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Sugar Loaf Guild : The Hidden History of Sugar Loaf, NY

 

       Sugar Loaf, NY 10981


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  Updated Dec 28, 2016 | By Bob Fugett

    Jon Baugh

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[  That Town  |  Candle Maker  |  Breakers  |  Four Step  |  Jon Baugh  |  Too Much   |  Startup   |  Cut   |  Art   |  Community   ]

Jon Baugh's head had already spasmed backwards into my windowsill at least a dozen times before I could turn and stupidly ask, "Jon, are you ok?"

It was a pounding thrashing brutal violence like nothing I had seen portrayed in movies as the way people die.

Death came quickly as he finally settled to a shudder against the wall, sank to the floor (one, two) stiffened and listed left, a half moment more and he let out that famous last gurgling which is everybody's right.

My final words to him were a very quiet almost unwhispered, "Oh...Jon..."

My shouts to 911 were louder.

Afterwards there was an odd sense that I had shared a very intimate moment with him, and I wished I could let him know he was forgiven the outburst.

But Jon was gone while his final days were spent in preparation of a new acting job for which he needed to sing, and at the last moment I was giving him a voice lesson.

In truth I was only getting ready to give him a voice lesson and my back was turned fiddling with a tape recorder while nursing a massive all-night recording session migraine.

One of my guitar students was a doctor, an internist, and when I told him what had happened and what Jon had told me earlier about his condition, the doctor said, "Anything you did at that point would have been like trying to stop a car tire blowout with a band-aid. He was dead before he hit the floor."

Jon had been told months before that his time was short, but he worked full throttle right to the end.

He had trudged main street Sugar Loaf through a bright midmorning bitter cold blizzard, crossing at the Barnsider (not yet a restaurant), past the Waldren house, continuing past Resplendent Candles and Our Glass House to arrive at Fantasy Factory (now retitled Endico Watercolors).

This was to be Jon's first voice lesson: he was 72 years old.

The EMTs dropped chunks of tramped snow from their boots as they frantically ran procedure trying to revive him.

A few years earlier, a warm summer day, I was standing on the corner of our stage in the middle of a Sugar Loaf with my arms wrapped around my guitar as throngs wandered past and I bent over to listen to Jon.

He was telling me about a new idea he had for a music festival and wondering if I would be willing to help.

I told him I would love to, but my schedule of performance, composition, recording, teaching, renovations to our house, helping with town advertising (paste-up and editing the content of brochures), plus helping Mary with her painting sales made it impossible.

It was the first time I ever said no.

I had finally been worked to the end of my rope by the constant flurry of Sugar Loaf events, festivals, advertising meetings, and running a full-time art and music business.

There was plenty of volunteer work to go around.

I mean Sugar Loaf was having at least one large festival a month, usually two.

Even on a regular weekend we would routinely see 5,000 people pass through our door.

Mary was averaging three painting sales a dayeach and every day of the year—about a thousand annually ten years in a row according to our database (which was not established until we had already been here for nine years).

Our best customers started grabbing the event flyers by our door, not so they could attend Sugar Loaf festivals, but so they could avoid them, in hopes of getting Mary's special one-on-one attention without fighting the crowds.

Probably the straw that broke this camel's back was my overseeing the build of my state-of-the-art recording and video production studio.

It was first of its kind in Orange County built from the ground up, and it produced videos that on two separate occasions were breathlessly commented on by first a producer from NBC then one from CBS who both stood slack jawed beside me and asked, "But how do you get that kind of quality?"

My response was, "Well of course the source material is High-8 and not Betacam, so you wouldn't expect it, but this box is a fully digital real time non-linear editor, therefore there is no generation loss, so as close to straight-wire to product as you can get. Only twelve of these boxes exist in this country, so I know you people haven't started using them yet, but you will."

A friend of mine at the time (who went on to receive 6 Emmys and 2 Grammys for his audio work in television and the record industry) once commented, "You know Bob, if somebody came in here that didn't know anything about audio, they'd say, 'Nice little studio', but if they did know a lot about audio they'd say, 'Nice little studio.'"

So I say state-of-the-art because that was back then, but if it was here today, well...I guess it would still be considered state-of-the-art.

People had never seen a multi-track recording studio (open to street traffic), so while working on music I gave constant tours and was often asked how I was so lucky to be doing exactly what I wanted with my life.

I would explain, "I once saw a documentary about the California Condor in which they said, 'This bird needs a great deal of space and habitat. The condor is more than just flesh, feathers, and bones. It is a place. If the place is destroyed, the condor will be gone.' I am like the condor. If Sugar Loaf is gone, I am gone."

My studio was the central focus of my 1997 offer to provide free media production and websites for every artisan in town.

I saw the fast approaching digital age, and I knew if Sugar Loaf was gone, I would be gone with it.

We needed to be ready.

Nevertheless people found it odd for me to offer massive technical resources and solid production experience for free, but on our first day in Sugar Loaf somebody had shaken my hand saying, "Welcome to the land of barter," and I soon learned it is also the land of volunteerism.

Certainly trading goods and services one-for-one does make things run more smoothly, but also personally doing what is needed immediately when needed with no questions asked puts a community into the fast lane.

Eventually I gave the whole studio to my nephew (except the ground-up room, my guitars, piano, and an amplifier) as part of a promise to my wife that allowed us to purchase a large format scanning-back camera that we now use to document and publish provenance for each of her paintings.

Our digital photography system was put together by the same people who put together the exact same system for the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, and we could have bought two nice houses with what we paid for it.

If you know anything about cameras you will know that current high-end digital cameras are considered around 23 megabytes, 12 megabytes for top prosumer models, but our 15 year old camera is 120 megabytes (still nothing can match it), it uses the same technology as Google Earth, and it required enlisting help from the Department of Defense when we had a problem with it.

The only other place I have seen the same brand color-proofing monitor, such as the one that came with our camera, was in the imaging lab of New York Presbyterian Hospital in NYCmany years later.

That is right, what with the camera system plus the significantly more expensive media production studio before it, plus retrofitting our house to make it more eco-friendly and energy efficient, we put more money into our tiny property on main street than was required to build the Sugar Loaf Performing Arts Center.

Nobody knew it at the time, and nobody knows it now.

But this is not about that, this is about Jon Baugh and what he was doing when I could no longer help out.

If The Candle Shop is our anchor store, and if the artisan community could not be here without it, then it is also unlikely that The Candle Shop would be here without Jon Baugh.

Jon's studio was a single room in the back of the Tobacco Shop (now the location of Bodhi Tree), and he worked with broken glass putting it together in a sort of small diorama, or rather a kind of...actually I guess more like...well, you know, they were framed little wall hanging glass sculptures.

The problem was (just like Sugar Loaf), there was not a name for what he did.

His shop was called Paintings In Glass.

Some were objective, some totally non-objective.

He was always rejected from craft shows because they said it was an art and rejected from art shows because they said it was a craft.

I guess nobody had heard the word 'artisan' yet.

He just made the things and sold them, and he once told me if he considered the amount of time he spent on town advertising and promotion in addition to the time he spent creating his work, he was making about twenty five cents an hour.

But he loved it, and every time I walked into his shop he was putting together another town ad, and that was back when paste-up was done by hand.

Later I decided he must have been paying for all the ad space himself too, because in Guild meetings he was always ultra passionate about what needed to be done with advertising, and after he died none of the half dozen people who took over his job could figure out how to pay for any of it.

I only heard their complaints.

At one point during Jon's tenure there was (another) new breed of merchant in town who decided Jon's group advertising was too rustic and homey, and they pushed to slicken the logo and make it modern.

Typical clueless people: Jon resisted.

He was doing the kind of advertising he did because it worked, and it brought people to town who appreciated what was here, and they purchased.

They purchased fine hand-made items they could get nowhere else but here, and they were being serviced by the very people who made those items.

Could anything be better?

There was nothing like it, and there still isn't.

Years later (after Jon's death) I was taking another break from playing music on the main street beside our shop (but on a new stage) when somebody asked, "Did you happen to know Jon Baugh?"

"Absolutely, this town would not be here without his work on our promotions."

"No doubt," they said, "I used to work with him when he was head of a top advertising firm in NYC. Guy was a genius!"

So much for the belief that people in Sugar Loaf are bumbling country folk trying their hardest to be exactly like New York City, instead of sophisticated citizens of the world exceedingly happy to be nothing like New York City.

Below are two examples of Jon Baugh framed glass sculptures.

The bottom piece is actually larger than the top which shows closer detail.

 

Jon Baugh, Painting in Glass, Sugar Loaf, NY
Jon Baugh, Painting in Glass, Sugar Loaf, NY
Jon Baugh framed glass sculputures

 

We now know your real name was Herbert Henley McGuire; born in Gadsden, Alabama; October 31, 1908, but thanks, Jon.

Everybody else can turn the page.

(Jon's real name provided by his great-granddaughter Maddie Dake, 04/03/2013)


 

Jon Baugh, Brochure, Sugar Loaf, NY
Jon Baugh, Brochure, Sugar Loaf, NY - c. 1976
Outside (PDF 13 meg)

Jon Baugh, Brochure, Sugar Loaf, NY
Jon Baugh, Brochure, Sugar Loaf, NY - c. 1976
Inside (PDF 13 meg)

Jon Baugh, Brochure, Sugar Loaf, NY
Quick Read smaller file

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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