Residents step to the beat at annual block dance

MILLERTON — By 8 p.m. on  Saturday, July 31, Century Boulevard was overflowing with parked vehicles. Shiny new firetrucks lined the sides of the double-wide road. And local residents spilled into the streets, gathered to enjoy the Millerton Fire Company’s annual block dance.

The event is held every year as a fundraiser for the company and to enjoy the simpler things in life: the company of friends and neighbors. Admission was technically free, and the suggested $1 donation to the fire department, which automatically entered the donor into a raffle for prizes, wasn’t asking a lot.

Residents were entertained into the wee hours of the evening by returning musical trio Natural Gas, a local band that’s no stranger to the block dances in Millerton.

The group ran through its repertoire, ranging from ballads for slow-dancing to the participatory newer songs for the children. Band members strolled the perimeter of the firehouse’s parking lot with the aid of wireless mics, serenading residents while standing on chairs and leading the crowd in the obligatory “everybody stop and wave at the car driving by� dance move.

Meanwhile, members from the Millerton Fire Company manned the food tent, grilling up hamburgers and hot dogs as well as the firehouse speciality: french fries.

The company was proud to show off its newest member of the department: a compressed air foam sprayer vehicle, not even one week old. It will run with a water pumper vehicle that the department received earlier this year. The two smaller trucks were custom built to navigate some of Millerton and North East’s more challenging back roads.

“I think people had a really good time,â€� said organizer Mariley Najdek the following Monday, adding that a few more bills had to  come in before a final fundraising figure could be tallied. “The band went until 11 o’clock and by all accounts I think this year was very successful.â€�

Latest News

South Kent School’s unofficial March reunion

Elmarko Jackson was named a 2023 McDonald’s All American in his senior year at South Kent School. He helped lead the Cardinals to a New England Prep School Athletic Conference (NEPSAC) AAA title victory and was recruited to play at the University of Kansas. This March he will play point guard for the Jayhawks when they enter the tournament as a No. 4 seed against (13) Samford University.

Riley Klein

SOUTH KENT — March Madness will feature seven former South Kent Cardinals who now play on Division 1 NCAA teams.

The top-tier high school basketball program will be well represented with graduates from each of the past three years heading to “The Big Dance.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hotchkiss grads dancing with Yale

Nick Townsend helped Yale win the Ivy League.

Screenshot from ESPN+ Broadcast

LAKEVILLE — Yale University advanced to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament after a buzzer-beater win over Brown University in the Ivy League championship game Sunday, March 17.

On Yale’s roster this year are two graduates of The Hotchkiss School: Nick Townsend, class of ‘22, and Jack Molloy, class of ‘21. Townsend wears No. 42 and Molloy wears No. 33.

Keep ReadingShow less
Handbells of St. Andrew’s to ring out Easter morning

Anne Everett and Bonnie Rosborough wait their turn to sound notes as bell ringers practicing to take part in the Easter morning service at St. Andrew’s Church.

Kathryn Boughton

KENT—There will be a joyful noise in St. Andrew’s Church Easter morning when a set of handbells donated to the church some 40 years ago are used for the first time by a choir currently rehearsing with music director Susan Guse.

Guse said that the church got the valuable three-octave set when Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center closed in the late 1980s and the bells were donated to the church. “The center used the bells for music therapy for younger patients. Our priest then was chaplain there and when the center closed, he brought the bells here,” she explained.

Keep ReadingShow less
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Penguin Random House

‘Picasso’s War” by Foreign Affairs senior editor Hugh Eakin, who has written about the art world for publications like The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times, is not about Pablo Picasso’s time in Nazi-occupied Paris and being harassed by the Gestapo, nor about his 1937 oil painting “Guernica,” in response to the aerial bombing of civilians in the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

Instead, the Penguin Random House book’s subtitle makes a clearer statement of intent: “How Modern Art Came To America.” This war was not between military forces but a cultural war combating America’s distaste for the emerging modernism that had flourished in Europe in the early decades of the 20th century.

Keep ReadingShow less