An Amsterdam tavern, a paint brush factory and a pool Hall
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette and Amsterdam Recorder
The late Shawn Kevin Duffy contributed stories to this column on many topics including O’Shaughnessy’s, his family's East End tavern.
O'Shaughnessy's Tavern was once owned by Duffy's grandfather Martin J. O'Shaughnessy. Located at East Main and Eagle Streets in a building no longer there, O'Shaughnessy's regulars included movie actor Kirk Douglas's father, Harry Demsky. The Demskys lived at 46 Eagle Street at the end of the dead end street.
The Historic Amsterdam League marker for Kirk Douglas’s boyhood neighborhood was placed where the tavern used to be on East Main at Eagle.
Duffy wrote, "The bar survived Prohibition as so many did not. My mom, Mary O'Shaughnessy Duffy, told me that she used to help make bathtub gin when she was around ten, actually in the bathtub. Her brother Martin Junior (who had polio) sold the moonshine off the back porch to make ends meet during these hard times."
Eventually the “O” was dropped from the tavern’s name and it became known as Shaughnessy’s.
Duffy also had memories of working at Edy Brush Company on Brookside Avenue in Amsterdam, a firm that made paint brushes out of hog bristles imported from Poland in the late 1960s. Edy Brush closed in the 1980s and the building, originally the Wasserman broom factory, was destroyed by fire in 2010.
Duffy’s job was to dye the hog bristles black in a large vat of boiling dye. He also cut long tubes of synthetic bristles with a hand chopper. He sometimes thought his arm was going to fall off.
“I broke the elevator by loading boxes of bristle almost up to the limit of the elevator,” Duffy wrote. “A co-worker and I were also told to stack boxes of bristle in a large storage room as high as we could. The ceiling was probably 30 to 40 feet. We made stairs out of the boxes as we stacked and therefore got right up to the ceiling. I don't think the foreman really expected this and we were in trouble again for doing what we were asked.”
Duffy used to visit his aunt, Loretta on the grounds of Amsterdam City Hall on Church Street, the former Sanford mansion.
Duffy wrote, “At that time, the landscaping at City Hall was outstanding, with three levels of gardens and hedge bordered walkways.”
Duffy also spent some time at Louie Allen’s pool hall on Market Street near the old Rialto Theatre.
Duffy wrote, “Louie Allen would occasionally play the good players that would sometimes come around as he was a very good player himself. The strange thing was that Louie had one crippled arm and played with only his good arm, using the rail as a bridge. The story was that in his younger years Louie once hustled the wrong person at the wrong time, and they made sure he would never do that again by taking him out back and giving him a non-pool lesson, (not sure if this story was true or just hype). Louie also had an assistant by the name of Joe Corrigan who was close to a world-class player while still in his teens.”
Corrigan joined the Navy and Duffy was informed that Corrigan was killed in an auto accident in about 1970 while still in the Navy.
Duffy, born in Amsterdam in 1949, died in 2019 at his home in Lake St. Louis, Missouri, at age 69. He was a Navy veteran and worked for General Electric and other firms in the turbine generator business. When he retired he was part owner of Turbine Generator Technical Services.
Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer.
518 346 6657
bobcudmore@yahoo.com
Amsterdam Native was Theater, TV and Nightclub Star
Arlene Fontana, an Amsterdam native, appeared almost two thousand times in the national company of Flower Drum Song. In a show business career spanning four decades, Fontana sang on many TV programs including Ed Sullivan and played nightclubs in New York, Chicago, London and Miami.
"Her greatest appeal was her energy and her appearance on stage," said Fontana's husband and theatrical agent Carmen LaVia.
Born in 1936, Arlene was the only child of Marty and Palmera Masson Fontana. Marty Fontana came to Amsterdam as a young child from Genoa, Italy. A salesman for WCSS radio and other companies, Marty played trombone and violin in his own band, the Knights of Rhythm.
Arlene began taking tap, toe and ballet lessons at age ten. She studied piano. When she was 14, she did song and dance numbers in variety shows directed by drama coach and later high school principal Bert DeRose.
In 1949, she attracted a regional following by appearing on the WRGB television program Teenage Barn. At the time, television was a rapidly growing medium and there were several local music shows. Fontana sang with WRGB performers Gary Stevens and Earle Pudney, toured New York, Massachusetts and Vermont with Teenage Barn and did summer stock at the Malden Bridge Playhouse.
In high school, she won an essay contest on the dangers of Communism and worked on a WCSS radio theater series directed by speech teacher Grace Rutherford.
When Fontana graduated from Wilbur H. Lynch High School in 1954, former Amsterdamian and family friend Joe Miller offered her a contract to sing at Miller's Shell Room Lounge in Miami. Fontana and her parents moved to Miami.
For a year, she sang in Miami nightclubs then secured bookings in Pittsburgh, Washington, Detroit, Cleveland, Dallas, Houston and Las Vegas. She was a favorite on Television Nacional in pre-Castro Cuba. Her recording of Easy backed with I'm In Love on a 45 record in the late 1950s did well in England, getting her club dates in London.
In the early sixties she was auditioned by Richard Rodgers for the part of Linda Low in the national touring company of Flower Drum Song. She played that role 1,972 times.
Over one thousand of those shows were done at the Thunderbird in Las Vegas where Fontana met her future husband. She and Carmen LaVia married at St. Michael's Church in Amsterdam in 1965. The couple lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where LaVia worked for the Fifi Oscard Agency. He became Fontana's agent in 1972.
On television, she appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, Merv Griffin, Tonight Show and the Mike Douglas Show.
As a birthday present for her father, Fontana played a concert in 1971 at the then Coliseum Theatre in Latham. Marty Fontana died in 1974.
In 1984, Arlene Fontana was diagnosed with breast cancer. “She was in her last stage show -- This Joint Is Jumpin' -- in 1988.
Cancer returned and she died of a stroke at New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in May of 1990. Her mother, Palmera, survived her daughter by more than a decade. Palmera died in Amsterdam in 2001. Fontana's husband Carmen LaVia died in 2017 in New York City.
NOSTALGIA NEIGHBORHOOD
John Angerosa, an eye, ear, nose and throat physician and accompliahed jazz pianist, passed away on April 24. His love of music carried over to his medical practice, treating many musicians with special awareness of the importance of their ability to continue to perform.
Long distance love
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette
In the summer of 1931, my parents lived on what my father called ”long distance love.”
Born in England in 1909, Clarence Cudmore came to America with his mother Elizabeth and three siblings in 1912. My grandfather Harry Cudmore and oldest uncle were already in Amsterdam, weaving silk at Fownes Brothers glove mill. The family settled with other relatives in the East End on Eagle Street.
Julia Cook, my mother, was born in Randall in 1914 and moved to Amsterdam with her mother and two siblings after World War I. Her mother Margaret was a widow and started a boarding house on Forbes Street to support her family.
Clarence and Julia met at East Main Street Methodist Episcopal Church. Clarence left school to work in Mohawk Carpet Mills. Julia skipped two grades and graduated high school in 1930. She went to Albany Normal School to earn a teaching degree but left school because of emotional and money problems.
She and her sister Jane spent the summer of 1931 working as maids at a Jewish Catskill resort.. Their mother had grown up near Phoenicia and relatives kept their eyes on the girls.
That summer Julia and Clarence exchanged 24 love letters. “It seemed awfully queer and funny to me Sunday not having you come after me and loving me too, “ Julia wrote in June.
Clarence responded with a story about a rain-soaked church picnic in Tribes Hill where the minister’s car got stuck on wet grass and Clarence and his friends put chains on the tires, “I had my new suit on, so you could imagine how mad I was.”
“Oh, by the way, I have an appointment with my cousin on Thursday to go to see “Dracula” at Fleischmanns,” Julia wrote. ’You don’t mind, do you? He’s my cousin and we’ll be chaperoned thank God.”
Clarence had a sudden expense--$3 to fix broken glasses. His sister, Gladys, was mad when he told her how much it cost.
In July Julia had an attack of hysterics. Clarence told her of a wedding at their Amsterdam church where the groom was late and the 100 guests were served sandwiches which were left over from a church picnic. Julia refused two dates and said business was brisk at the inn. Clarence hitched a ride with Julia’s sister’s fiance for a visit in Phoenicia.
Clarence wrote, “Gladys (Clarence’s sister) asked if you threw your arms about me when you saw me. I told her ‘What did you think she was going to do, break out with smallpox?”_
Julia came down with stomach ulcers. A doctor prescribed medicine and a bland diet for the rest of the summer. “Nothing but milk and cereals,“ she wrote.
Clarence responded, “If I was the doctor, I wouldn’t give you anything but love and kisses.”
Clarence made another trip to Phoenicia and came back with pictures to show his mother, “After my mother looked at them for five minutes, she said ‘Is that Julia?’ I told her it was Greta Garbo!”.
In August, Clarence wrote, “I don’t like the idea of living on long distance love.”
Julias health had improved but she was fearful after a summer of swimming because infantile paralysis was spreading in the Catskills. “They are closing the movies and churches,” she said.
Julia and Clarence were married in Amsterdam by the Reverend Frank T. Love at East Main Street Methodist Church in Amsterdam in 1934. They raised two children and had been married 60 years when Clarence died in 1994. Julia died two years later.
Death at the Armory
Members of the Forty-sixth Separate Company of the National Guard were preparing to depart for the Spanish American War on Sunday May 1, 1898 at Amsterdam’s four-year-old Armory on the city’s south side. The Armory today is a hotel.
A concert was in progress and Shaw’s City Orchestra was performing “My Country Tis of Thee” for a crowd of two thousand.
At that moment Private Calvin B. Van O’Linda, who had enlisted the previous Thursday, was showing his equipment in the soldiers’ locker room to Anabelle Turner. Two friends, Wilbur Jeralemon and George S. DeGraff, entered the room.
Jeralemon, sixteen, wanted to see the revolver Van O’Linda had purchased the night before. The soldier found it in his hip pocket and handed it to Jeralemon.
As he did so, Van O’Linda said, “Look out! It’s loaded.” No sooner were the words uttered, according to a Recorder account, when Jeralemon accidentally pressed the trigger and a thirty-eight caliber bullet entered DeGraff’s right jaw bone.
Van O’Linda, who had been studying medicine on Long Island, held DeGraff and applied a handkerchief to the victim’s mouth to try to stop the flow of blood. DeGraff staggered and fell face down. A doctor was speedily summoned but DeGraff died a minute after the physician’s arrival.
The sound of the gunshot was so muffled in the locker room that it was scarcely discerned in the armory hall where the concert was taking place. The orchestra finished playing “My Country Tis of Thee” and then played “Auld Lang Syne.”
National Guard Captain Vunk wanted to avoid panic and kept the news of the death from spreading through the crowded building. He placed a guard at the locker room door and the audience was asked to leave the building when “Auld Lang Syne” concluded.
The newspaper wrote, “While many knew that some accident had occurred, but few were aware that the result had been so speedily fatal.”
The body of the young victim was moved to the city morgue and about midnight was taken to the home of his aunt, Elizabeth DeGraff on Grove Street, where he had been residing. Miss DeGraff apparently had taken care of her nephew since he was an infant.
After the shooting, Jeralemon was “stupefied”, wandered about the room and fainted. Van O’Linda was overcome as well. The doctor gave Van O’Linda morphine but it was midnight before he revived from his comatose state.
An autopsy of the victim found the bullet drove parts of the jaw bone to the spinal cord and also perforated the jugular vein. The newspaper reported, “Death resulted from hemorrhage, which filled the lungs immediately, and had this been otherwise, the injury to the spine would have resulted in death within a few weeks.”
The day after the accidental shooting, what was now known as Company H of the New York National Guard departed from Amsterdam for the war after a rousing sendoff. The brief war with Spain ended before the local soldiers could get to the battlefields in Cuba. In a sense, though, one young Amsterdamian had already lost his life because of accidental friendly fire.
GEORGE S. DEGRAFF
The victim was attending Amsterdam High School. His father, Dr. E.E. DeGraff, was a dentist with a practice at 9 East Fourteenth Street in New York City. Young DeGraff had been planning to study dentistry and go into practice with his father.
The newspaper wrote, “He was greatly beloved by his schoolmates at the high school and was making every effort to complete his education at that institution this year with fitting honors.” He was buried at Green Hill Cemetery.
Artist was drawn to Country Homes
He slept in barns and relieved the pain of rheumatism with alcohol.
He spoke broken English and died at the Montgomery County almshouse in Yosts in 1900. And he left a collection of 200 drawings that became the subject of an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City in 2003. The retrospective was also displayed in Cooperstown and Orlando, Florida.
No one knows what Fritz Vogt did during his first 48 years of life in Germany, where he was born in 1841, wrote New York Times reviewer Ken Johnson. In 1890, Vogt came to America and spent his last ten years as a traveling artist, recording what Johnson called “lucid descriptions” of the homes of his clients, primarily farmers in Schoharie and Montgomery counties. He did 40 drawings of farms, churches and other buildings in the town of Sharon, for example, and 25 in Canajoharie.
W. Parker Hayes, Jr., project director for the Smithsonian Institution’s traveling exhibition service, produced the catalog for Vogt’s retrospective, ‘Drawn Home: Fritz Vogt’s Rural America.’ The catalog was published by the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown.
At first, Vogt drew realistically with graphite pencils then switched to colored pencils and his work became more complex with multiple perspectives.
“Somebody could have happened to buy him a set of colored pencils,” Hayes said. “Or somebody said ‘I want this in color’ and all of a sudden his constituency decided, ‘Hey I want my work in color.’”
Why did farmers want pictures of their homes? Hayes said New York State agriculture was facing competition from the Midwest. There was nostalgia for the dwindling numbers of gentleman farmers. Vogt’s drawings also mirror another19th century social trend: publication of county atlases depicting homes of wealthy people.
Hayes chronicled Vogt’s life from oral histories recorded in the 1960s, interviews with people who had known Vogt when they were children. Hayes created a database of Vogt’s work to fill in biographical details in that the artist dated and described each drawing.
The oral histories state that Vogt picked hops. “In August of every year from 1891 until he died he didn’t do any drawings,” Hayes said. August is the beginning of the hops picking season. You can prove or verify what’s out there about Fritz Vogt through what the drawings say.
A few drawings indicate Vogt was paid a couple of dollars for a specific piece. Vogt was more often paid with a place to stay, meals or alcohol.
Vogt fit in with the region’s existing German-American population. “He relied on an ethnic network to get the basic things in life and to find patrons,” Hayes said. Vogt had a “good rapport” with children and may have earned money by teaching German.
Hayes wrote that Vogt was “a short, smallish man with a quick step, yet slightly rotund.” Hayes added: “He wore five or six second-hand shirts layered over each other, the underlying shirts visible through holes in the outer layers. He slept in the shelter of barns between two buffalo-hides on a pile of hay.
When Vogt entered a home to complete his drawings, he wore a pair of slippers fashioned from carpet remnants.
“There often are little things in his drawings,” Hayes said. “The way a certain cornice has some flourish. He saw those things. He knew the homeowners who lived there were very attuned to that. But at the same time he had a perspective that was different because he didn’t have a home.”
Amsterdam Woman was Pioneer Union Leader
An Irish immigrant woman became a leader in the fledgling union movement while living in Amsterdam in the nineteenth century.
Leonora Kearney was born in 1849 in Cork. Her parents, John and Honor Kearney, fled the Irish potato famine and settled in Pierrepont in northern New York where her father worked a farm.
When Leonora was in her early teens, her mother died. Her father married a woman a few years older than his daughter and the two women did not get along.
Young Leonora took lessons from the head of the Colton Girls School and earned a teaching certificate at age sixteen. Leonora taught school for seven years.
In 1871 she married a house painter and musician, William Barry, who lived in Potsdam. William, too, was born in Ireland and came to Canada when young. He served nine years in the British army including assignments in Gibraltar and the Mediterranean.
The Barrys moved from town to town seeking work. They settled on Amsterdam’s Voorhees Street with their three children.
William Barry died in April 1881. The obituary of the 38-year old said he had suffered lung ailments for two years. He was a “well-known musician” and composer who led the Amsterdam Cornet Band and played in the Thirteenth Brigade Band. The Barrys’ three-year-old daughter also died that year.
Now a widow with two young sons, Leonora could not go back to teaching because only single women were acceptable candidates for teaching positions. She went to work at Pioneer Hosiery, one of Amsterdam’s many knitting mills. It was located on the south side of 31 Main Street, between Market and Church Streets.
Barry wrote. “Day after day, I sat sewing men’s trousers for five cents a dozen.”
In 1884 Barry joined a women’s branch of the Knights of Labor in Amsterdam. There was a knitting mill strike and management lockout of the union in 1886. The mill owners eventually prevailed in ousting the Knights, at least temporarily.
In 1886 Barry attended a Knights of Labor convention in Richmond, Virginia, and was named to the new department of women’s work. Leaving her children with relatives, she traveled the country.
The Biographical Dictionary of Notable American Women described her as tall with a commanding presence, gifted with Irish humor, blue eyes and spontaneity.
Barry advocated equal pay for women and fought against child labor. She spoke against sexual harassment, saying men used the power of their positions to “debauch women and boys.”
In 1888, at Susan B. Anthony’s invitation, Barry spoke to the 40th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention for women, held in Washington, D.C.
In 1890 Leonora married Obediah Read Lake, a printer from St. Louis. Leonora didn’t think married women should work outside the home unless there was economic necessity. She resigned from the union.
Known as Mother Lake toward the end of her life, she lived until 1923 and was popular on the lecture circuit as an advocate for temperance and women’s rights.
After marrying Lake, Leonora lived in St. Louis until 1916 when she moved to Minooka, Illinois, to live with her husband’s sister. A baseball fan, she visited Chicago to see baseball games. She died of cancer in 1923.
Former Montgomery County historian Jacqueline Murphy was instrumental in getting an historical marker honoring Barry placed at the east end of the Riverfront Center in downtown Amsterdam in 1998.
Mohawk Valley sports reporter John Thomas enjoyed the article on NFL quarterback Russell Wilson’s Amsterdam ancestors. Thomas wrote, “In the twilight of his career we finally have him back home. Thanks for the memories.”
Bicycling in the old Mohawk Valley
An organization called the Clerical Bicyclists reached Amsterdam on August 10, 1886 and stayed the night at the Warner Hotel on Main Street.
The pastors and their machines, on a summer outing according to the Daily Democrat newspaper, boarded a train for Canajoharie. There they went “to their wheels” and cycled to Sharon Springs for dinner.
Pedaling preachers were just part of the explosion of interest in bicycling in the late 1800s and early 1900s in America.
Amsterdam merchant Seely Conover, who served twice as city mayor, once rode a high-wheeler, a bicycle with a large front wheel and a smaller rear wheel. The chain drive bicycle, invented in 1879, kept the user nearer the ground and became the standard design.
The Amsterdam Wheelmen organized bicycle trips every summer in the 1890s. They staged “lantern parades” with lights attached to their bikes.
Amsterdam historian Hugh Donlon wrote that bicyclists did face a problem, “Dirt roads with deep ruts and large stones encountered in inter-village travel provided a kind of obstacle course, but when cindered sidepaths were built about the turn of the century the going was easier.”
The Sidepath Law had passed in 1899 when Theodore Roosevelt was Governor. Pedestrians had to give the right of way to oncoming bicycles on sidepaths. Wagons and cattle were supposed to stay off the sidepaths altogether.
In 1900 the Montgomery County Sidepath Commission collected a thousand dollars by issuing sidepath permits to bicycle riders. The permit cost a dollar a year. Within five years though the amount collected fell to $50. Donlon wrote, “Cycling scofflaws could be very nasty.”
Edward DeGraff of Amsterdam, who later moved to Albany, was a prime mover along with other wheelmen in constructing sidepaths along miles of roads east of Amsterdam.
Donlon wrote in 1934, “One of DeGraff’s prized possessions is a photograph taken forty years ago which shows him in cycler's costume on his trusty vehicle under the gateway to the sidepath he built out of Amsterdam.” The picture is in Donlon’s Amsterdam history, “Annals of a Mill Town.”
DeGraff was quoted as saying, “It was all we could do to keep the sidepath from being rutted by wagons. The truth was that the sidepath was much better than the road.” People gradually came to the conclusion that the roads themselves needed to be improved.
Perhaps Amsterdam’s most famous cyclist was E. Adelbert Payne.
“Dell” Payne was born near Oriskany. He married, settled in Amsterdam and operated a bicycle sales and repair shop on Chuctanuda Street.
Payne and DeGraff once traveled 201 miles in one day, going from Amsterdam to Saratoga Springs, Glens Falls and Lake George, returning by way of Albany.
Payne set a record in August 1901 by pedaling from New York to Buffalo in 42 hours and 55 minutes. He sold and repaired the “National” brand bicycle that he used in his racing career.
Fire destroyed most of Payne’s Amsterdam shop in late 1913 and he was only partially insured. In 1916 Payne got a job as a lock tender at the then new Mohawk River/Barge Canal lock adjacent to Guy Park Manor in Amsterdam.
On June 22 1917 Payne was on the bridge of the lock trying to remove a log that was impeding the water’s flow. He leaned out, lost his footing and fell into the rushing river.
Soldiers were guarding the lock against possible sabotage as America had entered the Great War that year. Private Albert Munton reached Payne but could not save him.
Payne’s body was recovered the next day. He was 45. He and his wife had no children.
Football star Russell Wilson's Amsterdam Roots
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History for Daily Gazette
NFL quarterback Russell Wilson's roots go back to an African American family in Amsterdam.
Wilson and the NFL Giants have agreed to a one year deal, according to multiple sources.
Wilson was starting quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks in 2013. He and the Seahawks defeated Denver in the 2014 Super Bowl. The Seahawks lost to New England in the 2015 Super Bowl. Wilson is coming off his first year with the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Wilson's great grandfather, Harrison Wilson, Sr., was born in 1888, the son of a formerly enslaved man in Falmouth, Kentucky. Harrison Sr. migrated to Amsterdam in 1910 where he had relatives. In Amsterdam the Wilson family lived at locations including West Main, Cedar and Pine Streets.
Harrison Sr. and his wife Marguerite (Ayers), also from Kentucky, raised eight children and stressed education. Marguerite's grandmother had taught at a one room school in Kentucky.
Harrison Sr. was a plasterer, although racial discrimination kept him out of the union. He later was maintenance man for Amsterdam builder and landlord Thomas McGibbon.
Harrison Sr. saved the lives of two female pin setters working at a bowling alley in a downtown building owned by McGibbon, which caught fire in 1943.
McGibbon died later that year. The Wilsons were then able to make their livelihood by operating a private parking lot in busy downtown Amsterdam on land behind East Main Street that had been owned by McGibbon.
The Wilson children pursued careers in education, health care, industry, law and sports.
Harrison Sr.'s namesake Harrison Wilson, Jr., born in 1925, shined shoes and delivered newspapers as a seven-year-old. His mother told him he looked like his grandfather and that instilled pride in the young man.
Harrison Wilson, Jr., was the only African American on Amsterdam High's championship basketball team during the 1942-43 season. Coach Ed Cionek called him the team's "key player."
Harrison Jr. and his siblings were childhood friends of the late restaurateur Sam Pepe Jr. when both families lived on West Main Street. Pepe recalled going to YMCA summer camp with Harrison, Jr. and Harrison’s brother Willis.
Harrison Jr. played every sport he could in high school, even speed skating. After graduation, he entered the U.S. Navy and was tops in his class at basic training. He became a hospital corpsman.
When World War II ended, Harrison Jr. was a student and basketball star at Kentucky State, and then basketball coach at Jackson State in Mississippi. He taught at Jackson State and earned a doctorate at Indiana University. He was president of Norfolk State University, a historically black institution in Virginia, from 1975 to 1997.
Harrison Jr. frequently visited his parents in Amsterdam and provided help to young African Americans who wanted to pursue higher education. He was guest speaker at Amsterdam High graduation in the 1990s.
Marguerite Wilson died in 1960. Soloist Marilyn Lyons sang "He Will Understand and Say Well Done" at Marguerite's funeral. Harrison Sr. died in 1982 at age 94. Harrison Jr. passed away in 2019, also at 94.
One of Harrison Jr.'s six children, Harrison Wilson III, was a Dartmouth graduate and attorney who almost got into playing professional football with the San Diego Chargers. Harrison III died from complications from diabetes in 2010.
NFL quarterback Russell Wilson is the son of Harrison Wilson III and grandson of Harrison Jr.
Russell was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1988 and raised in Richmond, Virginia. He played football with his father and older brother at age four. He had a college career at North Carolina State and the University of Wisconsin. He played professional baseball with the Colorado Rockies organization.
Amsterdam’s mill girl’s long and Productive Life
Amsterdam’s mill girl died August 24. 2018, at Albany Medical Center. Sophie “Sue” Fraczek was 94. According to her grandnephew, Dominick Fraczek, she died at Albany Medical Center but had been living in a second-floor apartment on Amsterdam’s Guy Park Avenue.
Her parents, Dominick F. and Mary Kosiba Fraczek, were Polish immigrants. Her father worked at Mohawk Carpet mills in Amsterdam. Her mother, who died young, sometimes worked at Bigelow Sanford, the rug mill that bordered the Fraczek’s Park Hill neighborhood.
Aunt Sue, as she was known to her nieces and nephews, attended Amsterdam High and took a power machine course at Vrooman Avenue School in 1940. She worked at Novak’s shirt factory on Edson Street and the Amsterdam Coat Company in the West End.
Bigelow Sanford hired her to operate a twisting machine toward the end of World War II. The mills hired many women then to take the places of men who were in the military. She worked in Building 54.
“When I went to work (at Bigelow, I was scared to death,” she said in an interview. “It was my first time in a carpet mill. It was hot. It was noisy.”
The machine she used took two or three strands of wool and twisted the strands into yarn that was used to weave carpets. The yarn left the twisting room on spools or bobbins which fed the yarn into the looms.
Her pay was based on piece work, in her case determined by the weight of the bobbins of yarn she produced. She recalled making $45 for 40 hours work, a lot less she said than carpet weavers made.
Her picture was taken in front of her machine, a photo that ended up at the Walter Elwood Museum in Amsterdam. Television producer Steve Dunn picked that image to symbolize the 2000 WMHT-TV documentary he and I produced, “Historic Views of the Carpet City: Amsterdam, N.Y.”
Dunn said, “It is a really good picture, technically good. The black and white content expressed the whole theme—industrial workers in a mill town. I loved the way the spindles receded in the picture, and I loved the bandanna and the period clothes the woman wore.”
The photo was used in the documentary and illustrated newspaper articles about the film. It was displayed on the cover of WMHT’s viewer magazine.
Aunt Sue did not know the photo existed until she saw it on television. According to a grandnephew she would tell people, “I’m the mill girl!” The photo is one of two pictures of her in the collection of the Elwood Museum.
Dunn and I did not know the identity of the mill girl until several months after the documentary appeared. School teacher Gerry Brown stopped to talk with me at the Amsterdam Price Chopper and identified the mill girl as her godmother and aunt. Aunt Sue was the topic of my first column for the Daily Gazette in November 2000.
She stayed at Bigelow Sanford until the company left Amsterdam in 1955. She then did a similar job for Mohawk/Mohasco Carpet for six years.
Later she worked at several textile mills, retiring in 1989 from Stratojac a company that moved to Amsterdam in the 1980s to make coats.
She was not the only Amsterdam mill veteran who could say, “Almost every job I lost was because the company moved out.”
Sophie “Sue” Fraczek never married but spent years helping raise children in her extended family. She had a great eye for selecting gifts for nieces and nephews. She liked listening to the radio and loved to read, especially the classics.
Amsterdam’s Rocket Man
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History
Amsterdam city historian Robert von Hasseln has compiled biographical data on Rocco Petrone, Amsterdam’s link to the moon landings that took place over 50 years ago.
Petrone was launch director at Kennedy Space Flight Center in Florida and was what the New York Times called a “driving force” in the Apollo moon program. “Sparsely spoken and self-effacing in public, Petrone was tough, blunt, and demanding in private,” von Hasseln said.
“Once, when a briefing contractor attempted to bluff him on a critical question the contractor could not answer, Petrone physically hustled him off the podium and had him banned from ever working with the space program again.”
Petrone was born in Amsterdam in 1926. His parents were immigrants from Sasso di Castalda in Basilicata, Italy. Petrone’s father was a railroad laborer killed in a work accident when Rocco was an infant. His mother worked in a glove factory and later remarried.
“As a child, Petrone delivered ice to make family ends meet,” von Hasseln said. Petrone received an appointment to West Point in World War II where he did well academically and played defensive tackle on the 1945 national championship football team.
He served during the occupation of Germany and earned advanced degrees at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He worked on the U.S. missile program in the 1950s and was detailed to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He retired as a Lieutenant Colonel from the Army in 1966 to assume the launch director job at NASA.
After the moon landing in 1969, Petrone was promoted to direct the entire Apollo Program. In 1973, he became director of Marshall Space Flight Center where he oversaw the Skylab space station project. He retired from NASA in 1975.
He became CEO of a resource recovery organization but returned to the space industry as an official of Rockwell International.
Von Hasseln said, “Petrone was one of the few to recommend against the launching of the Space Shuttle Challenger on its last mission in 1986, although his concern was that cold weather would damage its insulating tiles, not the o-ring seals in the booster rockets which failed causing the explosion that destroyed the craft and killed its crew.”
Petrone died in 2006. He and has wife Ruth Holley Petrone lived in California and had four children. The launch control center in Florida has been named in his honor. Petrone Square at Church and East Main in downtown Amsterdam is also named for him.
Von Hasseln said, “The day he died the Space Shuttle Atlantis was undergoing its final preflight checks at the space port he had helped build. In an ironic but perhaps fitting tribute to his accomplishments, Petrone’s obituary drew more space in the national media than what by then was an almost routine event.”
Historic Amsterdam League held an Amsterdam trivia night recently at the Brewery at 30 East Main Street. Jerry Snyder of the League said, “We had about 40 people there and I think everyone had a good time. How can you not when there's pizza and beer? We'll probably do another one later this year.”
Bonus question at the first session was about WCSS, Amsterdam’s first radio station. Here’s a WCSS question: Who was the longtime early morning host of Amsterdam’s WCSS? Was it Bill Pope, Don Weeks, Lloyd Smith or Boom Boom Brannigan?
The answer is Lloyd Smith. Bill Pope was popular on WCSS but did not do the early morning show. Don Weeks did early mornings on WGY radio. Boom Boom Brannigan did an early morning radio shift in Amsterdam but at another station, originally called WAFS.
Amsterdam area native was Baseball Pioneer
Nick Young, a founder of Major League Baseball, was a native of Amsterdam. Born in 1840, Young was the son of Almarin and Mary Young. His father was in the grain and gristmill business.
When Young was eight years old, his family moved to Old Fort Johnson, which had been built west of what is nowAmsterdam by prominent Colonial figure Sir William Johnson.
Young learned to play cricket which had been brought to Amsterdam by English immigrants hired by the growing textile industry.
Young recalled that he and other young Americans became so "proficient" playing cricket that they soon were able to beat the English carpet and knitting mill workers "at their own game."
A short, nimble player (he was five foot six), Young played on New York's top cricket team.
Young moved to Albany to help his father's business in 1858, the year his mother died. His father Almarin was appointed Amsterdam postmaster by President Lincoln in 1861.
Young enlisted in the Union Army in 1862 and first with a New York regiment and later with the Signal Corps, he participated in many battles in the Civil War.
Young also took part in an early version of the new sport of baseball while in the Union army. During a lull in the fighting, Young was the pitcher on a pioneer ball team called the New Yorks. The New Yorks played a game against non-New Yorkers who called themselves the United States as a reported fifteen thousand people watched.
When the war ended Young went to Washington, D.C., where he worked for the Treasury Department but continued to be active in baseball.
He was a right fielder and official of an amateur baseball team in Washington. He officiated as an umpire in championship games. However, rowdiness and rampant gambling turned the public against baseball.
With reform in mind, in 1871 Young issued a call for the first nationwide meeting of professional baseball club owners. Delegates met in a large room over Collier's Restaurant at the 10th Street and Broadway in New York City. The National Association was formed at that meeting with Young chosen as secretary.
"From the seemingly little acorn we planted that night on St. Patrick's Day, 1871," Young wrote, "what a giant oak has grown, spreading its branches over this greatest of all lands, and furnishing clean, honest, healthful amusement for millions of people."
Young and Mary E. Cross of Washington married in 1872. They had four children. In 1876 baseball's National Association became the National League and Young continued as secretary. In 1881 he was elected National League president.
Although he was called Uncle Nick and was a popular figure, Young's years as league president were marked by continued conflicts. There were rowdy and violent incidents on the baseball playing fields.
Many players bolted to the rival American League when it formed in 1901. The turmoil led to Young withdrawing from a further term as National League president in 1903.
He returned to the Treasury Department. He died in 1916 at 76 at the home of one of his sons in Washington.
NOSTALGIA CORNER
Reader James Flack is looking for family information on Nick Young. You may reach Flack at jkflack@verizon.net
Judith V. Reynolds Hoell wants to know more about her Reynolds’ ancestors who were dentists in Amsterdam, “There are many old newspaper clippings about the family. Yet when I search historical sites in your area there is no mention of them.” Her grandfather was Clarence and his dad was Wallace T. Reynolds. There were seven dentists and one M.D. in the family. Hoell’s email is vseacoast3@aol.com
Library plays role in region's cultural life
Carved in stone over the front entrance to the Amsterdam Free Library at Church and Grove streets are the words, "Open to All." Generations of Amsterdamians are familiar with the interior of the stately building with its handsome woodwork, large reading tables, computers and second floor children's section.
The present library building opened in 1903. A wing at the rear of the structure was added in 1980. The Amsterdam facility has now been named the central library for the Mohawk Valley Library System.
“We’re proud to call ourselves the central library and we’re going to do our best to make sure that we do as much as we can for everyone,” said Nicole Hemsley, the library’s executive director, in an interview with the Daily Gazette.
The first organized book collection in the city was the Amsterdam Union Library, founded in 1805 and operated one day a week from the home of the librarian. There are no records for the Union Library after 1832 and it is not known when this subscription library ceased operations.
The Amsterdam Literary Association was formed in the 1840s to promote literature and the association lasted at least until 1860.
Speakers were invited to winter sessions but the bylaws stipulated that speakers be paid no more than travel expenses. When there was no speaker, topics were debated, such as "Is the motto, Our Country Right or Wrong, consistent with true patriotism?"
On January 14, 1848 an unknown topic was discussed with "a good deal of irregular conversation between members -- whereupon on or about the hour of ten and without any motion being put, the meeting broke in a row." At the next meeting, the minutes were altered by changing "row" to "disorder."
In 1891, prominent citizens led by two physicians, William H. Robb and S.H. French, founded the Amsterdam Library Association. That collection was located on East Main Street, west of Church Street. It was not a free library -- members paid a subscription fee of one dollar a year.
In 1895, the facility became a free library after a fund raising campaign organized by women in the community sponsored by the Daily Democrat newspaper, a forerunner of the Recorder. A special women's edition of the newspaper sold 10,000 copies and raised $1,500.
In 1902, the Amsterdam Library Association became the Amsterdam Free Library after a donation of $25,000 was secured from philanthropist and industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who was solicited by Dr. French. Carnegie agreed to put up the money to construct the library building in exchange for the city's pledge for ongoing financial support.
Historian Hugh P. Donlon wrote that city aldermen were hesitant about the idea of ongoing library maintenance, but went along with the proposal after a meeting at alderman Frank Parmentier's saloon on Railroad Street.
At the library’s 1903 cornerstone ceremony, Dr. French paid tribute to the city's growing industrial importance, "The whir of spindle and wheel will penetrate even the rooms set apart to reading and meditation, a constant reminder of the fact that thought and action must be inseparable. The toiler, not the idler is the one for whom libraries are founded."
Through the years, natives of the city including movie actor Kirk Douglas have remembered the library with donations. Douglas honored his friend Sonya Jacobsen Seigel with a library gift.
My Aunt Vera Cudmore visited the library monthly in her later years, plopping herself on a chair next to the mystery section to borrow books, especially murder mysteries set in England donated by the wife of longtime Mohawk carpet company executive Herbert Shuttleworth.
Drum corps boosted Mohawk Valley patriotism
After World War I, Amsterdam veterans’organizations formed drum and bugle corps. Most drum corps members were war veterans who had learned to march in the Army. The premier groups were those of the James T. Bergen and John J. Wyszomirski American Legion posts.
During World War II the number of drum corps multiplied and the organizations attracted younger, teen-aged members.
Amsterdam’s two Polish neighborhoods, Reid Hill and Park Hill, had separate drum corps. On Park Hill the all-female St. John’s Fife and Drum Corps looked sharp in blue and gold uniforms. The group was originally known as the Seventh Ward Fife and Drum Corps.
On Reid Hill the co-educational Polish National Alliance (P.N.A.) Drum and Bugle Corps took the field wearing maroon and white. Based at the P.N.A. building at Reid and Church Streets, many members were parishioners of St. Stanislaus Church.
One of the P.N.A.’s young buglers, Frank Ratka, went on to a career as business manager for symphony orchestras in Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Oklahoma City and Atlanta. “It was during the war and something that was very patriotic at the time,” said Sylvia Zimolka Stock in a 2004 interview, explaining why she joined the St. John’s corps at age 11. Stock began as a flag bearer then played drums. Frank Yazum, also interviewed in 2004, joined the P.N.A. corps in 1937 as a bugler.
Stock and Yazum said their groups performed traditional marches plus popular songs set to a martial tempo.
The St. John’s group marched in a Polish-American parade in New York City and played at Fort Smith near Peekskill where Company G of the National Guard from Amsterdam was stationed.
Another martial music group of the 1940s was the all-female Fort Johnson Fife and Drum Corps, who wore bright red uniforms.
Marge Vertucci Habla was filling in as a flag bearer with the Fort Johnson corps during one memorable Memorial Day parade in the 1940s. Habla and majorette Grace Bender had received conflicting marching orders. Habla took a turn and starting marching toward the Old Fort, with soldiers saluting along the way. However, the music got fainter. Behind Habla, Bender had not taken the turn and was leading the instruments in a different direction.
The drum corps competed against each other and out of town groups in appearance and performance. Inspections and competitions were held at Amsterdam’s Sanford Field, now Veterans Field on Locust Avenue. One Johnstown unit wore dressy black uniforms. Troy had the Mighty Callahans, who dressed in green.
When Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, the Allied victory in Europe, Stock said the St. John’s group “marched through the streets of Amsterdam because everybody was out celebrating.” Yazum did not recall if the P.N.A. corps marched that day, but said, “We just went around kissing all the girls.”
There were eight drum corps marching in Amsterdam’s World War II victory parade on September 15, 1945. Half of the groups were from the city and others came from Fort Johnson, Johnstown, Waterford and Syracuse. An all-female drum corps in Fonda sponsored a competition in 1947. The Fort Johnson drum corps entertained at the opening of the Mohawk Theatre in Amsterdam in 1949. For many years after the war, drum corps competitions were held in Amsterdam, Fonda, Fort Plain and Johnstown.
Nostalgia Corner
After URI Kaufman’s unsuccessful effort to turn the vacant Chalmers mill on Amsterdam’s South Side into an upscale housing protect, there was another developer who put a project together to rehabilitate the Chalmers building. Reader Bob Scott said that proposal also failed. The Chalmers building was torn down in 2011 and 2012.
Luxuray--an employment mainstay in 20th century Fort Plain
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, Amsterdam
A textile mill on Willett Street in Fort Plain produced women’s underwear, mainly panties, and was a major employer for most of the twentieth century.
The multi-storied factory was occupied in 1874 by the Shipman Spring and Axle Works, previously located in nearby Springfield and Van Hornsville. Minden town historian Rob Carter wrote, “In the course of a business combination, the factory was removed to Chicago Heights, Illinois, in 1894. The loss of this industry to Fort Plain was keenly felt.”
In about 1900, the Bailey brothers bought the Willett Street complex for their silk mill. That ran until 1931 when a company with the poetic sounding name of Luxuray bought the facility and embarked on an expansion.
“When this work is finished,” wrote the Otsego Farmer newspaper in 1933, “Luxuray Inc. will be one of the most complete and modern underwear plants in the United States, with a force of employees totaling from 250 to 300.”
The Gloversville Morning Herald that year reported Luxuray was implementing two shifts at its Fort Plain factory making rayon underwear. The predominantly female Luxuray employees, most of them operating sewing machines, were regularly noticed in local newspapers for sporting events, employee parties and good deeds. In 1945 many of the women from Luxuray used their own funds to help pay for a bingo party for soldiers recovering from war wounds at a Utica hospital.
Luxuray sold its own line of panties and also supplied lingerie to stores like Macy’s and J.C. Penney’s. Luxuray had a factory store in Fort Plain. Luxuray had several corporate owners. In the 1950s it became part of the Beaunit Corporation. The Fort Plain plant was sold to a group of Mohawk Valley investors in 1974.
“They may not know it,” wrote reporter Charles Tobey in a story in the Courier Standard Enterprise in 1984, “But right now, thousands of women are wearing panties made in Fort Plain.”
"We have people here who have worked 40 or more years in this factory," said plant manager Harry Reeder.
“Ladies' panties always have been the dominant product at Luxuray, although some other items have been manufactured,” Reeder said, “We make everything from a skimpy string bikini up to a size 68-inch hip."
Reeder added, “We like to think of ourselves as a good place to work.” Rolls of cotton, nylon, acetate and other materials were trucked to Fort Plain, and Luxuray’s cutting room staff was responsible for minimizing fabric waste.
From there, the material went to the sewing machine operators, women who comprised the majority of the employees.
Lightning apparently started a fire that damaged the roof of the factory in 1986. The company kept going. Foreign competition led to Luxuray’s demise. The company merged with Johnstown Knit in the closing years of the 20th century,
By 1999 underwear production ceased.
Reader Ronald Johnson wrote, “I was happy to see my grandparents’ Walter and Gertrude Johnson's business (on East Main Street) mentioned in your Sam Stratton column in which Sam meets John Naple. (Ron’s relatives) started the ice cream business in the 50's and it was one of the first soft serve ice cream stores in the area. My sister, Linda and I recall the name as Frosty Freeze. My grandfather had previously run service stations on Church St., Guy Park Ave and Tribes Hill. My father, Ron and Uncle Walt (both WWII vets) helped their parents in the evenings and weekends as both had full time jobs. After several years, my grandparents left the business primarily due to their ages and amount of time required. The location on East Main and Elk later became an insurance business and used car lot.”
Chalmers on Amsterdam's South Side
David W. Chalmers and his partners were the last industrialists to start a major knitting mill in Amsterdam. Chalmers, John Blood, John Barnes and Howard Hanson founded Chalmers Knitting Company in 1901 in a building on Washington Street north of the Mohawk River.
An Amsterdam knitting expert, Martin J. Shaughnessey, had discovered a way to knit fabric and leave tiny holes to allow air to reach and cool the body of the wearer. Shaughnessy worked for Chalmers and they called the breathable fabric Porosknit. Chalmers advertised in a spectacular way for a decade with a large lighted sign in the 1920s above New York's Times Square, touting Porosknit underwear and other products. Historian Hugh Donlon said Amsterdamians who visited the big city "gawked" at the huge sign.
In 1912 Chalmers and partners moved knitting operations to a four story brick building they constructed on the south side of the Mohawk River in Amsterdam. Turner Construction of Amsterdam built a seven-story concrete addition to the Chalmers factory in 1916.
Many of the employees were Italian-Americans who walked to the mill from their South Side homes.
It was not easy work. "How many times we used to come home from work and cry because it was a bad day," said Elizabeth Sardonia in an interview with the Daily Gazette. "But you went to work the next day just the same, and punched that clock."
Turner Construction built a mansion on Guy Park Avenue for David Chalmers and his wife Emsie. A friend of Thomas Edison, Chalmers had electric lamps at his home and a third floor ballroom. The mansion is still in private hands.
The South Side knitting mill was sold in 1945 to Lester Martin of New York City who continued to manufacture underwear under the Chalmers name. In 1946, Martin's controller Joel Kaplan began making trips to Amsterdam from his native New York City to inventory the Chalmers operation.
David Chalmers died in 1950 at his Guy Park Avenue home. In 1955, Kaplan moved to Amsterdam to oversee the Chalmers plant, which at one time during Martin's ownership employed 650 people.
Martin died in 1959 and the Chalmers mill closed that year. Textile operations continued, however, at the former Chalmers building, purchased by Edward Stern in 1962. Stern had a knitting operation on the fourth floor. Kaplan headed a new company named Montco which occupied the third floor, manufacturing women's sportswear. Montco had a second factory in Johnstown.
Stern closed his Amsterdam operation in 1978. Montco closed in 1980 as textile manufacturing moved overseas. Kaplan said Montco production supervisor Beatrice Fredericks and 30 other women started their own company in the Chalmers building in 1980. They produced clothing there until about 1985. Kaplan was active in numerous non-profits in particular the Amsterdam Free Library. He died in 2015.
In the early 2000s, Long Island developer Uri Kaufman proposed construction of a luxury apartment complex using the Chalmers building. Kaufman has created apartment complexes from former mill buildings in Cohoes.
The Chalmers building was placed on the National Historic Register in 2010. But there was opposition to Kaufman's plan on the city's Common Council.
The Gazette reported, "That plan fell apart amid the housing market collapse, trouble with the title to the property and a general desire by many to have the eyesore gone and the site available for redevelopment." The Chalmers mill was torn down over several months, starting in late 2011 and finishing in 2012.
The Chalmers site is now adjacent to the entrance to Amsterdam's popular pedestrian bridge, the Mohawk Valley Gateway Overlook.
Tuba player struck up the band
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, Amsterdam Recorder
Amsterdam tuba player Herbert S. Breen was married twice. His first wife, Maude Mosher, died in 1927, the year the Mohawk Mills Band was formed. Two years later he married Carrie Wilbur. Breen said he met both women when he was playing in a band, “Must be that uniform that gets them.”
Born in Manchester, England, in 1879, Breen came to America at age six and his family settled in Amsterdam. Breen’s first job in 1896 was at John E. Larrabee’s, the city’s popular hardware store. He later opened his own plumbing and tinsmith shop. He also worked for Chuctanunda Gas and Light before returning to Larrabee’s, where he remained for 45 years. He serviced air conditioning units.
His passion though was music. According to a 1950 feature article in the Mohawk Carpet Mills publication Tomohawk, Breen started his musical journey playing an alto horn in the Rock City Silvertone Cornet Band, the same year he started working at Larrabee’s.
The musical group practiced in a grocery store at the corner of First Street and Forest Avenue in Amsterdam’s Rockton section. Breen said the band could have been more successful, “People used to blow their lamps out if they thought we were going to play in front of their house.”
When the Rock City band broke up, Breen sometimes played in the Hagaman Citizens Band, Fort Hunter Military Band, Minch’s Military Band, Hagaman Boys Band and the popular 13th Brigade of the Knights of Pythias, a fraternal group. “As the band grows older,” Breen told Tomohawk, “it seems to me the boys go into a kind of a slump and have to start over again.”
Breen said the major “start over” in his musical life came in 1927 when the Mohawk Mills Band was formed, subsidized by the carpet mill owners, the Shuttleworth family. The band was led by a number of men but for many years one of the Musolff brothers—Edward, Harry or Frank---held the conductor’s baton.
Quite a few members worked for the mill but others, like Breen, did not. The band was in peak form in 1950 when Breen was interviewed for a company magazine article. He is pictured on the cover playing the tuba.
At age 70, Breen was the oldest member of the organization. The youngest was Amsterdam junior high school student George Guilbault, Jr., a percussionist. His father, George Guilbault, Sr., owned a supply business, was a snare drummer and persuaded his son to join.
Carpet weaver Al Pietro played clarinet. Finishing room worker John Carbonelli was a cornet player, as was weaver and charter member Arthur Cook.
Music store proprietor and former weaver Martin Dybas was a charter member and played clarinet, as did banker James McGibbon. Herm Bettine, who operated an auto repair garage, played bass drum.
Breen told Tomohawk that he didn’t consider himself “much of a musician” but said he had a “wonderful chance to do some clowning and have a few laughs.” In 1961 American Legion Post 701 took over sponsorship of the band from the carpet mill. Carpet production was now moving south.
Herb Breen died at Amsterdam Memorial Hospital in 1962 after a month-long illness. He was 82. His wife, one son, one step-son, one grandson and two great-grandchildren survived him. He was buried at Hagaman Cemetery after a service conducted by Reverend Albert Brockway of First Methodist Church.
Members of the newly named Post 701 Band called to pay their respects. Breen had been named an honorary member of the Amsterdam Musicians Local. He was a charter member of the Hagaman Volunteer Fire Department
Bob Cudmore is a free lance writer.
518-346-6657
Helping Sam Stratton get elected
On one of Samuel Stratton’s early trips to Amsterdam as part of his first Congressional campaign there he luckily ran into an 11-year old entrepreneur.
East End native John Naple wrote, “If I was 12 years old I could get my working papers and then have my own paper route, but it was only 1958 so I had one more year to wait. While I waited, Mike Sheridan from Kline Street hired me to deliver his route.” Sheridan had over one hundred Recorders to deliver from Marotta’s News across from St. Casimir’s Church to Degraff Street near Coessens Park.
It was a hot summer day and Naple still had half the papers to deliver, “Having some pocket change, I stopped at Frosty’s Ice Cream at the top of Elk Street. A handsome, thin young man, with a sweaty wrinkled white shirt pulled a beat up station wagon into the parking lot. He jumped out and started talking to the people in line.” He told them, “I’m the mayor of Schenectady, running for Congress and looking for your vote.” Stratton was 41 at the time. He had been awarded two bronze stars as an officer in Navy intelligence in World War II. Naple said Stratton was handing out small cards with this name and picture on them, “I introduced myself to him, while he was eating his ice cream.
“I was taken by the man and making an executive decision, offered to put his cards in my papers when I rolled them up. I showed him how to roll the paper and tuck the card inside. He gave it a try and did a fair job. I could roll a paper in about two seconds. I rolled about 50 of his cards into the papers in the dirty canvas bag that hung over my shoulder.”
Naple threw some rolled papers up on first and second story porches. Some went into milk boxes and others behind screen doors. “All those customers received the card of Sam Stratton,” Naple recalled.
Stratton won the election in November and served 30 years in Congress, 1959 to 1989. Naple said, “Years later Stratton appointed two of my younger brothers to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. They both had distinguished naval careers. Did I help my brothers get their appointments by helping Sam get elected?”
John Naple went on to be a science teacher. Now retired he is active in the community organizing Amsterdam Reads for the local library.
COUSINS
Naple and his cousin Sharon DiMenno Menech now of Broadalbin grew up on Eagle Street.
Menech recalled, “In the neighborhood everyone got along, and all the adults sat out in front of our house and the kids played all kinds of games.”
Menech and Naple grew up on Eagle Street, across the street from where Kirk Douglas was born and raised. She used to walk past old Amsterdam landmarks on her way to and from school: Shell’s Pharmacy, Johnny’s Seafood and the Mohawk, Tryon and Rialto theaters.
Menech said, “Friday nights there always was walking downtown. shopping and meeting friends at Brownie’s and sitting in tbe back booth.” Menech’s father worked at Bigelow-Sanford carpet mill and her mother worked third shift at Mohasco carpet mill. When Bigelow-Sanford moved out in 1955 her father got a job at a Christmas tree factory. When Mohasco moved out, her mother found work at the Big N store deli on Route 30.
“The closing of the carper mills put many out of work,” Menech said. “But they usually found a job of one kind or another.”
The woman who was was the queen of Fonda
People called her Queen Libby
A formidable woman from Italy, Queen Libby literally stopped a train, saved a man from the electric chair and became a major property owner in Fonda. Elizabeth Luciano was born in Pietremalara near Naples, Italy in 1872. She came to America alone when she was 15 and settled in Fonda to be near relatives who lived in Johnstown.
She married another Italian immigrant, James Cassell. They had three children before Cassell died at the age of 33. Libby then married Alfonso Mancini, who worked for the railroad, and had four more children.
Libby and Alfonso returned to Italy for a time where Alfonso was a jailor. Libby returned to America by herself and Alfonso eventually followed her back to America. According to one of her grandchildren, Libby was a large woman who received her nickname when she knocked down a man who had used an ethnic slur about Italians. “The next time you see me, you bow,” Libby told the fallen man, leading him to refer to her as Queen Libby or Queen Lib.
Queen Libby ran a boarding house and grocery store in the west end of Fonda, where she fed, housed and cared for Italian immigrants who worked on the railroad. She had a good head for business and also purchased 16 two family houses in the village. Patsy Cassell, one of Libby’s sons, ran a popular Fonda tavern called Patsy’s for many years.
In 1923, one of Libby’s daughters, Eva Mancini Pepe, was about to give birth to her first child. Eva had married Ralph Pepe, whose father Salvatore had founded Pepe’s Bakery, which was a family business on Amsterdam’s South Side.
According to a clipping from The Recorder from January 20th of 1923, Libby was informed by telephone that her daughter was about to have a rare Caesarean section at St. Mary’s Hospital in Amsterdam.
Libby secured a red flag at the Fonda train station and when an express came thundering in its usual way she waved the red flag, convincing the engineer to stop the train and take her to Amsterdam. Arriving at the hospital, she charged into the operating room.
Libby also made a phone call to the New York Central Railroad and demanded that the next possible train stop in Fonda to take her husband to Amsterdam. The headline from the newspaper clipping reads: “Flags train to reach daughter as stork comes: Fonda woman bossed the whole New York Central Railroad but got to Amsterdam hospital on time.”
The child born that day was Vincenza Pepe, who passed away in 2001. Vincenza Pepe had seven children and the child she bore in 1924 was Salvatore Pepe of Amsterdam, who provided information for this story. “Queen Libby was strong-minded, tough but a gentle grandmother,” Salvatore Pepe said, recalling that Libby gave quarters to her grandchildren.
Ann Nardick Sherman of Amsterdam also claimed Queen Libby as a grandmother. Sherman’s mother was Constance Cassell, one of the children from Libby’s first marriage.
According to Sherman, Libby was an interpreter for Italians who could not speak English who were brought before the court in Fonda. Libby once saved an innocent man from the electric chair. Libby called Italy where the real murderer had fled and had him sent back to the United States for trial. Governor Franklin Roosevelt was so impressed that he visited Fonda to commend Libby and a parade was held in her honor.
Queen Libby died in 1938 and her grandchildren said her funeral was the biggest funeral ever seen in Fonda.
Mary Anne Krupsak’s roots
Long before Polish-American John Gomulka was elected mayor of Amsterdam in 1967, Michael J. Wytrwal, who never held elected office, was widely known as the city’s unofficial Polish mayor.
Wytrwal was born near Krakow, Poland in 1882 and immigrated to Scranton, Pennsylvania when he was fourteen with his mother Sophie, who then returned to their native land to retrieve another son. Sophie and her other son died in Poland.
Wytrwal worked in Scranton’s coal mines for six months then moved to Reid Hill, one of Amsterdam’s two Polish enclaves. There he started a candy and ice cream business.
Wytrwal married Mamie Brudzdowski in 1904 and sold life insurance. Mamie died two years later in childbirth. In 1907, Wytrwal married Mamie’s sister Josephine. He fathered seven children, the son from his first marriage plus five daughters and another son from the second marriage. The Wytrwals took up residence in the Brudzdowski’s two-family home at 26 Cornell Street.
Wytrwal became an entrepreneur. He founded a pharmacy in 1910, later operated by a daughter and son-in-law as Krupzak’s Pharmacy on Hibbard Street. Next door was Wytrwal’s Furniture, managed by one of Wytrwal’s sons. M.J. Wytrwal Coal and Oil, started in 1926, was on James Street.
He was a founder of what was known as the Polish bank and the local Polish National Alliance. He built homes in Amsterdam and was part owner of a Fort Plain knitting mill.
Local Polish people frequently approached Wytrwal for assistance getting work, even for help with personal problems.
In the Depression Wytrwal let it be known he enjoyed “welfare peanut butter” given out to the needy. He bought many jars of peanut butter from destitute friends who were too proud to ask for a handout.
In the 1933 mayoral election Wytrwal helped English native Arthur Carter win the race as a Democrat. President Franklin Roosevelt named Wytrwal to head National Recovery Act programs in Montgomery County. Carter served twelve years with Wytrwal’s support in the predominately Polish Fourth Ward.
One grandchild said Wytrwal was eloquent in both Polish and English and was a broker between the Polish-speaking community and the English-speaking power structure. The grandchildren remember Christmas Eves when the needy always found a seat at the family table.
Wytrwal doted on his fifteen grandchildren, one of whom drove him places when his failing eyesight made it impossible for him to drive himself.
He was a role model for granddaughter Mary Anne Krupsak, the trailblazing woman politician who was born in Schenectady and raised in Amsterdam. Her parents operated Krupsak’s Pharmacy on Hibbard Street..
Mary Anne Krupsak died December 28, 2024 at age 92 at her home on Seneca Lake, New York.
Young Krupsak ate lunch at her grandparents’ home every day when she attended St. Stanislaus School nearby. She saw a constant parade of people seeking assistance from her grandfather.
Wytrwal’s wife Josephine died in 1956. Michael Wytrwal lived to see Krupsak sworn in as an Assemblywoman in January 1969.
When Wytrwal died January 21 of 1970, the Recorder editorialized that he was “likeable, friendly, considerate, a progressive in the finest sense of the word.”
After Wytrwal’s death, Krupsak won a State Senate seat. She was elected the state’s first woman Lieutenant Governor in 1974, running with Democrat Hugh Carey. In 1978 she unsuccessfully challenged Carey for governor in a Democratic primary.
After leaving public life, Krupsak worked as an attorney encouraging startup companies. The work was similar to what her grandfather had done in Amsterdam, where he negotiated deals to help the community with nothing more than a handshake.
“People trusted him because of his honor,” Krupsak said.
Amsterdam sparkled in 1925 expoBy Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, Amsterdam Recorder
America was prospering in 1925, one hundred years ago, and local businesses staged.Amsterdam’s Progress Exposition and Auto Show that year to show off that prosperity. “In the 1920s, that was the heyday here,” said anthropologist Susan Dauria. “The population was about 35,000, the biggest it’s ever been.” Dauria wrote her doctoral dissertation on the rise and decline of manufacturing in Amsterdam.
The Progress Exposition was organized by the Board of Trade, predecessor of the Fulton-Montgomery Chamber of Commerce. The event was held for eight days in September at Ross’s Flats in the East End. Admission was 25 cents for adults and 10 cents for children.
The Recorder reported that on opening day people "stormed the entrance" which was dominated by a large windmill to emphasize Amsterdam's Dutch roots. Mayor Carl Salmon opened the festivities saying Amsterdam had "diversified industries" and it was time to show people what was "made and done here." State Senator William Byrne, who had a home in the nearby town of Florida, said it was time to put Amsterdam on the map.
The exposition had more than a hundred booths where manufacturers and businessmen showed their wares. One mammoth tent was dedicated to the display of automobiles. Socony (Standard Oil of New York) showed off a gasoline pump.The carpet mills, Mohawk and Stephen Sanford & Sons. had booths in the Exposition, as did other manufacturers.
A Main Street parade preceded opening night. The Schenectady Gazette reported, “All the industrial concerns and stores in this city have been invited to have their old employees in point of service participate in the parade, as the parade will feature those who have had part in the building up of Amsterdam.”Schenectady General Electric furnished floodlights. There was a fashion show, baby contest and pet show.
Main Street department store Holzheimer & Shaul occupied several booths that looked like store window displays. A cardboard cutout of a young girl was behind a new Hoover vacuum cleaner, offered with “unusually easy terms.” A female mannequin wearing an apron was placed amid a display of Glenwood gas and wood stoves.
One of the firm’s principals, P. Dater Shaul, was pictured at a planning session for the Exposition. To tout the city’s role in making rugs, Holzheimer’s put a Sanford carpet on the sidewalk in front of its East Main Street store during the Exposition.
In Amsterdam since 1882, Fitzgerald’s Bottling Works offered ginger ale for five cents a bottle at the Exposition. “The safest drinks--kills disease germs,” stated an advertising poster.
The Walter Elwood Museum in Amsterdam has a book of pictures of the Progress Exposition taken by photographer Emil Zillgitt for the Board of Trade.
One picture shows the booth of real estate agent Monroe Gray, selling suburban lots at Tribes Hill Heights, west of Amsterdam. “A lot means a home and a home means a lot,” stated a poster. Gray was seated, smartly dressed in a three-piece suit, holding a rolled up blueprint.Another poster promised, “Invest now and double your money at Tribes Hill Heights.” Gray had blueprints of the lots and pictures of homes stacked on a table..
Zillgitt was born in Germany in 1883 and came to America when he was five.. He worked for photographer Fred Morse and bought Morse’s business.
Amsterdam native Peter Betz said, ‘I have a picture of myself in a sailor suit taken at home by Zillgitt sometime around 1944. I was about two years old and vaguely remember the gent because he was a very humorous man who knew how to get a nervous kid to sit for him. ‘
Highlights of Focus on History columns in 2024
By Bob Cudmore
The movie "South of Tahiti" was playing at the Strand Theatre on East Main Street in Amsterdam, when interrupted as the news broke that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.
Radio coverage was piped into the theater and dazed patrons left the building.
A soldier who grew up on Northampton Road in Amsterdam was among the 2390 Americans killed in the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941.
William E. Hasenfuss, Jr., died when Japanese airplanes shot up the B-24 bomber Hasenfuss and his ground crew were working on at Hickam Air Field in Hawaii.
Amsterdam country music performer Dusty Miller, whose real name was Elmer Rossi, Sr/, had a band called the Colorado Wranglers. Miller’s day job was stocking cigarette and other vending machines. In later years he delivered medicines from John Tag’s Guy Park Avenue pharmacy to local customers.
The Colorado Wranglers had a long run at Amsterdam's Bob's Tavern. Miller managed to fit an Amsterdam radio show into his schedule well into his eighties. "I like country music because it shows life as it is," Miller said.
When he died in 1998 Dusty Miller was buried in his colorful cowboy clothes. Stanley Silvernail was born in Otsego County in 1917. He worked for the Amsterdam Recorder for 41 years. In 1970 he became managing editor and in 1978 editorial page editor. He was a graduate of Syracuse University and a veteran of the U.S. Army Air Corps and U.S. Air Force. He married Wilhelmina Anna Phillips. They lived on Black Street in Vail Mills.
Their son Jeff recalled, “We had a private line before anyone on Black Street because people were always calling for him usually with things that no one wanted to share on a party line.”
When Orsini’s Royal Restaurant at East Main and Liberty Streets in Amsterdam opened in the 1920s, there were curtains on the booths. Customers who were not Italian didn’t know how to eat spaghetti. They closed the curtains when dining on pasta. The Board of Health ordered the curtains removed.
Anthony Orsini, an immigrant from Abruzzi, and his wife Julia Richitelli, born near Naples, started the restaurant, also known as the Royal Lunch. It was a family business. Anthony’s daughter Genevieve was a founder of a high school sorority for Italian girls. After graduating, she worked as a waitress.
When Judge Robert Sise was a youngster he went to communion at St. Mary’s Church, then stopped at Orsini’s for breakfast before school. Sise’s parents told Genevieve to supervise. Sise wanted chocolate doughnuts but Genevieve made him have toast or oatmeal, “Bob was a little annoyed with me.” Amsterdam’s Fairview Cemetery was built on a 110-acre parcel of land once owned by Revolutionary War surgeon Dr. David Shepard on a hill overlooking the Mohawk River valley.
By the late 19th century the land was purchased by Warren K. Nibble of Troy. Nibble decided to use the land for a cemetery.
The project was laid out by landscape engineer G. Douglas Baltimore. The chapel and mausoleum were completed in 1901. A gateway of stone and iron was erected on Steadwell Avenue as the entrance to the cemetery in 1902.
Many of Amsterdam’s prominent citizens were buried at Fairview: the Shuttleworth family, who founded the factory that became Mohawk Carpet Mills; the Chalmers family, who operated knitting and button mills; and manufacturer John R. Blood, among others.
In 2024, two historic roadside markers were placed at the front entrance on Steadwell Avenue. One marker is dedicated to Fairview Cemetery itself and the second is for the Admiral Dahlgren cannon, located in the Veterans Section.
Christmas in Amsterdam through the years
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History for Daily Gazette, Amsterdam Recorder
Amsterdam retail sales records were broken in the 1902 Christmas shopping season.The post office, then at the corner of East Main and Church streets, was extremely busy. So many packages and letters crowded the postal facility that employees had problems finding places to stand to do their jobs.
One of the sights in Amsterdam during the heyday of carpet manufacturing was the lighted outline of a Christmas tree installed on the front of the Clock Building on Prospect Street.
The Clock Building at the time was Amsterdam headquarters of Bigelow-Sanford. Carpets.During World War II Mohawk Carpets sent gift boxes to each of the mill’s soldiers. The 1943 box included candy, playing cards and a greeting card from company president, Howard Shuttleworth.
The city had a Christmas parade in 1947 featuring a balloon train. A picture shows parade watchers spilling onto East Main Street to view the engine. The Mohawk Mills Chorus, predecessor of the Mohawk Valley Chorus, appeared on NBC television in 1949 singing Christmas tunes with vocalist Roberta Quinlan on her Mohawk Carpet Showroom program.
In the 1950s Amsterdam held a Christmas Festival at Coessens Park in the East End, organized by Mayor Thomas F. Gregg. A Christmas village was built in the park and the festival lasted from early December through Christmas Day.
An estimated 35,000 attended the event. Santa talked with children and animals were brought in from the Catskill Game Farm, including eight fallow deer posing as Santa’s reindeer.
The festival cost a couple thousand dollars more than was raised. Although Mayor Gregg wanted to stage a festival the next year, that did not happen. Proprietor of a downtown butcher shop on Railroad Street, Gregg died in 1960.
In the 1950s Larrabee’s hardware store on Market Street sold Lionel and American Flyer model trains at Christmas. Each brand installed its own model railroad layout. The grandchildren of Polish American community leader Michael J. Wytrwal remember Christmas Eves when the needy found a seat at the family table on Cornell Street.
Albert “Kiddo” Zierak, tended bar Christmas Eve at Kiddo’s Tavern on Reid Street. He would send lonely people from the tavern to the house next door where his sisters lived, to enjoy the traditional Christmas Eve meal.
Alphonso and Catherine D'Alessandro owned the Gift & Hobby Shop at Lark and East Main Streets. On Christmas Eve Alphonso would stay late at the store, awaiting people coming to pick up their layaways.
At midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, all main lights at St. Casimir’s Roman Catholic Church then on East Main Street were turned off, smaller lights turned on. A parishioner recalled that with the smaller lights and candles, the church looked magical.
The Christmas Eve service at St. Ann’s Episcopal Church on Division Street was so crowded years ago that ushers set up extra chairs in the center aisle to accommodate everyone.
The matrons at the Children’s Home orphanage on Guy Park Avenue years ago asked each child for a list of three things wanted for Christmas. One woman remembered getting paper dolls and white socks.
When high school social life was dominated by sororities and fraternities, a high point of the holidays was Phi Delta sorority’s Christmas formal. In 1963 the dance was held at the Century Club on Guy Park Avenue. The girls of the sorority asked boys to attend.
Amsterdam wrapped up its bicentennial year in 2004 with City Hall display of a Christmas tree with ornaments made by students. Windmills on the tree paid tribute to Dutch heritage. One large windmill had holiday greetings in English, Italian, Polish and Spanish.
Family fun with the Recordio
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette and Recorder
In the late 1940s my family had a machine called the Recordio to make 78 rpm records for our own amusement.
We often sent these homemade records to my Aunt Winifred and Uncle Albert Gulloni who, with Albert’s daughter Sylvia, had moved to Inverness, Florida after World War II. The Gullonis sent us Recordio Discs they had recorded in return.
First sold in 1939 in variously priced models, the Wilcox-Gay Recordio enabled consumers to make their own records using a microphone or recording audio from an embedded AM radio.
My uncle Al had operated a radio and television repair shop in Scotia and moved south to advance his career in retail. My hunch is my parents got a deal on the Recordio from Uncle Al. It might even have been a gift.
There is a fair amount of information online about the Recordio, manufactured in Charlotte, Michigan. Youtube has examples of recordings made on this system, which one online audiophile described as “decent.” It’s reported online that Johnny Cash and Les Paul used these player-recorders at some points in their early careers.
Wilcox-Gay sold Recordio Discs or blank records in two sizes. You also could play commercially produced 78 rpm records on the machine’s turntable.
Unlike later cassette tape recorders, you couldn’t record over a Recordio Disc once you created it.
That was a problem in our case in that as a spoiled young child I was a show-off, fond of off-color words.
My father would say, “Bob, say Merry Christmas to Aunt Winnie and Uncle Al.” I would sometimes respond by saying, “Poop!”
In my defense I knew this would get a laugh at home from my aunts and sister, if not from my mother and father. We no doubt mailed the off-color Recordio Disc to Florida anyway, where my potty mouth likely got more chuckles.
One family picture shows my father Clarence holding a vase of flowers, standing and singing or talking into the Recordio microphone on a floor stand in our living room in our flat on Pulaski Street.
In this picture the Recordio itself is on a coffee table to my father’s right. The recording arm does not look like it is on the turntable. Maybe my father was practicing.
The picture was taken in 1949 or so as I was a toddler on the floor playing with my aunt, my father’s youngest sibling, Vera Cudmore. My sister, the real singer in the family, may have taken the picture.
My mother and my father’s oldest sister, Gladys Morrell, are sitting on a couch smiling, enjoying whatever father is doing.
The photo was taken before we had a television set and a large, handsome console radio, separate from the Recordio, has a place of honor along the Pulaski Street living room wall.
The Recordio made the move when our family relocated up the hill to a home of our own on Amsterdam’s Peter Lane in 1957. A few years after that Wilcox-Gay went out of business. At some point, unfortunately, our Recordio was discarded along with our Recordio Discs.
My friend Warren Garling, known as Chris Warren on the radio, has been interviewing veteran radio announcers for a podcast series about their careers. Several of them had technical skills and first got into radio by building their own home radio stations as teenagers.
I worked in radio for a half century or so but did not build a home radio station when I was a teenager.
But I did have the family Recordio which helped me practice my speaking skills when I was a child.
Amsterdam goes to war
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History for Daily Gazette and Amsterdam Recorder
Radio coverage was piped into the theater and dazed patrons left the building. A soldier from Amsterdam was among the 2390 Americans killed in the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941. William E. Hasenfuss, Jr. was from a family of nine on Northampton Road.
Hasenfuss had flown planes at an airfield in Perth before enlisting in the Army in 1939. According to research done by the late Bob Going, some 176 Amsterdamians were killed in World War II. Hasenfuss died when Japanese airplanes shot up the B-24 bomber Hasenfuss and his ground crew were working on at Hickam Air Field in Hawaii.
His mother Frieda, Amsterdam's first World War II Gold Star Mother, christened the light cruiser U.S.S. Amsterdam in 1944 at Newport News, Virginia. About twenty relatives and friends of the Hasenfuss family were at the ceremony along with Mayor Wilbur H. Lynch..
Mrs. Hasenfuss was overcome with emotion when shipyard workers gave her a diamond-studded wristwatch. Lynch said Amsterdam is “a splendid city” just as “the cruiser Amsterdam is a splendid ship.” "I was thinking of William when I smashed that bottle." she said as the vessel slid into the James River.
USS Amsterdam was among the American ships in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese surrendered in 1945. A model of USS Amsterdam was made by the late Albert M. Swager of Pennsylvania, a former crewman, who donated it to Amsterdam's Walter Elwood Museum.
George A. Tralka, 15, was at his family's James Street home in Amsterdam when he heard news about the attack on the radio. At first Tralka thought Pearl Harbor was in Alaska. Tralka’s parents went ahead with plans to go out that day and to have Tralka watch his younger sisters. The next day as Tralka delivered the Schenectady Gazette he heard President Roosevelt's "day of infamy" speech on the radio when at Reid Hill Pharmacy.
"It was a solemn moment in the drug store," Tralka wrote in his memoir, "Diary of a Replacement Soldier." As his senior year in high school drew to a close, Tralka enlisted in an Army training program. His notice to report came a few days before his senior prom and he was so busy getting ready to go that he failed to notify his date that he couldn’t attend the prom.
Later his brother accepted Tralka’s high school diploma. Tralka survived the war and became a physician in the Washington, D.C. area.
James V. Hogg from Amsterdam was on a Navy ship somewhere in the Pacific when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. His niece Karen terHaar said, "In the months after Pearl Harbor, many ships in the area were ordered to maintain radio silence. The families of crew members did not know if their fathers, sons or brothers were dead or alive."
Hogg's parents, Frank and Mildred Hogg, were living on Grant Avenue in Amsterdam.
TerHaar wrote, "About four months after Pearl Harbor, Mom was sitting on the front porch when she heard the postman's voice. She saw him running down the sidewalk. He was waving a letter and yelling, 'Jimmy's alive! Jimmy's alive!'"
James Hogg became a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy and married a woman from Australia. He later lived in California. Mitsuo Fuchida was the Japanese pilot who led the first warplanes in the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the war Fuchida converted to Christianity and spent many years living in America, although he died in Japan at age 73.