Maybe one moment can change the way you live the rest of your life

Stefanik has a new career holding, judges, lawyers and state officials accountable

If you are lucky, there are often one or two moments in your life that stand out above the others, instants that define you and guide you to not only be a better person but to leave the world around you a better place.

For Don Shuler, that moment came in Boston in 1965.

Shuler, an 87-year-old retired Baptist minister who now lives in Queensbury, was a graduate student at Andover Newton Theological School in Boston. He had enrolled in a non-violence program that spring and in April he got his first assignment.

Civil rights leaders planned on making a 2 1/2-mile freedom march from Roxbury to the Boston Common.

It was just a month after march from Selma to Montgomery and the ensuing violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Don Shuler was assigned to be a marshall at the Parkman Bandstand, the focal point of a series of Civil Rights speeches.

That's when he came face to face with Martin Luther King, Jr.

“It still fills me with emotion,” Shuler said this week. “I just kind of absorbed the man, just his presence."

Consider that description.

He "absorbed" the man, his essence, what he stood for then, and what he hoped to accomplish in the future.

"The group coming in just stood there," Shuler recounted. "Nobody was shaking hands or anything, and he was very calm, not looking around, just focusing his mind. I can still see him there - not speaking - just standing there for a couple of moments. It still fills me with emotion.”

Listening to Shuler now, it is clear it was not the celebrity of the Nobel Peace Prize winner that day, but something else, something almost impossible to define that changed the way he looked at his life and how he would live it. He would not be content to just be an observer ever again.

That was nearly 60 years ago.

After college, Shuler's journey took him to churches in New England and eventually to Ohio. He spent 25 years in Marietta, an Ohio River town hard by the West Virginia border where serving as a spiritual leader in his church was just part of the job.

When he retired in 1998, The Marietta Times wrote an editorial about his community service.

"In 1989, the Marietta schools were in a crisis," the editorial remembered. "The community, the school system employees and the board of education were divided. A leader was needed to bring all sides together for the improvement of education for the children of Marietta."

That leader was Don Shuler.

Don Shuler, right, while visiting Moscow, Ukraine and Estonia in 1990 shortly after the Berlin Wall fell.

After years of labor unrest, Shuler became president of the Board of Education and brought the community together over four years.

"Shuler left the schools in much better condition than when he entered as president," The Marietta Times editorial said.

You don't just turn off that type of passion.

Earlier this year he shared with me a letter he sent to an editor at The Marietta Times suggesting he read my book The Last American Newspaper.

“Like you, he too is concerned about the future of the local, small-town newspaper and the loss of the voice and conscience it provides to the community,” Shuler wrote to the editor.

That tells you a lot about Shuler, but the next part of he message revealed more.

“I will always be grateful for The Marietta Times and the support and voice it offered, especially when I was involved in the planning the response to the coming of the KKK in Marietta in the 1980s.”

Yes, the 1980s.

In 1987, a Ku Klux Klan group from South Carolina announced it was coming to Marietta for a rally.

The local black church called a meeting to address the situation. Shuler reached out to local black businessman he knew and they agreed to go to the meeting together.

The meeting evolved into a plan to confront the Klan on the courthouse steps.

“I turned to my friend and said one of us has got to speak,” Shuler remembered.

He stood up.

It was Shuler who told the group they were playing into the hands of the Klan.

He told them the Klan wanted a confrontation, or worse.

“We need to celebrate our unity as a community,” Don argued.

The group planned an entire event around the unity theme starting with a worship service at the Baptist Church, then a march to the college green where Marietta students were involved and then a walk to within a block or so of the Klan rally on the steps of the county courthouse.

“We had about 600 people at our rally,” Shuler remembered. “They had about 200.”

So it came as no surprise Sunday when it was Shuler who responded to Will Doolittle's column about seeing the Confederate flag in Saranac Lake last week.

Shuler related a story from when he first moved here. After a black man moved into the neighborhood, the man next door hung a Confederate flag on his porch.

“I was really upset by the flag,” Shuler wrote on the post. He wrote he was tempted to sneak out in the middle of the night and tear it down. But remembering his training from those long ago non-violence classes, he took another approach.

His neighbor was outside talking to another neighbor so Don walked over and said sternly, “I’ve got a problem.”

He intentionally assumed responsibility for the issue.

“Yeah, that flag,” Shuler continued. “It reminds me of the Klan, and several years ago in southern Ohio, I had a run-in with the Klan.”

The neighbor said he did not like the Klan either.

“Well, that’s their flag, and for me it’s a symbol of racism and hate and white supremacy,” Shuler responded.

Then, he made his neighbor an offer.

“Tell you what. If I buy you an American flag, will you fly it instead,” Shuler asked.

“Sure,” the neighbor said.

Shuler bought a couple of American flags that day just in case.

The Confederate flag came down and the U.S, flag went up.

About a year later, the Confederate flag went back up. Shuler saw his neighbor’s wife on the porch and went over and said to her, “I noticed the American flag was getting a little weather beaten, so here’s another one.”

Shuler handed her another American flag.

“We never saw the Confederate flag again,” Shuler related in his post. “Just the American flag.”

Don Shuler made a difference in his little corner of the world. I suspect it wasn't the first time.

The words from The Marietta Times' 1998 editorial rang true.

“Shuler was no ordinary pastor,” the editorial said. “Shuler believed that ministering to his congregation meant ministering to the community, too. He was a pastor who did not let the walls of the First Baptist Church keep him from touching the lives of thousands of Mariettan’s in the 25 years he served at the church.”

That’s quite a tribute.

“The losing of a pastor is a loss for any congregation,” the editorial concluded. “The losing of Shuler is a loss for all of Marietta."

But perhaps our gain.

Stefanik quite busy

Rep. Elise Stefanik should have gone to law school.

She appears to be spending more time filing lawsuits and complaints against judges than actually working on legislation to benefit the North Country.

Back in November, Stefanik filed ethics complaints against federal judge Beryl Howell for her remarks about Jan. 6 defendants in her court in Washington, D.C.

Stefanik objected when Howell made reference to the U.S. being “at a crossroads, teetering on the brink of authoritarianism.” She argued that Howell was promoting the Democrats political campaign theme.

Does that mean the Republican campaign theme is an endorsement of authoritarianism?

Stefanik later referred to those incarcerated for their actions on Jan. 6 as “hostages.”

A month later, Stefanik filed an ethics complaint against Judge Arther Engoron for engaging in “clear judicial bias” against President Trump in his civil fraud trial. And this was before Engoron slapped the Trump organization with a $400 million fine.

Earlier this month, Stefanik also filed a complaint with the New York bar alleging Attorney General Letitia James conducted a biased investigation into President Trump’s business practices.

You may have noticed a pattern.

Last fall, Stefanik sued Gov. Kathy Hochul for signing into law an “early voting” measure.

On Monday, a state Supreme Court justice dismissed the challenge saying that the Legislature had the right to set the laws of elections and the vote-by-mail statute was within those parameters.

Stefanik said she would appeal.

Navalny message

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny regularly corresponded by letter with others in West.

After writing about the potential of another Trump presidency in one of his final letters in December, he concluded by saying “Please name one current politician you admire.”

I’m still trying to think of one.

Election fraud

More than once on this site, a reader has endorsed the theory that election fraud during the 2020 election was real.

After the election in January 2021, the Texas-based  group “True the Vote” filed a complaint with the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger saying it had obtained “a detailed account of coordinated efforts to collect and deposit ballots in drop boxes across metro Atlanta.”

An Atlanta judge filed an order last year requiring the organization to provide that evidence after it refused to share the evidence with investigators.

Earlier this week, the group said it had no names or other written evidence to share.

“Once again, True the Vote has proven itself untrustworthy and unable to provide a shred of evidence for a single one of their fairy-tale allegations,” Raffensperger spokesman Mike Hassinger said Wednesday. “Like all the lies about Georgia’s 2020 election, their fabricated claims of ballot harvesting have been repeatedly debunked.”

Model train open house

The Upstate Model Railroaders will be holding an open house on Sunday, Feb. 25 from 12 to 3 p.m. at 22 Hudson Falls Road in South Glens Falls where it will be showing off their layouts and model trains and be available to answer questions.

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