Eric Emery met Andrea Chula while attending Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire. After graduation, the couple married and moved to Denver. Eric’s father had recently passed away from pancreatic cancer, and instead of settling in New Hampshire they decided to go live someplace new before their careers and family made that more difficult. Both avid skiers, they chose Denver because they wanted to spend some time “skiing in the powder in the Rockies.” When not on the slopes, Eric worked in sales for Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and Andrea worked as a pre-school teacher at the Cerebral Palsy School of Colorado.

They didn’t stay away for too long. It was when their first child, Ayela, was born that led to thoughts of moving back home after seven years away. Home for Eric and Andrea would always be in New England. Eric grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire, and Andrea’s parents were in Northfield, Massachusetts, where she grew up. The question of where exactly was up for conversation.

Eric credits Andrea with decisively choosing Quechee as the nest for their family. The couple looked all over the Upper Valley, finally deciding that Quechee was the best place to settle. They purchased their home in 2011. Eric says that considering the amenities of the community it made sense for a family of four. Sports are important to Eric and Andrea, they were both ski racers in high school and college, so the camps, clubs, and groups available to the children through The Quechee Club was especially enticing to the young parents. Having a ski hill right in the community was the perfect scenario. “Ayela and Jayce already love skiing and are great golfers,” says Eric.

Eric and Andrea have comfortably settled into the area as well. Eric works in sales at Townline Equipment, a successful, locally run business in Plainfield, New Hampshire, that sells and services new and used tractors and construction equipment. Andrea works from home as an independent consultant for Arbonne, a vegan health and wellness company. Ayela is going into third grade at the Ottauquechee School, and Jayce will start Kindergarten there this year.

“We love the Ottauquechee School. It’s an amazing public school. Our children are happy there. We like the teachers and the other parents. We have good friends whose kids go to school next door at the Waldorf School. Our kids can meet up with their kids after school and play on the athletic field or go to the Quechee Library. This just adds to the sense of community for us,” Eric says.

The Emery’s take advantage of everything that Quechee and Woodstock have to offer, especially the Quechee Balloon Festival held over Father’s Day Weekend, says Eric. “This is such a unique event. There’s nowhere else around here that has something like this.”

Getting involved in the community

Eric joined The Quechee Club’s Winter Sports Committee in 2017, and is eager to be an active member of the community to “make sure that younger, year-round members have a voice and opinion in winter activities.” Eric is adamant that the reputation that some have of Quechee lacking something of a community is not true and he promotes the idea of his family’s decision to buy in Quechee and raise their kids here. Eric hopes to support even more kid-centric activities to further attract young families to visit, engage at the club, and maybe fall in love with the place.

“The Quechee Club, and especially the Recreation Department, is doing a phenomenal job incorporating kids and family into club events. I’ve seen this change since we first moved here,” says Eric. And Eric points out other changes that continue to make this area appealing. “The whole Route 4 corridor is really developing; there are more restaurants, grocery stores, and coffee shop options.”

“For us, the biggest draw to Quechee is the sense of community. This is not just a resort or a seasonal destination. It’s a real community. Our family takes advantage of all four seasons and what they have to offer for the whole family. That’s why we chose Quechee to call home,” says Andrea.

Making it a family affair

The Emerys have felt and seen the Quechee charm do its thing. Two years ago, Andrea’s parents, Karen and David Chula, bought a home right next door to the grandkids, and are living there full-time. Living in Northfield, Massachusetts, the Chula’s came for visits, and like Eric and Andrea were drawn to the area, and – both avid golfers – the golf courses. David is now one of the golf-course rangers.

Their move here has made the home nest in Quechee more complete than Eric and Andrea could have thought possible. The Emery’s won’t be leaving anytime soon, the family only plans on deepening their connections and commitments to their unique community.

Filling Life’s Stage

I love an audience,” Eleonora Stein proclaims. Throughout her life she has found audiences, in her careers as dancer, singer and teacher. Now 89, she has lived a full and active life that’s provided her with many stories and collections of memorabilia—and she continues to accumulate anecdotes and events. “All the world,” even each local village street, is her stage.

“Mme. Stein,” as she is known to her ballet students, speaks with enthusiasm and precision—and presumably with accuracy—of her life and experiences. “I was born in Budapest on August 16, 1926,” she says. “This year I’ll be 90 years old! In 1938, I arrived with my mother on October 10 in New York. My mother’s father got the visa. We went through Berlin, and the train stopped in a huge Bahnhof—train station. They wouldn’t let us get off the train. The glass dome, the roof, was hung with gigantic swastikas from one end to the other.”

“My father and brother left the next year; they were sneaked out,” continues Mme. Stein. The family was Jewish—their name was Reich. She converted to Catholicism in the 1950s. “When we arrived, we lived with my grandfather on 72nd Street. My mother was excellent in needlework. She worked for an outstanding costumer in New York, and went to night school to learn English. I went directly to school—I didn’t like that! I learned English in three months and started writing for the school newspaper. And soon I was a well-known figure in school because of dance.”

All artistic endeavors appealed to the young Erika (Mme. Stein’s birth name). One day in a music class she noticed an empty front row and rushed up to claim it. When the class sang an aria from Faust, she gave it her all. “The teacher was listening,” she recalls, “ and said, ‘Erika, come up and sing it yourself,’ and the class applauded. Of course, all I needed was an audience,” she laughs.

Press photo from The Roxy Theatre.

The pretty child who had taken many dance classes in Budapest, and also performed there in children’s theater and short films, had disappointments as well as successes. In New York she attended the High School of Music and Art (which existed from 1936 to 1984), beginning in 1941, but her dance career ran into problems. Too early work in ballet on pointe in her early childhood had injured her feet, and doctors discovered she had a slight heart murmur, which in those days was treated with complete rest. “They gave me a pass to use the elevator—can you imagine!,” she exclaims. “It was such a heartbreaker.” Making lemonade out of lemons, she began taking voice lessons.

In the 1950s, Mme. Stein performed under the name Erica Bard (an Americanization of her grandmother’s name, Bardos) at The Roxy Theater, and toured with the company. At times she worked with her family: her father designed toys, including an angel Christmas-tree topper, which shows up in movies (including The Bishop’s Wife, and Holiday Inn). “I was the fastest on the assembly line,” she recalls. “I always had to shine. I’m a ham from way back.” In 1958, Stein became her name with her marriage to Hal Stein, who was her supervisor at a graphics company. The couple lived in New Jersey, where their two sons still live­—one a police sergeant and the other a corporate vice president. Mme. Stein is still in touch occasionally with Hal, though they divorced in the 1970s and he has remarried.

Settling in Vermont

Around 1985 she moved to Woodstock. She has been known in this area as a teacher of dance, and she still has an occasional student. “The Russian style is what I teach. Arm movements are very important,” she says. “Like this, graceful!,” she demonstrates by moving her arms through several canonical positions with a smooth, lilting, continuous flow. “Not like this!,” as she moves her arms from down to up then to side and front in a stop-action style.

Press photo from her days as a singer.

Mme. Stein’s cozy apartment displays mementos of her activities over the years. Photos of herself and her family fill the walls, along with children’s drawings, paintings and sketches she has done, and works by friends. A treasured souvenir is a newspaper article telling of her visit to London’s Royal Ballet, signed by some of the company’s greats, including famous ballet dancers Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev.

As she faces the challenges of age, Mme. Stein remains valiant. She can no longer drive, but she cuts a notable figure when she walks, wearing “my fur jacket, my beautiful fur boots, my fur hat, and of course my gold pocketbook.” As a visitor reaches to pick up a fallen item since Madame has difficulty with her knees, she exclaims, “No, no! I don’t want help. I do it myself.”

“If you want to find me on Wednesdays, you can come to the hospital [Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center] between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. I’ll be there, playing piano,” says Quechee’s Bill Emerson. “When I retired I had two goals, to play golf and to play piano.”

Emerson learned to play the piano by ear. His first venture into playing music was in college with a ukulele. He then began to experiment with the piano, and was a quick study. “There was always a piano inside of the frat houses. And when I was in the Navy, there were two pianos on the ship. One in the enlisted men’s quarters and one in the officers’, and I had a lot of free time while we were sailing to Korea and back.”

After his retirement in 1986, he took lessons from two excellent jazz pianists. He learned to read music, after 40 years of playing by ear. He spends most mornings practicing, which he enjoys.

“The hospital gig is my pride and joy,” he says, “but it all started at the Powerhouse Mall. In 1986, after I retired, my wife and I went on vacation. When we came back to Logan airport, someone had smashed the window of our car in the parking garage and stolen the radio. So I went to get it replaced at Car Sounds (now the Electronic Superstore in Lebanon), and they said it would take a couple of hours. So I went over to the Powerhouse Mall to wait, and there was this guy in a tuxedo playing the piano. I thought ‘I can do that!’ and I wrote a letter to Bayne Stevenson (the owner of the Powerhouse Mall). They gave me an audition, and I was in!”

In addition to volunteering at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Bill also plays professional gigs at events and at places like the Canoe Club in Hanover, the Woodstock Inn, and Wheelock Terrace, to which he was headed after the hospital. He favors classic easy jazz—Gershwin, Cole Porter, the cream of the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. He loves seeing new generations falling under the spell of these great tunes. He laughs, “It’s great when some kid says ‘Will you play “The Way You Look Tonight” at my wedding?’