The summer of 1882 was a bad time to be an inhabitant of Little Falls as sickness and death raged throughout the village. In those few months, an estimated sixty people died, with hundreds more sickened – over half of the deaths were of infants and adolescents. Cholera, typhoid fever and “brain congestion”, at the time often lumped together as “malarial disease”, were the culprits. Victims of cholera suffered severe cases of diarrhea and subsequent dehydration, with death sometimes occurring within hours or a few days from the onset of symptoms.

I love Halloween. Always have. My earliest remembrance is dressing up in a cowboy outfit complete with flannel shirt, neckerchief, vest, chaps and the piece de resistance, a pearl-handled, silver Lone Ranger cap pistol.

I never thought about turning 80. Because I hadn’t. But now that I’m about to, I was asked by a friend if there was one word that could describe how I felt about becoming an octogenarian.

Two years into the Revolutionary War, the British three-prong campaign of 1777 sought to seize New York’s waterways and thus divide New England from the rest of the colonies.

For the past 8 years I have had the privilege of conducting a history and storytelling tour, “Growing Up on The Southside 1957 – 1970.”

It is important to understand how and why this tour started. It was to have a better understanding of why the “Southside” of Little Falls, NY has such a very special and perhaps unique place in the hearts of each and all who have had the privilege of growing up there during the “baby boomers” period, and those who followed, up until perhaps the late 1970s, when it’s aura and special ethnic qualities faded away.