Tag: Memories

When I was a kid growing up, my mom strictly enforced a great many food quotas. Woe be to the kid who got caught violating any of them. My younger brother & I were allowed one small glass of orange juice each morning. Brown bag lunch desserts had a...

A Simple Coincidence? Or a Legendary Baseball Great’s Ghostly From Beyond the Grave Greeting? ********** October, 1920 A Baseball Legend Retires After a career spanning 14 illustrious Major League seasons, 3 National League Pennants, the 1912 Chalmers Award as the Senior Circuit’s best player, the 1915 NL batting title,...

Author’s Note: I penned the first drafts of this story as a poem in the summer of 1983, while working out of Lake Colden’s Interior Headquarters as a trail hand on the NYSDEC trail crew, during one the two summers I served as assistant to Lake Colden’s caretaker. I...

With a month long string of record breaking temperatures, low water extremes, droughtlike conditions, and a fire hazard driven state wide burn ban, as I climbed from my old friend the Saranac River’s waters after an unseasonably warm October afternoon bottle dive, I couldn’t help but wonder. Was this...

My 2025 Mission As with most of my missions, it arose from a mix of epiphany, frustration, cold calculation, determination and boredom. It was late February. With hopes and plans for winter snow’s exit and spring’s at some point arrival seeping into my brain, I suddenly realized I had...

A Deer Hunting Story If you asked five different deer hunters their primary reason for hunting, you’d likely get five different answers, each and every one of them valid. One hunter might respond, “To enjoy time outdoors.” Another will say, “Putting venison in the freezer.” A third common reason...

Whether folks call them jackknives, penknives or pocketknives, there was a time not too far past when any Adirondack Outlaw worth his salt didn’t consider himself fully dressed in the morning without one. How many folks out there still carry a pocketknife? I grew up with a knife in...

A Nostalgic Look at Some Bear Truths of Adirondack Economics As I sit here penning this story to page, the minimum wage here in New York State is $15.00 an hour. $15.00 an hour! To an old bear like me, that seems a king’s ransom. But there it is....

Could the fishing legends and stories be true? Was there really a time forgotten pocket of monster pike lurking Little Weller Pond’s waters? As far back as I can remember, since my days as a lad, whispered rumors and campfire stories have abounded. Legends of a remnant population of...

A Young Adirondack Outlaw’s Recipe for Justice Mid-seventies Saranac Lake was a magical place. It was a great time to be an Adirondack kid growing up. Kids were allowed to be kids. Cell phones and the internet had not yet been invented. Today’s crowded high peaks lakes, mountains &...