Charles Champlin passed away last month. If we were to make a list of those who’ve brought attention to Hammondsport in the 20th century, we’d start with Glenn Curtiss, the airplane, engine, and motorcycle man. We’d include the winemakers… Charles Fournier, Konstanin Frank, the Taylor family. And we’d mention Charles Champlin.
Charles was born locally in 1926, his mother the former Katherine Masson, whose family were winemakers for Pleasant Valley Wine Company. Most of us have seen photos of her at age 16, clad in white, christening the Curtiss flying boat America just a hundred years ago last June.
His father was Malburn “Kid” Champlin, whose family were owner-operators at Pleasant Valley. Their elopement might have been greeted with pleased indulgence locally, BUT… she was Catholic. He was Protestant. Quelle scandale!
That meant a lot more in those days than it does in this, and weighed heavily on a marriage that finally came apart – though both parties still lived locally, and their families still worked together. Charles grew up in Hammondsport, where he joined Boy Scouts, attended school both at the old academy building and at the “new” Curtiss School, played cornet in the town band, and haunted the library. He also taught himself typing, subscribed to the New Yorker, and rented a Post Office box to send out writing submissions (and, as all writers know too well, to receive them back).
What he wanted to do, even as a kid, was write, and after combat infantry service in World War II (with a purple heart) he went to work for Time-Life. Charles told me once that he lit out for southern California “as soon as I heard about it,” but actually that came in 1965, when owner Otis Chandler recruited him as entertainment editor at the L.A. Times. Needless to say, that’s a big beat out there. Charles watched about 250 movies a year for decades, reviewing about half of them, and seven years ago got his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He was one of the first critics to take note of young George Lucas and Christopher Reeve.
And now and then Times readers found in their pages fragments of memories… stories about growing up in a little town in the far-away Finger Lakes. There they read about swimming and boating, and about Saturday nights in the bandstand. They read about bicycling to Bath, to take music lessons and to see his father. They read about the neighbors who made wine, and the neighbors who made airplanes. They read about small boys hanging around a store during the Great Depression, trying to convince customers how much they’d enjoy themselves if they bought (and set off) firecrackers. They read about Charles’s older cousin Tony Doherty carrying both Charles and his younger brother Joe to safety during the catastrophic 1935 flood.
Very few Times readers had any connection with, or even any knowledge of Hammondsport. But they eagerly awaited the off-and-on stories of long ago and far away. Eventually they came together into a book, Back There Where the Past Was: A Small-Town Boyhood. Ray Bradbury himself (Ray Bradbury!) wrote the foreword. And readers across the country discovered what Angelenos had already learned – that a memoir by a man they’d never met, about a town they’d never heard of, was reading to remember. People who read it thought that maybe they had actually grown up in Hammondsport themselves.
Charles later wrote about his writing life, and about his journey with macular degeneration – what could be worse for a writer and film critic? Yet even that story, made possible by touch typing learned long ago, and by innate reservoirs of courage and confidence, shows its gleams of humor, and continuing good spirits.
I was lucky enough to know him a little, on his visits home and through occasional letters we exchanged, and he was kind enough to surprise me by sending a signed copy of My Friend, You Are Legally Blind. From time to time when I get stalled writing I ask myself, “How would Charles Champlin say this?” Then I do NOT write it as Charles would. But thinking that through helps me unlock my own voice.
One measure of his writing is the fact that people with no connection to Hammondsport are still buying Back There Where The Past Was, and reading it with joy. Ray Bradbury imagined local folks saying that Chuck Champlin “remembered more than we had all forgot.” Thanks to him we all remember, even though we weren’t even there. Thanks for remembering, Charles. Safe journey.