A letter from Nathalie Thill, ACW’s Executive Director:
It is with the deepest sadness that we mourn the passing of our dear friend and mentor, Betsy Folwell.
Betsy was a great friend to ACW and to me personally. She helped start ACW and was our board president for years. While she was on the board I called her multiple times a week to share news and gossip, but most often, to ask advice. She steered ACW in our formative years; there is no teasing out where her influence begins or ends. I still have a file labeled “Betsy’s Ideas” because she had so many of them.
Between her work at ACW and her legacy at Adirondack Life magazine, Betsy was the pivot point around which the Adirondack literary community revolved. She knew every Adirondack book, no matter how obscure and the history behind it. The Adirondack Literary map that we produced came mostly from Betsy’s memory. She knew that the first chapter of the Spy Who Loved Me was set in Glens Falls, that Sylvia Plath broke her leg skiing at Mt Pisgah, and that Nancy Drew set a novel in Saranac Lake. She knew it all; I just had to write it down.
Her knowledge of all things Adirondack was encyclopedic. I suspected she had a photographic memory, which she never confirmed nor denied. But how else to explain her ability to help edit the Adirondack Atlas when she was blind? I could ask her anything, from Great Camp architectural styles to where to find the best chicken salad (Oscar’s in Warrensburg), and she would rattle off from memory so many details, locations, histories, and backstories.
There is a concept called “shared memory” in a relationship, where one person doesn’t bother to learn certain facts because it’s a given that the other person knows them. When my mother died, I realized how much I personally didn’t bother to learn because I believed I could always just ask her. I suspect it isn’t just true for me—there must be so many others in this region who relied on Betsy’s uncanny ability to always have the answer. What are we going to do now?
Betsy was brilliant, witty, talented, and had limitless energy. I’ve never met anyone as committed to their community as she and Tom, her husband and partner in crime. Read her moving collection of essays, Short Carries for a study on love: love of place, love of community, and love of language.
Few people could have handled going blind with such grace. They never did find out what caused it—she just lost sight in one eye, then a year later, in the other. She lost the sight in her second eye shortly after looking at my honeymoon photos. I assumed it was the sight of me in a bikini that blinded her. Once when she was paying for something in cash she casually mentioned that it was me that taught her the trick of folding the various dollar denominations differently in her wallet to tell them apart. I found it hilarious that she had to learn this from me, especially since I gleaned this tip from the 70s sitcom, Different Strokes.
But her most outstanding trait, the thing that made Betsy Betsy, was her curiosity. She was curious about everything. You could tell her the most random fact and she would be intrigued and want to know more. This made her outstanding company, the best really, to know as much as she did about everything but to still be thirsty for more. She was remarkable.
She was also charmed by so many of life’s littlest things. She once was talking about wrens, marveling at how such a tiny bird—“one that would weigh next to nothing in your hand”— could have such a complicated and beautiful song. I think about her every time I hear one, maybe now you will too.
I am so sorry to learn of Betsy Folwell’s passing. I enjoyed her writings in Adirondack Life long before I met her at the Annual Awards ceremonies for Adirondack Center for Writing. She was indeed a legendary presence in the Adirondacks; condolences to her family, friends and colleagues.