THE SHAKERS ARE CLOSER to finding a new home here. Not the actual Shakers who lived in northern Columbia County. They’re long gone. It’s the people who preserve and share the Shaker legacy of skill, community and devotion who are closing in on a place of their own in the Village of Chatham.

The Shaker Museum used to be housed in a barn in Old Chatham, an inadequate home for what the museum’s website describes as “the world’s most comprehensive collection of Shaker objects, archives, and books.” The museum also “stewards” the Mount Lebanon site, the founding community of the Shakers.

The late Judy Grunberg first suggested to the executive director of the museum, Lacy Schutz, that there was a building in the Village of Chatham that would be an ideal home for the Shaker artifacts and records. Read more…

THERE WERE CROWDS and explosions the last time I was at the Capitol of the United States. It was nearly 40 years ago. I kept a tight grip on our youngest daughter, who sat on my shoulders. Below us were people everywhere we looked stretching past the Washington Monument, the Reflecting pool to the Lincoln Memorial. Our daughter learned a new expression that night from a boy nearby, a voice in the crowd but no face we could see: “Holy guacamole!”

He repeated the phrase with each fusillade of the annual July Fourth fireworks on the National Mall. Soon enough I heard the expression echo from over my right ear. Once again people of America were celebrating themselves and their country. Hundreds of thousands gathered in a space that belonged to them. And then they left. We walked home. It was 10 blocks away but I never took the official tour of the Capitol.

What I saw on TV and online news streams last week was not a building or a country that looked familiar. The action sequences were framed in the dimensions of smart-phone video. They looked like scenes from an amateur movie where angry monkeys escape their cages. But the cast last week wasn’t monkeys, it was a mob—a term reserved for humans who attack other humans for no good reason. Read more…

THANK YOU. That’s nearly all there is to say. Your support has kept us going another year. We could not have imagined your generosity. You have troubles enough of your own from the pandemic and other hardships that seldom make headlines. Yet you continue to purchase subscriptions and newsstand copies, and click on www.columbiapaper.com. All of it helps.

You’ve noticed that the paper is thinner now than when we suspended publication for 10 weeks beginning in April. That’s not the result of too little news. Fewer pages means lower costs. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. But here’s a breaking story: local newspapers are among the businesses eligible for loans as part of the $900-billion pandemic relief bill approved this week by Congress.

The preliminary information says that money for newspapers will come from an improved loan program called the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which was part of the first pandemic recovery legislation. The original PPP got mixed reviews: some big shots got big loans and shouldn’t have; small firms who got money later wished they hadn’t. The rules in round one of PPP excluded this newspaper from applying. Local banks we contacted gave us the bad news. Read more…