Recently in this space we looked at “superlatives” – some of the best our region has to offer (in my humble opinion) in eclectic, unrelated fields. Continuing on that thought, here are some more superlatives, exemplaries, or just plain curious and unusuals from here in the Finger Lakes and Southern Tier.
*Best memoir: Back There Where the Past Was: A Small-Town Boyhood, by Charles Champlin. Charles was heading up the film desk at the L.A. Times (no small beat out there) when he started occasionally publishing vignettes and reminiscences of his upbringing in Hammondsport.
Well, who in Los Angeles knows from Hammondsport? But very soon readers were eagerly awaiting each new installment of his intermittent musings. When it was published in book form, Ray Bradbury wrote the foreword. And people all across America – people who’d never even heard of Hammondsport – discovered that they had a second home town.
*Best regional novel: Genesee Fever, by Carl Carmer. Once one of America’s most popular novelists, Carmer wrote about the very earliest days of white settlement, centering on the Bath-Keuka Lake area. Despite being originally from western New York, Carl Carmer perpetrated a few howlers for the sake of plot: the central character rides horseback from Bath to Jerusalem, and back, twice in one day; Charles Williamson and two comrades walk from Bath to Mount Morris in a single morning, and still have enough gumption left for a major brawl when they get there. But suspend the smirk, and it makes a terrific story.
*Best-loved observer: Arch Merrill. In the days before, during, and after World War II, Rochester reporter Arch Merrill wandered our entire region, soaking up all the stories he could find, turning them into newspaper columns and then into books. A River Ramble, The Finger Lakes, Slim Fingers Beckon, and a dozen or two more were beloved in their day – and they still are now. He collected stories, and I’ll warn you right now – a lot of them were not accurate. But they were all wonderful. Most of our libraries have a least a few of his volumes. Check the antique shops and used book stores if you’d like your own.
*Best-loved musician: A lady some years ago told me that she and her husband had been visiting Corfu, and were looking over the lovely Adriatic Sea, when a voice behind them said, “Now there’s someone from Rochester, New York.” They turned around, and it was Mitch Miller, record-company executive, conductor, composer, oboist, and leader of the Sing-Along Gang. After a cheerful conversation, she asked him how he’d known where she came from. “I recognized the accent,” said Mitch, who was born in Rochester on the Fourth of July in 1911, and died in New York City 99 years later. He got his musical education at Eastman School and University of Rochester, playing with both the Syracuse Symphony and the Rochester Philharmonic.
*Royal visitations: Future French King Louis Philippe toured our area in the days of his exile. Supposedly he did a painting, now in the Louvre collection, of the Montour Falls-Watkins Glen area.
According to Aileen Arnold McKinney, long-term Corning city councillor and secretary at the Curtiss plant during World War I, the future Duchess of Windsor was in town back in those days, accompanying her naval-officer husband. Nobody saw very much of her, because she kept very different hours from the local folks. Of course, the College of Heralds would no doubt inform us that the Duchess was NOT, in fact, royal, but we’ll take what we can get.