Members of the Geezer Corps, a corps of retired Woodstockers who serve as volunteers on town projects, remember former town board and planning board member Lorin Rose for his sharp wit and excellent craftsmanship.
Rose died April 22, Earth Day. He was 68.
Born February 27, 1956, son of Malcolm and Betty Busch Rose, Lorin Rose spent much of his life in Bearsville and attended Onteora and Ulster County Community College. He co-owned I.J. Rose & Sons and Bearsville Auto Parts.
Rose is survived by his wife Shirley, dogs Poncho and Lefty, sister Carolyn; brother David, and many cousins, nieces and nephews. A memorial service will be held at a later date.
“I was on the environmental commission. He was poking around with that and the Comeau trails task force. And when I started doing some projects there that needed somebody with some oomph, I said to Lorin, Could you come help with this? He said, Sure,” said Geezer Corps member Jim Hanson. “And the first thing we did was the bridges on the far end of the Comeau. They were built by somebody else. He helped bring them in and put them in place.”
The informational kiosk for the entrance to the Comeau trails was the next significant project. “I said, Well, I bet Lorin Rose could head that up and probably do a real good job. He’s a very skilled craftsman. And we asked him, and he said, Sure.”
And that’s how the Geezer Corps started.
Amazing building skills
“He called himself Creaky because his bones creaked so much,” Hanson said. “He started calling me Leaky because I drank a lot of coffee.”
Richard Heppner, town historian and former fellow member of the town board, worked on the kiosk panels with text and photos, He found himself invited to regular Geezer Corps meetings at Bread Alone, where the Geezers have been getting together for a decade.
Then Tom Unrath, former chair of the planning board, got inducted into the Geezer Corps. At first Unrath didn’t think the kiosk was a good project, but he soon changed his mind. Unrath was able to bring brought stone from his son’s quarry to the Comeau for the kiosk base.
Unrath was bestowed the nickname “Sneaky” because he was a lawyer.
Heppner got the nickname “Geeky” because “these guys don’t even know how to do a rotary telephone.”
Rose knew how to run a construction crews. Those skills were vital to the Geezer Corps projects.
“And he had amazing skills. But he could transmit them to idiots like us,” Unrath said.
Rose got frustrated with his fellow Geezers, but he never yelled. “He never got violent. He would just call me names. He had ruthless names,” Hanson reported.
A job the Geezers did for Family of Woodstock proved aggravating.
“They took down a shed and asked us to rebuild the shed. They had a metal shed with pre-made parts. And took us la week to put together all these parts,” Unrath said.
“It was screwed together with these little tiny screws and you got the box of screws and the box of the washers that go on the screws. We had to put all those little screws on the little washers and screw that thing together. It was tedious,” Hanson explained.
“There were literally thousands of them,” Heppner recalled.
“He was the master”
The kiosk was a good example of how Rose could accomplish things most could not.
“The kiosk has a three-sided roof,” Hanson said. “He figured out how to do that. The average builder can’t just put together a three-sided roof, and he was able to do that. His stonework was marvelous. We were the grunts. he was the master.”
Hanson called the memorial to former town supervisor Jeremy Wilber a “masterpiece of stonework.” Lorin “knew exactly how he wanted it done, and it was amazing to watch him do stuff,” Hanson said.
Materials for projects were either donated or provided by the Geezers themselves.
The stone for the Wilber memorial came from the Snake Rocks Preserve. “That was a fun adventure in and of itself getting that rock out of the mountain,” Hanson said.
There were some 15 Geezer Corps projects in all, including a base for the Keegan Bell in a cupola on top of the Mescal Hornbeck Community Center.
The Rose family pool
Some were art projects for art’s sake, like a giant bug that sprayed water. It was towed behind Rose’s Jeep at the Memorial Day parade one year.
“We looked at him and said, ‘You’re nuts,’ but we spent a couple of weekends building the bug.
“And then he had the idea it’ll be a float in the Memorial Day parade,” Heppner said. “And I said, ‘Well, where’s the water going to come from,’ and he had a big water tank, so we put that in the back of his Jeep,” Heppner said.
“We covered it in red burlap and made it look like a big tomato,” added Hanson.
Overlook is everywhere
Ribbing was par for the course among these friends. Rose was a good golfer. Heppner made it his goal to get Rose off his game. He found a way.
“You could get him mad, and when he got mad, he wasn’t a good golfer,” Heppner said. “I’d start whistling ‘Rule, Britannia,’ and he’d get angry. Or I’d start singing Christmas carols, and his game would go to crap and I’d beat him, and I won money.”
Rose had a talent for making fun of people in a way that the target of his ridicule enjoyed it. “For all of his toughness underneath he was probably one of the kindest, gentlest guys I’ve ever known. He would kill me for saying that, but he was a sweetheart,” Hanson said.
Rose was also known for including hidden logos and designs in all the projects. “If you look closely at the various projects we’ve done, you’re very likely to see an outline of Overlook Mountain secretly carved into the metal or something,” Unrath said.
Heppner said Overlook can be seen in the cemetery signs completed a few years ago and even on [Jeremy] Wilber’s memorial. Hanson said the distinctive shape of Overlook is even in the metal brackets that hold the kiosk posts at the Comeau.
“Lorin know that mountain and the land like the back of his hand. He grew up here,” Heppner said.
Rose always looked out for the other Geezers, especially if one didn’t show up for the regular Bread Alone meetings. “If I didn’t show up one day because I had a medical problem, he called and said, ‘Where were you?’ and it became like a tradition,” Unrath said.
“Then he didn’t show up one day.”
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