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THE HEMLOCK 

Winter 2005 - 06

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LEDGESIDE CHRONICLES

By George Saqqal
(Mr. Saqqal was a summer resident of Haines Falls in the Eisenhower years. He has generously allowed us to publish his remembrance in the Winter 2005-06 issue of The Hemlock.  What follows here is a slightly more complete version of the essay than the print version.)

Copyright 2005 George Saqqal -- used with permission.

ledgeside- postcard collection of H&J Hommel "Ledgeside", was my grandmother's summer home in the Catskill Mountains. It was built by a minor beer baron on the side of a mountain in the quaint hamlet of Haines Falls. The actual location was a small enclave within Haines Falls called Sunset Park. The locals called these summer homes "cottages" no matter how big or small they were, and hers  had 10 rooms.

 Its most memorable feature was the deep, sweeping porch that embraced the house on three sides and afforded an unforgettable view of the lush green mountains that you could almost reach out and touch.  To this day, the porch was the quietest place I had ever known. Even the gentle breezes that swayed the branches of the trees and the z-z-z-z-ing of a vagrant bee hardly  disturbed  the incredible stillness. Sometimes, when the wind was just right, one could hear a truck or a bus in low-low gear grinding its way up the Rip Van Winkle Trail a few miles away. Otherwise it was as still and quiet as could be.

Behind my grandmother's house was our very own forest. A dark, primeval place that my imagination had insisted non White man had tread upon and  had known only the soft tread of Indian hunting parties.  Here and there, a shaft of sunlight would infiltrate the leafy overhead canopy and reach the ground, creating a pool of light  on the soft, spongy ground,  covered with the fallen leaves from innumerable autumns past.

On top of the mountain, and safely above the forest, stood the Sunset Hotel, like a lighthouse on a stormy shore. It was a classic confection of stone and wood and the prized possession of its owner, a vast,  genial Greek gentleman who played host to legions of his countrymen who came with their families every summer to feast at his table, wallow in the ambiance of their native land,  and kibitz, play cards and argue politics. After Labor Day, they would pack up their wives and children and head back to Chicago, Providence, Cleveland or wherever, until the next summer, when they would return.

*     *     *     *    *

Ledgeside had been purchased just as World War II was coming to an end. My grandmother wanted a country place where her grandchildren could escape the stifling heat of a Brooklyn summer.

It soon became a gathering place for all her relatives, both close and distant. They would arrive at her house, tired, hungry and disheveled, their ancient cars overheating.  Their excuse for coming uninvited was always the same: "We were in the neighborhood..." spoken with a straight face despite the fact that they all lived in Brooklyn, 150 miles distant, and she was the only person on the mountain that they knew.

Despite these impositions on her patience and generosity, there was always a place at her table and a spare bed when it was needed. In those early years, Ledgeside often resembled a small hotel.

*     *     *     *     *

Speaking of which, there were many in Tannersville, Hunter and Haines Falls that were geared to family vacations for people of all ethnicities. I mean there was a French hotel, a couple of Italian hotels, a few German hotels, a Swiss hotel, and a string of Armenian, Turkish and  Middle Eastern hotels all catering to the former citizens of their various homelands. There were rooming houses and boarding houses, inns and lodges, and much later, motels. There were even hotels that accepted American guests. The thing they all had in common was their penchant for grandiose-sounding names. Listen: Pera Palace, The Grand, Cold Spring, The Majestic, The Mountain House, La Cascade, The Belmont, Villa Maria, Shady Grove and on and on. The one thing they still have in common is that they are all gone now, victims of arson, abandonment or changing tastes in vacations.

Our next door neighbor was an immigrant for whom the American Dream had come true by dint of hard work, some luck and raw courage. He had come here from Ireland, penniless, and had built  a comfortable life for his wife and children. He had a certain gift for getting his way. It is called leadership today. Then it was called Blarney.

One of his house guests  was a mild-mannered, bespectacled, school master-ish type who was the first person I ever saw who drank a brown, frothing liquid I later learned was stout. Let's call him Jack, Jack was a master mason. He could take a pile of rocks and rock fragments and transform them into a retaining wall before our very eyes. He made the rocks fit together like a jigsaw puzzle without using a drop of mortar and his work was in evidence all over my neighbor's property.

 He was also a master story teller who kept me and the young sons of my neighbors enthralled with his tales of derring-do while a soldier in the Irish Republican Army. Of course, he wasn't. What he was, was a building contractor from Chicago who had gone broke in the Great Depression.

One day, one of us gathered up enough courage to ask Jack why he drank that stuff and Jack told us.  It seemed that he was guarding an IRA hide out when a patrol of British soldiers approached. Jack fired at their officer who fired back just as Jack was ducking down behind a bush where he had stashed a bottle of stout  The bullet whizzed over Jack's head  Had he been standing up when the officer fired, the bullet would have hit Jack in the head and killed him outright.  Now the firing alerted the other IRA men who rushed out and drove the patrol off  The IRA had strict rules about drinking on duty and if he had been discovered with a bottle of stout on his person while on guard duty, he would have been punished severely by his superiors.  In Jack's mind the bottle of stout had saved his life and the life of his IRA compatriots, and from that point on he called stout his holy water and he blessed himself with a few bottles every chance he could. Jack was a very holy man.

Our neighbor had a lot of friends like Jack. A lot.

*     *     *     *     *

Sunset Hotel -postcard collection J&H Hommel New York Route 23A was Haines Falls's Main Street. It was a narrow, two-lane, serpentine road that began in Palenville and ended in Haines Falls five plus miles later. It was called the Rip Van Winkle Trail for that stretch and was our local Burma Road. Filled with blind curves, 30 degree gradients, breath taking scenery and precipitous drop-offs, the Trail caught its breath in Haines Falls and went on to connect us to Tannersville and Hunter and points west that no one had ever heard of.

Main Street was somewhat shorter than a city block and was lined with the usual array of shops and services one expected in a very small hamlet. There was the usual gas station,  post office, barber shop, beauty parlor, drug store, a couple of coffee shops, a souvenir store and a bar.

A single traffic light guarded the only intersection. Its amber light warned motorists of oncoming traffic which never actually came. It hung there, like the light at the end of Daisy's dock, blinking stupidly at nothing in particular.

Next to the gas station, and wedged between it and the post office was a large, white Victorian  gingerbread house wherein the postmaster and his wife lived. He was a gracious, courtly old gentleman who was always impeccably dressed,  and she, a dark, silent woman devoted to her garden. He doubled as one of two taxi drivers in Haines Falls who used their personal vehicles to transport vacationing residents to nearby towns for shopping or the movies.

He spoke so low and so slowly that it was as if  the very act of speaking was a great effort he could barely sustain. He ended every sentence  with the same phrase; "Don'tcha know?" After which, like clockwork, he would expel a stream of brown tobacco juice with unerring accuracy at some invisible target only he could see. He was a treasure from the 1920's who found himself in the 1950's through no fault of his own.

*     *     *     *     *

The summer of 1952 I worked behind the counter in the only drug store in town. The proprietor was called "Doc" not surprisingly. The store was on the street level of a two story building right on Main Street. It was a dilapidated structure that was used by Doc as living quarters (upstairs) and livelihood (downstairs). He was looked after by his neighbor, a kindly Italian woman of indeterminate years who cooked for him on occasion and lived next door. Doc left the running of the non-prescription part of the business to me. He opened the store in the morning and disappeared into the back room where he officiated as the town's only pharmacist, doctor and sage.

His "pharmacy" was a dark cavern of a room lined with wooden shelves filled with glass bottles whose labels were in Latin. It was more of an alchemist's laboratory than an example of a modern pharmacy. But, he managed to fill those odd  prescriptions that came his way more and more infrequently.

How times have changed. Walk into any chain store or grocery today and guaranteed you will see a bewildering display of condoms of every size, color and advertised sensitivity staring you in the face. Back then, in the Dark Ages, Doc kept just one brand of condoms in the store. Trojans. And he insisted they be kept in a drawer under the cash register. A purchaser almost needed a password to purchase a three-pack of Trojans. They cost all of 50 cents. Really.

I could always tell when some young blade was about to make a purchase. He would wait until the last female customer walked out of the store before coming over and slapping a 50 cent piece on the counter like some cowboy buying drinks for the bar in a bad western. The young blade would then step back with a silly grin on his pimply face and wait for me to produce the latex. If I was having a bad day, and needed some comic relief to jerk me back to sanity,  I would ask him what he wanted. This always produced a quizzical look as if I should have known. He usually replied "raincoats" or "...you know..."  to which I would reply that raincoats were available in Tannersville at so-and-so's department store. This would so discountenance young blade that he usually blushed and if, perchance, a female customer would enter the store just then, he would turn around and rush out as Doc, who had been watching the exchange, and I would melt into laughter. He lost a lot of business this way, but it didn't seem to bother him much. Doc always enjoyed a good laugh.

Business was often slow on those lazy summer afternoons. And when it was, Doc would come out and sit on a stool by the soda fountain and tell me stories of his life and times. They were pips. They were about Prohibition, flappers, bootleggers, gangsters and speakeasies. He never spoke about his wartime experiences except to say he was gassed,  and no amount of prompting could get him to do so. The ubiquitous Dunhill cigarette holder clenched in his teeth as he filled my head with tales of his mis-spent youth. As he droned on, my attention would drift across the street where there stood a magical coffee shop presided over by a husband and wife team of Swiss immigrants. He was a genius of a pastry chef who produced such exquisite  fruit tarts that I can still taste them now. The place was spotless, and she, its guardian and keeper of the cash register was always there, ever watchful and obedient to her husband's demands.  She kept the display cases  filled with her genius husband's  flaky, mouth-watering tarts, cookies and cakes all arranged with Swiss precision in silver trays behind gleaming panes of glass that she polished every day.

 Theirs was the first stop I and my friends made every Sunday after church.

*     *     *     *     *    

It turned out that Haines Falls was a regular stop over for the bootleggers running  whiskey down from Canada to New York.  Some of Haines Falls's leading citizens were involved, or, as Doc put it so succinctly, "Oh, Hell, everybody was doing it. It was no big deal."  Doc also let it slip out that during Prohibition, medicinal brandy was exempt from the prohibitions of the Volstead Act, and could be had from the local pharmacy by prescription only and that many a pharmacist got wealthy by dispensing it.

 Doc was the son of a pharmacist who emigrated to the US from Europe, and like a lot of first generation sons of immigrants, Doc became fond of all the pleasures that America had to offer. Especially in New York City at the turn of the century. Doc's father despaired of his oldest son's ever making anything of himself, Doc got into trouble with everyone, cops, teachers and girls, but his gift of gab always got him through unscathed..

When the US entered World War I, Doc fooled everyone and joined the Army. In short order, the government gave him a quick course in survival,  put him on a troop ship (" We lived like cattle") and shipped him to France, where he was  wounded and then gassed and shipped home ("We lived like barons on that ship."). Back in the bosom of his family he was treated like a war hero by friends and family alike. He was barely out of his teens when all this happened. The war  had a sobering effect on him because he wasted no time in enrolling in Fordham University's School of Pharmacy as soon as he got back. Soon, he had a degree in pharmacy to go with the chronic asthma the gassing had left him with, and a wife. The asthma stayed with him his whole life. His wife didn't. Once every summer she would arrive at the store with an empty shopping bag and fill it with face powders, perfume, shampoo and other beauty aids as Doc retreated into his cave and fretted and fumed until she left.

Doc's timing was impeccable and so was his stamina. He got out of the Army just before the Roaring Twenties got started and managed to graduate from Fordham while missing none of the fun New York's nighttime enticements had to offer.

One way or another he found Haines Falls and began a life-long relationship with that tiny hamlet. a counterpart of the mythical Scottish village of Brigadoon. Instead of coming alive once every hundred like Brigadoon, Haines Falls came alive every summer from Memorial Day to Labor Day and then went back to sleep.

*     *     *     *     *

In the mid-Nineteenth Century, the Newly Rich "discovered" Haines Falls as a summer retreat for them and their children. They built grand homes which were called "cottages" no matter how large and grand they were.  Two railroads offered passenger service and built resort hotels in the area. More and more of the Newly Rich arrived. Visitors wrote books about the beauty of the Catskill Mountains. Artists painted pictures of its scenic attractions and soon, it became the place to spend one's summer.

This idyllic situation lasted until 1929 when the crash of the stock market annihilated the fortunes of the Newly Rich. Without its summer visitors, the hamlet went into an economic decline for a time.

If you dwell on the economic statistics of the Great Depression, you will read, time and time again, that the unemployment rate stood at 25 % . If the unemployment rate was at 25%, then the employment must have been 75%, and it was this 75% of the workforce that kept the economy alive. And Haines Falls was no exception.  The Newly Rich gave way to Middle Class working stiffs, and Brigadoon came back to life every summer just like before, only this time FDR and the New Deal helped too.

*     *     *     *     *

Like our parents, Doc was a child of the Great Depression and the Roaring Twenties. Unlike them he was also a true war veteran.  Yet he seemed not to show any scars. He was always cheery and his chronic asthma did not interfere with his fondness for Pall Mall cigarettes. His only concession to the asthma was a hoarse whisper and  a  Dunhill cigarette holder which he clenched in his teeth much like FDR.

Every fall, when the first hint of winter approached, Doc closed the store and drove to Florida where he spent the winter employed as the payroll manager for a local construction company. I never heard him say a bad word about anyone, even his ex-, and he was always there to help a neighbor in distress.

*     *     *     *     *

Now, having graduated from high school, I broadened my sights and got a job at the local gas station. It was a thriving enterprise owned by two gentlemen. I spent two summers while in college there as a replacement for one of the partners who moon-lighted as a correction officer in Coxsackie. It was made clear to me that my duties were to pump gas and change the occasional flat and that was all  The other partner was the mechanic. He was a WWI veteran who had worked as an airplane mechanic for the Army Signal Corps in France. Like his next door neighbor, the postmaster, he was a tobacco chewer. But unlike the postmaster he was not too careful where he spat. But he was such a gifted mechanic that his occasional "accidents" were forgiven by the locals. His skill drew customers from all over the area who brought him their cars for healing after lesser mechanics had given up on them.

It was he who taught me how a universal joint worked and how a WWI airplane could fire its guns through its own propeller arc without hitting the blades.

My tenure was not a success at first. While work in the drug store was a cinch, work at the gas station was not. For me, anyway. It wasn't that pumping gas was hard and changing tires, a challenge. It was that I had no "feel" for the work. My fingers were all thumbs and my mechanical aptitude nil. Making change was my only real skill.

That I survived two full summers without blowing up the gas station or killing myself or an innocent motorist was a tribute to sheer dumb luck. If the partners were disappointed with my maladroit efforts they kept it to themselves. In due course, I learned the difference between high test and regular gasoline and how to remove the filler cap from a radiator that was about to burst without scalding myself. I even learned how to use that infernal contraption that could remove a tire from its wheel simply by pressing a button.

By osmosis, I learned how oil filters, water and fuel pumps, power brakes, power steering and various and sundry other parts of a car worked. At least theoretically. Ask me to point one out under the hood and I was at a loss.

After embarrassing myself numerous times by not being able to pop a hood because I did not know where the release was, I caught on and could actually find the oil dip stick and the brake fluid reservoir without help. I thought I was finally getting the hang of it until one fine day when a motorcyclist pulled in to the station and asked for some gas. Flush with success at my newly found automotive knowledge,  I unscrewed the wrong cap and blithely filled the oil reservoir with gasoline as the biker sauntered off to use the men's room.. The biker noticed nothing was amiss, paid the bill and roared off in a cloud of blue smoke. I did not realize my mistake and asked the mechanic why the motorcycle was smoking so badly. Kindly, and with great patience he explained what I had done wrong. The biker never came back with his friends to do me harm and I chalked it up to experience. while resolving never to work around machinery ever again. It was a promise I kept.

*     *     *     *     *

Those were the last two summers I spent on the mountain. The next summer I graduated from New York University and went right into the Army. That summer was spent at Fort Dix thrashing about the pine barrens and being bitten by mosquitos as large as B-17's. I survived Basic Training and went on the Specialist Training Regiment where the Army taught me the intricacies of its paperwork.

By then, I and my friends had grown up and embarked on our own journeys. I visited Haines Falls only occasionally after that, and just once after my grandmother died in the summer of 1959 while at her beloved Ledgeside. The house passed out of the family in the mid-1960's

Doc died in 1957 from lung cancer before I had a chance to say goodbye.

In the 1960's the world turned upside down and one of the casualties was the family summer vacation in the Catskills.  The jet plane made it uncool to spend one's vacation where one's parents had spent it. Europe beckoned, so did the Caribbean and other exotic places. Some die-hards from the old days inherited their parents summer homes, winterized them and relocated to Haines Falls permanently, and I  had always envied them; even to this day.

Like Brigadoon, Haines Falls went to sleep, but it turned out to be just a short nap on the couch.

Someone discovered that there was such a thing as a winter vacation, and skiing was the attraction. So, a savvy promoter raised some cash and decided to turn Hunter Mountain into a ski resort. He gouged out ski trails from the wooded flanks of  Hunter Mountain, disfiguring it.
When the first snows fell that winter Hunter Mountain was "discovered"  by hordes of New Yorkers who had never been on skis in their lives. Nevertheless. it became a great success by any measure. A-frames sprouted like mushrooms on the forest floor after a rain and real estate values went ballistic. New bars, lounges, restaurants and boutiques appeared as if by magic and suddenly, Hunter Mountain was the place to be in the winter if you loved skiing or just went to be seen. It still is.

I visited Haines Falls just once after Ledgeside was sold. I went to see if any of my old neighbors were still around. The visit was just after the riot at Attica. I found my former next door neighbor had moved down the road to a larger house that was now undergoing renovation. I had not seen him in  about 15 years but he was still the same. He was a little hunched over but he still sported the signature tam. Now, instead of carrying his shillelagh, he leaned on it.  But he was still  as clear of eye and as keen of mind as he had been the last time I had seen him.

He took me aside as soon as he could and led me into the kitchen. His wife had set out steaming cups of tea, a dish of butter and her  famous soda bread.  He leaned across the table and speaking to me as if we were conspirators, he said  ''Tell me, what do ye think of this Attica situation?"

I could not think of a thing to tell him.

" Well, I'll tell ye what I think. In the old country", he said," when ye went inside, ye kept your mouth shut and didn't make any trouble."

Suddenly, a picture flashed across my mind of my neighbor as a young man, pistol in hand, firing at the British soldiers from a shattered window in Dublin's Main Post Office on that horrific Easter Monday  morning in 1916. Then, just as suddenly as it appeared, it disappeared and there he was sitting in front of me in his wife's sun-filled kitchen, big as life, a smile creasing his face, those steely blue eyes crinkling at the corners, and I thought to myself that he and I had just shared the same vision, as impossible a happenstance as that could be. Then I remembered that we were in Rip Van Winkle's back yard and strange tricks of the imagination were not as out of place there as they would  be elsewhere.

 The Catskill Mountains were enchanted, and I think the sly old Dutchman had just given us a parting gift.