A voice that has been familiar to generations of kids at Pine Bush High School will be missing this fall. Marshall Canosa, gym teacher, and football and baseball coach, has retired.

Still looking fit enough to play if he had to, Mr. Canosa says that retirement hasn't really hit home yet.

"I'm still on summertime," he says. "Wait until September. Then I'll know."

That will be the first September in 39 years that Marshall Canosa will have time on his hands and no gym classes to run. Standing at the front doors of the high school on a warm evening in August, Mr. Canosa seems very much in charge, but at the same time possessed by his memories.

"When I first came here," he says, making a sweeping gesture that takes in Pine Bush Equipment and the Town of Crawford Government Center, "all of this was just fields."

It's an interesting story, beginning not that far away in the town of Marlboro.

"I went to Marlboro High School," he recalls. "My best friend there was a guy named Pat Mataraza. Both of us ended up at Salem College in West Virginia. While I was at Marlboro High School, the assistant principal was Fred Bement. Four years later, in the spring of 1969, Pat and I got calls from Mr. Bement. He had moved back to Pine Bush to take over as superintendent from E. J. Russell and he asked both of us if we'd like to teach in Pine Bush."

Canosa, who had a degree in Physical Education, and Mataraza, who had one in Business, both accepted the challenge. Canosa wound up teaching fifth grade. "That year they had so many kids they had the fifth grade up in this place called Camp Quannacut. You see, the high school then was housed in what is today Crispell. The primary school, E.J.Russell today, was bursting at the seams. They had just started work on the current high school.

"So we taught up at Camp Quannacut for September and October, and then in Novermber, just as it started to get a bit cold for teaching in what was basically an outdoors situation, we moved down into the first rooms that were available in the new High School building."

It was all part of E.J. Russell's grand plan for the district. In the early 1960s, Pine Bush annexed all of Scotchtown to the district. The idea was to spread the growing tax burden of educating the baby boom generation in a rural school district. At the time, there were twenty five dairy farms here and not much else.

"The Valley Supreme was there, it had been built in the sixties, but everything down there on Boniface Drive was just fields and woods."

So while Marshall Canosa taught that year's fifth graders, the high school was built around them. In March, enough of it was completed that they could move the high school age classes up from Crispell and move the fifth graders down to Crispell.

"It just showed us how fast the district was growing then. When I was back in the Crispell building, I could still see the Future Farmers of America Office, which was in the Ag. and Tech office. That was an important aspect of the school then."

But the Norman Rockwell world of Pine Bush circa 1960 was rapidly changing.

"After Scotchtown was annexed, a few years later the farmers down there began selling out to developers. Lots of people wanted to move up here. The developers put in the housing tracts, the population grew, and Pine Bush changed."

By then, the morning milk train to the city was a memory and the dairy farms were closing down. Marshall Canosa had left the 5th grade too.

"I did one year of it and then a job opened up in Phys Ed. I started out teaching half a day in the elementary school and half a day at the high school. I was twenty three years old and I was having a great time. I really enjoyed having the little kids in the morning and the high school guys in the afternoon."

Back then, of course, Phys Ed was not co-educational. The girls had their own instructors, all female.

"Then, after a couple of years of that I moved over to Crispell to teach Phys Ed all day for the boys. I was there for ten years. I moved to the high school in 1984. I had already coached football at the high school from 1970 to '78, either JV or Varsity Assistant Coach. I was Varsity Coach from 1983 to 2005."

Eventually, the Pine Bush School District has become one of the largest and most diverse districts in the Hudson Valley.

Bringing up football with an old football coach always stirs memories. Mr. Canosa has plenty of those.

"We always had big kids," he recalls. "Right from when I started coaching in the '70s, all the way up to the end, we had big kids. Whenever you thought about Pine Bush football teams, you thought of big kids."

And one of those big kids went on to play in the NFL. Michael Kiselak, a young giant in the offensive line, played at the University of Maryland, and after a spell in the Canadian Football League, he wound up in Texas, playing for the Dallas Cowboys. Mr. Canosa remains in touch.

"I speak to Michael; he's still in Texas, doing well. But I talk to a lot of former players from here."

Gym teachers, coaches, see social changes that perhaps the rest of us don't think about immediately when we contrast the 1970s with today.

"The biggest single thing that I've seen has been the evolution of women's sports. When I started, the girls were taught by female instructors in the gym. The girls' basketball teams had six players, and the girls only competed with other schools at what were called "sports days."

"That seems like another world now.

"The second biggest thing I've seen," he continues, "has been the increasing specialization of young athletes. I'm an old school guy. I think kids should play all kinds of sports. But now, with technology and the dream of a sport scholarship at college, kids are specializing at a young age. I preach that they should play more than one sport. Part of that is you don't necessarily know what you might turn out to be good at. But the lure of the silver bullet — those college scholarships — is too strong. Every coach in every school nowadays has this situation to deal with.

Looking back over his time in Pine Bush, would Mr. Canosa change anything?

"Nope. I wouldn't change a thing," he says. "It was a great career for me. Pine Bush has been a wonderful place to raise my family. My kids went through the Pine Bush schools and then off to college. I look back to 1969 and I'm grateful that Mr. Bement made those phone calls that brought me here."

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