Celebrating the obvious in a 28-page study aimed at political candidates, the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities proclaimed late last year that Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven and Waterbury are poor and have special needs and thus a special claim on state government’s resources.No one would dispute the poverty. But the report’s argument for pouring still more money into those cities was weak. Yes, the cities are home to many property tax-exempt institutions like colleges and hospitals, and state financial grants don’t fully cover the tax loss. Tax exemptions and inadequate state reimbursements cost the four cities at least $115 million each year, the CCM report says. But then, colleges and hospitals are major employers and spenders, hardly economic burdens at all. Further, the four cities get hugely disproportionate state and federal grants for education and income support for their residents. Would those cities really be much improved demographically if they were to divide another $115 million each year, maybe $30 million each? Or would most of the new money just be absorbed by the compensation of city employees?Yes, as the CCM report notes, the cities are full of nonprofit social service agencies ministering to the poor. But those agencies don’t cause poverty or strain municipal budgets; rather, they are just manifestations of the poverty already present.The four cities, the report adds, have more crime, more former offenders, more medically uninsured people and more people with bad health, as well as horrible educational performance by local students. But the report fails to note that all those circumstances long have drawn disproportionate state and federal government aid without much result.As the state and federal governments themselves do, the CCM report implicitly assumes that government cannot alleviate poverty, just administer it. Even if that assumption is granted, couldn’t government at least do something about the concentration of poverty in the cities, as by arranging inexpensive housing in the most exclusive suburbs? But the CCM report makes no mention of housing, perhaps because dispersing the poor would be too difficult politically. After all, people, including the poor themselves, move to the suburbs precisely to escape the pathologies of poverty. Nobody wants to live among former criminals, whose recidivism rate may approach 70 percent, or send his children to schools dragged down by kids who are at best neglected and at worst abused at home.Having given up on alleviating poverty, having no interest in ascertaining why public policy has failed to alleviate it and having gotten comfortable with the business of administering poverty, Connecticut long ago settled happily for poverty’s concentration. As the CCM report notes, “Connecticut as a whole has the third lowest poverty rate in the nation for families, 6.7 percent. However, the poverty rates in Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven and Waterbury for families are at least twice as high as the state average.” CCM sees this data as evidence of failure. But most Connecticut residents — those people who don’t live in the cities — may see this data as evidence of success.CCM isn’t likely to persuade them otherwise with the pious old nonsense of the conclusion its study draws. “The health of our central cities, their suburbs and the state are linked,” CCM Executive Director Jim Finley summarizes. “Despite tough fiscal times, state government has a moral and economic imperative to provide increased assistance to Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven and Waterbury. They are regional hubs for economic development, health care, and culture. If these hubs fail, the suburbs around them will also founder. As go these cities, so goes Connecticut.”Of course, Connecticut’s experience has been exactly to the contrary: that the poorer the cities are, the richer the suburbs are; that nothing done in the name of alleviating urban poverty has worked; that the suburbs lately have succeeded in economic development far more than the cities have; that the police in the cities can keep sufficient order around the facilities suburban residents really need, if not in city residential areas; and that cable television, CDs and DVDs supply culture far more conveniently than cities do.No, the only people who need Connecticut’s cities are the poor, and nobody yet has published the report about how to get them out of poverty. Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
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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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