Recalling Her Red Hook Roots and Touched by Ukraine’s Pavel Kuljuk, Kansas Woman Becomes New Donor to The Daily Catch

Editor’s Note: This past weekend, The Daily Catch’s series with our Ukraine correspondent, Pavel Kuljuk, was featured on the acclaimed national NPR broadcast, UpFirst, after its debut last week on Rough Translation and, in an abbreviated form, on Morning Edition. A woman in Eastern Kansas then reached out to donate to the newspaper. We asked her to explain why.

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Carey Maynard-Moody, 78, has strong feelings about small towns – one in particular. “Small towns are where sights and sounds carry the day,” she said by phone from Lawrence, Kansas. “Local is just something I value more than I ever thought I would.”

This past weekend, Red Hook and the idea of “local” that Maynard-Moody so deeply cherishes popped up completely by surprise in her NPR podcast feed. “The sights and sounds of Pavel’s world brought me back,” she said. Then, as the podcast rolled out, she was stunned to realize that Red Hook, where she grew up, was the very town whose local newspaper, The Daily Catch, had linked up with Pavel Kuljuk in Kramatorsk, Ukraine.

“Even though I can’t have The Daily Catch thrown on my porch, it was so wonderful to discover it exists,” Maynard-Moody said. “Local newspapers are so important to our connections with one another.”

So, she made a donation to support the paper, the existence of which she only learned about through the NPR program.

“I was moved to donate after hearing the podcast everyone is raving about, about the man in Ukraine with whom The Daily Catch has struck up an incredible partnership,” Maynard-Moody wrote in her letter. “What a winner!”

Maynard-Moody was born in 1944 and spent her entire childhood in Red Hook at 59 W. Market Street, the beloved red-roof Victorian near the corner of Linden Avenue, before heading to college in Bennington, Vt. in 1962.

She and her second husband, Stephen, moved in 1981 to Lawrence, where he became a professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Kansas. Maynard-Moody worked as an itinerant rural school social worker and had three children.

What she calls “free-range children” abounded in Red Hook in the 1950s. “Those of us still living, who remember it, have fun stories to tell,” Maynard-Moody wrote to The Daily Catch by email yesterday, ahead of a phone interview today. “Village life was precious. What a blessing to have had it and to have been so kindly shaped by it.”

Maynard-Moody’s mother, Helen Beardslee Maynard, who lived to be 99, was for decades a teacher, both kindergarten and second grade, in Red Hook public schools. Her father, John Maynard, was a traveling salesman for Maytag Home Appliance.

After her brothers and sisters “fledged the nest,” her parents sold the West Market house around 1990. They moved to Seattle to be with their grown daughter, Helen, and her children. 

The photographer who snapped photos of the Maynard family back in the day, Charles Eggert, also contributed photos to The Red Hook Advertiser, which has now been digitized, thanks to a grant from Bill Wilken, whose father and uncle ran Wilken Brothers/GLF Agway in Red Hook for some 40 years (read our story).

In one such Eggert photo, Christopher Klose, still active with his wife, Claudine, in a variety of Red Hook civic activities, shows up riding Klose’s horse, Hal, retired from days working for the New York Police Department. Five children are arrayed, all from the Klose, Eggert and Maynard families.

Klose said he credits the power of 21st-century media, especially the Internet and email, for his reconnection with Maynard-Moody 10 years ago. ​​After Klose wrote a story about Red Hook’s bicentennial for the Red Hook Observer, Maynard-Moody’s aunt, the acclaimed former opera singer Bethany Winham, forwarded it along.

“In the same vein, we now have a connection to Carey via The Daily Catch, NPR, and your correspondent in Ukraine,” Klose said today. “The world has become a global village, its stories made personal and powerful through immediate, vivid reporting.”

Maynard-Moody, who today works as a volunteer court-appointed special advocate, said she plans on visiting Red Hook this fall to celebrate the life of aunt Winham, who still lives at Maizeland (AKA Maizefield), the so-called Van Ness mansion of the Revolutionary War era that sits behind the brick wall at 57 West Market. 

She thanked The Daily Catch for its contributions to village life and said she now plans to follow her hometown more closely via the newspaper. “Not only are you creating a local community, focusing on local folks,” Maynard-Moody wrote. “You have bridged the world with coverage of two local communities, separated by the sea but now linked to one another through one man and his editor. That is truly magic.”