Tieger Talks Tivoli
by Dorothy Dow Crane

In 1967 Bernie Tieger, a young sociologist who had just finished his graduate studies at NYU, decided a stay in the country would be a welcome break from city life. He piled his family and the dog into the car and headed north for an interview to teach at Bard College. It was December. It was cold. The Tiegers got stuck in the snow. The children whined. Even the dog whined. The original plan was to live there for just two years. He’s been here ever since.

Now 80, he peers at me with a stare that takes me back to sitting in my college professor’s office dreading the next question and sums it up in one short sentence: “I fell in love with Tivoli.”

Fellow professors were baffled by why Bernie would choose to live in a village of 700 that had seen better days. Some claimed a Harvard study showed Tivoli had a high rate of incest. “The attitude of the outside world toward Tivoli back then was not exactly positive,” he recalls. “Turns out there was incest here,” he chuckles, “but it was on the part of the Livingstons. Depeyster was a Livingston and he married another Livingston. The Livingstons were always marrying their cousins!”

Actually, Bernie seldom talks about the Livingstons. For Bernie, now the village historian, Tivoli’s people of note have always been those who make it work, not the famous who periodically descend and then disappear. When the new (sometimes described as abrasive) professor arrived here, the village had lost jobs, its railroad station, and its school. Too many houses were empty and most of the rest needed a coat of paint, but he sensed the vitality behind the dingy clapboards. “The Legion wasn’t just a collection of guys who sat around and drank beer—they volunteered their services for community functions. The church groups and ladies auxiliaries were all working on community projects.” Bernie rocks back in his chair and brings his fingers together in that thoughtful way professors often do. He’s hesitant to use the word community—it’s overused and too vague for his taste. Still, he’s proud to have organized the first Tivoli Day in 1972 (that one lasted three days!), a party on a shoestring budget that everyone in the village pitched in to pull off.

Bernie acquired his community organizing skills as a young man living in the Bronx. His father had come from Vienna after World War I as a labor organizer and a cab driver. He followed his father’s footsteps, first doing labor work and then driving a cab to put himself through graduate school. At that time small towns were under the academic microscope. Some argued rural villages like Tivoli were provincial backward remnants of what had once been a primarily agrarian nation. Others claimed these tiny communities were vital, valuable bulwarks against the increasing depersonalization of American culture. Bernie came to Tivoli, in part, to see for himself. During most of his 20 plus years at Bard (he was named Bard’s Best Professor in Birnbach’s 1984 college guide) he taught a course on the small town. But the village has never been just an educational lab for his sociology students. Tivoli is his home, a place where intellectual credentials have always taken the back seat to working side by side with neighbors to improve the village. “It doesn’t matter to me whether my neighbors went to grad school or college. Many people are as smart as academics—they’re just not educated to know it.” It’s hard not to be impressed by a person who so thoroughly lives his principles. He’s a believer in total immersion democracy. “Genuine democracy,” and here he is emphatic, “is as much about allowing yourself to be shaped by your community as it is about pressing for your own agenda.” He leans forward, his eyes passionate. “At a certain point, you make a commitment to being in it, being linked in many ways.”

And Bernie has been linked in many ways. He’s served on the village board, chaired the first zoning and planning commission, was a volunteer fireman, and is now the village historian. “We don’t always agree on village issues,” former mayor and lifetime Tivoli resident Woody Neese commented, “but we agree on how important it is to work for the village. There’s no B.S. with Bernie. He’s a fine man and a great citizen. We’d be better if we had more like him.” When I ask other Tivoli residents about Bernie they say things like, “He’s scratchy, but you know where you’re at with him.” “He’s very moral; he refuses to be swayed by pomp and celebrity status.”

As we sit together in the bookstore and watch people carry their laundry into the Lost Sock Launderette before they slip into Broadway Pizza for a slice, I ask him about the future of small towns like Tivoli. He settles back in his chair, scratches his head, and says he doesn’t know. He muses about the people who come to Tivoli and want their Sunday Times and Sunday brunch. “They’re not doing anything different than what they would do on the Upper West Side—and they won’t join our fire company. They come because they like the life here, but then they want to tidy it up. People need time to live together for there to be cohesive village life.”

He peers out from under his bushy eyebrows and becomes the observant sociologist: “Take the front porch. The contemporary American home doesn’t have a front porch. It has a patio or deck in the back surrounded by a privacy fence. Now it’s almost a nostalgic tic to build a porch, sit out front, and say hello to whoever walks by. I’ve had people tell me they’re moving because they don’t want to hear the neighbor’s kids. America has changed. When I was growing up in the Bronx, the mothers kept folding chairs under the stairs of their tenements. At night after dinner, the kids would play in the street, the men would congregate on the corner, and the ladies would come out and sit together. Everyone was on the street in sight of one another.”

Bernie’s home is just a bit too far from the center of town to get much foot traffic, so in good weather he sits on the porch of his store (a porch he built himself) to keep an eye on things. “The porch used to be the center of small town life.” He sighs. Then his eyes soften. “Still, you can go into the Tivoli post office to get your mail and bump into six people you know.”