The man with visionary eyes

Doanda Risley came from old Connecticut money. Her husband, Gideon, had visionary eyes. Their household inventory totaled three cups with saucers, a trio of plates, some knives, some forks, and a teapot. Together, they created a city.

STORY: HERE 

Pictures of 2009

I am not a photographer, I only play one, at times, when on assignment and a real one is not available.

Going back over a year's worth of stories and pictures that was 2009, these images strike a resonance with me because they help in reliving a certain moment in time.

1. If you wait around long enough, something is bound to happen.

I learned this listening to photojournalists: find an interesting background, and wait.

In this instance, and as luck would have it, 9-year-old Elizabeth Burdick walked in front of the window display at G. Willikers toy store on Broadway in Saratoga Springs, shortly after sunrise on Black Friday, 2009.

2. Hundreds of job-seekers traveled from as far as an hour away to attend an October Job Fair at the City Center. Ed O'Connor was one of them. O'Connor has worked in the accounting field for 20 years. He has been searching for a job since March, when his employer downsized and he was let go.

3. A Sept. 11 Remembrance Day Ceremony in Saratoga Springs.

Wearing pristine white gloves, members of the city Fire Department set the flag to fly at half-staff.

4. In March, Congressional candidate James Tedisco took reporters on a caravan tour through the muddied fields of the Luther Technology Park, where Global Foundries will be setting up their billion dollar plant.

Several vehicles got stuck in the mud.

The image was captured by pointing the camera at the rear-view mirror while traveling over one of the paved areas of the complex.

Tedisco eventually lost the race to Scott Murphy.

5. After a number of unknown vandals/graffiti artists broke in to the city's skatepark and

decorated it with their vibrant scrawl, a local power washing services company came to the city's rescue to remove the "offensive" paint prior to the opening of the skatepark's 2009 season.

--- Thomas Dimopoulos

It was only a matter of time

Every day, the reporter makes his round of calls to police stations across the region to learn what damage its citizens have inflicted upon one another overnight.

Since the discovery of the mysterious influenza that is creeping across the planet and infecting humans like an invisible ghost, the daily calls of the reporter have been amended to include public health officials in Saratoga and Warren and Washington counties, as well as the agencies keeping a watchful eye over the movement of the virus throughout the state.

We have gotten to know each other on a first-name basis. Soon, we will be having dinner parties together. That is, if we survive.

"The virus is infecting people and spreading from person-to-person, sparking a growing outbreak of illness," says the Centers for Disease Control, in press releases that read like they were scripted by someone who grew up watching too many Vincent Price movies.

"The CDC anticipates that there will be more cases, more hospitalizations and more deaths." Nice.

Reassuringly, the CDC is up on technology, posting updates regularly on Twitter so now anyone in the country can share the quality of their sneeze in real time, provided it is done in 140 characters or fewer.

"With H1N1, you have flulike symptoms," said the voice on the other end of the line during a daily round of calls. The voice was infectious, all right. Immediately, I felt a tightening in my chest, the way it does when it tries to suppress a cough.

"Flulike symptoms," said another voice on the line, who was on the list of daily calls.

My throat felt scratchy. My nose began to itch. And I felt the urge to sneeze.

I put my hand to my face and felt the skin on my cheek begin to roast. Now, there was no doubt.

I read somewhere that the government had squirreled away a stockpile of anti-flu drugs that could save 11 million people, but now, blaring with fever as I was, I couldn't remember where I had read it and the only thing that kept running through my head was the medical community's ultimate fear that the virus would mutate into something even more severe as it moved across the heartland and infected people around the planet.

Sometimes, the reality of a situation appears to you in a way that is clear as the nose on your face. In this case, a runny nose at that. And when that reality dawns, when there is nothing else that can be done, you sit at the keyboard, stare deep into the abyss of the computer screen, and wait to die.

Reporting from Saratoga Springs. Over. And out.

Post-Star Saratoga Bureau writer Thomas Dimopoulos can be reached at tdimopoulos@poststar.com.

After the bombs, a fragile hope for peace

The bombs stopped falling after 23 days.

When the last of Israel's troops left the Gaza Strip Wednesday, more than 1,000 people lay dead, most of them civilians.

Forty-five minutes away, 31-year-old Megan Coss hears the chugging of helicopters and the rumble of fighter jets roaring across the western sky.

Home is a cooperative agricultural community that sits in between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but the distance from the Gaza Strip -- which she says is similar to the distance between Saratoga Springs and Albany -- means she is relatively far removed from the war.

"I try to explain to people back home that it's not like you see on the news. Even though there is this crazy conflict, we have fun. We have everything you have in America," said Coss, who grew up in the town of Greenfield, graduated from Saratoga Springs High School in 1995 and completed her college studies with a desire to teach and a yearning for travel. The combination led her to Israel in the summer of 2000. To Coss, it was the calm before the impending storm.

"Everyone was so optimistic. Then, suddenly everything exploded," she says.

In October 2000, riots broke out in the streets. Banks and businesses were set on fire. People were killed.

"It was scary, and I was clueless to the situation because it was so new to me then. Now, I have a sort of blase attitude about it," she says, although the threat of suicide bombers is always near.

"You can have a false sense of security. The next eruption could be just around the corner. It's a way of life."

Coss met the man whom she would eventually wed when he worked as a guard at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv. Today, he works in the Israeli military, and the couple have two daughters, ages 2 years and 5 months.

Coss teaches at a Christian International School in West Jerusalem, where a diverse student body includes children of missionaries who support Israel, as well as children of diplomats and U.N. personnel who share an allegiance with the Palestinians.

"One of my students is the son of a CNN correspondent, and today he was wearing a sweatshirt that said, 'Free Palestine,' and had a map of Israel without the borders," Coss noted, during a conversation that occurred last week. "I just rolled my eyes at him and gave a little chuckle. He smiled in response. Things are usually like that. We accept each other's viewpoints and leave them aside in the classroom."

Outside the class, the fear of war and annihilation pushes many toward nationalism.

"I will say there is a lot of hate on both sides, but I think that's because people don't have exposure with one another. In times like these, people become desensitized. They start seeing things as 'us' and 'them,' but there are many Israelis and Palestinians who are friends. They have a human connection.

"There are human relationships beyond this war, beyond the terror. It's a different side people don't really see. People just feel despair at these times, because peace seems so far away."

By Thomas Dimopoulos

The Post-Star, January 2009.
Saratoga Bureau writer Thomas Dimopoulos can be reached at tdimopoulos@poststar.com.

Kirsten Gillibrand and Grape-Nuts

During her first political race in the days leading up to the 2006 election, I had an opportunity to conduct a sit-down interview with the then-relatively unknown, long shot congressional candidate Kirsten Gillibrand.

We talked about Springsteen, Saratoga, and cereal.

"My father liked Grape-Nuts and we used to share the cereal in my house when I was growing up,' she said.
'What I really liked when I was very young, though, was Cap'n Crunch.
Later, as I got older it was Frosted Mini-Wheats,' said the Democratic candidate, reminiscing about her childhood, while in her campaign headquarters on Broadway in Saratoga Springs.

Her earliest concert at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center featured The Doobie Brothers. The most recent was last June's appearance of Bruce Springsteen.

One of her all-time favorites was seeing The Clash perform at the Glens Falls Civic Center.

'My first concert (though) was seeing Cheap Trick at the Palace. All the girls in the seventh grade liked them,' she recalled with a giggle that came right out of middle school.

She likes swing music, and hums a few bars of 'Fly Me to the Moon' as proof, and enjoys listening to Sarah McLaughlin and U2.

Gillibrand also holds a special affinity from her childhood of The Spinners, whose tune 'Rubber Band Man' she recites verbatim while accompanying herself with light percussive taps on a table top.:
'Hand me down my walkin' cane/ Hand me down my hat/ Hurry now and don't be late.'

Gillibrand sticks to the classics when it comes to films - 'It's A Wonderful Life' is her favorite - and describes herself as a book nerd when it comes to reading current volumes of political biographies.

As for TV, these days she said she watches '60 Minutes' and 'Meet the Press,' years removed from childhood favorites like 'Gilligan's Island,' 'The Partridge Family' and 'The Brady Bunch,' where her favorite, she said, was 'the middle one - Jan.'

And if there were a TV movie made about her life, Gillibrand said the actress she would want to portray her is Jodie Foster.
'She seems like me - serious, and policy-focused.'

Thomas Dimopoulos
November, 2006

Did the luck of the Irish pull friends through police chase?

The dark-red SUV exited the Northway and swung onto Ballard Road, a police car in pursuit.

After being forced to come to a halt at a railroad crossing to allow a speeding train to pass, the man inside the SUV kept an eye on the passing train that was blocking his escape route.

Another eye followed the pair of officers who exited their squad car and were fast approaching the van on foot.

A few miles away, Niall Roche sat inside a silver Toyota Camry, his father, Billy, and his brother-in-law, Patrick, along for the ride.

Billy and Patrick had made the journey from their native Ireland to visit Roche, his wife, Nikki, and the couple's 22-month-old daughter at their new home in Saratoga Springs.

Roche was working in New York City when he got the chance to relocate his family upstate last spring.

"This seemed to us like a nice neighborhood in a nice town," Roche said. "That day, we were leisurely driving on our way home.

"The funny thing is that 20 seconds before it happened, my father was commenting on how courteous and polite the drivers here are," Roche said about the day two weeks ago when the three men navigated their vehicle onto East Avenue, right into the middle of a police chase.

At the Ballard Road railroad crossing a few miles away, a police officer fired two shots at the man in the SUV, missing his target. The SUV's driver pushed down on his gas pedal, burst through the gates of the crossing and turned onto Route 50, speeding toward the mall.

Alerted to the pursuit of the suspected armed bank robber, more than a dozen other police cars joined in the chase, which zoomed past the mall and toward the city of Saratoga Springs.

Inside the Camry, Roche watched the traffic light above the Route 50 intersection turn to green.

On the left horizon stood the Covell Avenue ridge. On the right was a small billboard with an arrow pointing to the Gateway Motel. Their car rolled forward.

There was the green light, then -- "bang," Roche recalled.

"I saw the SUV doing a roll on its roof and all of a sudden all these squad cars were zooming past us. There were cops everywhere," he remembered. "They told us to stay in the car and not to move. We were in shock. At that point, you think, 'What the hell just happened?' "

The police captured the suspected bank robber, and besides sustaining some minor injuries, Roche, his father and brother-in-law seemed none the worse after the ordeal.

"It could have been a lot worse. We feel pretty lucky," said Roche, who may have been graced by the luck of the Irish at holiday time.

He said he plans on opening a new pub, which he will call Irish Times, on Phila Street in Saratoga Springs on St. Patrick's Day.

published in The Post-Star, Friday, Jan. 2, 2009
Thomas Dimopoulos may be reached at tdimopoulos@poststar.com