Follow Up on the News
And that’s
without taking in the fact that the deceased was married and the father
of five… and that until toxicology reports come back from the state,
a mysterious pall will hang over what happened.
“On January 17, 2008 members from the Ulster County Sheriff’s
Office responded to an Ulster County 911 poll for an unconscious, unresponsive
male lying in the roadway at the end of a dead end road in the Town of
Shandaken,” read the departmental press release of January 21. “Upon
arrival by deputies, the male was identified as Gary Stevan Corwin, age
62, of Broad Street Hollow Road, Lexington, Greene County, NY. Corwin,
a Town of Lexington resident, was reported missing to the Greene County
Sheriff’s Office on 01/16/08. Mr. Corwin was administered medical
assistance at the scene and subsequently transported the Margaretville
Hospital by the Town of Shandaken Ambulance squad where he was later pronounced
by Margaretville Hospital Medical Staff. An autopsy was performed at the
Kingston Hospital and officials are awaiting the toxicology results.”
According to Corwin’s obituary released by E.B. Gormley Funeral
Home of Phoenicia, the deceased had been an area resident for the past
six years, having formerly made his home in Manhattan. He had performed
as a musician for over 35 years, primarily in the New York City metropolitan
area, as the band leader of Gary Corwin & the Dream Band, and, previously,
the Gary Corwin All-Star Band. At the time of his death, he was authoring
a book about sound, music, the universe and the human spirit.
“He especially loved teaching children how to open up and discover
their own true voice, read the obituary written with the help of Corwin’s
wife, Marily Jurenka Corwin and mother-in-law Gerri Jurenka. “He
was a loving father and husband who
enjoyed walks in the woods, and quiet moments of meditation in a nature
setting.
Corwin was born November 6, 1945 in Brooklyn, NY, son of Max Corwin and
the late Sandra Berger Corwin. Surviving are his wife Marilu Jurenka Corwin,
his father Max and his wife Roslyn of Florida, children: Sarah, Hannah,
Sophia, Samuel, and Abraham all at home, and Keith of NYC. A brother Neil
and sister-in-law Dale of NYC, and niece Michelle of Albany.
Corwin was found several miles from his home near the old church, now
a private home, located at the end of Church Street Road in Big Indian,
a small dead end lane that runs behind the Big Indian Service Center to
the edge of the Esopus Creek. According to sources, the body – discovered
by a passer-by who noticed “a pile of clothes by the road”
— was naked from the waist down and appeared to be bruised.
“Nothing new on the case,” Ulster County Sheriff Paul Van
Blarcum noted this week. “Waiting for toxicology test to come back
from lab.”
Ulster County District Attorney Holly Carnright said last week that the
incident was not being treated as a murder, but that police were investigating.
He urged anyone with any information to contact the Sheriff’s Department
at (845) 338-3640.
What, with
cuts to the state’s arts council and state Department of Environmental
Conservation’s General Fund, is being considered?
And what else might be of interest to citizens in the Upper Esopus/Ashokan
region in that proposal, as well as a recent address Spitzer designed
to address “Upstate” issues.
On the latter front, the first thing we discovered is that what the governor
considers “Upstate” doesn’t necessarily include the
Hudson Valley or Catskills.
And yet his $124.3 billion state budget DOES include more than $21 million
in state funding to “critical projects” in the area, including
$5 million for a solar energy research center in Kingston, $8 million
for converting the old Poughkeepsie-Highland railroad bridge into a pedestrian
walkway, $7 million for the state’s quadricentennial celebration,
a $50 million boost in local funding through the Aid to Municipalities
program, continued investment in the rural broadband initiative, a generalized
promise to start taking education funding off the back of property taxpayers…
and that $1 million for a Catskill Interpretive Center.
Countering the good news, though, are budget balancing items that throw
more weight onto county governments, some $300 million in new fees, as
well as savings of more than $1 billion in the hospital and nursing home
sector and in tax rebates under the STAR program. Plus state debt would
increase from this year’s $50 billion to $53.3 billion.
“While he did not specifically mention the Hudson Valley or Catskill
regions, his focus on property taxes, economic development, access to
affordable and quality health care, spiraling energy costs and improving
education struck at the heart of the major concerns of our communities,”
said State Assemblyman Kevin Cahill, defending the governor’s efforts
in light of a united opposition from local Republicans, including State
Senator John Bonacic. “For the second time in a week, while pledging
to hold the line on taxes, the Governor acknowledged a growing consensus
that we can no longer distinguish between taxes raised at the state level
or those locally, such as through the unfair and unaffordable real property
tax. He reiterated a clear commitment to thoroughly address the property
tax crisis by forming a commission to examine the way we fund our schools
and local government consolidation.”
We checked around this week with various people who should know…
and didn’t, except to note that they’d been having talks about
reviving the CIC with state officials in recent months, had noticed the
figure in the budget, and wanted to remind everybody there were still
months of negotiations pending before any final budget figures were arrived
at or approved.
“We’ve been kind of on the verge of things with a lot of movement
on the support level, for some time now,” noted the CIC’s
original visionary Sherret Chase, currently chairman of its Friends board
of active supporters. “Given that it would take $5 million to $10
million to build the thing, and our current plans are out of date, I suspect
these funds are for redoing our plans.”
Chase noted that he and others working with the Friends of the Interpretive
Center have been envisioning making any new plans for such a facility,
whose entrance road off Route 28 in Mount Tremper and basic site preparation
were completed before incoming Governor George Pataki puilled the plug
on the entire project upon taking office in 1995, so whatever got built
was more “green” and lexible than what was originally planned.
Chase added that he would be meeting with Friends Secretary Jim Infante
this coming Monday, January 28, to go over what’s now on the table,
as well as to set a larger meeting of all interested in the facility in
the following fortnight.
“I don’t know how these things get done,” he added,
“But we had strong support from (State Senator John) Bonacic, as
well as a meeting with DEC Commissioner Pete Grannis and constant support
from DEC regional Director Willi Janeway in recent months. Everyone’s
been very supportive.
Speaking for Janeway the day after the budget announcement, DEC spokeswoman
Wendy Rosenbach said things were still vague as to what exactly was being
set aside via the state’s Environmental Protection Fund, which would
also be funding the upcoming quadricentennial of Henry Hudson’s
voyage up the river bearing his name in the coming year.
“Willi said he’d heard there was $500,000 this year and $500,000
next year,” she said. “That’s enough to keep planning,
but not to build it.”
And Deb Dewan at the Catskill Center said that although the budget had
yet to go through full discussions, the state’s renewed interest
in an interpretive center for the region was a good sign of a renewed
commitment to see it built in the coming years.
The effort to get the state to build an Interpretive Center for its Catskill
Park holdings similar to interpretive centers located in two locations
in the Adirondacks started in the middle 1980s as a grassroots effort
including numerous community members, local business leaders, political
representatives, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
(NYSDEC), and The Catskill Center for Conservation and Development (CCCD).
Eventually, plans for a Center were formalized in the early 1990s, with
the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development and Trust for Public
Land eventually purchasing a 62-acre parcel of land on Route 28 in Mount
Tremper when it was discovered that the state could not buy such property
without making it part of the overall state park… sans development.
The DEC then spent over $1 million on road, bridge, site grading, and
other improvements to the property, plus more for architectural blueprints
for a 18,600 square foot building and for surrounding grounds, plus plans
for interpretive exhibits, interpretive and educational programs, travel
information resources, a reference library, auditorium, gift shop, and
hiking trails and connections to nearby State land. In 1995, the projected
cost of the building (not including the cost of exhibits, furniture, equipment
and supplies) was $ 3.68 million.
“The need for an interpretive center for the Catskills remains,”
the Friends now say on their website, www.catskillinterpretivecenter.org.
“We believe that The Catskill Park and Forest Preserve represent
significant and unique public assets badly in need of an interpretive
center to give them the focus and accessibility required for their full
public value to be realized. The Catskills, and their visitors and residents,
suffer from this unsatisfied need.”
“We’ll see what happens now,” added Chase this week.
As for the in-betweenies our region seems to have found itself in, and
what that might mean for future funding initiatives, most asked felt that
the problem was largely semantics… at least for now.
“We are between areas of enormous prosperity, New York City and
the state Capitol,” Bonacic said. “Revitalizing upstate means
more than helping Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo and Albany. It must
mean helping the Mid-Hudson, an area of enormous wealth of natural resources
but desperately in need of sustainable jobs.”
Stay tuned as the promises of the proposed budget get deciphered and reworked
over the coming months… The new budget is to be adopted by the Legislature
and signed by the governor by April 1, a deadline that has been met each
of the last two years after being missed the previous 20 years.
Phoenicia’s Healthy Healthcare
“People should be
able to have quality care locally,” says Dr. Martin Krakower,
who along with partner Dr. Randall Rissman own and operate both the
Phoenicia facility and a larger one on Zena Road in Woodstock which
Rissman opened in 1981. Between the two health centers, the group provides
primary medical care to almost 1,000 people every week, with up to 200
seen at the Phoenicia office. Most patients are from Shandaken, Olive
and Woodstock but many come from as far away as Greene and Delaware
counties.
“We realized,” said Krakower, “that this Route 28
corridor has a real need for expanded medical services, and we saw Phoenicia
as the logical place for it. We also realized it would be devastating
for the community to lose any facility that was here, which is why we
agreed to take it over. It’s been a difficult few years, and we’re
just reaching the point where we’ve recouped our initial losses
and the practice in Phoenicia is self-sustaining. But as the community
and the practice has grown, we also realize we need to make the shift
from one full-time to two full-time providers. If we aren’t able
to do that, we’re getting to a point where we might not be able
to take new patients, and we’d need to look at relocating to another
facility. But that definitely isn’t what we want.”
“What we’d like to do,” says Krakower, “is provide
more services in Phoenicia with more practitioners. We’d like
to expand women’s health care and gynecology, and counseling and
mental health services. And we’d like to be able to provide facilities
for specialty practices like cardiology and gastroenterology, at least
on a visiting basis.”
At the Phoenicia facility, the primary providers have long been Brian
Callahan, a Nurse Practitioner with a PhD in Public Health, together
with Krakower. Both have worked at the facility for many years, with
Krakower taking over as its Medical Director for Benedictine early in
2000.
To facilitate the changes they envision, Krakower and Rissman hired
a consultant and an architect, and came up with a design plan based
on an 800 square foot expansion of the building’s first floor.
The plan includes four new exam rooms for a total of six, expanded office
and waiting room space, and modest renovations to the building’s
second floor. Projected costs are about $300,000, which they’re
hoping to find grant funding to support, with other operational costs
involved to be funded by the practice. As a practical matter, support
funding for the project will likely need to be sought in combination
with the Town of Shandaken, which now owns the building again, after
Benedictine closed down its community clinic system in 2005. Krakower
said in the past he’s worked closely with former Supervisor Cross,
and that he’s looking forward to working with Peter DiSclafani
and the new town board to try and ensure the community’s medical
needs will be met.
As for Krakower and Rissman’s commitment to that end, few would
likely take issue. When they first took over the practice, major billing
complications with the HMO’s, Medicare, and Medicaid, nearly put
them out of business.
“Everybody in town received free health care for six months,”
said Krakower, who indicated that those same problems caused a similar
facility in Catskill, also owned by Benedictine, to close soon after
its new owners took over.
“We had no money coming in for six months, with full salaries
and overhead to pay. We’re still trying to recover what’s
at best maybe a very small portion of that lost revenue. Even now, the
practice in Phoenicia doesn’t really operate at a substantial
profit.”
Whether an expansion of the practice would change that remains to be
seen, since the partners’ attitudes about such matters are hardly
typical. They still make house calls for instance, a practice generally
thought extinct forty years ago. “Anybody who can’t get
out, we go to see,” said Krakower. And their policy about payment
for services is hardly the norm. If a patient has no insurance, they
ask that people pay what they can afford.
“When you’re a community-based practice,” says Krakower,
“you have a responsibility to care for all members of the community
regardless of their ability to pay.”
Krakower says he’s pleased that the building’s ownership
issue is finally resolved, and that he’s hopeful that town government
will be as supportive as possible in seeking funding for the project,
both from public and private sources. He’s hopeful too, that the
coming months will provide a clearer picture of how things may progress,
and that in the near future, many of us will have to travel less than
we do for the care we need.
“Our goal,” he says,“is to try and ensure that these
rural communities have the health care they deserve, now and well into
the future.
He pecked away at first,
then learned some chords and theory. Before long, songs and lyrics began
to emerge. So did a plot, a story about a teenager who wanted to be
a New York City fireman, just like his hero dad. But first, he’d
have to overcome his fear of heights and, perhaps even more daunting,
his parents’ desire for a better life for him. It would be a love
story, of course, set against the turbulent Vietnam era. And it would
take place on Long Island, Dowd’s boyhood home, and in Brooklyn,
where his parents came from, and where his real-life dad used to fight
fires.
The songs Dowd wrote on that old piano, and the ones that followed over
the next decade, became the basis for an original two-act musical about
a version of his life story that didn’t happen, the story of the
firefighter he never became.
He wrote the play on weekends and evenings for months at a time, working
scenes and revising them, then putting the package away in despair,
wondering why he was bothering at all. Who would produce it? Who would
even read it? What was the point of all this?
He’d return to the piano and a new song would be written. Amazingly
it would fit somewhere with the ever expanding plot lines. He’d
try out the new songs on his two kids, Katie and Emily. When their friends
would come over, he sing the songs to them (always careful to skip the
bawdy lyrics.) He began to wonder if there was some bigger meaning to
this story.
And then came September 11.
In the days following the attacks, the world came to know the dedication
of New York City’s firefighters, who lost 343 members in the collapse
of the Twin Towers that morning. Dowd’s news team was involved
in the weeks of subsequent coverage of the events, and by the time he
could return to the play, he wondered if any of it would still be relevant.
In fact, all of it was: Even more so than before.
He made only slight revisions to reflect the coming disaster and to
foreshadow it in the action of the second act.
Still, despite the revisions and the addition of a final song to end
the first act, the completed play sat in his desk drawer for two years.
Dowd was convinced it would stay there.
Then, last spring, Dorothy Toman was in the soup aisle of a Kingston
supermarket when she was introduced to Dowd. The conversation went like
this: She was an actress and director. He had this musical in his drawer.
She’s on the board of STS and we like to promote the work of local
playwrights; could she read the script. Dowd said OK.
In a matter of weeks, She had pitched the play to the board of directors
and STS voted to produce the musical. This feisty theatre group in the
heart of the Catskills would produce a full-blown, two-act musical from
scratch with local talent and a pencil-thin budget.
The gifted Ms. Toman, a tireless perfectionist and master of details,
assembled a talented cast of local actors and STS veterans. Members
pitched in to build sets capturing the essence of Long Island and Brooklyn
in the early 1970s. She spent hours with Dowd examining everything from
character motivations to the meaning of the various insignias on F.D.N.Y.
uniforms. The cast is currently in rehearsals.
Talented local musician Jesse Chandler is the production’s music
director and performance pianist. He and Toman have created arrangements
of several of the musical numbers.
“It’s a dream come true, like living out one of your fantasies.
I watch the scenes come alive and am filled with wonder… It’s
a true community theatre in every sense. I’ve never seen such
team spirit. STS welcomed me with open arms and everyone performs multiple
jobs to make these productions happen,” Dowd says of the experience
leading to his work’s upcoming premiere. “Dorothy believed
in this project from the very beginning. She is a brilliant pro who
is indispensable to the cast and production team. She saw things in
the play that even I didn’t see and she makes all of us better.
Jesse is a magician at the keyboard.
STS will present the world premier of “Sons of Brooklyn”
Feb. 8, 9 and 10, and Feb. 15, 16 and 17. Friday and Saturday performances
are at 8 p.m.; Sunday matinees are at 2 p.m. The theatre is located
at 10 Church Street, Phoenicia.
Sure, OCS Superintendent
Leslie Ford had noted in previous weeks that discussion would be limited
to the two options the board has decided to pursue, one involving the
placement of the new facility in the existing Middle School facility
adjacent to the High School, the other tied to placing it in the building
now holding Bennett Elementary. But that didn’t mean people didn’t
want to talk anyway about closing yet another elementary school, bonding
figures upwards from $60 million, and the nature of the board’s
insular process that got them to this point in the first place.
“We’ll be doing this on a carousel basis,” Ford said
at the start of the promptly-run three-hour session, noting that after
an introduction by she and project architect and planning consultant
Armand Quadrini, those in attendance should split into groups and then
move between tables organized around various physical attributes of
the planned-for Middle School open for discussion. When bells rang,
people were to move on. Like in Middle School.
The tables focused on issues related to what people wanted the new school’s
entry to look and feel like, how they envisioned new classrooms, science
and art lab needs, special instruction elements (including overall technology
requirements and music classes), and phys ed and wellness concerns.
People’s concerns would be tabulated, Ford said, and discussed
at the end of the session, when a straw poll would be taken.
“These decisions are made by the board but they want to know what
you are thinking,” Ford said.
Quadrini, in his presentation, noted how a decision to place the Middle
School in Bennett would result in the tearing down of much of the current
Middle School wing at the high school.
Ford spoke about how a bond would be needed for long-postponed building
updates and repairs, no matter the public’s view of the current
Middle School plans. She talked about the changed and charged, future
that present and future students from the district will be facing. She
tried to inspire her skeptical audience, filling the room by the time
she finished.
“We welcome your suggestions. This isn’t the end,”
she said. “It’s not even the middle.”
When several people in the audience tried to ask whether the 5-8 Middle
School configuration could be discussed, Ford said no. There was an
agenda to keep. She suggested that people with questions and comments
apart from the specifics addressed by the carousel method talk to her
directly. She’d also be taking comments about people’s ideas
for a Middle School Parking Lot.
A petition was passed around from Woodstock parent Donna Flayhan, opposing
the 5-8 Middle School plan and asking that the board agree to keep all
three elementary schools open. By event’s end, 32 of the 120 or
so in attendance had signed.
Olivebridge resident Charlie Blumstein talked about how he’d been
asking friends and neighbors in Olive about why there’d been such
silence to date about the bonding figures being proposed. He said every
time the subject came up people started “laughing hysterically
at the cost.”
Others gathered around and similarly questioned the size of the project,
as well as its timing at the start of a national recession. A group
of Phoenicia parents got Quadrini to compare costs between his propositions,
noting that closure of Bennett had not been factored in to any plan,
then noted their surprise at the day’s disclosure that there was
now a possibility of tearing down part of the current Middle/Senior
High School structure, should Bennett get a makeover go-ahead.
Ford’s “Parking Lot” list included repeated requests
that the board further discuss its 5-8 plan with the public, and that
a new option putting 5th and 6th grades into Bennett, keeping 7th and
8th in its current place, be looked into.
After discussing people’s wish lists at the meeting’s end,
Ford noted that a similar Forum held last year had proved indispensable
to the board’s current decision-making. People grumbled that they’d
suggested nothing like what was eventually decided upon. She added that
it was the board’s role to make decisions, and that Onteora would
henceforth be moving in the direction of a 5-8 Middle School whether
a bond passed or not.
Some asked why there was no regular running water in many of the districts’
bathrooms. Others began filtering out of the room and school, shaking
their heads.
“How can we discuss this more,” asked Phoenicia’s
Tony Fletcher, “Or is it a done deal?”
“The board has made a decision,” replied Ford.
“Is it reversible?” asked Michael Lang of Woodstock.
“Board decisions are not reversible,” said Ford. “It’s
the role of the board to listen. Voting is a public right… If
this seems deceitful, at least it’s all out in public.”
Parents rose and noted how they hated to vote against a school bond,
but they felt compelled to in order to save their community schools.
“We have a lot to think about,” said Ford. “This is
not an easy time.”
Later, during a Tuesday night, January 29 regular board meeting at Woodstock
Elementary School, Ford announced that the next steps after the forum
would include presentation of a budget advisory committee report on
cost efficiency at the February 26 board meeting and a presentation
for Strategic planning.
After reading a lengthy rule sheet that the public must follow during
public be heard, school board president Mary Jane Bernholz had to cut
off several people expressing anger over the school board proposals.
Board member Cindy O’Connor added that the communication committee
is creating a newsletter dedicated to the middle school option, “to
answer some questions and start the process…”