Remembering one long night for Bud Taylor
Stefanik votes to keep Santos, despite well-documented ethics violations
By Ken Tingley
As I combed through my collection of Post-Star columns this past spring, I found one that had to be included.
It was on Bud Taylor, who left us this weekend at the age of 83.
Bud Taylor was not the most exciting man on the political scene, but he was a public servant in every sense of the word. He wanted to make a difference. He wanted to make his community a better place to live.
Bud was one of those people who never retire, they just move on to the next project and I suspect that is what we have here.
The column on Bud was my effort to take the reader where they could not go, to take them behind the scenes on election night as Bud made his second attempt to become mayor of Glens Falls.
He had lost four years earlier by 121 votes. The number would be ingrained his his memory for the rest of his life. He had been ahead by 81 votes on election night, but the absentee ballots went the wrong way.
So here on election night on Oct. 4, 2008, Bud Taylor let me behind the scenes as he waited for another verdict.
This time it wasn’t close.
But here is the more important thing to remember.
Bud Taylor wasn’t bitter. He never stopped caring for Glens Falls. He never stopped working for Glens Falls.
In 2011, the Adirondack Regional Chamber of Commerce presented Taylor with the prestigious J. Walter Juckett Award for community service for spearheading efforts to build a concert shell and new field house in Crandall Park. He was also instrumental in relocating the Open Door soup kitchen from South Street to Lawrence Street in Glens Falls. He served on the the Warren County Board of Supervisors until 2015 when he stepped down at the age of 75.
His kind are rare. His presence will be missed.
Below is the column published on October 5, 2008 that is published in “The Last American Editor, Vol. 2.”
Another race, another long night for Bud Taylor
October 5, 2008
You wonder how Bud Taylor got back here.
You wonder what is inside a man at the age of 68 to make him want to go down this road again, to do the campaigning, and put in the time and risk another disappointment by a few hundred votes.
He had served eight years on the Common Council. He had won the Republican primary over Peter McDevitt and he was the center of attention in the ballroom at the Queensbury Hotel on election night three years ago. He was optimistic, waiting to see how it would all play out against the Democrat Roy Akins and McDevitt, who had refused to quit.
It was close and Taylor was winning. At the end of the night, he led by 81 votes. Even though there were still a few hundred votes to be counted, you figure there had to be part of him that was preparing to be mayor, preparing for the next challenge and excited about what he could do to serve the people of Glens Falls.
Three years later, Bud Taylor remembered the number without prompting.
"We thought we had it won," Taylor remembered on Monday. "The difference was 121 votes."
His world came to a halt.
He had completed one career at GE and started another with his own business. This was going to be the third act in his life. And then it was gone.
What does a man do when the whirlwind he lives in suddenly stops?
He looked around the house and found a project. He pulled out the bathroom vanity, yanked out the sink, started painting and tiling to fill up the hours in the day. He had to stay busy.
You wonder what he was thinking in there. You wonder what was going through his mind. And then when the bathroom was done, you wonder how many times he turned to his wife Pat and asked her what he should do next.
And you wonder how many times Pat pretended she didn't hear him or just changed the subject.
The untimely death of the mayor led him back here with another chance for a job he said he always felt he would be good at.
On Monday, he looked tired. He talked about how Pat and he had decided to retire from the business on Jan.1. Pat planned on doing volunteer work and Bud was planning on being mayor of Glens Falls.
At least last night, he wasn't teased with a lead that wouldn't hold up. It was clear that Jack Diamond would be the winner and Bud would need another project to get him through the winter.
Stefanik votes to keep Santos
The unprecedented lying that Rep. George Santos has done since he entered the public eye us well-documented.
Rep. Elise Stefanik was one of her his most well-known supporters when he ran for his Long Island seat. But on Friday, the House of Representatives voted to expel Santos with 105 Republicans joining the Democrats in the 311-114 vote with two members voting “present.”
North Country Public Radio reminded readers of her endorsement in August, 2021 when she called him "my friend and fellow America First conservative."
Santos has since been indicted on 23 counts related to corruption and a recent House Ethics Committee report corroborated the federal accusations.
Stefanik defended her vote saying it was a dangerous precedent to set before Santos was convicted in a court of law.
But 105 of her fellow Republicans disagreed and believed the evidence overwhelming.
There will now be a special election to fill the seat.
The entire Republican leadership - including Stefanik - voted to keep Santos. It suggests they were more interested in power than punishing criminal behavior.
Let it snow
While visiting here in Hawaii, I was hoping to make the trek to the top of the Mauna Kea volcano to see sunset and do some stargazing. We did it the last time we were here and it was truly spectacular to see the stars from the 14,000-foot summit.
The weather has not cooperated so far. It has rained every day since we arrived and on Friday we were informed that five inches of snow had been deposited on the summit of Mauna Kea.
After looking at the video below, I decided I didn’t need to come to Hawaii to experience more snow.
Former P-S reporter
Kathleen Moore, an outstanding reporter at The Post-Star for a number of years before moving on to the Albany Times Union in 2020, continues to make us proud as the education reporter at the T-U.
T-U Editor Casey Seiler applauded one of her recent stories as an exemplary job of local journalism.
“In the past two weeks, Kathleen turned in a compelling story on the decline of Albany’s Free School, a decades-old alternative education program — said by some to be the nation’s oldest — now suffering from a budget dangerously close to zero and a student body that on most days you could probably fit in a single elevator,” Seiler wrote this week. “It was a bummer.”
But it was also important journalism. It was great to see Kathleen practicing the craft at its highest level.
Crandall Library event
Reminder to mark your calendar for December 12. I will be speaking about my new book “The Last American Editor, Vol. 2” and the people and their stories I have chronicled there.
People like Bud Taylor and many more.
I hope you will join me so I can share this little slide of history.
One melty spring day 20-some years ago a white whale of a Cadillac drove through about 6” of mud and slush around the side of our shop (Chicken Coop Forge) in Queensbury. A few minutes later Bud Taylor and Ron Newell knocked at our door. They were here representing the Crandall Park Beautification Committee. They had tracked down the iron fence that had once surrounded the Broad Street school which we had bought from a local junk yard, their plan was to have it restored and installed to replace an aging treated wood fence. They asked if we could add a detail - the 5 point star which was the log mark of Henry Crandall. We suggested adding a small piece of flat bar across all the points for safety. We made a deal and there it is today, still looking pretty good. When we installed it Steve (I’m blanking on his last name at the moment) from GF public works regaled us with a story of having jumped that fence when he attended Broad Street school and getting his pants caught on the pointy iron pickets.
Bud Taylor, a Republican, Ron Newell, a Democrat, weren’t interested in party affiliation but in doing good, lasting work that benefitted the community.
It’s a striking contrast to what Elise Stefanik seems to be about.
One of her worst votes. Stefanik virtually spit on the constituents in his district and indeed on the rest of the citizens including hers. She should cover her mirrors in her home so she doesn't have look at herself after this. As I blame all of the electeds who still are living the lie about the Trump loss in 2020, I have just one major question. Did you have your fingers crossed when you took the oath. This appears to be part of her campaign to be Vice President. While some of us acknowledge that we could be wrong, she obviously is too weak to do that.