First Meeting
I was introduced to Annemarie a few years before at a block party that her mom cosponsored when Hastings had a July Fourth fireworks display on the Hudson River off MacEachron Park, which is directly down a steep embankment and across the railroad tracks at the end of our block. Anne lives on Edmarth Place, a mirror image of our street one block to the north. It has a much better view of the river, however. Anne's house is at the very end of the street on the south side. Many windows face the river, several of which she and her late husband Bob, who owned a service station around the corner from us, installed after they bought the house more than fifty years ago. Looking out on the river one day, Ann told me that she never takes the view for granted. The way she said it sounded like she had seen a lot in her life but presumed nothing.
Edmarth Place was a wonderful place to watch pyrotechnics that July Fourth. Everyone from the surrounding neighborhood brought a potluck dish. Anne's oldest son, Bob Jr., who lived catty-corner across the street, fired up hot dogs and hamburgers on several grills. Kids ran around with abandon. It was a real picture of Americana at its Norman Rockwell best. I remember Anne introducing me to Annemarie as if we had met before. She said something like, “And of course you know Annemarie.” I didn't. In our brief exchange of words, I remember being taken by her husky voice and rich Yonkers-area accent. She seemed liked someone I'd grown up with, though, and hadn't seen in a long time.
A few years later, someone I was interviewing for The Elephant on Main Street told me that I must talk to Annemarie. I was interested knowing more about in the nearly two dozen Hastings kids from the Sixties and Seventies I'd learned about who had died from drugs or alcohol, including several heroin ODs.
“Annemarie's a drug counselor upstate now,” I was told. “And she hung out with all the people you want to know about.”
The list of people I wanted to interview had grown exponentially over time. Many were survivors - kids who used pretty heavily but had finally kicked. Also parents, siblings and friends of the nonsurvivors - suicides, ODs, victims of accidents, the ones whose stories never got told. Then there were the cops, social workers, educators, concerned citizens, healthcare workers and others who were somehow connected to the story. Because I had no deadline or strict methodology, I generally let serendipity dictate who I'd interview. Inevitably, I'd run into someone in a social situation who someone else said I should talk to and I'd make a date. And so it was with Annemarie. It turned out that she was not a drug counselor, per se, although she did a lot of work with AIDS victims, some of whom were addicts. And she lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut, not upstate, but that's a quibble as far as parochial metro New Yorkers are concerned.
A few years ago, the Hastings Historical Society started collecting oral histories with the idea of creating an exhibit about the saloons of Hastings. Before the factories on the waterfront closed down more than thirty years ago, there had been, by varying accounts, fourteen or more active gin mills in the two square miles that contained Hasting's eight thousand residents. It sounded like a juicy project to me, so I interviewed a few people who had grown up in Hastings, piggybacking on discussions about the drug and alcohol scene in general for my own information. Anne Schnibbe was one of those I interviewed. I set the session up for Columbus Day 2003, which turned out to be a brilliant, sunny Monday.