Monthly Archives: October 2014

A Great Time in Allegany

Leave a reply

My wife and I recently took an overnight in Allegany County. Three different county residents asked, “why would you do that?”
There is a certain level of sadness in a sparsely-settled county that some ratings name the poorest in the state outside New York City. But sometimes you miss something when you’re too close to it. We had a great visit.
After a fine sunny country drive, on which we passed through Almond and Andover, we started out at Hamilton’s in Wellsville, because we both needed a new pair of New Balance sneakers. Hamilton’s has been in business for about 75 years, and they fit you carefully. If need be, they rebuild the shoe on the spot. Since Joyce has heel spurs… and broke both ankles over an 18-month period… we wanted to make sure her new shoes fit right.
Then we puttered up Main Street to the David Howe Memorial Library. We noticed years ago that when we ordered books on inter-library loan, a high percentage of them came from Wellsville, so we enjoy our rare visits there to scope out the collection in person, and stock up on reading material. I’ve said before that the building looks as though it was airlifted in from Williamsburg, and the interior is especially lovely. There’s even a huge globe, worthy of Nero Wolfe’s office.
After ferrying our stacks of books back to the car we cruised up Route 19, passing through Scio, Belmont, Belvidere and Belfast on our way to Oramel. We didn’t see very much farm country along the way, but the forest offers other opportunities – Allegany, like Steuben, is a big county for hunting and fishing.
We spent the night at the Oramel Inn Motel, which started out in the fifties as a root-beer stand. The structure is period but meticulously maintained and cared for; the rooms are lovely, comfortable, and modern. A little earlier in the season we’d have been able to take better advantage of the friendly garden, not to mention the ice cream.
That night we ate a great meal at the Stillwater Inn – my fish and chips were outstanding, and so was Joyce’s sandwich on a hard roll. The place is clearly popular, packed with a nice friendly family clamor on Friday night. Breakfast was included with our room. Many places make the same offer, which often consists of a box of donut holes and a jug of Sunny D. Breakfast at Oramel Inn takes place in the restaurant/ice cream stand, private in the morning except for guests. You order off the menu, then it’s prepared to order and served at your table. We had French toast.
A short drive took us to Angelica where we strolled the sidewalks of Main Street to the crunching accompaniment of fallen leaves. Along the way we took in some antique shops, notably Delectable Collectables in the old garage, where I bought two old Catholic-school comic books and one on the history of rubber (honest), all of which need to be entered into the Grand Comics Database.
For lunch I had an egg and olive sandwich at the sunny Black-Eyed Susan Cafe, with its old safe still built into the dining room, while Joyce had a three-cheddar grilled cheese with tomato – all great. After that we finally headed home. Despite the surprise expressed by some of our friends, we had a great time.

Here’s some more cool stuff about Allegany County.

*Allegany is home to Houghton College, Alfred University, and Alfred State (SUNY College of Technology). That’s more institutions of higher learning than any of Steuben, Chemung, Schuyler, Yates, or Ontario Counties.
*Angelica’s Park Circle is home to five church buildings and the municipal hall.
*Allegany has 17 libraries… as many as Steuben, which has greater area and more population.
*Cuba Cheese Shop.
*Wilson Beef Farm in Canaseraga.
*Cartwright’s Maple Tree Inn – the same family tapping the trees for 160 years.
*The Finger Lakes Trail, which treks across much of the northern half of the county. I’ve been enjoying myself lately in the Bully Hill State Forest area.
*Oak Duke, outdoor writer and well worth reading.
*Craig Braack, Allegany County Historian… great speaker and unfailingly helpful.
*The late Carroll Burdick, who loved crafting miniature working carousels, many of them still whirling happily throughout our region. Keep your eye peeled… you’ll be glad you did.

Who’s the Top!?

Leave a reply

I get around a fair amount in our region, and delve into its history pretty deeply. And idly to my mind have been coming thoughts of the “best” of… well, everything. So here’s an unorganized, eclectic, and utterly idiosyncratic look at the cream that rises to the top of our jug.

*Top innovator: No disrespect to Corning Glass researchers and many others, but the palm has to go to Glenn Curtiss. Somehow blending his eighth-grade education, a hyperactive mind, a demeanor so austere it must have seemed terrifying, and explosive flamboyance in any powered vehicle, Curtiss built a breathtaking fortune from innovations in engines, airplanes, motorcycles, and travel trailers. He’s still our star in this field.

*Top entrepreneur: With a tip o’ the hat to Curtiss, various Houghtons, Joe Meade and many others, who could we name here but Tom Watson? Born and brought up in Campbell, educated there (in a one-room school that’s still standing) and in Addison, he worked hard and dreamed big, eventually betting International Business Machines on a yet-unbuilt computer. Results were generally considered satisfactory.

*Best view: It’s a tie! Mossy Bank lookout overlooking Bath, and Harris Hill lookout overlooking the Chemung Valley are both spectacular. See the seasons change, and watch the world go by.

*Best walk in the woods: The Finger Lakes, Trail, duh. What an incredible resource – right in our backyards! It runs all the way from Allegany State Park to Catskill State Park. With its various branch trails, the system is a thousand miles long. Best walk ON the main trail… between Mitchellsville Road and Pleasant Valley. Gorges, pines, a stile, Cold Brook, expansive forest flowers in season, a vineyard – what could be better?

Library superlatives
*Best selection: Steele Memorial in Elmira, the biggest library in the five-county region.
*Coolest building: Howe Library in Wellsville. It looks like it was airlifted from Williamsburg, and it’s great fun to poke around in.
*Biggest surprise: Dormann Library in Bath, with its own in-house cafe (“Chapters”).

*Best comic-book store: Heroes Your Mom Threw Out, in Elmira Heights. Honorable mention to Comics for Collectors in Ithaca, and Pulp Nouveau in Canandaigua.

*Our comic-book hero (artist): Dick Ayers, who passed away earlier this year just after his 90th birthday. Famous for inking and penciling Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Sergeant Fury, the original Ghost Rider, and many many more, he will probably be most fondly remembered for his westerns, which he often set in the rocks and ravines of Colorado, and based on the rocks and ravines of Pulteney.

*Our comic-book hero (writer): Joe Simon of Rochester, who co-created Captain America… not to mention the proposed character that eventually morphed into Spider-Man. He and Jack Kirby also generally get credit for more or less creating romance comics.

*Best hot dog with meat sauce: a geographically-convenient three-way tie between Central Hots in Elmira Heights, Jim’s Texas Hots in Corning, and Texas Cafe in Hornell. Honorable mention for Light’s in Elmira.

*Best choreographer: Bill T. Jones, who arrived as part of a migrant worker family that made its home in Wayland. Since then he’s gotten a MacArthur “Genius” Award, a Tony, six honorary doctorates, Kennedy Center Honors… and induction into the Steuben County Hall of Fame.

*Most determined fighter: Margaret Higgins Sanger, originally of Corning. After years of fighting for women and workers, Sanger was arrested in 1914 for mailing obscene material (birth control information), after which she fled the country and took an assumed name. Back in America again she was arrested in 1916 for providing birth control information. In the 1950s she raised money for the research that created the birth control pill, and died in 1966, not long after the Supreme Court finally and definitively ruled contraception legal.

Campbell Man Was Top Cop in the Big Apple

Richard E. Enright traveled a long way from the country lanes of Campbell, and a long way on the sidewalks of New York.
Born August 30, 1871, Enright left Campbell as a young man to work as a telegrapher in Elmira, and later joined the New York Police Department (in 1896). Starting out as a patrolman he plodded up the ranks, pushed up from below and held down from above. He was president of the Sergeants’ Benevolent Association, and later of the Lieutenants’ Association. He was also a popular member of the Steuben County Society of New York City… a group of successful transplants who hosted a hugely popular annual banquet in which they wined and dined themselves, visitors from back home, and big city bigwigs. Naturally, they “wined” with Steuben vintages.
His union activities repeatedly kept him out of the captain’s rank, but on January 23, 1918 he was called from his desk at his precinct to become the first man to rise through the ranks and become New York City’s police commissioner. This was no small accomplishment. One of his predecessors (William Gibbs McAdoo) had become secretary of the treasury, and another (Theodore Roosevelt, with a different title and organizational structure) was president of the United States.
The mayor hoped Enright would be more pliable than his predecessor. Reformers hoped he was a new broom sweeping clean. Both would have their disappointments.
Once on the job he attacked gambling, set up a vice squad, beefed up the missing persons bureau, hired more policewomen, improved police working conditions, and strengthened the pension fund. He organized an international conference that helped lead to the creation of Interpol. In 1921 he was one of a jolly group that accompanied Franklin D. Roosevelt on a boat trip to the Bear Mountain Boy Scout encampment — quite possibly where FDR contracted polio. On the way FDR conducted a mock trial for Enright, who brought with him a liquid that his fellow-passengers suspected might violate the Prohibition laws.
Many supporters turned on him when he got rid of some famous members of the force.  This was either a move to divest himself of some veteran who had successfully exposed city hall corruption, OR a move to get rid of 19th-century fossils and bring in new blood — depending on how you looked at it.  Enright had little success in rooting out corruption within the force. This problem only deepened as Prohibition went on, and reform groups began to call for his resignation, which he submitted effective December 30, 1925. Only one person has ever served longer as police commissioner. (Enright’s predecessor only lasted 23 days.)
Enright later published both fiction and non-fiction on police work, served as a reserve colonel on the army, worked for the National Recovery Administration, and on September 4, 1953 died as the consequence of a fall. His term as commissioner consisted of an endless drive to modernize and professionalize the New York Police Department.
Richard E Enright

Color Quest — Fall in the Finger Lakes

Leave a reply

Fall in the northeast… fall in the Finger Lakes, no less! Take it from a guy who used to live in Vermont, and loved it; our autumn colors are just as good as theirs.
It’s always hard to recommend good places for peeping at leaves, because the vista varies from day to day, even hour to hour. It even depends on how the sun is shining (or isn’t).
I’m hearing that our “peak” this year was a week or so back. But some trees are still green today! So peak even varies from tree to tree. You never know what you’re going to find, or where you’re going to find it. Some residential streets in Bath and Dansville are gorgeous just now. And one of the most spectacular displays I’ve EVER seen was on Victor Road near Fairport, right by Lollypop Farms – and that, as I recall, was mostly because of the brush, not the trees.
So what the heck, I’ll take the plunge, and suggest some places where I’ve found terrific foliage over the years.

Foliage Villages
In our region, I’ve found two villages where a stroll can deliver really memorable foliage – Hammondsport, and Honeoye Falls. In both places you can wander around on sidewalks, at your own pace, without worrying about you or somebody else being a distracted driver. Hammondsport, of course, gives you the great wall of that wooded cliff looming over town – a gigantic palette – plus the lake, and the colors of the distant shore. But Honeoye Falls also has that wonderful waterfall on the Honeoye Creek, right in the heart of the village. Both places are worth a walk.

View From a Height
At least three high places in our region offer breathtaking views regardless of season, made more magnificent in the fall.
*Mossy Bank Park, near Bath. The lookout here gives a great vista of the village right below, of miles along the Conhocton River and its surroundings to the west, and for a good distance northward to the heights that hide Keuka Lake. And once you’ve surfeited yourself at the lookout, you can walk along the trails in the park.
*Harris Hill, outside Big Flats. At the lookout here you get a great view for several miles of the Chemung River, and the Flats, plus there’s always the chance a sailplane will take off or land right over you. Then you can walk in Harris Hill Park, or in nearby Tanglewood Nature Center.
*Ontario County Park, outside Naples. The lookout at the dramatic “jump off” point gives a staggering view. Add fall colors, and it’s especially impressive. Once again, you’ve then got the park trails to pursue, including the Bristol Hills Trail.

State Parks
I’ve found three of our area state parks to be especially fruitful for fall foliage.
*Stony Brook Park, near Dansville. For some unfathomable reason this park is overlooked and underappreciated. Sometimes you’ll find a yellow wood as you make your way along the brook.
*Watkins Glen State Park in Watkins Glen. If you haven’t been for a while – what’s keeping you? I can almost guarantee you’ll experience parts of it that you’ll swear you’ve never seen before.
*Letchworth State Park, near Mount Morris. To all those fall colors add that great cleft in the earth, and the spectacular falls. What more needs to be said?Top that, Vermont.

A Walk in the Woods
I’ve had really good fall experiences in three places that stand out in my memory.
*Sanford Lake in Moss Hill State Forest, near Savona. Fall brings a lovely bleak beauty to the lake, with its few odd restless waterfowl taking suspicious wing. One trail crosses a little tributary to Mud Creek right by an old beaver dam. I’ve often got the place to myself this time of year.
*Bully Hill State Forest, near Almond. One sunny October afternoon I enjoyed a wonderful walk from Karr Road to Bully Hill Road and back, along the Finger Lakes Trail. The dry leaves crunched deliciously beneath my feet, and birds clicked and twittered along the way.
*Interloken Trail, outside Burdett. Last fall I walked this entire trail in five out-and-back stages. I walked from north to south, and so walked along with autumn. Every hike brought forth a new experience of fall.

Feed the Birds
Mendon Ponds Park, south of Pittsford can be glorious when you catch it right. Walking along a lane shadowed on both sides by long rows of maples, planted in days long gone by someone with confidence in the future, can be like walking through an explosion in the paint factory – or like walking in a stained-glass window. Bring some sunflower seeds along, and the songbirds will eat from your hand.

Any of these I’ve found to be great. But to be perfectly honest, all you’ve got to do for a great fall is to look out your window, or wander your neighborhood. Just really look, and you’re bound to be overwhelmed.