Howard Riley My name is Gerry Waterson and today we are interviewing former Saranac Lake Mayor Howard Riley. The date is December 28, 2010 and this is part of the Historic Saranac Lake oral history project and we are located here at Saranac Village at Will Rogers.

GW: First of all, Howard I’d like to thank you for taking the time to talk with us. Let’s begin by asking a few basic questions and then I hope from there we won’t have yes or no answers, but that could be my undoing. I might give you the wrong questions and since we are time limited to about 40 minutes we have to proceed at a good pace here. Some beginning things, first of all, let me have your full name.
HR: Howard John Riley
GW: And you were born in what town?
HR: I was born in the hamlet of Gabriels on July 20, 1930 on a farm, in the farmhouse.
GW: And you essentially lived here most of your life?
HR: I’ve lived here all my life. You’re supposed to say you’ve lived here all your life, so I can say not yet. My five siblings all were born in that farmhouse, actually called the sisters farm in Gabriels. My father was the farm manager for the Sisters of Mercy on the farm and that farm was built to support Gabriels Sanatorium which was run by the Sisters of Mercy. There was one other question, people wanted to know why I was born in the farmhouse, why I didn’t go to the hospital, I told them I wanted to be near my mother.
GW: Is the farm still there?
HR: Yes it is. The house is still there.
GW: What were your parents names?
HR: Elizabeth Keegan Riley and Dennis Edward Riley. My grandparents were born here, but my great grandparents were born in Ireland on both sides.
GW: Oh so you’re true Irish.
HR: Right
GW: I’m sorry I didn't bring a bottle of Irish whiskey.
HR: Just as well, I have to go home for Easter.
GW: Did you have any siblings?
HR: Yes, five of them.
GW: Five?
HR: Five brothers and sisters. My oldest is, one of them died, Marguerite took better care of herself than the rest of us, that’s always the way. She died at 79, but my oldest brothers and sisters are twins, Rita and Ray are 86, and then Charles is 83 and then I’m 80 and my youngest sister is 76, Teresa.
GW: Okay. And you of course went to school in this area. What were your schools, just the early years, not the later years?
HR: The earlier years I went to the school building that no longer exists in Gabriels, it was called the East Gabriels Jr. High School. I started first grade there and I moved up and went to school in the house that we now live in, in Harrietstown.
  We moved to a farm there after my father left the other one. We moved to Split Rock Farm. Lightning hit it and burned down the barn with all our machinery. We moved up here near where we live now to another farm that he leased and I went to school; it was just called Harrietstown School District No. 3 and we bought a farm on Norman Ridge outside of Vermontville and I went to a place called the Porter School.
  All those little schools were all run by their own little school boards out in the country. There was no centralized system at all. I went there and then we moved to Ray Brook where dad managed that farm over there and I started school at St. Bernard’s Catholic School in Saranac Lake. I graduated from there in 8th grade in 1944 and then went to Saranac Lake High School, graduated in ’48 and I took other courses at Columbia, journalism stuff later, but that’s the only schools I ever graduated from.
GW: And I guess that was the old high school?
HR: Yes, that’s now the elementary school.
GW: Do you have any basic memories of early childhood? Do you remember anything significant that happened that, in your early years?
HR: Yeah, it’s pretty interesting with the farm where we were born. It’s probably more from me hearing the story told so many times, but my next older sister Marguerite, the one who died, that Marguerite and Charlie, Chick they called him, weren’t supposed to go up in this hayloft and they went up there and I followed them, but I was only like 3 and I fell out that barn window down onto the ground. Apparently they told me I threw a kitten out, I must have heard at that age that they always landed on their feet, because I remember the cat did, but I didn’t and anyway it got told so many times that they thought I was dead and I had this great uncle, Tommy Keegan, lived there and he ran over and saw me on the ground and picked me up and I was perfectly fine.
GW: Do you remember how old you were then?
HR: Maybe almost three. I guess three and I followed them up the steep stairs.
GW: That’s amazing that you remember that far. Most people can probably remember back to year five, but not three normally.
HR: That little bit and I remember running into a stone step on a tricycle or something and cutting my lip. There’s a scar underneath there, but anyway I guess the dramatic thing about the fall out of the barn window, you know because it knocked the wind out of me and I guess they thought I was dead. My father was out in the field driving a tractor and my mother sent these two brothers and sisters out to get him and of course they were scared to tell him because they weren’t supposed to be in the barn. They rushed me to the doctor and I was fine, but apparently at that time it was quite an event.
GW: What were your courses in high school?
HR: They were the easiest so I could get through. I think it was then called, I took Shop, I took commercial course, I took typing, anything that looked easy, I took. We took general electricity, I almost electrocuted myself because I made a lamp and when you pulled the chain the light was supposed to go on, but actually somehow the current come down through the chain.
  At that time, girls all took home economics to learn how to cook. Then we switched classes and they took shop classes and we took baking and baking bread and stuff and me and this other guy made the best rolls so we got to bring them up to the superintendent of schools, Professor Littell, but on the way up I remember they went off the plate and they were rolling down the stairs, it’s true, and we picked them up and dusted them off and brought them into the professor, and he said they were very good.
GW: Now at Saranac, were you into any clubs or athletic associations or societies?
HR: I made the varsity club just through track and cross-country, those were the only two sports. I don’t even know what it was, the club you had to be pinned to, it was actually a Christian thing, I wish, I can’t think of the whole name for it. It was called the Hi-Y Club and I was in the band and like I said we had won the state championships in the cross country that year.
GW: Do you remember your after school hangouts when you were going there?
HR: Almost everybody here probably would have told you the same thing, it was called Bernie Wilson's. It was a place in Berkeley Square and even though it had been sold a couple times had apparently been the hangout for everybody from the 30s, 40s, 50s, and everybody went there after school and it was a big, I mean for here, it was a big restaurant. There was counter down both sides and all the other stuff was in the middle then there were booths along the other, it was just for kids, people had stores and stuff downtown, that place was packed all the time. So that’s pretty much where we hung out.
  There was a curfew then and you had to be home by 9:30 at night if you weren’t 16, if you were under 16, and they enforced it pretty well, the cops, so they’d pick you up and bring you home. That seemed to be a big thing at that time, I can remember walking a girl home who lived on Upper Broadway after a band practice or a band concert one night and it was July, right after I turned 16 and she lived way on Upper Broadway and I was walking down the street feeling pretty hot stuff, you know. The cops pulled up beside me and they rolled down the window and I said “I’m 16”. We don’t care how old you are, do you want a ride home. Of course, I didn’t, but I got in the car and hid. I can remember it was only about 11:00, we pulled up in front of 5 Pine Street where my brother still lives, he bought the house from my father after, I didn’t want my parents to see me come home in a police car, you know. But it’s so funny that such trivial things now, how important it was then.
GW: Didn’t you used to have a teen canteen here at one time?
HR: Yeah, the first one was in the church hall for the Methodist Church. You know, it had a jukebox, it had, not counselors, they weren’t called that then, they were just parents. I don’t think they had a paid person, but you know they had a jukebox and ping pong table and that was a lot of fun. It was a great place to hang out. And later years, I was a little older then, it moved to the town hall and they used to have dances and things like that.
GW: What instrument did you play in the band?
HR: I started with the trombone, but
RC: One of the points I thought you should make is the transition from moving from Norman Ridge into Saranac Lake and how that changed your life.
HR: Yeah, when we moved to the farm that we owned, and we’re backing up here, but on Norman Ridge. We’d lived at the Split Rock Farm which was beautiful and a beautiful house, but then my father bought this farm on Norman Ridge through the Federal Land Bank I think it was called, but when we moved up there we had no running water, no electricity, nothing. There was nine of us because my grandfather lived with us. Even for all the cows and horses and mules and everything there you had to haul water from a mile down the road and fill these kerosene lamps and clean them and clean the chimneys and have them ready. There were three stoves that heated the house it was a horrible life and it was in the mid 30s. And then as Ruth said we moved to Ray Brook and dad managed, that Oseetah Dairy was put there to feed Ray Brook Sanatorium which was a huge state tuberculosis hospital which is now a prison. But yeah, it turned my life around completely. I might as well have moved from Poughkeepsie to New York City, moving from Norman Ridge and going to school there, I don’t think I’d ever been to a movie or anything and I walked into the sixth grade there the first day, of course it was nuns that taught there, the Sisters of Mercy, and my aunts were Sisters of Mercy and I had cousins that were priests and all then, but I walked into, I was entering the sixth grade there, and god there was like 33 kids in the sixth grade. There was only 18 in our whole school, all 8 grades at the Porter School, there was only one teacher and she taught all 8 grades, but there was many grades there was no one in.
  And then a short while after moving to that farm we actually moved to Saranac Lake where my brother lives now, back in 1942 when I would have been 12 and I got a job you know as a paperboy and it was like, you’re right, like my whole life changed all of a sudden. You know I had money all the time, I knew everybody, I was downtown, we had this house you just walked from the house downtown and had, you know, electricity and running, well the farmhouse did there too, but yeah it was like I couldn’t have had a happier childhood.
  The strange thing was that this being so active with the tuberculosis then, we lived at 5 Pine Street and on the corner there was a huge house, Ron DeLair, the architect owns one of the houses, there was two there and they named them for most of the patients. I think this was Endicott Johnson’s house because a lot of people in these big places all got sick and they had cottages for most of the people were from one company, but anyway, so I carried trays there when I was probably 14 and that was, nobody seemed to worry about us getting TB, I mean they were the sickest patients, there were some that were bedridden, they didn’t get up, you brought them their breakfast, brought the tray back down, but the funny part I used to think about after, on Sunday I used to go shop for these patients down at Rice's Drugstore, buying them cigarettes and candy and newspapers and here they're dying of lung disease, but they’re out there smoking away and the doctors didn’t seem to mind.
GW: The doctors probably smoked too.
HR: Oh, they did.
GW: And you weren’t afraid of catching the disease at all.
HR: It never occurred to me and the strange thing is I never heard of anybody in our high school ever getting TB. Ever.
GW: Was that a well paying job for the time? Hourly rate?
HR: Well, I would say I was so happy with my life then that it only took me a few minutes because we lived next door, so I’d go over at breakfast and carry the trays up, go home and eat breakfast, and go back and carry trays down, then go to school. So I did that three times a day seven days a week and I got $3.00 for the week, but it didn’t take long. Mr. Denny, who owned the jewelry store downtown owned the park right across the road, which is still there, but he gave it to the Village Improvement Society, I used to mow the lawn there on Saturdays and then go down to his jewelry store and clean all the cases and mop the floor. He had rubber runners in the jewelry store and I’d mop them and mow the lawn and I got $3.00 for that, but the movies were 10 cents, 11 cents, they were 10 cents and a penny tax and milkshakes were 15 cents. I mean, it was like I was wealthy. I had money with me all the time.
GW: Did you have many serious romances in those days, or just one day flings?
HR: Well, high school was a lot different in the 40s. I do remember one couple that were together all the time and she got pregnant, and that was unheard of then. We didn’t even know how they did it. I was a total mystery to us, but going out with girls in the band at different times and as far as serious…
GW: Did you go to proms and stuff like that?
HR: No, I never went to the prom.
GW: You never did that. Okay, so
HR: Couldn’t afford the corsage, you see.
GW: What were your dreams of the future at the time— did you have any, or did you think, you know, I want to leave this little burgh and go to the big city, or did you aspire to be a rocket scientist or did you want to…
HR: I had no dreams outside of getting out of high school. I didn’t care what happened after that, I just wanted to finish high school. We had joined in the teenage years, the National Guard. There was about 8 of us guys that all had birthdays almost the same, so we all graduated when we were 17 from high school and we had all joined the Guard that year during the winter.
GW: What year was that?
HR: 1947. So the National Guard Armory was all filled, non-commission officers were World War II veterans. They were looking for recruits and we all joined the National Guard but it wasn’t anything patriotic. They had the only TV set in town, they had a pool table and a gymnasium, it was a Boys' Club down on River Street, so oh my god, we just loved it, we went there immediately after school and shot pool and everything, we drilled on Monday night and some weekends I guess on the fire range, but it leads to the questions about did you have any dreams to do anything. That first summer, I turned 18 that July and most of the other guys did. None of the guys then were going to go to college, they were all going in the service and I said I was going to because some of us were going to get in the service and get in the military band. It looked like the easiest route, but I said, god why don’t we wait till we get the Fort Drum or Pine Camp it was called then, and we’ll get that two weeks training, we’ll be way ahead of those guys you know when we get to boot camp, well I went that two weeks in Fort Drum for that training, I’d have gone to Canada to live before they’d ever get me in the Army after that, I hated it and everyone of those guys joined the service after, one stayed in 20 years. I couldn’t believe it, I never hated anything so in my life.
GW: But you were in the reserve for how long?
HR: I was in there for 9 years.
GW: I don’t see how if you hated every…
HR: Well no, once we got, then I got to be a sergeant first class, it was two stripes down, I was supply sergeant. You know, it meant for that two weeks, you know, I was still single and then they froze the enlistments when the Korean War started and you couldn’t get out anyway. If you got out, you went directly into the Army.
GW: So, did you have any dreams beyond high school?
HR: No, I didn’t.
GW: Okay, you just wanted to…
HR: I just wanted to get a job and hang out.
GW: In Saranac Lake?
HR: Yup.
GW: Okay, so you kind of answered the question about the military service and you said you didn’t really take too many college courses, you didn’t graduate from college, you just…
HR: No, I didn’t go to college at all. I went later to North Country Community College when it opened and I took courses for credit, but I’d go at night and I might have gone one or two semesters and just took things I was interested in.
GW: Where did you develop your writing skills. I have read many of the things you have written. I’ve enjoyed them. I even contacted you once about one of the articles you wrote. Where did you hone those skills?
HR: Well, thank god I run into one of my old English teachers who I was scared to death of because she said to me once, if you’re already insecure can you imagine what this did to me, she said how can you have such beautiful blue eyes and be so stupid? Well, I already thought I was stupid, so when you have a well-educated teacher tell you that she just confirmed what I already knew. But one night I saw her at the Elks Club and we both had a couple pops and I said, you now despite your awful treatment of me in you English class, I’m now editor of the Adirondack Enterprise so what you did didn’t hurt me after all or something like that, you know.
GW: You held the same position Evelyn did?
HR: She was city editor and then I was editor.
GW: Which one was higher up?
HR: The editor was the highest person. But that… I worked in garages and I drove taxi and I carried trays at Trudeau, that was almost two or three years right after high school and then finally there was a job at the Enterprise that they needed a, they would train a linotype operator and that was a pretty good job at that time, you know, so I applied there and started what they call a printers double which really meant you were cleaning the floor and they operated with hot type then, you had to remelt lead and keep the tin content, it had to be measured and all that but, because they used these what they called pigs that were poured, it was hot metal and hot lead in the troughs then they cooled and you’d take them down and there’d be a pile of them on each linotype machine. The Enterprise had three, I think the New York Times had 200. They all operated the same way at that time whether it was this paper or the times. So they had linotype operators. So I started there doing that and cleaning the floors and then I got from there to making up pages and then I started doing linotype work in the afternoon. There’s 99 keys on a linotype machine and you type up and down, you don’t type crossways and they claim, somebody must have figured out that the most used letters in the English language are like a Frenchman, Antoine Strudel. The first line down is ETAION and the next down is SHRDUL.
GW: Sounds like QUERTY on a typewriter.
HR: Yeah, and they said the reason it was made that way is those are the letters they used the most but the whole keyboard for capitals was separate. Same thing only it was on a separate keyboard.
GW: So anyway, you worked your way up. I mean you just only stayed at the Enterprise for the most part.
HR: Yeah, to the linotype operator, then I became [??] and a guy by the name of Jim Loeb and Roger Tubby bought the newspapers. They’d both been, Roger had been editor the Burlington Banner, but he graduated from Yale and was Harry Truman’s last press secretary and Jim Loeb had worked for Averil Harriman and he was a PhD in romance languages, anyway, they loved this little newspaper and they were so nice to all of us, I’d never been treated so well by, you know, educated kind of quasi-wealthy people so I remember Roger Tubby was covering meetings and of course he was new in town so I’d set his stories on the linotype and there’d be mistakes in people’s names or something, so I would correct them and tell him I corrected them and, I thought he was being sarcastic so one day after I corrected these names he said, Howard why don’t you try covering some of these meetings at night and I thought oh I can’t cover any meetings, I’m just trying to help you. Well, I know you are, he said. I’d like you to cover a meeting, I think that’s someplace in the book, but I went to the first one. You can imagine how nervous I was and Hayward “Red” Plumadore was the town supervisor, he was a good lawyer, his son just retired as state supreme court judge, and Red later became a New York State Assemblyman and, anyway I went to my very, very first meeting and of course I got there early with a notebook and Red, they were all in the back room, the clerk, all the councilmen and that and I went in and sat down and they all quit talking and they said can we help you. I said I’m here to cover the town board meeting, or I’m here to cover this meeting.
GW: And how old were you then?
HR: Oh I don’t, 24 or 25 probably.
GW: That’s still pretty young.
HR: Yeah, I was still working the composing room, I’d never been to a meeting and he says well you’re not covering this meeting. I didn’t know what to say. I said, well my boss and don’t forget, I’d never been to any meeting, never as a reporter, it was my very first experience and I said well, my boss sent me down to cover the town board meeting. Well he finally saved me, he said, everyone of them was Republican, so this isn’t the town board meeting, this is a Republican committee meeting, but of course, oh my god, so they said the board meeting is going to start, I got there at 7:00, the meeting didn’t start till 7:30, but anyway when the thing started I went around and that was the very first thing I’d ever written for the paper. But the weird part was, I took out the whole middleman because the reporters when they cover the meeting, they got up there and typed it all on the typewriter, 250 words to a page, and got it and sent it down in this basket to the composing room and then we’d typed it all, so I’d just go into my notes and type it on the linotype and it was already set in type, I took out the whole middleman. Anyway, that’s how I started and I eventually covered meetings, or started writing feature stories in the afternoon. The paper was usually out by 3:00 or so, we started at 7:00 in the morning. I started doing feature stories and then finally they moved me up to the newsroom and I was made city editor, like Evelyn, and then editor and I was finally made publisher of the Adirondack Publishing Company because they’d just bought the Lake Placid News, so I was editor there for a while and editor at the Enterprise.
GW: That’s amazing, the rise that you did, it enabled you to experience the entire operation, it’s better than had you just moved in at the top, you saw everything from the bottom up.
HR: Yup, yup, the very last chapter in that book, Alice Ridenour whose father owned the paper from 1920 something to 194, I wrote this story, it’s the very last chapter in the book called Web Break and when it, when the temperature was bad on a cold day in the winter, the web was the way the paper was weaved through the press and it would break, it would take forever to wind it back through and people waiting for the paper, and it would be snowing and cold and stuff, so anyway that, she loved that part of the story the way we used to put out the paper by hot type. But anyway, I stayed there for 23 years.
GW: Now I know you’ve had a life in government. Tell us a little bit about that. What offices you held and things like that.
HR: Well, when I was still at the Enterprise, cause I then covered all sorts of meetings and plane crashes and every place the troopers were, I was, I just started covering everything and writing about it and when the Catholic church burned down, but going to these board meetings, I said it’s got to be interesting to actually be a village trustee for one term and later on a got to be Mayor also and I was still editor of the paper and I said that was a great thing because I’d write an editorial once a month saying the Mayor’s doing a hell of a nice job, we ought to re-elect him, but anyway, the strangest thing happened with politics and I realized how much I liked it after I got into it, but I ran that year and there were six of us running, three Republicans and three Democrats, I’m a Democrat and I got the higher vote than all six and the Democrats took over control of the board and of course the guy who was elected Mayor was John Campion and a guy named Alton B. Anderson they were World War II veterans, but the strangest thing happened a year later. Back then every postmaster in the country, they were political jobs, they were appointed by the Postmaster General, so it didn’t matter if you’d ever mailed a letter, you could be Postmaster the next day and that’s what happened here. John Campion had been a Marine Major in World War II and the postmaster died or something and he was a Democrat, there was a Democrat in Washington, it happened to be John F. Kennedy, and Campion was appointed Postmaster and he’d only been Mayor for a year. The Deputy Mayor was Myron Skeels who worked for the telephone company, the other guy had a gas station and there was one Republican on the board and they weren’t going to appoint him, so they said we’ve got to appoint somebody as Mayor so after a year on there, and I was 30 then, I was appointed Mayor. I had no idea what I was doing, even though I’d covered a lot of meetings….
GW: You were a cub reporter at 24 and Mayor at 30.
HR: Yeah.
GW: That’s strange.
HR: It’s pretty amazing. It’s the sidebars that are so much fun, the big steps that we did the minute we got in there, you couldn’t do it, get away with it, and we didn’t tell anybody, but about the second meeting we fluoridated the water supply. You know what that’s like, cause I lot of people think it’s poison, maybe you do, but it’s a health measure to put fluoride in the water and saves people’s teeth, then we got….
GW: Quite a controversy.
HR: Oh my god, nation wide it was, we almost got hung, there was guys who owned bait shops come in with dead fish in a pail and everything, but that’s when people had a sense of humor. This Art Hay, I love telling this story because I loved him. There’s a place called the Santanoni Apartments here, they took the third floor off, but there used to be a third floor and it was so modern, it had an elevator and kitchens for people who had TV, but they could rent these luxury apartments in there, that’s why it was built. A guy by the name of Art Hay owned it, and Art was always dressed up and he looked like W. C. Fields, he had a big stomach and a big red nose and he drank about two six packs of Ballantine’s Ale every day. Well, he come in to complain about the fluoride in the water, right? Well this Myron Skeels was a Navy veteran of World War II, they called him Rube, he was an incredible baseball player, he probably could have ended up in the majors, but he was always very quiet at the meetings, so Art sat there, this Art Hay with the red nose, about this fluoride in the water, and he went on and on, finally Rube Skeels, who was my Deputy Mayor said hold it just a minute Art, what the hell are you worried about the water, you haven’t had a drink of water in ten years, he said. It stopped everything, the guy didn’t get mad, everybody laughed, and that was the end of it. Anyway, so I went from there and I ran for Mayor again and was elected and I was later just, that’s what I retired from 8, 7 years ago as Village Manager. I was on the town council for 4 years, I was on the town planning board and all the other boards, you know, Adirondack Medical Center and the Chamber of Commerce and the Adirondack Scenic Railroad.
GW: I think Donn was on the planning board too, wasn’t he, Donn Garwood?
HR: Probably not at the same time I was, he was probably on the village planning board, by that time we’d moved out in the country and I was on the town planning board.
GW: So when did you, I know you were still working for the Enterprise, but when did you quit as editor?
HR: I quit in 1974 and I bought, there was a liquor store down across from where they build the ice palace now, where the deli is, I bought that building and the ones next to it and I had a liquor store there for a while and that’s when I went to work for the Olympic Committee. And I had…
GW: Tell us about that.
HR: Well, the strangest thing had happened, it’s never happened before or since, in 1976 Denver, Colorado was awarded the games and they backed out, it’s never happened before in Olympic history and it’s never happened since and it changed the whole process of the way the games are bid because they started, there was nobody in the wings, the environmentalists started a movement out there, they were laughing at them at first, protesting that the games had ruined their city. They weren’t laughing a year later because they forced it to a statewide referendum backed by the governor of Colorado and it was turned down, so there’s three years left, the United States Olympic Committee is totally embarrassed, there’s nobody to host the games, and Lake Placid who’d been hosting [world cup] games ever since 1932, the third games ever held, had been holding world covenants, said hey, we’ll save face for the United Sates, let us put on the 1976 games, so finally after all their bidding it was, they got to go to Lausanne, Switzerland in January 1973 to present a bid to the international Olympic Committee and I went with that committee then as a reporter and Lord Killanin who was President of the IOC at that time had met with our guys and I told him that he was related to me because we didn’t have a lot of lords in my Irish family, but the bid was over, as history knows the bid went to Innsbruck, Austria because they had held the games in ’64 so their facilities were the newest, but on the strength of that bid the press in Europe, every story was about Lake Placid because they’d loved interviewing, I always liked to tell the people, it wasn’t like Mitt Romney and that slick group from Michigan, you know, with 1,000 people on the bid team, here was a Mayor who owned a dairy farm, the postmaster, the village attorney, the Methodist minister and the guys interviewing, it was like us talking, and the headlines in New York were all about them, and the reporters couldn’t go in the bid room, we had to interview everybody out in this hallway, but when it was all over Lord Killanin come out and shook hands with all our guys and before he told them what a great job they’d done, before he walked away, he winked at them and said it would be nice to see you fellows again in 1980 in Lake Placid, so that was practically a promise. They must have met in that back room because the guys went the very next year and were awarded the 1980 games. As soon as they got them, I quit the newspaper then where I’d been for 23 years and I was made Director of the President’s staff. I got a lot of free beer, they thought it was President Carter, they didn’t realize it was the Olympic President.
GW: Did you have any meetings with Ned Harkness?
HR: Yeah, he was there much later.
GW: He was my coach in college.
HR: Oh, is that right? He went on to coach in the NHL, he coached Detroit didn’t he?
GW: Yes, and then he did Cornell, he started the hockey program at Union, but he was at RPI when I went to RPI.
HR: Oh, okay, that’s where I, well that’s a funny story and you said about making choices and not wanting to come up here for the games because they weren’t going to be any good. He called me and came over, I’d gone to the Lake Placid Club after that, that’s another story, but he asked me to go to work for ORDA, the Olympic Regional Development Authority, they were just getting started, there was only about five guys there. I went to see the owner of the Lake Placid Club and said gee, I’ve had this offer over here, but the club just got into private ownership and I said I’d kind of like to stay here. He said, oh yeah, this is going to be great, well of course he ended up in the Atlanta Penitentiary and Ned Harkness ended up with a staff of 45 where I’d been one of the head honchos, so that’s another choice I made, so I didn’t go to work there.
GW: Now you’re still doing something at the Olympic Committee, or the Olympic Center, I mean.
HR: Yeah, I do these tours, that’s all. Two or three days a week and take people through and show them the film of the hockey game cause I was at that famous hockey game and all six of my sons played hockey at one time or another.
GW: Oh, they did, okay.
HR: My youngest son ended up a soloist with Ice Capades. He wanted to try figure skating and…
GW: Now, there is a story that I’ve heard about that particular game that there was only, I forget, let’s say 3,000 seats, but for some reason the people who admitted them asked where they were from. Were they from Russia? No, you’re not allowed in. Were you from the United States, they allowed them in and it turned out there may have been close to 6,000 or something. Is any of that true?
HR: It’s so far out from really the true, there’s 8,500 seats in the arena. The protocol in the accreditation and the tickets was so closely controlled that it didn’t matter where you were from except at the end, after the place got filled. By the time the game started, I think there was close to 10,000 people in there. I looked up, I was sitting about 8 rows behind the American team, there was a commotion up by the doors, and I looked up and the New York State Police had lined up across there so they wouldn’t let one more person in. But what was happening as it got crowded, there was so many people wanting to go in, you know the cold war was on, Russia had invaded Afghanistan, and we were boycotting, that’s another thing, the games are staggered so now, all because of Denver. Rio de Janeiro already has the summer games for 2016, Russia has the winter games for 2014, all because of Denver they’re awarded so far ahead and they’re staggered, they always all held the same year, so along with the cold war we were boycotting the summer games in Moscow that same year, but what I understand was happening, our guys would go to the door and there’d be people jammed, they’d say USA?
GW: And they’d let them in.
HR: So whether they had a ticket or not they’d let them in till it was so crowded
GW: So what I said is partially true?
HR: It’s partially true.
GW: Okay. You mentioned your boys. I’d like to get a little bit of your personal life. You were married. When were you married?
HR: We were married in June of 1953 and divorced about 18 or 20 years ago.
GW: And you had children
HR: Six sons.
GW: How old? Their names?
HR: Keefe, as in O’Keefe, Kurt, Keegan, Keane and Kasey, who own the shop down on Broadway, and Kelby, who is the youngest, he lives in New York City and coaches skating.
GW: How did you embark on this naming process?
HR: I don’t know, I saw some actor’s name and my wife liked it, Keefe Murcell. There were some O’Keefe’s way back in our family some place, so we just thought Keefe, and I said they all have to spell their names, you know, because Keefe, they think it’s Keith and, you know, and Kurt’s name is Kurt Patrick, is the middle name, so sometimes he uses it that way and it come out Kurtpatrick. So then Keegan was a natural because that was my mother’s maiden name.
GW: Okay. I actually saw that somewhere and I was kind of curious, I thought I had to ask you that question, so, and the kids, do the kids still live in this area?
HR: Yeah, they’re all around here, Kelby was just up, he lives in New York City but teaches skating at [??]. They tell me the ice skating, figure skating places in the northeast, and it’s called the Ice House in Hackensack. He teaches skating there, he took some students a year ago now, or a few months ago to Switzerland to a competition and he teaches at the Mennon Rink, named for the old Mennon shave stuff, that’s in Morristown, New Jersey, so he teaches there. Keefe just retired, he had a four year degree in behavioral science and he just retired as a correctional officer and Keegan’s a salesman and Kurt who has the highest IQ of anybody doesn’t do anything, and, he said he’s in the music biz, what do you mean, well, he lays on the couch all day and listens to music, they thought he was a musician, you see. That’s the easiest way to get out of it and Keane and Kasey, Kasey sort of does construction and property care, but they own, they’ve been rock hounds since they were this big and they own this beautiful little shop on Broadway that used to be Scheefer’s Jewelry Store and they have jewelry, and they cut rocks and teach classes.
GW: And the name of the store that they own?
HR: The Twin Crystal Rock Shop.
GW: Now, you’ve been divorced for many years, I can’t imagine any other woman being interested in you, but have you developed any serious relationships?
HR: No, not lately, not in the last 17 years or so.
GW: What happened 17 years or so ago?
HR: Well, Ruth and I met.
GW: Ruth, what is Ruth’s last name.
HR: Ruth’s last name is Chasolen. I’d like for you to meet her someday. We had met early on, I was, I haven’t told you about 4 or 5 other careers I had, but I was manager of Lake Placid Real Estate after I had left as, I was the last manager of the Lake Placid Club
GW: You’re avoiding Ruth, though, but go ahead
HR: So Ruth and I had met years before when I was selling real estate, but she and her ex-husband were typical real estate lookers, you know, I had driven them around for two years looking at houses and I finally got sick of it and I told them they ought to, they were looking down in Keene and so I gave them the name of a very nice realtor down there, I said look why don’t you just go down there and meet with him and he’ll find you a place and that’s what they did, they finally went down there and they went to him and bought a place from him. Now they took very good care of me. My wife and I had moved to Keene and then sold, we had about 8 acres with a brook back of this property and, anyway I don’t know, a couple years after that, you called me one day or I called you, and she was divorced and I was just going through one and you had
GW: For the record, Ruth is here watching all this.
HR: Yes, and you hadn’t sold the house down there yet, I guess and so
GW: So, it’s only lasted 17 years?
HR: That’s all, I guess it’s 17, am I being right, I hate being on camera and it’s close enough. All right, close enough for government work, huh?
GW: And aren’t you doing some other work now with Ruth?
HR: Yes, we have a business called Monarch Interior Resources, is that right? I’m the Vice President.
GW: You’re the Vice President of a company you’re not sure of the name of. Okay. Well, this is going well.
HR: Ruth’s family has been in the furniture business forever. Her brothers still have a factory in Patterson, New Jersey, so we became manufacturers representatives of these high-end furniture companies. One’s called McKenzie Dow, it’s all cherry furniture made in West Virginia, the other one Flat Rock Furniture is all hickory, that’s made in Indiana and Kentucky and if you want to see beautiful examples of that go to the Whiteface Lodge in Lake Placid and that’s all Flat Rock Furniture in there. So, anyway we represent her family company called Samuelson, her father’s name was Sam.
  Before that, that was called IPF, I love the name of the old company, I worked there a short while, it was called IPF, was for Invincible Parlor Frames, isn’t that a cool name, her grandfather came from Russia and then her father and them made frames by hand and sold them to upholsterers, I mean that’ the way…
GW: So they just did the frames?
HR: Yeah, that’s the way it started way back till they bought property in Patterson in like 1935 and built this factory, it’s a big factory, it’s still there, that her brother runs. So, yeah, we go to Boston and
GW: You travel around now?
HR: Toronto, yeah, sometimes
GW: What do prospective buyers say when you say you’re Vice President and I don’t know the name of the company that I’m Vice President of, but I think it’s Majestic or something, what do they say to that?
HR: She doesn’t let me speak in those meetings. So after a half hour they say and what do you do, it’s I’m the driver.
GW: You’re the chauffeur.
HR: Yeah, the chauffeur. I tell them a few Irish jokes and get them loosened up a little, you know.
GW: I’ve got you. Now, I think you’re still doing columns for the Enterprise, so you still haven’t divorced yourself. What’s the name of your column there?
HR: "You Know What?"
GW: And so, we’re just joking around because I do read his columns except I forgot the name of it, but I even read your columns last week. Personally, I’ve told you this in the past, I love the Enterprise. I think it’s one of the great small newspapers in the whole country and haven’t you written a book lately about your columns?
HR: Yes, that’s the name of the book, was the name of my column, it’s You Know What. It’s just a bunch of my columns I had written, I guess 300 we figured out since I retired in 2002, eight years ago, but I started the next year writing a column for the paper. The introduction to the book is actually the first column I wrote and so we picked about half of the 300 and made it into a book and Ruth started that as my 80th birthday present in July.
GW: Maybe you could show the cover of the book, just for the camera here.
HR: Okay, well I don’t know if you can see it, but I kind of designed it.
GW: A little closer
HR: I kind of designed the cover with Don and Mike Quenell, Mike being his wife, who were in Paul Smiths, New York, and they did this part and I said gee I’d really like a montage or collage whatever it’s called of all these columns, so and that’s what that is, and we actually just got the book in hand a week ago Friday, whatever that date would be.
GW: So, it’s hot off the press.
HR: I can’t, yeah, I can’t believe
GW: Well, thank you for that complimentary copy of the book. I really appreciate that Howard.
GW: Well, we’re kind of wrapping it up. Is there anything else you want to add because we do have a time limit that we have approached. Oh yes, I forgot you’re a judge.
HR: Yes, I’m a town magistrate. I was elected three years ago, I’m in my fourth year, or I will be in January, the fourth year of a four year term and as one of my sons would tell you, people aren’t in jail because they’re smart, they’re in jail because they’re stupid. I just had a quick case I’ll tell you about, during hunting season you get a lot of DEC, Department of Environmental Conservation cases. This guy catches a guy hunting on his property so he calls the DEC officer and has him arrested for trespass. When the officer gets there, he arrests the guy who made the phone call because he had a bait pile on his property.
GW: He got fined?
HR: He got fined, yeah, he got fined $250, said duh maybe I hadn’t oughta called the police. So anyway, yeah that was the last thing.
GW: I assume you deal with these cases with your usual dour humor and you’re very serious I’m sure when you’re…
HR: I have a lot of fun when I wear my black dress depending on who’s in front of me. I do only New York State Police cases because I’m a town magistrate, so sometimes they call you at 1:00 in the morning, you have to go in, but it’s doing weddings that are a lot of fun. I do a lot of weddings, it’s much more fun than putting my Irish relatives in jail.
GW: So, you’re empowered to do weddings?
HR: Yeah, we do quite a few weddings. I don’t go after them, some of the judges just do that all the time, but when people ask me I have fun doing them and
GW: Anybody knock on your door at 3:00 in the morning and
HR: To do weddings?
GW: Yeah.
HR: No, they aren’t that anxious. But some people get married, in October somebody called and said do you do weddings, yeah, well, what do you have to do? I said well you have to have a license I think for 48 hours and you have to have a witness and you come to court, you can get married right then as long as I’m scheduled to have court and don’t have to go outside, there’s no charge for it. Remember that woman that called, I said when do you want to get married, she said as soon as possible, I didn’t say we don’t want shotguns in our courtroom, but when they come in, that was on a Monday, she come into court on Wednesday and they were an older couple, they had another couple with them, they just, they’d been going together some time and decided to get married and it was really, really very nice. Takes about 10 minutes. I said you want to think about it, takes about 10 years to get divorced, takes about 10 minutes to get married.
GW: And you’ve had experience with that.
HR: Yes
GW: Okay, well we’re going to wrap it up, we’re running out of time, so any other questions from the people in attendance here? No, okay it’s time to go. Well, thank you very much, this is one of the better interviews I’ve ever had.
HR: You’re welcome, well thank you.
GW: Actually you're in the top three at this point. I’m glad to have met you and I hope we can meet sometime again and maybe have a few Irish whiskeys together.
HR: I’m sure we can do that.
GW: Okay, very good.
HR: We can meet again, but the Irish whiskey, they cut me off about 28 years ago, so…
GW: Oh my god, you’re one of those, huh?
HR: Yeah, I’m one of those.
GW: Well, thanks for agreeing to this.
HR: You’re welcome. I enjoyed it.
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