Teaching History Matters

We lost a good, good friend in our community this week.

I really don’t remember the first time I made the acquaintance of Kendall McKernon, but it doesn’t really matter. I know it was relatively late in life, and we got to know each other at the Sandy Hill Farmers Market in Juckett Park. Here’s this guy, poking around with his camera taking shots wide and long, but also up close and candid, engaging in conversation with the vendors and just reveling and eating up the back and forth. I was sitting there hawking my first book, and he would come by the table to chat me up, and take photos of me and book subject WWII veteran and fellow former HFHS history teacher Alvin Peachman, which somehow wound up in the local weekly The Chronicle. Alvin was our own embodiment of Hudson Falls and Kingsbury, but Kendall was becoming one as well.

Later, he came to Juckett Park for the dedication of a tree in my name, and wrote up a succinct summary of the event, complete with his candid photos—he just had the knack, the artist’s eye, for framing his subjects, no matter what the subject—and conveying the emotion, the beauty to the viewer, as all in the community who witnessed his work can attest. I recognized the inherent uniqueness in his work, and helped him learn how to watermark the images that he was posting out to the world. In the article, he deflected attention from himself as a ‘chronicler of all things Hudson Falls’—but you were, Kendall. You just were.

I was happy for him when he opened his shop at the Sandy Hill Arts Center at the former Masonic Temple, a vision he helped Bill realize with his own love and faith of our community. Naturally, he wanted to carry my history books. My regret right now, as with many of us, is that maybe we didn’t just drop in and sit with him for a while in our busy worlds. As a former shopkeeper myself, sometimes it can get a bit lonely in slow times, though a few times when I slowed my truck driving past, to see an opening, he was definitely holding court with the ladies or some customers. It made me smile, because the times when I did stop, I got some good stories with a twinkle, and caught up on the local happenings, of course.

I’m sad for Kathleen, his daughter, my former student (sorry Kat, but you were Kathleen to me!) for his friends and former classmates who really knew him better, especially Joyce, Bill, and Tom—but he was ours for a moment; he certainly was a kindred soul.

The memory of Kendall is just a warm bath moment for me. Kendall McKernon was ‘Mr. Hudson Falls’ in my book, for our era, and his work will live on, like his memory and his legacy.

You have made your mark; go forward, sweet sir and gentle prince of Hudson Falls and Washington County, and be free with your beloved and all the ancestors greeting you right now. ~MR