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06/05/2024 08:30 AMThe New York Mets are having what has become an all too familiar season: mediocre at best. But there is at least one new thing going forward. Skip Hubbard will have more time to watch the team he has rooted for since the fabled departure of the Dodgers from Brooklyn.
That’s because Skip has just stepped down after 20 years as a member of the Board of the Chester Historical Society, 10 of them as president.
“When your age gets to a certain point, it’s time,” says Skip, who points out he has just passed another decade marker.
He and his wife Karen would like to do more traveling, particularly to see their daughter Betsy in San Francisco and their son Tom and his family in Chicago.
Skip originally got involved with the Historical Society through Chester resident Cary Hull, who was then editor of the Main Street News, which has since ceased publication.
He started out as a photographer and photo editor, ending up as the publisher of the paper.
“Cary roped me into it,” he says of his involvement in the historical society. Hull, long active in the group, is currently its president.
Skip’s decade as president saw the opening of the society’s showplace and headquarters, the Museum at the Mill. Skip says in the beginning of the building’s renovation, the society was uncertain about whether to create an historic home or factory, or, instead, to devote the two floors to exhibitions.
They chose to feature exhibitions with the first floor housing an exhibit that changes yearly and the second floor a longer running display.
“Though we have tweaked the second floor as well,” Skip says.
Skip credits the help of museum professional Brenda Milkofsky, who suggested the historical society focus on life and industry along Chester’s Pattaconk Brook.
“We had never set up a museum. We had to learn along the way,” Skip says. “One of the things we learned was to put ourselves in the position of a visitor who doesn’t have a wealth of information about this area.”
The first year the museum was open, 2010, the group applied for a recognition award and won both a state-level citation and a national honor. Skip recalls going to Richmond, Virginia, to accept the national award. It was a special moment for him.
“I keep thinking here we are with the big boys,” he remembers.
Skip is enthusiastic about a current exhibit, an interactive map of Chester, showing the locations of the various small industries that once populated the two branches of the Pattaconk Brook. Touching the name of a particular location will bring up information on what industries occupied the site, what each produced and the history of each different business.
The large interactive map was mainly financed by a grant from a local Chester firm, Nathan L. Jacobson & Associates. The story of the industries in Chester, particularly those powered by water, has always been a subject of interest to Nathan Jacobson, the founder of the firm. The historical society published a book he wrote on the subject, The Streams, Mill Dams and Mills of Chester.
In doing research and planning for the interactive map, Skip visited a similar display at Mystic Seaport. He recalls a Mystic representative explaining there were three kinds of visitors to a museum: skimmers, swimmers, and divers.
“Appropriate for Mystic,” Skip says.
The classifications, he points out, also work well for the historical society’s new interactive map, with enough detail to satisfy visitors who want to delve into a subject in some detail but with enough visual stylishness to capture the interest of a more casual visitor.
Skip grew up in Essex and met his wife Karen in seventh grade, which was then located in the same building as Valley Regional High School.
“Grades 7 and 8 used the same four corridors as grades 9 to 12 in the original building,” he notes.
After graduating from the University of New Hampshire, from 1970 to 1992, he worked at the C. J. Bates & Son, later Susan Bates, Inc. in Chester as Manager, Information Systems. Bates moved out of Chester in 1992.
Retiring from the board of the historical society does not mean retiring from the society. Skip is still involved in writing the annual report. And he is still one of the group’s most enthusiastic boosters.
“It’s a wonderful thing to do in retirement, a new challenge, a new activity, a chance to get involved,” he says.
For the first two years of its existence, the Museum at the Mill charged admission but since then admission has been free. The museum does not have a paid professional staff. Skip points out that all the work on exhibits and research is done by dedicated volunteers.
He would like to see more Chester residents visit the exhibits.
“We get a lot of people from out of town. For local people, the museum is right under their noses,” Skip says. “The challenge is getting them in the door.”
Oh, and about those Mets. On a recent afternoon, Skip was planning to watch a night Mets game against the San Francisco Giants, a meeting of two teams that once played Big Apple baseball. But it was not a game for Mets fans like Skip to remember. The Mets lost by one run.
For more information on the Chester Historical Society, go to: Chesterhistoricalsociety.org