Facing Out: The Week’s Most Interesting News

May 18, 2024

An Adirondack Spring: Wondrous color along with the unwelcome arrival of black flies. (Nancie Battaglia)

Good morning, Colleagues and Friends:

Today, we begin with a question we can all relate to: How does one find a good butler?

Not just anybody is qualified. To buttle, it takes a Mr. Carson, a Mr. French or a Lurch. It takes talent, foresight, unflappability, and sparkle. Today’s butler is a lifestyle executive, at his employers’ side whether they are at home or not.  He can whip up an espresso martini blindfolded, arrange dinner on a mountaintop, or wrangle six donkeys for a makeshift Nativity scene at Christmas.

NO BUTLER NEEDED: Unpopular Washington Commanders Owner Dan Snyder and his wife Tanya had trouble finding a buyer for their Potomac, Maryland, mansion, so they donated it to the American Cancer Society.  It was the largest gift in the 110-year history of the Cancer Society, and now the organization is hoping to sell it for the final price the Snyders sought: $34.9 million. It’s common for wealthy people to leave art or real estate to charities or to donate a portion of the proceeds of a major sale. But now some high-net-worth individuals are transferring titles to major single-family properties while they are still alive. In 2022, billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott donated two mansions in Beverly Hills, Calif., valued at a combined $55 million, to the California Community Foundation.

CRIES FOR MORE BABIES: Around the world, birthrates are falling across all levels of income, education, and labor-force participation. And global leaders recognize the urgency of the problem: shrinking workforces will mean fewer employees to staff businesses and slower economic growth. With fewer employees to contribute, pensions may be underfunded.  Nations with fewer people have diminished international clout in world affairs; Superpower status may be threatened. “The demographic winter is coming,” says Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist specializing in demographics at the University of Pennsylvania.  Even China, which famously set a one-child limit for families 35 years ago, is now urging couples to have more children.

BLACK FLIES: Spring comes to the Adirondacks more than a month after it’s marked on the calendar and long after we grow impatient waiting for warmth. It is heralded by soft green in the trees, fresh leaves in the shrubbery, frogs mating in the ponds and … hordes of blackflies. It’s hard to explain blackflies to the uninitiated. They don’t buzz around so much as they swarm. They don’t bite so much as they chomp, leaving a hole completely incongruous with their stature. Do I really need a head net, you might ask? Yes, yes, you do. The experts on blackflies are battle-worn. For example, Phil Fitzpatrick of Franklin County has spent more than 40 years watching the snow recede and the blackflies emerge. He’s grown philosophical, even poetic, about black flies.

Rafiat Timothe greets her friends after graduating magna cum laude from SUNY Adirondack.

ACCOUNTING FOR HER SUCCESS: Rafiat Timothe left her native Nigeria to come to the Lake George, N.Y., area in 2019. She aspired to be a chef and worked at The Sagamore Resort in Bolton Landing, where she soon met her future husband, Alvin. After COVID, she began to think about returning to school but was reluctant due to her challenging previous college experience in Nigeria. Ultimately, she decided to give SUNY Adirondack a try. There, she said, her teachers “so much believed in me that I truly began to believe in myself.” Last week, she graduated from SUNY Adirondack with a degree in accounting, magna cum laude. She’s now working as an intern tax accountant at Shade Tree Advisors in Saratoga Springs and preparing to continue her education at Siena College or SUNY Albany. Rafiat and Alvin make their home in Glens Falls.

EXPAND YOUR HORIZONS: Samuel J. Abrams has a suggestion for college students this summer: get out of your comfort zone and go talk to people whose lives are unlike their own, either at home or on campus. “The sad reality is that recent and current college students have not had a real taste of American society whatsoever,” he writes for the American Enterprise Institute, citing a toxic blend of social isolation, pandemic restrictions, and campus polarization. He recently visited a small town in Pennsylvania and found people of all political persuasions who cared about their community and worked together to make it better. “(I)t is refreshing to see that, outside the college world, many Americans see the world differently and behave like adults interested in community and care about civility,” he writes. “This would be a fantastic lesson for our college students to learn this summer.”

OPENING UP: The mother and aunt of a young girl who was kidnapped from an Upstate New York campground and rescued two days later, a case that generated blanket media coverage in the Capital Region and was picked up nationally, have launched a biweekly podcast titled “Sisterhood of the Survivors,” the Albany Times Union reports. They were encouraged by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which has worked with the family since the abduction and remained in contact.

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES: Eight U.S. states, including New York and Massachusetts, are led by Democratic women, and they lean on each other for advice and support much more than you might think, forging strong bonds in the early days of the pandemic that have endured as new members are added. “The earliest days of the pandemic were a difficult and emotional time, forcing us to make life and death choices, and as women leaders, we weren’t really allowed to show it,” Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, told 19thnews.org. Gov. Kathy Hochul said the group boosts each other with levity. “(W)e really have a lot of fun together, to be honest. I think it’s because you really do have to have a sense of humor to get what we do.”

GET ME OUT: The age at which people say they want to retire has been declining for a decade, but really accelerated during the pandemic. Researchers with the New York Fed found the number of years Americans expect to continue working is down 9.5% since March 2020, and it appears that more and more people are following through on their intent, helped by a long bull market and strong housing values. Axios reports that fewer than half of workers under 62 now expect to continue working past that age, despite technologic improvements that making working much less physically taxing for many jobs.

Alfonso’s in its heyday on Route 9 in Queensbury. (Dick Dean photo courtesy of Mark Bowie)

 ALFONSO’S: In 1949, an internationally acclaimed chef from Austria who had cooked for the King of Bavaria journeyed to the wilds of the Adirondacks where he opened an upscale restaurant to serve celebrities, vacationers, and local people. Columnist Maury Thompson remembers Alfonso’s.

1980: After a 5.1-Richter scale earthquake, Mount St. Helens in Washington state erupted in one of the greatest volcanic explosions ever recorded in North America.

1860: Abraham Lincoln became the Republican candidate for president on the third ballot at the Republican National Convention in Chicago

1933: The U.S. government established the Tennessee Valley Authority to control floods and produce electrical power along the Tennessee River and its tributaries.

2001: The comedy Shrek—with voices provided by Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, and Cameron Diaz, among others—had its nationwide release in the United States; it went on to become the first movie to win the Academy Award for best animated feature.

Source: Britannica.com

PROPERTY LINES: New York State has a well-publicized housing shortage, which in turn has driven costs beyond affordability for an increasing number of people. City & State New York reported that, over the past decade, New York had created nearly 1.2 million jobs but built only 400,000 housing units.  

PRESENT IN JOHNSTOWN: Across the nation, educators are working to reduce chronic absenteeism among students, even among kids in elementary school. The Johnstown, N.Y., school district implemented a mentoring program that pairs school district people, including Board of Education members, with at-risk students. It is working, and this week Johnstown was one of four schools in the nation honored at the White House for its success.

DOROTHY JEANIUS: Dorothy Jean Tillman II — named for her grandmother, a former Chicago alderwoman — has, at 17, earned a doctorate in integrated behavioral health from Arizona State. She started taking college courses as a 10-year-old. She earned a bachelor’s in humanities from New York’s Excelsior College in 2018.

SWEET NOTORIETY: Saratoga Chocolate Co., founded in 2016 and located in the Downtown Marketplace on Broadway in Saratoga Springs, has been nominated by readers of USA Today as one of the best chocolate shops in the nation. Meanwhile, an Upstate New York bakery that got its start in Manhattan is drawing major food-world props. Mel the Bakery is in the running against four other bakeries for a James Beard Award.

RARE BIRD: A blue rock-thrush, far from its native breeding habitat in parts of Europe, Africa and Asia, was spotted for the first time in the U.S. in April. It's the first blue rock-thrush sighting in North America since 1997, according to the American Birding Association, when the species was spotted in British Columbia.

FIRST FAMILY OF FORECASTING: Punxsutawney Phil, the furry fabled weather forecaster, and his partner Phyllis welcomed two kits to their family this spring. The expanding family will make their home in a climate-controlled burrow near the local library. The couple chose Mother’s Day to share the happy news. The kits are named Sunny and Shadow.

JUST FINE: The Town Court of Colonie in Albany County, N.Y., collected more fines and fees than any town or village court in Upstate New York in 2023, according to the state Comptroller’s Office. Colonie Town Court collected over $1.6 million last year, about $100,000 more than the No. 2 court on the list, the Town of East Fishkill in Dutchess County.

HELPING HANDS: Last week we told you about the woman who was found living inside a storefront sign in Michigan. The grocery store, Family Fare, has made a $10,000 donation to a local organization that provides shelter and meals to people experiencing homelessness.

MARY WELLS LAWRENCE created an indelible brand for New York State hospitality with her ““I Love NY” campaign. She put the “plop plop, fizz fizz” into Alka-Seltzer. And she broke through advertising’s Mad Men culture, quitting one ad agency when it did not promote her to president and forming her own company. She became the first woman to own and run a major national advertising agency — Wells Rich Greene — and the first female chief executive of a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. She was “arguably the most powerful and successful woman ever to work in advertising,” Stuart Elliott, former advertising columnist for The New York Times, wrote in 2002. She died in London at 95.

ALICE ANN LAIDLAW was born on July 10, 1931, in Wingham, Ontario, on the banks of Lake Huron. Her father tried raising silver foxes and mink but that failed, and he went on to become a foundry watchman and turkey farmer. Her mother developed Parkinson’s disease, and it fell to Alice, not yet a teenager, to care for her. Alice was able to attend college at the University of Western Ontario, where she majored in English but kept her writing ambitions to herself. She married a fellow student named Munro and had two children. The domestic demands of those years precluded much writing. She was always “getting apple juice, answering the phone and letting the cat in,” so she decided to master the short story, which better fit her schedule. Ms. Munro’s stories were widely considered to be “without equal,” The New York Times said, “a mixture of ordinary people and extraordinary themes. She portrayed small-town folks, often in rural southwestern Ontario, facing situations that made the fantastic seem an everyday occurrence. Some of her characters were fleshed out so completely through generations and across continents that readers reached a level of intimacy with them that usually comes only with a full-length novel.” She won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2013 when she was 82. She died at 92.

JIM SIMONS was a mathematician by training, and his skill with handling large sets of data and finding patterns within them were put to good use when he transitioned to the world of computer-assisted investing. He founded Renaissance Technologies in 1978, growing it into one of the world’s most profitable hedge funds and earning himself the nickname “Quant King.” “We hire physicists, mathematicians, astronomers and computer scientists and they typically know nothing about finance," Simons told a 2007 New York conference. “We haven't hired out of Wall Street at all.” A prominent philanthropist who donated billions of dollars during his lifetime, he was 86.

“Disappointed and nobody likes to lose, that’s how it is. Can’t beat yourself up too much about one game.”
—    Caitlyn Clark after her professional basketball debut this week, in which she scored 20 points, but saw her Indiana Fever fall to the Connecticut Sun 92-71.  The NCAA’s all-time Division I scoring leader, who finished the game 5 for 15 from the field, went scoreless in the first quarter. She missed her first four shots before finally getting on the board midway through the second period.

YANKEES’ OWNER HONORED: The New York State Senate this week honored baseball Hall of Famer and Red Sox legend David Ortiz with a resolution recognizing his career and philanthropic work. He batted .387 and drove in 11 runs in the 2004 American League Championship Series, when the Red Sox erased a 3-0 deficit to beat the Yankees in seven games.

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Principal Author: Mark Behan.

Sincere thanks to our contributors: Ryan Moore, Bill Callen, Leigh Hornbeck, John Brodt, Kristy Miller, Tara Hutchins, Claire P. Tuttle, Nancie Battaglia, Maury Thompson and Mark Bowie.

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