SARATOGA LIVINGThe City. The Culture. The Life.

My wife tells this story like it happened yesterday: When we were dating, the one time she thought I was going to break up with her was during the week of April 9, 2007, when I didn’t call her for a few days. That was because I was in mourning. On Wednesday the 11th, my literary hero, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., had died, and it sent me spiraling into a deep depression. So it goes.

My reverence for Vonnegut springs eternal not only because of his novels (my all-time favorite is God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater), but also his connection to the Capital Region. In 1947, the General Electric Company (GE) in Schenectady hired him as a publicist. Vonnegut’s debut novel, Player Piano, tips its cap to the Electric City and GE in the guise of fictional town Ilium (ironically, Greek for “Troy,” and not to be confused with the actual Upstate New York town of Ilion) and its Ilium Works (a stand-in for Schenectady Works), respectively. Vonnegut even swiped his main character’s name, Dr. Paul Proteus, in part, from one of GE’s most famous engineers, Charles Proteus Steinmetz.

There had also been a fuzzy memory on my mom’s side of the family that, at some point during his life—and by process of deduction, it would’ve had to have been in the late 1940s—my grandfather (her father), Van Ladd, had either been in a bar and shared a drink with Vonnegut or simply seen the soon-to-be-famous author around town somewhere in Schenectady. (It’s tough trying to fact-check family lore, so this snippet was left out of the magazine story.) Maybe as a sign that the story had actually been true, when my grandmother had passed away suddenly in 2004, and shortly after, our family was in the process of moving grandpa out of his home on the GE Realty Plot to a nearby, one-story home in Niskayuna (his bad knees had prevented him from scaling the grand staircase), I’d saved a few knickknacks from their home for posterity, including a first edition of Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which sat on the bookshelf in their study. (It now sits in my own study.) Maybe they’d bought the local hero’s 1965 novel for a reason? We’ll never know, I guess.

While Player Piano (or God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, for that matter) is certainly not Vonnegut’s best work—check out Slaughterhouse-Five or Cat’s Cradle—it still helps to pay tribute to a city where I spent a sizable part of my youth.

Whenever I find myself on the Skidmore College campus, I immediately feel better about the world. And after chatting with Cerri Banks, the college’s seemingly fearless dean of students and vice president for student affairs, I have faith that the future’s going to be a bright one. Banks compares her job to running a household: “You’re in charge of making sure everyone’s healthy and happy and on task,” she says. And like any parent, she’s got a mind-blowing list of responsibilities. The big difference? She has 2500 kids, who leave the nest every four or so years and are replaced by another 2500, ad infinitum. The administrative duties that fall within Banks’ purview include everything from managing the residence halls, athletics department and student counseling to health services, on campus religious/spiritual life and the international student body. Sometimes, she has to make controversial decisions such as banning smoking and tobacco on campus, which she did last January (yes, puffing, vaping, hookah-ing and bong-ing are banned everywhere on campus, indoors and out).

The job might sound like a lot to shoulder, but Banks has had a lot of practice: Before she landed in Saratoga Springs three years ago, she was Mount Holyoke College’s vice president for student affairs and dean of the college, and prior to that, dean at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. And she’s been a campus role model for even longer. Growing up in Rochester, NY, Banks started out as a part-time student at Monroe Community College, and cleaned houses and worked for Citibank’s Student Loan Corporation to make ends meet. With unwavering support from her family and a number of key mentors, she eventually earned a PhD in Education from Syracuse University. “I wanted to make a real difference in the world, and I knew that college was a pathway for me,” says Banks. “It altered the course of my life; it opened up doors and opportunities for me.”

Even with the job at hand, she’s still an academic at heart: Banks taught a multicultural education class at the college last year, and her scholarly publications include a book, entitled Black Women Undergraduates: Cultural Capital And College Success.

Despite the rigors of the job, Banks has found ample time to enjoy Saratoga living. Off campus, you’ll find her browsing the latest fashions at Caroline & Main, Violet’s of Saratoga and Lifestyles of Saratoga. “I love shopping at the small boutiques downtown,” she says. You can also find her enjoying a meal at her favorite restaurant, The Mouzon House, or digging into a chopped salad at The West Side Sports Bar & Grill.

But catch her on campus, and she’s all about the students, attending their concerts and athletic events. “I have 2500 young people who keep me very, very busy every day,” Banks
says. She believes in her students. And that’s downright inspiring.

Everybody loves to say they were fans of a band before they were famous. As in: I owned Radiohead’s debut album, Pablo Honey, in 1993, along with the rare “Stop Whispering” single, which includes the non-album UK single “Pop Is Dead.” One venue Radiohead never played? The Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC). Had they been a little better known, they’d have probably opened for The Kinks (July 1993) or Peter Gabriel (September 1993) there. Throughout its history, SPAC’s been a great proving ground for young bands. Here are five of the greatest green (or opening) acts that have played SPAC throughout the years.

Phish

In the early 1990s, the coast-to-coast jam band craze was just starting to catch on, even though OG jammers the Grateful Dead, and leader Jerry Garcia, were still very much alive and kicking. In ’92, SPAC crowds would’ve probably been wowed by the guitar heroics of Trey Anastasio from the Burlington, VT-based Phish, but would’ve likely been there to catch headliner Santana. Some 27 years later, both bands played separate headlining dates at the Saratoga venue, with Phish actually playing two.

Nine Inch Nails

A handful of years before their ’94 breakout, The Downward Spiral, and more than a decade before Johnny Cash covered “Hurt,” Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails (NIN) were just another group of poor, young industrialists, trying to get noticed. When 1991’s nascent Lollapalooza music festival rolled through SPAC that August, NIN was, without question, one of the lesser-known acts, with just a single tune, “Head Like A Hole,” getting airplay on the radio. It would be 15 years before they’d headline SPAC on their “Live: With Teeth” tour in 2006.

Dave Matthews Band

It was a long way to the top for SPAC’s perennial darling, the Dave Matthews Band (DMB). With the alternative rock and jam band scenes crossing over in the early ’90s, harmonica virtuoso John Popper, along with his band Blues Traveler, organized the Horizons Of Rock Developing Everywhere (H.O.R.D.E) Festival in ’92 to showcase some of his favorite bands. (Phish jumped on board that year.) By ’93, H.O.R.D.E.’s lineup had ballooned, including up-and-comers DMB, who, the following year, who were billed as headliners, when they landed at SPAC, supporting their then-brand-new record, Under The Table And Dreaming. During their set, DMB played a paltry 9 songs; over 2 headlining nights this past July, they ran through nearly 50!

Kacey Musgraves

In 2013, the year Kacey Musgraves’ whip-smart debut album, Same Trailer Different Park, dropped and won her a pair of Grammys—and a six-spot before she took home Album Of The Year honors for her sublime Golden Hour—she was part of the supporting cast of Farm Aid. That year, the lineup wowed SPAC audiences with headliners such as Willie Nelson and Neil Young. Good luck trying to get ahold of Musgraves’ “Oh, What A World” tour tickets these days; most of her headlining dates have been sold out for a long, long time.

Melissa Etheridge

All the way back in August 1988, a little more than three months after she released her eponymous debut album, a virtually unknown Melissa Etheridge opened for Bruce Hornsby and The Range at SPAC. That show pre-dated her colossal breakthrough album, Yes I Am, by five years, and Etheridge has since won a pair of Grammys, an Oscar and the adoration of millions of fans the world over.

I might not have been born with the brain matter required to become an engineer or industrial scientist, but I do have a close, personal connection to Schenectady’s General Electric Company (GE). For the first decade and change of my life, my family spent nearly every weekend and major holiday in Schenectady at 1089 Avon Road, where my maternal grandparents, Van and Martha Ladd, lived. They owned a majestic, two-story house in what’s known as the GE Realty Plot, a prime parcel of land that GE purchased from Union College in 1899 to transform into employee housing. The 75-acre GE Plot wasn’t any old residential neighborhood; it was a tree-lined wonderland, conjured up by and catering to the company’s top executives. Though neither of my grandparents—nor my mom or uncle, who spent their childhoods on Avon Road—ever worked at the company, at least in Schenectady, owning property on the GE Plot was (and still is) worn as a badge of honor. It’s just one of the countless ways GE engineered the meteoric rise of the Electric City into one of the most important industrial centers in the world, a place where the greatest minds in science and engineering literally dreamed up America’s future.

Nine years before workers showed up to mold the GE Plot into the modern marvel of real estate it is today, famed American inventor Thomas Alva Edison consolidated his various businesses into one-half of what would become the modern-day GE. In 1892, Edison merged his Edison General Electric Company with competitor Charles A. Coffin’s Thomson-Houston Company to form GE. While the company’s founding would eventually mean mountains of dollars of business, the two companies weren’t a perfect fit by any stretch of the imagination; it was a clash of cultures, says Harold Wallace Jr., curator of the electricity collections at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. Whereas Edison’s men were a rag-tag group of genius engineers, loyal to Edison, Coffin’s employees were mostly suits. So synergy took time to happen. Not to mention the fact that the company couldn’t have been established at a less favorable time in American history: The following year was the Panic of 1893, the worst financial crisis to predate the Great Depression.

Of course, GE persevered, and by the 1900s, it was off to the races, modernizing America at an incredible clip, weaning the country off of gas-lit everything and plugging it into the earliest electrical grids. Its state-of-the-art Schenectady headquarters consisted of a 600-acre Schenectady Works industrial campus, dotted with more than 240 buildings and touted as America’s “largest electrical workshop.” “They did all the big stuff here,” says Chris Hunter, vice president of collections and exhibitions at Schenectady’s Museum of Innovation and Science (miSci), which houses one of the most comprehensive GE archives in the country. “With all the engineering facilities, it served as an incubator for products.” Arguably, the crown jewel of the operations was GE’s research and development laboratory—the first of its kind in the world—which worked in service of the company’s business units and was, basically, a giant sandbox for scientists to play around in, day and night, dreaming up products that seemed more science-fiction fantasy than reality. GE’s all-star R&D team included Charles Proteus Steinmetz, a German immigrant who quickly became the top electrical engineer in the world, developing the mathematical theory for alternating current electricity and the million-volt lightning generator—a way to simulate, in a lab, what it might be like for a piece of equipment to be hit with a massive power surge (he also co-founded GE’s research lab in his backyard barn). Bernard Vonnegut—whose brother, Kurt, worked for a spell as a GE publicist and later became a bestselling novelist—was part of Project Cirrus, an attempt by GE at manufacturing weather. (Yes, you read that right.) Also assigned to the project were self-taught scientist (and high school dropout) Vincent Schaefer, who created the world’s first artificial snowsquall and rain shower; Schenectadian Katharine Blodgett, the first woman scientist hired by GE and first woman awarded a physics PhD by the University of Cambridge in England; and the giant among men (and women), Irving Langmuir, who became the first industrial scientist to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1932.

For an audience who has access to the world’s most knowledgeable research assistants (i.e. Siri or Alexa) and is starting to see the first driverless automobiles tested across the country, what GE has accomplished in more than a century might seem like child’s play. But its global importance cannot be understated. As early as 1907, the company began rolling out its first line of appliances, making kitchens into kingdoms of convenience. In 1927, GE brought to market its first Monitor Top refrigerator, and the following year, the first range with a “Calrod” heating system (a heat-conducting ceramic still used in today’s appliances). In ’53, it started selling the first toaster ovens; in ’63, the first self-cleaning ovens; and in ’78, the first over-the-range microwaves. GE researchers also dreamed up the first X-ray machine (1896), American jet engine (1941) and nuclear power plant (1957). At one point in the late ’50s, GE even had its skin in the industrial diamond-making business, with a mine in Schenectady. Just as its spring waters or racetrack did for Saratoga, GE transformed Schenectady from just another city in Upstate New York into a globally famous hub, which at its peak, employed 30,000 workers in Schenectady alone.

Those glory days didn’t last forever—and as it turned out, had been corroding for quite a few years. Despite all the societal strides GE was making for the average Joe, from 1947 to 1977, the company was also dumping around 1.3 million pounds of waxy, oily Polychlorinated biphenyls (or PCBs)—a man-made chemical—in the Hudson River from plants in nearby Hudson Falls, NY and Fort Edward, NY. Needless to say, it was catastrophic for the environment. GE’s contamination of the Hudson—affecting everything from the river’s sediment to its fish and wildlife—in part, led Congress to pass the Clean Water Act in 1972. (PCBs were banned in 1979.) And in 1984, a 200-mile stretch of the river was designated a Superfund site. (The US Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] lists PCBs as a “probable” human carcinogen linked to such maladies as thyroid disease and immune system disorders.) Overlapping that environmental disaster, which has cost GE nearly $2 billion in cleanup efforts—and at press time, has compelled New York State to sue the EPA allowing GE to stop its Hudson cleanup campaign early—was an era of company austerity unlike any American worker had ever seen before. From 1981 to 2001, under the leadership of CEO “Neutron” Jack Welch, so nicknamed because of his penchant for pink-slipping, GE began a series of massive layoffs, which took a heavy toll on Schenectady’s GE workforce. Per a company rep, GE’s regional workforce today is now just around 4000.

As time wore on, the spotlight was taken off the Electric City. GE’s headquarters shifted away from Schenectady, eventually landing out of state in Boston. Then, the Great Recession of 2008 walloped the company, and between 2017-18 alone, GE lost more than $200 billion in market value. And just this past August, allegations were levied against the company by former Bernie Madoff whistleblower Harry Markopolos, claiming that, among other things, the company had committed $38 billion in accounting fraud, comparing it to disgraced energy company Enron and telling CNN that GE was “one recession away from bankruptcy” (at press time, experts seem divided on Markopolos’ claims, though the company has been under federal investigation for its accounting practices). In a firm rebuke, GE’s current CEO and Chairman H. Lawrence Culp called Markopolos’ allegations “meritless,” assuring investors that “GE operates at the highest level of integrity and stands behind its financial reporting.” It remains to be seen what the outcome will be.

But even with its overall valuation in freefall and local headcounts dwindling, GE still has a sizable presence in the Capital Region that can be felt over a trio of locations: its research lab—renamed GE Global Research—whose 550-acre campus was moved from Schenectady to Niskayuna, NY and deals with everything from aerospace and healthcare to defense and security innovations (there’s a second research hub in Bangalore, India, hence the “global” moniker; it also sits adjacent to the former GE-run Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, which is now overseen by the government); GE Power in Schenectady, which has been focusing its energy on the renewables business through wind, water and solar power innovations (perched atop GE Power’s Building 37 is the company’s iconic monogram sign); and a North Greenbush facility that deals with the production of digital X-ray detector technology, used in medical processes such as mammography.

During a four-hour tour of Niskayuna’s GE Global Research center and Schenectady’s GE Power last August, saratoga living was provided with behind-the-scenes access to both facilities and granted interviews with a number of senior-level employees. The week before I arrived, GE’s largest union had settled on a new four-year contract with thousands of employees, many of whom were local. (The IUE-CWA Local 301, which represents many Schenectady workers, did not respond to our repeated requests for comment.) And while the company certainly didn’t connect me with union workers, I was able, through simple observations and interactions with a number of employees, to paint a rosier picture of GE than what I’d walked in believing I’d see. For one, sizable portions of the company infrastructure were either brand new or in the process of being drastically updated. At GE Power, for instance, in an open cafeteria setting, buzzing with all manner of employees, I saw a pair of employee-musicians jamming in a corner on their lunch hour. (I have to admit I was a little jealous.)

All the GE employees I had the chance to meet and interview in person were lifers, who had nothing but the highest praise for their employer (it’s possible that this was all by design, but in mentioning things like the Markopolos report to some of them, they seemed altogether unfazed by the bad news surrounding the company). Take dual 17-year GE Global Research veterans Masako Yamada, a technology manager in software and analytics; and her husband Gautam Parthasarathy, a senior scientist, who specializes in material physics and processes, and who is a Saratoga Springs High School graduate, whom I grew up with. Conducting interviews in two separate buildings, it was clear that Yamada and Parthasarathy were both very much engaged in and excited about their jobs. “I lead a group of software engineers and computer scientists,” says Yamada. One of her unit’s primary focuses is “additive manufacturing”—a fancy way of referring to GE’s industrial 3-D printing business, which not only builds and sells the printers themselves, but also uses the technology to produce products such as complex engine parts. (The business unit itself is just two years old.) “Here, a lot of our job is ascertaining what it is that needs to be done, which is very defining,” says Yamada. That’s practically unheard of in most workplaces. Imagine going to your boss and saying, “I’m just going to do what I want all day,” and having him or her say, unflinchingly, “Sure.”

Parthasarathy, on the other hand, I met with in the additive lab, with the man who hired him in the early aughts, Chief Scientist and nearly three-decade GE vet Steven Duclos. (The room where we eventually talked reminded me of a Westworld set, minus all the rogue robots.) “There’s a common public perception that scientists and engineers are not creative—they’re automatons, they’re [working with] their head down, shoveling the dirt,” says Parthasarathy. (This was in response to me positing that the general public assumes scientists aren’t “creative”—that they’re just folks in white lab coats scurrying around labs with test tubes.) “But to be successful in the research center, you have to have a continuous innovation mindset; if you’re not creative here, you can’t be successful,” he says. Example: Cincinnati’s GE Aviation developed a turbo-prop engine for a business jet using just 12 additive parts. Before the age of 3-D printing, that same engine had been constructed out of 855 parts. “Every single day, things are being made here that, in many cases, have never been [made before] on the planet,” says Parthasarathy. (Behind a wall of glass, a trio of plain-clothed scientists—identified, simply, as Bob, Victor and Jack—stood around an additive machine, working with a bed of fine metal powder and a laser in order to make a metal part, seemingly out of thin air. They looked like they were having fun. So I asked what they were doing. Duclos said, with the germ of a chuckle in his voice, “We can’t tell you what they’re doing right now.” And the room dissolved into laughter.) “In this business, it’s extremely important to be humble,” says Parthasarathy. “If everything everybody touched turned into gold, it wouldn’t be research or difficult.”

Last year, I found myself back on the GE Plot, more than a decade following the death of my grandparents, parked illegally in front of their Avon Road property, which had exchanged hands multiple times since I’d last been there. I got out of my car and snapped a photo of the house for Instagram, and as I was writing up the post, its current owners—perfect strangers to me—emerged, at first skeptically, and eventually warmed to me and took on a tour of my old childhood stomping grounds. The next time I drive by there, I’ll think of my grandparents, for sure (I miss them every day). But I’ll also think of a time when Schenectady—as difficult as it may be to wrap my head around nowadays—was a much, much bigger deal than Saratoga Springs could’ve ever dreamed of becoming. And in many ways, it still is.

While I’ve been writing for saratoga living and its website, I’ve gained a new level of respect for my alma mater, Skidmore College. It’s even more of an inspirational place than I could’ve ever imagined. Case in point: It’s where Emmy-nominated film and TV composer Nathan Barr (class of ’95)—best known for his complex scores of hit series such as FX’s The Americans and HBO’s True Blood—wrote his first serious compositions as a music and English double major. (Editor’s note: When he was growing up, saratoga living Executive Editor Will Levith had the lesson after Barr’s with then-Skidmore cello teacher Ann Alton.)

After finishing up at Skidmore, Barr’s graduation present to himself was a four-month road trip in a mid-size bus from New York City all the way down to Brazil. It may seem like a digression in Barr’s musical journey, but when the Skidmore graduate moved out to Los Angeles after the trip, the story of his odyssey through the Americas helped him score an interview for an auspicious assistantship with famed Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer, who won a Best Original Music Score Oscar in 1995 for The Lion King. “That caught Hans’ eye,” says Barr of his trip. “He told a friend of mine that anyone who does stuff like that was worth getting to know better.” The application process was narrowed down to just three candidates and, in Barr’s words, he and Zimmer simply “hit it off best.” “That was a crash course in the industry,” says Barr of his time working under Zimmer. “During that job, I landed my first agent—really, my only agent—and that launched my career.”

Barr’s come a long way in his nearly quarter-century on the job. In 2013, he became the first composer in Emmy history to be double-nominated in the Outstanding Original Main Title Theme category for his work on Netflix’s Hemlock Grove and the aforementioned The Americans. (For the latter show, Barr even got to write a song with legendary guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend of The Who.) And Barr’s star hasn’t stopped rising; currently, he’s composing music for shows on Amazon, Hulu and a brand-new drama called Uncle Frank from True Blood creator and Oscar-winning film writer/director Alan Ball. “It’s been an incredibly busy year in a great way,” says Barr. Music to his ears.