DID YOU KNOW YOU HAVE CHOICES WHEN IT COMES TO MEDICARE???
THERE’S A LOT TO LEARN AND WE CAN HELP YOU
COMMUNITY CENTER
227 Maple Ave, Pine Bush, NY
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4th AT 1:00 pm
PLEASE REGISTER BY CALLING THE LIBRARY
THIS IS STRICTLY AN EDUCATIONAL SEMINAR ON MEDICARE TO HELP YOU LEARN MORE AND ANSWER YOUR QUESTIONS.
The Pine Bush Area Public Library would like to thank all those who came out to vote. We were thrilled to receive a 100% vote in favor of our budget!!
Thank you for your support of the Pine Bush Area Public Library!!
AARP SMART DRIVER CLASS
GET A DISCOUNT ON YOUR AUTO INSURANCE AND/OR LOWER POINTS ON YOUR LICENSE!
SIGN UP NOW!!!
Saturday, October 19th @ 9 AM TO 4:30 PM
PINE BUSH AREA LIBRARY COMMUNITY CENTER
$20 FOR AARP MEMBERS – $25 FOR
NON-AARP MEMBERS
(MUST REGISTER. CALL 744-4265 ext. 2)
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19TH TO FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25TH
THE PINE BUSH AREA PUBLIC LIBRARY IS PARTICIPATING IN “THE GREAT GIVE BACK”
A DAY OF OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE PATRONS
OF NYS PUBLIC LIBRARIES TO PARTICIPATE IN MEANINGFUL, SERVICE-ORIENTED EXPERIENCES.
AS PART OF “THE GREAT GIVE BACK”, THE PINE BUSH AREA LIBRARY HAS CHOSEN TO COLLECT NON-PERISHABLE FOOD ITEMS FOR
THE NEW PROSPECT CHURCH FOOD PANTRY, ROUTE 52, PINE BUSH, NY.
DONATIONS CAN BE BROUGHT TO THE MAIN LIBRARY BUILDING OR LIBRARY COMMUNITY CENTER FROM
OCTOBER 19TH TO OCTOBER 25TH. DURING DAILY HOURS OF OPERATION.
ART PROJECT
JOIN MEADOW, ARTIST/INSTRUCTOR, ON SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14TH AT 10:30 AM TO MAKE “MY HOPES” BOARDS. OPEN TO KIDS AGE 7 AND UP. THIS IS A FREE PROGRAM. MUST SIGN UP TO RESERVE, AS SPACE AND SUPPLIES ARE LIMITED. NO WALK-INS, PLEASE.
CALL 845-744-4265, EXT. 2
FALL OPEN MIC POETRY READING
AT THE PINE BUSH AREA LIBRARY COMMUNITY CENTER
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26TH 2019 AT 7:00 PM
HOSTED BY GLORIA WINTER
POETS AND NON-POETS ARE WELCOME TO READ THEIR OWN ORIGINAL FALL-INSPIRED POEMS OR WORKS WRITTEN BY OTHERS.
ALL ARE WELCOME TO COME, LISTEN, AND BE ENTERTAINED!
IF YOU THINK POETRY IS NOT YOUR THING……THINK AGAIN….POETRY IS ALL AROUND YOU! SONG VERSES, CHILDREN’S RHYMED STORY BOOKS, GREETING CARDS, AND MUCH MORE!
REFRESHMENTS AVAILABLE. NO COVER
THE MULBERRY HOUSE PLAYERS
ARE COMING TO PINE BUSH!
ENJOY LAUGH-A-MINUTE COMEDY SKITS BASED ON SOME OF THE FUNNIEST TV SHOWS OF THE PAST FEW DECADES.
PINE BUSH AREA LIBRARY
COMMUNITY CENTER
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 AT 1:30 PM
Call 845-744-4265, Ext. 2 to Let Us Know You’re Coming.
Frederic Spione
Frederic Spione has an extensive background as a successful commercial artist and illustrator in NYC. Relocating to Pine Bush, NY, Spione now works in his converted garage studio painting landscapes, abstract imagery and whimsical pictures inspired by his idyllic rural setting.For the last 20 years, Spione has also worked in the field of Creative Aging facilitating and training staff and older persons to share memories and life experiences through visual art.Spione facilitates creative workshops for adults, children and persons with dementia. He also provides private art lessons with a special focus on helping people overcome artistic blocks.Frederic Spione is a member of the Pine Bush Area Arts Council (PBAAC) and the Middletown Art Group (MAG).He was a featured exhibitor at the Crawford Gallery of Fine Art (CGFA).
“I discover a texture, see color and shapes or hear a melody that then awakens in me a desire to create and capture mystifying understandings.”
FS
RAVE REVIEWS by Jean E. Eustance
This summer’s reading program was “A Universe of Stories.” With that in mind, last month I reviewed The Astronauts Wives Club. It covered the years 1959 to 1972 and was about the Race to the Moon. The next book, Hidden Figures, starts in 1943 during World War II and ends in the present, with the epilogue. The book covers a great many changes to American life. You could say it is “To boldly go where no one has gone before.”
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race is written by Margot Lee Shetterly. It is upstairs in Adult Services, in the non-fiction part of the Pine Bush Area Public Library. It is about the black women who worked as “human computers” for first NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) and later for NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration.) The lives and careers of four women are the main focus. They are Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden. This is a deep and intense book, and it deals with many different people (not only these four) and their struggles to be treated as dignified human beings.
When I hear the word “computer” I think of machines that make life more complicated. Originally “computers” meant “people who can compute” or, in other words, people who are astonishingly good with math. And these women were astonishingly good. What nowadays is done by soulless machines was done back then by women with adding machines, paper and pencils. It was the math to get rockets up and down and, when they were manned, to get the men back to earth in one piece. John Glenn was one of them: the first American to orbit the earth.
NASA was using IBM computers, but some people wanted the human computers to check on those numbers. Shetterly writes “Every engineer and mathematician had a story of double-checking the machines’ data only to find errors…The human computers crunching all those numbers—now that the astronauts understood. The women mathematicians dominated their mechanical calculators the same way the test pilots dominated their mechanical planes…Spaceship-flying computers might be in the future, but that didn’t mean John Glenn had to trust them. He did, however, trust the brainy fellas who controlled the computers. And the brainy fellas who controlled the computers trusted their computer, Katherine Johnson…therefore, John Glenn trusted Katherine Johnson. The message got through…”Get the girl to check the numbers,” said the astronaut. If she says the numbers are good, he told them, I’m ready to go.”
On page 223, the book reads, “Katherine organized herself immediately at her desk, growing phone-book-thick stacks of data a number at a time…She worked through every minute of what was programmed to be a three-orbit mission….At the end of the task, every number in the stack of papers she produced matched the (mechanical) computer’s output…The pressure might have buckled a lesser individual, but no one was more up to the task than Katherine Johnson.
“God speed, John Glenn,” and he got into space and safely back down thanks in part to Katherine Johnson, the human computer. Nowadays she is called a “retired NASA mathematician” and she is 100 years old and she has written her autobiography. Atheneum Books for Young Readers is bringing out her story, Reaching for the Moon. It is for middle readers. It is now in the Junior Biography Section of the Pine Bush Area Public Library.
Back to Hidden Figures. It’s not all “God speed.” The book starts in 1943 at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, in Hampton, Virginia. The black women joined the West Computers. White women joined the East Computers. Then there’s the cafeteria, which was segregated. “Most groups sat together out of habit. For the West Computers, it was by mandate. A white cardboard sign on a table in the back of the cafeteria beckoned them, its crisply stenciled black letters spelling out the lunchroom hierarchy: COLORED COMPUTERS.
This is a book I can’t do justice to in a review. There is so much more to it than I can tell you about. Many different people and many situations make it a dense and strong book. Margot Lee Shetterly has moved heaven and earth to write about the black women and their families in the space program. And she says that she has not been able to cover everything that she had intended. So you must read this book for yourself, to get the true measure of it. Find it in the non-fiction section in Adult Services in the Pine Bush Area Public Library. And look in Chapter Twenty-Three, “To Boldly Go” for the conversation between the actress Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura of Star Trek) and Martin Luther King, Jr. She was thinking of leaving the show in 1967. Dr. King convinced her to stay. “You can’t leave the show,” King said to Nichols. “We are there because you are there.” There—in the future on a starship which had no signs in its cafeteria about who could sit where.
Click on the link below to access the August 2019 newsletter and calendar:
Rave Reviews by Jean E. Eustance
July and August 2019 should make quite a summer! It’s the fiftieth anniversary of both the first lunar landing, and the Woodstock Festival. For those of us who can remember watching the TV when the astronauts landed on the moon, and who can remember seeing the chaos of Woodstock also on the TV, it’s a case of “Hey, man, where did the time go?”
You know the old joke, don’t you? If you can remember Woodstock, you weren’t there.
Very few Americans were “there” near Houston or Cape Canaveral for the Race to the Moon, but now you can get an “in” with a marvelous book called The Astronaut Wives Club. Lily Koppel published this in 2013. We have this book upstairs in Adult Services in the Pine Bush Area Public Library.
I expected it to deal mainly with the lunar landing of July 20, 1969. To my surprise, the book started with the Mercury missions. On the first pages of the book, the wives are listed so you the reader can follow who these women were (and are) and who were their astronaut husbands.
“In April 1959 NASA’s first spacemen, the Mercury Seven astronauts, were announced in Washington, D.C. and their wives were like America’s first reality stars:…Louise Shepard, wife of Alan Shepard, the first American to go into space…Annie Glenn, wife of John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth; Annie was what NASA wanted the wives of its seven astronauts to be…Betty Grissom, wife of Gus Grissom, the second American to go into space on a suborbital flight.”
In The Astronaut Wives Club, things went on, with the Gemini missions and the Apollo moon missions, and more women were added to the roster as their husbands were chosen to risk their lives. And I was surprised at how risky it really was. On Halloween Night of 1964, a reporter showed up at the door of Faith Freeman’s house, asking about “the accident.” Her husband, Ted Freeman, had died in a crash of his jet, a T-38. The official people, who were supposed to tell a woman if her husband had died, were no where in sight.
The fire in the Apollo 1 capsule was also covered in this book. Lily Koppel writes, “That morning, January 27, 1967, Gus Grissom climbed into the Apollo 1 capsule with his crew, Roger Chaffee and Ed White. This was a dress rehearsal for the actual flight, so while the booster was not fueled, the Apollo 1 capsule would be sealed and pressurized with pure oxygen as they ran through everything, including a T-minus countdown.”
As some of you remember, electricity sparked and caused a fire, and this killed all three astronauts, needlessly, on the launch pad. By 1967, the “protocol” for announcing deaths had tightened up. Betty Grissom was at home, and two of her friends, fellow astronaut wives, just “happened” to come over for a drink, and were there “when Dr. Berry, the astronauts’ physician, arrived” to announce the death. The women who were involved in the space race “knew their unspoken promise, ‘If you need us, come’.”
The book covers the day-to-day lives of the women in the years of the big missions. Obviously, the moon missions were covered, including Apollo 11 which landed humans on the moon, and Apollo 13, which did not. Jim Lovell is now renowned for saying, “Houston, we have a problem”
Eventually the moon missions ended with Apollo 17. Barbara Cernan was waiting for her husband, Geno Cernan, to come back. (He did, safely.) Lily Koppel writes, “Barbara sat in the dark…On his previous Apollo 10 mission, a “dry run” for Apollo 11, Geno had radioed back to Houston that riding around the moon was a piece of cake… ‘It was definitely not a piece of cake for me,’ said Barbara. ‘If you think going to the moon is hard, try staying at home’.”
And that is what The Astronauts Wives Club is about. Detailed, fascinating, and going into the present, with “where they are now.” It is about friendships and heartbreaks and bonds that cannot be broken. “If you think going to the moon is hard, try staying at home.”
