Blazing Star Grange #71 in Danbury held its annual Community Citizen of the Year award night on October 15. Because of the outstanding contributions of Tom Curren and Kathy Neustadt, the Blazing Star Grange recognizes them as co-recipients of the Danbury Citizen Award for 2015.
We know Tom as Danbury’s Johnny Appleseed and agricultural advocate; bean-hole bean baker; farmer; a conserver, reactivator, and promoter of old plant breeds and seeds; and the Dad to four handsome Herefords, as well as sheep and chickens. His comments and photos enliven and enlighten the Friends of Danbury Facebook page. If his cows get out and you’re trying to find him, call the Danbury Country Store (his second home) first. If you are the one needing help, ask Tom, and the big red pickup will be at your door in no time.
Tom has a distinguished career in land conservation and professional fundraising as executive director of the Lakes Region Conservation Trust and as director of the Northeast Land Trust Consortium, a grant project of the Pew Charitable Trusts – experience that can help Danbury protect its agricultural and forest lands and its open space. Tom is also a member of the Danbury Planning Board, so his expertise is available to the town.
Tom is well known as a teacher, historian, researcher, and author; one of his many publications is the New Hampshire Preservation Alliance’s Old Home Day in New Hampshire. Tom is also a music historian, singer/songwriter, and one of the three members of The Good Old Plough, whose repertoire of songs about old-time agriculture in New Hampshire and New England has a devoted following here in Danbury and beyond.
He and Carl Hultberg have transformed the Danbury Transfer Station into a live music venue during the warm months, continuing with winter jam sessions and sock hops at the Grange and the South Danbury church. Dudley Laufman invites Tom to play concerts with him, including one held at the Grange earlier this year.
Kathy Neustadt
Kathy is Danbury’s Hostess with the Mostest, opening her home and heart for Easter sunrise breakfasts in front of a blazing fire, for the Grange Curtains Committee meetings when the Grange Hall was too cold, for summer lunches on the lawn for the Danbury Historical Society farm and garden tours, and for Danbury Grows picnics as sunset claims Mount Kearsarge. She is also the initiator and instigator of the food and flower gardens and the mini-bistro at the Danbury Transfer Station … surely something unique to Danbury.
Kathy is a culinary writer and world traveler. Among her books is Clambake, published by the University of Massachusetts Press for the American Folklore Society. As a professional folklorist, she was an organizer and presenter of the New Hampshire Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington DC, in 1999 and in New Hampshire in 2000, and she was involved in the Boston Cultural Heritage Festival.
She has had a notable career and exhibits as an assemblage artist, transforming cast-off and neglected everyday objects into art with a capital “A.” Kathy has also found time for oral history and writing and grant-writing projects in New Hampshire and elsewhere.
All of these various elements of her life and work have coalesced with her creation, presentation, and promotion of the South Danbury Church Speaker Series, sharing Danbury and the wider world with each other, now in its third year and gathering enthusiastic audiences from Danbury and far beyond. But there’s more: Kathy is also the impresario of the South Danbury Church Fair and the church’s famous Christmas Pageant.
Even though Tom and Kathy are distinct (and distinctive) individuals, in Danbury they are also Tom ‘n’ Kathy, constantly encouraging and supporting each other and the community to learn, share, and help as “Danbury Grows.”