HARTFORD — With U.S. financial markets hemorrhaging Monday afternoon, the irony of positive economic news for Connecticut was not lost on Congressman Chris Murphy (D-5) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who teamed up to present the results of a manufacturing survey in a televised press conference at the state Capitol.Launching the survey in April, the congressman and senator provided online links to a questionnaire, asking respondents to give their outlook for the future of their businesses and to identify pros and cons of doing business in Connecticut. Murphy said they collected responses from 151 manufacturers from across the state who suggested that business is beginning to boom again.“We are of the belief that Connecticut’s economy cannot thrive going forward without a vibrant manufacturing sector, and as we have seen with the last round of jobs numbers, manufacturing is far from dead in this country,” Murphy said. “In fact, it is one of the leading edges of growth as our very fragile economy continues to creep toward recovery.”Murphy noted that 89 percent of manufacturers surveyed reported that they had plans to hire new workers or maintain current employment levels in the next year, which is in contrast to a decade of decline in manufacturing in Connecticut and across the country. “The optimism that you hear nationwide from manufacturers is reflected in Connecticut,” the congressman said. “In the last month, the United States added 24,000 jobs in manufacturing, and since December of 2010, this country has added almost 300,000 new jobs in manufacturing. That reverses a decade-long decline in manufacturing throughout this country. We are on the brink of a reindustrialization of this nation, and Connecticut has to make sure that it is part of that manufacturing rebirth.”Murphy said the primary lesson from the data was that America should not decrease its investment in education and vocational programs. “When you hear that almost 90 percent of manufacturers want to expand and almost 90 percent are having trouble finding trained workers, it should be a caution to anyone in Washington who is talking about dramatically cutting funding for education or job training,” he said. “Cuts that could come down to the state of Connecticut could result in a reduction in slots at community and technical colleges and that could have a devastating impact on Connecticut’s ability to be a part of this manufacturing renaissance.” Murphy said it would be “foolhardy” to make such cuts.Blumenthal agreed with Murphy and called the manufacturing survey “a game changer. It shows in the real world that Connecticut manufacturing is poised for expansion, creating jobs and new businesses. “The takeaway here is that almost all manufacturers are looking forward to hiring or maintaining their present workforce and that what they need is the skilled workers to fill those potential openings,” Blumenthal said. “We’ve been hearing that but to have it reinforced so overwhelmingly by these numbers is really groundbreaking.”Both Blumenthal and Murphy acknowledged that the positive economic news was coming on a bad day for the U.S. economy, as the markets reacted to the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) first-ever downgrade of the country’s credit rating, from triple-A to AA+. As Connecticut’s congressional delegates were delivering their positive survey results, President Barack Obama was addressing the country regarding the downgrade and its effects on the markets.“I know we’re going through a tough time right now,” Obama said from the White House. “We’ve been going through a tough time for the last two-and-a-half years. And I know a lot of people are worried about the future. But here’s what I also know: There will always be economic factors that we can’t control — earthquakes, spikes in oil prices, slowdowns in other parts of the world. But how we respond to those tests — that’s entirely up to us. Markets will rise and fall, but this is the United States of America. No matter what some agency may say, we’ve always been and always will be a triple-A country.”Financial markets continued to reel Monday afternoon, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average losing 634 points to settle at 10,809.85 while the NASDAQ lost 174 points, or more than 7 percent, to end up at 2,357.69. Blumenthal had particularly strong words for Standard & Poor’s, which he said was partially responsible for the country’s fiscal crisis. “Standard and Poor’s has completely surrendered, in my view, any claim to credibility and integrity over the years by its contribution to the fiscal crisis that brought this nation to the precipice of catastrophe,” the senator said, adding that the credit-rating agency was “a little bit like the arsonist setting the house on fire, pouring fuel on it and then wanting to claim a reward for reporting the house on fire when the fire department’s already there.”Blumenthal also noted that, in his first six months on the job, he has been “astonished by the gridlock, even paralysis,” that exists in Washington, but he remains encouraged by the manufacturing survey response. “I think there has to be consensus that the American economy needs more jobs, that we need to rescue the home manufacturing industry and we need manufacturing to thrive, and the way to do it is to provide workers to fill those openings,” he said.Murphy said he and Blumenthal would be taking the survey results back to Washington to lobby for support of education and job-training programs and to address manufacturers’ concerns about health-care costs, tax structure and regulations. “There is a lot of new information in this report, but some of it simply confirms a lot of what the senator and I have been hearing as we’ve been traveling around the state,” Murphy said. “For me, it reaffirms some of the work that has already been underway and gives me new impetus to be a stronger voice on many issues.”
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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 former partner, 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.”
This article has been changed to reflect that Hermans and Nelson were partners. A prior version states that they were married.
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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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