Cliff Snyder is an amazing resource. He was born in the Commons to a High Woods quarryman family in 1925 just as quarrying was declining. He vividly recalls when in 1937 Harvey Fite bought the neighboring property and his father guided Harvey's beginnings of the work that became Opus 40. And then when his father died in 1943 and Cliff wanted to quite High School because his brothers were in the war and the family had no support Harvey Fite discouraged him and mentored him through to graduation. Cliff carried firewood and wash water for Harvey after school that winter of his senior year after Harvey broke a leg skiing. Then there was only Cliff and his mother there to be Harvey's family.

These memories of the period lifestyle of Cliff's High Woods quarrying and farming community that he shared with Harvey Fite, the professor and acclaimed sculptor, are priceless. His family's relationship to Harvey Fite gives a rare picture of these early years as Opus 40 began to transform Ben Myer's quarry. These stories are finely punctuated by neighbors looked after each other's welfare and everyone sharing the joys of the fall fox hunt together in recognition of Cliff's return from the war.

Cliff had a hardship deferment from the draft after his graduation before his induction in May of 1944. During this he worked in the Diamond paper mill. He is one of the few remaining souls that can give an accurate account of what is only represented by yellowed pictures of that mill now. He's located the beater operations where he compounded the pulp to make the slurry material for the paper; and the machine shop where he ran a metal lathe making parts work again for the then ancient machinery. He has stories of the open waterworks that flowed through the Diamond mill's wheel where he caught herring following the spring flow, thick alongside other spawning populations, migrating up the Esopus to its clear gravel banks in the mountains.

Cliff entered the service a few months after he turned nineteen. He was in the 83rd Thunderbolt division, saw his first fight in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge, and received a unit citation from General Patton for the capture of Bihain that blocked the escape route of the Germans. He then saw action in the Rhineland and Central Europe before the war in Europe ended. When the 83rd was returned home he was assigned to New York City's 42nd Rainbow division and then immediately reassigned to military government duties in Linz, Austria. There he was in charge of an IBM Unit Record function that searched for those accused of committing war crimes in northern Austria, matching surveillance and intelligence to war crimes complaints using a new punch card memory technology. His experience with this unit record system later evolved into the career at IBM he would retire from in 1987 after thirty-seven years, seven in New York City and 30 at Kingston.

When he came home from the war Cliff found work in the Woodstock Garage where a specialized truck was being constructed. Paving was being laid on graded beds of what was the first section of the four-lane Thruway. This truck was an innovative cement hauler developed by Bill West of Woodstock designed to carry three batches at once to extend the time the truck could spend at a paving location. Because Cliff understood the operation of this truck he became the first driver/operator of it and thus had the opportunity to daily observe the engineering and design decisions that were proving out the many different and novel processes that went into the beginnings of the Thruway. The truck went on to be duplicated after Cliff and this prototype were involved in laying a record amount of concrete for a single year of road paving. His memories of this short post-war period of his life are invaluable to an full understanding of the history of this feature of the Saugerties landscape.

In spring of 1949 Cliff's work on the Thruway interchange at the Malden Turnpike aroused great concern when he was at a meeting of the Masonic Lodge and this resulted in the move of the interchange to Rt. 212 and the subsequent two toll booth B2 Parclo design cloverleaf necessary for the number of state highways that merged onto the constricted landscape at this site.

Then a 1950 visit to his future wife, who was working at an advertising firm in New York City, found Cliff curious about what may be available at 590 Madison Avenue; the IBM headquarters. His experiences during the war with their technology brought reciprocal curiosity and he was immediately hired. This was the beginning of a typewriter repair career that would have had its high points in the maintenance of every IBM electric typewriter at the United Nations and in babying of the machine given personally by Tom Watson to Eleanor Roosevelt if it were not for his ambition to go up against the odds, having no college degree, and become a part of the engineering side of IBM in Poughkeepsie.

Cliff found himself in Poughkeepsie as a field customer engineer, and then, in 1957, after a brief time when IBM moved him to its typewriter manufacturing facilities in Kentucky, he was put into the newly built plant in Kingston. This is when he bought the home he still resides in on Edith Avenue in the Dutch Settlement section of the developing Barclay Heights in Saugerties. He was one of the earliest and now is the longest to continually reside in that part of its Simmons Park subdivision.

From the Kingston IBM's earliest incarnation as an expansion of the typewriter manufacturing in Poughkeepsie, Cliff saw most of the transformation of IBM to a computer technology manufacturer during his first half dozen years working there. With little preliminary education but his experience during the war with punch card computing he became part of making this transition possible within these first few years. Cliff saw the opportunity to retain his department of punch card data transcribers overstaffed after government operations had dwindled by converting their skills to design automation. This level of organizational skill was the earliest way efficiencies in applying the then cumbersome magnetic memory technology for IBM's internal manufacturing provided manufacturing and support data that resulted in the first commercial computers to be brought to market. That was the grit and spirit that remained a part of the Kingston plant and IBM's dominance in computer manufacturing up to Cliff's retirement in 1987. Shortly thereafter the Kingston plant closed.

As Cliff settled into his management at IBM he was encouraged to share his skills on the political front. In 1967 he ran for the county legislature, won, and spent ten years there, one year as majority leader. After not running for election for a few years when the work at IBM prevented his concentration, he again took up the office and served another four years. He retired from IBM and the legislature at about the same time.

After Cliff retired in 1987, he began to play golf with Morris Rosenblum and continued that weekly, every season, nearly until when Morris died at the age of 95 in 2004. Morris and Cliff had the same love affair with Saugerties and both harbored the same attitude about the satisfaction that gave them. Neither seems to care if anyone else recognized that. It was something personal.

Yet due to their efforts they can be counted among the greatest citizens of Saugerties. They can be counted with our Leon Barritts, Henry Barclays, or any of the other storied characters of Saugerties that, by their presence, made this community. The fact that it is personal to them should not mean the heritage they leave is private. The sense of community found in our Greatest Citizens is their legacy even if they never thought of it that way. Cliff's story that blends Opus 40 with IBM and Morris' collection with Barclay Heights follows a pattern that is deeply embedded in the course that history has taken here. Cliff overlaps Harvey and Morris overlaps Leon and so on, back to Henry and Jeremiah. This has been consistently the way this community took stock of its character; through the impressions of individuals and what they valued to remember.