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| May 05, 2024 |
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General News: Golden Memories Book Published
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| Betty Jurgens wrote the book Golden Memories. |
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| In a photo from the book, an army truck on parade on Main Street passes the post office, now Smitchger Realty. |
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September 25, 2008
A new book published by a Cornwall native preserves glimpses of life in Cornwall, Mountainville and Cornwall-on-Hudson in the 1930s and 40s.
Betty White Jurgens, who lived on Wood Avenue in Cornwall-on-Hudson as a child in the 1930s and 40s, wrote “Golden Memories – A glimpse into small town life in Cornwall, New York and surrounding hamlets during the 1930s and 1940s through the eyes of those who lived it.”
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Residents today will enjoy reading the descriptions of life in a more rural Cornwall, when men were avid fishermen and hunters and families ate the fish they caught or the venison they shot along with bread baked in their own ovens and vegetables straight from the garden.
Jurgens said she got the idea for the book at a brainstorming session of the Cornwall Historical Society. She told the group a story about how as a child she and others would walk over to Black Rock Forest to swim in the reservoir where snakes could be seen wriggling through the water. “Everybody loved my story,” Jurgens said in an interview in the house in Cornwall where she has lived since marrying more than 50 years ago. “I said I would go around and gather old stories.”
Jurgens interviewed many of the senior citizens who gather at Munger Cottage and says she is glad that she got a chance to speak with them. Two of those she spoke with, Jake Pryne and Nelly Messinger, have since passed away.
Liz Ewanich helped her with the typing and suggested that photos would be a great addition. Jurgens went back to her sources and found old photographs of street scenes, school athletic teams, and parades that are now scattered throughout the manuscript. In one, coach Glen McGinnis, who still coaches at Cornwall High School, reveals his lifelong love of sports. When McGinnis was in grade school he was a huge fan of Army football halfback Monk Meyer and in the photo he is wearing a uniform like Meyer’s that his mother had made for him.
“Golden Memories” is divided into subject areas, beginning with Fun & Recreation and Public Schools, then moving through the neighborhoods, including Mountainville, and forgotten landmarks like the Blind Home that stood where the town park is today. Jurgens includes a newspaper clipping about Doris Jameson Williams, one of the few African-Americans in the village, who graduated from the Cornwall-on-Hudson high school (now the elementary school) in 1949 and went on to study voice in Europe.
Jurgens says that she finds the World War Two period the most interesting, a time when young men, including her brother, would march down Dock Hill Road to Cornwall Landing to board trains that would take them to the war. As a student, she remembers crawling under her desk during air raid drills and the rationing of staples from food to gas. Jurgens had a job during this period as a soda jerk at Whitney’s Drug Store, now the home of the Hudson Valley Gallery.
Now that she has finished this project, Jurgens, 78, is thinking about what she wants to tackle next. Her four children, including Jeff, who was a star basketball player in high school and college, are grown. She has ten grandchildren and a commitment to working with the Newburgh Ministry that keeps her busy but she is intrigued by the idea of taking up another book project.
If you would like to order a copy of this 43-page book, please send a check for $25 made out to First Impressions and mail it to Betty Jurgens, 14 Maple Street, Cornwall, N.Y. You may also email her at [email protected] or call her at 534-9953. Orders must be received by October 15.
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