Other Voices

Jim Gardner, the former long-time owner of The Altamont Enterprise, was raised in a large family in Guilderland. As a boy, he fished in the Black Creek and hunted pheasants and rabbits, squirrels and partridges along Siver Road. “We were born into it,” he says in this week’s podcast at AltamontEnterprise.com/podcasts, of hunting for game. “We never wasted it … If you shot it, you prepared it for the cook.” Gardner was in the Class of 1955 — the first to graduate from the new Guilderland High School. His best friend, Chuck Pergl and classmate Frank Elliott thought up the Flying Dutchman as the still-used symbol for the school. Gardner and Pergl loved country music and listening to their favorite songs on WWVA, a station in Wheeling, West Virginia. “Especially on rainy nights, you could pick it up,” said Gardner. One weekend, they took a spur-of-the-moment road trip to a WWVA jamboree in Wheeling, an adventure that inspired a lifetime of stories. In high school, Gardner started working at The Enterprise as a printer’s devil, carrying heavy frames of hot-lead type to the grand printing press in the cellar. When the press ran, you could hear it in the middle of Maple Avenue, Gardner recalled. He learned the art and craft of printing. “That’s when I fell in love with the printed word ….I have never gotten over that.” Gardner became a master printer and a partner at The Enterprise. Eventually, with his wife, Wanda, working by his side, he was the sole owner of the newspaper and the print shop. He had met Wanda Sturgess when he was the best man at his brother’s wedding and she was the bride’s maid of honor. “It was amazing,” recalled Gardner. “When I met this woman, I said, wow!” They married a year later. The Gardners still work side by side at Enterprise Printing and Photo at 123 Maple Avenue.