Around 8 o'clock one night in the summer of 1967, Sid Pinsky slung me over his shoulder and took me home in a taxi. The trip, from the Plaza Bar on Houston Street and Ave B to 211 West 106, took a long time and cost a lot of money, two things we didn't have much of in those days. Sid and I were working for one of Lyndon Johnson's "poverty programs" - an outfit on the Lower East Side of Manhattan called Mobilization For Youth (MFY) where you stirred up the community and generally raised hell with landlords, city agencies and anybody else who wanted the world to stay still. That's the same Sid Pinsky that we all know and love up here in Sandisfield, where he and his family have enriched our community for close to ninety years.

I met Sid back in the Sixties. He was one of the nation's first "advocate" social workers. He and Danny Kronenfeld and Marilyn Gore (all of whom have lived and own homes in Sandisfield) were the heart of MFY's Community Organization Department.

Actually, they all were part of a larger, non-violent revolution. Social work had taken a critical turn in those days. The uncompromising challenge of the Civil Rights movement in the early 60's turned many social workers into advocates, far beyond their traditional role as compassionate caregivers. Sid Pinsky brought a soft-spoken, thoughtful presence to a flurry of programs, crises and egos.

And it all began right here in Sandisfield, Massachusetts.

Sid was born in the downstairs "birthing" room at 6 Silverbrook Road on November 19, 1929. The great white house was a boarding house created seven years earlier by Sid's parents, Libby and David Pinsky. It later became a dairy farm and summer refuge for immigrant Jews living in the slums of New York City. (See "Getting a Room at the Pinsky's" , Page 7, Sandisfield Times, July 2010) Sid grew up in the midst of a noisy gang of transplanted children and adults. He went through 8th Grade at the local schoolhouse and graduated from Lee High School.

In the summer of 1952, Sid met Terry Chapman, a radiantly beautiful dancer who was on a scholarship at Jacob's Pillow. They were married after a two-year courtship by a Justice of the Peace in Pittsfield. They lived in a variety of locales while Sid pursued his higher education. Two children eventually arrived: Daniel in 1959 and Nina in 1960. Today both are proud citizens of Sandisfield. In time, Terry joined the Barrington Ballet and under her leadership it became a nationally prominent school of dance.

Sid's first job as a social worker-activist came courtesy of two of his Sandisfield neighbors: Irving Levine and Len Dryansky. In the summer of 1956, Levine and Dryansky brought Sid into the Brownsville Boys Club in Brooklyn where he found his lifelong calling of organizing and counseling children in the poorest neighborhoods of the city. A story is told that Pinsky, who had been born and raised on a dairy farm in Sandisfield, actually found a cow in Brooklyn and astonished his Brownsville youngsters by teaching them how to milk.

I met Sid (along with Danny Kronenfeld and Marilyn Gore) when I showed up in 1965 as the MFY public information director and watched in awe as their workers organized rent strikes, food co-operatives, started small locally-owned businesses; and built new and rehabilitated housing in a wave of social and political action unlike anything New York City had ever seen. Sid Pinsky was the grown-up...the sensible adult who kept the rest of us sane.

After five years at MFY, Sid went back to Columbia and got his Ph.D. in psychiatric social work. Dr. Pinsky then returned to the Hillside Hospital where he worked for the next 30 years, ultimately retiring to Sandisfield where he and Terry and Len Dryansky started an Arts Center in the old synagogue on Hammertown Road.

Teacher-dancer Terry Pinsky died in 1991.

One final, important note: When the social upheaval and struggles of the Sixties ended, many of the same people associated with that movement, all friends of Sid, began to drift to Sandisfield, most ending up in fierce post-mortem discussions in the historic Pinsky house. Many of them stayed and bought homes in our beautiful town, bringing another part of American history along with them. ST