When it rains, it really pours sometimes. In the past few weeks, the Altamont community has gotten a bit smaller and less interesting with the passing of several noteworthy Altamont residents.

Some of them had been pillars of the Altamont community for decades, and others had only later in life found a home here, but all were valued tiles in the mosaic of our village.

About some of them, like George Pratt, much has been written and not much more needs to be said (except to say that the last time I shook his hand, George — by then well into his 90s — still had the strongest handshake I think I’ve ever experienced).

Some others, however, can be memorialized further. Ruth Anne Burby left us a few weeks ago at the far too young age of 57. She was a devoted library user, a prolific volunteer, a kind and generous soul who gave more of herself to the Altamont and Farnsworth PTAs than could reasonably have been asked of anyone.

Mary Hughes was, like George Pratt, 94 at the time of her passing last week. She lived nearly her entire life in Altamont, and was active in nearly every aspect of community life, including serving on the library’s board of trustees among much, much else. She was a particular favorite of ours, a voracious reader and a warm and gentle presence especially when accompanied by her husband, Hal, who passed away last June.

Two more recent additions to the community were David Silver and Charlie Russell, both neighbors at Brandle Meadows, who found a welcoming home in Altamont later in their lives. Both were great readers, and all-around great guys. All of them made a contribution to the life of our village, and all will be deeply missed. 

It’s weeks like this that remind us of the double-edged nature of living in a tight community like Altamont, where it can sometimes feel as though everybody knows everybody. We get to enjoy the joys of comfort and familiarity, but we also have the sadness that comes when any member of our community leaves us. 

Library gala

Tickets will be available next week for the 2023 I Love My Library Gala! 

Taking place on Saturday, May 20, from 6 to 9 p.m., the gala is AFL’s biggest fundraiser of the year (actually, it’ll be our biggest fundraiser in over three years!), and we need your help to make it a success.

This year, we’re changing things up a bit: Instead of the freezing cold of February, we’re holding it amid the (hopefully) beautiful weather of early spring, and instead of holding it at Village Hall, we’ll be holding it in the beautiful Flower & Fine Arts Building on the Altamont fairgrounds!

If you attend, you’ll enjoy hors d’oeuvres, a carving station and a salad station, homemade desserts, live music, and an auction in a beautiful setting amongst the snazziest dressed folks in town. Tickets will be $75 per person. Better yet, join our Honorary Committee and you’ll get your ticket to the gala, and have your name prominently displayed in the event program and on posters around the Fine Arts Building.

This year, our theme will be Our Community in Bloom, and we will be honoring several individuals who contribute to the daily beautification of the village. I am very pleased to announce that our honorees this year are Keith C. Lee, John Sands, Al and Veronica D’Alauro, and staff of the Village Department of Public Works. Each of them have contributed in their own ways to make Altamont the lovely and picturesque place that it is. We are proud to be able to call them all friends of the library.  

Earth Day

happenings

Earth Day is coming up on Saturday, April 22, and we’ve got two cool things going on that day. First, we’ve got the annual Village-wide Green & Clean sponsored by Altamont Community Tradition from 9 a.m. to around noon. We’ll pick up sticks and trash, prepare garden beds, and generally give Orsini, Schilling, and Angel parks a nice spiffing up.

It’s a great way to give back to the community and to show your gratitude for the wonderful place that we call home. If you happen to have some garden tools and/or a wheelbarrow that you can bring, it would be greatly appreciated.

If you’re not at the Green & Clean, why not start your day off with an inspiring screening of the award-winning documentary “The Seeds of Vandana Shiva,” at the Guilderland Public Library? Presented jointly by the Guilderland Public Library and the Altamont Free Library, the film tells the remarkable life story of Indian eco-activist Dr. Vandana Shiva and her struggles with the corporate industrial agriculture giants.

The film also aims to shine a light on where we are today — industrial food accounts for up to 40 percent of carbon emissions, while pesticides destroy soils, water systems and biodiversity, and harm human health. While the film is for all ages, we especially encourage teens and young adults to attend!  As an additional feature, we will be giving away a copy of Dr. Shiva’s brand-new memoir, “Terra Viva: My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements,” to the first 10 people to attend the event!

The gala is back! Please join us on Saturday, May 20, at the beautiful Flower and Fine Arts Building on the Altamont fairgrounds. This is our most important fundraiser, and we haven’t been able to hold a gala in three years, so we couldn't possibly be more excited for this event.

More information will be available soon including how to join the Honorary Committee and purchase tickets, so stay tuned. In the meantime, find yourself a babysitter, pick out something neat to wear, and save the date!

Library Expedition

On April 4, all of the libraries in Albany and Rensselaer counties will celebrate the kickoff of the 2023 Upper Hudson Library System Library Expedition. Think of it as a kind of Cannonball Run for nerds.

The idea is for folks, as individuals, families, or teams, to visit every single one of the 36 library locations in our two-county library system between the beginning of April and the end of August. In 2018, folks who visited all 36 libraries got their very own gold library card, but we couldn’t have the same prize this time, so this time, anyone who completes the entire expedition will receive a platinum library card!

It’s a fun challenge for folks who love libraries and want to explore parts of the Capital District they may have passed by or passed through but never stopped to smell the books. If you would like to be a 36er — and who wouldn’t? — stop by the library and pick up your official map and get your official Altamont Free Library stamp on your passport! All aboard for adventure! 

Guilderland/Altamont

Spelling Bee

Speaking of our friends in UHLS, we’re also happy to announce the Great Guilderland and Altamont Spell-Off! Sharpen your pencils and break out your dictionary! Altamont Free Library and Guilderland Public Library are teaming up for an old fashioned spelling bee! 

Join us at Guilderland Public Library on Tuesday, April 11, at 6 p.m. as Altamontians and Guilderlanders vie for spelling glory, the nerdiest kind of glory there is! The winners will qualify to compete against teams from other UHLS libraries in a final spell-off, to be held April 30 at the Colonie Town Library! 

Teams of two spellers each are invited to sign up for the event. Choose a partner and team name! Going solo? We'll pair you with another singleton contestant, if possible. Participants can be age 10 or older, but at least one person on your team should be age 18 or older.

For more details and to register, please go to https://guilderland.librarycalendar.com and click on the April 11 event on their online calendar of events. Spots are L-I-M-I-T-E-D, so register today!

First Monday

Book Club

Do you love to read? Do you love talking about what you’ve read with other interesting and smart people? If so, please join us for the next virtual meeting of the First Monday Book Club on Monday, April 3, at noon.

If you would like to join us for our next meeting, please call us at 518-861-7239 or email us at and we’ll make sure that you get all the details. Over the next two months we’ll be talking about Anthony Doerr’s sprawling new novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land.” We’ll discuss the first half of the book at this meeting and the second half in May. There will be plenty to discuss, so call today to reserve your copy and join us! 

Ukulele Group

Do you uke? If you do, even if you’re not very good yet, please join our monthly ukulele meetup. Our next meeting will be Tuesday, April 4, at 6 p.m., and we’d love for you to join us. It’s too cold to meet in the Orsini Park gazebo, so we’ll be meeting inside the library this time.

Bring a song or two to share with the group if you like. This is a fun, supportive way of growing as a player, picking up hints and tips, learning new tunes, and meeting fellow ukesters. We hope to see uke there!

Last week, we asked local artists to let us mount an exhibit of their art, and we got some great responses! We’d still love to hear from a few more artists and collectors, though.

Throughout the spring and summer, for a very exciting reason that we’ll be announcing next week, we’re expecting to see a notable uptick in visitors here at the library. Since we’re going to have so many new friends coming through the library, we’d love to fancy the place up a little bit and show off some of our local artistic talent!

If you’re an artist and you’d like to display your artwork here at the library, please get in touch with me by email at or by calling 518-861-7239 to discuss scheduling a showing. We’ll take good care of your treasures, we promise.

Our art display system allows us to professionally and securely display art and we’d love to display yours. Likewise, if you’ve got a cool collection you’d like to show off, please consider letting us show it in our display case. 

Stories & Stuffies

Stories & Stuffies is back! On Saturday, March 25, at 6:30 p.m., put on your pj’s, grab your favorite stuffed animal, and join Ms. Erika for a pre-bedtime story and craft! This low-key story time will be just the thing to prepare your young folks to count some sheep.

Make sure to sign up in advance by emailing us at , or by calling us at 518-861-7239.

Nature Story Time

Please join us on Wednesday, March 29, at 11 a.m. for another wonderful outdoor nature story time with Thacher Park Nature Center educator Shannon Duerr. This month, we’re going to be talking all about burrowers, the animals who make their homes in holes in the ground like moles, and voles, and prairie dogs.

We’ll read some stories, do some activities, and have a great time outside! We’ll meet in the Orsini Park gazebo and be outdoors for about 45 minutes. In case of muddiness, you might want to wear your galoshes. 

Save the date!

Do you miss the annual I Love My Library gala that we used to have every February? Well so do we, so we’re bringing it back!

It won’t be in February though. This year it will be Saturday, May 20. There will be lots more details available soon, including an awesome new location, but for now just keep that date open, find a babysitter, and pick out something fancy to wear!

Have I ever mentioned how much I love audiobooks? I do!

Listening to audiobooks is the primary way I read over the past few years, and anyone who says that listening to audiobooks doesn’t count as reading can go jump in a lake.

I still love reading on paper, and I still find some time to do it almost every day, but the ability to listen to a good book in my car on my way to and from work or while I’m cooking or doing chores around the house has allowed me to read so many more books than I would otherwise be able to.

Currently, I’m listening to “Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster” by the historian H.W. Brands and read by Eric Martin, which I understand might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I think it’s great and very pleasingly narrated. (For first-time audiobookers, I often recommend the wonderful novel, “The Dutch House” by Ann Patchett, narrated by national treasure Tom Hanks, or any of Bill Bryson’s books narrated by the author.)

I mention this because the primary way that I get audiobooks on my phone is through a free app called Libby. Libby allows library users to download anything from the Upper Hudson Library System’s catalog of tens of thousands of ebooks and digital audiobooks for free! All you need is a smartphone or tablet and a library card and you’re all set.

Libby is produced by a company called Overdrive, and ever since Libby came out, Overdrive has had two different apps that you could use to get free ebooks and downloadable audiobooks. When libraries first started lending out digital materials, many library users started using the old Overdrive app, and lots of folks are still using it.

The time has come, however, to make the switch. Starting in late April, app stores are no longer going to offer users the Overdive app and they won’t update it any longer. So, if you’re still using Overdrive and want help in switching to Libby, just stop by and we’ll be able to help.

You can learn more about Libby at https://www.overdrive.com/apps/libby. You’ll still be able to have access to the same catalog of tens of thousands of ebooks and digital audiobooks, you’ll just be accessing them through a new, more user-friendly app!

If you already use Libby, here’s a pro tip: The Upper Hudson Library System has an agreement with our neighboring Mid-Hudson Library System that gives us access to their Libby catalog too, so there are even more thousands of books to download and read or listen to! If you’d like to get connected with the MHLS Libby catalog, we can help with that too!

First Monday

Book Club

Do you love to read? Do you love talking about what you’ve read with other interesting and smart people? If so, please join us for the next virtual meeting of the First Monday Book Club on Monday, March 6, at noon. If you would like to join us for our next meeting, please call us at 518-861-7239 or email us at and we’ll make sure that you get all the details.

Just like last month, we’ll be talking about Kate Atkinson’s beloved novel “Life After Life.” We’ll discuss the second half of the book at this meeting. There will be plenty to discuss, so call today to reserve your copy and join us! If you’d like to read ahead, in April and May, we’ll be talking about Anthony Doerr’s “Cloud Cuckoo Land!”

Ukulele Group

Do you uke? If you do, even if you’re not very good yet, please join our monthly ukulele meetup. Our next meeting will be Tuesday, March 7, at 6 p.m., and we’d love for you to join us. It’s too cold to meet in the Orsini Park gazebo, so we’ll be meeting inside the library. Bring a song or two to share with the group if you like. This is a fun, inviting way of growing as a player, picking up hints and tips, learning new tunes, and meeting fellow ukesters. We hope to see uke there!