Charity Robey

Profile: Charles Olton, the past is always present

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO   Charles Olton and Poppy at home in Hay Beach.

Published on May 21, 2015 in the Shelter Island Reporter

From Charles and Barbara Olton’s house on the northern tip of Shelter Island, the sweeping view takes in Gardiners Bay to Orient. But when Charles gazes out, he also sees across several centuries.

The 18th century, to be exact, when the British fleet en route to attack New York in 1776, lay becalmed off Hay Beach Point, keeping their horses alive with hay harvested just below his living room windows.

Trained as an historian at Wesleyan University and the University of California at Berkeley, Charles went on to be an administrator and leader of educational and arts institutions. He was dean of faculty at Barnard College from 1977 to 1987, dean of Parsons School of Design from 1989 to 1995, and president of the League of American Symphony Orchestras from 1995 until his retirement in 2004.

Charles and Barbara met when he was at Wesleyan and she was studying science at Mount Holyoke, in the days when both schools were single gender. They married and moved to Berkeley, California, where Charles did graduate work in American colonial history and Barbara worked in the lab of Nobel Laureate Melvin Calvin. “It was bliss,” Charles said. “We were young and it was radical, and she was the breadwinner.”

A freshly minted Ph.D. in history, Charles joined the faculty at Union College in Schenectady, New York, where he taught history for five years. During his time at Union, he began to understand his true interest in academia was not in teaching but in administration. “I didn’t even care about tenure,” he remembered.

“I wanted to be a college administrator.”

A one-year fellowship at Swarthmore and six years at SUNY Buffalo solidified his experience with all aspects of higher education administration. “I learned a lot,” he said, “and among the things I learned was that I don’t like large universities.”

Charles and Barbara’s children, Matthew and Gretta, were born during the Union College years. Both graduated from Wesleyan, Matthew in 1988 and Gretta in 1991. Matthew is now a senior vice president at a company that develops and manufactures mega data-storage equipment and lives with his wife and children, Madeline and Jack, in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Gretta is a ceramic and graphic designer. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts with her husband and daughters, Sophie and Katie.

The years Charles spent at Barnard as dean of the faculty were “great years,” he said, “a wonderful academic community and a very interesting time.” His stint at Barnard coincided with the transition of Columbia from all male to coed, and the subsequent need to revise the Barnard general education curriculum.

For Barbara, the move from Union College to New York meant giving up work she loved and she felt the loss. Charles said.

One day Barbara went for a drive to Shelter Island. “I was pretty unhappy at the time and it seemed like a destination,” she said. “I felt like I needed shelter.”

In 1980, the builder Ralph Kast made a Hay Beach Point home for the couple. The education of their children had drained the family coffers and put a crimp in the plan for a comfortable, well-lit place with views. Charles claims that Ralph informed Barbara, “You can have a kitchen or you can have a bathroom, but you can’t have both at your price.”

A family of sailors, once their new home was complete, their pleasure craft became an extra guest room and even a floating line of credit. “We’d park the boat in the harbor at the Yacht Club and the kids would sleep on it,” Charles said. “We were able to rent the house out in the summers and stay on the boat.”

In 1989, Charles became dean of Parsons School of Design. He was drawn by the school’s reputation and for its creative, outspoken and quirky student body. Ever the historian, he related an incident from Parsons’ past, when students, fed up with a design curriculum that catered to Park Avenue penthouse redecorations, as opposed to design for ordinary people, hired a truck full of coal and dumped it on the president’s lawn.

Charles became the dean just as it was entering a financial crisis caused by plummeting enrollment, a situation Charles perceived with his usual historical perspective. “I had arrived at Parsons just about exactly 20 years after Americans stopped having lots of babies,” he said. “The demographics took a dive.”

Facing a crisis for the future of the school, “I despaired as to what to do about it. If I don’t get this thing fixed, I am out of a job.” He decided to pull a team together and “we jawboned and got an answer. And that was to go overseas.” Charles worked to build Parsons’ program in the Dominican Republic and establish new programs in Malaysia, Korea and Japan.

In 1995, he became president of the League of American Symphony Orchestras. He worked to establish the Orchestra Leadership Academy to train orchestra managers who had come up through music but lacked business management skills. He also established professional development programs to help improve the fundraising effectiveness of orchestras, and increased opportunities for the development of American conductors.

Barbara and Charles became full-time Islanders in 2004. Retired by then, Charles became more involved as a volunteer, serving as president of the Shelter Island Educational Foundation, working to provide an array of rich educational experiences for Island children, including the 2Rs4Fun program at the Shelter Island Library and an annual schooner trip.

After an excursion to the Metropolitan Opera, Charles said one child commented, “I noticed that they sang really loud,” and another said, “They had a horse onstage. A real horse.”

American history remains a passion for Charles. In 1997, Syracuse University Press published his “Artisans for Independence,” a gripping narrative of a case study set in Philadelphia during the American Revolution.

He has taught seminars on American art at the University of Rome, the University of Venice, Columbia University, and The New School. In 2004 he began to refine ideas into a multi-media course about early American painting, music and the revolution in the arts that accompanied the American Revolution for an adult education program on Shelter Island, setting the stage for his most recent book, “Heroic Vision.”

Charles’ long view goes forward as well as back, embracing changes in the way history can be told by fully integrating audio and visual arts in his new work. “‘Heroic Vision’ is necessarily an ebook, because it introduces readers to a great deal of visual art and music,” he said, adding that Green Publishing will publish the ebook this coming June.

Key Lime: A soupy pie and a lesson learned

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO This glorious key lime pie was the goal. The first attempt was not so pretty.

 

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on April 30, 2015

I considered myself a very good baker until I attempted key lime pie. My friend John makes a great one, so when I came into possession of a bag of key limes recently, I called him. He graciously gave me his recipe, but I was sure it was wrong. How could the filling cook in 10 minutes? Wasn’t using sweetened condensed milk in a pie recipe the moral equivalent of adding cream of mushroom soup to a casserole?

I was about to be schooled. 

John says you should be able to feel, as well as taste, the tang of good key lime pie, a sensation similar to sucking on a sourball. By that standard, I guess it was a good pie, because it did make me wince, although the sourness was in my heart, not the pie.

My mistake was to substitute evaporated milk and some sugar for the sweetened condensed milk. At the time, I thought I was a pie genius, improving an old-fashioned recipe with a more healthy approach. But I had violated a basic principle of food chemistry. The interaction of the sweetened condensed milk and the lime juice, which was supposed to thicken the filling, could not take place, and I got key lime soup.

After it cooled, I cut a slice, and watched as the meringue dropped onto the crust and the filling formed a puddle around it. I scraped the hideous mess into the garbage.

Chastened, I made a new pie, but this time I didn’t try to outsmart the recipe. Following John’s directions to the letter, I got a creamy, delicious filling. Now I know to follow a recipe from a trusted source faithfully the first time I make it. No matter how weird it sounds.

Anyone who cooks has made something that did not quite turn out. I’m gathering stories told by Island cooks of food fails that occurred in their own kitchens. If you would like to share a story, contact me at [email protected].

Makes one 9-inch pie

For the crust:

1 and 1/4 cups graham cracker crumbs

1 tablespoon shredded coconut

1/4 cup sugar

6 tablespoons of melted butter

For the filling:

4 eggs, separated, whites reserved at room temperature for the meringue

1 14-ounce can of sweetened condensed milk

1/3 cup freshly squeezed lime or key lime juice

1 tablespoon grated lime or lemon rind

1/8 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup superfine sugar

Make the crust:

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

2. Break the graham crackers into a quart-size Ziploc bag, squeeze out most of the air and crush with a rolling pin or a large wooden spoon until the crumbs are fine, but not dust.

3. Add the coconut, sugar and butter to the bag of crumbs and mix with your hands until the crumbs are uniformly moist.

4. Press the mixture into a 9-inch pie pan and bake at 375 degrees until the edges are browned, 7 to 10 minutes. Allow the crust to cool while making the filling and turn the oven down to 350 degrees.

Make the filling:

1. Beat the yolks lightly with a whisk and add the sweetened condensed milk. Slowly add the lime juice and rind and continue to whisk as the acidity of the lime juice thickens the mixture.

2. Pour into the warm crust and bake for 10 minutes at 375 degrees while you make the meringue.

Top the pie with meringue:

1. Beat the egg whites with an electric mixer in a bowl that is completely free of any trace of butter or oil. If you are not sure about your bowl, pour a teaspoon of white vinegar into the bowl first and wipe it out with a paper towel.

2. When soft peaks form, start adding the sugar slowly until the whites form stiff peaks and are glossy.

3. Apply the meringue to the top of the pie with a spatula, spreading it to the edges of the crust and leaving some peaks.

4. Bake the pie for another 10 minutes, just until the meringue peaks are browned.

On the half shell: The Year of living doglessly | Shelter Island Reporter

CHARITY ROBEY | Hudson, at rest.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter and The Suffolk Times on April 30, 2015.

Last April, our beloved dachshund, Hudson died. He was twelve, which is pretty old in dog years, as they say.

My husband suggested we wait a year before we started sniffing around for a new dog, “out of respect.” I thought this was a strange idea, but now that a year has passed, I can see some good has come of waiting. No good for Hudson alas, but waiting has helped me understand what that long, black dog meant to me.

H.L. Mencken described the dachshund as “a half-dog high, and a dog-and-a-half long.” By my calculations that made Hudson a double-dog. He was twice the trouble of any dog I have known, and I loved him twice as much.

When my spouse, two school-age sons, and I brought Hudson home as a puppy, we didn’t know he was a “special needs” dog, and I never thought of him that way. I thought he was perfect.

Yes, he had “separation anxiety” as well as an eating disorder, but can’t you say that about a lot of New Yorkers? True, we could not leave him alone, and we could not feed guests while he was in the house, but who needs guests?

Like all our dependants, Hudson received an education. But puppy classes, anti-barking collars, and the combined techniques of Dog Whisperer Cesar Milan, Barbara “No Bad Dogs” Woodhouse, and the Monks of Skete, could not set him straight. Two kinds of anti-anxiety medication did not work.

I took Hudson to a canine behavioralist, to treat the separation anxiety that meant he could not be left alone without howling piteously. She told me to impose a routine of ever-lengthening absences, rewarding him for being alone, with a bone cut from the leg of a creature that must have been the size of mastodon.

She said the bone would “make him associate your leaving with something pleasant.” In other words, I would train my beloved companion animal to want me to leave him alone. This did not work either.

And so, for twelve years, this twenty-five pound hound was my bane and my joy. I’ve thought of him so often in the past year.

In July, I remembered the Independence Day fireworks displays that Hudson attended with us, during which he was the only dog not barking at the sounds of exploding shells. Ironically, leaving him home would have made him bark. As long as he was with us, he was happy and quiet.

Hudson believed in preemptive eating. When he saw something that might be food (and his definition was liberal) he ate first and asked questions later. At my son’s baseball game, he ate the umpire’s sandwich, bag, and all.

While I made lasagna, he nabbed a pound of mozzarella from the kitchen counter and ate it in three bites.

During apple season, he earned the moniker, “Air Hudson” for his move to the fruit bowl. He entered the dining room at a dead run, launched himself, and bending his upper body and long jaw over the apples in the center of the table, snagged a Macoun on his way down. Rarely did I catch him in the act. The only evidence was a little pile of apple seeds under the table, although I did wonder at our brisk rate of apple consumption.

When we went on vacation, Hudson stayed at a kennel. One year he got into a bag of food meant to last another dog a week and ate every morsel. When we picked him up, he looked like he had been inflated with a bicycle pump. The vet showed me an x-ray in which the unchewed kibble filled his digestive system like a logjam of redwoods on the Columbia River. Somehow he pulled, and it went, through.

Repeated bouts with cold and flu this past March resulted in a blanket of damp tissues in the house, and more thoughts of Hudson, who would have had this problem under control. Some people keep cats to control the mice, or dogs to guard the house. Hudson was a Kleenex dog. While he lived, we did not have a problem with discarded tissues. He ate them.

A classic American folk song about a dog named Blue goes, “Old Blue died, and he died so hard, Shook the ground in my back yard.” One year later, our yard is still vibrating a little, but the year of living doglessly has passed. We are sticking our snouts into the world of shelters and rescue organizations. I hope we find another dog as perfect as Hudson.