manages staff schedules and payroll, orders supplies — and, if necessary, teaches new team members to change the soda fountain syrup, as he did in the middle of this interview: “There are plenty of moments where you’re doing a little bit of everything.”
He credits Assistant General Manager Tom Cloutier, Public Relations and Marketing Director Helen Seslowsky, and the rest of the team for creating a culture built on trust and teamwork.
“When I’m not here physically, I trust that the people who are here are handling everything well,” he said. “That’s a really good place to be.”
Jeremy Boviard and the team have expanded concessions at The Moviehouse.Annette Stover
Under Boviard’s leadership, The Moviehouse has expanded well beyond first-run films. Trivia nights, filmmaker discussions, live performances, after-school filmmaking programs and community partnerships have become part of its identity.
His goal is to offer something streaming services can’t.
“There’s something special about sharing a story in a room full of other people,” he said.
In an age when so much entertainment is experienced alone, Boviard believes the real magic of the movies is not confined to the screen. It’s found in the shared experience of watching together, lights dimming and a community discovering, for a couple of hours, that great stories are better when they’re shared.
That commitment extends beyond the theater. As co-chair of the Millerton Business Alliance, Boviard helps organize community events, including free holiday movie screenings and Festival of Lights activities.
He says he still finds himself struck by the quiet beauty of the region he unexpectedly came to call home.
Asked what advice he would give his younger self, Boviard doesn’t talk about career success or favorite films.
Instead, he offered a lesson earned through experience.
“Life’s full of surprises, and things often won’t play out how you expect,” he said. “If you put your best foot forward, stay even-keeled and remain as realistically optimistic as possible, life will lead to some unexpectedly wonderful places.”
Presenters at the 2025 Berkshire Mushroom Festival.
On Aug. 22 and 23, Tam Integration, an online psychedelic community organization, and Lee, Massachusetts-based dispensary Sweetgrass Botanicals will bring together foragers, cultivators, scientists, artists, cooks and curious humans at Dewey Hall in Sheffield, Massachusetts, for a weekend devoted to the remarkable world of mushrooms.
Stamets’ books, including “Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World,” have helped inspire a broader fascination with the fungal kingdom, from the role of mycelium in forest ecosystems to the potential of mushrooms in medicine and environmental restoration. Similarly, Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind” introduced millions of readers to the history and revival of psychedelic research, including scientific investigations into psilocybin, the psychoactive compound found in certain mushrooms. Pollan’s reporting has helped illuminate a field that had moved from the counterculture into laboratories and serious conversations about consciousness and mental health.
This spirit fits the Berkshire festival, whose theme this year is “the mycelial web of nature, creativity, science and magic.” Over the course of the weekend, visitors can explore mushrooms from nearly every conceivable angle: guided walks and species identification, cultivation, cooking, crafts, spore-print art and conversations about medicinal and psychedelic fungi.
Among the presenters is Berkshire native John Wheeler, founder of the Berkshire Mycological Society, who has been foraging for more than 30 years and has identified roughly 1,100 mushroom species. He’ll lead a Sunday foraging workshop and join a panel on foraging and identification with Luke Sarrantonio, founder of Mycophilic. Sarrantonio, who grew up in Rosendale, has built a career around fungal education, cultivation and community projects, including the Catskills’ annual “For the Love of Fungi” mushroom and arts festival.
Daniel Shankin
The festival also goes deep into the increasingly visible world of psychedelic fungi. Daniel Shankin, founder of Tam Integration, is a psychedelic integration coach whose work focuses on helping people incorporate transformative psychedelic experiences into their lives.
“It’s so exciting to be able to bring in such wide-ranging talent,” said Shankin of the speakers and presenters at this year’s festival. “There are people that I’ve been friends with in this community for years that I haven’t gotten to work with in person because they live in Guatemala or the Netherlands or another part of the world, so this is so exciting.”
As the founder of an organization that works with the psychedelic portion of the fungi world, Shankin is also excited to bring the growing consciousness around this modality to more people and train more people to be guides. “Not everybody necessarily needs to do psychedelics,” said Shankin, “but I feel like everybody needs to be able to hold space for somebody who’s on psychedelics.”
Cassandra Purdy, founder of Sweetgrass Botanicals, has spent more than 30 years immersed in the world of plant medicine, shamanism and entheogens. Together with other presenters, they’ll explore psychedelic preparation and integration, spirituality, safety, ethics and the art of creating supportive spaces for psychedelic experiences.
And the weekend’s conversation about fungi extends well beyond psychedelics. Imani Turnbull-Brown, co-founder of the Entheogen Melanin Collective, brings a focus on ancestral healing, Black wellness and making the psychedelic conversation more accessible and inclusive. Other sessions explore soil and regeneration, functional and medicinal mushrooms, cultivation, mushroom-inspired art and the practical business of growing fungi.
“I think people are increasingly suspicious of Western medicine,” said Shankin. “They’re looking for ways to combat the effects of aging and pollution, the effects of toxins in their foods, and they’re interested in taking their health and well-being into their own hands. Learning about functional mushrooms and the healthy lifestyle that goes along with them can go a long way.”
The Berkshire Mushroom Festival offers a particularly enjoyable way to investigate these extraordinary organisms — and to consider whether fungi might even hold some answers to the human-made environmental challenges unfolding around us. As Stamets has put it, “I love a challenge and saving the Planet seems like a good one.” Come see what the fungi have to say for themselves.
The Berkshire Mushroom Festival takes place Aug. 22 and 23 at Dewey Hall, 91 Main St., Sheffield, Massachusetts. For more information and tickets, visit berkshiremushroom
.com
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(From L to R) Jakob Kerr-Lucero (Jake), Charlotte Wise (Candy), Richie Crane (Joey), Brianna Vivace (Coco), and Vivian Burnham (Stage Manager) in rehearsal for Sharon Playhouse’s “Zombie Prom.”
Set in a candy-colored 1950s high school, “Zombie Prom” has everything a vintage teen musical could want: a sweet girl, a rebellious bad boy, a terrifyingly strict principal, rock ’n’ roll, big dance numbers and enough adolescent angst to power a small town. It also has a dead boyfriend who refuses to let the grave interfere with his love life.
The show is the second annual production of the Sharon Playhouse’s Launchpad Company, a pre-professional program for theater artists ages 15 to 20. This year’s young cast comes from communities on both sides of the Connecticut-New York border, including Alex Wilbur of Lakeville as Eddie Flagrante, Carlo Desy of Fairfield as Jonny, Abby Callaway of Woodbury as Toffee and Callie Audia of Dover Plains as Miss Delilah Strict.
Rehearsals for “Zombie Prom” at the Sharon Playhouse.Lynette Shy
The musical, with music by Dana P. Rowe, lyrics by John Dempsey and a book by Dempsey and Hugh M. Murphy, premiered Off-Broadway in 1996. Sharon’s production has a particularly fun connection to that original run: Director DJ Salisbury was a member of the original Off-Broadway company. He also returns to the Sharon Playhouse, where he directed “42nd Street” in 2011. Michelle Lemon choreographs, and Eric Thomas Johnson is music director.
Expect catchy songs, big personalities, teenage melodrama, zombie shenanigans and enough high camp to make death look like a pretty good time. But underneath all the hairspray and grave dirt, “Zombie Prom” is also a coming-of-age story about love, friendship, refusing to become somebody you’re not and never letting something as minor as death get between you and true love.
“Zombie Prom” runs Aug. 21 and 22 at 7 p.m. and Aug. 23 at 3 p.m. at the Sharon Playhouse, 49 Amenia Road, Sharon. Tickets at sharonplayhouse.org
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