Luzerne headliners making history

John Oliver could give Rep. Stefanik a lesson in economics

By Ken Tingley

When my son was working at Gettysburg, he would take us up to Little Round Top right before sunset. We would sit there on a big warm boulder and not only appreciate the setting sun, but what happened there 150 years earlier when one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War took place.

The land remains mostly as it was, as the soldiers saw it when they shed their blood there.

There are precious few historic sites like that anymore.

If you love history, you might want to turn out for the Hadley-Luzerne Historical Society’s Speaker Series on Wednesday Aug. 3 at Lake Luzerne Town Hall. The subject will be Anne Cesar,  Le Chavalier de La Luzerne, the French ambassador to the United States during the American revolution and the likely namesake for the town of Lake Luzerne.

And while the story of de La Luzerne is one few of us have heard before - and important in its own right - it might be the stories from the two presenters who will steal the show.

Dr. Richard Dressner and Dr. David Allison will be making the presentation at the 7 p.m. event and both have some impressive historical credentials.

Allison is the curator-emeritus of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History while Dressner was previously the associate director of George Washington’s Mount Vernon. He is also a long-time property owner in Lake Luzerne.

Dressner became the dean of the history department at the University at Albany in 1978. His wife and he loved the region so much, they started looking for a weekend retreat. They drew a circle an hour’s drive all around Albany and started looking.

In 1980, they found a little cottage on Lake Luzerne.

“Do you remember Papa’s Ice Cream?” Dressner asked me. “I was sitting there on the back porch overlooking Rockwell Falls. I thought it was the most beautiful place on earth. We bought the cottage and we came up every weekend winter and summer.”

The couple fell in love with the town and Dressner began collecting hundreds of Lake Luzerne postcards. He recently moved to Virginia, but his Virginia license plate is “Luzerne.”

Yet, in all those years, Dressner never wondered where the town got its name. Like many of us, he just assumed it was named for the lake.

He spent over a decade at the university in Albany before not only changing jobs, but the direction of his career. He took a vice president’s job at Buffalo State where he was in charge of fundraising. Then, he got the offer of a lifetime.

The Mount Vernon Ladies Association hired him to raise funds to help them preserve George Washington’s home.

Dressner explained how the Mount Vernon Ladies Association was the first national historic preservation organization and the oldest women’s patriotic society in the United States. It predated the Daughters of the American Revolution by 25 years.

In 1853, Louisa Bird Cunningham stumbled upon a crumbling Mount Vernon while she was touring the Potomac River and wrote a letter to her daughter that said:

“If the men of America have seen fit to allow the home of America’s greatest hero to go to ruin, why can’t the women of America band together to save it,” she wrote.

Her daughter, Ann Pamela Cunningham, took the message to heart and helped raise $200,000 to buy the mansion and its 200 acres of property. That’s about $7.5 million in today’s dollars. Their goal was to preserve not only Mount Vernon but all the buildings on the property

  It has been in the ladies control ever since and the organization has never taken a dollar of government funding.

When Dressner arrived he was in the education business, but he soon found himself in the history business with Mount Vernon getting ready to celebrate its 200th anniversary.

It was there on one of those first weekends that Dressner found himself taking his turn as one of the deputy directors who had to be at the site.

“The first weekend I was in charge, I remember walking around Mount Vernon at 6 in the morning,” Dressner remembered. “There was no visitors there yet and I found myself walking on the same paths where George Washington walked, the same rooms that George Washington occupied. It was an overwhelming sensation. I’m standing on the porch where Washington met with Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. You never get over that. I never stopped feeling that sense of awe.”

The story was giving me chills.

“I came to appreciate the goal of museums and historic sites,” Dressner said. “We spent most of our time addressing the issue of if we have a visitor for four or five hours, what does he leave our site knowing and understanding about American history. It was so straight forward.”

Eventually, that appreciation of American history led Dressner back to Lake Luzerne after he saw a letter that was written by de La Luzerne being auctioned online. He wondered if there was a connection to the town he loved. He eventually bought the letter and will present it to the town during next week’s event.

He had known Allison from his time at the Smithsonian and got him involved with the project as well. It’s the story they will be telling on Aug. 3 in Lake Luzerne as they bring a little local history to life.

“That’s why we keep going to historic sites,” Dressner said. “It is so important to keep history alive.”

Explaining inflation

If you don’t watch “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver on HBO, you should. It will make you smarter.

Oliver explained why there is inflation Sunday night. And it’s complicated. It was one of the best explanations - and most entertaining - I have seen yet and does justice to the complexities at work here in a global economy.

Any politician who blames one thing for the inflation we are experiencing right now - our own Rep. Elise Stefanik comes to mind - needs to watch the show and be educated.

While Stefanik regularly blames the spending policies of the Democrats - and there is some truth to that - there are a lot of other forces at work. And without explaining those other forces, she is just playing politics.

Unhappy penguins

Another segment on Oliver’s show this week featured a CNN story about penguins in a Japanese aquarium refusing to eat after the aquarium started feeding them cheaper fish because of inflation.

These are definitely 100 percent spoiled penguins.

Tweet of the Day

Casey Seiler @CaseySeiler

"Looking at what happened with Ms. Stefanik is sad and disturbing because people who know her say she knows better." (Those people are almost entirely anonymous in this piece.)

Dan Weiller @DanWeiller

Those who know Ms. Stefanik well consider her smart and talented but hollow at the core. She is an individual of “ambition unmoored to principle,” said Barbara Comstock, a Virginia Republican who served in Congress with Ms. Stefanik. https://t.co/RSQtVxZqBy