Appreciation : Les Line

AMENIA — Word inflation has reduced the value of “greatâ€� to dime-a-dozen status, but in the truest sense of the word, Les Line was a great person. His legacy was to turn Audubon magazine into the standard-bearer of the conservation movement. His years as editor (1966-1991) coincided with the rise and high water mark of environmentalism.  But Les’s genius and greatness were in making nature and the environmental ethic felt deep in the hearts of countless individuals.

Like so many of my generation, I grew up on Audubon magazine, poring over the breathtaking photographs that sang every month from its cover and inside pages, finding a refuge for my own nascent love of birds and nature. In later years I came to appreciate the quality of writing as well as the art and photography.

Under Les, Audubon was among the few magazines in wide circulation that gave space to lengthy, totally engrossing, New Yorker-type pieces.

Twenty-five years ago this month, I answered an ad for a job at an “environmental organization� in New York City, and walked through the doors of the National Audubon Society, to be greeted by a glass case showcasing issues of the flagship magazine — Les’s magazine. I took one look and knew I was where I belonged.

Over the years I got to know Les in many of his larger-than-life ways. He was renowned for his great appetites for food and jazz, as well as his uncompromising drive to excel as a nature writer, photographer and editor. 

But Les never lost his gentle kind-heartedness and humility — byproducts, perhaps, of his rural Michigan upbringing and his bucolic life in Amenia. One day he invited me into his plush New York office; a beautiful, muscular gray tabby cat was curled up on his desk. The cat came from Les’s farm, and he became ours for many years.

That cat did not make the journey to Sharon when we became near-neighbors to Les and Lois a dozen years ago  (he had died a few months earlier.)  But the day we moved up, there was a one-line message from Les waiting for me, which I will never forget: “Welcome to God’s country.â€�

The world was Les’s country, and he made it more memorable, more precious and more beautiful for all of us.

— Fred Baumgarten, Sharon

Latest News

South Kent School’s unofficial March reunion

Elmarko Jackson was named a 2023 McDonald’s All American in his senior year at South Kent School. He helped lead the Cardinals to a New England Prep School Athletic Conference (NEPSAC) AAA title victory and was recruited to play at the University of Kansas. This March he will play point guard for the Jayhawks when they enter the tournament as a No. 4 seed against (13) Samford University.

Riley Klein

SOUTH KENT — March Madness will feature seven former South Kent Cardinals who now play on Division 1 NCAA teams.

The top-tier high school basketball program will be well represented with graduates from each of the past three years heading to “The Big Dance.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hotchkiss grads dancing with Yale

Nick Townsend helped Yale win the Ivy League.

Screenshot from ESPN+ Broadcast

LAKEVILLE — Yale University advanced to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament after a buzzer-beater win over Brown University in the Ivy League championship game Sunday, March 17.

On Yale’s roster this year are two graduates of The Hotchkiss School: Nick Townsend, class of ‘22, and Jack Molloy, class of ‘21. Townsend wears No. 42 and Molloy wears No. 33.

Keep ReadingShow less
Handbells of St. Andrew’s to ring out Easter morning

Anne Everett and Bonnie Rosborough wait their turn to sound notes as bell ringers practicing to take part in the Easter morning service at St. Andrew’s Church.

Kathryn Boughton

KENT—There will be a joyful noise in St. Andrew’s Church Easter morning when a set of handbells donated to the church some 40 years ago are used for the first time by a choir currently rehearsing with music director Susan Guse.

Guse said that the church got the valuable three-octave set when Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center closed in the late 1980s and the bells were donated to the church. “The center used the bells for music therapy for younger patients. Our priest then was chaplain there and when the center closed, he brought the bells here,” she explained.

Keep ReadingShow less
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Penguin Random House

‘Picasso’s War” by Foreign Affairs senior editor Hugh Eakin, who has written about the art world for publications like The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times, is not about Pablo Picasso’s time in Nazi-occupied Paris and being harassed by the Gestapo, nor about his 1937 oil painting “Guernica,” in response to the aerial bombing of civilians in the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

Instead, the Penguin Random House book’s subtitle makes a clearer statement of intent: “How Modern Art Came To America.” This war was not between military forces but a cultural war combating America’s distaste for the emerging modernism that had flourished in Europe in the early decades of the 20th century.

Keep ReadingShow less