George Wislocki, Fighting the Good Fight

A remembrance by Tad Ames, BNRC President from 2001–2017

On a sunny spring morning in 1991, tooling up Alford’s West Road in his red Chevy Blazer after a visit with a farmer in Egremont, George Wislocki spotted a man on a ladder, repairing the track of a fading barn’s sliding door, and slammed on the brakes.

“Ray, you SOB,” he yelled through the open passenger window.

The man grinned in recognition, dismounted slowly and sauntered around to George’s window, lighting a cigarette on the way. His eyes crinkled with intelligence and amusement above a bushy mustache.

“Be a good boy and give me one of those, would you, my friend?” George asked. Ray cackled, tapped a Marlboro out, and lit it for George.

“What’s new with you, George?” he asked.

“Fighting the good fight, babes,” George said.

“Not trying to sell that scenic mountain bullshit anymore?” Ray asked, squinting through the smoke.

“The time will come, my boy.”

Both men laughed. “When pigs fly!” Ray said. “You’re a damned fool! We’ll hand your ass to you again if you want to come back for more.”

George guffawed. “Someday you’ll be begging me for help.”

Ray slapped the roof of the vehicle. “I gotta get back to work. And don’t flick that butt in the road. No littering in Alford!”

Back underway, George explained. Ray Wilcox ran the Alford Board of Selectmen. A couple of years earlier, supported by several allied Alford residents and the local Planning Board, George and BNRC had brought the Scenic Mountains Act forward to the Alford Town Meeting for enactment. Ray and seemingly 99 percent of the voting population in town, bolstered by a well-prepared town counsel for whom George reserved a special enmity, had routed the proposal, sending George out into the night just this side of tar-and-feathering.

The roadside encounter was, as the kids say, classic George. As comfortable with profane farmers as he was with the fancies of Stockbridge’s most ancient living rooms. Jovial with his adversaries, shaking hands and jollying up to even the most seething opponent.

From the beginnings of BNRC’s founding in 1967, outside of a handful of visionary supporters who included the Millers of The Berkshire Eagle, the Cranes of Crane & Company, and the Berkshire institutionalists they’d managed to recruit to BNRC’s founding board, George had swum upstream against a current of indifference and sometimes outright hostility.

But it wasn’t all futility. The early victories were telling.

The Stokes and Hatch families donated steep and remote lands around the saddle separating Lenox and West Stockbridge Mountains, a ridgeline that George and collaborator Warren Archey later rebranded as “Yokun Ridge.”

A new tool, the “conservation easement,” was ratified by the Internal Revenue Service, making private conservation more practical, while opening the way to a new state conservation tool, the Agricultural Preservation Restriction.

The Crane family saw the opportunity and pioneered the APR program and the newly approved Massachusetts conservation restriction statute, by conserving nearly 2,000 acres of Holiday Farm, to this day BNRC’s single largest conservation project.

George took advantage of government “self-help” grants to help numerous towns acquire and protect local gems, the Notch Cascades in North Adams and Brattlebrook Park in Pittsfield among them.

Through the years, perpetually underfunded, and often under-appreciated, George and BNRC persisted, conserving significant lands when the opportunity arose, fighting for improvements in public conservation (the Scenic Mountains Act! Housatonic River clean-up!), and opposing projects out of scale and out of tune with the intimacy of his beloved Berkshires (highway bypasses in Pittsfield and Monterey! 1,200 houses at Greylock Glen! A solid-waste mega landfill adjacent to the Appalachian Trail in Hinsdale!).

I first met George Wislocki in the fall of 1986, as a newly hired editorial writer at The Berkshire Eagle. George practically inhabited the Eagle’s halls—his primary patrons, the Miller family, owned the place after all. With their long family habit of private conservation for the public good, and a well-respected, profitable newspaper to promote their views, the Millers were steadfast allies from the start.

But the relationship went far beyond the corner office. George was a champion advocate. He befriended reporters and opinion writers, and was always available for a quote … or, as often, present with a point of view that he hoped would be reflected in the Eagle’s columns.

One afternoon, while trying to work my way through a turgid opinion piece, I heard a barking voice and turned to see a shaggy-maned, bespectacled head leaning through my office door.

“I’m George Wislocki,” the man said with a broad smile, “and I dictate editorial policy here!”

Several weeks later, with my actual boss away on vacation in Germany, I was wandering the business floor, trying to figure out what to say about the newly uncovered land-clearing on and around the wetlands at the site of the now-defunct Lanesborough mall. I bumped into George outside Pete Miller’s office, and asked him what he thought.

To his delight, the following morning’s edition of The Eagle conveyed his sentiments in a brief editorial comment. The episode was apparently enough to convince George to recruit me to BNRC when I came looking for career advice four years later.

It was only when I started working with George that I began to fully appreciate the man himself—as distinct from his accomplishments. He called me “Todd” for the first few years I worked with him. Two women named Sally worked for BNRC at the time. They were Sally 1 and Sally 2. After he finally got my name straight, he began calling his friend Todd Frederick “Tad.” When he couldn’t retrieve a name—including that of his staff—we might be known as “sweetie babes,” or, simply, “babes.”

George laid out the picture for me. He was dyslexic. Details grew jumbled. Facts and ideas flipped and folded. Names came and went. “My thoughts are like a ship,” he told me once, “and sometimes I find myself sailing into a harbor with no outlet.”

While the mechanics of communication presented a challenge, George was a master when it came to the substance. Whether by native aptitude, or as a method of coping with dyslexia, or some combination, George deployed a nearly clairvoyant perceptiveness and originality of thought. He understood motivations. He understood spectacle. He built and used alliances, and studied the alliances of those whose interests differed from BNRC’s. I’ve never met anyone more able to see around corners into the future than George at the height of his powers.

He could be infuriating. You found yourself doing things that you definitely didn’t want to do. You found yourself undoing something you’d done at George’s behest because he’d decided it was a bad idea after all … a truth which you’d been unable to convince him of when the idea first arose. You found yourself wondering if you were a being of free will, or just a player in George’s never-ending stage dramatics.

But it was impossible to resist George for long. He was funny, he was fun, he was unkempt and cheerful in a way that undermined everything stuffy and conventional. He’d stir milk into coffee with a pencil, then dry the pencil off on his shirt. Shirttails were habitually untucked, trousers at risk of falling any second. The staff at the Registry of Deeds told me they called him “the unmade bed.” If a trail dedication could be made more entertaining by bringing llamas along to tote a case of champagne, then by God, you’d get those llamas to the dedication, no matter the hassle. He loved children, and he loved dogs, and he was delighted if either a dog or baby came to the office and had an accident of one kind or another. He was alive and alert and ready to laugh—at himself as often as anything—when human reality showed itself behind the mask of propriety. The last time we discussed movies, he still insisted that “My Cousin Vinny” might have been the best one he ever saw.

And beyond all the hilarity, there was always the intelligence, the determination, and the passion for nature, and for the people who tended to it. He loved supporting younger conservationists, and he deeply admired the people—the farmers, the loggers, the scientists and stonemasons and trailbuilders and title examiners—who knew just what they were doing in, and for, the natural world.

“It’ll happen, but not in my lifetime,” he’d say to me when a deal looked hopeless. “Maybe in yours. You’ll see.”

I did see.

That farmer by the side of the road, Ray Wilcox? He later worked with BNRC to put his beautiful land in the Alford Valley under a permanent APR.

The Town of Alford passed the Scenic Mountains Act in the early 2000s.

The citizens of Alford formed a town land trust … joining the dozen or so other towns which had done the same, always with support, encouragement and sometimes outright husbandry provided by George and BNRC.

And that town counsel, who helped send George off with his tail between his legs after a drubbing at the Alford Town Meeting? His name is Syd Smithers, and without his swift and incisive legal work at a crucial moment, Mahanna Cobble on Yokun Ridge, site of George’s bench, and the place where I believe his spirit will reside in perpetuity, would have been lost forever to a developer who wanted to build a restaurant at the summit of the Bousquet Ski Area.

George lived to see all of these things happen. Many more seeds that he planted will bloom in your lifetime, and the lifetimes of those who come next. Spare a thought of thankful remembrance for him, and for all those allies, both with us and departed, who worked with him to open the way for conservation in the Berkshires of today and tomorrow.

To quote the man himself:  Love ya, babes!