ALTAMONT — When Don Rittner was a kid, he says he wanted to be like Toby Tyler, a 10-year-old who ran away from his foster home to join the circus. Rittner was inspired by the Disney film based on the 1880s book by journalist James Otis Kaler.

“I’ve been going to fairs all my life,” said Rittner.

That includes the Altamont Fair, which celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2018. Rittner is writing a book about the local fair, which now serves Albany, Schenectady, and Greene counties.

“Fairs have been going on since Medieval times,” he said. “They started out more as markets. With the Renaissance, entertainment came in.”

His book consists of two parts — one is a timeline detailing the fair’s history and the second is filled with photographs from every era, “1893 to modern times,” he said.

The timeline, he said, “has highlights of what went on including what the board was deciding — the inner workings of the fair.”

He has been doing research since he was 8 years old, Rittner said. “I know how to find stuff.”

Rittner has written many books, ranging from the 1976 “Pine Bush: Albany’s Last Frontier,” to “Adriaen Block and the Onrust: Setting the Stage for Dutch Colonization of North America,” on the 17th-Century Dutch captain who explored the Hudson Valley.

Rittner has also written a slew of Arcadia history books, on Troy, Schenectady, and Albany, as well as books on computers and three encyclopedias — on chemistry, biology, and atmospheric science.

For his book on the Altamont Fair, he used the fair’s own archives, the village archives, and newspaper archives to do his research.

“Fairs were a big thing before TV,” he said. “They were more social events, like an earlier version of Facebook.”

He went on, “Farmers would see new tractors or compete for who had the best cows. Kids developed friendships with 4-H. Couples courted at the fair.”

And, he said, there were all kinds of races — horse races, car races, bicycle races, and sack races.

As Rittner winds down his research, he’s eager to add another dimension to the book: recollections of fair-goers.

So far, he’s conducted three interviews. He talked to Betty Spadaro, who turned 100 last year, and was a longtime fair volunteer, and was also a teacher at the Bozenkill school that was moved to the fairgrounds.

He talked to Ev Rau before he died about the antique farm machinery, which is demonstrated every year at the fair. And he talked to Jack and Cindy Pollard who own the Home Front Café in Altamont.

Cindy Pollard used to oversee the Farmhouse Museum at the fair, where she created the same sort of vignettes of bygone life that she has created in her café, which she has likened to the ambience of her mother’s kitchen during World War II.

Now Rittner hopes to add other voices to the narrative. “I’d like to talk to people who have had a unique experience at the fair — meeting a celebrity or enjoying a show,” said Rittner. “They might say, ‘I met my husband there,’ or, ‘I got scared on a ride.’”

He’d also like to see pictures or memorabilia that fair-goers have kept over the years. People who are interested in sharing their memories or memorabilia with Rittner may reach him at drittner@aol.com or they may call the Altamont Fair office.

Vita

Rittner was born in a Pennsylvania coal-mining town and grew up in Troy in the 1960s in what he describes as “tumultuous times.”

As a young student, he and a buddy, Paul Klink, would regularly cut class to visit museums — the Junior Museum in Troy and, said Rittner, “If we could steal a dime, we’d take the bus to Albany to go to the New York State Museum and the Albany Institute of History and Art.”

“We knew every exhibit; we’d give tours,” said Rittner. “The security guards never called the truant officer.”

“I had my own lab in sixth grade,” said Rittner, explaining he wanted to find cures for diseases. But labs in the sixties were “making napalm to use in Vietnam,” he said. “A lot of my friends got killed.” His number didn’t come up for the draft, he said.

Rittner says he was kicked out of high school at age 15 because he wouldn’t cut his long hair and then his mother kicked him out of her home, too. He learned a lot in his free time, he said.

Rittner has used the sixties to set a film, “Karen or Bust,” about a pair of long-haired 16-year-olds, Ringo and Freddie, hitchhiking through the deep South with the goal of visiting Ringo’s old girlfriend, Karen; they never make it.

The film, shot here and in Baltimore with New York City actors, explores the prejudices of the times. Rittner says he “maxed out his credit cards” to pay for making the film, which is available on DVD.

“It’s a story that hasn’t been told … the beginning of this big upheaval,” said Rittner.

Rittner’s own journey in the sixties was shaped by his boss, Dave Hutchinson, at a summer job when he was 17 — he worked for the federal Office of Economic Opportunity. Hutchinson “thought I was smart for a hippy,” said Rittner.

Hutchinson guided Rittner back to school, and he earned a bachelor’s degree in environmental science and anthropology at the University at Albany. While in college, he wrote his first book, a self-published work on the Pine Bush. “I’ve spent 25 years saving the Pine Bush,” said Rittner.

Rittner went on to get a master’s degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in urban and environmental studies. He did not complete his Ph.D. in archeology from the University of Leicester in England, which he started in 2001, due to lack of funds, he said.

Rittner said he did complete a free one-year program on use of electron microscopes, offered by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs.

In 1973, he became the Albany City archaeologist, a post he held for seven years, Rittner said.

Rittner became the Schenectady County historian in 2005 and started the Schenectady Memories project in which everyday residents tell their stories, he said.

Rittner said he and a friend, Greta Wagle, built a replica of the Onrust, the first fur trading ship built in America, in 2014 on the tip of what is now Manhattan.

“People from that ship founded Albany,” he said.

The $4 million project harnessed the energy and expertise of 300 volunteers, he said, and the ship now functions as “a floating museum.”

“Onrust” is Dutch for “restless,” said Rittner.

He currently teaches a wide variety of courses at Westchester Community College — on archeology, cultural anthropology, sociology, world religions, geography, and Native American studies.

“I love teaching, said Rittner. “You spend all your life accumulating knowledge. You can’t take it with you.”

Rittner said he learned that philosophy from his mentor, Vincent Schaefer. Schaefer, a chemist and meteorologist, developed cloud-seeding while working at General Electric in Schenectady. Schaefer was also a hiker who helped to develop the Long Path, which starts at the George Washington Bridge in New York City and was meant to stretch to Whiteface Mountain in the Adirondacks.

Schaefer’s mantra was, “You pass it on,” said Rittner.

The importance of history

Rittner says the Altamont Fair has changed in its 125 years, but some things remain the same.

“It’s become a lot more commercial,” he said. “You can spend a lot of money there.

“It still has tradition. It still has animals. It still has 4-H. It still has the Grange.”

He went on, “In the schools now, they want to get rid of history and civics. To me, the Altamont Fair is almost a replacement for that ... You can see how they planted potatoes with a steam-powered machine,” he said, giving an example of hands-on history.

“It’s the only place a city kid can see a sheep being sheared or see where milk really comes from.”

Rittner concluded, “A lot of history is being thrown out. There’s an old saying: You can’t understand where you are if you don’t know where you’ve been.”