When thinking of noteworthy women from the Berkshires, a handful immediately come to mind: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Freeman, Edith Wharton and Jane Swift, to name a few. Look a little deeper and you will find there are dozens of women from the Berkshires who left their mark on the world. But these women and their contributions are often forgotten or overlooked, reduced to historical footnotes.
In this collection of articles, originally published March of 2019, we honor these Berkshire women and their legacies in honor of Women's History Month.
- Lindsey Hollenbaugh, The Berkshire Eagle
If it wasn't for a wedding gift, we might not have Hancock Shaker Village to appreciate today.
Amy Bess Williams Miller was gifted a Shaker dining table as a wedding gift after her marriage to Lawrence K. "Pete" Miller, former publisher and owner of The Berkshire Eagle, in October of 1933. Amy Bess would later go on, spurred by her love and interest in that original piece of Shaker craftsmanship, to help found Hancock Shaker Village through a large-scale restoration project, turning the once living Shaker community into a living museum still enjoyed today.
In the late 1950s, the last of the Shakers at Hancock were leaving the village. At that time, Amy Bess was immersed in Shaker history and culture and was determined to preserve the tradition for future generations. According to The American Antiquarian Society, she toured museums and historical villages in the United States and Canada, and raised money to restore the 17 buildings at the village. She also wrote four books about the Shakers: one about Shaker cooking, another on the Shaker image, yet another on Shaker medicinal herbs, and a fourth describing Hancock Shaker Village as a "City of Peace."
John Ott, who was the Shaker Village director from 1970 to 1983, described her as a "powerhouse."
"She practiced leadership in everything and kept her staff energized. She married the collections, the land, the philosophy and the buildings into one. It was a picture of the Shakers as they were in Berkshire County — a powerful story," he said, according to Amy Bess' American Antiquarian Society obituary. In 2003, Amy Bess died at her home in Pittsfield. She was 90.
Born Amy Bess Williams on May 4, 1912, in El Paso, Texas, she was the daughter of Dr. Frederick R. Williams and Elizabeth Avery Taft Williams. The family moved to Worcester when she was 5, and that's where she grew up. She graduated from both Bancroft School in Worcester and Miss Hall's in Pittsfield. Amy Bess studied art history and architecture at Sorbonne University in Paris.
She was the first woman named as president of the Pittsfield Community Chest and received a national preservation award from the Garden Club of America. She was also president of the Berkshire Athenaeum from 1944 to 1979. She was the one who issued a plea for a new library in 1972 — another one of her ideas that came to fruition and is still enjoyed today. From 1964 to 1970, she served on the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners.
In 1995, her alma mater, Miss Hall's School, awarded her The Distinguished Alumna Award, saying: "She exhibits an enviable combination of infectious enthusiasm, grace, wit, kindness, and boundless energy."
- Jenn Smith, The Berkshire Eagle
Dr. May Edward Chinn advocated for medical equity, including improving access to care for people of low-income backgrounds and advocating for early cancer screenings and interventions.
Her father, William Layfayette Chinn, was a former Virginia slave. Her mother, Lulu Evans, came from a Chickahominy Indian reservation near Norfolk. The two met and married in Great Barrington, where Chinn was born and raised for the first few years of her life.
Chinn's mother went on to work as a live-in housekeeper for the Tiffany family (of the jewelry company fame) and Chinn lived with her growing up in New York City. Despite dropping out of school in the 11th grade, Chinn became a talented pianist, accompanying singer Paul Robeson and earned a spot at Columbia Teachers College (now Teachers College, Columbia University). She intended to study music, but one music professor's racist remarks dissuaded her. With the encouragement of Dr. Jean Broadhurst, she pursued a career in the sciences.
Despite many adversities and objections to her advancement in the medical field, Chinn became the first African-American woman to graduate from Columbia and Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1926. That year, she carved her niche serving in Harlem, as the first African-American woman to hold an internship at Harlem Hospital and one of the first women to ride with the hospital's ambulance crew on emergency medical calls.
In the 1930s, she worked with Dr. George Papanicolaou, noted for his work on the Pap smear test for cervical cancer. She earned her master's degree in public health from Columbia University in 1933. In 1944, four years after black physicians were granted admitting privileges at New York hospitals, she joined the Strang Cancer Clinic at Memorial Hospital, taking a full-time position at the Strang Clinic at the New York Infirmary, the following year. She remained with the clinic, conducting cancer research, for 29 years. She practiced medicine for more than 50 years, running her own private practice in Harlem until her retirement at the age of 81.
- Heather Bellow, The Berkshire Eagle
She was the first woman to have tenure in Columbia University's English department.
And after 32 years there, Carolyn Gold Heilbrun left, saying she was "sick of the treehouse gang."
"Sad, exhausting — and infuriating," she told The New York Times Magazine in 1992. "Because Columbia will continue to be run by male professors who behave like little boys saying, 'This is our secret treehouse club, no girls allowed.'"
Her revelations apparently sent discomfort and defensive posturing rippling through academia.
Heilbrun, a Virginia Woolf scholar who had a summer home in Alford, had told the magazine that she had been pushed around by an old boys' club within the department when she had piped up about women's issues.
This author of 14 works of nonfiction and 15 mystery novels had had enough. She said the department was discriminating against women; that not a single woman sat on the tenure committee, and that the place was operating amid "old-boy secrets."
"In life, as in fiction, women who speak out usually end up punished or dead," Heilbrun had said. "I'm lucky to escape with my pension and a year of leave."
The feminist literary scholar could afford the exit. She was married to an economist, lived on Central Park West and had two summer homes.
Heilbrun was born in East Orange, N.J., in 1928. She was 67 when she up and left her endowed position at Columbia. Over the years she would write scholarly feminist books like "Toward a Recognition of Androgyny" and "Reinventing Womanhood."
She also snuck in a series of intellectual murder mysteries.
Writing under the pen name, Amanda Cross, she fashioned the rich, beautiful and sophisticated protagonist, Kate Fansler. The book jacket for the first in the series, "In the Last Analysis," explains:
"When beautiful Janet Harrison asks English professor Kate Fansler to recommend a Manhattan psychoanalyst, Kate immediately sends the girl to her dear friend and former lover, Dr. Emanuel Bauer. Seven weeks later, the girl is stabbed to death on Emanuel's couch — with incriminating fingerprints on the murder weapon ... Kate's analytic techniques leave no stone unturned."
Heilbrun tried to hide her identity, but was apparently found out by a scholar who sleuthed through copyright records. According to the Times Magazine article, she started writing the first Fansler mystery under the following conditions: "... while an assistant professor at Columbia, living in a crowded New York City apartment with three children under 8, a large dog and a husband in graduate school. She began rising at 5 a.m. to type her way into an alternate existence ..."
The book was up for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
Later she said, ''Winning would have blown my cover."
She managed to keep it for six years, fearing the revelation could affect the perception of her as a serious academic and threaten her tenure.
Heilbrun who had also lectured at other ivy league colleges and taught at Brooklyn College, had already begun to talk about taking her life at age 70 in her work, "The Last Gift Of Time: Life Beyond Sixty." The idea, she said, was to "quit while you're ahead."
She made good on this at age 77. Her son had told The New York Times that "she wanted to control her destiny."
Heilbrun's suicide note: "The journey is over. Love to all."
As members of Washington D.C.'s elite society, sisters Josephine Porter (Boardman) Crane and Mabel Thorp Boardman were expected, as most prominent socialites are, to throw parties and outings and do so, occasionally, in support of local charities. In this regard, the sisters failed to meet society's expectations.
Instead, they used their status to enact social change. And neither sister was afraid of ruffling a few feathers along the way.
Mable T. Boardman led the faction that ousted Clara Barton from the presidency of the American Red Cross. Mable would head the American Red Cross for a time, overhauling and re-organizing its internal structure. She later served as the director of its volunteer service.
Josephine Porter Boardman focused her attention on education, the arts and bettering the living conditions of women and children. She married Winthrop Murray Crane, of Dalton, who served one term as governor, from 1900 to 1902, and then in the U.S. Senate from 1904 to 1914.
But Mrs. Crane was anything but the perfect hostess. The Pittsfield Journal reported on July 27, 1908: "Mrs. Winthrop Murray Crane, wife of the Massachusetts senator, is depriving Washington society of much of her time to study social problems as they relate to the work of women and children in New England mills."
But while she was being criticized locally for "depriving Washington society of much of her time," Crane was busy founding The Congressional Club, the only social club charted by an act of Congress. The club, which continues today, as a non-profit organization of current and former spouses of members of Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court and the President's Cabinet, who promote volunteerism, facilitate bi-partisan efforts, raise awareness of and support charities in the District of Columbia.
In 1921, she established the Berkshire Museum's Junior Naturalists, a program of studies in natural history for children, who received medals for their work. She served as a member of the Berkshire Museum board of trustees from 1937 until her death, at the age of 98, in 1972.
She was also an advocate of progressive education practices, supporting the work of Helen Parkhurst. In an Associated Press report out of New York on Feb. 4., 1928, she was quoted as saying: "90 percent of the education poured into the minds of children does not give them any preparation for life. This is because it is education by ritual, and education by ritual gives slavery to those who cry for freedom." The article continued: "Mrs. Crane advocated letting the child choose the subject in which he is most interested and concentrate on it so long as he is getting something out of it, instead of allowing him a specified time for one subject and then turning abruptly to another, unallied subject."
That educational philosophy, which was first tested in Dalton's public schools, became known as The Dalton Plan and is still in practice at The Dalton School in New York City.
Among her other social contributions, Crane was one of the original founders of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and was on the boards of the Morgan Library and the New York Public Library. She also helped found a visiting nurse association in Dalton and was one of two women from Massachusetts appointed by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to the National Women's Committee of the 1933 Mobilization for Human Needs.
Today, the Josephine and Louise Crane Foundation, formed in 2008 after the merger of the Josephine B. Crane Foundation and the Louise Crane Foundation, supports non-profit organizations in the arts, cultural and human service fields.
Born in Dalton on June 21, 1855, Mary Salome Cutler Fairchild is noted for her establishment and teaching in the field of library sciences.
Her father, Artemas Hubbard Cutler, was a papermaker, and her mother was his second wife, Lydia Wakefield.
According to American National Biography Online, Fairchild, after graduating high school, was offered a position in a community library but turned it down to attend Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College).
After an early career in teaching, her interest was piqued by the development of what would be known as the American Library Association. In 1884, she accepted a position as a cataloger at Columbia University from Melvil Dewey (founder of the Dewey Decimal System), and later joined him in Albany, N.Y., at his School of Library Economy, which was later named Albany Library School and New York State Library School.
During her career, Fairchild remained a driving force at this library and in her field, training some 500 students in librarianship after earning her bachelor's degree in library science from the University of the State of New York. She also served as head librarian of the New York State Library for the Blind in Albany, an ode to her father, who was blind.
She suffered health issues throughout her life that challenged her career, but left a legacy of written articles on topics ranging from establishing a children's library at home to fair wages for women librarians.
— Jenn Smith, The Berkshire Eagle
- Lindsey Hollenbaugh, The Berkshire Eagle
If you've ever enjoyed one of designer Nicole Miller's carefully constructed creations, you might have General Electric to thank for that.
Miller's father, Grier Bovey Miller, worked for General Electric in Pittsfield as an electrical engineer where he designed a fire-control system for submarine-launch missions until he retired in 1987. According to an article published in New York Magazine in 1993, the designer credits her father's engineering mind for inspiring her career as a designer.
"My mother was always clothes-minded," says Miller in the article, of her French mother Jacqueline Mahieu "... But I have my father's mind. The way you figure out how to make something is engineering."
And figuring out the perfect cut of a dress is what the fashion designer and businesswoman would become known for in the fashion industry. That and a menswear line of graphic ties and boxer shorts that put her company on the map in the 1980s. Today, Nicole Miller's women's collection apparel is sold in more than 1,200 independent specialty stores and namesake boutiques in cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia and La Jolla, Calif. Her fashion line is also sold in department stores such as, Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale's and Nordstrom.
Miller was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1952. During her father's early years at GE, the family lived in several places, finally settling in Lenox in 1958, where the budding designer grew up with her sister and brother, Michele and Alan. But it was her French mother's aesthetic (Jacqueline was born in Paris, and met Miller's father during World War II, emigrating to the U.S. after the couple wed in 1946) that would later have a larger influence on her designs. Her mother never changed her citizenship, according to the New York Magazine article, and insisted her children have dual citizenship, dressing her daughters like little French girls.
But it wasn't until Miller was 19 that she make her first trip to France. (Her mother was notoriously afraid of flying, so much so that Jacqueline's obituary in 2017 mentions that she still enjoyed traveling abroad despite that fact that she "never drove a car or flew in an airplane.") It was her sophomore year at Rhode Island School of Design and she arranged to spend a year in Paris to study at L'Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. There, she learned the art of fabric drapery and the classical method of dressmaking.
"It was an haute couture school, and it was intensive," she says in the article. "I got incredible training in the aesthetics of clothing that I never would have gotten anywhere else. I think the cut of clothes is most important, and it's been instrumental in making my clothes sell."
Miller started working as the chief designer at P.J. Walsh manufacturer of dresses a few years after graduating. Bud Konheim, who was the company's president at the time, hired Miller. In 1982, Konheim and Miller collaborated to start the Nicole Miller company and in 1986, her first store opened on Madison Avenue. She married her husband, Kim Tiapale, in 1996 and the two have a son, Palmer. While Miller calls New York City her home, her sister, Michele Miller, still lives in Berkshire County and is owner and founder of BOLA Granola.
Nicole Miller's designs — best known for form-flattering dresses in bold colors and creative necklines — have been worn by many celebrities, including Anjelica Huston, Beyonce Knowles, Angelina Jolie, Brooke Shields, Jennifer Stone, Susan Sarandon and Eva Longoria.
The Berkshires may one day be able to claim a Catholic saint was born here.
Mother Mary Alphonsa, founder of the Dominican Order of St. Rose of Lima, was declared a "Servant of God" in 2003 by the Cardinal Edward Egan, archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York, the first step in the canonization process.
A decade later, in 2013, the Vatican's Congregation of the Causes of Saints released a "Decree of Validity" affirming they had accepted Mother Alphonsa, also known as Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, for consideration. The investigation period, a somewhat lengthy process used to determine sainthood, officially began in 2014.
Lathrop, the youngest daughter of author Nathaniel Hawthorne and illustrator Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, founded the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne in 1900. The religious order provides palliative care to terminal cancer patients free of charge.
"We feel she can speak to so many people," Mother Mary Francis Lepore, superior general of the order Lathrop founded, told the The Journal News of Westchester County, N.Y., in 2013. "She was a wife who had a difficult marriage, a mother who lost her child and a convert. She also sends a strong message about the dignity of life when there's so much talk about euthanasia."
Born in Lenox in May 1851, Rose Hawthorne's time in Lenox was short, as the family moved to Britain in 1853 when Nathaniel Hawthorne was appointed as the American consul in Liverpool. The family spent time in England, France and Italy, where, although raised in the Protestant faith, a young Rose spent time at the Vatican Museum and reportedly caught a glance of Pope Pius IX on his balcony. The family returned to Massachusetts in 1860, settling in Concord. Her father would die four years later and her mother, in an effort to save money, moved the family to Germany where the cost of living was far less than in America. It was there Rose Hawthorne would meet George Lathrop, an American writer and later editor at the Atlantic Monthly. They would marry in 1871. The couple returned to the United States and in 1876, their only child, Francis, was born. They would lose him to diphtheria in 1881.
Following their son's death, the couple moved from Cambridge to Connecticut, where they converted to Catholicism. In 1895, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop petitioned the Catholic Church for permission to leave her husband, an alcoholic. The couple separated (but remained married until George Lathrop's death in 1898). A year after their separation, in 1896, Rose Lathrop, 45, enrolled in a course to become a nurse and began working with the then New York Cancer Hospital. Inspired by the work, she founded Sister Rose's Free Home in a Manhattan apartment building to care for impoverished patients. She would join the Dominican Order in 1899 and found the Dominican Order of St. Rose of Lima a year later. She became the order's first Mother Superior, taking the name Mother Mary Alphonsa. The order refused all payments from the patients and their families, existing on donations from supporters.
Today, the order continues Lathrop's work at three locations: Rosary Hill Home in Hawthorne, N.Y.; Sacred Heart Home in Philadelphia and Our Lady of Perpetual Help Home in Atlanta.
- Kate Abbott, Eagle Correspondent
On summer days in 1916, Madame Toussaint Welcome would have seen young men in uniform marching a few blocks south of her brownstone.
The 15th New York National Guard would march out from the Lafayette Theater as their armory, through the theater center of Harlem. They would spend more days in the trenches than any other American unit.
She would memorialize their efforts in "Charge of the Colored Divisions," the only painting accepted by the U.S. government's National War Savings Committee by an African-American artist to be used as a war poster in the War Savings Stamp and Liberty Loan drives. Nearly 100,000 full-color posters of her painting, featuring a soldier with the 15th's insignia on his canteen, were distributed across the country.
And she became one of the first black woman filmmakers in the country and took a stand to defend them.
She was born in Lenox, in 1885 as Jane Louise Van Der Zee. Her brother James, a year younger, would become known as one of the central photographers of the Harlem Renaissance. A record of her life exists mainly in the background of his, and yet she was an artist and musician in her own right — his biographers often say she was as talented, or more.
She and her husband, Ernest Toussaint Welcome, ran the Toussaint Conservatory of Art in Harlem and Queens for more than 40 years, and they joined the growing silent film industry as filmmakers with the Toussaint Motion Picture Exchange.
The Van Der Zees — she was the oldest of six children — grew up in Lenox, where their aunts ran a bakery, and their grandparents lived next door, writes Rodger Birt in "A Live in American Photography," a study of James Van Der Zee's work.
They were a warm and musical family — everyone played an instrument and sang. And they would paint and draw together on winter nights, writes Jim Haskins in "Picture Takin' Man," a biography of Van Der Zee based in long conversations with him.
Jennie studied at the Kellogg School of Art in Pittsfield, and by 1908 she had married Ernest Toussaint Welcome; her family members were heading to New York to find work, and she and her husband moved to Harlem and opened the Toussaint Conservatory.
Jennie painted and drew, and she and her school taught oil painting and watercolor, piano and violin, bass and reeds — she and her husband took out a full-page ad in the NAACP's journal, The Crisis, as early as 1910.
"He was a good promoter," Van Der Zee says in "Picture Takin' Man." "Anything he set his mind to, he was successful at it. He had the finest singing voice I ever did hear. He should have sung professionally."
Ernest, like Jennie, was an entrepreneur and an artist. They would run many businesses together — a magazine, a realty company, a photography studio.
By 1918, the Toussaint Welcomes had branched into film. The young film industry was taking root in New York City, writes Paula J. Massood in "Making a Promised Land: Harlem in Twentieth-Century Photography and Film." Between 1918 and 1925, she says, there were at least eight black-owned-and-operated film production companies in Harlem.
This was the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance.
Black filmmakers were rising too, Massood wrote. Black audiences and film critics, theater owners and managers were protesting against demeaning characters and stereotypes in many American films; they wanted films to tell the real stories of the lives they led and could hope to lead.
The Toussaint Welcomes were making newsreels, Massood wrote, like most of the filmmakers in Harlem then.
On June 8, 1918, the Toussaint studio announced in the Chicago Defender a film on African-American soldiers overseas: "Twelve stirling [sic] chapters of two full reels each," Margaret Olin wrote in "Touching Photographs."
It was a story Madame Toussaint Welcome worked passionately to tell. The Toussaint Pictorial Company published one million post cards of black soldiers, according to The Defender, and one of the only examples of her work on record is her World War I poster.
She continued to paint and draw and to run her school through the Depression and World War II. She continued to run both the conservatory and his real estate business following the death of her husband.
"She always had the house and yard full of children," Van Der Zee said in "Picture Takin' Man." "She'd teach them painting and drawing and music and wouldn't charge any fee; she was just interested in their learning."
Her brother closed the school after she died from cancer in 1956.
On a train ride from Albuquerque to New York City, in August 1945, a Russian spy averted detection by handing the stolen plans she had wrapped in a newspaper to a military officer for safekeeping while she fumbled with her luggage and purse.
When the search of her luggage was over, the officer, never the wiser, handed the newspaper and stolen plans back to her. Had he stopped to check the papers, he would have discovered that he was holding the Manhattan Project's plans for the atomic bomb.
The spy, Lona Cohen, continued on to New York and delivered the documents to her handlers. Known by the code name "Leslie," she was one-half of "Dachniki" ("Vacationers" in Russian). Her husband, Morris Cohen, code name "Luis," was her partner. The couple, also known as Helen and Peter Kroger, would later be arrested in England, where posing as antiquarian booksellers they worked as radio operators for a KGB spy ring in the London suburb of Ruislip.
But long before her days as a spy or even as a member of the Communist Party, Lona Cohen lived in Adams, where she attended Renfrew Elementary School and later, St. Stanislaus Kostka School, according to the October 1983 Adams Historical Society Newsletter. Born Leontina "Lona" Petka, on Jan. 11, 1913, she was one of six daughters of Wladyslaw and Mary Petka, Polish immigrants who met and married in Adams. The family lived on Bellevue Avenue for a time, before purchasing a tenement on Albert Street.
"They were a typical Polish family," Eugene Michalenko, historical society president, told The Eagle in a 2005 interview. He noted that unlike Susan B. Anthony, who was also born in town, Cohen wasn't remembered by townsfolk in the same way, if at all.
"As intriguing as all this is, she still betrayed her country," he said.
The family moved to Connecticut in 1923, eventually settling in Norwich. According to numerous reports, Lona ran away in 1928. Little is known about her whereabouts during that time, but she later appears in the 1940 U.S. Census working as a "baby nurse," for Joseph and Ethel Weinstein on West End Avenue in New York City. She tells the census worker that she works 60 hours a week and that her highest level of education was the eighth grade.
Petka is believed to have joined the Communist Party around 1935, just prior to meeting Morris Cohen in 1938. The couple married in Norwich on July 13, 1941. When Morris Cohen was drafted during World War II, Lona took up his courier work. In 1951, when friends and fellow spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were arrested by the FBI, the Soviets helped the Cohens make their way to Mexico. The couple disappeared, but according to the book, "The Sword and the Shield," they were in Russia undergoing training in coding and decoding. In 1954, they re-emerged in England as a New Zealand couple known as the Krogers.
In 1960, British Intelligence broke the KGB spy ring run by the Krogers (Cohens). British police found a 74-foot antenna with a transmitter capable of reaching Moscow in the attic of the Kroger's house. The couple was arrested and tried. They were sentenced to 20 years in prison. In 1969, the Krogers/Cohens were released to the Soviet Union in exchange for Gerald Brook, a British school teacher held by the Soviet Union for smuggling anti-Soviet literature into the country. The Cohens were awarded the Order of the Red Star upon their arrival in Russia and began teaching at the KGB training academy.
Lona Cohen died of cancer in 1992. Morris Cohen followed his wife in 1995. In 2005, former Eagle reporter Christopher Marcisz reported the couple was buried in Moscow, where their black marble tombstone bears their etched likenesses along with a ribbon marking them as "Heroes of the Russian Federation."
- Benjamin Cassidy, The Berkshire Eagle
Edith Wharton may be the Berkshires' most famous female novelist, but she is not the county's most pioneering one.
That distinction belongs to Stockbridge native Catharine Maria Sedgwick, whose 19th century writings were among the earliest contributions to the U.S. literary canon that developed after the American Revolution. The preface to Sedgwick's anonymously published debut novel, "A New-England Tale," indicates just how few peers she had when the book was released in 1822.
"The writer of this tale has made a humble effort to add something to the scanty stock of native American literature," it begins.
She more than accomplished that modest goal, composing a novel that captured Berkshire life and foreshadowed, through orphan Jane Elton's striving, the vital role that women would play in the nascent nation's growth. Over the course of her life, she published five more novels, including "Hope Leslie." Her most well-known work was set in the 17th century and is regarded as forward-thinking for its time due to its positive treatment of Native Americans. Heroines also featured prominently in her work, which included two biographies, countless short stories and novellas.
"Miss Sedgwick is not only one of our most celebrated and most meritorious writers, but attained reputation at a period when American reputation in letters was regarded as a phenomenon," Edgar Allan Poe once wrote, naming Washington Irving and her friend, William Cullen Bryant, among her contemporaries.
Sedgwick was born Dec. 28, 1789, into one of the Berkshires' most historic clans. Her parents were Pamela Dwight and Theodore Sedgwick, the latter a judge, lawyer and politician. Though arranged marriages were common at the time, Sedgwick rejected many suitors' offers, choosing to remain single until her death in West Roxbury, in 1867.
"Marriage is not essential to the contentment, the dignity, or the happiness of woman," Sedgwick wrote in "Hope Leslie."
These days, Sedgwick's name has been in the news not only for an early brand of feminism but also because of her connection to Elizabeth "Mum Bett" Freeman. With Sedgwick's father representing her, Freeman became the first enslaved African-American to win a Massachusetts freedom suit in 1781. Afterward, she took a domestic service job with the Sedgwicks at their Stockbridge mansion. Catharine grew close to Freeman and, in 1853, published the former slave's life story under the title "Slavery in New England" in Bentley's Miscellany.
Today, Sedgwick is buried next to Freeman in the "Sedgwick Pie," the family's famous concentric circle burial plot within the the Stockbridge Cemetery.
- Benjamin Cassidy, The Berkshire Eagle
"Scorn, derision, insult, menace — the handcuff, the lash — the tearing away of children from parents, of husbands from wives — the weary trudging in droves along the common highways, the labour of body, the despair of mind, the sickness of heart — these are the realities which belong to the system, and form the rule, rather than the exception, in the slave's experience."
Before author, actress and abolitionist Frances Anne "Fanny" Kemble lived at her Lenox estate, "The Perch," she resided on a Georgia plantation with her husband, Pierce Butler. In "Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839" (1863), Kemble provides a firsthand account of slavery's atrocities during a four-month span on St. Simon's and Butler islands. The work emerged from letters she wrote to Elizabeth Sedgwick during that time and offered vivid, awful details that garnered lots of attention from abolitionists in the North.
Kemble would move in that direction after leaving Butler. When they married in 1834, she didn't know he was set to become one of the country's largest slaveholders. Born in London in 1809 to a famous acting family, Kemble had come to the U.S. in 1832 for a theatrical tour. Butler attended some of her acclaimed performances, wooing her in the process. But when Butler inherited his grandfather's slaves, Kemble soon became painfully aware of her husband's moral lacking. She eventually left him, though it wasn't until 1848 that Butler, not Kemble, filed for divorce. Kemble lost her parental rights in the case.
"Mrs. Butler was an abolitionist and her husband wished her to keep her tongue and pen still on the subject, his income being derived from slave property in Georgia. The lady persisted in the utterance of her sentiments and it was the cause of domestic infelicity," The Pittsfield Sun wrote at the time, according to past Eagle reporting.
The next year, Kemble settled in Lenox at "The Perch," which she called her "safe haven," across from what is now Canyon Ranch. Her dramatic readings of Shakespeare drew considerable praise in the Berkshires. But she also kept writing, penning poems, plays, memoirs and a novel, "Long Ago and Far Away," while hanging at "The Hive" with Catharine Sedgwick and other literary luminaries.
Today, Kemble Street in Lenox pays homage to Fanny.
- Meggie Baker, The Berkshire Eagle
If Phyllis Birkby had listened to her high school career counselor, she might have had a different path.
"Well, Miss Birkby, it appears that if you were a man, you should be studying architecture," she was told, according to documents in Smith College's collection of her materials. As a 16-year-old in 1949, she "swallowed the implication that there just weren't any women architects."
Birkby — born Noel Phyllis Birkby on Dec. 16, 1932, in Nutley, N.J. — showed an interest in architecture early on, but didn't fully pursue her passion until she went on to earn a Masters of Architecture from Yale University. At Yale, Birkby was one of only six women in the department — to a student body of 200 men. Despite struggling to "rise above the female role" and having to prove her capabilities, she graduated from Yale in 1966.
Birkby was a founding member of the Alliance for Women in Architecture in 1972. After coming out as a lesbian in 1973, Birkby began her own practice. An involved activist, she was also a filmmaker, documenting the women's movement and lesbian culture of the 1970s. Looking at the field of architecture through the lens of feminism and activism, Birkby criticized the architecture of the patriarchy — a tradition of creating spaces by and largely for men. In response, Birkby led a series of fantasy workshops for women, asking participants to imagine their ideal environment.
In 1973, she edited and published the book, "Amazon Expedition: A Lesbian Feminist Anthology," for which she would win much critical acclaim.
"Before the 1970s, lesbians could publish their writing in nonspecific collective volumes, but not until 1973, with the publication of 'Amazon Expedition: A Lesbian Feminist Anthology,' edited by Phyllis Birkby, was the lesbian anthology in its own right born," wrote George Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman, editors of "Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures."
Evolving out of a series of Women in Architecture conferences around the country, in 1974, Birkby, with Katrin Adam, Ellen Perry Berkeley, Bobbie Sue Hood, Marie Kennedy, Joan Forrester Sprague and Leslie Kanes Weisman, founded the Women's School of Planning and Architecture. WSPA was a series of five sessions held from 1975 to 1981 for women of all backgrounds interested in architecture. Held around the country, participants met to collaborate on ideas on how to design spaces that were inclusive to women.
Following the swell of the women's movement in the 1970s, things were quieter for Birkby in the 1980s; she predominately taught and designed on commission. In 1992, Birkby was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died at her summer home in Great Barrington in 1994 at age 61.
Birkby's writings and her films, documenting the women's and gay rights movements and lesbian culture in New York City during the 1970s, were donated to the Sophia Smith Collection of Women's History at Smith College.
"I have not by any means been a linear oriented professional person," said Birkby, according to documents in Smith College's collection.
- Katherine Abbott, Eagle Correspondent.
At the foot of Mount Greylock, a round building with a wall of windows looks out at the the stone path of a labyrinth in the grass. The center of the room is a sanctuary, and a woman stands taking in the light.
She moves with poised self-command and an undercurrent of laughter. Walking in, a neighbor might hear her singing a prayer to a folk melody on her guitar, or sharing and reflecting a friend's quiet triumph, or talking frankly about navigating a time of pain.
On a Saturday morning, she will welcome in the community, wearing a rainbow tallit, a prayer shawl. Rachel Barenblat is the rabbi and spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Israel, the only synagogue in Northern Berkshire.
Around the walls hang messages of support written on paper in colored marker. Last fall, in the wake of the violence at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, people in North Adams reached out to CBI; the congregation coming to Shabbat prayer found loving graffiti — Your community stands with you. Sending you peace. We've got your back.
For Barenblat, being a rabbi means leading a community within a larger world and reaching out to both. It means standing with the people she serves in high times and hard times — comforting illness, celebrating a coming of age, washing a body and preparing it gently for burial.
It means finding beauty and meaning, day to day. In a recent poem, posted on her blog, she listens to her son singing as she bakes challah for her mother on the last Sabbath they will ever welcome in together. And, as it did then, her work means weaving tradition and contemporary life and keeping them in relationship, direct and real.
"It's one of my moments of greatest joy," she said at Tunnel City on the first day of spring, "when someone comes up after a high holiday or a b'nai or bat mitzvah and said, `I didn't know Judaism could be like that — I didn't know I could feel it like that.' Those are the days I know I'm really doing my job."
She has served here as rabbi for eight years, and as a rabbinical student for five years before that. And in that time her influence has grown across the country and beyond.
Born in San Antonio, Texas, Barenblat has lived in the Berkshires for more than 20 years, since her days as a undergraduate at Williams College. She has since earned her MFA from Bennington College, and as a writer she has published five books of poetry.
She has also earned an international readership for her blog as the Velveteen Rabbi, which she began writing in 2003. In April 2008, Time Magazine named hers as one of their top 25 blogs, and in 2016 the Forward named her as one of America's Most Inspiring Rabbis.
And in 2018, she took the lead in an adventure with a group of rabbis, scholars and writers from coast to coast.
With her fellow rabbi and Williams alum David Markus, she has created Bayit: Your Jewish Home (yourbayit.org) — an online community that provides "tools" to build a contemporary Jewish life.
In the last year, Barenblat has been writing and editing the recently released book, "Beside Still Waters: A Journey of Comfort and Renewal," a companion for mourners. As a freelancer for more than 20 years, she brought together some 40 writers for the book, published in March by Bayit through a partnership with Ben Yehuda Press.
This book, she said, wanted to exist for 14 years and readers have welcomed it eagerly — as of the first week of spring it is the No. 1 new release in Jewish life on Amazon.
And, she said, it was released just as she came to need it. She lost her mother a month ago.
"In my own days of mourning," she said, "I was amazed at how resonant it was and how new it felt for me. Encountering it in my own time was entirely different."
In that time, she listened to a friend reading aloud her own poem, an evening prayer for the first days after a deep loss — soothe my fear of life without enough light — surrounded by the voices in her new work, and candle flame, and her own windows looking toward the hills at dawn.
Note: Rachel Barenblat has been this writer's editor and teacher and friend for almost 20 years.
- Jennifer Huberdeau, The Berkshire Eagle
When the first-ever U.S. Olympic Trials for Women's Boxing were held in February 2012, the woman who paved the way for the historic event was ringside.
Local boxer Gail Grandchamp won the right for women to box as amateurs in 1992.
"I've been fighting for this for 18 years," Grandchamp said in a 2012 interview with the North Adams Transcript. "I fought for eight years for women to have the right to box as amateurs and then I fought 10 more years to get women to the Olympics ... We're making women's boxing history — boxing history."
Grandchamp's battle for the right to be licensed as an amateur boxer began in 1984, when she was part of a team from North Adams State College selected to participate in the state's Golden Gloves competition. She was the only member of the team whose application was denied, specifically because she was female. She sued on the basis of sexual discrimination.
In 1992, a Berkshire Superior Court judge ruled that a by-law of the New England Amateur Boxing Federation and its parent organization, U.S. Boxing, prohibiting women from being licensed, was illegal under sexual discrimination laws.
The victory, which opened amateur boxing to women, came too late for Grandchamp. She was now too old to register as an amateur boxer.
"Because it took so long in court and because of my age, if I wanted to have my own career, I had to turn pro," she said. "I had to fight for that too. I became the first licensed professional female boxer in Massachusetts and won the first female professional boxing match in the state."
In her professional boxing debut, in July 1987, Grandchamp won a split decision against Linda Casey in a match sanctioned by the state Boxing Association at the then Mohawk Performing Arts Center. According to boxrec.com, Grandchamp's record is 1-6, with her last professional bout taking place in 1998.
Grandchamp, a professional trainer, campaigned to make women's boxing an official Olympic sport throughout her professional boxing career and after. She co-authored a memoir, "Gail Grandchamp: A Fighter with Heart Pursues an Olympic Dream" in 2006.
But it wasn't until 2012 that Grandchamp began to receive national recognition for her legal victory. Until then, her boxing legacy was overshadowed by that of Dallas Malloy, who grabbed national attention in 1993, at the age of 16, when she sued U.S. Boxing in federal court for sexual discrimination. Malloy's case never went to trial. In May 1993, a U.S. District Court judge in Washington filed an injunction that allowed Malloy's amateur license to be approved. At the time, U.S. Boxing, which had invited Grandchamp to its convention in late 1992, had already begun drafting rules for women's boxing. Malloy fought and won her only amateur bout in October 1993, before retiring from the sport in early 1994.
- Jennifer Huberdeau, The Berkshire Eagle
Anna Helen (Crofts) McCuen lived a secret literary life.
It was so secret, that her achievements, including co-authoring a short story with the master of horror fiction, H.P. Lovecraft, went untold until decades after her death.
All mention of her literary endeavors are non-existent in her 1975 obituary, which mentions her 22-year career as a teacher at Sarah T. Haskins School in North Adams, from 1920 until her resignation in 1942, as well as her education. Mostly, it mentions that she is a direct descendant of Thomas Meagher, designer of the Irish flag and once acting governor of Montana.
The same omission is true of her profile in the 1919 North Adams Normalogue, the yearbook of the North Adams Normal School (now Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts). There, a paragraph besides her photograph includes: "She must have some magnetic power, for all who come to know her, love her. She is ever ready to help the poor and weak with their lessons. She seems to know everything about every subject. Lesson plans? Why, they don't bother her! She could write a dozen while one of the rest of us could write none."
The only mention of her writing, other than that of writing lesson plans, was a 1932 North Adams Transcript article about her essay, "Guidance versus knights in the road," being published by the nationally circulated Guidance Vocational Magazine.
But, McCuen, as Anna Helen Crofts, had dipped her toes into the literary waters. In 1920, she co-wrote the essay, "Poetry and the Gods," with Henry Paget-Lowe. Published in the September edition of The United Amateur, the official publication of the United Amateur Press Association, the story may have gone unnoticed. However, the publication's editor was H.P. Lovecraft and Henry Paget-Lowe was one of several pseudonyms he used. (His real name was used several months later when the pair won an award for the piece.) Both McCuen and Lovecraft were board members of the United Amateur Press Association.
Lovecraft, a master of the horror genre, was editor and publisher of several publications. He had published Crofts' work twice before in The Tryout, a literary magazine out of Haverhill. Her short story, "Le Silent," was published in 1918, and an article, "War Literature," followed in 1919. A publication, The Vagrant, not affiliated with Lovecraft, published one of her poems, "To Autumn," in 1918.
It's not clear why she kept her writing secret. But, what is known is that McCuen's foray into fiction coincides with the start of her teaching position in North Adams. She taught first and second grade, as well as elementary sewing and canning classes, until she resigned at the age of 52. She married Joseph McCuen in 1945 and settled in to married life until she was widowed in 1963. From that time on, she was known as Anna Crofts McCuen and spent most her time traveling to exotic locations. Upon her death in 1975, at the age of 85, she left behind a fortune of $500,000, in addition to $57,000 in property. She also left a trust of $5,000 to care for her French bulldog, Mr. Grinch.
Nearly a century after McCuen penned "Poetry and The Gods" with Lovecraft, fans and scholars are still debating her contributions to the work and at one point, whether or not Anna Helen Crofts even existed, arguing the name was a pseudonym for another writer, not an actual woman.
McCuen may have left a posthumous answer for those who doubt her existence. The answer is as simple as the name on her gravestone: Anna H. Crofts.
- Margaret Button, The Berkshire Eagle
Dr. Seraph Frissell dared to go where few women did in her day - not only did she earn a college degree, but she went on to become a physician, specializing in diseases of women and children, and was a prolific medical writer. She was the first woman in western Massachusetts to be admitted to any district medical society, when she was admitted to the Hampden Medical Society in 1885. She was the fourth woman to be admitted a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society.
Born in the town of Peru on Aug. 20, 1840, Frissell was the third child of six of Augustus Caesar and Laura Mack (Emmons) Frissell. According to the book, "A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-Seventy Biographical Sketched accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life," Frissell's father died when she was 11, and she went to live with an aunt in western New York, "during which time she decided she would rather earn her own living, if possible, rather than be dependent on relatives." She returned to Peru and, for the next 18 months, spent her time in school and helping a neighbor, which allowed her to earn some money for clothing.
When she was 15, her oldest sister began working in a woolen mill, and Frissell soon joined her, dividing her time between school and the mill for six years. She saved enough money to continue her education and, in 1861, entered Mount Holyoke Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College), where she remained for a year. She taught for a year, returning to the seminary for another year of studies. After four more years of teaching, she resumed her studies in the fall of 1861 and received her diploma from the seminar in July 1869.
Frissell spent the next three years teaching, and thinking about studying medicine. She entered the University of Michigan in 1872 and received her medical diploma from its Department of Medicine and Surgery on March 24, 1875.
Frissell opened her practice in September 1876 in Pittsfield, where for eight years she did pioneer work as a woman physician. In 1884, she moved her practice to Springfield.
In 1896, Frissell took a course in electrotherapeutics, and was the medical examiner for the Berkshire Life Insurance Co. From 1890 to 1891, she was resident physician and lecturer on physiology and hygiene at Mount Holyoke College.
Frissell was the author of several papers. She presented before the American Medical Association a paper on the treatment of diphtheria without alcohol, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Nov. 13, 1897. She also wrote papers on "Tobacco," "Contents of a Teapot," "Why I'm a Temperance Doctor," "Hygiene: Why it should be taught in our Public Schools," "Prevention better than Cure," "Colonial Flags and the Evolution of the Stars and Stripes," also "Pioneer Women in Medicine."
A member of the temperance movement, Frissell, according to the authors of "A Woman of the Century," attributed part of her personal success as a physician "to not prescribing alcohol stimulants." She was the first president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in Springfield
She died in 1915, and was buried in the Peru Center Cemetery.
- Lindsey Hollenbaugh, The Berkshire Eagle
Gertrude Robinson Smith was a woman who knew how to get things done.
In the 1920s, she and a friend took it upon themselves (literally, took it upon themselves, like hoisting beams) to build her own home on her family's Stockbridge property. Later in life, Gertrude — in a less direct way, but no less arduous — would build Tanglewood.
Gertrude Robinson Smith was born in 1881 to a wealthy New York family. Her father was a corporate lawyer and her mother had been largely raised in Paris. Gertrude split her childhood between New York and Paris. When World War I broke out, the family purchased a property in the Glendale section of Stockbridge.
The summer resident would later help found the Berkshire Symphonic Festival, Inc., in 1934. The festival would go on to involve The Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1936 and later take up residency at the Tanglewood estate.
The festival was originally conductor and composer Henry Hadley's dream. But when he wanted to see if it could become reality, he went to visit Robinson Smith.
"She was raised in the old tradition that the strongest virtue of the well to do was civic mindedness," says The New York Times in Robinson Smith's obituary, which ran Oct. 23, 1963, one day after her death. She was 82.
Robinson Smith had a long history of getting things done. She was the president of the Vacation Savings Stamp Fund, an organization which dedicated itself to providing vacations for working girls in Manhattan. During World War I she and her friend author Edith Wharton organized medical supplies for France, raising $70,000 for surgical motor units. She didn't just do good from afar. She traveled to France in a blacked-out ship and flew over the front lines, according to Lenox History, the Lenox Historical Society's website. She was later made a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor for her efforts.
So when Hadley approached her with an idea for an outdoor music festival in the Berkshires, Robinson Smith, a woman of experience and determination with connections, knew what to do.
She, along with 63 other men and women living within 40 miles of Stockbridge formed the Berkshire Symphonic Festival, Inc. They elected her as its president, a post she held until the group dissolved in 1955.
"I am sure you will agree with me that there are few things artistically more enchanting than listening to a beautiful symphony orchestra on a summer evening outdoors under the stars," she said, according to The New York Times.
Two months after the festival was formed, its first set of three concerts was held on a farm just west of Mahkeenac Lake — 5,000 people attended over the three nights. But Tanglewood wouldn't be Tanglewood as we know it today, without Robinson Smith's excellent negotiating skills.
According to The New York Times, talks with Serge Koussevitzky to bring the Boston Symphony Orchestra to the newly formed festival were beginning to stall, that is until Robinson Smith met with him. What was supposed to be a 15-minute appointment between the symphony's conductor and the woman charged with getting the job done turned into a two-hour meeting that resulted in a marriage between music and nature that lives on to this day.
A search for a permanent home for the festival began soon after and ended when Gorham Brooks and Mary Aspinwall Tappan offered up their Tanglewood estate in Lenox. But it wasn't until after a downpour one August evening, that Robinson Smith was able to give her most lasting plea for the case of Tanglewood. During the first concert on the propriety, held under a large tent, a storm rolled through with a downpour that ended up seeping through the tent to the dismay of audience members and players. Robinson Smith famously made her way to the stage and announced that the storm had demonstrated their need for a more permanent shed — something Koussevitzky had requested early on to protect his orchestra from the elements and enhance the acoustics. She boldly stated "we must raise $100,000 to build it," according to The New York Times.
She raised $80,000 in time to build the shed — now known as The Koussevitzky Shed — in time for the 1938 season.
- Margaret Button, The Berkshire Eagle
Genevieve L. Hutchinson claimed to have only walked a small portion of the Appalachian Trail, herself, picking wild flowers once on Bald Mountain. But the Washington resident was a legend in her own time for being what is now known as a "trail angel," hosting thousands of AT hikers in her home on Main Street, across from the former Town Hall.
She began hosting hikers in 1921 and continued for 53 years, until her death in February 1974.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Aug. 10, 1883, she graduated from Hartford Public High School in Hartford, Conn., in 1900 and graduated as a deaconess of the Methodist Church from the Lucy Webb Hayes Training School, Washington, D.C. in 1904. She married Frederick W. Hutchinson June 28, 1905, and they subsequently moved to the town of Washington. A poet, she published several volumes, including "Memory and other Poems" (1947) and "Substance" (1953).
Appalachian Trail guidebooks often directed hikers to Hutchinson's home from a lean-to about a half-mile away. Ronald Fisher, a noted writer for National Geographic who hiked the AT and later recounted his adventure in his book, "The Appalachian Trail, " devotes a section to Hutchinson, calling her "one of the state's most gracious citizens." He adds her home "is half a mile from a lean-to in the October Mountain State Forest. She is mentioned in the trail guidebook: 'Brook in rear of lean-to unsafe for drinking; obtain spring water from Mrs. Hutchinson's home 0.67 m. north.'"
Upon arriving at her two-story frame home, Fisher was welcomed with "no-nonsense cordiality" and brought to a cozy living room with lace curtains, a fire crackling in the pot-bellied stove and walls displaying Hutchinson's watercolors of wild flowers. After being served cookies and coffee, she showed Fisher a scrapbook and register she had been keeping since 1938. In the register, thru hikers were marked with a red star; the scrapbook held postcards, letters and clippings from hikers she had met, and photographs, many of them of her with pack-laden hikers. Fisher persuaded her to read from her memoir, "Home on the Trail," which was not for publication, as she put it, but "for my family, so they'll know what it has meant to me to live here on the Trail."
Ben Montgomery, in his "Grandma Gatewood's Walk," also mentions Hutchinson. Emma Gatewood, another legend on the AT, was in her mid-60s when she began her hike in 1955. No women — and only five men — had ever hiked it continuously. She encountered Hutchinson as a hurricane bore down on the Northeast. "The rain clouds parted momentarily the next morning and Emma hiked into Washington, Massachusetts, where Mrs. Fred Hutchinson started to fill her canteen, thinking she was a berry picker, until Emma spoke up and got herself invited to dinner, then to a nap on the couch, then to the obligatory newspaper interview, then to a night in a bed."
Gatewood thru-hiked the A.T. a second time in 1957 and a third in 1964.
"It will not last forever," Hutchinson told Fisher, gazing at her house as he continued his journey on the AT. "Any more than I will. Or you. Or anyone else."
But her legend and her home live on. A blogger and trail angel, Carol Lew of Washington wrote in February 2016 about hosting the well-known hiker, The Real Hiking Viking, in her home — the very house that Hutchinson had welcomed so many hikers so many years before.
- Jenn Smith, The Berkshire Eagle
Florence Bascom was highly encouraged to attend college in an era when it wasn't common.
She would become a trailblazing geologist, who, in 1893, was the first woman to earn a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University and, in 1896, became the first woman employed by the United States Geological Survey.
Born in Williamstown on July 14, 1862, she was the daughter of John Bascom, a professor at Williams College and a Greylock Reservation Commission (Bascom Lodge is named for him), and Emma Curtiss Bascom, a women's rights suffragist, educator and activist.
During her time at Johns Hopkins, where she did her thesis on the origin and formation of the Appalachian Mountain range, "she was required to sit behind a screen, lest she disturb the men," according to an article on the university's website.
Nevertheless, she persisted in her field, going on to serve as associate editor of "American Geologist" magazine, teaching at Vassar and Smith colleges, and in 1895, founding the geology department at Bryn Mawr College where she taught for more than three decades. Her most notable work is published on the geological profile of the Mid-Atlantic region.
In addition to distinctions like being named among the top 100 geologists in the U.S. in the 1906 edition of "American Men of Science," a crater, an asteroid and a post-glacial lake have all been named in her honor.
The comedy of trivial day-to-day events — a lost set of keys, a misplaced letter or the wrong caption under a newspaper photograph — were not invented by the creators of Seinfeld.
Decades earlier, they were the foundation of "Ethel and Albert," a radio show and later a television sitcom from Peg Lynch, a Becket resident, who was the creator, writer and star of one of television's first sitcoms.
Lynch, who was dubbed "the lady who invented sitcom" by BBC Radio's Dick Vosburgh, wrote more than 11,000 radio and television scripts over the course of her seven-decade career. She first penned the husband-and-wife sitcom in 1938 as a three-minute radio dialogue.
"I wrote about what I knew. I wrote about real life," Lynch told The Berkshire Eagle in a 2014 interview. "I knew from a young age that I wanted to be a writer. When I was 10, I won a newspaper contest. You had to write about 'What Thanksgiving means to me.' I didn't write about anything prolific; just turkey and gravy. I was probably the only one who entered. I don't remember getting a prize either. I think getting published was it."
Lynch died in July 2015. She was 98.
"Ethel and Albert," which she created while working at Albert Lea, Minn., traveled with her, first to Charlottesville, Va., then to Maryland. It debuted as a 15-minute five-days-a-week evening sitcom in 1940 in Cumberland, Md., and finally to New York in 1944, where within a few months it had its own 15-minute five-days-a-week evening slot on ABC national radio. In 1950, it would transition to television, airing first as a 10-minute segment on "The Kate Smith Hour," before earning its own 30-minute time slot on NBC in 1952.
The show, which she owned the rights to, would later air on CBS and then ABC, before transitioning back to radio in 1957, as "The Couple Next Door." In 1963, it would be revived as part of National Public Radio's "Earplay," and be reborn in 1975 as "The Little Things in Life," for Radio Playhouse.
Born Margaret Frances Lynch on Nov. 25, 1916, in Lincoln, Neb., she married Odd Knut Ronning in 1948. Her husband died in June 2014. They resided in Becket for more than 40 years.
Lynch's sitcom legacy is kept alive through the website, peglynch.com and the Facebook page, A Funny Woman - Peg Lynch, which her daughter, Astrid Ronning King, uses not only to record her mother's career highlights, but also the more intimate stories involving family and friends.
Among those stories are tales that include Margaret Hamilton, best known for her role as the Wicked Witch of the West, whom was Lynch's best friend for 40 years and also appeared as "Aunt Eva" on "Ethel and Albert." Other stories include her brushes with celebrities, such as the time the Andrews Sisters stopped singing to help her search for her earring or the time she sat next to Charles Lindbergh on the train.
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- Lindsey Hollenbaugh, The Berkshire Eagle
If it wasn't for a wedding gift, we might not have Hancock Shaker Village to appreciate today.
Amy Bess Williams Miller was gifted a Shaker dining table as a wedding gift after her marriage to Lawrence K. "Pete" Miller, former publisher and owner of The Berkshire Eagle, in October of 1933. Amy Bess would later go on, spurred by her love and interest in that original piece of Shaker craftsmanship, to help found Hancock Shaker Village through a large-scale restoration project, turning the once living Shaker community into a living museum still enjoyed today.
In the late 1950s, the last of the Shakers at Hancock were leaving the village. At that time, Amy Bess was immersed in Shaker history and culture and was determined to preserve the tradition for future generations. According to The American Antiquarian Society, she toured museums and historical villages in the United States and Canada, and raised money to restore the 17 buildings at the village. She also wrote four books about the Shakers: one about Shaker cooking, another on the Shaker image, yet another on Shaker medicinal herbs, and a fourth describing Hancock Shaker Village as a "City of Peace."
John Ott, who was the Shaker Village director from 1970 to 1983, described her as a "powerhouse."
"She practiced leadership in everything and kept her staff energized. She married the collections, the land, the philosophy and the buildings into one. It was a picture of the Shakers as they were in Berkshire County — a powerful story," he said, according to Amy Bess' American Antiquarian Society obituary. In 2003, Amy Bess died at her home in Pittsfield. She was 90.
Born Amy Bess Williams on May 4, 1912, in El Paso, Texas, she was the daughter of Dr. Frederick R. Williams and Elizabeth Avery Taft Williams. The family moved to Worcester when she was 5, and that's where she grew up. She graduated from both Bancroft School in Worcester and Miss Hall's in Pittsfield. Amy Bess studied art history and architecture at Sorbonne University in Paris.
She was the first woman named as president of the Pittsfield Community Chest and received a national preservation award from the Garden Club of America. She was also president of the Berkshire Athenaeum from 1944 to 1979. She was the one who issued a plea for a new library in 1972 — another one of her ideas that came to fruition and is still enjoyed today. From 1964 to 1970, she served on the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners.
In 1995, her alma mater, Miss Hall's School, awarded her The Distinguished Alumna Award, saying: "She exhibits an enviable combination of infectious enthusiasm, grace, wit, kindness, and boundless energy."
- Jenn Smith, The Berkshire Eagle
Dr. May Edward Chinn advocated for medical equity, including improving access to care for people of low-income backgrounds and advocating for early cancer screenings and interventions.
Her father, William Layfayette Chinn, was a former Virginia slave. Her mother, Lulu Evans, came from a Chickahominy Indian reservation near Norfolk. The two met and married in Great Barrington, where Chinn was born and raised for the first few years of her life.
Chinn's mother went on to work as a live-in housekeeper for the Tiffany family (of the jewelry company fame) and Chinn lived with her growing up in New York City. Despite dropping out of school in the 11th grade, Chinn became a talented pianist, accompanying singer Paul Robeson and earned a spot at Columbia Teachers College (now Teachers College, Columbia University). She intended to study music, but one music professor's racist remarks dissuaded her. With the encouragement of Dr. Jean Broadhurst, she pursued a career in the sciences.
Despite many adversities and objections to her advancement in the medical field, Chinn became the first African-American woman to graduate from Columbia and Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1926. That year, she carved her niche serving in Harlem, as the first African-American woman to hold an internship at Harlem Hospital and one of the first women to ride with the hospital's ambulance crew on emergency medical calls.
In the 1930s, she worked with Dr. George Papanicolaou, noted for his work on the Pap smear test for cervical cancer. She earned her master's degree in public health from Columbia University in 1933. In 1944, four years after black physicians were granted admitting privileges at New York hospitals, she joined the Strang Cancer Clinic at Memorial Hospital, taking a full-time position at the Strang Clinic at the New York Infirmary, the following year. She remained with the clinic, conducting cancer research, for 29 years. She practiced medicine for more than 50 years, running her own private practice in Harlem until her retirement at the age of 81.
- Heather Bellow, The Berkshire Eagle
She was the first woman to have tenure in Columbia University's English department.
And after 32 years there, Carolyn Gold Heilbrun left, saying she was "sick of the treehouse gang."
"Sad, exhausting — and infuriating," she told The New York Times Magazine in 1992. "Because Columbia will continue to be run by male professors who behave like little boys saying, 'This is our secret treehouse club, no girls allowed.'"
Her revelations apparently sent discomfort and defensive posturing rippling through academia.
Heilbrun, a Virginia Woolf scholar who had a summer home in Alford, had told the magazine that she had been pushed around by an old boys' club within the department when she had piped up about women's issues.
This author of 14 works of nonfiction and 15 mystery novels had had enough. She said the department was discriminating against women; that not a single woman sat on the tenure committee, and that the place was operating amid "old-boy secrets."
"In life, as in fiction, women who speak out usually end up punished or dead," Heilbrun had said. "I'm lucky to escape with my pension and a year of leave."
The feminist literary scholar could afford the exit. She was married to an economist, lived on Central Park West and had two summer homes.
Heilbrun was born in East Orange, N.J., in 1928. She was 67 when she up and left her endowed position at Columbia. Over the years she would write scholarly feminist books like "Toward a Recognition of Androgyny" and "Reinventing Womanhood."
She also snuck in a series of intellectual murder mysteries.
Writing under the pen name, Amanda Cross, she fashioned the rich, beautiful and sophisticated protagonist, Kate Fansler. The book jacket for the first in the series, "In the Last Analysis," explains:
"When beautiful Janet Harrison asks English professor Kate Fansler to recommend a Manhattan psychoanalyst, Kate immediately sends the girl to her dear friend and former lover, Dr. Emanuel Bauer. Seven weeks later, the girl is stabbed to death on Emanuel's couch — with incriminating fingerprints on the murder weapon ... Kate's analytic techniques leave no stone unturned."
Heilbrun tried to hide her identity, but was apparently found out by a scholar who sleuthed through copyright records. According to the Times Magazine article, she started writing the first Fansler mystery under the following conditions: "... while an assistant professor at Columbia, living in a crowded New York City apartment with three children under 8, a large dog and a husband in graduate school. She began rising at 5 a.m. to type her way into an alternate existence ..."
The book was up for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
Later she said, ''Winning would have blown my cover."
She managed to keep it for six years, fearing the revelation could affect the perception of her as a serious academic and threaten her tenure.
Heilbrun who had also lectured at other ivy league colleges and taught at Brooklyn College, had already begun to talk about taking her life at age 70 in her work, "The Last Gift Of Time: Life Beyond Sixty." The idea, she said, was to "quit while you're ahead."
She made good on this at age 77. Her son had told The New York Times that "she wanted to control her destiny."
Heilbrun's suicide note: "The journey is over. Love to all."
As members of Washington D.C.'s elite society, sisters Josephine Porter (Boardman) Crane and Mabel Thorp Boardman were expected, as most prominent socialites are, to throw parties and outings and do so, occasionally, in support of local charities. In this regard, the sisters failed to meet society's expectations.
Instead, they used their status to enact social change. And neither sister was afraid of ruffling a few feathers along the way.
Mable T. Boardman led the faction that ousted Clara Barton from the presidency of the American Red Cross. Mable would head the American Red Cross for a time, overhauling and re-organizing its internal structure. She later served as the director of its volunteer service.
Josephine Porter Boardman focused her attention on education, the arts and bettering the living conditions of women and children. She married Winthrop Murray Crane, of Dalton, who served one term as governor, from 1900 to 1902, and then in the U.S. Senate from 1904 to 1914.
But Mrs. Crane was anything but the perfect hostess. The Pittsfield Journal reported on July 27, 1908: "Mrs. Winthrop Murray Crane, wife of the Massachusetts senator, is depriving Washington society of much of her time to study social problems as they relate to the work of women and children in New England mills."
But while she was being criticized locally for "depriving Washington society of much of her time," Crane was busy founding The Congressional Club, the only social club charted by an act of Congress. The club, which continues today, as a non-profit organization of current and former spouses of members of Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court and the President's Cabinet, who promote volunteerism, facilitate bi-partisan efforts, raise awareness of and support charities in the District of Columbia.
In 1921, she established the Berkshire Museum's Junior Naturalists, a program of studies in natural history for children, who received medals for their work. She served as a member of the Berkshire Museum board of trustees from 1937 until her death, at the age of 98, in 1972.
She was also an advocate of progressive education practices, supporting the work of Helen Parkhurst. In an Associated Press report out of New York on Feb. 4., 1928, she was quoted as saying: "90 percent of the education poured into the minds of children does not give them any preparation for life. This is because it is education by ritual, and education by ritual gives slavery to those who cry for freedom." The article continued: "Mrs. Crane advocated letting the child choose the subject in which he is most interested and concentrate on it so long as he is getting something out of it, instead of allowing him a specified time for one subject and then turning abruptly to another, unallied subject."
That educational philosophy, which was first tested in Dalton's public schools, became known as The Dalton Plan and is still in practice at The Dalton School in New York City.
Among her other social contributions, Crane was one of the original founders of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and was on the boards of the Morgan Library and the New York Public Library. She also helped found a visiting nurse association in Dalton and was one of two women from Massachusetts appointed by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to the National Women's Committee of the 1933 Mobilization for Human Needs.
Today, the Josephine and Louise Crane Foundation, formed in 2008 after the merger of the Josephine B. Crane Foundation and the Louise Crane Foundation, supports non-profit organizations in the arts, cultural and human service fields.
Born in Dalton on June 21, 1855, Mary Salome Cutler Fairchild is noted for her establishment and teaching in the field of library sciences.
Her father, Artemas Hubbard Cutler, was a papermaker, and her mother was his second wife, Lydia Wakefield.
According to American National Biography Online, Fairchild, after graduating high school, was offered a position in a community library but turned it down to attend Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College).
After an early career in teaching, her interest was piqued by the development of what would be known as the American Library Association. In 1884, she accepted a position as a cataloger at Columbia University from Melvil Dewey (founder of the Dewey Decimal System), and later joined him in Albany, N.Y., at his School of Library Economy, which was later named Albany Library School and New York State Library School.
During her career, Fairchild remained a driving force at this library and in her field, training some 500 students in librarianship after earning her bachelor's degree in library science from the University of the State of New York. She also served as head librarian of the New York State Library for the Blind in Albany, an ode to her father, who was blind.
She suffered health issues throughout her life that challenged her career, but left a legacy of written articles on topics ranging from establishing a children's library at home to fair wages for women librarians.
— Jenn Smith, The Berkshire Eagle
- Lindsey Hollenbaugh, The Berkshire Eagle
If you've ever enjoyed one of designer Nicole Miller's carefully constructed creations, you might have General Electric to thank for that.
Miller's father, Grier Bovey Miller, worked for General Electric in Pittsfield as an electrical engineer where he designed a fire-control system for submarine-launch missions until he retired in 1987. According to an article published in New York Magazine in 1993, the designer credits her father's engineering mind for inspiring her career as a designer.
"My mother was always clothes-minded," says Miller in the article, of her French mother Jacqueline Mahieu "... But I have my father's mind. The way you figure out how to make something is engineering."
And figuring out the perfect cut of a dress is what the fashion designer and businesswoman would become known for in the fashion industry. That and a menswear line of graphic ties and boxer shorts that put her company on the map in the 1980s. Today, Nicole Miller's women's collection apparel is sold in more than 1,200 independent specialty stores and namesake boutiques in cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia and La Jolla, Calif. Her fashion line is also sold in department stores such as, Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale's and Nordstrom.
Miller was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1952. During her father's early years at GE, the family lived in several places, finally settling in Lenox in 1958, where the budding designer grew up with her sister and brother, Michele and Alan. But it was her French mother's aesthetic (Jacqueline was born in Paris, and met Miller's father during World War II, emigrating to the U.S. after the couple wed in 1946) that would later have a larger influence on her designs. Her mother never changed her citizenship, according to the New York Magazine article, and insisted her children have dual citizenship, dressing her daughters like little French girls.
But it wasn't until Miller was 19 that she make her first trip to France. (Her mother was notoriously afraid of flying, so much so that Jacqueline's obituary in 2017 mentions that she still enjoyed traveling abroad despite that fact that she "never drove a car or flew in an airplane.") It was her sophomore year at Rhode Island School of Design and she arranged to spend a year in Paris to study at L'Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. There, she learned the art of fabric drapery and the classical method of dressmaking.
"It was an haute couture school, and it was intensive," she says in the article. "I got incredible training in the aesthetics of clothing that I never would have gotten anywhere else. I think the cut of clothes is most important, and it's been instrumental in making my clothes sell."
Miller started working as the chief designer at P.J. Walsh manufacturer of dresses a few years after graduating. Bud Konheim, who was the company's president at the time, hired Miller. In 1982, Konheim and Miller collaborated to start the Nicole Miller company and in 1986, her first store opened on Madison Avenue. She married her husband, Kim Tiapale, in 1996 and the two have a son, Palmer. While Miller calls New York City her home, her sister, Michele Miller, still lives in Berkshire County and is owner and founder of BOLA Granola.
Nicole Miller's designs — best known for form-flattering dresses in bold colors and creative necklines — have been worn by many celebrities, including Anjelica Huston, Beyonce Knowles, Angelina Jolie, Brooke Shields, Jennifer Stone, Susan Sarandon and Eva Longoria.
The Berkshires may one day be able to claim a Catholic saint was born here.
Mother Mary Alphonsa, founder of the Dominican Order of St. Rose of Lima, was declared a "Servant of God" in 2003 by the Cardinal Edward Egan, archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York, the first step in the canonization process.
A decade later, in 2013, the Vatican's Congregation of the Causes of Saints released a "Decree of Validity" affirming they had accepted Mother Alphonsa, also known as Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, for consideration. The investigation period, a somewhat lengthy process used to determine sainthood, officially began in 2014.
Lathrop, the youngest daughter of author Nathaniel Hawthorne and illustrator Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, founded the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne in 1900. The religious order provides palliative care to terminal cancer patients free of charge.
"We feel she can speak to so many people," Mother Mary Francis Lepore, superior general of the order Lathrop founded, told the The Journal News of Westchester County, N.Y., in 2013. "She was a wife who had a difficult marriage, a mother who lost her child and a convert. She also sends a strong message about the dignity of life when there's so much talk about euthanasia."
Born in Lenox in May 1851, Rose Hawthorne's time in Lenox was short, as the family moved to Britain in 1853 when Nathaniel Hawthorne was appointed as the American consul in Liverpool. The family spent time in England, France and Italy, where, although raised in the Protestant faith, a young Rose spent time at the Vatican Museum and reportedly caught a glance of Pope Pius IX on his balcony. The family returned to Massachusetts in 1860, settling in Concord. Her father would die four years later and her mother, in an effort to save money, moved the family to Germany where the cost of living was far less than in America. It was there Rose Hawthorne would meet George Lathrop, an American writer and later editor at the Atlantic Monthly. They would marry in 1871. The couple returned to the United States and in 1876, their only child, Francis, was born. They would lose him to diphtheria in 1881.
Following their son's death, the couple moved from Cambridge to Connecticut, where they converted to Catholicism. In 1895, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop petitioned the Catholic Church for permission to leave her husband, an alcoholic. The couple separated (but remained married until George Lathrop's death in 1898). A year after their separation, in 1896, Rose Lathrop, 45, enrolled in a course to become a nurse and began working with the then New York Cancer Hospital. Inspired by the work, she founded Sister Rose's Free Home in a Manhattan apartment building to care for impoverished patients. She would join the Dominican Order in 1899 and found the Dominican Order of St. Rose of Lima a year later. She became the order's first Mother Superior, taking the name Mother Mary Alphonsa. The order refused all payments from the patients and their families, existing on donations from supporters.
Today, the order continues Lathrop's work at three locations: Rosary Hill Home in Hawthorne, N.Y.; Sacred Heart Home in Philadelphia and Our Lady of Perpetual Help Home in Atlanta.
- Kate Abbott, Eagle Correspondent
On summer days in 1916, Madame Toussaint Welcome would have seen young men in uniform marching a few blocks south of her brownstone.
The 15th New York National Guard would march out from the Lafayette Theater as their armory, through the theater center of Harlem. They would spend more days in the trenches than any other American unit.
She would memorialize their efforts in "Charge of the Colored Divisions," the only painting accepted by the U.S. government's National War Savings Committee by an African-American artist to be used as a war poster in the War Savings Stamp and Liberty Loan drives. Nearly 100,000 full-color posters of her painting, featuring a soldier with the 15th's insignia on his canteen, were distributed across the country.
And she became one of the first black woman filmmakers in the country and took a stand to defend them.
She was born in Lenox, in 1885 as Jane Louise Van Der Zee. Her brother James, a year younger, would become known as one of the central photographers of the Harlem Renaissance. A record of her life exists mainly in the background of his, and yet she was an artist and musician in her own right — his biographers often say she was as talented, or more.
She and her husband, Ernest Toussaint Welcome, ran the Toussaint Conservatory of Art in Harlem and Queens for more than 40 years, and they joined the growing silent film industry as filmmakers with the Toussaint Motion Picture Exchange.
The Van Der Zees — she was the oldest of six children — grew up in Lenox, where their aunts ran a bakery, and their grandparents lived next door, writes Rodger Birt in "A Live in American Photography," a study of James Van Der Zee's work.
They were a warm and musical family — everyone played an instrument and sang. And they would paint and draw together on winter nights, writes Jim Haskins in "Picture Takin' Man," a biography of Van Der Zee based in long conversations with him.
Jennie studied at the Kellogg School of Art in Pittsfield, and by 1908 she had married Ernest Toussaint Welcome; her family members were heading to New York to find work, and she and her husband moved to Harlem and opened the Toussaint Conservatory.
Jennie painted and drew, and she and her school taught oil painting and watercolor, piano and violin, bass and reeds — she and her husband took out a full-page ad in the NAACP's journal, The Crisis, as early as 1910.
"He was a good promoter," Van Der Zee says in "Picture Takin' Man." "Anything he set his mind to, he was successful at it. He had the finest singing voice I ever did hear. He should have sung professionally."
Ernest, like Jennie, was an entrepreneur and an artist. They would run many businesses together — a magazine, a realty company, a photography studio.
By 1918, the Toussaint Welcomes had branched into film. The young film industry was taking root in New York City, writes Paula J. Massood in "Making a Promised Land: Harlem in Twentieth-Century Photography and Film." Between 1918 and 1925, she says, there were at least eight black-owned-and-operated film production companies in Harlem.
This was the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance.
Black filmmakers were rising too, Massood wrote. Black audiences and film critics, theater owners and managers were protesting against demeaning characters and stereotypes in many American films; they wanted films to tell the real stories of the lives they led and could hope to lead.
The Toussaint Welcomes were making newsreels, Massood wrote, like most of the filmmakers in Harlem then.
On June 8, 1918, the Toussaint studio announced in the Chicago Defender a film on African-American soldiers overseas: "Twelve stirling [sic] chapters of two full reels each," Margaret Olin wrote in "Touching Photographs."
It was a story Madame Toussaint Welcome worked passionately to tell. The Toussaint Pictorial Company published one million post cards of black soldiers, according to The Defender, and one of the only examples of her work on record is her World War I poster.
She continued to paint and draw and to run her school through the Depression and World War II. She continued to run both the conservatory and his real estate business following the death of her husband.
"She always had the house and yard full of children," Van Der Zee said in "Picture Takin' Man." "She'd teach them painting and drawing and music and wouldn't charge any fee; she was just interested in their learning."
Her brother closed the school after she died from cancer in 1956.
On a train ride from Albuquerque to New York City, in August 1945, a Russian spy averted detection by handing the stolen plans she had wrapped in a newspaper to a military officer for safekeeping while she fumbled with her luggage and purse.
When the search of her luggage was over, the officer, never the wiser, handed the newspaper and stolen plans back to her. Had he stopped to check the papers, he would have discovered that he was holding the Manhattan Project's plans for the atomic bomb.
The spy, Lona Cohen, continued on to New York and delivered the documents to her handlers. Known by the code name "Leslie," she was one-half of "Dachniki" ("Vacationers" in Russian). Her husband, Morris Cohen, code name "Luis," was her partner. The couple, also known as Helen and Peter Kroger, would later be arrested in England, where posing as antiquarian booksellers they worked as radio operators for a KGB spy ring in the London suburb of Ruislip.
But long before her days as a spy or even as a member of the Communist Party, Lona Cohen lived in Adams, where she attended Renfrew Elementary School and later, St. Stanislaus Kostka School, according to the October 1983 Adams Historical Society Newsletter. Born Leontina "Lona" Petka, on Jan. 11, 1913, she was one of six daughters of Wladyslaw and Mary Petka, Polish immigrants who met and married in Adams. The family lived on Bellevue Avenue for a time, before purchasing a tenement on Albert Street.
"They were a typical Polish family," Eugene Michalenko, historical society president, told The Eagle in a 2005 interview. He noted that unlike Susan B. Anthony, who was also born in town, Cohen wasn't remembered by townsfolk in the same way, if at all.
"As intriguing as all this is, she still betrayed her country," he said.
The family moved to Connecticut in 1923, eventually settling in Norwich. According to numerous reports, Lona ran away in 1928. Little is known about her whereabouts during that time, but she later appears in the 1940 U.S. Census working as a "baby nurse," for Joseph and Ethel Weinstein on West End Avenue in New York City. She tells the census worker that she works 60 hours a week and that her highest level of education was the eighth grade.
Petka is believed to have joined the Communist Party around 1935, just prior to meeting Morris Cohen in 1938. The couple married in Norwich on July 13, 1941. When Morris Cohen was drafted during World War II, Lona took up his courier work. In 1951, when friends and fellow spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were arrested by the FBI, the Soviets helped the Cohens make their way to Mexico. The couple disappeared, but according to the book, "The Sword and the Shield," they were in Russia undergoing training in coding and decoding. In 1954, they re-emerged in England as a New Zealand couple known as the Krogers.
In 1960, British Intelligence broke the KGB spy ring run by the Krogers (Cohens). British police found a 74-foot antenna with a transmitter capable of reaching Moscow in the attic of the Kroger's house. The couple was arrested and tried. They were sentenced to 20 years in prison. In 1969, the Krogers/Cohens were released to the Soviet Union in exchange for Gerald Brook, a British school teacher held by the Soviet Union for smuggling anti-Soviet literature into the country. The Cohens were awarded the Order of the Red Star upon their arrival in Russia and began teaching at the KGB training academy.
Lona Cohen died of cancer in 1992. Morris Cohen followed his wife in 1995. In 2005, former Eagle reporter Christopher Marcisz reported the couple was buried in Moscow, where their black marble tombstone bears their etched likenesses along with a ribbon marking them as "Heroes of the Russian Federation."
- Benjamin Cassidy, The Berkshire Eagle
Edith Wharton may be the Berkshires' most famous female novelist, but she is not the county's most pioneering one.
That distinction belongs to Stockbridge native Catharine Maria Sedgwick, whose 19th century writings were among the earliest contributions to the U.S. literary canon that developed after the American Revolution. The preface to Sedgwick's anonymously published debut novel, "A New-England Tale," indicates just how few peers she had when the book was released in 1822.
"The writer of this tale has made a humble effort to add something to the scanty stock of native American literature," it begins.
She more than accomplished that modest goal, composing a novel that captured Berkshire life and foreshadowed, through orphan Jane Elton's striving, the vital role that women would play in the nascent nation's growth. Over the course of her life, she published five more novels, including "Hope Leslie." Her most well-known work was set in the 17th century and is regarded as forward-thinking for its time due to its positive treatment of Native Americans. Heroines also featured prominently in her work, which included two biographies, countless short stories and novellas.
"Miss Sedgwick is not only one of our most celebrated and most meritorious writers, but attained reputation at a period when American reputation in letters was regarded as a phenomenon," Edgar Allan Poe once wrote, naming Washington Irving and her friend, William Cullen Bryant, among her contemporaries.
Sedgwick was born Dec. 28, 1789, into one of the Berkshires' most historic clans. Her parents were Pamela Dwight and Theodore Sedgwick, the latter a judge, lawyer and politician. Though arranged marriages were common at the time, Sedgwick rejected many suitors' offers, choosing to remain single until her death in West Roxbury, in 1867.
"Marriage is not essential to the contentment, the dignity, or the happiness of woman," Sedgwick wrote in "Hope Leslie."
These days, Sedgwick's name has been in the news not only for an early brand of feminism but also because of her connection to Elizabeth "Mum Bett" Freeman. With Sedgwick's father representing her, Freeman became the first enslaved African-American to win a Massachusetts freedom suit in 1781. Afterward, she took a domestic service job with the Sedgwicks at their Stockbridge mansion. Catharine grew close to Freeman and, in 1853, published the former slave's life story under the title "Slavery in New England" in Bentley's Miscellany.
Today, Sedgwick is buried next to Freeman in the "Sedgwick Pie," the family's famous concentric circle burial plot within the the Stockbridge Cemetery.
- Benjamin Cassidy, The Berkshire Eagle
"Scorn, derision, insult, menace — the handcuff, the lash — the tearing away of children from parents, of husbands from wives — the weary trudging in droves along the common highways, the labour of body, the despair of mind, the sickness of heart — these are the realities which belong to the system, and form the rule, rather than the exception, in the slave's experience."
Before author, actress and abolitionist Frances Anne "Fanny" Kemble lived at her Lenox estate, "The Perch," she resided on a Georgia plantation with her husband, Pierce Butler. In "Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839" (1863), Kemble provides a firsthand account of slavery's atrocities during a four-month span on St. Simon's and Butler islands. The work emerged from letters she wrote to Elizabeth Sedgwick during that time and offered vivid, awful details that garnered lots of attention from abolitionists in the North.
Kemble would move in that direction after leaving Butler. When they married in 1834, she didn't know he was set to become one of the country's largest slaveholders. Born in London in 1809 to a famous acting family, Kemble had come to the U.S. in 1832 for a theatrical tour. Butler attended some of her acclaimed performances, wooing her in the process. But when Butler inherited his grandfather's slaves, Kemble soon became painfully aware of her husband's moral lacking. She eventually left him, though it wasn't until 1848 that Butler, not Kemble, filed for divorce. Kemble lost her parental rights in the case.
"Mrs. Butler was an abolitionist and her husband wished her to keep her tongue and pen still on the subject, his income being derived from slave property in Georgia. The lady persisted in the utterance of her sentiments and it was the cause of domestic infelicity," The Pittsfield Sun wrote at the time, according to past Eagle reporting.
The next year, Kemble settled in Lenox at "The Perch," which she called her "safe haven," across from what is now Canyon Ranch. Her dramatic readings of Shakespeare drew considerable praise in the Berkshires. But she also kept writing, penning poems, plays, memoirs and a novel, "Long Ago and Far Away," while hanging at "The Hive" with Catharine Sedgwick and other literary luminaries.
Today, Kemble Street in Lenox pays homage to Fanny.
- Meggie Baker, The Berkshire Eagle
If Phyllis Birkby had listened to her high school career counselor, she might have had a different path.
"Well, Miss Birkby, it appears that if you were a man, you should be studying architecture," she was told, according to documents in Smith College's collection of her materials. As a 16-year-old in 1949, she "swallowed the implication that there just weren't any women architects."
Birkby — born Noel Phyllis Birkby on Dec. 16, 1932, in Nutley, N.J. — showed an interest in architecture early on, but didn't fully pursue her passion until she went on to earn a Masters of Architecture from Yale University. At Yale, Birkby was one of only six women in the department — to a student body of 200 men. Despite struggling to "rise above the female role" and having to prove her capabilities, she graduated from Yale in 1966.
Birkby was a founding member of the Alliance for Women in Architecture in 1972. After coming out as a lesbian in 1973, Birkby began her own practice. An involved activist, she was also a filmmaker, documenting the women's movement and lesbian culture of the 1970s. Looking at the field of architecture through the lens of feminism and activism, Birkby criticized the architecture of the patriarchy — a tradition of creating spaces by and largely for men. In response, Birkby led a series of fantasy workshops for women, asking participants to imagine their ideal environment.
In 1973, she edited and published the book, "Amazon Expedition: A Lesbian Feminist Anthology," for which she would win much critical acclaim.
"Before the 1970s, lesbians could publish their writing in nonspecific collective volumes, but not until 1973, with the publication of 'Amazon Expedition: A Lesbian Feminist Anthology,' edited by Phyllis Birkby, was the lesbian anthology in its own right born," wrote George Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman, editors of "Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures."
Evolving out of a series of Women in Architecture conferences around the country, in 1974, Birkby, with Katrin Adam, Ellen Perry Berkeley, Bobbie Sue Hood, Marie Kennedy, Joan Forrester Sprague and Leslie Kanes Weisman, founded the Women's School of Planning and Architecture. WSPA was a series of five sessions held from 1975 to 1981 for women of all backgrounds interested in architecture. Held around the country, participants met to collaborate on ideas on how to design spaces that were inclusive to women.
Following the swell of the women's movement in the 1970s, things were quieter for Birkby in the 1980s; she predominately taught and designed on commission. In 1992, Birkby was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died at her summer home in Great Barrington in 1994 at age 61.
Birkby's writings and her films, documenting the women's and gay rights movements and lesbian culture in New York City during the 1970s, were donated to the Sophia Smith Collection of Women's History at Smith College.
"I have not by any means been a linear oriented professional person," said Birkby, according to documents in Smith College's collection.
- Katherine Abbott, Eagle Correspondent.
At the foot of Mount Greylock, a round building with a wall of windows looks out at the the stone path of a labyrinth in the grass. The center of the room is a sanctuary, and a woman stands taking in the light.
She moves with poised self-command and an undercurrent of laughter. Walking in, a neighbor might hear her singing a prayer to a folk melody on her guitar, or sharing and reflecting a friend's quiet triumph, or talking frankly about navigating a time of pain.
On a Saturday morning, she will welcome in the community, wearing a rainbow tallit, a prayer shawl. Rachel Barenblat is the rabbi and spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Israel, the only synagogue in Northern Berkshire.
Around the walls hang messages of support written on paper in colored marker. Last fall, in the wake of the violence at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, people in North Adams reached out to CBI; the congregation coming to Shabbat prayer found loving graffiti — Your community stands with you. Sending you peace. We've got your back.
For Barenblat, being a rabbi means leading a community within a larger world and reaching out to both. It means standing with the people she serves in high times and hard times — comforting illness, celebrating a coming of age, washing a body and preparing it gently for burial.
It means finding beauty and meaning, day to day. In a recent poem, posted on her blog, she listens to her son singing as she bakes challah for her mother on the last Sabbath they will ever welcome in together. And, as it did then, her work means weaving tradition and contemporary life and keeping them in relationship, direct and real.
"It's one of my moments of greatest joy," she said at Tunnel City on the first day of spring, "when someone comes up after a high holiday or a b'nai or bat mitzvah and said, `I didn't know Judaism could be like that — I didn't know I could feel it like that.' Those are the days I know I'm really doing my job."
She has served here as rabbi for eight years, and as a rabbinical student for five years before that. And in that time her influence has grown across the country and beyond.
Born in San Antonio, Texas, Barenblat has lived in the Berkshires for more than 20 years, since her days as a undergraduate at Williams College. She has since earned her MFA from Bennington College, and as a writer she has published five books of poetry.
She has also earned an international readership for her blog as the Velveteen Rabbi, which she began writing in 2003. In April 2008, Time Magazine named hers as one of their top 25 blogs, and in 2016 the Forward named her as one of America's Most Inspiring Rabbis.
And in 2018, she took the lead in an adventure with a group of rabbis, scholars and writers from coast to coast.
With her fellow rabbi and Williams alum David Markus, she has created Bayit: Your Jewish Home (yourbayit.org) — an online community that provides "tools" to build a contemporary Jewish life.
In the last year, Barenblat has been writing and editing the recently released book, "Beside Still Waters: A Journey of Comfort and Renewal," a companion for mourners. As a freelancer for more than 20 years, she brought together some 40 writers for the book, published in March by Bayit through a partnership with Ben Yehuda Press.
This book, she said, wanted to exist for 14 years and readers have welcomed it eagerly — as of the first week of spring it is the No. 1 new release in Jewish life on Amazon.
And, she said, it was released just as she came to need it. She lost her mother a month ago.
"In my own days of mourning," she said, "I was amazed at how resonant it was and how new it felt for me. Encountering it in my own time was entirely different."
In that time, she listened to a friend reading aloud her own poem, an evening prayer for the first days after a deep loss — soothe my fear of life without enough light — surrounded by the voices in her new work, and candle flame, and her own windows looking toward the hills at dawn.
Note: Rachel Barenblat has been this writer's editor and teacher and friend for almost 20 years.
- Jennifer Huberdeau, The Berkshire Eagle
When the first-ever U.S. Olympic Trials for Women's Boxing were held in February 2012, the woman who paved the way for the historic event was ringside.
Local boxer Gail Grandchamp won the right for women to box as amateurs in 1992.
"I've been fighting for this for 18 years," Grandchamp said in a 2012 interview with the North Adams Transcript. "I fought for eight years for women to have the right to box as amateurs and then I fought 10 more years to get women to the Olympics ... We're making women's boxing history — boxing history."
Grandchamp's battle for the right to be licensed as an amateur boxer began in 1984, when she was part of a team from North Adams State College selected to participate in the state's Golden Gloves competition. She was the only member of the team whose application was denied, specifically because she was female. She sued on the basis of sexual discrimination.
In 1992, a Berkshire Superior Court judge ruled that a by-law of the New England Amateur Boxing Federation and its parent organization, U.S. Boxing, prohibiting women from being licensed, was illegal under sexual discrimination laws.
The victory, which opened amateur boxing to women, came too late for Grandchamp. She was now too old to register as an amateur boxer.
"Because it took so long in court and because of my age, if I wanted to have my own career, I had to turn pro," she said. "I had to fight for that too. I became the first licensed professional female boxer in Massachusetts and won the first female professional boxing match in the state."
In her professional boxing debut, in July 1987, Grandchamp won a split decision against Linda Casey in a match sanctioned by the state Boxing Association at the then Mohawk Performing Arts Center. According to boxrec.com, Grandchamp's record is 1-6, with her last professional bout taking place in 1998.
Grandchamp, a professional trainer, campaigned to make women's boxing an official Olympic sport throughout her professional boxing career and after. She co-authored a memoir, "Gail Grandchamp: A Fighter with Heart Pursues an Olympic Dream" in 2006.
But it wasn't until 2012 that Grandchamp began to receive national recognition for her legal victory. Until then, her boxing legacy was overshadowed by that of Dallas Malloy, who grabbed national attention in 1993, at the age of 16, when she sued U.S. Boxing in federal court for sexual discrimination. Malloy's case never went to trial. In May 1993, a U.S. District Court judge in Washington filed an injunction that allowed Malloy's amateur license to be approved. At the time, U.S. Boxing, which had invited Grandchamp to its convention in late 1992, had already begun drafting rules for women's boxing. Malloy fought and won her only amateur bout in October 1993, before retiring from the sport in early 1994.
- Jennifer Huberdeau, The Berkshire Eagle
Anna Helen (Crofts) McCuen lived a secret literary life.
It was so secret, that her achievements, including co-authoring a short story with the master of horror fiction, H.P. Lovecraft, went untold until decades after her death.
All mention of her literary endeavors are non-existent in her 1975 obituary, which mentions her 22-year career as a teacher at Sarah T. Haskins School in North Adams, from 1920 until her resignation in 1942, as well as her education. Mostly, it mentions that she is a direct descendant of Thomas Meagher, designer of the Irish flag and once acting governor of Montana.
The same omission is true of her profile in the 1919 North Adams Normalogue, the yearbook of the North Adams Normal School (now Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts). There, a paragraph besides her photograph includes: "She must have some magnetic power, for all who come to know her, love her. She is ever ready to help the poor and weak with their lessons. She seems to know everything about every subject. Lesson plans? Why, they don't bother her! She could write a dozen while one of the rest of us could write none."
The only mention of her writing, other than that of writing lesson plans, was a 1932 North Adams Transcript article about her essay, "Guidance versus knights in the road," being published by the nationally circulated Guidance Vocational Magazine.
But, McCuen, as Anna Helen Crofts, had dipped her toes into the literary waters. In 1920, she co-wrote the essay, "Poetry and the Gods," with Henry Paget-Lowe. Published in the September edition of The United Amateur, the official publication of the United Amateur Press Association, the story may have gone unnoticed. However, the publication's editor was H.P. Lovecraft and Henry Paget-Lowe was one of several pseudonyms he used. (His real name was used several months later when the pair won an award for the piece.) Both McCuen and Lovecraft were board members of the United Amateur Press Association.
Lovecraft, a master of the horror genre, was editor and publisher of several publications. He had published Crofts' work twice before in The Tryout, a literary magazine out of Haverhill. Her short story, "Le Silent," was published in 1918, and an article, "War Literature," followed in 1919. A publication, The Vagrant, not affiliated with Lovecraft, published one of her poems, "To Autumn," in 1918.
It's not clear why she kept her writing secret. But, what is known is that McCuen's foray into fiction coincides with the start of her teaching position in North Adams. She taught first and second grade, as well as elementary sewing and canning classes, until she resigned at the age of 52. She married Joseph McCuen in 1945 and settled in to married life until she was widowed in 1963. From that time on, she was known as Anna Crofts McCuen and spent most her time traveling to exotic locations. Upon her death in 1975, at the age of 85, she left behind a fortune of $500,000, in addition to $57,000 in property. She also left a trust of $5,000 to care for her French bulldog, Mr. Grinch.
Nearly a century after McCuen penned "Poetry and The Gods" with Lovecraft, fans and scholars are still debating her contributions to the work and at one point, whether or not Anna Helen Crofts even existed, arguing the name was a pseudonym for another writer, not an actual woman.
McCuen may have left a posthumous answer for those who doubt her existence. The answer is as simple as the name on her gravestone: Anna H. Crofts.
- Margaret Button, The Berkshire Eagle
Dr. Seraph Frissell dared to go where few women did in her day - not only did she earn a college degree, but she went on to become a physician, specializing in diseases of women and children, and was a prolific medical writer. She was the first woman in western Massachusetts to be admitted to any district medical society, when she was admitted to the Hampden Medical Society in 1885. She was the fourth woman to be admitted a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society.
Born in the town of Peru on Aug. 20, 1840, Frissell was the third child of six of Augustus Caesar and Laura Mack (Emmons) Frissell. According to the book, "A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-Seventy Biographical Sketched accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life," Frissell's father died when she was 11, and she went to live with an aunt in western New York, "during which time she decided she would rather earn her own living, if possible, rather than be dependent on relatives." She returned to Peru and, for the next 18 months, spent her time in school and helping a neighbor, which allowed her to earn some money for clothing.
When she was 15, her oldest sister began working in a woolen mill, and Frissell soon joined her, dividing her time between school and the mill for six years. She saved enough money to continue her education and, in 1861, entered Mount Holyoke Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College), where she remained for a year. She taught for a year, returning to the seminary for another year of studies. After four more years of teaching, she resumed her studies in the fall of 1861 and received her diploma from the seminar in July 1869.
Frissell spent the next three years teaching, and thinking about studying medicine. She entered the University of Michigan in 1872 and received her medical diploma from its Department of Medicine and Surgery on March 24, 1875.
Frissell opened her practice in September 1876 in Pittsfield, where for eight years she did pioneer work as a woman physician. In 1884, she moved her practice to Springfield.
In 1896, Frissell took a course in electrotherapeutics, and was the medical examiner for the Berkshire Life Insurance Co. From 1890 to 1891, she was resident physician and lecturer on physiology and hygiene at Mount Holyoke College.
Frissell was the author of several papers. She presented before the American Medical Association a paper on the treatment of diphtheria without alcohol, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Nov. 13, 1897. She also wrote papers on "Tobacco," "Contents of a Teapot," "Why I'm a Temperance Doctor," "Hygiene: Why it should be taught in our Public Schools," "Prevention better than Cure," "Colonial Flags and the Evolution of the Stars and Stripes," also "Pioneer Women in Medicine."
A member of the temperance movement, Frissell, according to the authors of "A Woman of the Century," attributed part of her personal success as a physician "to not prescribing alcohol stimulants." She was the first president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in Springfield
She died in 1915, and was buried in the Peru Center Cemetery.
- Lindsey Hollenbaugh, The Berkshire Eagle
Gertrude Robinson Smith was a woman who knew how to get things done.
In the 1920s, she and a friend took it upon themselves (literally, took it upon themselves, like hoisting beams) to build her own home on her family's Stockbridge property. Later in life, Gertrude — in a less direct way, but no less arduous — would build Tanglewood.
Gertrude Robinson Smith was born in 1881 to a wealthy New York family. Her father was a corporate lawyer and her mother had been largely raised in Paris. Gertrude split her childhood between New York and Paris. When World War I broke out, the family purchased a property in the Glendale section of Stockbridge.
The summer resident would later help found the Berkshire Symphonic Festival, Inc., in 1934. The festival would go on to involve The Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1936 and later take up residency at the Tanglewood estate.
The festival was originally conductor and composer Henry Hadley's dream. But when he wanted to see if it could become reality, he went to visit Robinson Smith.
"She was raised in the old tradition that the strongest virtue of the well to do was civic mindedness," says The New York Times in Robinson Smith's obituary, which ran Oct. 23, 1963, one day after her death. She was 82.
Robinson Smith had a long history of getting things done. She was the president of the Vacation Savings Stamp Fund, an organization which dedicated itself to providing vacations for working girls in Manhattan. During World War I she and her friend author Edith Wharton organized medical supplies for France, raising $70,000 for surgical motor units. She didn't just do good from afar. She traveled to France in a blacked-out ship and flew over the front lines, according to Lenox History, the Lenox Historical Society's website. She was later made a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor for her efforts.
So when Hadley approached her with an idea for an outdoor music festival in the Berkshires, Robinson Smith, a woman of experience and determination with connections, knew what to do.
She, along with 63 other men and women living within 40 miles of Stockbridge formed the Berkshire Symphonic Festival, Inc. They elected her as its president, a post she held until the group dissolved in 1955.
"I am sure you will agree with me that there are few things artistically more enchanting than listening to a beautiful symphony orchestra on a summer evening outdoors under the stars," she said, according to The New York Times.
Two months after the festival was formed, its first set of three concerts was held on a farm just west of Mahkeenac Lake — 5,000 people attended over the three nights. But Tanglewood wouldn't be Tanglewood as we know it today, without Robinson Smith's excellent negotiating skills.
According to The New York Times, talks with Serge Koussevitzky to bring the Boston Symphony Orchestra to the newly formed festival were beginning to stall, that is until Robinson Smith met with him. What was supposed to be a 15-minute appointment between the symphony's conductor and the woman charged with getting the job done turned into a two-hour meeting that resulted in a marriage between music and nature that lives on to this day.
A search for a permanent home for the festival began soon after and ended when Gorham Brooks and Mary Aspinwall Tappan offered up their Tanglewood estate in Lenox. But it wasn't until after a downpour one August evening, that Robinson Smith was able to give her most lasting plea for the case of Tanglewood. During the first concert on the propriety, held under a large tent, a storm rolled through with a downpour that ended up seeping through the tent to the dismay of audience members and players. Robinson Smith famously made her way to the stage and announced that the storm had demonstrated their need for a more permanent shed — something Koussevitzky had requested early on to protect his orchestra from the elements and enhance the acoustics. She boldly stated "we must raise $100,000 to build it," according to The New York Times.
She raised $80,000 in time to build the shed — now known as The Koussevitzky Shed — in time for the 1938 season.
- Margaret Button, The Berkshire Eagle
Genevieve L. Hutchinson claimed to have only walked a small portion of the Appalachian Trail, herself, picking wild flowers once on Bald Mountain. But the Washington resident was a legend in her own time for being what is now known as a "trail angel," hosting thousands of AT hikers in her home on Main Street, across from the former Town Hall.
She began hosting hikers in 1921 and continued for 53 years, until her death in February 1974.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Aug. 10, 1883, she graduated from Hartford Public High School in Hartford, Conn., in 1900 and graduated as a deaconess of the Methodist Church from the Lucy Webb Hayes Training School, Washington, D.C. in 1904. She married Frederick W. Hutchinson June 28, 1905, and they subsequently moved to the town of Washington. A poet, she published several volumes, including "Memory and other Poems" (1947) and "Substance" (1953).
Appalachian Trail guidebooks often directed hikers to Hutchinson's home from a lean-to about a half-mile away. Ronald Fisher, a noted writer for National Geographic who hiked the AT and later recounted his adventure in his book, "The Appalachian Trail, " devotes a section to Hutchinson, calling her "one of the state's most gracious citizens." He adds her home "is half a mile from a lean-to in the October Mountain State Forest. She is mentioned in the trail guidebook: 'Brook in rear of lean-to unsafe for drinking; obtain spring water from Mrs. Hutchinson's home 0.67 m. north.'"
Upon arriving at her two-story frame home, Fisher was welcomed with "no-nonsense cordiality" and brought to a cozy living room with lace curtains, a fire crackling in the pot-bellied stove and walls displaying Hutchinson's watercolors of wild flowers. After being served cookies and coffee, she showed Fisher a scrapbook and register she had been keeping since 1938. In the register, thru hikers were marked with a red star; the scrapbook held postcards, letters and clippings from hikers she had met, and photographs, many of them of her with pack-laden hikers. Fisher persuaded her to read from her memoir, "Home on the Trail," which was not for publication, as she put it, but "for my family, so they'll know what it has meant to me to live here on the Trail."
Ben Montgomery, in his "Grandma Gatewood's Walk," also mentions Hutchinson. Emma Gatewood, another legend on the AT, was in her mid-60s when she began her hike in 1955. No women — and only five men — had ever hiked it continuously. She encountered Hutchinson as a hurricane bore down on the Northeast. "The rain clouds parted momentarily the next morning and Emma hiked into Washington, Massachusetts, where Mrs. Fred Hutchinson started to fill her canteen, thinking she was a berry picker, until Emma spoke up and got herself invited to dinner, then to a nap on the couch, then to the obligatory newspaper interview, then to a night in a bed."
Gatewood thru-hiked the A.T. a second time in 1957 and a third in 1964.
"It will not last forever," Hutchinson told Fisher, gazing at her house as he continued his journey on the AT. "Any more than I will. Or you. Or anyone else."
But her legend and her home live on. A blogger and trail angel, Carol Lew of Washington wrote in February 2016 about hosting the well-known hiker, The Real Hiking Viking, in her home — the very house that Hutchinson had welcomed so many hikers so many years before.
- Jenn Smith, The Berkshire Eagle
Florence Bascom was highly encouraged to attend college in an era when it wasn't common.
She would become a trailblazing geologist, who, in 1893, was the first woman to earn a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University and, in 1896, became the first woman employed by the United States Geological Survey.
Born in Williamstown on July 14, 1862, she was the daughter of John Bascom, a professor at Williams College and a Greylock Reservation Commission (Bascom Lodge is named for him), and Emma Curtiss Bascom, a women's rights suffragist, educator and activist.
During her time at Johns Hopkins, where she did her thesis on the origin and formation of the Appalachian Mountain range, "she was required to sit behind a screen, lest she disturb the men," according to an article on the university's website.
Nevertheless, she persisted in her field, going on to serve as associate editor of "American Geologist" magazine, teaching at Vassar and Smith colleges, and in 1895, founding the geology department at Bryn Mawr College where she taught for more than three decades. Her most notable work is published on the geological profile of the Mid-Atlantic region.
In addition to distinctions like being named among the top 100 geologists in the U.S. in the 1906 edition of "American Men of Science," a crater, an asteroid and a post-glacial lake have all been named in her honor.
The comedy of trivial day-to-day events — a lost set of keys, a misplaced letter or the wrong caption under a newspaper photograph — were not invented by the creators of Seinfeld.
Decades earlier, they were the foundation of "Ethel and Albert," a radio show and later a television sitcom from Peg Lynch, a Becket resident, who was the creator, writer and star of one of television's first sitcoms.
Lynch, who was dubbed "the lady who invented sitcom" by BBC Radio's Dick Vosburgh, wrote more than 11,000 radio and television scripts over the course of her seven-decade career. She first penned the husband-and-wife sitcom in 1938 as a three-minute radio dialogue.
"I wrote about what I knew. I wrote about real life," Lynch told The Berkshire Eagle in a 2014 interview. "I knew from a young age that I wanted to be a writer. When I was 10, I won a newspaper contest. You had to write about 'What Thanksgiving means to me.' I didn't write about anything prolific; just turkey and gravy. I was probably the only one who entered. I don't remember getting a prize either. I think getting published was it."
Lynch died in July 2015. She was 98.
"Ethel and Albert," which she created while working at Albert Lea, Minn., traveled with her, first to Charlottesville, Va., then to Maryland. It debuted as a 15-minute five-days-a-week evening sitcom in 1940 in Cumberland, Md., and finally to New York in 1944, where within a few months it had its own 15-minute five-days-a-week evening slot on ABC national radio. In 1950, it would transition to television, airing first as a 10-minute segment on "The Kate Smith Hour," before earning its own 30-minute time slot on NBC in 1952.
The show, which she owned the rights to, would later air on CBS and then ABC, before transitioning back to radio in 1957, as "The Couple Next Door." In 1963, it would be revived as part of National Public Radio's "Earplay," and be reborn in 1975 as "The Little Things in Life," for Radio Playhouse.
Born Margaret Frances Lynch on Nov. 25, 1916, in Lincoln, Neb., she married Odd Knut Ronning in 1948. Her husband died in June 2014. They resided in Becket for more than 40 years.
Lynch's sitcom legacy is kept alive through the website, peglynch.com and the Facebook page, A Funny Woman - Peg Lynch, which her daughter, Astrid Ronning King, uses not only to record her mother's career highlights, but also the more intimate stories involving family and friends.
Among those stories are tales that include Margaret Hamilton, best known for her role as the Wicked Witch of the West, whom was Lynch's best friend for 40 years and also appeared as "Aunt Eva" on "Ethel and Albert." Other stories include her brushes with celebrities, such as the time the Andrews Sisters stopped singing to help her search for her earring or the time she sat next to Charles Lindbergh on the train.
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Every March, Mayor Jennifer Macksey plans to induct women "who have contributed to the growth of women's rights, have had positive impacts on the community, and overall are examples of strength wisdom, and courage."