Anyone who spends time walking the campus is bound to see college arborist Paul Freemantle up in a tree, dangling from ropes, chainsaw in hand.
So it was something of a busman's holiday on Saturday when Freemantle volunteered the day to remove branches from trees along Riverside Park in Schenectady's Stockade neighborhood.
Freemantle cleaned up more than a dozen silver maples and honey locusts, just in time for a Stockade neighborhood cleanup this weekend, when all the debris will be carted away.
His involvement began over coffee in Reamer Campus Center when Jean Delgado, library specialist and secretary of the Stockade Garden Club, casually asked if he knew anyone who could trim the trees. “It didn't take him 10 seconds to say, `I'll do it,'” she recalls.