‘The Connecticut 169 Club’ author to speak

KENT — Travel and history author Martin “Marty” Podskoch is hoping to give Connecticut residents a chance to explore every one of the 169 municipalities in the state of Connecticut with his new book, Connecticut 169 Club: Your Passport and Guide to Exploring Connecticut. The book is a collective effort. Podskoch recruited the best and the brightest Connecticut writers, historians and officials, and each contributing a passage about their town’s histories, haunts; food fixes and landmarks. In Kent’s case, Kent historian, Marge Smith wrote the write-up on Kent.

Podskoch and Smith will share stories about the book, followed by the opportunity to purchase and have one or both of them sign the book, at the Kent Memorial Library’s Reading Room on Wednesday, Dec. 12, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.

Podskoch,, a retired reading teacher from Delhi, NY who now lives in East Hampton, has compiled interesting information for his new Connecticut Travel Guide Book on the 169 towns, cities and villages in the State of Connecticut in the hopes of encouraging people to visit them all.

Smith grew up at South Kent School, where her parents were both teachers. She graduated from Kent Center School, Kent School and Lafayette College with a BA in History. Coming back to Kent after college, temporarily she thought, she found work as warehouse manager for a small book distributor, and has been here ever since.

She spent many years at the Kent Greenhouse and then the Litchfield County Times, before beginning her own landscape business. She volunteered for many years for the Kent Historical Society during that time, and was finally hired as its first paid Executive Director in 2000. The job as Assistant Director at Sharon Historical Society soon followed.

The guidebook, The Connecticut 169 Club: Your Passport and Guide to Exploring Connecticut, navigates readers onto Connecticut back roads to meet and merge with fascinating neighbors and uncover cool curiosities tucked into the 169 towns and cities in the Nutmeg State. Visit them all; get your passport book signed or stamped in each of the burgs, make notes in the space provided and you’re a member of an exclusive club, with an official Leatherman patch. The patch commemorates this legendary vagabond, who during the late 1800s – in head-to-toe leather – travelled a 365-mile circuit between the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers while camping out in caves.

This is a redux of the author’s highly praised first passport volume, Adirondack 102 Club, a guidebook on the 102 towns in the Adirondack region. It is inspired by Vermont’s 251 Club – made famous by the 1954 writings of Professor Arthur W. Peach, who was all about seeking adventure on the back roads and it continues today.

This event is free and open to the public. To register or for more information call 860-927-3761; email kmlinfo@biblio.org; stop by the library; or visit kentmemoriallibrary.org.