“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”

— Frederick Douglass

“Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.”

— Carl Sagan
 

Daniel Ethan Van Hoesen led a remarkable life. He raised two daughters who adored him, served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War, and worked for 36 years as a caretaker and carpenter at the Albany Institute of History and Art, eventually having his own artwork displayed there.

“As a person he exemplifies a lot of what we do as an institution,” said Christine Miles, director of the institute at the time he retired. “He’s sensitive and pragmatic …. He has a sixth sense about how to move about and care for things. He is extremely sensitive and amazingly creative.”

Mr. Van Hoesen built the exhibition furniture on which artwork was displayed at the institute and also designed and built the crates for artwork that was shipped.

He sculpted as well as drawing and painting. He made a dinosaur out of sand in his backyard to delight his daughters. And one of his sculptures was chosen best in show by the viewing public at the Altamont Fair.

He died on July 11, 2025 at age 83 after being diagnosed less than six months earlier with an aggressive form of cancer.

“He was very artistic, very humble,” his daughter, Victoria Van Hoesen, said this week as she described the additions he built onto the family home — less than a mile from Clarksville — that started as a Windsor trailer, and he also built a “mini life-size dollhouse that we could climb into.”

She said, “Anyone in the community, no matter what they needed, he would help.”

Mr. Van Hoesen was also musical and mastered the guitar although he couldn’t read music. “He would create all these little colored stickers of where to put his fingers for the chords,” said his daughter as he played music and sang.

Mr. Van Hoesen played the guitar as his uncle played the violin and his wife played the drums, entertaining at family picnics that drew crowds of 100 or more.

“He could do all this stuff but I think the education was the thing that always made him feel like he wasn’t as good as others or not as smart as others ….,” his daughter said. “I know my dad had nightmares about not graduating high school and he always felt bad about it.”

Because Mr. Van Hoesen struggled to read, he dropped out of Bethlehem Central High School without graduating. He’ll soon be receiving his high school diploma posthumously.

This came about because Ms. Van Hoesen’s cousin attended the Westerlo Hometown Heroes Closing Ceremony in November where Tom Mullins had a table set up. She put down Ms. Van Hoesen’s name. Mr. Mullins works, as a volunteer, to get veterans the honor he feels they deserve. This can range from high school diplomas to medals.

Mr. Mullins worked with Ms. Van Hoesen through the State Education Department’s program called  Operation Recognition that awards diplomas to veterans who left high school without graduating. He says he was “bowled over” by Mr. Van Hoesen’s life story.

“He was in school before they had special-ed programs …. This guy’s whole life was about overcoming difficulties ….,” Mr. Mullins said. “After he dropped out of school, he worked as a gravedigger, a mason, a carpenter, a paver until he was drafted in 1967.”

Mr. Mullins went on, “I always say, if a story is good, it has legs. This has four legs, this story. To me, this is the ultimate Christmas gift.”

Mr. Van Hoesen, who was a gymnast at school, took all the art courses Bethlehem offered, Mr. Mullins said. In the Army, he was stationed in West Germany with the Army Signal Corps where he was a sketch artist.

Ms. Van Hoesen relayed a story from her father’s service years where an officer told him there was no desk for him:

“And my dad said, ‘If you get the wood, I can build you two desks. One for you and one for me.’ So he was that kind of person.”

Mr. Van Hoesen used to paint pictures for his Army buddies of their girlfriends, his daughter said. “He wasn’t one of the ones to go out and get drunk every weekend,” she said.

He did take a break with his buddies to Switzerland one weekend to ski, which he’d never done before. Ms. Van Hoesen has a picture of her father doing a handstand on moving skis. “He used to do gymnastics in middle school … So he was very good at handstands and was just willing to try anything.”

“After he was discharged,” Mr. Mullins went on, Mr. Van Hoesen got a job as a custodian with the Albany Institute of History and Art.

“One day, while he was doodling on a piece of paper, an artist walked by and noticed and said to him, ‘Did you just draw that?’ He says, ‘Yes, I did.”  Word then spread on his artistic talents.

But Mr. Van Hoesen was not at peace because of his struggles to read. 

When he was in his fifties, his daughter said, “He joined the Literacy Volunteers because he wanted to overcome that stumbling block of not reading well.”

His volunteer tutor was Anne Cooke and the family still has the certificate he was awarded by her in 1999 for “Excellence in Literacy and Language Study.”

“From there, he just wrote all the time,” said his daughter. This included both poems and stories, some of which were printed in the bulletin of his church, the Clarksville Community Church.

Mr. Vanhoesen greatly valued education and inspired his daughters to pursue higher learning. “He always looked proud,” his daughter said, when he would help his girls set up at college.

Each of the Van Hoesen daughters have two master’s degrees. Christina Van Hoesen, whose undergraduate degree was in electrical engineering, has master’s degrees in computer science and library science. Victoria Van Hoesen has master’s degrees in economics and mental-health counseling.

Mr. Mullins hopes that people reading Mr. Van Hoesen’s story will be inspired to act.

“Maybe a person that’s out there who never learned how to read,” he said, “maybe they’ll go and look up Literacy Volunteers.”

Literacy Volunteers now goes by the name Literacy New York Greater Capital Region, having merged with another literacy organization.

Anyone who wants help in learning to read or write may call 518-244-4650 or go to the website.

“More than 22 percent of the population, including our community, reads and writes at or below the fifth-grade level. So that’s pretty high,” said Nancy Benz, the program’s executive director.

With one out of five people struggling to read and write, she said, “We are known as an organization that works with the lowest level learning, meaning if somebody comes here from another country, and they can’t speak any English at all or read or write, we will work with them and provide them with a tutor.”

The program has no set curriculum but, rather, is “learner-centered,” she said.

“If someone says, ‘I want to get a driver’s license,’ we help them focus on that. If they say, ‘I just want to read to my grandchild,’ then we focus on that,” said Ms. Benz. “So everyone has something that they want. They might want to become a citizen. Whatever it is, we help them with that.”

Literacy New York Greater Capital Region also offers programs in workplace literacy, financial literacy, digital literacy, and health literacy.

Health literacy, for example, might include how to make a doctor’s appointment or how to read a medicine bottle “but it’s also learning the language,” said Ms. Benz.

Because this is a season of giving — and Mr. Mullins considered Daniel Ethan Van Hoesen’s story a gift — we would urge our readers with spare time to become a literacy volunteer.

The training is not arduous. It starts with an in-person session — the program has offices in the Albany Public Library on Washington Avenue and on the Russell Sage campus in Troy — and then moves to online training. The online training, which is self-paced, takes six to eight hours to complete.

The only qualifications to be a volunteer are to be 18 or older, to be able to read and write, and to have time to spend to help someone learn.

“Typically,” Ms. Benz said, “our volunteers are older than 18 and they’re usually college educated but that’s not essential. It could be someone who’s just out of high school, is good in English, and wants to teach others. So really it’s having the time available and the interest.”

Once the training is complete, the program matches the volunteer tutor with a student, one on one, or to teach a small group.

All of the teaching is done in English. “If someone can speak only Burmese,” said Ms. Benz, “they’re still going to be taught in English … It’s very, very basic in the beginning and then it can advance from there.”

The program offers instruction throughout Albany, Schenectady, and Rensselaer counties. “Most of it happens at libraries," said Ms. Benz, “because they’re very welcoming for us and for our tutors and our students.”

If you struggle to read or if you want to make a difference in someone’s life, we urge you to call 518-244-4650.

In this time of darkness, what better way to shed light?