Another challenge is the reduction in revenue from the education program, which has been a model for other nonprofit organizations with historic boats, according to Nestler, who oversees a program for school kids conducted at Esopus Meadows. Programs such as No Kid Left Behind and CORE, which emphasize testing over hands-on experience, have caused schools to reduce the number of field trips. “We’ve been losing schools,” Nestler said. “Our costs have gone up as well. It costs well over $1,000 a day to run the sloop.”
According to Nestler, “the peak in terms of our membership was in the 1980s. As we got further away from Pete, various things have fallen from the wayside.” Nestler and other Clearwater veterans reminisced about the annual Pumpkin Sail, in which the sloop would be loaded with pumpkins at Albany at the end of October and stop at every port on its two-week journey south to New York City. “It was a sea-going carnival, and thousands crossed the boat as it sat dockside,” recalled Nestler. “People would get a copy of the newsletter, which had an application for membership, and in port someone would stand PR watch, engaging visitors in conversation and giving them an application. They stopped it because it didn’t make a lot of money, but it was a unifying thing.”
Indispensable
“With the Pumpkin Sail, we got more members just by allowing people to help us,” added Dan Einbender, who started out at Clearwater in 1969 working as a cook and fondly remembers the “pumpkin-passing shanties” that accompanied the unloading of the pumpkins by a long line of volunteers. Einbender, a resident of Wurtsboro who later became a Clearwater educator and started the Rivertown Kids chorus with Seeger, observed that in making the “effort to professionalize everything, maybe we went too far from our grassroots … Pete and Toshi really believed in shared work as being more important with the membership that just writing a check. It was an enormous supportive community, and it had to be because the boat was a lot more dependent on people helping us.”
His suggestion? Do a pumpkin-style sail during the summer, in which the sloop starts in Albany and sails from town to town doing dockside festivals, hosting farmers’ markets, and conducting fundraising concerts at night. “It’s difficult to run an organization without giving people a real sense of involvement,” especially one consisting of activists “who question authority,” he noted.
“If everyone in the Hudson Valley got out on the sloop it would switch their thinking about how important this is,” said Swanzey. “I can’t imagine the implications for the river and its communities if Clearwater hadn’t formed and spawned the environmental movement in this country.”
Greene noted that Clearwater has expanded its horizons, for example through its work lobbying for the transition to a green energy economy, its work in helping form the Hudson River Watershed Alliance, which encompasses communities along the tributaries, and its fight to ensure the continual PCBs cleanup. But “it’s a constant effort to look for new funding. Right now, if you have a great idea for a fundraiser, such as a concert, will you organize it for us? Because we’re all stretched as we possibly can be.”
Here in Kingston, work on the sloop, which is on a dry dock moored alongside the Hudson River Maritime Museum, continues apace, with the crew issuing weekly reports. “Clearwater is so important to the community,” said Lisa Cline, chief operating officer at the museum. “We do combined programming,” including visits by school groups to the Home Port and Education Center Barn, which Clearwater leases over the winter for construction work. “It’s been a remarkably smooth relationship and we’re pulling for them. Yesterday a guy came here who’s clearing his forest and wanted to give us his white oaks to use at our new boat-building shop. We said ‘yes’ and we’re going to give them to Clearwater, which is probably the equivalent of a $15,000 donation. A lot of people are doing that kind of thing.”
I remember Pete Seeger’s television program ‘Rainbow Quest’ on Channel 13 in NYC before PBS was PBS. Building a historic Hudson River sloop to ply the waters of the Hudson was his dream.
As the Clearwater has matured as an organization, it has changed. This is not necessarily a negative, only that the funds that are required to keep the current organization operating are most daunting.
Pete never stopped giving concerts at local libraries. Everything he did had an intimate and human touch. I’m sure that being too big to fail was not something Mr. Seeger ever envisioned for the Clearwater.