“In October, 2017, my husband David and I were sitting on Elliot Street on Gallery Walk one Friday evening in Brattleboro – a beautiful October evening: food trucks, kids running around, teenagers and parents. This is where I could tend my own garden: my, ourcommunity. I decided right then and there I would start interviewing people in SE Vermont. I would set up my own radio show on BCTV to celebrate this remarkable corner of the world. I’d call the show simply “Here We Are.”
“ For the first five years I was doing a weekly show: Johnny Swing, a metal sculptor from Newfane; Ken Burns, Tom Bodett, Curtis Tuff from his BBQ bus in Putney, Amber Paris, a young poet from Putney, even Gordon Hayward who interviewed me for THIS profile. Now, in 2024, my show is running every other week. And no money changes hands.
“ I call people up from my list of 100 to see if they’d like to be interviewed. If they say yes, I interview them for maybe two hours, take notes on ledger paper, write up an outline and questions, then do the live interview on BCTV. (To see them all google BCTV Here We Are. There are hundreds.)” Each show is posted on BCTV for two weeks, but to really get the show out there, I post them on Facebook sites, community sites….. It’s all an energy exchange. I even have an eblast site for the community I live in on Sunhill Road in Putney. And I don’t want to get it professional. It’s all about people!”
“The story of MY life? Books, lots of books, and lots of friends. Who did you run into today? And beauty. I was brought up surrounded by beauty. My parents – Paul and Eleanor O’Connell – were living in Manlius, NY when I was born September 21, 1950. Both had been students of fine art at Syracuse University. As students, they rented an apartment on campus which they renovated and redecorated for pretty much no money: lead-glassed windows they found, a beautiful banquette they found restored. Their apartment was all so beautiful on no money House Beautiful Magazine published a piece on it – “Look what YOU could do!”
“They developed wallpaper designs, painted murals and portraits. All through the 40’s they worked together to find ways to make a living but life always had to be fun. Always good food on the table beautifully presented but no money at all left over at the end of the week. They refurbished furniture. Always, there was a studio or an antique shop they were running and people were in and out, in and out.
“Then Dad bought an abandoned church in Manlius, NY, a little lively town like Putney, and he set up a picture frame studio in it. Then he bought an old church and then an octagonal corn crib that eventually burned. He did all the renovations himself. One day he came home with a pickup truck load of 2’x3’ panes of glass someone had given him. He made a whole wall of glass out of them so sunlight poured into the kitchen and sitting room. A few days after he installed the windows, the sun hit them just right and I saw an elbow in one, someone’s knee in another, an ankle… The windows were all discarded X-ray plates.
“ I was an only child and spent ALL my time with my parents. We did everything together. Everything. I read every Nancy Drew book and even formed a Nancy Drew Club. (I was the only member.) Friends of their’s moved in nearby. They had three boys 8, 6 and 3 years older than me but one girl only 1 year older than me. They had horses, cats, and dogs. These were the quiet Eisenhower years, a typical 50’s country life in Upstate NY: treeforts, a pond to skate on, K through 12 in the local schools with the same kids.
“At Manlius Middle School the teacher had set up a Biography Section near a heating panel. I was drawn to it in part for the heat – I never knew hot running water until I was twelve. All the orange books were biographies of women; all the blue books were about men. I read all the orange books: Dorothea Lynde Dix, Mary Dodge, Elizabeth Stanton, Helen Keller, Anne Frank. I read none of the orange books – they all told the same story. High school at Fayetteville Manlius was a very social time for me and I read everything by Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath - confessional poetry. Books. That’s the story of my life but…
“I loved a senior guy in the class ahead of me. After graduation, he LEFT for Colgate University and was out of my life. I have brushed with Colgate toothpaste every day since. I didn’t go to college but then on a day pouring with rain, November 1, 1967, Mom and I went to see Windham College in Putney – now Landmark College. It was the day after Halloween and Putney was strewn with toilet paper. I was accepted on the spot. I never went. I Did go at age 17 with friends – all dressed in orange robes – to an Ashram, part of The Yoga Society of NY which was run by an Indian Guru who was also a brain surgeon. I also went to Green Mountain College for three weeks.
“I got a job in an old-fashioned three-story bookstore. My boyfriend and I started setting up a household. He was a musician. This was 1968-1972. Lots of music, in Rochester, Syracuse, Ithaca, no drugs but people, friends, people…Then Dad broke his leg – Cancer. I had to stick around for him, so back to Manlius. My parents had bought an abandoned church – after the house with the x-ray windows – in fact a hexagonal chicken coop – had burned, but then Dad died. Mom and I were on our own, bereft.
“I eventually made my way back to Syracuse and worked in a bookstore for two years while writing a lot of poetry. One day in 1977 a book salesman came into the store – David Blitstein. Over the course of the next year he became my husband and he still is.
“Because he had graduated from Amherst College, he knew the area around southern Vermont and western New Hampshire, and was living in Surrey, NH. I moved in with him on April Fool’s Day, 1977. We washed our hair in the pond, heated with wood and loved it. David was and is good friends with Ken Burns who had been at Hampshire College near Amherst at the same time. (In fact, David gave Ken a copy of David McColluch’s book Brooklyn Bridge. Two years later Ken moved from NYC to Walpole, NH where he has made himself, in a way, America’s filmmaker-historian.)
“In 1979 I gave birth to our daughter Emily. By this time we had moved to Brattleboro. Emily went to the Brattleboro Schools, graduated from BUHS and then Brown University as a gender studies major and is now Director of Communications for the Addison County School System here in Vermont.)”
“We had moved to West Brattleboro in 1980 and I have to say I was relieved to be back in civilization after the New Hampshire woods. From 1982-1986 I worked with Ken Burns in Walpole, NH on his films about the Shakers, Huey Long, The Statue of Liberty – at the end of many days, we’d leave his living room with strips of film dangling from strings to be edited the next day.
“During that time David and I and Emily lived in three different places in West Bratt until we moved to Miller Road in Dummerston, just across the road from Dwight Miller’s peach orchard. I set up a little painting studio and did faux marblin in the 80’s and 90’s. But I was getting tired working alone. From 1989 until the mid-90’s I worked for Planned Parenthood in Brattleboro. Then BACK TO BOOKS. From 1997 – 2005 I worked for Rosemary Ladd and John Smith at their Heartstone Bookstore in Putney. I set up author talks and established a Notable Vermont Authors Series: Reeve Lindberg, Howard Frank Mosher. Richard Schmid, painter, came to talk about his new book The Landscapes. Win Cooper helped me with all this. FD Reeve came to read and brought a three-piece jazz band with him.
“From there, in 2014, I moved on to the Rockingham Public Library – more books. I set up evening shows with authors and local luminaries. Mark Breen from St. Johnsbury and VPR talked about weather one night. Roger Haydock gave a talk on Vermont Geology. Gail Golec talked about prehistory in what is now Vermont. After 2017 I volunteered at The Brattleboro Museum and Art Center while shopping my resume around and that’s when I realized, “My life is all about other people.
“And then I realized, “This is what my parents were all about: PEOPLE! I had links to Brattleboro Community TV. I had lived in the extraordinary Brattleboro community and surroundings for forty years. I knew and loved the people here. I was filled with gratitude for the people in this area. I’ve lived all those transitions we all lived through starting when the Beatles came to the US, and I even have John Lennon’s autograph. NOW, after all those rich cultural transitions these last 40 years, all I have to do is BE.”
This is one of a series of some 30 profiles of working people from southern Vermont and adjacent New Hampshire that I wrote and then published in the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper every Friday from Jan 1 - May 30. Do the same with your local newspaper.