Name: Norene Hartley

Age: 71

Currently lives in: Rochester

How she got here: A car ride as a baby from St. Luke’s Hospital to her family home in Rochester, which dates back generations.

Favorite Tri-Town place: “I think my home. I enjoy looking at the animals that live there around me.”

What she’d change if she were the President of Tri-Town: “I wish there were more people who were born and raised and stayed.”

Ever seen a celeb locally? “Oh, I guess Ted Kennedy marched in a few parades … but if I ever saw someone famous, I’d just let them go about their business, ‘Have a good day, enjoy yourself.’”

By Jonathan Comey

If you ask Norene Hartley to describe how she’d take an out-of-town guest through Rochester to her home, be prepared for detours.       Delightful, well-described detours, full of local history and theory, and an obvious and deep love for the town she calls home. By the time she’s done, you haven’t quite gotten to the destination … but who cares? You can’t wait to explore the town on your own.

“For me, there’s a feeling you get for a place when you’re really invested in it,” says Hartley, who is a founding member of the Rochester Land Trust. “You have a support system. Nothing formal, or anything. There are relatives, and relatives related to relatives … it just fits.”

Hartley is preparing for a Sunday picking blueberries on Eastover Farm, one of her favorite places out of many around town, and she’s got her sun hat and long-sleeved shirt packed in her sturdy white van.

She talks about the large parcels of land that once were this and now are that, the stores that have had different names and different roles with the changing times. About the pond that “Sherman Fearing dug, because he always got his tractor stuck there, so he decided to dig a pond.”

About how she owned two shares of the Rochester Golf Course back when it was converted from an open field by the Tallman family: “Finally, young Tallman came to me and said, ‘You know, you’re the last person that’s got shares that’s not a member of the family, are you sure you don’t want to sell them?’ And I said ‘OK, sure.’ But I don’t think I ever golfed there.”

She uses her work-beaten hands to shape the air in the form of winding roads and sloping hills, the ups and downs, the thens and nows of Rochester.

The town she loves.

While she spent more than 25 years away from Rochester after leaving for college in upstate New York, the town was always home.

“I figured, this is Rochester, but there’s a whole world out there,” she said. “Let’s see some of it. But cities just didn’t interest me a lot … I guess I just like all of the living things around here.”

So after a series of jobs that kept getting further and further from industry and closer and closer to nature, she returned to the town in 1989.

“I just decided Rochester was where I wanted to be,” she said. “I guess there was too much country in me.”

She’s got one of those well-known Rochester surnames like Tallman or Chase, thanks to the foresight of her forebears.

“There’s a lot of Hartleys around because my great-grandparents had fifteen kids,” she says. “So that’ll do it!”

After returning, Hartley spent five years living with her parents and building her own home on a small plot of family land on Bradford Estates (she’s a carpenter and still active with several local clients).

“My dad was a carpenter, and I was the oldest kid,” she says. “So there was a lot of ‘Hold the other end of this, kid!’ You can learn a lot holding the other end of it.”

Much of her time in Rochester has been spent in pursuit of land preservation, both as a founder of the land trust and current board member.

“I hate to sound antisocial, but we need to protect the part of the earth that supports life. We need to protect the ecology, but we haven’t figured out how to love happily without taking more and more and more.”

“I think it’s a case where if we can just keep our produce local, it’s going to be better for us. Everything is so conglomerated, agriculture through pesticides, patented seeds. I don’t think it’s a good thing.

The land trust, which represents over 700 acres of protected area, is trying to preserve green spaces, and Hartley has been its steadiest voice.

“Whether it’s agricultural or not, open land is certainly going to help. It’s going to be the lungs of the planet. As time goes on in town, it’s going to get more and more crowded, and that’s going to change it. But things have already changed, and things will always change.

“There are a lot of people in town who believe in preserving things, but it’s kind of like, ‘I want mine, first,’ you know? For me, it’s what are you going to give up, to accommodate all of the cycles we need to have intact to keep our planet healthy.”

While she knows she runs the risk of being considered “the crazy old lady at the end of the cul-de-sac,” Hartley doesn’t plan on changing her earth-loving tune.

“It starts in your neighborhood. You teach people how things work, and how they’re connected, and then you can start looking at bigger pictures. I just want to help things survive. People, animals, the earth, all of it. There are so many ways to preserve the land and still build and live happily on it.

“I hope people continue to do so.”

Who better than our libraries and librarians to provide a platform for discussion on critical public issues in the 21^st century? If you asked Lawrence DiCara, lawyer, author, political historian and educator, he’d say no one.

On July 21 at the Marion Music Hall, Tri-Town Library Directors Susan Pizzolato of Mattapoisett Free Public Library, Elisabeth O’Neill of Marion’s Elizabeth Tabor Library, and Gail Roberts of Rochester’s Joseph H. Plumb Memorial Library joined in hosting DiCara as he spoke on the importance of civic engagement in the 21^st century.

This is the first in a series of three discussions that the Tri-Town libraries will jointly hold on civic engagement in government, and the role of civic engagement and climate change.

DiCara has been mentoring young people for many years through the Boys and Girls State program that first debuted in 1935. The program was founded on the principles of developing youths’ civic intellect and understanding of the responsibilities associated with living in a democratic society. Regarding politics in the technology age, DiCara believes engaging youths today is not only more important than ever before but vastly more difficult.

During his 30-minute talk, DiCara pointed to the communication pathway used by not only youths but most of society: the iPhone, “Today we shop, message, receive news, take pictures, do everything – no verbal contact needed.” And it is that void of personal contact that makes reaching younger generations so difficult, he stated. While newspapers have seen an increase in circulation, he said, it’s unclear if younger adults are subscribing.

DiCara said that the political system doesn’t work for Millennials, people born between 1982 and 2004. “Today, more people over the age of eighty are voting versus people under the age of twenty-five,” he shared. That age factor makes political change difficult.

One way to engage younger people, DiCara speculated, was through changing voting mechanics. “Voting needs not be so burdensome,” he said. He suggested that the U.S. look to the way other countries engage their citizens by allowing voting to take place during special holidays or on weekends or even electronically.

But a chilling reality, DiCara said, was that young people don’t understand U.S. history or how the government works. “Teaching of civics has to be done in the schools,” he insisted.

Several in the audience concurred, saying that MCAS and similar assessment testing tools have become all-consuming in public education, forcing teachers to “teach for the test.” And those tests do not include civics, they said.

To that point DiCara said, “Ten percent of kids think Judge Judy is a Supreme Court judge!”

On the bright side, Kris Eastman from the League of Women Voters said the organization has seen an increase in interest at the high school level where they encourage students to become registered voters.

Of the baby boomers DiCara said, “They’ve been in power for over twenty-five years,” adding, “…nearly every leader is on the other side of seventy.” He believes this age discrepancy is indicative of youths’ disengagement with the political process. “Will we see a burst of energy from our young people … will we see a new patriotism,” DiCara remains hopeful it can happen.

The next discussion will be hosted at the Mattapoisett Free Public Library on Sunday, September 17 at 2:00 pm when guest speakers Mindy Todd of WCAI/NPR radio and Cape Cod Times editor Paul Pronovost will share thoughts on the role of media in civic engagement. In Rochester during October (time and day pending), the Joseph H. Plumb Memorial Library will host Dr. Jennifer Francis who will discuss the role of civic engagement and climate change.

By Marilou Newell