Remembering Alf Evers

Alf and Ed Sanders. (photo by Dion Ogust)

Alf was deeply involved in the many artistic and intellectual currents of the era. He was active, with Pete Seeger and others, as an instructor at the famous left-progressive Camp Kinderland in Woodland Valley, Phoenicia. He had many memories of the composer John Cage’s visits and performances in Woodstock. Once he took Cage on a mushroom hunt up and down Hutchin Hill Road. He was also close friends with the famous composer Henry Cowell and his wife Sidney, who lived off Route 212 near Reynolds Lane. The Cowells collaborated on a well-known book, Charles Ives and his Music, published in 1955. In the introduction the Cowells wrote that “Alf Evers as a Catskill Mountains neighbor of skill and experience, has been generous with the finest possible professional help over stiles, past technical traps, and through mazes and thickets.” Alf helped them in the editing and writing of the book.

1955 was also the year that MacMillan published Alf’s book, The Treasure of Watchdog Mountain, which Alf recalls “was an attempt to teach children what ecology was, about the relationship of man to the land. It was a pioneer book of its kind. I based it on Overlook Mountain, which I saw through my studio window.” After Alf had written The Treasure of Watchdog Mountain, he had begun “delving into the regional background, with the Catskills as the central thing. I wrote a piece for The New York Conservationist on Overlook Mountain, which had an extraordinary reception. They didn’t pay. I did it because I wanted to.

“I made up my mind to continue writing about the Catskills, and I did. I wrote for local newspapers, and I gave talks. I was thinking then of a book on the Catskills, in the ’50s.  These pieces of mine would appear in the Woodstock and Kingston papers on various Catskill mountain subjects.”

The House in Shady

After 17 years, around 1959, Alf sold the house in Lewis Hollow and purchased a white single-story house on Hutchin Hill Road, part of the Vosburgh Mill complex located just up the street along the Sawkill Creek. Alf transformed the property into his own personal ultra-hilly garden. He used to write in a little cabin that he built himself high on the hill above his house, near which, along the hilltop ridge, he created a labyrinth of shrubs and adorned it with garden furniture he crafted himself. There he would walk, holding his vaunted 3×5 cards, pausing to make some notes for his current projects. “I do a lot of writing while I’m walking,” he once told me. “That helps my rhythm. I try to alternate physical work with writing. When I’ve written something that’s become too complicated, it achieves clarity when I go through it in my mind while I’m walking.”

Attracting the Attention of an Editor at Doubleday

A senior editor at Doubleday named Ellin Roberts (later, when she retired, the Woodstock librarian), wrote Alf a note, saying “I’ve been following the articles that you write. Have you ever thought about writing a book about the Catskills?”

Alf recalled, with a laugh, “Well, I hadn’t thought about anything else for a long  time.” Alf signed a contract in 1963 to write a history of the Catskills. He worked on it for eight years, completing it not long after the famous Woodstock Festival, which inspired part of the book’s title. Published in 1972, and dedicated to Barbara Moncure, The Catskills — from Wilderness to Woodstock was a brilliant success, and has astounded and thrilled generations of readers since.

Alf Evers was instrumental in getting Byrdcliffe registered as a national historic place. In 1978, he prepared a nomination document, sent to the National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places, with the result that the Byrdcliffe Historic District was listed in 1979 on the National Registry. Thank you, o Alf! Alf was also active in 1978 organizing for Woodstock to purchase the Comeau property.

History of Woodstock, published in 1987

Then he began a book on Woodstock. Since Alf was a leading avant-garde intellectual, some assumed his book on Woodstock would be about artists and the Art Colony. Not so, he told them. Instead, as in the Catskills book, he brought forth from the shadows of time a wide assortment of people, places, moods, movements and moments, for the enjoyment of the next centuries. Woodstock, History of an American Town was published in 1987, in time for Woodstock’s bicentennial celebration.

In 1989, at the suggestion of publisher Peter Mayer, who had been a neighbor of Alf’s when Alf lived in Lewis Hollow, he began a history of Kingston. At first, it was to be a fairly short book, with many illustrations — easy for a brilliant mind to put together.  But as Alf researched more and more, and created draft upon draft, he became absorbed with the interesting stories and fact-chains he was uncovering in dusty old books and public records. The book was to occupy the remaining 15 years of his life, against the panoply of many life-threatening ailments.

He explained once how he perceived the structure of his book on Kingston. “It is a revisionist view of Kingston history,” he said. “All this material was waiting in the old records, and nobody paid any attention. What I’m doing is taking each one of these early people, and assembling all the information I can get about the individual to give an idea of what he was like as a human being. It takes an awful lot of delving…Being my age, and with my infirmities, I can’t dash around the city the way I used to. It’s one reason the book has taken this turn. I have the printed materials that were not ever used, the court records and that sort of thing.” His book would feature, he told me, “an interpretation of material that was available, but that no one ever thought of in that connection before. It’s really a book about Kingston. It doesn’t purport to be a chronicle.”

The Hervey White project

By around 2003, as work on the Kingston book was coming to a close, Alf and I talked about a new book. I thought it was very important that he have a new project. At first he wanted to write a book on the bluestone and mining industries, with emphasis on the quarry workers, for whom he felt great sympathy. Then one day he said he wanted to write a book on Hervey White. “I want to call it something like Hervey White — a Maverick Man,” he told me.

Alf worked with White’s granddaughter, Christine Dauphin, to gather material. The Woodstock Guild bought him a digital tape recorder and Alf was going to be the first 99 year old writer in Western Civilization to have his dictation transcribed by an internet transcription service. He was working on the Hervey project regularly while he was rewriting the final section of Kingston — City on the Hudson during his final weeks. Just a few days before he passed away, Alf asked to borrow my copy of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, which he said was much discussed among the intellectuals of Woodstock around the time that Hervey White was founding the Maverick Colony.

Meanwhile, by early 2004, I had finished a book, and had a few months of free time, so Alf and I accelerated the pace of working together that summer and fall. I printed out draft after draft of the book, as he perfected it. Finally, in mid-November of 2004, Kingston — City on the Hudson was done! I brought the manuscript and discs to a meeting with Peter Mayer and his staff at the Overlook Press offices in New York City.  They were excited about it, and decided to publish it in the spring of 2005, around the time that Alf was scheduled to get an honorary degree from Bard College. I’d never seen Alf so happy as when an e-mail arrived from Peter Mayer praising the book.

But that didn’t stop Alf, a famous rewriter, from continuing to work on parts of the manuscript. Of great help during recent years was Alf’s good friend, Karlyn Knaust Elia, then the Ulster County Historian. He was fiercely dedicated to the end. In one of our final conversations he suggested I go up to the State Library in Albany to try to locate a certain old map of Kingston which clearly listed the location of the Indian Katsbaan, or “Tennis Court,” where the Esopus natives played their version of lacrosse, a place he felt that lay near the intersection of current Pierpont and Hone Streets off Lower Broadway.

The Passing

Just after Christmas day of ’04, Alf came down with a cold. I could hear him cough when we talked over the phone. For seven years, on many occasions, I had shouted through the deafness, “Alf! Don’t dare get sick!” I shouted it once again. I came to his house a couple more times to help him make the final additions to the acknowledgements, and to locate some of the images. To my shock, I noticed that, even with his cold, he had made numerous changes to the final part of the book!

On December 29, I called Tom O’Brien in the afternoon. Alf was singing, Tom said, and speaking as if in a dream. Later that afternoon, Tom prepared one of Alf’s favorite meals, a bowl of hot oatmeal, which Alf ate almost entirely. He was quite jovial with Tom, singing and talking in a soft happy voice. “We had a good time over the oatmeal,” Tom told me. Then he went to sleep on his side and passed away. The Rescue Squad was summoned, but could not revive him. Alf’s passing reminded me of the great English poet William Blake’s, who also passed while singing and seeing his dreams before him.

Upon his death, Alf’s archives were turned over to the Woodstock Guild, thanks to a generous grant by Woodstocker A. J. Lederman. His library is housed now on shelves in the Loom Room of White Pines, and his 120 boxes of alphabetized and ordered archive is housed in the offices of the Guild on Tinker Street, with Elia Kokkinen working as a volunteer for the last nine or ten years to sort them out. A Finding Aid, listing the components of the Alf Evers Archive, can be located on the Guild’s website.

Richard Heppner, Eila Kokkinen, Glenn Kreisberg and I have taken on the volunteer task of coordinating the scanning of Alf’s excellent collection of photographs and images in the archive, the goal being to place them, available to the public, on the Guild’s website. We need money for scanning equipment and software.

Coming up on August 29, that’s Saturday, at 8 p.m., at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts is the Alf-Scan Benefit Concert, to raise scanning money. Performing will be Amy Fradon, Leslie Ritter, Scott Petito, Marc Black, Jules Shear, Tom Pacheco with Brian Hollander, Mikhail Horowitz, Gilles Malkine, Ed Sanders, and Michael Veitch with Julie Last. Don’t miss it.

Poet, author, activist, Fug, Ed Sanders is a Woodstock resident. For more of his work see https://ulsterpub.staging.wpenginejournal.com/.