By Claudine Klose, Chair, Collections Committee
September 2011. From left to right: Barbara Bielenberg, Claudine Klose, Patsy Vogel.
I met Patsy in 2010, soon after moving to Red Hook full time, when I ventured upstairs at the Elmendorph Inn to visit the Archives Room. There, Barbara Bielenberg, Bobbie Thompson, and Patsy Vogel, longtime volunteers for Red Hook’s Egbert Benson Historical Society, held forth. They invited me to be on the EBHS Board, and Patsy urged me to get involved in planning the celebration of the Town of Red Hook’s 200th birthday in 2012. She was charming and persuasive. I couldn’t say no. That began a friendship that sadly ended with Patsy’s death this summer, on July 13.
As an EBHS volunteer and assistant Town Historian, Patsy was totally dedicated to preserving Red Hook’s history. She never turned down an opportunity to collect, organize, and showcase items she thought were important representations of the Town’s past. When presented with the challenge of how to make accessible a set of circa 1900 glass-plate negatives taken by local farmer W.S. Teator, and no budget for professional scanning, she learned how to scan the negatives herself, providing us with a set of priceless images of local people and places. Those images can be found here. When she met and married Dick Hansen, a former stock car driver who had raced the speedway on the Rhinebeck fairgrounds track in the 1950s, she proposed an oral history program to capture the voices of a local sport long forgotten. Those oral histories can be found here. She donated dozens of photographs and documents from her own family archives, passed down by her grandfather, Roland A’Brial, and her father-in-law, Henry Vogel.
As a fellow volunteer, Patsy was a joy to work with, blending qualities so important to archival work —attention to detail, persistence, and patience—with a kind, upbeat demeanor and a delicious sense of humor.
We cannot thank Patsy enough for her invaluable contributions to preserving Red Hook’s history, and we will miss her greatly.
You can read Patsy’s obituary here.