On Anniversary of His Birth, Fieg Recalled by his Contemporaries

Former Oneonta Mayor Albert S. "Sam" Nader, the iconic leader who brought about the sweeping Broad Street urban renewal and the eight-story Nader Towers project, and established a minor league baseball franchise that introduced professional players Don Mattingly, Bernie Williams, John Elway, Amos Otis and others, has seen the great ones come and go -- both the famous and the not-so-famous.

The image of Lothar Fieg Sr. will never appear on a postage stamp or baseball card, but when Nader needed a job done and done right, Fieg was the man to whom he turned.

On the occasion of the 125th observance of Lothar Fieg's birth, the mayor and other Fieg contemporaries recently took a few moments to reminisce about the late builder of beautiful and enduring homes, describing him as a top professional in his field.



Mayor Albert S.
"Sam" Nader

"Lothar was a master craftsman," said Nader, 92, in a telephone interview from his home on River Street.  "He did a lot of things for me.  I remember one time he came to me with this old saw I had lying around and asked, 'What's this?'   He oiled it, cleaned it up, sharpened it and made it useful again."          

                                                                                                             

That was typical of the late contractor, who paid attention to details and was unafraid to demonstrate a little extra effort.



The late Mayor Roger G. Hughes, in whose administration Fieg served for seven years as chairman of the City Public Service Board, praised Fieg at the time of the builder's death in 1958 and ordered that the City Hall flag be lowered to half staff.  He noted that Fieg "was held in the highest esteem."



"Lothar was a man of sound judgment, a wise counselor, a solid citizen,"  Hughes said. "... He was recognized as an authority in the field of construction."



It has been said that few were the buildings in the downtown commercial district that did not have a Fieg  fingerprint on them at one time or another, as his company's repair and remodeling jobs were too numerous to count during the four decades he practiced his craft in Oneonta.

Retired Air Force Col. Clifford R. "Roger" Silliman, 92, perhaps the last survivor of the Fieg crew that built the Woodchuck Knoll mansion in Emmons in 1935, recalled that, though he was merely a teenager, he was given the chance to work alongside skilled carpenters and masons. Silliman was easily the youngest of the 20 to 30 men who would meet early in the morning at Fieg's shop at 3 Lewis Street to be handed assignments scattering them to various projects out, about and around the the city.



"He was so good to me, giving me jobs in his company,"  Silliman recalled during a telephone interview from his home near Vandenburg Air Force Base in Lompoc, Calif.  "I always felt that he gave me the benefit of working for him because of his loyalty to my family."



Ray Finkle, 90, went to work for Fieg in 1949 and, among many other assignments, helped erect the 160-foot Elmore Feed Mill silo, the tallest structure in Oneonta at the time.  Finkle also worked on the Duncan Briggs estate house.



"He knew how to handle a T-square,"  Finkle said.  "He knew just how to cut the right angle when you were fitting joists and pitched roofs and so forth.  He was very clever with it."

Finkle was being trained to take charge of the First National Bank of Hobart project when the 72-year-old Fieg died suddenly after coming home for lunch after a morning's work. Finkle was stunned.  

"It was a shock, all right," said Finkle, who had seen his share of carnage as a World War II veteran of the Battle of the Bulge in a supporting role.  "He had been working right along and had never been sick or anything and then, boom!



"I felt real bad because I had worked for him a long time.  He was a good friend.  He was such a good person that everybody liked him."

Besides Thornwood (the home of the president of Hartwick College), Woodchuck Knoll and the home of Briggs Lumber Co. president Duncan Briggs, Fieg erected the Wycoff Florist owner's home on 

Country Club Road, the Upstate Baptist Home for Children in Portlandville, the Russell home on Union Street, the Gardner home at Chestnut and West Streets, and the Main Street Baptist Church expansion, to name a few.  He and Mayor Hughes collaborated on planning, financing and construction of a new city water filtration plant on East Street which today bears Hughes' name.



Fieg, who was born on Aug. 11, 1886, also oversaw the complete dismantling, piece by piece, and reassembly of a 19th-century one-room schoolhouse, frontier blacksmith shop and country store, supervising their move from their original locations to the the grounds of the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown.  At the museum he also built the original display for the world infamous 1869 Cardiff Giant hoax, in which charlatans claimed they had unearthed a ten-foot tall, petrified pre-historic man.



In addition to being chairman of the City Public Service Board, he was a leader on the steering and operations committee of the annual Oneonta Home Show, a member of the board of directors of the Oneonta Symphony Orchestra, twice president of the Lion's club and played tuba in the New York State National Guard Co. G marching band.  He was also a Mason.



As a Lion he devoted himself to providing aid to the vision-impaired, including the distribution of reading glasses to disadvantaged children.  "A benefactor of the blind, he did much for them in his quiet, unassuming way," Hughes remembered.  "His integrity and character will ever shine as a beacon to his fellow men."



Perhaps more important to Lothar, however, were his wife, the former Florence Shields, and their seven children, upon whom he doted.  Often he had a child or two in tow when he toured construction sites or traveled out of town.

Five-year-old grandson Greg Fieg saw the city of Utica through the windshield of "Grandpa's" Willys.  Roger Silliman as a boy made at least two trips with Lothar to the Albany-Schenectady area and Lothar's daughter, Maxine, rode with him to the Corbett and Stewart acid factory in southern Delaware County, where he had been named superintendent when he was only a teen himself.

Maxine recalled that he also took her aboard the Staten Island Ferry and, ignoring signs barring passengers from entering the wheelhouse, persuaded the captain to give them a tour of the helm and explain all its workings.  His curiosity was irrepressible, she said.

Lothar was a friend of the late Oneonta grocer Nicolas Rizzo Sr., with whom he formed a special bond as both were immigrants and were nearly the same age.  He and old Nick regularly chatted when Lothar stopped by the store.  One day he found Nick's boy, Joe, struggling (as usual) with his junior high mathematics homework.

"Let me see that,"  Lothar said to the boy, and took 30 or 40 minutes to work through the problems with Joe while teaching him how to solve them.

"I was real happy the next morning because I had my homework done," Joe, 70, recalled.  "I usually didn't."