Like the sun on a cold November day, Cindy Pollard’s warmth was sustaining.

Her Main Street thrift shop and later the Altamont café she owned with her husband, Jack, were places the community could gather. Everyone was welcome.

The Home Front Café was a place where painful memories could be safely shared.

It was also a place of celebration and learning, offering food for thought and sustenance for the soul as well as food to eat.

Cindy Pollard died this week at the age of 89.

I met Cindy as my children conducted treasure hunts in her jam-packed consignment shop. My younger daughter sought gowns we could make into princess costumes. My elder daughter was drawn to romance novels.

Cindy called me once with concern that perhaps my 11-year-old wasn’t mature enough for the racy paperback she’d selected. 

Cindy cared about everyone’s welfare and would quietly see that needs were met with goods from her shop. When I was facing cancer surgery, Cindy gave me a little bag to take with me to the hospital — with a compact, comb, and lipstick.

Although I don’t usually wear makeup, my lips were painted a defiant scarlet as I was wheeled into surgery still feeling the warmth of Cindy’s hug.

Cindy is probably best known for her Home Front Café, which functioned as the village’s living room.

Memories need a place to reside. And Cindy’s restaurant provided that.

She hosted an “I remember Altamont” event where old-timers shared their memories with newcomers.

How many villagers know that New York’s governor came to Altamont three-quarters of a century ago to congratulate volunteer firemen for averting a water disaster?

Cindy told the story of how, in the 1950s, Altamont was in a crisis for lack of water. “Firemen came to the rescue. They laid hose from Thompsons Lake to the reservoir and manned it 24 hours a day for a month. The ladies’ auxiliary cooked meals to keep the men going,” she said.

Cindy at the time was dating a volunteer fireman who would become her husband. “I never saw him for a month,” she said. “Averill Harriman came out to commend them on their work.”

Old firemen told their stories at the gathering and so did old graduates of the long-gone Altamont High School. Ev Rau told of farming on Settle’s Hill, Porter Bidleman shared memories of Altamont’s funeral home, and Fred Crounse spoke of Helen Becker who ran a shoe-repair shop and candy store on Maple Avenue.

“Her father was Minton Becker, a harness and shoemaker,” said Cindy. “All the kids used to love to go to her store. She was a poor person. She didn’t dress well. She didn’t have much, but she loved what she was doing. She sold penny candy and all the kids loved her.”

It wasn’t just because of the candy, Cindy said; it was because Helen never rushed them and never made light of their purchases.

Cindy herself never made light of others and took the time to understand people on their own terms.

She welcomed café visitors as a host would to her home. She modeled the café on her mother’s kitchen — complete with a mid-century stove and 1940s patterned tablecloths. The Andrews Sisters crooned “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” in the background as diners decided between The Victory Garden veggie burger and The MacArthur grilled chicken.

Cindy grew up in the nearby city of Albany during the war. Her father was a gunner on a B-17 bomber; her mother she describes as “a Rosie the Riveter” who worked long, cold hours at a hard job unloading and loading ships at the Port of Albany.

When she first opened the Home Front Café, Cindy told me in an Enterprise podcast, “Some people felt I was paying tribute to a war and I said, ‘No, it’s not. It’s that we work together. That’s what the homefront was.’”

Working together — that’s what Cindy inspired people to do.

She brought in school kids to talk to World War II veterans. 

“It’s like I’m the keeper of their stories,” she told The Enterprise. “They’re important, each and every one of them.”

Sometimes Cindy’s celebrations became too big for her café, like when she hosted a 100th birthday party for John Finn in 2005, then the oldest living recipient of a Medal of Honor. A thousand people — including two other Medal of Honor recipients — came to honor John Finn at Altamont’s Village Hall.

“They did something heroic and honorable — acts of great courage — because it had to be done,” said Cindy of why she hosted the event.

Her café became a magnet for veterans to meet and share their stories. A father visiting an Altamont daughter hung out there long enough to unloose some of his long pent-up, difficult memories, and was urged to seek counseling; he did, and it helped him.

Cindy recalled another veteran who came to the café with his daughter and told a story to Cindy he had never told before.

“It’s like I’m the keeper of this story,” said Cindy. He told her of how frightened he was to land on Omaha Beach. He turned his face in the sand and saw a man dying next to him. “The man who was dying was someone he went to school with.”

The old veteran wept as he told his story and his daughter said, “You never told me this.”

Cindy went on, “I was able to say how horrible that must be for you but think how comforting it was for the man who left that he knew someone at the very end.”

Cindy seated schoolchildren at tables with the veterans — not podium style, but as if they were talking to their grandparents.

“In all the years I’ve been here and all the classes we’ve had,” Cindy said, “I’ve never had one veteran be a warmonger.”

Cindy encouraged what she called “the blending of veterans,” including soldiers and sailors from different eras to come together to tell their stories.

“I love to involve kids,” she said. “I love to have them touch history.”

She and Joe Burke, who directs Altamont’s library, as part of a summer reading program had veterans of different wars tell their stories to the children

A young man from Altamont who had just come home from Afghanistan where he watched a buddy get wounded lost his composure as he told his story.

“One of the Iwo Jima vets got right up and put his arm on his shoulder to calm him,” said Cindy. “It was an amazing moment for everyone to witness. Here you had two warriors 72 years apart … and they could still feel the compassion for one another.”

Only rarely did Cindy sound weary.

Once, after she’d hosted a gathering of Korean War veterans who had given her an award acknowledging her “outstanding and long-time dedication to preserving the military history of wars fought in our lifetime,” Cindy said, “That made me think of all the wars fought in our lifetime.”

She spoke then of Francis Currey, one of the World War II recipients of the Medal of Honor whom she’d befriended, “When he came home from the war, five years later, we were back in Korea, then Vietnam, then the Gulf Wars, and now Iraq and Afghanistan. We keep wondering, will they ever end? The only time there will be peace on Earth is when mankind is gone.”

She heaved a heavy sigh.

But she continued with her work.

When Cindy set out to raise funds for the World War II monument in Washington, D.C., she was put off by the size of contributions expected. She reminded organizers in D.C. that “the base of the Statue of Liberty was built because of pennies that schoolchildren sent in.”

Cindy put a coin collection jar next to the café’s register and at cash registers in businesses throughout the village. She hosted a forties-style canteen at Village Hall involving countless community groups from the Scouts to the PTA and ended up raising over $17,000 for the monument.

She hosted gatherings of veterans returning from Honor Flights to visit the monument. “It’s very healing,” she said. “They go to the World War II Memorial and they come back and they will say, ‘I really was a part of something big.’”

She also hosted a celebration at her café to honor Guilderland author Joseph Persico, who was a member of the American Battle Monuments Commission — he was nominated to the commission by then Secretary of State Colin Powell — and, as a writer, the members looked to him to come up with the wording to memorialize the veterans of World War II.

He wrote the words inscribed on the monument. Seven of his words, “Here we mark the price of freedom,” are inscribed underneath the monument’s gold stars — 4,000 stars, each one standing for 100 Americans killed in the war.

When veterans gathered to meet him at the Home Front Café, he described the words as “a kind of poetry in granite.” He said they were the most satisfying words he ever wrote.

The veterans also contributed memorabilia to the café. The most famous of the artifacts that was displayed at the café was the Orsini flag.

Millard Orsini — one of seven brothers to serve — left Altamont to fight in World War II. As a prisoner of war, he risked his life to create an American flag out of whatever scraps he could steal from his captors.

Orsini had survived the Bataan Death March and became a Japanese prisoner of war, a slave laborer for 39 months.

“It took him three years to make a flag out of bits and pieces of anything he could steal from his captors,” Cindy told a gathering at her café. “Had he been detected, he would have been executed. The day he was liberated, he ran out with the flag.”

The flag, when she first saw it, Cindy said, “looked like a piece of dried up old oil cloth … You couldn’t touch the flag without it flaking.” It was painstakingly restored and, to protect it from the light, Altamont’s Train Station Quilters fashioned a red, white, and blue cover for the flag.

Helderberg artist John Williams contributed a large painting of a fighter plane, a Bell P-69, to the café. It struck him that the mechanics’ work was essential for the safety of the pilot while, in turn, the pilot put his life on the line to protect the mechanics and their families. “It’s about everybody being dependent on everybody else,” he said of the painting.

That is what Cindy Pollard inspired in the village of Altamont and beyond: a sense of community, a realization of our interdependence, an imperative to work together — the way she experienced the homefront as a girl.

Thank you, Cindy. I hope to keep your light alive.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer, editor