First Grade students at Elm Drive Elementary School lined up to take turns at shoveling soil to secure the roots of a sugar maple tree planted at their school on Friday, April 25. Dennis Gendron of Twin Brooks Tree Farm was ready to assist as needed with proper shovel technique.
MILLBROOK — With each shovelful of soil that covered the roots of a newly planted sugar maple tree at Elm Drive Elementary School, First Grade students continued a long-standing tradition in observance of National Arbor Day on Friday, April 25.
By his estimation, Dennis Gendron, owner of Twin Brooks Tree Farm, has annually contributed a tree to the Village of Millbrook’s annual observance for twenty years. Gendron had prepared the spot where the young tree would thrive, fluffing up the pile of soil to make the shoveling easier for the children.
“It’s a joint effort,” said Gendron as he prepared for the event. The Village Highway crew will look after the care and watering of the tree for the next year.
The new tree is planted on the school’s property to the rear of Village Hall.
“We always try to plant the trees near the Village Hall, close to the kids,” said Mike Herzog, Climate Smart Task Force member.
Village Trustee Julia Bucklin, a history educator, told the children that Arbor Day was first celebrated in 1872, making them a part of a very long tradition.
Mayor Peter Doro read an official proclamation speaking to the children’s connection to the natural world and encouraged attention to planting trees.
Then it was the children’s turn to participate in finishing the planting, each child taking to the shoveling task with purpose and diligence, appropriate to the occasion.
Millerton News
EAST CANAAN — Lawrence Fredrick Twordusky Jr., 79, of East Canaan, Connecticut, formerly of Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, passed away peacefully on May 1, 2026, surrounded by his family after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. A cherished husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and friend, Larry will be deeply missed by all who knew him, especially his faithful dog, Barney.
Larry was born on Feb. 2, 1947, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Lawrence and Esther Twordusky. He graduated from Tunkhannock Area High School and later from Johnson Technical School. In 1969, he married his high school sweetheart, Linda LaBar, before serving in the United States Air Force, where he was stationed in Mountain Home, Idaho.
Larry dedicated many years of service to Procter & Gamble, where he worked in various roles before retiring. A lifelong woodworker, he found great joy in carpentry and was known for his skill and meticulous craftsmanship. From building his own home to helping his daughters with home repairs, Larry’s handmade furniture and creations were treasured by those he loved. Larry had a deep appreciation for the outdoors. From a young age, he enjoyed hunting and fishing, and many of his most memorable stories came from time spent in the woods or out on the water.
Larry is survived by his beloved wife of 57 years, Linda; his daughters, Lori Twordusky (her fiancé, Jason English) of Bear Creek, Pennsylvania, and Amy Helminiak (Shane) of East Canaan, Connecticut; his granddaughters, Megan Woronko (her fiancé, Vance Collier) and Wren and Briar Helminiak; his great-granddaughter, Harper Collier; his sister, Sue Farrell of Montrose, Pennsylvania; and several nieces and nephews.
The family kindly asks that, if Larry touched your life in any way, you consider making a donation in his memory to The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research:https://give.michaeljfox.org
Millerton News
Producing a blizzard of bubbles, the Bubble Bus delighted visitors to the annual Webutuck Community Day at the high school on Saturday, May 17, 2025.
AMENIA — The Webutuck PTA’s annual Community Day is returning once again this Saturday, May 16.
Planned festivities will take place rain or shine from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Webutuck High School on Haight Road.
This year’s installment of the annual event will feature the usual classic attractions — a bubble bus, balloons with Bee Bee the clown, a petting zoo and a car show all in Webutuck’s parking lot.
Vendors will be selling goods and food. Class representatives and extracurricular groups will also be selling items.
Community Day comes at the end of a three-day long book fair hosted inside Eugene Brooks Intermediate School and Webutuck Elementary School.
The Scholastic buy-one-get-one book fair ran from Tuesday, May 12, to Thursday, May 14, and will be open in the Webutuck Elementary School gym during Community Day on Saturday, May 16.
Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.
John Coston
The following excerpts from The Millerton News were compiled by Kathleen Spahn and Rhiannon Leo-Jameson of the North East-Millerton Library.
MT. WASHINGTON - Mrs. Emma Isaacson, 78, has been issued a combination sporting license by Town Clerk W. A. Hunt. Being over 70 years old, Mrs. Isaacson is entitled to a free license which allows hunting and fishing but no trapping privileges.
A series of child health consultations to be conducted under the direction of Mrs. Mabel Rus-sell of Dover Plains, Dutchess County nurse, have been arranged for communities in the Harlem Valley. Pre-school children between the ages of six months and six years will be administered toxoid for diphtheria and will receive a physical examination at the Hose House in Millerton next Tuesday afternoon from 2 to 4 o’clock daylight saving time. Dr. A. F. Hoag will give the innoculations [sic] and examine the children.
AMENIA - Pupils of the nine district schools in the Town of Amenia are competing in a tent caterpillar eradication contest. Mrs. Joel E. Spingarn is in charge of the contest which will close the week of May. A prize will be awarded to the school collecting the most egg masses.
After a long and heated debate at the annual school meeting Tuesday night, voters of the North East Center School District decided to contract with the Board of Education of the Millerton school to have the children transported here next year. Benjamin Booth was elected trustee of the district, succeeding William M. Sadler who was not a candidate for re-election. Mrs. Nettie Milton was re-elected collector and Mrs. Stella Willson, clerk.
ALBANY - New York led all the States of the Union in tree-planting in 1934, according to figures compiled and released today by Lithgow Osborne, Conservation Commissioner. This State planted 40,564,282 trees and of this total 37,882,432 were planted upon reforestation areas alone. The remainder was planted on State lands in the forest preserve.
The continued operation of the Taconic State Park at Rudd Pond still hung in limbo this week.
The facilities at Rudd Pond in the Town of NorthEast and at the Taconic Park at Copake Falls will be closed for the summer season unless money is restored to the budget of the New York State Office of Parks and Recreation (OPR), according to State officials.
MILLERTON — “This is news,” said Partners for Children Director Karen Kisslinger during a speech at the North East Community Center (NECC) on May 4. “So often you read about horrible events, but wonderful things like this happen every day.”
Ms. Kisslinger was referring to the presentation of 20 desks, constructed by students at Webutuck High School, to children graduating from the Partners for Children Program and the Astor Center.
MILLERTON-Private First Class Lamay was recently promoted to Lance Corporal. Lcpl. Lamay joined the United States Marine Corps in July, 2000 and is stationed at Camp LeJune[sic], North Carolina. While at Camp LeJune[sic], Lcpl Lamay continues training with the 3rd Battalion 2nd Marine Division India Co.
Peter Riva
I have been increasingly concerned over AI and questions of originality of journalists’ work, authors’ manuscripts, plagiarism.A new manuscript submission as agency made to a publisher was rejected because they ran the author’s text through an AI detector and claimed it was mainly AI generated. The manuscript was an anthology of short stories and true histories the author had written and compiled (about the history of dogs) over more than 10 years. The author claimed that most of the text was written before AI was around. The only editing he has done has been within the confines of MS Word (grammar and spell check). He has “NEVER used AI, ever.”
So I ran portions of the dog book text in Grammarly and Pangram and it came back “42% appears to be AI-generated” and “49% AI-generated,” respectively. Incredible.
So, as a test of these and two other AI detection systems, I ran 15,000 first (unedited) words of a manuscript I wrote in 2018 and was published in 2022 (Elephant Safari) and this was the result in a third AI checker: “75% of your text has signs of AI.” Considering I wrote this thriller on the dining room table in the dark of night without any copy and paste whatsoever, I knew this AI plagiarism was misleading, to say the least.
So I went further back and chose text from a book written in 1990… delivered in Nov. 1990, edited by Victoria Wilson at Knopf and still in print: Marlene Dietrich: By Her Daughter Maria Riva Result? On “JustDone” AI checker: “82% AI content.” This manuscript was handwritten on yellow legal pads.
So, the question we all have to ask is this: If AI memory already contains many of the materials, texts, of published books in AI memory… are they all now considered AI owned/generated? Or is AI actually saying that the material is not new to AI and therefore labels it as plagiarized?
The issue here seems to me to be a definition of “original” – original to whom? If an author sends a Gmail with a manuscript to an editor, Gmail (Google) has the file and their AI can presumably read it. Also, if Google or other AI platforms have scanned a previously published magazine article or a book, I believe the very familiarity of what is in the AI memory will give the result that “AI is familiar with this text” and therefore leads to accuse an author of plagiarism.
As for me, I have no faith whatsoever in these so-called AI detection systems. They provided complete nonsense on something I wrote in 2018 and an author delivered in Nov. 1990! To further illustrate the point, I ran Act 1 of HAMLET: “Most of your text is AI/GPT Generated,” so Shakespeare is also a plagiarist? Teachers, professors, and editors everywhere are relying on these false readings and contributing to fake literature appraisal.
Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, New York, now lives in Gila, New Mexico.
Mac Gordon
Most of us tend to take food supply for granted. Our grocery stores and supermarkets are full of most everything we might wish to eat except for the occasional out-of-season fruit or vegetable—and even these have become more available. But there are some increasing signs that our food complacency may be short-sighted, that there may be trouble down the road.
Over the past eighty years, the world’s human population has quadrupled and still continues to grow. Just providing food for people in the less affluent regions is more and more difficult. All over the world forests are being torn down to make way for economically viable but strictly for export crops like palm oil trees. In many parts of the U.S., clean, fresh water, a basic requirement for agriculture is becoming scarcer thereby making agriculture considerably more expensive and food scarce.Drought caused by climate change is making more land around the world unsuitable for growing crops. Over-harvesting can devastate land; 2,000 years ago most of North Africa was forested and fertile but largely through poor management it became over the centuries nearly desert.
President Trump’s war in Iran has disrupted global commerce beyond expectations. The predictable closing of the Strait of Hormuz has limited trade of most everything coming to or going from the Middle East, the most obvious commodities being oil and gas which run most industrial (and agricultural)operations worldwide. The Middle East also supplies a major portion of the world’s fertilizer, both the finished product and the raw materials and that is for most of the world not just Europe and America. A significant reduction in world food supply is expected.
Currently before the U.S. SupremeCourt is a case regarding the legal liability ofMonsanto, now a subsidiary of Bayer, for its herbicide, Roundup, the country’s most popular weed killer. The suit concerns whether product liability warnings issued by a state agency are overruled by a differing federal ruling. While the state has a warning label on the container saying that the contents are “probably carcinogenic” to humans, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has said Roundup is not carcinogenic.Countless lawsuits and billions of dollars of possible settlements await the Court’s verdict.
To help diminish future lawsuits, a homegardening version without glyphosate, the key ingredient, has recently come on the market. Should standard Roundup actually be banished, the effect on conventional industrial agriculture would be huge. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has campaigned repeatedly for organic farming, has backtracked, speaking out forcefully against a ban on glyphosate saying that such a move would be “tooabrupt” (thereby infuriating most of his “MAHA” supporters). But a banning of Roundup’s glyphosate with no proven successor and a swift return from industrial agriculture to basic organic farming techniques would raise food prices enormously and probably cause a lot of political dissent.
Another looming problem comes from PFAS, often referred to as “forever chemicals” because of their inability to break down. In 1946, DuPont introduced nonstick cookware coated with Teflon. Today the family of fluorinated chemicals that sprang from Teflon includes thousands of non-stick, stain-repellent and waterproof compounds called PFAS, short for per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances.
Back in the 1970s I was involved in the creation of several community parks and gardens on vacant lots in New York City. To cover the crushed rubble ground surfaces, we located a large supply of special compost soil from a drug company’s corporate campus in the suburbs—free but for the trucking.Composed of company dining hall food waste, sewage sludge, mycelium from drug manufacturing, and other organic waste. The compost proved to be fertile, humusy soil, an excellent growing medium, a good prototype for rich planting soil (without chemical fertilizers).
Over the decades more and more farm fields have drastically cut back on their use of expensive chemical fertilizers and, at the same time and are providing disposal for municipal sewage and other composted waste. But a few years ago, a New York Times environmental reporter discovered that compost from many sewage treatment plants across the country were contaminated with high levels of PFAS and other dangerous contaminants. Subsequently, this widespread use of sewage sludge fertilizer is being restricted in many instances and will continue to be discouraged until the federal Environmental Protection Agency follows through on its earlier promises to mandate cleaning up public water facilities of PFAS and other contaminants.
In 1935, the Dupont Corporation came up with one of the most famous advertising slogans of the era:“Better Living Through Chemistry”.But the naive optimism of the original slogan now carries a more sardonic tone. Modern science has made great strides in agriculture as in so many fields but our problems feeding ourselves and keeping healthy are not behind us.The Green Revolution that came into being after WW2 doubled world food production but also left us with perhaps insolvable medical problems.
Architect G. Mackenzie Gordon, AIA lives in Lakeville, Conn.
Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.
Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.
