Shaped by the ‘fresh air’ of Old Hollow
‘I’m crying as I’m driving up because my soul is here’
As Debbie Keyser tells it, when 6-year-old Michael Cook visited her family’s Old Hollow farm for the first time in 1974 “he kept calling the front yard ‘the floor,’ because he’d never seen land or grass.”
“They had always been on concrete or blacktop,” says Daniel Keyser, Debbie’s father, referring to Michael and his 5-year-old sister, Michelle, who were growing up in the gritty borough of Queens, N.Y. Picture Archie Bunker’s neighborhood — and environment
— in the 1970s sitcom, “All in the Family.”
“Even our parks didn’t have grass then, they were all concrete,” recalls Michael, now 51, who with his 15-year-old daughter Rachel in tow returned this past week to the rural Virginia farm that holds so many fond memories.
“I’m crying as I’m driving up because my soul is here,” he says. “I spent a lot of time here. My fondest memories are here.”
Seated around the Keysers’ kitchen table Sunday afternoon, the pair of dads and daughters turn the pages of a neatly arranged scrapbook kept by Daniel’s late wife, Sally, who died in 2002.
“When my wife passed away Michael played the piano and his sister sang ‘The Rose’ at her funeral,” Daniel remembers affectionately. He pulls from his wallet a worn and faded picture of the brother and sister from Queens, calling them “my own children.”
Since its founding by a Pennsylvania minister in 1877, The Fresh Air Fund has provided life-altering summer experiences for children from New York’s City’s underserved communities. As of this year, more than 1.8 million “Fresh Air” kids have experienced outdoor adventures through extended visits with volunteer host families like the Keysers.
“The way we got involved, I was with the government at the time, and the wife of a guy I worked with was the head of the Fresh Air Fund in Winchester, where we lived at the time. And he asked me if I was interested and I said no way. But I went home and spoke to my wife and daughter and son [Danny] about it.”
“Mom and dad worked,” recalls Debbie, a high schooler at the time, “and they asked me if I was willing to take care of them. So they were under my care and direction during the day, and then mom and dad would come home and do things with them in the evening.”
Michael and Michelle’s mother was also a Fresh Air child, spending summers with a family in Winchester. She deemed it important that her children similarly experience life beyond the asphalt jungle.
“We were very fortunate to get Michael and Michelle,” says Daniel, perusing album photographs that include one of Sally washing the siblings’ hair in the kitchen sink. “We used to come here to the [family] farm on weekends and Michael and my wife would catch bugs and put them in jars. And this picture here, one of Michael’s things was he loved to drive the lawn mower.”
Michael breaks into a wide grin: “The thing I remember the most is how much they [the Keysers] let me do, because I came from a strict family. I used to drive that lawn mower, but my fondest and funnest memories were just taking walks. And I would build rafts for the pond and catch snapping turtles — I’d take one home with me every year to New York! My sister and I would spend all day building dams in the creek so we had a little swimming hole.
“Hours and hours of free time just walking in the fields, fishing for sunny fish. There was a cage with a trap door I built by hand out of scrap wood that I placed in this forgotten cemetery from the 1800s, where groundhogs had dug all through the ground. Sure enough, I caught one the very first day and I was so scared . . . I couldn’t go near the cage. The groundhog was violent, jumping all around. Fortunately it escaped that night. Another thing I loved doing was shooting . . . I became an expert shot. And I learned to ride horses here — I love riding horses to this day. I’ve taken my whole family riding.”
But most of all, Michael enjoyed wading in the North Fork of the Thornton River, which borders the large Keyser farm.
“I would go down with my sister to the old bend there where the rocks meet,” he says. “I’d stand at one end and when she threw rocks over the other side the fish would swim straight to me. I would catch them in the net one at a time. I caught all these by hand,” he says, pointing to a later photo from his many summers here.
In fact, when the Cook family ultimately moved to New Jersey, and Michael and his sister no longer qualified for the Fresh Air bus to Virginia, Sally and “Grandpa” would drive the several hundred miles to pick them up.
“I remember calling them mom and dad,” explains Michael, “but it felt uncomfortable, cuz we had mom and dad at home. So we switched.”
Michael took his groundhog trap-building skills and became a successful general contractor and consultant in California. A proud father of four children, he lives today in Simi Valley, about an hour’s drive north of Los Angeles.
“Influenced by this farm, I purposely bought a place where I can’t see another house,” he says. “I’m surrounded by hills and mountains, no bad smog that you get in LA, with federal land behind me that will never be built on. I’m completely separated [from the city], with coyote and deer running past every day. It’s amazing how much Virginia affected my life.”
Michael’s sister, Michelle, also moved out west, living in Salt Lake City with her husband and two children. She works as a company executive.
“I’m here now because I’m trying to make up for lost time,” Michael says. “I can travel more, my budget is better, my kids are grown. I brought the whole family here about 15 years ago, saw my New York family, then drove down and stayed here. Now I’m doing it with my 15 year old.”
Rachel, not surprisingly, who hopes to attend college in Hawaii in two years, is getting an eye and earful from her dad.
“Every time we take a walk I’ve got a story,” Michael says. “To be able to come back with my daughter and do the same exact same things” — which, of course, includes wading every day in the river.
“My daughter and I started a new dam the day before yesterday,” he says.