{ title: 'The Altamont enterprise and Albany County post. (Altamont, N.Y.) 2006-current, March 09, 2006, Page 2, Image 2', download_links: [ { link: 'http://www.loc.gov/rss/ndnp/ndnp.xml', label: 'application/rss+xml', meta: 'News about NYS Historic Newspapers - RSS Feed', }, { link: '/lccn/2006245259/2006-03-09/ed-1/seq-2/png/', label: 'image/png', meta: '', }, { link: '/lccn/2006245259/2006-03-09/ed-1/seq-2.pdf', label: 'application/pdf', meta: '', }, { link: '/lccn/2006245259/2006-03-09/ed-1/seq-2/ocr.xml', label: 'application/xml', meta: '', }, { link: '/lccn/2006245259/2006-03-09/ed-1/seq-2/ocr.txt', label: 'text/plain', meta: '', }, ] }
Image provided by: Guilderland Public Library
From the editor The Altamont Enterprise - Thurada^j^r]^li^^(f0^ By Melissa Hale-Spencer I knew Lansing Christman through his words. And what wonderful words they were. I never met the man, face to face, but I feel I knew his heart and soul because of the words he spoke to me and the words he wrote for our newspaper. Lansing died March 1 at the age of 96. had lived in the South for years, couldn't have much to write of local interest. I was wrong. Lansing wrote prose that read like poetry — clear and straight to the heart. Many of his col umns, called \Countryside Gleanings,\ were based on his> boyhood recollections of the area yet addressed universal themes Born and raised on a hill farm 'Old barns are like old scribes... Theirs is a script that has lasted well. \That's the last of 'em from the old guard,\ said the Enterprise's publisher, Jim Gardner, on hearing the news. Jim, a printer, stopped his endless work for a moment to reflect. His press stood silent. Jim had started working at the Enterprise print shop over a half-century ago, a half-dozen years after Lansing had left. But Lansing kept up his ties with The Enterprise. \The first time I met Lansing was in 1955,\ said Jim. \He stopped by to talk to Howard,\ Jim said, referring to Howard Ogsbury, the long-time pub- lisher, who lived over the print shop where the newsroom is now. \Lansing was a New Deal De- mocrat and Howard was an old- guard Republican,\ said Jim, noting the' current editor and publisher have similar political differences, \and I can remember some spirited debates on politi- cal issues.\ Recalling Lansing as a news- man, Jim said, \He just had a level head on his shoulders. He was stable. He was dependable. He had a nose for news.\ - Lansing, who was the editor of The Enterprise during the De- pression, wrote me from his home in South Carolina not long after I became editor. He proposed writing a column. I didn't have a lot of hope for it, since I told him we were all about local news, but said I'd give it a try. I thought, to myself, a man in his late eighties who in Duanesburg, Lansing was the youngest of nine children — seven boys and two girls. His father, W. W. Christman, was a poet. \Old scribes\ Lansing's essays were filled with rich descriptions of nature and farm life, from which he often drew life's lessons — but not in a preachy way; rather, as a simple matter of fact. \Old barns are like old scribes,\ he wrote in one of his columns. \They write their rhythmic lines out in the fields far back from the road. They stand alone, surrounded by the land they once served. Theirs is a script that has lasted well, a chronology of life and time, a journal of the years, a record of harvests from the fields.... \I played in barns as a boy. I worked in them as a man. I rested in them on rainy Summer afternoons with the raindrops on the shingled roof sending me off to sleep while swallows chat- tered overhead.\ In his late eighties and through his early nineties, Lansing would write his weekly column, without fail, for our newspaper. Each week, I put his column on the bottom of my ed- iting pile, so I had a reward to look forward to. He ended each dispatch with a newsman's \30.\ Many of those columns were collected into a book, his third, Harp Strings in the Wind, pub- lished in 1998. In the title essay, he tells of his daily journey to school in Altamont. Lansing Christman, in recent years, with lilacs that bloomed in October. \As a boy, more than 70 years ago walking the tracks for a mile to the station to catch the train that took me to high school 10 miles away, I often heard the harp strings, that lyrical music played by the wind and the wires,\ he writes. \The wind, picking a t the long lines of wire, was the refined and sensitive harpist.\ Lansing noticed everyday things and made them poetic through the way he perceived and described them. His formal education ended with his graduation from Altamont High School. \I would very much have liked to have gone to college,\ he told me. \There were no funds...I could have gone to Cornell and probably gotten some kind of scholarship. But I saw how much we had to struggle to make a living on the farm. I knew I'd never make a go of it...My next love was writing, so I followed that.\ Lansing wrote for a Schenectady newspaper even before graduating from high school. \When I started working on the paper, I was so young, I was afraid to use my own name,\ he recalled, \I used the name of an older brother.\ He remembered being shy at the start of his reporting career and, while he wrote with ease, he found it \a burden\ to inter- view people. \To learn,\ he said, \I read every newspaper I could get my hands on...I covered everything Arv--JE^tr4/Exira Broadcast of The Altamont Enterprise oyer ^ Dash\; HqUi.ard Ogstiury, publisher of The Enterprise; Editor Lansing Christman; and Mayor Mead Z. Sheldon. Christman left The Enterprise ih 1947 for WGY-WRGB radio and television, at the dawn of news programming in those mediums. He was the news director for radioand'TVstations WGY-WRGB for20years. from major accidents to anniver- saries.\ Lansing started at The Altamont Enterprise as a corre- spondent, covering Duanesburg when he as 17 years old. Seven years later, when he was 24, Publisher Ogsbury asked him to be the Enterprise editor. \I never asked why h e asked,\ said Lansing. \I just took the job. My father and I had finished harvest.\ \Coverage of both sides\ Lansing took his notes long- hand, but pounded out his sto- ries, up until the very last, using two fingers, on an old Royal typewriter. . \I don't think I could get used to one of those new-fangled com- puters,\ h e told me during one of our phone conversations, which I grew to relish as much as.read- '• inghis columns. He had left The Enterprise, though, for the newest technol- ogy of the time. In 1947, he joined WGY-WRGB, radio and television, where he worked un- til 1966 as news director. The Schenectady television station, one of the first in the country, got its FCC license and current call letters — in honor of Walter Ransom Gail Barker, an early broadcaster — in the 1940's. At the start of the dec- ade, the Capital District had only 300 televisions, while there were over 2,000 by the close of the decade, and 300,000 by the middle of the 1950's. In the midst of making some- times hard news decisions, and feeling very much alone, I knew there was a comforting voice of experience only a phone call away. In one such instance, Lansing reviewed the mission of The En- terprise for me in his day — \to bring news to the. areas in which the subscribers live.\ He went on, describing a philosophy I, too, held: \We'd record progress, and the tragedies, too.\ He em- phasized that the important facts were covered but that the news was not sensationalized. \If a controversial subject came up,\ said Lansing, \I in- sisted on coverage of both sides; I would not publish a biased re- port. I carried that same tradi- tion with me into broadcasting.\ He left for \the challenge,\ he said. \The opportunities looked great with radio and television; television was new,\ said Lans- ing, and he helped develop news programs and schedules from scratch. He was not pleased with how local news was broadcast in re- cent years. \Don't ask me what I think of news today,\ h e said. \I can't be quoted....Look how acci- dents are covered; the photo- graphs of blood and guts; it kills me to see it on TV...I sometimes wonder if news on TV is inciting some of the problems we have.\ \Part of my heart\ In his later years, Lansing gave up the burden of writing news for the pleasure of writing about nature and of composing poems. He became the poet in resi- dence at Shepherd's Center in Spartanburg, South Carolina, his wife's home state, where he moved after retiring. \News writing was a chore; this is a pleasure,\ he told me. \News was a necessity; this is part of ray life, part of my heart.\ Even during the years he earned his living by reporting on the news, he still wrote about nature and he still wrote poems. \I was very fortunate,\ h e said, \my father and my mother both loved nature and were conserva- tionists.\ (Continued on next page)
