So long, Brother: A Kingston Farewell to 'Uncle' Willy Guldy
A farewell to the City of Kingston's very own court jester, everybody's uncle, the guy who kept it real.
“Uncle” Willy Guldy in Uptown Kingston.
Photo by John W. Barry
A few years ago I got an email telling me “Uncle” Willy Guldy of Kingston, New York, was in bad shape and on his last legs.
I dropped everything I was doing and set off on what became a two-week quest to find him. I hadn’t seen Willy in years and was concerned. I also needed to do my due diligence as a journalist and locate Ulster County’s very own Mick Jagger, who had the moves and the charm and the ability to draw an audience wherever he went, even if it was nowhere at all.
I thought I had traced him to an apartment in Rosendale. I showed up and found someone in charge and said, “I’m looking for Uncle Willy and I heard he lives in an apartment of yours.”
The response: “Yeah, a guy named Willy lives here. But I know Uncle Willy and it’s not him.”
Ok. I was no closer to finding him. So I laid low on the search for a couple of days.
Then, I was driving from the Senate Garage in Kingston, down the hill to Kingston Plaza, and I see a guy bounding—not just walking, mind you, he was bounding—toward the plaza. He had long locks of gray hair, a joy to his gait, an unburdened spirit and an old-school baseball jacket that said, “Electric Hot Tuna—Rockin’, Rowdy and Genuine,” on the back.
Did I mention the safari hat? What are they called? Pith hats? Yeah, that’s it. He was also wearing a tan pith hat, as in “Dr. Livingston, I presume?” And that pith hat bore an embroidered patch that read “Security: Olympics Games: Atlanta: 1996.” Giddy up.
Well, alrighty then. I had found Uncle Willy. Resilience. Endurance. The Forever Man. That’s Uncle Willy, I thought. There he is, just as he’s always been—whether he was running a bar, working behind a bar, serving as emcee of an event, or navigating a scooter down Broadway in Kingston while dressed like a leprechaun. He seemed as healthy as he ever was, as we all knew him and remembered him.
I drove to the Walgreens parking lot across the railroad tracks, got out of my car and waited for him to reach me. I said, “Uncle, Willy. It’s John Barry.”
He looked at me as he had done a hundred or more times, in the midst of those late nights and early mornings in Midtown and Uptown Kingston, at concerts and bars and events too numerous to name here. He grinned. And he said, “Hello, brother.”
Uncle Willy died on Sunday, June 23, 2024. He’s gone. End of story. And I’m crushed. He surely was the most recognizable person, by face and name, in the City of Kingston, in New York’s beautiful Hudson Valley. A saloon keeper, bartender, ringmaster, daredevil, high-wire trapeze artist (not really, but he could have been) and musical impresario.
For many in Kingston, NY, whether they knew it or not, daily, upstate life in the state’s first capital revolved around everyone’s favorite uncle. If you took a stroll with Willy through Uptown, you’d see first-hand how this guy shaped the city’s personality. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE says hello to Uncle Willy. He’d give ‘em back a wave, or a, “Hello, brother,” or a, “Hello, dear.”
Asbury Park will always have Bruce Springsteen. Boston has Tom Brady. Chicago has the Blues Brothers. And for Kingston, NY, it will always be Uncle Willy. Effortless. Hilarious. Wise. That was Uncle Willy. And Kingston, which survived burning by the British in 1777, will be lucky to recover from the loss of everyone’s favorite uncle.
In various Poughkeepsie Journal articles, here’s what folks close to Willy had to say about him:
Danny Louis of Gov’t Mule: “He’s basically everything that’s right about being a flower child.”
Jorma Kaukonen: “As a club owner, he was in a class by himself. As a human being, when they made Willy, they broke the mold. I played Uncle Willy’s on Broadway in Kingston more times than I can remember playing any other venue. When my wife and I moved from Woodstock to Ohio, Will made the drive out, and when we got to Meigs County…helped us unpack and everything.
“He stayed with us for one week after that and I’ll never forget the sight of him mowing our front-40 by hand with a Weed Wacker. You know what they say…You find out who your friends really are when it comes time to move.”
And here are some facts about the man, according to Willy, as published in an article I wrote for the Times Union in Albany. :
Uncle Willy was the oldest of five children.
He was born in Kingston.
His father tended bar at the old Wimpy’s on Sunday nights.
He left Kingston High School at 17, joined the U.S. Navy and worked as an aviation storekeeper at Naval Air Station Sanford in Florida. He was later transferred to Naval Air Station Key West.
Out of the Navy, Willy lived in Daytona Beach, worked as a lifeguard and attended Daytona Beach Junior College.
He returned to Ulster County and started running The Well, a bar in Rosendale.
Few people in my life have made me laugh so hard, ponder life’s deep questions for so many hours on one barstool and just make me appreciate my lungs, and feel grateful they were pumping air to my heart. That is what lungs do, isn’t it?
Uncle Willy launched the Rosendale Street Festival.
He was there when Danny Louis—also of Gregg Allman fame—launched his musical career. He romped around Yankee Stadium dressed as the King of the Bronx during Yankee games that I am pretty sure were played while my dear old dad, a captain in the NYPD and a Bronx native, commanded the 44th precinct—the FOUR-FOUR as they called it—home to all three incarnations of the Stadium. Uncle Willy hosted legendary performances by Jorma, Hot Tuna and Rick Danko at the club on Broadway in Kingston that was named for him. There were lots of other legendary shows as well.
He was a dead ringer for comedian George Carlin. And I couldn’t have been happier when the Poughkeepsie Journal published a story of mine about Uncle Willy, pegged to a performance by Carlin at UPAC in Kingston, that carried the headline, “Carlin—He’s No Uncle Willy.”
Willy told me a story about delivering pizzas from Tony’s, where he worked as a bartender, to the UPAC backstage for Carlin once, and he was wearing a hat that said, “Women Rule.” He told me Carlin complimented him on the hat. Some years later, I was interviewing Carlin and I asked him about Willy. Carlin’s response?
“Nice guy. Great hat.”
When I think of Uncle Willy, I think of a guy strolling through Uptown Kingston in street clothes and a multi-colored jester’s hat; or an even crazier getup, with groovy sunglasses, far-out shirt and pants and goofy hat at the Rosendale Street Festival.
But here’s what Uncle Willy really means to me—he showed me how to laugh at the absurdity of life and how to let all the gabagool roll off my back; how to view the glass as half-full and how to let tomorrow take care of tomorrow, because we’re having too much fun today.
I couldn’t help but feel happy, unburdened and relieved of stress whenever I saw Willy, wherever I saw Willy. He channeled some beam of light radiating from somewhere in the universe, and he shared it with us all. Uncle Willy was all about the giving, with little use for the taking.
With much respect, I say he was Kingston’s class clown, working hard to distract us all from whatever train wreck of a day we were having at the moment, reminding us to focus on the good times, the sunrise rather than the sunset, and the possibilities rather than the obstacles.
Uncle Willy was a beacon of power, a signpost at the fork in the road, that guy on the airport tarmac waving those orange hand-held baton-things, directing us to the sunny side of the street and making sure we arrived safely.
We’ve all got a tiny bit of Uncle Willy in us—that kooky, zany, off-the-rails-“Hello, Brother” approach to life. But speaking for myself, I know I’m constantly trying to suppress it out of insecurity and fear of being vulnerable. Uncle Willy, on the other hand, seemed to surrender to it all—the abandon, the joy, the whole who-gives-a-f***-about-anything perspective on life. Uncle Willy had the courage to let it all hang out. He had the courage to be himself, his authentic, genuine self. I certainly can’t say that about myself.
When I think of Uncle Willy, I think of something the great Wavy Gravy, the original counter-culture court jester, the guy who saved Woodstock, said about the court jesters of old.
I’m paraphrasing here, but Wavy basically said the court jester came off as a jokester and a fool, but was actually the only person who truly had the ear of the king. The king relied on the jester to give him the straight juice, the honest lowdown about the characters who passed in and out of the court, as well as the affairs of state and decisions that affected people’s lives. And thus, it was truly the court jester who wielded the greatest influence on the monarch. Beneath the jester hat and the funny shoes and the clown getup, the court jester was something of a gatekeeper, person of reason and counselor.
I think we can say the same things about Willy.
I am also reminded of something that the late, great Ken Kesey—Wavy’s fellow Merry Prankster—said about Jerry Garcia when the Grateful Dead guitarist died in 1995.
We can definitely say the same thing about Willy, who I will always remember for that catch phrase, “Hello, brother.”
And so I say, so we say, to the one, the only, our very own court jester and counselor, the guy behind the bar, our very own Ace of Hearts, “So long, brother.”