For the past fourteen years, Shabir Kamal, 58, has been a nurse in the emergency room at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital. He’s a tall man, positive, talkative. But because most people think all nurses are women, pretty much every time he parts the curtains to attend to a new patient, he is greeted with “Thanks, Doc.”

Dorothy (Dotti) Osterholt is the daughter of the 95 year old Betty Kennedy of the previous profile for this newspaper. Dotti was born in 1956 in Norfolk, Virginia. Five years later, in 1961, her family moved to Concord, Massachusetts. In 1975, Dotti graduated from Concord/Carlisle High School. In a very real sense two experiences during that time motivated her future.

Betty was born July 19, 1930. She’s now 95 and lives in Westminster West. Every Monday evening she joins her sixty league members competing at Brattleboro Bowl.

For the past 59 years, Wayside Fences, located on Marlboro Road in West Brattleboro, has enabled three generations of the Martin family of hardworking people to make a living and provide more and more services to their community.

Local folks working the farm; Jamaicans picking most of the apples; a native Dummerston woman with two boys; a young family man from Brittany; heirloom fruit trees on land farmed since the 1700’s by local Vermonters. It’s all a remarkable local story, with Dummerston citizen and world-renowned filmmaker Robert Flaherty’s story thrown in for good measure!

On Feb. 8, just a few days ago, Calvin Powling, Jr., a logger from Newfane, was called to the stage in an auditorium in Barre in front of hundreds of fellow Vermont loggers. The Vermont Forest Products Association named him “Vermont’s Outstanding Logging Operator, 2024” at the organization's annual meeting.

The Brattleboro Reformer's Managing Editor Melanie Winters has been a
professional journalist for over 35 years now, but her connection to
the newspaper industry goes back even further than that.

Painters, carpenters, bankers, teachers, travellers, electricians,
plumbers….. many folks buy Susie Duprey’s stuffed sandwiches or
baguettes most noontimes from the Walpole (NH) Grocery on Main Street.

Ruthann Rudel is one of many here in southeastern Vermont to have recently moved here.

Ken Brautigam's fellow teachers at The Grammar School in Putney refer to him as their Pied Piper. 

The Momaneys, most from Dummerston and Brattleboro, were and are house painters. Moe’s father was, his Dad’s cousin, his uncle Walter, his Uncle Ed, his brother Mitch….. Moe’s son Terran works with him now and his daughter Ambria even got into the business for awhile.

Jumi Cha has had a clothing repair and alteration shop in the Vermont Marketplace at 580 Canal Street just off Interstate 91, Exit 1 for the past several years. (He set up his first shop in The Brooks House in Brattleboro just over 20 years ago.) He was born in Incheon, Korea, just west of Seoul, in 1952, which makes him 73 today. He lived in Incheon for most of his early life. His father, who retired in 1970, was a policeman most of his life; his mother was a hair stylist and ran a beauty shop. In 1985, at age 33, he married Euisoon Jung and they lived in Incheon.

Natalie Sensor is 19. She will be twenty on June 17, 2025 and is already employed full-time by M and T Bank. She is being trained and is, for the time being, a “Float Teller”. When the M and T Banks in Newfane, Bellows Falls, Putney, Wilmington, Newfane or maybe even Chester, are short a teller for a day or more due to ill-health or other reasons, Natalie fills in. In the meantime, she’s being trained by the bank to gradually move higher up in the business. When she works in Putney, she works with three other women who manage the business there, all of whom are professionals, all of whom love working together and having a very good time together and with customers. One of them referred to Natalie as “a ray of sunshine.”

Ruth Grandy has lived all but five or six days of her 81 years in Westminster, VT. She was born July 18, 1943 in the hospital in Walpole, New Hampshire, then adjacent to the Walpole Library on Main Street. She and her mother spent a few days in that little hospital and then went across the Connecticut River to their home in Westminster. She never left town.

Ken Fitzkee and Liam Terry work as a team for Jancewicz & Son Roofing in North Walpole, NH. Ken lives right there in town; Liam lives just across The Connecticut River in Bellows Falls. Ken is what the company calls a Project Manager who gets the initial workorder from management but from that point on these two roofers-craftsmen work together out of a two-seater company truck. (Each day the company sends out seven or eight roofing crews, one insulation crew, and five or six carpentry crews ranging from two to six guys each day.) They work throughout southern Vermont, Northern Massachusetts,and Eastern NH, pretty much within a 1 ½ hr. driving radius from North Walpole.

In 1982, then Windham County Sheriff Bill Graham hired Holly Ellis as a part-time dispatcher. Graham would have known Holly as a girl because he had grown up with her father in Putney. In fact, Holly’s father, Ken Ellis from Putney (and her mother Shirley Stomberg - originally from Wisconsin), were both well-known to Sherrif Graham growing up. So, in 1982, when the previous day-shift dispatcher, Nancy Kent, moved up to the Office Manager position, Graham hired Holly to replace Kent full-time. In May, 2024, 42 years later, Holly will soon be retiring from her role as an administrative assistant in the Sheriff’s Department now located on Old Ferry Road.

Lisa (Patno) Bianconi was born in Rutland, Vermont in 1963. In 1981 she graduated from high school there, having been deeply engaged in music, band choir and debate and athletics. Four years later she earned a degree from Norte Dame College in Manchester, NH in 1985 with a Bachelor’s degree in music education. In 1989 she  earned a Master of Education from Keene State College. At 21 years old,  Lisa looked for work in music education and in two weeks or so accepted the job as the Music Director at Kurn Hattin Homes for Children in Westminster, VT.  She’s still teaching with passion there after 39 years.

Daisy (Goldschmid) Unsicker was born in 1976 on Daigle Road in Westminster where her mother Raine Kaine (her father is Tom Goldschmid.) had planted lovely perennial beds all around their home. Even before Daisy started first grade at the Westminster West School – where Claire Oglesby and this writer’s wife, Mary Hayward, were her teachers in grades 1-4  – she helped her Mom with flowers as well as their family’s large vegetable garden. 

Imagine you’re in your late 60’s. You’re living in calm, quiet, woodsy Marlboro with your husband. You’ve just retired from a professional life teaching art at the college level. Your two daughters in their late 30’s are living happy, productive lives here in the Northeast. Everything is coming up roses. 

 “We drove schoolbuses and got our kids safely to school.” That’s what Sandy McDermid, now 76, and her husband Archie, now 83, both told me they had done for a living – both now retired.