Remembering Alf Evers

(Photo by Dion Ogust)

Thinking of Becoming a Writer at 15

When he was young, he came across the works of Henry James. “I think I read all of Henry James by the time I was 15, especially those prefaces, and that made me think of writing. I’d always written verse, from the time I could talk, and made up little jingles and verse.” But, reading James’ prefaces, “I began to see that writing could be a serious and worthwhile thing.”

Hamilton College and the Arts Students League

In 1925, Alf spent a year at Hamilton where he put to use his Hudson Valley skating skills. “I was on the hockey squad. Hockey I loved. I loved to spin along the ice.” He also became a close friend of fellow student B. F. Skinner who went on to achieve fame as a behavioral psychologist. Skinner had originally hoped to become a writer, just as Alf was considering becoming a psychologist. A few days before he passed away, while he was writing the acknowledgements for his book on Kingston, Alf told me that “one of Skinner’s biographers described him and me as having exchanged ambitions for careers. He became a psychologist and I a writer.”

In 1926, Alf left Hamilton to live in New York City to study painting and drawing at the prestigious Art Students League. It was one of the years in which Alexander Calder was also studying at the League. There Alf met Helen Bryant Baker, who was preparing herself to become a commercial artist.

They were married, and then the Great Depression fell with clouds of poverty upon the Nation, and indeed much of the world. For a while Alf worked as a Fuller brush man, selling door to door. More important for his writing, he took a job as an investigator of people doing business with life insurance companies, an occupation in which he learned basic techniques of research. “I would go out in the morning and prowl around and try to answer questions about people who had illnesses they were trying to hide or people who had something in their lives that led them to think that the insurance underwriters would think they weren’t good risks for insurance. I learned how to develop information and how to evaluate it.” Digging up secret facts became part of his persona, and of course by then he had to be fully aware of his ability to remember almost everything he experienced.

His wife Helen worked those years as an artist for Norcross greeting cards and Alf helped by composing captions and verses for the cards. They were living in Connecticut, where from around 1929 to ’31 he ran for political office. As for politics, his beliefs lay in the democratic left. He had been friends with the Socialist mayor of Schenectady, he once told me.

Alf and Helen would have three children — Jane, Barbara and Christopher (Kit), and so it was a challenge to keep above the economic mire of the Depression when they moved to Woodstock from Connecticut around 1931 with baby Barbara and slightly older Jane. Christopher was born in 1940.

Alf and Helen were living in a studio on Deming Street near the intersection with Sled Hill Road, when, one evening in 1932, Helen Evers said to Alf, “I’d like to illustrate a children’s book, why don’t you write a story.” So he did. It took him about a half hour.  “It was a very brief picture story,” he later remembered, “called This Little Pig, about a pig whose tail was curly, but he wanted a straight tail, and how he got it. It was a humorous story and an immense success.

“My wife had a gift for drawing very charming little animals and people. I wrote the stories and did rough drawings.” Helen would then create the illustrations, “and gave them the charm she was able to give them.”

It was a very successful charm, and together the husband/wife team published something like 50 books for young children. There are adults all over the region who recall their parents reading to them from the Evers books, a number of which are still in print almost 80 years later. “We’d get out one a year,” said Alf, “and they were very profitable for us. I did a lot of lecturing at schools, and on radio programs. This was during the Depression.”

Even though it was the impoverished 1930s, the success gave them a chance to live a full middle class lifestyle. They had a living pattern still common in the lower Catskills.  They kept an apartment in New York City for the winter months, and came to Woodstock for the warm times of year. They were able spend winters in Bermuda, where Alf painted some of his most interesting oils. The May 1938 issue of Children’s Life featured a letter from Helen and Alf Evers on vacation in Bermuda, plus a photo of a spiffily-suited Alf and his wife, and young daughters Jane and Barbara.

In the 1940s the Evers purchased a house on Lewis Hollow Road, the setting for several of his finest paintings. They kept an apartment in the city for the cold months, and continued their collaborations.

In the years after his move to Woodstock, Alf later recalled, “I took up again the interest in the county and the past, which I had felt in my boyhood. I began accumulating files on the past.” Wow, did he collect files! Several rooms of his house by the Sawkill are literally packed with them!

Wisteria Party at the Evers Home in Lewis Hollow

There was an article in late May of 1948 titled, “Wisteria Party at Evers Home.” The piece began, “Though the day was dull the occasion was brilliant when Mr. and Mrs. Alf Evers held their annual wisteria party last Saturday afternoon. Artists were in the majority, but a fair sprinking of writers and just plain citizens attended. The piece de resistance display of white wisteria blossoms which almost covers the front of the Evers charming colonial house in Lewis Hollow. The attendance list for the Evers’ Wisteria Party reads like a Who’s Who of post-war Woodstock.”

Alf was very active in 1948 in the campaign of Henry Wallace as a Progressive candidate for president. Wallace, of course, had been FDR’s vice-president but was crudely bumped by Democratic party bosses who were worried about FDR’s failing health, and prospects of a President Wallace.

In August of 1948, just months after the wisteria party, someone, probably the Ku Klux Klan, burned a cross during a meeting in Woodstock of “Progressive Youth…for Henry Wallace Rally,” about 70 yards from the Woodstock house of Howard Bird. In response the Kingston Freeman for August 31, 1948, published an account with the headline, “Woodstock Agog after Burning of Cross.”

By 1951, Alf had become president of the Woodstock Historical Society, which had been founded in 1929. He was president of the Woodstock Library, and served as the Woodstock Town Historian. Alf was also chairman of the steering committee which drew up the plan for the Mid-Hudson Library System and one of its original trustees.

Alf and Helen separated in 1952. His wife moved away, but Alf remained close to Woodstock till the end. After his separation from Helen, Alf became close to educator and folksinger Barbara Moncure. They were companions for many years until her death in the 1980s. Moncure’s 1963 album, recorded with Harry Siemsen, was Folksongs of the Catskills. With Moncure, Alf organized a series of three one-day folk festivals called Huckleberry Festivals during the summers. Alf recalled that “they were local people who sang or had something to say about folk matters — mostly singing, and I told folk stories in between. Barbara Moncure sang folk songs.” The first Huckleberry Festival was held at the Colony Center, the next year at the Parnassus Square barn, and the third year it was at the Maverick Concert Hall. “It was very successful,” said Alf. “I have a poster for it. The performers were almost all local.  Holly Cantine’s Woodchuck Hollow Band played.”