In addition to performing as a soloist, Chertock serves as principal keyboardist of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and has been a professor of piano at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.
Nell loved animals and was a veterinarian technician for many years. Later, she was a library assistant at the Berkshire Hills Regional School District.
She worked as a switchboard operator for Wheeler and Taylor, then for the General Electric's drafting department in Pittsfield, the E.M. Ryder Jewelry Store in Great Barrington, and then was the assistant town clerk for the town of Great Barrington for 11 years.
She was a charter member of the Sheffield Garden Club, the Thursday Morning Club, a past member of the Sheffield Historical Society, an honorary member of the Sheffield Kiwanis and a Cub Scouts den mother in Sheffield.
Berkshire County is particularly interesting as an architectural exhibit. Given New England practicality or parsimony or respect for our history, we didn’t always tear down and build new: We save our old houses.
Why are we honoring a massacre? On the other hand, how many monuments are there to Native American maltreatment? It’s a rare admission of how fiercely we wrestled New England from its indigenous people.
She was employed at Searles Middle School as a secretary until her retirement in 1982. Alice also volunteered at the Fairview Hospital gift shop and the Red Cross blood bank.
In 1798, Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, described Great Barrington and its buildings as “decayed…barely decent…ruinous.” He blamed it on the residents who were not properly religious.
