Facing Out: The Week’s Most Interesting News

March 8, 2025

An aerial view captures a portion of the vast Adirondacks wilderness of Whitney Park, the planned sale of which will exclusively benefit the Town of Long Lake in Hamilton County, New York. Nancie Battaglia

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

Long Lake, N.Y., is a quiet Adirondack community with fewer than 800 year-round residents. Until now, it’s been best known for good fishing, hunting and snowmobiling, Hoss’ Country Corner general store, and Custard’s Last Stand ice cream. It’s also a place that the late Marylou Whitney and her husband, John Hendrickson, came to love for its peaceful beauty and welcoming embrace. So, the couple decided to say thank you in a way the town and its people will never forget.

Pursuant to the wishes of Mr. Hendrickson, who survived his wife and passed away last August, the town will be the sole beneficiary of net proceeds from the contemplated sale of Whitney Park, a celebrated and historically significant 36,000-acre property that includes 22 lakes and ponds, over 100 miles of undeveloped shoreline, and a historic Adirondack Great Camp. The Whitney family acquired the property in the late 19^th Century and have maintained its environmental integrity for more than 125 years.

“This will be remembered in Long Lake forever,” town Supervisor Clay Arsenault said. “John Hendrickson and Marylou Whitney were strong supporters of Long Lake during their lifetimes. They both always said they felt welcomed as members of the community here in Long Lake. They were beloved and respected in this community and contributed generously to the Long Lake Library, Medical Center, annual fireworks show, a drone, and lots of other causes. But their generosity through the years did not adequately prepare us to learn that John left the Town with a gift of this magnitude. It is totally unexpected, incredibly generous, and will have a profound and positive impact on our community for generations to come.”

The estate will manage the continued marketing and sale of the property, which began in 2020 and is expected to conclude within the next several years. Though the amount of money that Long Lake will receive will not be known until the property is sold and the estate settled, the gift will certainly be transformative for the community. There are no restrictions on how the town may use the funds. Supervisor Arsenault and his colleagues on the Town Board said they will structure an open, inclusive and deliberative community process to determine specific uses based on the needs of Long Lake and its residents.

PAEN TO THE ADIRONDACKS: Speaking of the Adirondacks, National Geographic takes a fresh look at the birthplace of the American vacation, a term that dates to 1869 when a New England clergyman urged readers to “vacate” their city apartments and discover the wilderness. “The plaintive calls of a solitary loon echo across the water, but aside from this bird we’re alone on the lake that fronts 127-year-old Great Camp Sagamore, one of several historic camps in Adirondack Park, four hours north of New York City,” writes Karen Gardiner. “A 9,375 sq-mile patchwork of state-owned and private land, the park is bigger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Glacier and Great Smoky Mountains National Parks combined. Yet, with no gates or fees to enter, it retains a sense of wildness that can feel missing in those other parks. I’m here to follow in the footsteps — and paddle strokes — of America’s early ‘vacationers’, the first of many generations lured here by nature’s restorative powers.”

RACING CHALLENGE: As Saratoga continues preparations to host this year’s five day Belmont Stakes Racing Festival, the New York Racing Association this week announced the schedule for stakes races that will be moved to Aqueduct as Belmont Park undergoes a costly reconstruction project. Noah Shachtman, a former editor in chief of Rolling Stone and The Daily Beast, took a deep look at horse racing and came to some conclusions that are sure to cause some queasiness — if not outright defensiveness — in the communities these tracks support. Writing in The New York Times, he asks why state governments, including New York’s, are spending billions to subsidize the sport. “Few things are more inspiring than seeing a horse run, and the feelings that these animals evoke in humans can border on the mystic,” he writes. “But that’s neither an economic nor a policy rationale for spending billions on an unpopular sport. So why do it? Why keep propping up a pastime that, despite many attempted overhauls, can’t keep its fans and takes such a heavy toll on its athletes and workers?”

The Uncle Sam Statue gazes east from Riverfront Park in Troy, N.Y., hometown of Samuel Wilson, a 19^th century meatpacker believed to have inspired the iconic character. John Bulmer

THE BALM OF BASEBALL: For at least the last 50 days, their families have been uprooted, consumed by a daily struggle to find new homes, schools, clothes, doctors, cars and places to shop. Not last Saturday. Saturday was opening day for Little League and, despite the wildfires that destroyed their community and dispatched thousands of residents to the far reaches of the Los Angeles area, 305 of the 450 kids who had signed up to play showed up in new uniforms for the Palisades Youth Baseball program. Life could wait. It was time to “Play Ball.”

NOT YOUR FATHER’S SHOP CLASS: Remember when “shop” was relegated to the back corner of the school? Not anymore. Schools around the United States are investing in new, high-tech manufacturing centers, shown off in big glass fishbowl settings, where students master technical skills for the 21st century. Learning manual skills overlooked in the digital age helps students earn industry certifications in high-skill, high-paying jobs such as pharmaceutical technician and pipe fitter — jobs that don’t require college and may insulate them from the forces of AI.

SODA WARS: Beverage companies and their lobbyists are girding for what appears to be a coming battle against efforts to prevent federal food-aid recipients from spending their benefits on sugary, carbonated soft drinks, efforts that were rebuffed by the government for two decades when initiated by progressive states like New York and Minnesota but that are gaining momentum now that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and states like Arkansas are on board. “Nobody is anti-Diet Coke. Nobody is anti-soft drink. I like a soft drink, too. It’s whether or not the government should be paying for it,” Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders told The Wall Street Journal. The American Beverage Association is pushing back in part by citing polling that shows nearly 60% of people who voted for President Trump last year support allowing soda purchases with food aid. “The better populist path is standing with the historic working class coalition that voted for President Trump,” the group’s CEO, Kevin Keane, told The Journal. “There are no wins in pushing for restrictions.”

USA slider Mystique Ro zips past cheering fans on the first day of the IBSF Bobsled & Skeleton World Championships, the pinnacle of sliding sports, which continue this weekend and next in Lake Placid, N.Y. Nancie Battaglia

TASTES LIKE CHICKEN: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is concerned about the rapid increase in the population of nutrias, a rodent that looks like a beaver or a rat that’s disrupting marshes in the Gulf Coast, Southeastern United States and Pacific Northwest. Nutrias weigh 15 to 20 pounds and are said to be territorial and aggressive when cornered. They’ve been known to bite people and animals. But the real problem, according to the federal agency, is that they dig up marshes, uproot flora and cause widespread erosion in wetland areas. So, the U.S. Government says: Fire up the grill, or throw nutrias in a Crockpot or sauté them. Think of the possibilities: nutria tacos, nutria gumbo and nutria sloppy joes. And if don’t find rodents appetizing, try nutria cornhole.

A CONDUCTOR’S HOMECOMING: In 1995, when she was just 9, Lidiya Yankovskaya and her family fled growing antisemitism in Russia and came to the United States, settling in the Capital Region near an aunt and uncle, with help from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and Albany-based Jewish Family Services of Northeastern New York. Yankovskaya had studied voice and piano in St. Petersburg, Russia, and her parents were determined to help her continue her musical education. They enrolled her in the Guilderland, N.Y., public schools for their extensive music program and took her to see world-class performers at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall and Tanglewood. Today, she is the Music Director of Chicago Opera Theater and a Chicago Tribune Chicagoan of the Year. She returns to the Capital Region to conduct the Albany Symphony Monday evening at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady. 

CORRECTION: We took N.Y. Governor Kathy Hochul at her word last Friday when she declared she’d made a deal to end the illegal strike by the state’s prison guards. One week later, her administration’s “desperate attempt” to deliver on her big words continued. By the way: the strike is expensive, and you’re paying the bill.

LIFE ADVICE: Price of eggs got your goat? Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has a solution — raise your own chickens. Worried about measles? Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggests good nutrition and Vitamin A. Looking for radiant skin and less stiffness in aging muscles? Join the parade of people microdosing Ozempic.  

EXPENSIVE TASTES: A Texas man pretending to represent an NBA player fled a jewelry store with $770,000 worth of diamond earrings, then swallowed the merchandise when apprehended by police. A subsequent scan found “foreign objects” in the suspect’s stomach that “will need to be collected” once they passed through his digestive system.

MILESTONE ACHIEVEMENT: LeBron James, a superstar from the moment he started his professional basketball career as a teenager in 2003, this week became the first NBA player ever to reach 50,000 career points, a total that includes regular season and playoff games. Now 40 years old, he scored 34 points in the game in which he passed the milestone. Incredible.

IT'S AN HONOR: Congratulations to Karen DeWitt, the retired Capitol Bureau chief for New York State Public Radio whose dispatches on New York State government and politics aired on public radio stations across the state for nearly 35 years, for being chosen for a lifetime achievement award by the Radio Television Digital News Association..

LAND HO: A massive iceberg, the world’s largest, has run aground off the remote British island of South Georgia, and despite some expected challenges for fishermen and penguins, scientists expect it will create an explosion of life in the ocean as the ice melts and releases nutrients locked inside.

SPRING FORWARD: Daylight saving time begins at 2 a.m. Sunday, and with it, studies suggest, an increased risk of heart attacks and strokes as your body resets its circadian rhythm to account for less daylight in the morning and more at night.

JOHN VERBO was a 16-year-old athlete at Colonie High School, near Albany, who went into cardiac arrest while at a volleyball tournament in Boston and died days later at Tufts Medical Center. “John was a bright presence on the court and in our school community,” the school’s principal, Bill Behrle, wrote in an email to the Albany Times Union. “His leadership and dedication to his teammates and peers made a lasting impact on everyone who had the privilege of knowing him. This is a heartbreaking loss for our school, and our priority is to support the Verbo family, our students and our staff as they navigate their grief.” His obituary noted that “he was known for his vibrant personality, a love for sports, and an infectious enthusiasm for life.”

CARL DEAN is a name few people know, and that’s just the way he wanted it. The onetime owner of an asphalt paving business in Nashville, he was married to the legendary Dolly Parton for nearly 60 years, having met her outside a Nashville laundromat the same day she moved to the city as an 18-year-old in 1964. They married two years later, on Memorial Day. They maintained strict privacy in their marriage, with Parton telling The Associated Press in 1984, “A lot of people say there’s no Carl Dean, that he’s just somebody I made up to keep other people off me.” Parton told NPR a flirtatious bank teller’s interest in her husband inspired the smash hit Jolene, which she called “really an innocent song all around, but sounds like a dreadful one.” He was 82.

HAZEL DUKES was a trailblazing civil rights leader affectionately known as “Queen Mother” or “Ma Dukes” to advocates inspired by her more than seven decades in civil rights activism. Born in Montgomery, Ala., under Jim Crow, she moved to Long Island in 1956, where she advocated for housing equity and became the first Black woman to work for the Nassau County district attorney’s office. In 1972, she took the stage at the Democratic National Convention to second the presidential candidacy of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run for the party’s nomination. Her tenure as national president of the NAACP ended in controversy in 1990, after she pleaded guilty from embezzling funds from a cancer patient who had given her power of attorney, but she became president of the New York State Conference of the NAACP in 1999, a title she continued to hold until her death at 92 on the first day of Women’s History Month.

SYLVESTER TURNER was a first-term congressman from Texas, representing a Houston district that had long been served by his political ally, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who died last year in office of pancreatic cancer. He was mayor of Houston from 2016 to 2024, following 27 years in the state legislature, where he spent nearly 20 years on the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee and was the only Democrat to chair a budget subcommittee. A bone cancer survivor, he attended President Trump’s speech this week to a joint session of Congress and was hospitalized the same night. He was released and died at home a short time later of “enduring health complications,” according to a statement from his family. He was 70.”

“I am stunned.”
— Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in his dissent, along with Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, from the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision affirming, in his words, that “a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction [has] the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars.”

ROUNDING ERROR: A Citigroup customer who had requested a $280 transfer credit instead ended up with $81 trillion, enough to purchase the entire U.S. stock market. Not one but two employees failed to catch the error. A third finally noticed, about 90 minutes after the fact.

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Principal Authors: Mark Behan and Bill Callen.

Contributors: Ryan Moore, Kristy Miller, Nancie Battaglia and John Bulmer.

FACING OUT is what we do. We help companies, organizations and individuals work effectively with their most important external audiences – their customers, their shareholders, their communities, the government and the news media.  www.behancommunications.com

Facing Out features news and other nuggets that caught our eye, and that we thought might be of value to you, our friends and business associates. Some items are good news about our clients and friends, others are stories that we hope will leave you a bit more informed or entertained than you were five minutes ago. As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback. 

Let’s make it a conversation: mark.behan@behancom.com