ever mentioned the history of the Hudson River Valley, never mentioned the history of the Hudson River, never mentioned the history of Sing-Sing Prison, never mentioned Andre and Arnold and West Point, and they certainly never really talked about the water system. So when I graduated from college and went to the United States Army and came back, got a job as a teacher in Ossining, I think it was kind of my genealogy. It was kind of my background and desire to not only find out more about local history itself, but it was my childhood that Section 4: Interpretation Oral Histories 91 so small you could just put your hand through them and of course those are little culverts that probably run twice a year when there’s a heavy rain. Then there were other culverts where you could actually walk through, you could actually drive your car through. And the kids loved that. “Mr. O, Mr. O, can we go through the aqueduct, through the culverts?” I used to say to them, “When you’re inside the culvert, be careful, but look at the stonework. Look at the incredible stonework that those engineers and artisans and stonemasons, what they did in 1842. I mean, you don’t see work like that anymore.” And a third thing that the kids loved on the aqueduct, especially loved, were the ventilators. The ventilators were put in each mile along the pathway of the aqueduct to allow fresh air and to relieve the water pressure inside the tube. And they’re absolutely wonderful because they’re made of different stone. The engineers chose whatever stone they found in whatever community they were in, so when you’re in Croton it’s kind of a granitey, a granitey, kind of a brownish stone. When you get into Ossining, you’re dealing with a limestone; it’s called Sing-Sing marble because much of it was quarried at Sing-Sing Prison. So you’re dealing with more of a whitish color. When you get down around Yonkers and Hastings, it turns a dark brown, and that’s called Tuckahoe Marble. And it’s just, again, a different color. So the ventilators were inserted one every mile, and the kids used to love when we would get to the ventilators; they would all crowd around the outside of the ventilator, and they would look, they would ask me, “Well what number ventilator, how many miles have we walked so far?” and, “Look at this ventilator!” And then, we would usually choose a half a dozen boys and girls, and we would form like a human ladder, and we would have them hop up on shoulders, okay, kind of like Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, so that a few of them could actually climb right up to the top of the ventilator and then look down into the ventilator, down into the aqueduct, and they would then report to the rest of the group, “Well this is what we see, and this is what we don’t see.” So the ventilators were also a wonderful source of enthusiasm and excitement for the kids. Again, for my kids, most of them living in the village and town of Ossining, most of my seventh graders hadn’t done any traveling, they didn’t have automobiles, most of them were low, middle, blue collar, middle-class families, so taking the kids out of the classroom and getting them out into the field, out into Mother Nature, was just an absolutely wonderful experience. And, as I said before, I still get comments, letters, emails, Facebook, whatever, from former students talking about those kinds of experiences, so again, especially thirteen year old middle school kids. Today, I mean to see some of the adults, and today when I do walks on the aqueduct and talk about the dams and the aqueduct and the water supply system, I average about twenty or thirty adults, and they come out with the same enthusiasm, and when I take them up to see a ventilator, you know, I have people in their seventies and eighties whose jaws drop to think that, wow, this was built in 1842 and how magnificent it is that these structures still survive and that we have this wonderful history that still is truly in our backyard. Oral Histories 92 Solemn River there, it’s got to be 150 feet high. And there were times when the kids—you know, I’d say to the kids, “Okay, you can go up about 20 or 30 feet, but then you have to come back down, because I don’t want anyone getting hurt.” They were just, they were so excited, they would scramble up, and up they would go, and I’d have parents standing next to me going, “Mr. Oechsner, do you think maybe this is a little too dangerous?” And I would