I’m sure you’ve heard the University of Connecticut and the Burton family of Greenwich are friends once more. The UConn football operation will keep the family’s $3 million donation and the Burton Family Football Center will keep its name.You’ll recall Robert Burton, the family patriarch, had angrily sought a refund because he was unhappy with the selection of the new UConn football coach, a choice made without the proper input, as he saw it, from the generous Robert Burton. We don’t know what the incoming UConn president and the nervous athletic director said to the patriarch to make up, but I’m sure it was nice. At any rate, the team will continue to do what it does in the elaborate facility and play its home games at Rentschler Field in East Hartford, a considerable distance from the campus and the Burton Family Football Center but convenient for fans who don’t attend the college. There is no danger Rentschler Field will undergo a name change in the foreseeable future as it was properly named for the long deceased Frederick Rentschler. He was the founder of United Aircraft, an ancestor of United Technologies, which gave UConn the land in East Hartford. The basketball teams will continue to play at arenas named for a donor, Gampel Pavilion, on the campus, and at the XL Center in Hartford, which is so named, not to honor the Roman number 40, but to promote XL Group, a not terribly well known, 25-year-old insurance conglomerate. This means the University of Connecticut, at least for now, will not be playing home games in arenas or stadiums named for orange juice, dog food, companies with funny names or unsavory reputations.This is, however, not true of away games. Just the other day, the UConn men played the University of Louisville in an arena with the tackiest name around, the KFC Yum! Center, complete with the !. When I was growing up, ball parks honored people named Ebbets, Crosley, Griffith, Shibe, Comiskey, or they had names that reflected the teams, Braves Field, Yankee Stadium or even their neighborhoods, as in Fenway Park. But just a bit of research reveals there have always been commercial motives behind some name selections. Fenway Park is in the Fenway neighborhood, but its naming in 1912 started with a Red Sox owner who thought the name would be a plus for his Fenway Realty Co. Wrigley Field was named in 1926 for the Chicago Cubs owner, but Philip Wrigley picked the name to promote his chewing gum. Since naming rights are granted for as little as three years or as many as 20, there can be some confusion when names change faster than team rosters. The TD Garden in Boston has had about 35 names since it was built as the Shawmut Center in 1993. It was Fleet Center until owner Fleet Bank was gobbled up by the Bank of America and attained its record number of names when the arena’s owner bought the naming rights back from Bank of America. The arena couldn’t find a long-term name renter, so it auctioned daily naming rights on e-Bay for about $3,000 a day. This gave the center a different name every day for about a month, and the owners rejected only one, an attempt to name the arena the Derek Jeter Center. They did, however, allow the place to be called Yankees Suck Center for two days in 2005. The proceeds of the auction, more than $150,000, went to charities. Some names turn out to be embarrassing for more than a day or two and have to be changed. The Houston Astros played in a park named for the notorious Enron Corporation until it ceased to exist in that unseemly financial scandal in 2002. But the worst naming embarrassment may have involved a name honoring a contributor. UConn basketball teams play Villanova in a campus arena known simply as The Pavilion, but it was the du Pont Pavilion until the man it was named for, John du Pont of the Delaware duPonts, was convicted of murder in 1996. I guess there is something to be said for short-term, renewable naming arrangements. Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.
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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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