“There was an underlying sense of, ‘This is my home, but I belong somewhere else,’” says Jake Marmer of his childhood in Soviet Ukraine. The accomplished poet and Head of School at Lander-Grinspoon Academy in Northampton was raised in a Jewish family, where he was acutely aware of systemic repression and its lengthy history. But as a young student who loved the humanities, he learned that poetry was sacred. His grandmother was a teacher of literature and language, and learning poems by heart was a duty and a joy. 

Brook Wolcott was in the eighth grade when she decided to take to the skies. There were no pilots in her family. There were no ready role models. She would forge her own flight path.

“I want to let others know that this is attainable, because I didn’t think I’d be able to do it,” says the now 17-year-old licensed private pilot. “Because it was such a crazy – it’s just such a wild thing to do, to be a pilot. You don’t see a lot of eighth graders who want to fly airplanes.”

Three years ago, Chris Freeman, new to Northampton, had a tight circle of friends. Today he has a village.

The executive director of the Parlor Room Collective and the man who took the reins of the Iron Horse insists that the nonprofit, which oversees the club, is a product of his “being at the right place at the right time.”

In a way, Felicia Lundquist is like a new pair of glasses for people who don’t realize they’ve been looking through outdated lenses. The training manager at Think Again Training and Consulting is a lifelong social activist who celebrates diversity in all its iterations. “People use ‘diversity’ when thinking about race,” she says, “but in the work we do we’re talking about all forms of identity – queer, people of color, disabled, immigrants … We’re thinking about who does not carry privilege and making sure we center those voices.” And making sure those people are seen – not glanced over, but taken in.

When Sally Ekus was 4 years old, she had dinner with Julia Child. Technically, the already legendary chef was a guest of her parents, who were running a culinary agency in Hatfield, Massachusetts. And before they plated an elaborate Chinese feast, it should be noted that Sally was supposed to be sleeping.

But the smell of the meal wafted up the stairs to her bedroom, and soon Sally could hear Child’s distinctively loud, high-pitched voice mingling with her mother’s.

“I wish I could say I understood the gravitas of the situation,” she says now. “I had tremendous FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) as a kid, and I knew enough to know that she was someone very special.”

“Did you ever think you’d come into a mess like this?” Harriet Rogers asks. Though I’ve only known her for about an hour, I’ve learned quickly that she is wryly funny.

Truthfully, this interview is a little messy. In the day room at Rockridge, the assisted living facility where Harriet has lived for the past 17 years, she holds court on the couch. Around the room, 3 generations of her family listen attentively, pass around old photos, share anecdotes or shout questions. The shouting is necessary because sometimes everyone speaks at once. They are thrilled to memorialize her, and they don’t want me to miss a thing. Her nieces Susan and Jackie Ahlemeyer sit to her right; Jackie’s husband Bill and brother-in-law Bill Klaes are in the back; and Jackie’s son Brian his kids Jackson, Charlie, Joey and Grace, who have flown in from California, sprawl on the opposite couch. There are countless others here in spirit.

For Laurel Boyd, dancing was an awakening. While growing up outside of Boston, the studio was a refuge from the chaos that lived in her house. It was where she escaped, not just to a space but to a place inside of her that yearned to move. When she was 9, she found joy in jazz. Her teacher, a trained ballerina, was both elegant and boundless. “Part of me thought, ‘Maybe I can be strong and powerful and beautiful,’” she remembers. “‘Maybe I can be really excellent at something.’”

Monte Belmonte has a great fake laugh. Ha-ha! “It sounds like a record skipping,” observes his 10-year-old, Pax. We’re at the Shea Theater in Turners Falls, where the longtime, bigtime radio personality and his family have been instructed to ham it up for the camera. On cue, Pax giggles infectiously. Monte’s wife Melissa, his 16-year-old Enzo and his 19-year-old Atticus are much quieter laughers, though all the kids are naturals on-stage. But while Monte made a name for himself on-air at Northampton’s WRSI “The River,” he never had to contend with the camera. He actually hates having his picture taken. But he loves being a voice for the community.

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention

Be astonished

Tell about it

- Mary Oliver

The scene played out so naturally, I felt like I was at the theatre. As I stood with the lifelong actors on their deck in late November, they were on a stage of sorts, responding to cues from our photographer so she could capture our next cover. Candace and Raye Birk leaned against the rail of their patio with their hands in their pockets; it was chilly, and the sun was on its way down.

“Everyone has a connection to folk magic: It’s in your bones.”

Mischa Roy felt at home in the darkroom. Her parents’ photography studio had a built-in playroom, but she and her brother wanted to work. They need me, her brother would plead – anything to get his hands on prints. She watched her father manifest magic. She began to channel her own.

At 10 a.m. on a cloudless fall day, Ruth von Goeler and Juju Carpenter open the market. A card table – long enough for 4 people to shop comfortably – showcases today’s bounty, which includes peppers, carrots, lettuce, raspberries, eggs, sausage and tofu, all grown and produced on local farms. Ears of corn gleam in their husks, available with or without a recipe card in English or Spanish, for a corn and cherry tomato salad.

Within the next half hour, about 50 patrons will line up behind the Walter Salvo House, a low-income housing development for elderly and disabled Northampton residents. Many are on a first-name basis with the food access assistants from Grow Food Northampton (GFN), who replenish the stock, again and again, from cardboard boxes stacked underneath the table. The nonprofit’s goal is to build a just and sustainable local food system, and this is their mission in action.

“We’re bigger than the Beatles, dudes!” Leonardo yelled over the crowd outside the Academy of Music. The leader of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles emerged from a van to join franchise co-creators Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman at the totally tubular premiere of their second feature film in Northampton.

It was March 1991, the height of Turtlemania. After the release of their first movie, which grossed nearly $202 million worldwide in 1990, the 4 talking, walking, pizza-eating and crime-fighting Turtles were household names. Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello were no longer just revered Renaissance artists; instead, Leo, Raph, Mikey and Donny were down-to-earth dudes who inhabited the sewers of New York City.

Like Leo said, they were also mononymous superstars like Paul, John, George and Ringo. And they were even in a band, however short-lived. During the 1990 “Oprah Winfrey Show” dedicated to the international “Coming Out of Their Shells” tour – otherwise known as the most “Radical, radical, radical!” episode of “Oprah” in existence – the Turtles sing and dance like a boy band while Winfrey touts their “triple platinum” album. As Raphael puts it, “Singing in the sewer is a wonderful sound!”

For Lynnette Watkins, the hospital has always been home. As a young girl in St. Louis, Missouri, it was where her dad spent most weekends, visiting his patients and building his ophthalmology practice. When he had to perform cataract surgery, his little girl was entrusted to the nurses, who’d fill her with candy and lollipops to her heart’s content.

As a teenager, she worked as a candy striper in the same hospital, where she gathered bouquets at the flower shop and carted them to grateful patients’ rooms.

Now the president and chief executive officer of Cooley Dickinson Health Care, Watkins beams when she recalls her early days. “I still have a picture of me with my little hat and my candy striper outfit,” she says. “I just thought I was the bee’s knees.”

In Northampton’s heyday, the city pulsed with music. Main Street was a treasure map for aspiring performers and loyal fans, a trail of gold coins from the Iron Horse to the Pearl Street Nightclub to the Calvin Theatre. And with a built-in support system for bands, there was bounty aplenty for everyone.

Garrick Perry, better known as “Force,” arrived on the scene in the early 2000s. He joined the local hip hop/reggae band the Alchemystics in 2004 and formed a group of MCs called the Problemaddicts two years later. Soon he began managing Bishop’s Lounge – the only late-night venue that remains open in Northampton – a bar he envisioned as the city’s “Cheers.”

“I spent a lot of time community building,” he explains. “A number of friends joked that I was sort of like the Night Mayor.”

Paintbrush in hand, Alex Cook surveyed the brick wall on Bridge Street. He’d never painted publicly before. For years he’d swapped sketchbooks with his two best friends in Wellesley. Sometimes they rode bikes to Bertucci’s just after the dinner rush, because in the restaurant was a giant chalkboard known to moonlight as a canvas. The manager gave them free dinner rolls and all-access to the chalk stash, and though their murals were ephemeral – they would be erased for tomorrow’s specials – they were always meaningful.

Downton Valley has a royal feel to it. A long, winding driveway leads to a stately home that rises over the Pioneer Valley. Inside, the “Dowager Room” and the “Isobel Room” nod to two of the most powerful female characters on the historical drama “Downton Abbey.” But the woman behind this bed-and-breakfast home is a contemporary queen.

She rules.

The best thing about Lisa Lippiello is that she is a humble monarch. Before she was a mother, wife and entrepreneur; before she was a managing partner at a law firm in Northampton, she was just a little girl drawn to the ocean. “I have photos of my father racing to the shore because I was crawling through the sand to the water,” she says with a laugh. The water was her happy place; it would be her steady companion as she navigated her parent’ divorce and was tasked with caring for her younger brother.

Construction was his profession, not his destiny. Throughout high school and college, Scott Keiter was a natural builder and engineer – both were in his blood – but he had something else in his back pocket: his “Dream Book.” It was just as it sounds, a catalogue of possibilities, a reminder that one day the adventurer in him would helm an enterprise.

Are you teaching today? It was one of the first English phrases she understood, even though she was the new girl in Zumba class. No one knew that Aimee Salmon had never danced, that growing up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, moving just wasn’t on her radar.

“This is the dojo here. This is all our stuff,” says Erik Ostberg, gesturing toward two open duffel bags stuffed with gear that spills onto the floor. He clears off two metal chairs for Jack Power and me, then takes a seat behind the desk at Complex Sports Academy (Plex) in East Longmeadow. Ostberg, 27, and Power, 20, settle in and sip their Reign energy drinks. Last night was a late one in the cage.

The two Northampton-born athletes have lived and breathed baseball since they could wield a bat. Now Ostberg is a bona fide Major Leaguer, Power a Division I rising star. When they aren’t playing with the Tampa Bay Rays or the Long Island University Sharks, Plex is their home.

On the first day of class at Holyoke Community College, the teacher arrived early. He walked past rows of empty desks to the chalkboard, where he scrawled his last name, McBride, next to the title of the course, Introduction to Sociology. On the table in front, he put down his stuff, including the syllabus featuring readings by Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim. Then he adjusted his fitted cap, grabbed his hip hop magazine, and walked to the back row. His sneakers scuffed the floor when he took a seat. The pages of the magazine fluttered as he leafed through them. The people filing in barely glanced at the middle-aged man of color whom they assumed was a fellow student. Forty of his peers sat down and waited to learn.

Suddenly, McBride got up and eased his way through the rows. But instead of taking his place at the board, he walked out of the room.

When Holly Martineau joined the United Way of the Franklin and Hampshire Region last March, the first thing she did was celebrate. That’s because 2022 marked the organization’s 100th year of extraordinary service.

“The 100th anniversary of any nonprofit is a huge event,” says Martineau, director of development for the Northampton-based branch. “But the United Way is funding organizations that serve those most in need, and those needs are constantly changing. So that means we need to evolve as well.”

This is a story about grace. Not religious grace, per se, although there’s an element of spirituality. Not Grace Paint and Tile, specifically, although the company plays a large role. At its heart, it’s about a guy who lost his way for a while, who has become a mentor to Northampton High School athletes and Afghan refugees. It’s about his most recent crew of painters, football stars and former soldiers, who didn’t always understand each other but knew that when lunch rolled around, they would lay down a drop cloth, take off their shoes, and share a pot of stew. And it’s about his community, our community, that emerged from isolation eager to merge worlds.

Today’s meal is New Orleans dirty rice with a garlic aioli served over spinach. Start with a side salad or some fruit. Room for dessert? How about locally sourced fruit pie.

Welcome to Manna.

The Cheung family has lived in the Tinkham Woods neighborhood of Florence for fifteen years. Their daughter, Claire, now lives in Providence. Floyd Cheung has been a professor at Smith College for 23 years where he has taught Asian American literature. The last three years he has been serving as the Vice President for Equity and Inclusion.

Suna Turgay, of Bay State Village in Northampton, has been gardening since she was a student at Hampshire College, where she studied Experiential Education, Music and Dance, before working in education. Suna’s gardening has been a source of peace and joy, a comfort in times of distress, and a resource for her, her partner Ben Wood, and their children, Elsa and Cyrus.

Charlotte Cathro was raised in Florence and presently lives in the house she grew up in. But between growing up here and present day, a lot has happened. She has started her own business as a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), volunteered as a Board Member at president of the board of Dakin Humane Society and at the Massachusetts Society of CPAs, she has raised a family with her husband Patrick, who is a realtor with Rovi Homes, and so much more.

Few people are as well-known and well-liked in all of Northampton as Chelsea Sunday Kline. Having lived in the area since 2001, she has made her impact in ways such as starting a loving family, advocating for a litany of local causes, writing creatively and professionally for the Gazette, working as a life coach to help people fully inhabit their own stories, and eventually running for state senate in 2018 to represent our district.

Jill Foley is a Northampton native who’s excited to be back in the Valley. “After living in Boston for 10 years after college” she began, “nowhere else I went felt like home.” It was especially difficult because she had so many ties to the local community. She grew up doing laps at the YMCA and forming many of the lasting relationships she’s carried with her to present day.

Amy Dawn Kotel is a Personal Fitness Trainer who strongly believes that everyone should strive to be active in whatever way is possible for themselves. “I do think that if we’re feeling good we’re gonna be kinder to each other,” she said. It’s this spirit of finding innovative ways to stay active and this philosophy of doing so with self-kindness that she carries through her practice: Fit Spirit Personal Training. What brought her to starting this business and to her philosophy of fitness and life is a story all to itself.