By Russ Layne
When Duke Ellington proclaimed that a fellow musician – a fellow jazz pianist, in fact – was “beyond category,” the arts community paid attention. Ellington, the Maestro, was speaking of a man born in Goshen with the name William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholoff Smith but who has always been known to jazz aficionados as Willie “the Lion” Smith.

Goshen is widely noted for many things – the historic race track, the seat of Orange County government – but not as an express stop on the jazz train. It should be because, as Ellington pointed out, Smith was no ordinary player but one of the most influential pianists in American jazz history. Born in 1897, two years before Ellington himself, Smith would go on to create a style of play called stride piano, a form that eventually became a hallmark of the Harlem Renaissance. Listen to stride piano and you hear an unrelenting rhythm from the player’s left hand with both left and right hands playing slowly or often at lightning speed. It’s no accident that Smith named one of his more celebrated stride songs “Fingerbuster.”

Here, he plays “Ain’t Misbehavin” and “St. Louis Blues.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F0rd-ZbAiY

As a child, Willie Smith could be found playing in the hallways of the Hitchcock House, as it is still known today, one of Goshen’s more striking historic homes, which sits almost directly across from the government center. Willie’s mother, Ida Oliver, was a domestic worker for the wealthy Hitchcock family.

Ida was a woman of African American and Mohawk lineage. Smith’s father was William Bertholoff, a Jewish playboy who spent a good deal of time gambling and womanizing at the Goshen track, just a stone’s throw from the Hitchcock estate. Ida knew this was not a healthy formula for raising a child, and eventually told William to hit the road. Then, in 1901, Willie, 4, and his mother were uprooted from Goshen and moved to Newark, N.J. with his stepfather and Ida’s second husband, John Smith.

In Newark, Willie was raised in a black community adjacent to a Jewish neighborhood – the perfect setting for a Jewish black kid who would be a bar mitzvah boy in 1910. In his autobiography, “Music on My Mind,” Smith said, “A lot of people are unable to understand my wanting to be Jewish. They told me that I stepped up to the plate with one strike against me being born a Negro and now I take another strike right down the middle. They can’t seem to understand I have a Jewish soul and belong in that faith.” As if to prove the point, Smith eventually became a cantor in a Harlem synagogue.

In his teenage years, Smith was influenced by the rich traditions of two cultures: the invigorating gospel music of the black Baptist church and the incantations of the Jewish tradition. He was fluent in Yiddish, which proved quite handy: He was hired at Hausman’s Footwear in downtown Newark to communicate with monolingual Jewish customers. Young Willie must have done quite well because he was able to buy a second-hand piano with his earnings.

Primarily self-taught, Smith had amazing dexterity especially with his left hand. Most people might think that this special talent gave rise to his nickname, but in fact “Lion” had nothing to do with his musical prowess. As an soldier during World War I he handled heavy artillery with tenacious energy and his buddies began referring to him as “The Lion.”

Upon his return stateside, Smith lost no time re-familiarizing himself with the keyboard and developed the hot new stride style. His reputation in both Newark and Harlem burgeoned. Stride piano, not to be confused with ragtime, requires tremendous speed in the left hand while stretching and playing octaves – a style few practitioners could execute as clearly and meticulously as Smith. In fact, at the time there were just a few other pianists who could even approximate his skill, most notably Fats Waller, James P. Johnson and Donald Lambert. During the Roaring 20’s, some of these practitioners would convene and create what was known as “cutting sessions” to see who could outplay whom. Smith usually won these after-hours competitions.

Ellington, Count Basie, Thelonious Monk and the recently departed Billy Taylor all recognized the significant impact on their professional careers made by Willie “The Lion” Smith – a kid from Goshen.
Russ can be reached at guestwriter@zestoforange.com

* * *
Russ Layne is founder and executive director of the Sugar Loaf music series and chairman of the cultural committee of the Paterson N.J. school district’s Council on Equity and Diversity. He is also former host of the “Gumbo Shop” jazz program on WJFF-Radio Catskill.

By Jean Webster

Soon after Paul LePage was sworn in as the new governor of Maine last month his name and picture made the national news and Stephen Colbert’s program.

The reason? LePage told the Maine Chapter of the NAACP that he was too busy to attend one of the half dozen Martin Luther King breakfasts in Maine. Then, in response to media criticism, LePage said that the NAACP can “kiss my butt.”

He still wasn’t through. He then said he wouldn’t be held “hostage by a special interest” group, and if the NAACP “wants to play the race card, it’s not going to work” because “I have a black son.”

One of the many “open mouth, put foot in it” remarks by the new governor.

That LePage has a black son is a blatant lie. Devon Raymond, 25, is a native of Jamaica, not Maine. The LePage family met Raymond when his father was caddying for Paul LePage during a Jamaica vacation. But, he was not adopted by the LePages, nor does he live with them, although they are helping Raymond through college, and sometimes invite him to their home for special occasions.

That LePage would call the NAACP a “special interest group” is beyond insulting. How would he then characterize the Right to Life rally where he spoke the same weekend as the breakfast he would not attend? Were they holding him hostage? What power do they have over him?

During the campaign last year, LePage showed why he was backed by the Tea Party. In a speech to a group of fishermen and media he said, “When I’m your governor you’re gonna be seeing a lot of me on the front page saying, ‘Governor LePage tells Obama: Go to hell.’ ”

This shocked even the state’s Republicans who have voiced their concern about their new governor’s tactless remarks.

This is not the way most Mainers behave. Most of us have a more congenial way of looking at the world, our lives, and our politics. There is a kind of civility here. As a transplanted New Yorker married to a “Maine-iac” I’ve learned that people here are more laid back and, in many instances, more tolerant. For the most part, natives and newcomers respect each other, the land, the lakes and the ocean, which is not only our state’s neighbor, but its benefactor.

Perhaps it’s this mystique that has attracted tourists and “people from away.”

Paul LePage grew up in Maine but he never learned civility. For example, during the campaign, there were questions about his family’s homes, one in Waterville, Me. and one in Florida. LePage had turned the Florida home over to his wife, Ann LePage, a few years ago, but press reports revealed that Mrs. LePage was claiming residency in both states, violating tax laws in Maine and Florida. It was resolved recently, when she paid what she owed.

Then, after pledging to do away with cronyism, LePage hired his daughter for a $41,000-job as assistant to his chief of staff. Lauren LePage, 22, was a biology major who graduated from Florida State University last June. Her only work experience has been as a clerk in a variety of stores, including Marden’s Surplus & Salvage, the business her father has managed.

Governor LePage just keeps going. Now, he’s saying “go to hell” to the environment. In order to make Maine more business-friendly, LePage proposes that all of the state’s environmental laws conform to the less stringent federal standards. In a recent report, LePage addressed vernal pools, commenting that “if vernal pools are intermittent and dry up after a rainfall, I’m going to recommend that we ignore them.”

He’s obviously ignorant about the very definition of vernal pools, which fill in springtime and are breeding areas for frogs, salamanders, spring peepers, and other spring creatures important to woodland life. Yes, they dry up when the weather warms. But by ignoring them, we ignore the life of our woods, one of the principal attractions that draw visitors, and their dollars, to our state. Significant vernal pools are protected by the 2006 Natural Resources Act shielding the land around them from development.

The fact is that Paul LePage was elected by 38 percent of the voters, who were thrilled to throw out the Democratic governor and Legislature. Now we’ll see if Maine can attract tourists and new business with a head of state who can’t control his mouth, or his principles.
                                                                   * * *
Guest writer Jean Webster is a poet, public relations consultant and freelancer. She has worked for newspapers such as the Times Herald-Record and the Boothbay (Me.) Register. She lives in Maine year round, where she and her husband John operate Orne’s Candy Store, a seasonal business in Boothbay Harbor. She can be reached at guestwriter@zestoforange.com.

By Carol Montana

Were the title not already spoken for, the multi-award winning film The King’s Speech might have been called The Agony and the Ecstasy, so well is the angst, struggle and hard work depicted. But that’s just as well, because the actual title is much more indicative of the focus of the movie.

The film opens with a crisis as Prince Albert (Colin Firth) has to make a speech at the closing of the 1925 Empire Exhibition. Our first glimpse of the prince (a.k.a. the Duke of York) is not encouraging. He stammers something fearful. It is hard to watch. His personality is not much better. He is shy, retiring and diffident.

Encouraged by his sympathetic wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), Albert seeks the advice of various speech teachers. One suggests that he smoke to relax the throat; another puts sterilized marbles in his mouth.Frustrated beyond belief, Albert swears off further therapy.

But Elizabeth, determined to help her husband overcome his disability, goes to see Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an Australian immigrant with a rather unorthodox method of treating speech problems.

Prince Albert acquiesces to his wife, and, at their first meeting, Albert and Lionel get acquainted in a comical scene that gives welcome relief from the tension we’ve seen since the beginning of the story. Throughout the speech therapy, which is sometimes funny, often heartbreaking, Lionel gradually gains Albert’s trust as he digs, not unobtrusively, into the cause of the stammer.

Little crises build into big ones as Albert’s older brother, the carefree, fun-loving and irresponsible Prince David (Guy Pearce) ascends to the throne as Prince Edward VIII upon the death of his father, George V (Michael Gambon). But then, of course, Edward abdicates in 1936 in order to marry Wallis Simpson, American socialite and divorcée.

Suddenly, Prince Albert is the King of England and, as the country approaches involvement in World War II, the stammering prince, now King George VI, must rally his country behind him as a strong, regal and well-spoken leader.

The King’s Speech has already won numerous awards, including the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival People’s Choice Award, Best-Produced film from the Producer’s Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild awards for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role, Outstanding Performance by a Cast, and is a nominee for 12 Academy Awards, including   Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress and Best Supporting Actor.

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts has nominated The King’s Speech for 14 awards, including  Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Leading Actor, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress. 

Firth is nothing short of marvelous as Prince Albert, conveying every stammer, every pain-filled syllable with gut-wrenching angst.

As Lionel Logue, Geoffrey Rush is a true delight: irreverent, talented, unimpressed with royalty to the point of rudeness, yet so sure of his methods that he’s willing to take bets on the outcome.

Helena Bonham Carter, as Albert’s desperate yet tender wife, exudes the quiet support and fiercely protective instincts one expects of royalty, and the strength and determination one expects of a lover.

Other performances are equally strong. Guy Pearce as Edward is flighty, devil-may-care, and more involved with pleasing himself than with any supposed loyalty to the monarchy. And  the irrepressible Derek Jacobi as the Archbishop of Canterbury is always fun to watch as he struts and preens in his self-important way.

Ignore the R rating (imposed because of obscenities Logue uses to relieve Albert’s tension). Young people have no doubt heard those words and worse. Take them to see a wonderful story that roars full speed toward a triumph of the human spirit.

Written by David Seidler and directed by Tom Hooper, The King’s Speech, based on a true story and historically accurate to a fault, is so well acted and put together, so well written and directed that it seriously will leave you speechless.

Guest writer Carol Montana is a writer, photographer, proofreader and copy editor. A casualty of the 2007 job cuts at The Times Herald-Record, she is currently  co-editor of The Catskill Chronicle,  an online newspaper that publishes information about Sullivan County and the surrounding areas (http://thecatskillchronicle.com/).  She has a Master’s Degree in Dramatic Form and Structure from The University of Connecticut. In 1995, she founded Big Sky Productions, a community-based theatre company that operates out of Grahamsville, NY.

Carol can be reached at Bigsky1952@aol.com.

By Geoffrey Howard

I never met Sargent Shriver, who died last week, and that’s probably a good thing. I tend to get tongue-tied when I meet people I admire as much as I admired him.

Shriver is best remembered as the founding director of the Peace Corps, the almost iconic legacy of the Kennedy years, when Cold War realism and youthful idealism appeared to co-exist peacefully. But “founding director” doesn’t really do justice to what the man actually did and the things he set in motion.

Basically, he took a raw idea that John Kennedy, his brother-in-law, had thrown out offhandedly in a University of Michigan campaign appearance in October 1960 and turned it into a vital reality within 3 months of the inauguration. He created an agency on March 1, 1961 – almost exactly 50 years ago – that began sending the first of what would grow to be more than 200,000 volunteers (so far!) into remote corners of the world to teach, to build, to heal, but also to listen, to learn, to understand.

It’s hard to overstate the cumulative impact of the agency Shriver started. The Peace Corps presents a part of the American story that the rest of the world doesn’t get to see in our military, economic and diplomatic policymaking. In the 1970’s, President Nixon tried to kill the Peace Corps, but was thwarted by an unlikely coalition of Third World leaders, many of whom were vehemently anti-American in their views, coming out strongly and publicly in its defense.

And it’s worth noting that this positive impact comes at an incredible bargain price. With an annual budget of a little over $400 million – less than the annual budgets of our military bands – the agency sends about 8,500 volunteers to 76 countries from Azerbaijan to Zambia.

In its earlier years, up until the 1990’s, the Peace Corps was primarily focused on hard-core Third World countries in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. But the world changed and the agency Sargent Shriver created changed with it. The fall of the Soviet Union led to dramatic Peace Corps opportunities in the newly independent states from Albania to Uzbekistan, and even, for a while, in Russia itself. Just last year, new countries like Mexico and Indonesia – the world’s most populous Muslim nation – were added to the rolls.

Interestingly, with Shriver’s passing, coinciding as it did with the Peace Corps’ 50th anniversary, there is a groundswell of support for increasing the Peace Corps budget and the number of volunteers to something closer to its late 1960’s peak of 15,000. Unfortunately, the call for a bigger Peace Corps will have to do battle with demands to cut governmental spending. The outcome is unclear. 

Of course, great as it was and is, the Peace Corps is only a part of the Shriver legacy, only part of his answer to the famous challenge John Kennedy posed to us all. He went on from JFK’s Peace Corps to LBJ’s War on Poverty, starting Head Start, the Job Corps, VISTA – the domestic Peace Corps – and other anti-poverty initiatives. And it didn’t stop even there: he became Ambassador to France and was generally credited with helping to rein in a head-strong Charles de Gaulle.

He went on to run for the vice presidency on the Democratic ticket with George McGovern in 1972 against Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, and while the Republicans won, it is hard not to speculate on what McGovern and Shriver might have accomplished – and the critical mistakes they might have avoided – had the election turned out differently.

And even then he wasn’t finished. He and his wife Eunice were driving forces behind the Special Olympics, raising millions for charities in the process.

As I say, I never met Sargent Shriver, but I did pass within his orbit, as did so many others. A Peace Corps Volunteer in the early Sixties, with a brand new BA in my hand, I headed off to dig wells for two years in a West African country I had never heard of, and that experience changed my life.

Thank you, sir. I wish I had had the opportunity to shake your hand.

Geoffrey can be reached at guestwriter@zestoforange.com

* * *

Geoffrey Howard is semi-retired and lives in Warwick. After serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in a small village in Senegal, he and his wife Carole have maintained a management consultant practice, interspersed with volunteer assignments in Uganda, Namibia, Thailand, Ghana and – 40 years later – Senegal once again.

By Gretchen Gibbs

David Brooks in his New York Times column of January 10 condemned the media coverage of the Tucson shootings, arguing, in his usual moderate style, that Jared Loughner’s rampage was a consequence of mental illness, probably schizophrenia. Brooks pointed out that Loughner’s anti-government ramblings on the net owed something to the far left as well as to the far right and that there is no evidence that he was a Tea Party member or a fan of Sarah Palin. The criticisms of Palin and far right radio after Tucson, Brooks said, “were vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness.”

It does seem that Loughner had his own brand of anti-government hatred, and it is almost certainly true that he is schizophrenic, judging by his descriptions of imaginary persecution and his senseless lists of numbers. What Brooks seems to be missing, however, is the relationship between culture and mental illness. Loughner need not have been a member of the Tea Party to have been influenced by its violent rhetoric.

Culture impacts mental illness in several ways: the disorders themselves, their relative frequency, and the manifestations of the disorder. Thus I have never seen a case of pibloktoq (pronounced pie-BLOK-too; found in the Arctic, where an attack may cause the sufferer to run naked through the snow) or koro (found in Southeast Asia, where a victim believes his penis is retracting into his body and will kill him). Some disorders are much more or less common in certain cultures. The Amish, for instance, are said to have extremely low rates of depression. Schizophrenia is a disorder distributed quite evenly over cultures, implying that the biological basis for the disorder is probably more important than environmental causes. Even here, however, the manifestations of schizophrenia, specifically the content of delusions and hallucinations, differ culturally. Researchers have found that types of delusions vary according to gender, social class, and the specific society to which the individual belongs.

It is not surprising that Loughner has violent anti-government delusions about this country where a President has an almost 25 percent chance of dealing with an assassination attempt, and an almost 10 percent chance of actually being slain. (There have been ten attempts, five since Franklin Roosevelt, and four killings.) Violence is nothing new to American politics, the Tea Party did not invent it. But violent rhetoric exacerbates what is worst about our political imagery, and it contributes to a perilous climate for elected officials.

I am writing this on Martin Luther King Day, a commemoration that reminds us of both the dangers of violence in politics and the beauty of non-violent protest. Enough said.

Gretchen can be reached at guestwriter@zestoforange.com

By Gretchen Gibbs

While my health today is excellent, five years ago I was diagnosed with breast cancer, a potentially life-threatening experience that also made me feel like a fool. I had the estrogen-positive variety of the disease, meaning it had been stoked by estrogen, prescribed by my gynecologist. This is a familiar story, how estrogen was regarded by the medical profession as a way to lessen the chances of breast cancer, but when the “best science” study was conducted, it was discovered actually to increase rates of the illness.

For the past few years I have been taking the standard post-treatment for my kind of breast cancer, a drug which counteracts the effects of whatever estrogen the body is still producing, and leads to some nasty side effects including severe arthritis, hot flashes, and depression. In the past weeks I have found new articles in the Times and Wall Street Journal showing how in some conditions estrogen does reduce the likelihood of breast cancer.

What’s a person to do? New directives from medical science are always contradicting the old ones. Don’t eat eggs. It’s OK to eat eggs. Eat margarine, not butter. Eat butter, not margarine. Drink eight glasses of water a day. Don’t bother. Most of these changes are laughable, but the breast cancer example, at least for me, is not.

I was educated to believe in scientific progress. Medicine might make mistakes, but these would be corrected with time, and eventually we would understand almost everything about how the body works, just as we would understand the workings of the atom and the universe. A recent article in the New Yorker by Jonah Lehrer about the scientific method questions this premise. Entitled “The Truth Wears Off,” the article describes the “decline effect,” the phenomenon that, over time, “truths” in science become less able to be proved. Second generation anti-psychotic drugs, for instance, once provided dramatic improvement for patients compared to their functioning under the older class of drugs. Today, studies are concluding that the old drugs are cheaper and just as good. Lehrer describes a number of similar declines in what we have regarded as scientific truths, in the social and physical sciences.

The possible reasons he describes for the “decline effect” are several. Unless the study is a clear double blind, with neither experimenter nor subject aware of which is the experimental and which the control condition, biases from both participants can affect the result. Significant experimental findings are sometimes a consequence of unusual variation in scores, which will diminish on retest, a phenomenon called regression to the mean. Journals are only likely to accept significant findings, so that negative findings languish in the experimenter’s desk drawer. Granting agencies and pharmaceutical companies do not want to submit negative findings to journals. All of these factors contribute to a spate of positive findings in our scientific journals which do not hold up well on retest.

While Lehrer is not attacking the fundamentals of the scientific method themselves, he is implying that science, as it is practiced, is not likely to arrive at enduring truths. He concludes that once the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe. This is a troubling notion, since neither Lehrer nor anyone else has come up with criteria to help us choose. The danger is that science will be rejected altogether, with a kind of New Age arbitrariness, leaving us victim to charlatans and quacks. While there may be other avenues to truth, rejection of science seems to me dangerous.

I would like to come up with some criteria to help us choose what to believe. I would like to find some way to reassure myself and others that science is the right path. All I can say is that I think medical science played a role in causing my breast cancer, since I had few risk factors other than taking estrogen. Yet I know that the next time I’m ill, I’ll go to the doctor, not the shaman, and see what’s prescribed. I may not take it though.
                                      * * *
Gretchen Gibbs is a clinical psychologist and Professor Emeritus at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She is currently writing, and working at a domestic violence agency. Reach her at guestwriter@zestoforange.com.

By Gretchen Gibbs

Recently as I wrote down a diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, I realized it might be for the last time. In the last couple of weeks The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Psychology Today have featured articles on the diagnostic system of the American Psychiatric Association and how it’s changing to eliminate some of the personality disorders, defined as “maladaptive patterns of living.” Dropping Narcissistic Personality Disorder seems to be garnering the most attention.

So who cares? Some psychologists, including me, think the diagnostic system is an arbitrary group of categories into which we drop people to provide the illusion that we understand them. Still, the system has shorthand communication value, and some of the diagnoses are linked to effective treatments.  

What interests me is the power of the diagnostic system both to reflect societal shifts and to shape those shifts. While I was in graduate school in 1968, the second APA Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) came out, still including Homosexuality as a sexual deviation, alongside Sadism and Pedophilia. We learned in our classes the role of the overly involved, seductive mother in producing a homosexual son. Even in 1980, the third edition of DSM had a category for “ego-dystonic homosexuality,” which meant if it made you unhappy to be gay you could still be treated. Homosexuality was finally dropped as a disorder in 1987, reflecting the increased tolerance of our society. What an enormous impact dropping the diagnosis had, as mental health workers all over the country suddenly stopped labeling gays and lesbians as deviant. Without that change, we wouldn’t be talking about gays getting married, adopting children, or serving openly in the military.

Other changes in the diagnostic system reflected the feminist movement and shifting attitudes towards women. Can’t you just hear the disapproval of the male psychiatric establishment in the Hysterical Personality label, used to describe “self-dramatizing, attention-getting and seductive” women? That diagnosis bit the dust, along with Passive-Aggressive Disorder, also used more frequently for women than men. When your access to legitimate power is limited, finding some roundabout ways of getting your way becomes understandable.

What does it mean that the APA is dropping the Narcissistic Personality diagnosis? The label was created in 1980, apparently as our culture became more aware of entitlement and self aggrandizement as problems. Thirty or so years later, we seem to be saying, “Not problems, just the norm.”

Narcissistic Personality Disorder “is a pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration and lack of empathy.” According to The Wall Street Journal, quoting a 2007 Pew Research study, 51 percent of young adults said their first or second goal in life was to become famous.

There is narcissism all around us. I see it in politicians and sports figures and entertainers and the number of young people who want to go into the entertainment industry. I see it in young psychologists, who no longer say they want to help people; they want to “follow their passion.” I see it in reality TV and the endless people on cell phones or texting or twittering about their most mundane activities. I see it in the lack of empathy of American culture when it considers universal health care and minimum wages and giving to charity. Can you imagine how Tom Brokaw’s greatest generation would regard the narcissism of today?

Apparently, narcissism is now so general that the pathological level can’t be distinguished from the “normal” level. I believe, however, that dropping the disorder as a diagnosis will lead to further societal acceptance of the behavior. Removing the label of mental illness for homosexuality made it acceptable, no longer a social problem. We are about to do the same thing for narcissism.

* * *

By Jo Galante

My brother-in-law Bill couldn’t wait to show me the DVD made from some old home movies. One of the highlights would be seeing my beautiful sister Gloria, who I adored, at a school dance. There she was, in a lovely full skirt – crinolines flaring underneath – as she did the cha cha with her best friend Joanie. She and Bill were childhood sweethearts who would marry by the time they were barely 18.

Then, as she was sitting, I noticed an almost imperceptible movement that froze me in time. Gloria’s hand moved ever so slightly and I knew intuitively what would come next. It was a movement forgotten or clouded by time but as natural as if I’d been sitting right next to her. She moved her hand to her mouth, a familiar habit of her dogged nail biting captured in time. That’s when the tears welled in my eyes.

My sister-in-law Carole, trying to console me asked, “Isn’t it wonderful to see your sister in happier times?” I could not answer what I was thinking. What happier times? My sister’s life has been overshadowed by a single action on a single day in October 1974 when she chose to shoot and kill herself at age 32, leaving her husband, a 6-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son.

Gloria had been fighting depression and a general inability to find happiness for years. Her behavior had become riskier, her mood swings more pronounced. She eventually fell victim to a psychotic breakdown that led to hospitalizations and seemingly endless psychiatric visits. The therapies today that might have saved her life weren’t available at that time.

We’ve speculated why she killed herself and, perhaps to ease our minds, we concluded that she saw it as an act of sacrifice since she repeatedly voiced her concerns about her illness’ effect on her young family.

Fortunately, my brother-in-law married Carole who brought love, light and stability to my niece and nephew who we unwittingly hurt by trying to shield them from the details of their mother’s death. My niece has been plagued by mental health issues, especially of abandonment. Billy Boy fared better, perhaps because he was younger when he lost his mom.

I’ve measured everything in terms of what Gloria missed and what our family lost – holiday gatherings, her children’s birthdays, school events and awards. And, her children’s marriages and the beauty of a new generation that would never know her or feel her love. For me, the loss was heavy since my older sister was also my anchor in a family where mental illness was no stranger. She was the one who would sit with me and help beat back the fears of this scary illness as my mother was once again taken to Bellevue’s infamous “crazy ward.”

Since my sister’s death, I’ve had the gut wrenching experience of knowing about several friends and family members who have committed suicide and worse. A cousin through marriage killed himself. So did another cousin by marriage but not before he murdered his wife and son. There was the young mother who I once babysat. There are the close friends whose brother and brother-in-law killed themselves. Those were followed by the suicides of three children of people I care about. More recently, two very close friends confided that one had lost a son to suicide, the other a brother. Would there be no end to this madness? “The Suicide Club,” I called it among friends as we shared our losses.

With each suicide, I re-lived my sister’s death and was left to ponder how these other families would survive what I knew to be one of the greatest challenges they could face. Then I connected on-line with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (afsp.org) and had a eureka moment.

Thousands of families just like mine are touched by suicide. According to AFSP someone in the United States dies by suicide every 16 minutes.

Suicide is the fourth leading cause of death for people aged 18 to 65, and shockingly is the fifth leading cause of death among children aged 5 to 14.

Ninety percent of people who die by suicide had a diagnosable psychiatric disorder, AFSP reports. This statistic holds the key to prevention. We overlook the often evident signs of potential suicide, or in many cases feel helpless. Families need to be vigilant to mood swings and changes in behavior, and especially take all verbal threats of suicide seriously and encourage people who may be suicidal to seek help. Get information on how to help. Most important, AFSP says, is to be assertive and ask the person outright if they are thinking about committing suicide. Families are fearful that the mere use of the word could spur thoughts of action. Not true, the foundation says and notes that letting someone know of the consequences of suicide has been known to prevent it.

Suicide is preventable, but once someone turns that corner, it’s a lifetime of guilt and pain for the people left behind.

      * * *
Jo Galante, a former journalist, has served as a lobbyist for people with developmental disabilities. She will rejoin the board of the Mental Health Association in Ulster County in January.

Contact Jo at guestwriter@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

If in 25 years someone sits down to write about the demise of quality journalism in America, he or she might want to devote half a chapter to last Saturday’s edition of The New York Times.

Unlike some other big papers, The Times hasn’t fallen into the trap of spending its resources on the classic tabloid mix of gossip, sports, sex, news of television and movie industries, and Lindsay Lohan’s latest predicament. But then along came Page 1 of Saturday’s paper, and reasonable people are left wondering what flavor Kool-Aid the editors were sipping when, with one decision, they turned the front page into a joke.

The lead story Saturday was about a $625 million settlement of health claims by about 10,000 workers against New York City resulting from the Sept. 11 attack. An important story. Next to it was a piece about labor unions agreeing to dual wage schedules as a means of preserving their jobs. An important story.

There was a compelling story out of Port-au-Prince about Haitian canal workers joining the struggle to prevent the spread of cholera, an extremely important story that the editors buried at the bottom of the page.

It should have gone on top but was usurped by a story with this headline: “School Days Without Cuts or Cowlicks? Only in Pictures.”

School photographers, it turns out, are offering digital retouching of students’ pictures. Surely you agree that this story on Page 1 amounts to an unhealthy waste of space. The editors beg to differ; they allowed the reporter to write 33 paragraphs to tell her story. She focused on a towheaded first grader at Bay Ridge Prep in Brooklyn who went to school on picture day with a scab under his right eye, the result of a playground spill. The story then centered on the kid’s parents celebrating the photographer’s removal of the blotch, and wound up as a bizarre discussion of whether excising a kid’s blemishes is a form of revisionist family history.

Thirty-three paragraphs! And with this little fact tucked unobtrusively into the fifth graph: The practice of school photographers digitally retouching pictures of kids who don’t look so good because of their momentary or lifelong imperfections is about six years old. Meaning that story has been around since 2004.

Moreover, the reporter made a prep school kid her subject when there are 1.1 million other kids going to public schools in New York. They have picture day every year, too.

Note: The story about unions agreeing to bi-level wage schedules – an agreement that could foreshadow an extremely difficult time for organized labor in coming years – got 26 paragraphs. And the story about cholera in Haiti got 32, making it – in the freakish judgment of the editors – equal in importance to the story of parents worrying about one of the marks of childhood appearing on a school picture.

The next time some newspaper editors get together to bemoan plummeting circulation and readership figures, they ought to go back to Saturday’s Page 1. If they fail to understand that readers don’t like to be played for fools with garbage like that, they reveal that they are the fools.

Up here in the Hudson Valley, we pay $2 for a copy of the Times. For $2 we want news, not fluff about the inconveniences of the privileged class.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

Aja

This is the other painting I made at the Deerpark Family Fun Day a couple weeks ago. Aja is in the Port Jervis/Deerpark Humane Society shelter, and she is up for adoption. She’s a sweet dog, with the most hopeful expression on her face. Maybe you’d like to adopt her? If you do, I bet you could get this painting to go with her… Here’s the shelter’s web address: http://www.pjhumane.org/

There’s something about a shelter animal that pulls at the heart, even more than other animals do. It has always seemed to me that the shelter animals remember, and know that they’re better off, and treasure the change that you have made in their lives.

Of course, they come with their issues – but who doesn’t?

If you have room in your home or in your heart for a shelter animal, go out and get one. You will find love and company and, chances are, a true heart.

If you would like me to paint a portrait of your pet (Christmas is coming! Hanukkah is coming!), send me an email at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com