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Virginia Dare was a beautiful woman with a superb singing voice to match. When I first met her she was 24 and she looked like the Venus of Botticelli – I was 33. I was immediately enchanted by her and she favored me and we started living together immediately. We were together for 13 exuberant and dramatic years. Many things happened and we weathered them all – together, and with my children Diana and John.

Since silent movies, actors have been filmed in cars. It’s not unusual in old films, where try as they might, the scenes out the windows just look fake. As technology in film evolved from creative jerry-rigged camera cars, background film projection, green screens, to CGI, the quest has been to make as realistic and seamless an interior/ exterior car scene as possible. Carstage, a virtual production studio, is mastering this evolution in realistic filming.

Louise Spencer, born Louise Marie Due, in Exeter, Nebraska on 18th September 1928, will be remembered fondly by generations of kindergarteners whom she taught in Tappan and Orangeburg, NY. Her energy and strength were awesome! She and her husband Walt built their house on Gerson’s Lane in Palisades, NY, in a community that had grown together at Camp Shanks after WWII, and where their children Linda, Erik and Kent grew up.

Laurie Ferguson is the fourth generation to join the “family business” as she calls it. “My father, grandfather and great grandfather were all Presbyterian ministers, but I was the first woman,” she says. “None of my three younger brothers were interested. I wanted to be helpful in some way to the world. I considered various professions but decided becoming a minister was where I could be the most helpful.”

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Lee Sneden was born in Palisades on December 9, 1930 and died February 9, 2023 in Chatham, Massachusetts. He was the last of the historic Sneden family to live in Palisades. As an adult Lee moved to Spring Valley, where he worked in sales. He married Marilyn Whetstone of Nyack, started a family, and in 1967 moved to Chatham, Massachusetts where he worked in real estate. Lee and his wife divorced In the 1970s, and Lee moved back to Rockland County where he remarried and started his own successful business as a sales rep for several companies dealing in safety equipment. About nine years ago, Lee and his second wife divorced and Lee moved back to Chatham which he always loved and missed.

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Aaron Hodgins Davis, 38, founder of Hodgins Harvest in Blauvelt, didn’t like mushrooms growing up. “Then, in my mid 20s, my mom prepared some, simply, with butter and salt. She cooked ‘em crispy and I was hooked,” says Davis. “I had never tasted anything like that before.” So, Aaron began – as many who cultivate mushrooms do – by purchasing a grow kit with his daughter. In 2017 he took the plunge and turned his hobby into a business, Hodgins Harvest, operating out of his home in Blauvelt.

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Mary Ann Garland, formerly of Tappan, passed away peacefully at her home in Palisades on November 24, 2022 at the age of 95. Mary Ann was born to Edgar and Isabel Lowe and lived the first third of her life on the West Coast. She graduatedfrom Cal Berkeley where she was deeply involved in the Theatre Department. She came to New York in the 1950’s to pursue an acting career, appearing in multiple productions in and around New York City. She met her husband John Garland in a production of Under the Yum Yum Tree in North Conway, NH.

Rich Rasmussen has deep roots in Palisades, arriving with his parents in 1965, when he was just two years old. He enjoyed his childhood, making friends first in his neighborhood and then all over Palisades. He was cutting lawns for neighbors from the time he was eight years old.