ALTAMONT — Betty Allen Spadaro — a friendly and no-nonsense realist — never stopped caring about Altamont.

She started her teaching career at the one-room schoolhouse on the Bozenkill, continued it, teaching at the Altamont High School, and finally, after that school was demolished, taught in the then-new Altamont Elementary School.

By her own description, she “stressed the basics along with emphasizing promptness, honesty, ambition, faithfulness, and organization.”

Mrs. Spadaro was a fixture at the Altamont Fair; a long-time member of Altamont’s Order of the Eastern Star; an active member of the auxiliaries of the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Altamont Fire Department; and she cared deeply about the village’s library and its newspaper.

“Doing things for others,” she said, is why she liked the Eastern Star. This ranged from scholarships for nurses and teachers to helping someone who had cancer or who had lost their home. While she traveled the world in her later life, Mrs. Spadaro was rooted in caring for neighbors at home.

She died on Monday, May 2, 2022, about a month after entering an assisted living facility following a bad fall and finally succumbed to pneumonia. She was 103.

In the midst of the isolation caused by the pandemic, Mrs. Spadaro decided to write a letter to the Enterprise editor, recalling, with long lists of names and activities, her happy memories of village life. Her letters always arrived by mail — a rarity these days — and were written with precise penmanship.

“It is early morning and I am sitting in my cottage overlooking the quiet water of Glen Lake,”
Mrs. Spadaro wrote from the Warren County home she and her late husband had built in the 1970s. “Colorful shadows of the homes, trees, and flag poles are cast upside-down across the bay. Soon the lake will be rolling when the wind starts blowing. The sunshine will cause sparkles upon the waves.

“My mind turns to picturing my former home in Altamont in contrast to location, size, and scene. It was in the village of Altamont. It was there I had 34 years of teaching; met my husband-to-be; and my son, Dick, was educated there.”

Mrs. Spadaro was born in Amsterdam, the daughter of Virgil and Stella Horton Allen. In 1936, she graduated from Nott Terrace High School in Schenectady and three years later graduated with a teaching certificate from the Oneonta State Normal School. She later earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the New York State College for Teachers at Albany.

She came to Altamont when her widowed mother married an Altamont man and became Stella Allen Vroman. Mrs. Spadaro had always wanted to be a teacher, ever since she was a young child.

After graduating from Oneonta in the midst of the Great Depression, Mrs. Spadaro worked as a waitress while looking for a teaching job.

“Most of us, when we stood in line for graduation that year, had no jobs,” Mrs. Spadaro told the Enterprise in a podcast interview. “And, when we did have a job, it was only about $800, maybe $1,000 a year.”

Her stepfather had a chance encounter with Cyrus Spadaro, a trustee of the Bozenkill school, who said the school needed a teacher. She was hired on the spot, sight unseen, and went to work that September.

Cyrus’s son, Patrick, “came to inspect to see if the fire were working well in that potbelly stove,” Mrs. Spadaro said, adding with a wink, “That’s what he said.”

The two fell in love but World War II intervened and Patrick Spadaro was in service for almost four years, building airfields in Europe. The pair exchanged many letters as Mrs. Spadaro continued teaching at the Bozenkill school.

She taught children there from ages 6 to 16 and every subject — not just math, English, history, and science but also music, art, and phys. ed. as well. “I was 19 and the kids were almost as old as I,” she said of when she started teaching.

Mrs. Spadaro stayed in touch with many of her students over the years.

“It was one of the nicest schools around,” she said. Water was carried from the Spadaros’ house, which was quite a walk, she said. She was proud of the gingham curtains she sewed for the windows.

The Knox school served Bozenkill students from 1851 to 1955, and was moved, along with its outhouse, to the Altamont fairgrounds, in 1967. Gingham curtains were hung there, too. During Fair Week, Mrs. Spadaro would tell visitors about what it was like to teach in a one-room schoolhouse.

When Patrick Spadaro was discharged from the service, the couple married within two months. “Those days, we did not have many weddings,” said Mrs. Spadaro. “You just got married because you didn’t have any money.”

The couple married on Dec. 26, 1945 during her school’s Christmas recess to save the district from having to hire a substitute, said the ever-practical Mrs. Spadaro. “But what we did do is we went to New York City and saw the Rockettes ….,” said Mrs. Spadaro of their brief honeymoon. “I went right to work again. I didn’t take any days off.”

Mr. Spadaro worked at Crabill’s, on Maple Avenue in the village, a store that “had all kinds of everything ….,” she said. “Basic clothes and stoves and refrigerators and lawnmowers and shirts and blouses and napkins and tablecloths.”

The Spadaros’ young son, Dick, whom she said always loved wheels, would get on his bike and peddle around the village, stopping often at the store where his father worked. “I would not worry about him,” said Mrs. Spadaro, describing the trusting atmosphere that pervaded the village.

As a man, Dick Spadaro, Mrs. Spadaro’s only child, had a business selling parts for early Fords and was known across the country and around the world for his expertise in antique car restoration.

“He was involved with everything, very active. He kept his mother busy from the time he was born,” Mrs. Spadaro of her son. Sometimes, when she watched her son race, Mrs. Spadaro said, “My teeth would chatter.” She described him “going up in the car, landing with a thud, taking out part of the earth.” He was in a bad accident once, at Lebanon Valley, but, so as not to worry her, she said, “He never told me.”

Richard Allen Spadaro died in 2015 after a courageous battle with a rare form of brain cancer; he was 66.

With the baby boom that came after World War II, classes were taught in Altamont’s Reformed Church and in its Legion Hall, Mrs. Spadaro recalled. She served on a committee that guided the centralization of Guilderland’s schools and later served as president of the teachers’ association.

After teaching in a two-room schoolhouse in South Albany for a year, Mrs. Spadaro was hired to teach a fifth- and sixth-grade class in the old Altamont High School, which was demolished once the new elementary school was built. Her son was in the first kindergarten class at the new Altamont Elementary School.

Once Mrs. Spadaro retired in 1979, she and her husband started traveling — to Europe three different times and also to Australia. After Patrick Spadaro died in 1989, Mrs. Spadaro continued to travel — including to Africa, China, and Japan.

“I’ve always been interested in people,” she said of her motivation for travel.

Mrs. Spadaro also had an abiding interest in cats and described a trip to Kenya where she saw lions, which to her looked like large house cats. “I said, ‘Oh, look at that lion.’” The guide replied, “Look again.” Mrs. Spadaro did — and all of a sudden could see 10 lions.

“They blend right in,” said Mrs. Spadaro. “We’re not used to really looking well at things.”

But Mrs. Spadaro did look at things well and with purpose.

She started working at the Altamont Fair because her husband was the commander of the American Legion post, which had a concession stand there. She kept at it through three decades, introducing picnics, poetry, and posies to the fair, as well as seeing to more practical concerns like tightening the gates.

She started a tradition of poetry reading at the fair, getting the idea from the English custom of speakers in the underground train stations in London. “I thought, it’s noisy at the fair, too … Why couldn’t we have poetry?” she asked.

Volunteers have read everything from psalms in the Bible to nursery rhymes, Mrs. Spadaro said. “And Robert Frost is always popular,” she said, noting that sometimes farm machinery had to be quieted so that the poetry could be heard.

Mrs. Spadaro’s favorite reading materials were books about the Civil War and World War II as well as biographies. She had a love of the Altamont Free Library that lasted a lifetime.

The library’s current director, Joe Burke, said that last October, when he visited Mrs. Spadaro for an oral history interview, she wanted to know what it would take to eliminate fines for overdue books. He told her the amount the library had budgeted for overdue fines for 2022.

She said, “I can do that!”

And she did.

“With Betty’s donation and encouragement, and after much discussion and study, the Board of Trustees voted to eliminate overdue fines shortly thereafter,” recounted Mr. Burke. “To the end, she wanted kids to have access to the library no matter their economic circumstances. I can’t think of a better legacy to have left this community that she loved so well and served so long.”

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 Betty Allen Spadaro is survived by her cousins: Ernest Horton of Schenectady; Edward Horton of Amsterdam; Patricia Spadaro of Herkimer; Frank Spadaro of Malta; and Linda Miller of Menands.

She is also survived by her nieces Susie Arnold of Wisconsin and Terri McCoy of Albany. “Thanks to Frank and Susan Spadaro who have been there for Betty constantly since her son became ill,” her family wrote.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. on Friday, May 13, in the chapel of the Memory Gardens Cemetery at 983 Watervliet-Shaker Road in Albany, which will be followed by a committal service in the family plot where Mrs. Spadaro will be buried next to her husband and son. Mrs. Ruth Howe will officiate at the services.

Please feel free to bring a folding chair with you as they are limited at the cemetery.

An obituary that Mrs. Spadaro wrote herself is also posted on the Enterprise website.

Memorial contributions may be made to Queensbury Senior Citizens Inc., 742 Bay Road, Queensbury NY 12804; to The Altamont Fair, Post Office Box 506, Altamont, NY 12009; or to the Altamont Free Library, 179 Main St., Altamont, NY 12009.