On the Job - Hidden in the Hills: Prohibition still echoes in rural New York
In Duchess County New York, a woman who formerly ran the local tourism bureau has taken over a distillery that has a storied history – gangster Dutch Schultz once reigned there. She's turned it into a local attraction and has used skills from all parts of her earlier careers to make the enterprise a success. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
I competed nationally, played tennis, I competed nationally.
Used to get very nervous.
Now I don't care.
Two-time cancer survivor.
And I think I've learned not to be so embarrassed or worried about things that I am who I am and this is what I bring to the table and love me or leave me.
Love her or leave her, Lydia Higginson has taken on the challenge of her career, running a startup business in the Hudson Valley of New York.
We'll meet her and one of Public Radio's most accomplished correspondents on this edition of On the Job from Hired to Retired, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals.
Over the past 34 years, Express Employment Professionals has put millions of people to work in meaningful and fulfilling jobs and careers.
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Now, here's Karen Michelle with Lydia's story.
Your last name?
Lydia Higginson is a present and for the past year the head of honcho at a startup business.
We're at Dutchess Spirits at Harvest Homestead Farm in Pine Plains, New York.
Pine Plains is a tiny and somewhat remote hamlet in New York's Hudson Valley.
Lydia Higginson isn't tiny, has bright red hair straight to her shoulders and a laser focus.
I have a lot of talents.
I mean, I think a lot of them I learned when I was very young, my father used to have me help with him.
He was doing catering before he had his own restaurant.
So I was very used to the hospitality, welcoming people, greeting them, and I thought that was very important.
Those skills are very useful no matter what career you're in.
And the fact that I have a bunch of different talents, I mean, some of them are useful, some of them are not so useful, I think just give me a broader understanding of other people and relating to them.
And sometimes it wasn't so clear how her young talents would apply to making a living, say playing tennis and classical piano or majoring in French and Spanish in college.
I had no idea.
I just, I had a passion for languages.
I loved to travel.
My family were big travelers.
My father was from England.
My mother's family was from Wales.
So I spent a lot of time overseas growing up.
When I was in college, I spent a semester abroad in France and then I worked at my uncle's pub in northern England.
My parents had had a several year honeymoon when they got married and traveled all around the United States and Europe and they settled in New Jersey.
But they were very good about every year we had some big trips.
So we were very well exposed.
Not only in the United States, we drove around the United States, Canada, Mexico, and primarily the UK.
But it was just ingrained in me, you know, to travel and experience what other cultures had to offer.
And somehow I thought the Spanish and French was going to tie into that.
I knew I didn't want to be a teacher.
But I found that those things translated well in tourism because I understand what a visitor wants and I understand what people are looking for when they're traveling.
After graduating from college in 1984, Lydia started working for nonprofits in New Jersey.
And after a few years, I decided to move up here to be closer to my family.
And I moved up here without a job.
And I started out at Berkshire Schools, the associate director of the annual fund.
And from that, I learned about how big the area the Berkshires in the Hudson Valley were for tourism.
I then had a brief stint at the Hudson Valley Guide, which was a tourism guide, and loved tourism.
That was really my passion.
Start the movie.
Oh, great.
Welcome.
Where did you come from?
Well, we live in Brooklyn, but we have a place in Miller County.
Okay.
She parlayed that passion into a gig as director of development for the Samuel Morris Historic Site.
You know, the guy who came up with Morris Code.
And then she spent 10 years as the vice president for Dutchess Tourism.
Dutchess County is less than a two-hour drive north of New York City and is full of farms with the freshest eggs, the plumpest poultry, and truly gorgeous produce.
And about five years ago, I saw that this new distillery was opening and they were doing a tasting at Arlington Liquor.
And I went and I met Ariel Schlein, who was the founder and the president, and said to him, you don't know me, but you're going to know me.
You're going to be working with me.
And five years later, here I am.
Lydia is definitely the face of the place.
Ariel Schlein looks more like a slick-hipped, dark-haired New Yorker than a gentleman farmer or distiller.
The co-founder of Dutchess, he'd been a banker.
I never wanted, not that I never wanted to run Dutchess, but I'm much more of a developer, a builder.
So, you know, having built it kind of to this level, it was then up to me to find someone who could then bring, you know, those people who could bring that network or that community that they already had themselves.
And Lydia was certainly that.
And, you know, she's absolutely the face of Dutchess.
I didn't reject what you called me when you hired me.
I can't recall.
Your retirement plan.
Oh, yeah, my retirement plan.
Yeah, Lydia is my retirement plan.
You know, like I said before, whether Lydia was working here or outside of here, she's always been our biggest advocate.
She's the one that's out there.
And, you know, I heard you say she knows everybody.
She knows everybody.
She knows everybody.
Everybody knows her.
To know her is to love her.
Like, you know, I'm a big fan of no-brainer decisions.
And Lydia was probably the ultimate no-brainer decision.
You know, she likes to think that it was her idea.
You know, that five years ago, you know, you don't know me yet, but I knew.
I knew then.
So it just took a, it just, I needed to set the stage and I needed to really, I need to make sure that this place was ready for Lydia.
You know, say the other way around.
After we come back, more about Lydia Higginson's job change.
From working for a local government agency to private enterprise and booze.
You're listening to independent producer Karen Michelle with a profile of one of her unique neighbors in the Hudson Valley of New York State.
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And welcome back to On the Job from Hired to Retired.
Once again, here's Karen Michelle.
From her youth, Lydia Higginson's been unafraid to take on a challenge.
As she grew up and went out into the workforce, she worked hard, always looking for the right fit.
It just took me time, like trial and error, different jobs.
Like, yeah, this is close to what I want to do, but each time figuring out, I mean, you know, 10 years ago, there were no distilleries in Dutchess County, so I wouldn't even have conceived of it.
And I knew I didn't want to be at a winery.
Winery wasn't my passion.
But booze is, you know, bourbon, moonshine, brandy.
And this distillery connects with another of Lydia's many passions, history.
My parents had a 1720 inn.
My uncle's pub in England was over 400 years old.
I grew up in a 175-year-old converted barn, and I now live in an 1850s carriage house.
So, by nature, I appreciate it.
I also feel very strongly about using history.
I'm not of the let's just look at it and walk by it.
Like, the fact that people can go in our bunkers and do things makes me really, really happy.
And I think people get a real kick out of being in a place and saying, Wow, I'm hearing a lecture or I'm watching a movie where Dutch Schultz was.
I mean, we're living that history.
Dutch Schultz proved quite willing to use violence himself and to kill people.
I mean, it's not like he was a cannibal or something.
I mean, he was, yeah, he was a bad guy.
But I think people just like you know, the popularity of the godfather movies and stuff, there is a certain romance to the mobsters and the gangsters.
But we don't glorify anything he did other than making the booze.
Dutchess Spirits is a distillery with an unusual history.
Briefly during Prohibition, Dutch Schultz and his men lived and made moonshine right here.
Most visitors go on a tour.
Many weekends, they're led by Lydia's wife, Cameron Anderson.
Here you can see the top of one of the bunkers and all the exhaust pipes.
And here's another bunker right here.
You can see you can see how easily it blended into the environment.
Visitors can walk or crawl, depending, through the tunnels and into the bunkers where the hooch was made and the mobsters hid.
Though the distillery/slash hideout/slash farm was a big producer, it was in business for less than a year.
Lydia reads from an account of the final raid in October 1932.
This is from the local newspaper after the farm was raided by the FBI.
It was raided twice and they didn't find anything.
Third time they came back.
They reached the farm at 6 o'clock, finding two stills in operation and in the charge of the two men arrested.
They seized two 2,000-gallon stills, columns and condensers, two high-pressure boilers, 13 1,000-gallon vats of mash.
This iteration of the distillery started 80 years after that raid.
And while it's unlikely the activities back then were of a very social nature, it's now part of Lydia Higginson's job to devise and host events, speakeasies, paranormal explorations, mob-themed movies, and on this afternoon...
Hi, how are you?
Are you here for the book signing?
Great.
If anybody would like to have a seat, we're going to have Debbie start in a couple seconds.
There are more than two dozen guests milling, buzzing, clearly looking forward to what's ahead.
Thank you all for coming today.
I'm Lydia from Dutchess Spirits.
This is the site of Dutch Schultz's underground bootlegging operation during Prohibition.
At the end of her talk, and after she sells some books and you eat a little taste, we're going to take you on a tour and you have to go in the bunker where Dutch Schultz had his bootlegging operations.
Later that night, there'll be another event again prepped for and hosted and at least partly cleaned up by Lydia.
So how many hours do you think you work?
Friday was 14.
Today will be about 14.
Tomorrow it'll be 10.
I'm taking Monday off and I'll be working six hours Tuesday of my other day off and then back to eight and nine hour days.
Just Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, then another 12 hours next Saturday.
That's the hospitality biz.
But tonight you're working.
Yes, I came in.
I started at 9 this morning and I'll be here till about 1 in the morning.
So I will sleep well tonight, the few hours I get.
So do you feel differently motivated because you have a steak?
No, I did the same kind of hours for tourism.
I mean, I would go from event to event, plus work my normal workday to be a part of the community and active at other events.
So you have to have that drive, though.
You have to be willing to say, okay, you know, sometimes I'm giving up things.
Lydia is committed to making Dutch's Spirits rise again, whatever it takes.
So what would you like to try today?
You'd love that ginger.
I mean, if I could tell my 22-year-old self, you know, to be not so afraid of what's out there and just go for it and try.
I mean, it was a big risk to move up here and leave a job that I had for six years in New Jersey to move up here without a job.
But I had confidence in myself and being able to find something that would suit me.
And it may have taken exactly, you know, a little while.
You have to pay the bills in the meantime.
But each step gave me some other skill or skill set that helped me get to where I am now.
I will probably work until I'm 80-something.
It gives me meaning, you know, to get up.
I mean, I don't have children, so my legacy will be what I did for tourism, what I did for these different sites.
And that's what gives me my little legacy.
Hello, how are you?
How are you?
Good.
Are you just getting here?
Yeah, we'll turn around.
I have a lot of friends that work for very big corporations, and none of them are happy.
Yeah, they're making good paychecks, but they are not happy.
There are times here, yes, I'm sometimes weed whacking, sometimes I'm scrubbing a floor.
But in the same token, I'm creating marketing.
I'm working with partners to create exciting events here.
And it's all part and parcel of being willing to do anything and pitching in, and it makes me happy.
Now, they literally just started.
They should be in the corner of the distillery for a little bit.
So they're coming here.
So go catch it this week after that's Lydia Higginson, CEO of Dutchess Spirits and Harvest Homestead Farm.
I'm producer Karen Michelle in the Hudson Valley, New York.
That's all for this edition of On the Job from Hired to Retired.
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