Conversation with Parry Teasdale

By Renee Samuels

Once upon a time there was an editor at the Woodstock Times known as Parry the Kind-hearted. Everyone familiar with Parry Teasdale remarks on his integrity, his gentleness, his soft-spoken good humor and the rarity of his character. He’s currently editor of The Independent, a twice-weekly newspaper out of Hillsdale, NY; also, he is featured on the “Roundtable” program at 9:05 am on WAMC-FM every third Friday or so, with his sweet Smooth Hair Fox Terrier, Hopper. Parry is the author of Videofreex: America’s First Pirate TV Station & The Catskills Collective That Turned It On (Hensonville, NY: Black Dome Press, 1999)



Renee Samuels: You are the most articulate person I know, and I’m curious if it’s anything you’ve actually studied.

Parry Teasdale: It takes some study in the sense of thinking about what you’re saying and also emulating what other people do that you like. I’ve used my voice on either videotape or audiotape for all of my adult life, and if you’re a good self-critic, you force yourself to think in complete thoughts.

RS: Who did you learn to speak well from?

PT: I have the advantage of coming from a family where my parents were both educated, and they spoke clearly.

RS: But not all parents who are educated talk to their children much or at all. Did you have a lot of family interaction?

PT: Yes. My mother told us stories and sang to us, and she was very vocal, and so was my father. When I was young, my father read to me, from, I suppose children’s books, but later, he read history books to me. He was reading a series on the Civil War by Bruce Catten, and he would read them out loud in the early evening, and it got me accustomed to the spoken word, and I’ve always liked radio, as well.

RS: I would think having your father reading to you would make a great deal of difference.

PT: Yeah, and that was a wonderful way for us to communicate and for me to be with him and listen to what interested him, and since it was about the Civil War, it had violence and adventure and all the things kids like, so I think that probably did influence me; and as I say, my mother also made up stories. Every once in a while they’d get involved in amateur theatricals in the community, so they’d write new lyrics to popular songs, and it seemed natural to do that. My grandfather on my mother’s side, who was still alive when I was a child, was a physician, but he wrote an annual newsletter that he sent around, so there was a tradition of communicating verbally and through words.

RS: What about Videofreex?

PT: Videofreex started basically at the Woodstock festival when I met a guy named David Cort, and he shot video and I shot video, and so we were able to record some of the people interacting around the festival. We got together at David’s loft, he lived with a woman named Curtis Ratcliff, and they invited me to stay with them, which was very generous, and we edited the tapes, and then we went around New York just shooting things that were going on there, videotaping the art scene, which was very lively in 1969. I was actually living in their loft and in my beat-up, '63 VW bus and also occasionally crashing in other places and at home. Then we met a guy who was a big executive at CBS, and he was very interested in the social ferment at the time, and he was eager to document it and use it for entertainment purposes on network television. So he wanted to bankroll a show, and we agreed to provide him with footage. His name was Don West, and we presented the show to CBS, and the head of programming for the whole network came out, he was a little drunk, and he said, “You people are about five years away from being on network television,” and he was right to the year, actually. About five years later, a group called TVTV, which some of the people I worked with also were involved in, had a show on the new television network called the Public Broadcasting System, PBS. So he knew television.

RS: Drunk as he was.

PT: Drunk as he was, he understood television. We split from CBS and didn’t do anything more with them, but we did end up getting a lot of experience and equipment from that, and we formed a group; there were about nine adults involved in making videotapes and experimenting with this new medium, and it was difficult because there was very little money for it. But in 1971, the New York State Council on the Arts put a lot of money in video and film, and we got a grant, and we decided it was too expensive to stay in the city, and that there was stuff to be done upstate, and worlds to explore, so we moved to a big, old boardinghouse in a place called Lanesville, in Greene County but on the Ulster County border, and there we lived together, and after about a year, set up a pirate TV station, and we were broadcasting to the local community on Channel 3, Lanesville TV, and we did that for about five or six years, and actually the group continued in one form or another in the house from '71 until about '78.

RS: You had your three children there?

PT: Well, during that period, yeah, Sarah, my eldest daughter came first, and then Chloe was born in '77, but we moved out of Lanesville, Carol [Von Tobel] and I, to Phoenicia, in 1975, and both of us continued to work at Maple Tree Farm in Lanesville, but I then had to get more work, because I had to support two kids and eventually three kids. So I was really doing less and less with them and more work that I could get paid for.

RS: Like what?

PT: Mostly, to begin with, it was in production and directing and writing scripts for industrial videos. But I went from actually producing a video on a demonstration against the Seabrook nuclear power plant and started the next week on Wall Street.

RS: Was there any ethical question involved there?

PT: There was theoretically, and when I was there as a practical matter, it was fascinating, because I got a bird’s-eye view of the inside workings of this most powerful bank, at the time, in the world, Morgan bank. I was working with the top executives in the company, and they were the international bank, and it gave me tremendous perspective, a lot of respect for the intelligence of the people, and I saw the capitalist system in a way that I think people only can imagine if they haven’t seen it. For instance, I saw them, in the '70s, write off nuclear power as an investment, and still to this day there hasn’t been a new nuclear power plant built, and it wasn’t because they opposed nuclear power; they didn’t. But it just wasn’t good economics. They didn’t always make good decisions, but they made a lot of good decisions, and they had a lot of money and a lot of power. Money is power, and it was interesting to see how they wielded that power. Then I either had to make a greater commitment and move back to the city or do something else, and at that point I did some consulting and set up programming for a local cable TV company in New Jersey. Then I ended up starting a consulting firm with a friend of mine in Washington, D.C.; he had been a lawyer for the Federal Communications Commission, and I had written a report for them, and then they passed this regulation allowing these stations, like our Lanesville station, to exist where they’d been illegal before, and we helped people try to get stations started. It wasn’t very successful, it was kind of the luck of the draw, but it was an exciting time to be in Washington, D.C. It was the transition from Carter to Reagan.

RS: Were you commuting?

PT: I was for a while; I used to get on the shuttle. I did it for a number of years and was reasonably successful, but it wasn’t enough to satisfy me, I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do, which was to make programming and reach out to audiences. In the end, I found this funny little part-time job with the Woodstock Times.

RS: How did that happen?

PT: I was interested in the religious TV station that still, I think, comes out of Poughkeepsie, so I wrote a story about it for the Woodstock Times, and Geddy [Sveikauskas] published it.

RS: Did you propose the story ?

PT: Yeah, but Geddy and I were well acquainted, and he asked me if I’d write for the paper, and I wasn’t quite ready, I was involved in the consulting. Then I did something else for him, and that basically was at a time when the consulting was so hit-and-miss that I was worried about being able to support my family, so he and I agreed I’d be a part-time stringer, a reporter. I called myself the foreign correspondent, because I was covering Shandaken and Olive. Then the editor, Marguerite Culp, was ready to make a change after doing it since pretty much the inception of the paper, and Geddy was looking for somebody to first of all share the responsibility and then take it over, I guess, eventually, and in a very short period of time, that’s what happened. She left, and I took over as the editor, and I was there for 15 years. I started in 1985.

RS: I started in 1988.

PT: Actually I think I started editing there in '86, because I think for a year I was still doing mostly consulting. But it got pretty intense pretty quickly. It was still the days when we worked through the night, and Spider and Anita [Barbour] were there, and Spider would be slamming his fist on the machine and calling it an “idiot nostril beast.” It was wonderful. What a cast of characters. The people I worked with I will never forget, because they were each such individuals, and it was a little bit like a therapeutic community.

RS: You used to say we were all damaged.

PT: Yeah, damaged only in our inability to accommodate ourselves to all the norms of society.

RS: Maybe society was damaged, and we all had that perspective on it.

PT: Well, it was one of the things Woodstock welcomed and encouraged. It is a place where people are more free to express themselves and have fewer conventions to live up to, I think, and that’s one of the things that makes the community special. The paper reflected that, but that didn’t make it particularly efficient, and it didn’t make it particularly orderly. Whether it was good for the product in the end, I don’t know. We grew very rapidly for a while, and it was very exciting, and then there were doldrums we hit, as well. I still remember some of the most egregious mistakes I ever made in my journalistic career. Endorsing two people for the same seat on the school board would be one of them.

RS: Not you?!

PT: It was just one of those things, and they wrote to me and they said, thank you very much, but we’re both running for the same post. And one time we reversed the headlines on the front page, that was exciting, too. But by and large I think we had some wonderful triumphs, and we really did some fantastic journalism and good cultural reporting, certainly Mik [Mikhail Horowitz, the “Cultural Czar”] was a joy to work with and did wonderful things.

RS: Those of us who worked with you felt you were the best type of leader as far as keeping your cool, being very positive, production-oriented, not wasting time on egotism or being the boss. Nothing was sacred. What suited you to that role?

PT: I honestly don’t have any sense of it other than it doesn’t seem to me to be very productive to indulge in panic. If you want to get something done, you have to simply say, okay, this isn’t working, but we’ve got to deal with it now.

RS: Because we were deadline-oriented.

PT: There was always a deadline, and I guess I like deadlines, or I wouldn’t do the business. It’s something I thrive in.

RS: Also you like working with people. It was a service organization in the sense that we were providing something to the community. It was reality-based…

PT: …most of the time…

RS: …as far as you were trying to get the news in there. Recently Geddy told me it isn’t as important to have all the facts in as it is to be colorful.

PT: Newspapers are suffering, in this country, especially, as far as circulation. Fewer people are reading newspapers, because newspapers were a habit that came from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But then, as television came along, people stopped needing newspapers for what they felt they needed to be informed and entertained. So what’s happened is the audience for newspapers is dying because older people read them and younger people don’t. But whatever the reasons, newspapers are trying to figure out how they should relay information to people. I don’t think it’s necessarily a conflict between being colorful and being accurate, and I don’t think you should have to choose. But it’s a challenge.

RS: How about the difference between the Woodstock Times and The Independent?

PT: The paper I’m at now is the largest circulation paper in the county, even though this is a much smaller county and more conservative and a very different place in its history, its geography, its make-up, in a lot of ways. In any case, Columbia County—and southern Rensselaer County, which we also cover—is a smaller place in terms of population, but the circulation of the paper is larger than the Woodstock Times, and we are really in many ways the paper of record. We’re the biggest paper, whereas the Woodstock Times was the paper of record for Woodstock but not for a broader community. Also, we’re much more a hard-news paper. We need to get out news about, well, 21 towns and a couple of cities and nine school districts, so it’s a lot of information. We do a lot of cultural reporting, but we also do a lot of the spaghetti dinners and the people who won awards and those kinds of things.



RS: You were working on a book on the Vietnam era.

PT: I had hoped to do a book on American males who were of draft age during the late '60s and very early '70s. Some of the tapes were destroyed by the tape machine, so I wasn’t able to capture all the interviews I did, but I still have hopes that some of that information can be resurrected. The other part of it is that my job has taken so much more time than I had anticipated that I have far less time to work on it. So that book has to wait, but I think the topic is still relevant, because it’s not clear to me yet that this government won’t institute a draft of some kind.

RS: Isn’t this a historically low year for enlistment?

PT: They’re not meeting their recruiting goals. I don’t think it’s radically downsized the ability of the military to gather new people. The military in itself is not a bad career for lots of people, but when the military is abused as it’s been by this administration to fight a war that was based on bogus premises, and then to not allow the military to prepare for the aftermath, even though the best minds available said there was going to be an aftermath, is an abuse of the military. I have great respect for the military, but I think there’s an onus, at least a duty citizens have to say no, this is not the way to use our military, and certainly Iraq seems to me to be an example of how we shouldn’t abuse it, and the way we’ve abused it has really pointed out how it’s not the military’s fault, it’s the civilian government’s, if there’s something going wrong, and there is something going wrong.

RS: The book you did do, Videofreex: America’s First Pirate TV Station & The Catskills Collective That Turned It On, what kind of experience was that?

PT: It was going back and looking at a lot of tapes and remembering a lot. It’s basically a memoir, but it also tries to encompass what happened with this Lanesville TV project, which was really different, because no one had done it as far as I know anywhere, set up a pirate TV station and really broadcast to a community.

RS: How did the FCC not know?

PT: Because it was so out of anyone’s realm of consciousness that a bunch of long-haired people could start up a television station and broadcast on a regular basis, that when the FBI was investigating us, as they were a lot of people in the Catskills in the 1970s looking for Patty Hearst, which I thought was a ruse at one point, but it turned out, Patty Hearst was in the Catskills, yeah, she was in Sullivan County for a while. Anyway, when they asked questions about the Videofreex in Lanesville, they were told—because we saw the FBI reports, I got them a few years later—that we were polite young people who lived communally and broadcast on a local TV station. The only thing we were doing that was illegal was broadcasting on this frequency which we had no right to use, and in fact, when I was a consultant to the FCC, they did a check to find out whether they’d ever had any complaints, and they’d never had any complaints about the Channel 3 causing interference to other people. I think one of the reasons is because we always had a telephone number on the screen when we were broadcasting saying if you are getting interference, or if you have any questions, call us up. In one case we were interfering with Gert Neil, the woman who collected our garbage, and she said she wanted to watch All In The Family, and we were interfering with that, so we shut the station down so we wouldn’t interfere. And why would anybody think to go to the federal government, anyway, to complain?

RS: When you were writing the book, was it a sentimental journey for you?

PT: I don’t think of it so much as sentimental as I wanted to commit it to paper in a way that seemed to me to make sense. Actually it started with an article I wrote for Geddy’s Ulster magazine, and then I decided I would expand it into a book, and I found Debbie Allen at Black Dome Press, who was willing to take a chance on it, and I’m just delighted, because the relationship with Black Dome has been wonderful. I look at it as an important part of my life and something that taught me a great deal and brought me into contact with lots of different people, including neighbors I might not have had a relationship with otherwise, the people in Lanesville. We had dinner with folks, and they wanted us to cover the stocking of the trout stream, and they wanted us to cover birthday parties and to show their kids singing Christmas carols, and we showed that back to the community. It really is part and parcel of a lifetime I’ve spent in community media, because I find you have to be more responsive that way. It doesn’t mean you can’t think about international and national issues, but it means you have to be responsible and answerable for the things you broadcast, because people will meet you on the street and challenge you, and they’ll write you letters if you’re a newspaper, and they’ll call you up if you’re a television station.

RS: One memory I have of the Woodstock Times is you at your desk at the plate-glass window, and even though we weren’t in the center of town, people would drive over there because they knew they could get a fair hearing from you, you would listen to what they had to say.

PT: I think I’d have to credit the fact of that traffic to the whole newspaper being there. People would come in to place an ad, then they’d want to talk to the editor; or they’d come in to check an ad in the production department, and they’d want to talk to the salespeople. And it was such a small space. It was a bit like a rat’s maze in terms of those rooms, and it was so crowded. When you had everybody there, if you remember, in those early days when we were still just marginally computerized, and all the pages were being laid out by hand, and paper was knee-deep on the floor, and the ad people were rushing around and everybody trying to get a phone line at once, it was a bit of a madhouse, and yet the paper got out, and the paper was a good paper, I think. But, boy, it made it a very intense place to work, and the walls, even after people had left, seemed to pulsate. The whole place just vibrated, and you went out the door, and you locked it, even though people could always crawl in through the window, and nobody would have broken in, because the walls were rotting from the inside and the out, and there was only one bathroom, and it was in pretty bad shape and doubled as the archive for old papers, and the dust and the dirt that had built up there and crusted over during the years, and, my god, you could pull out a piece of furniture and find something from the mid-1970s…

RS: I have the “hair-shirt chair.”

PT: The hair-shirt chair, yes, and old pieces of technology languishing in various spots, and yet it was functional.

RS: You enjoyed it.

PT: I did enjoy it. Financially it wasn’t very rewarding for most people, but there were other rewards: the autonomy and the creative abilities you could bring to the job. You didn’t work in very good surroundings, but even so, it was a special place to work, and you could be proud of what you did. When I was a consultant, people would ask me, what does that mean, you’re a consultant? And I would go into long-winded explanations. But with the Woodstock Times, and here at The Independent, I just say, this is what I do, and I hand them a copy of the paper.