The Historians with Bob Cudmore

Conversations and Interviews

Coming in April

Friday, April 7, 2023-Episode 469- Composer, choral director and pianist Maria Riccio Bryce, creator of a new work called Requiem: What Remains Is Love.  CD recordings are available at Amsterdam Free Library. On Friday May 26, the Requiem will be performed at St Paul’s Episcopal on Hackett Blvd in Albany; Saturday, May 27, at First Reformed on N. Church St in the Schenectady Stockade; and Sunday, May 28 at 3pm at Trinity Lutheran on Guy Park Avenue in Amsterdam.

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Amsterdam remembers Teddy Roosevelt

By Bob Cudmore

               Memories of Amsterdam’s Theodore Roosevelt Junior High on Guy Park Avenue where a senior housing project exists today continue to come in.

               Evelyn Riccio, retired schoolteacher and librarian, said that the song about junior high quoted in a previous column had a verse, which indicates the song was written specifically for the Amsterdam school.  Otherwise, the words—to the tune of “Stars and Stripes Forever”—could be applied to any junior high.

               Riccio said the verse went like this:

Other students may think their school’s the best

And serve it with loyal devotion.

But the school that is dear to you and me

Is this school of ours with colors blue and silver.

               Riccio said that longtime Roosevelt principal Fritz Heil compiled the lyrics, although another alumna recalled that a student named Barbara Casey wrote the words as part of a school contest.

TEDDY REMEMBERED

`             Former student Paul Russo remembered that Heil addressed students on the first day of school in the auditorium, “He said that when he was a kid, Teddy Roosevelt came to town and Heil jumped up on the running board of Roosevelt’s car and shock hands with him.”

               There are 20 references to Theodore Roosevelt in Frank Yunker’s online database of newspaper headlines from the early twentieth century in Amsterdam (www.mohawkvalleyweb.com).  Roosevelt spoke in Amsterdam in 1898, 1900, 1910 and 1914.  When he died in 1919, the city held a Roosevelt Day in which clergymen paid tribute to “the great statesman.”

               The junior high was dedicated to the former President on October 2, 1925 with the main address given by state education commissioner Dr. Frank P. Graves.

               At Roosevelt Junior High in the late 1950s, student reporter Elizabeth Dye Russo found a ladder sticking up into the attic of the building and covered the story for The Broadcaster, the school newspaper.

               “We got permission to go up in the attic and see all the old stuff and I wrote an article about it. I can't remember, however what was up there!”

               Several people informed me that the name of my eighth grade homeroom and art teacher was Marian Gode Carnwright, married to John Carnwright, the printing shop teacher.

               As Amsterdam was the carpet city, a shop course was taught in textiles, first by a Mr. Noble and then by Bill Fennhahn.  My mother was a sewing teacher and my father a carpet weaver so I felt pressure to excel in Fennhahn’s course.  I did all right on the sewing machine but, alas, my partner Tom Christman and I messed up the threading of our loom so much that it was beyond help.

               Another alumnus recalled that physical education teacher Richard Ruback, who passed away recently, coached a seventh grade basketball team sponsored by a private sports club, the Hurricana Club.  Some of the outstanding players in Amsterdam High basketball received a solid foundation in the sport by participating in that club.

               A popular student stop near the junior high was Eddie Doyle’s confectionery store, where Eileen Macvean of Amsterdam recalled the big item in her day was the Jo-Jo Pop.

`             Students bought school supplies at Sam Soula’s card and magazine store.

Former student Peter Betz said, “We also bought the little glass bottles of colored ink there which in the spring we loaded in our water pistols to shoot at each other as the class lines moved from room to room.  That brought a lot of parent complaints so there was a crackdown---locker inspections, confiscation of weapons, etc.

“Sometimes we put cheap perfume in them too but that was a give away as to who was 'armed' so we didn't do that much.” 

Tomorrow, Friday, March 31, 2023

#468

Alan Maddaus is author of The Prestons of East Street, the Story of a 19th century American Family.  The lives of seven Preston family members from Galway, N.Y., were impacted by events including Civil War, the Second Great Awakening and the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the natural disaster claiming the most lives on US soil.

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