“Whatever else the wilds of Clear Lake in the 1880s could have provided, it was hardly a place where a 34-year old spinster might have expected to find a husband."

People have written a lot lately about the 1930s, concentrating one by one on IMPORTANT things. The Depression; the struggle over labor unions (UAW, CIO, AF of L) at a time when some 25% of employable American men were out of work. The New Deal; the veterans' Bonus March on Washington, the NRA (National Recovery Act) which failed, though its emblematic Blue Eagle sign bloomed throughout the land, even in Livingston Manor; the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) a useful FDR created device to give unemployed young men some pay for outdoor work.

Partly because they are too young to remember, partly because, as historians, they naturally emphasize continuity, modern writers rarely make a point that seems obvious to anyone alive today who actually lived in that time. Things that happened in America in the 1930s – and especially the early 1930s – didn't merely happen in another century, they happened in another country. That seems to me to be true even of Beaverkill, though the valley in many ways has changed less than almost anywhere else in the world I know.

In those days Beaverkill was very far from the world – and like the country in general, totally safe. Other differences also stir affectionate nostalgia; or emphatically do not. We were in a country with only one language, English. A country entirely without Television or the AIDS virus. Or plastic toys. (Parents of young children, think that one over!) As late as 1938 the House of Representatives voted a resolution (209 to 188) denying President Roosevelt the right to declare war unless foreign troops had actually landed on our soil. A country profoundly isolationist, largely pacifist, with a truly minuscule army. World War I was closer in time (and much closer in memory) than the 1991 Gulf War is now, often written about, especially in boys books of high adventures in the air.

Most of this 1930s vision is now packed with the not very attractive evergreens planted in NY State’s attempt to make the valley “forever wild”. Visible in the right front is the Collingwood house. See page 62. Lone Tree Hill in background. Enlargement

We had come some way from Jay Davidson's “no Hebes or consumptives,” in the original prospectus for Trout Valley Farm: but the country was anti-Semitic to a degree that no one today likes to even think of, let alone admit. Trout Valley Farm (see Vol 1) and Clear Lake Cottages, for instance, both of them very friendly, informal and charming places, were “restricted” simply as a matter of course.

Accepted morals, general culture, amusements, everyday attitudes toward work and authority could hardly have been more different than today's. Words like “Entitlement” and expressions like “I feel your pain” were simply not on the books. Millions of people went on relief, but reluctantly, feeling guilty at having to take such aid; in a fireside chat President Roosevelt warned that other countries would be watching the social experiment and urged us all not to abuse the new system.

At our toasted-marshmallow picnics around the fire at the far end of Clear Lake , grown-ups and children, pretty much from the heart, sang things like “Row, Row, Row your boat, Gently down the stream,” and “Home on the Range.” As well as an old favorite “There's a long, long trail a-winding into the land of my dreams...” That one sometimes had a twist in the lyrics because nearly everyone we knew had been in World War I. It went on: “Where the shrapnel shells aren't bursting in the star shells' gleam.” We sang a favorite new love song: “Twas on the Isle of Capri that I Found her.” Its lyrics touchingly evoked a brief, sentimental romance, abruptly broken off. Why? The last line told us: “There was a plain golden ring on her finger. Twas goodbye on the Isle of Capri.” No one then could have imagined No Fault Divorce, The Pill or the Beatles' “Why don't we do it in the road?” Let alone Eminem as a lyricist.

The League of Nations – like the UN except that after the Great War to end wars America had refused to join it – slipped into distant ignominy; Germany marched into the Rhineland unopposed in 1936.

As I remember it, such events hardly ruffled the surface of life in Beaverkill – except for the CCC which set up shop in the Campsite and planted thousands of little pines, most of them too close together. You need to imagine everyday life without dishwashers, or clothes washers or Disposalls. In fact, with no public power at all. Those power lines didn't reach Beaverkill until 1946, ten years after Lyndon Johnson had brought power to the hill country of Texas . A life virtually without earth moving machines, other than pick and shovel.

Cases in point: In the early 1930s, driving on the wrong side of the road (which he often did) my father went into a snowy ditch just above what is now Stuart Root's house; the only way of hauling him out was Frank Kinch who came with his team of horses, Barney and Blackie. The next year we needed to replace the 1200 feet of waterline to the house through the rocky woods from the spring and cistern on the hill above. The trench had to be four foot deep to prevent freezing. Two men dug it, working all summer at the going wage of 25 cents an hour. A couple of years ago a rented backhoe did the same thing – in one day.

Though there was no power line, a few families had electric lights, provided in most cases by a Delco system. Ours had to be charged at least an hour a day, the thump of its single-cylinder gas engine muffled by an exhaust/silencer sticking out of the back wall of the “old” garage. The system transformed mechanical energy into electrical energy, then stored it in large glass batteries, 24 of them, which sat in three raised rows like an audience at the opera. Only well-off farmers and a few other more or less year-round folks who could be regarded as affluent had Delco systems. Everyone else used oil lamps which, if you treat them right, are very beautiful and, compared to the small electric bulbs, give off a brilliant white light. (We had a complete set of lamps later put in service again during the war because the Delco by then was defunct.)

You learned quickly which appliances used the most power: the stand-up Philco radio (still there, stately but now forever silent at the end of the living room) took very little, a blessing, especially later when we took to tuning in on Lowell Thomas and the March of Time. But the electric iron was a killer, and therefore rarely used. Like everyone with a Delco, we were required to turn off every light every time we left a room at night, even briefly.

Radio was fairly recent in most houses. But boys did, indeed, crowd around the family set to hear “Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century.” (Courtesy of Cocomalt). Girls (my brother and I didn't know any) were supposed to listen to stories about an unctuous female named Little Orphan Annie (Courtesy of Ovaltine) with a pup named Sandy who had a one-word vocabulary: “Arf.” Everybody seemed to listen to Amos and Andy, which was in what was then known as “Negro dialect.” However, like A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, the show dealt in eternal (not racist) caricature: the Kingfish, an operator, always with a get rich scheme, Amos, busily earnest, and Andrew H. Brown, deep of voice, kind of heart, a natural target for the Kingfish's wiles. When they were revealed, Andy's disgusted line, “Ah's regusted” was affectionately echoed by us all.

The Beaverkill of the early 1930s (I came to the valley in 1926 as a six month old) is fixed in the amber of a boy's memory. It was small and beautiful – only two plus miles of stream, lake, rolling fields and woodland. Proceeding from the Roscoe end, it included Clear Lake (with rowboats, outbuildings, a croquet court and a rambling inn that served guests three meals a day), our house, then, just beyond the Glen Brook bridge, the houses of Leamon Hornbeck and Millard Vandermark (now Enger and Shea), the Church, Trout Valley Farm and golf course (both, alas, now missing, see Vol 1), the Covered Bridge, the Adams corner (as yet not dreaming of the Adams family), on up what is now called Campsite Road to the Lew Beach road, then left, about three hundred yards, just to the turn off to Elm Hollow.

Right there, starting I think in 1933 and closed in 1941, stood the Beaverkill Post Office now gone but in the 1930s new and imposing with its big glass front windows, broad flagstone steps and a Socony Vacuum wind-up gas pump emblazoned with the sign of the Flying Red Horse. There were individual, glass-fronted mail boxes inside and a proper Post Mistress, Mrs. Vernooy, but the place was presided over by her husband George. He looms in memory as a truly Dickensian figure, a huge man with a glaring eye, crippled by some wound from World War I or lingering deformation from childhood that required operations from time to time. He lurched about with a single crutch, used when he couldn't swing himself here or there by clinging to one surface or another. He lived with his wife and daughter Dorothy in the second floor quarters that were part of the Post Office building.

In addition to Socony gasoline the Vernooys sold Lollypops, chewing gum – mostly Spearmint, Juicy Fruit and Black Jack (licorice) – and Tootsie Rolls at 5 cents apiece. Also pipe tobacco. Prince Albert in a can with the prince's picture on it (already so old a joke that no kid would think of asking Mr. Vernooy to kindly let him out), and Velvet in a red can, and the favorite, Half 'n' Half, in a collapsible green can. The great advantage was that as you used the tobacco up you could squeeze the can's two ends together, making it a smaller package to stuff in a workman's pocket. Mr. Vernooy also sold corn cob pipes, and always carried one either clamped in his jaw or clamped in a mammoth paw, his whole hand making a cup around the brim so that he could pour loose tobacco in from the can without spilling any, and tamp it down with a thumb. Mrs. Vernooy was a sweet and gentle lady who used to come to the rare (auction) bridge gatherings my mother was sometimes dragooned into giving for the church.

The Post Office building marked one boundary limit for our treasure hunts – which were run on foot. The other limit (also gone though remnants still creak and sway in the wind) was the swinging footbridge across the Beaverkill beside Jim Marble's yellow house on Craig E Clair road, still yellow and until recently owned by Sue and Don Jaeckel.

This picture, taken in the early 1920s, shows the single storey, “summer bungalow” made of poured concrete which the Footes bought from Frank Smith in 1924, and then greatly expanded. Rather than break up its concrete core, they built upward and outward from it. That is why their house today still has the same concrete porch it had when it was built in 1908. It also has a lot of the original porch furniture. See photos page 145. It is notable that even as late as the 1920s the trees are so small and so few – the result of the clear cutting that went on in the 19th Century. In pictures taken from the Footes’ garage in the 1920s, you can see the whole valley. Enlargement

In her memoir Martha Stone Tobey (to whom we really owe the outside world's discovery of and subsequent protection of Clear Lake ) summed up her first 50 years in Beaverkill – 1884 to 1934 – by noting that the names of the owners change but the houses remain the same. Remarkably, that is still fairly true. The Beaverkill valley, as I reckon it, is now half a dozen houses, two operating country inns, a golf course and some cultivated fields short of what it was in the 1930s. Yet if I make the turn off the Lew Beach road, and head down toward the campsite, just at the corner I miss Wilbur Miner's unpainted board house (“forty by sixty a hundred foot square” Wilbur boasted) though Addie's house is near. But Wilbur's root cellar still peeks out like an abandoned chuck hole. Next comes Frank Kinch's house (now Larry and Anna Lise Vogel's) and Elsie Husk's – now Stuart Root's, but in the 1930s rented every summer to the Simpsons. (On each July 4th we saluted each other across the valley with volleys of rockets and roman candles.) Then Ethel and Kenneth Osborn's (now the Levys'), Fred and Grace Rogers' (now Wiser/Adams') and finally Andrew Ackerly's place (now John and Patricia Adams'). Same houses, a few considerably spruced up, but not torn down and rebuilt.

The letter above, dated 1917, explains the details of the property known as the “Catholic Lot” deeded to Frank W. Smith in October 1907 by the Rev. Archbishop John M. Farley. Enlargement

And yet, and yet. Except when driving up or down that road, or at the Covered Bridge itself, or right in front of the Church, visual memories fixed for good in the early 1930s take hold and I can hardly recognize the place. Shameful observation: my Beaverkill has been all but obliterated by trees! And reflection on photosynthesis, and the ozone usefulness of beech, cherry and maple, or even on the fact that a lot of it might have become a trailer park does not soften the sense of loss as much as it should.

Explanatory anecdote in my defense. In 1937 I was eleven. We had lived in our house pretty much year round for more than a decade. That year, with the help of detailed plans, a single edge razor, a lot of Duco cement and sliced fingertips, I had built a flying scale model of a French Nieuport biplane with a 24-inch wingspan. Along with France 's SPAD, Richtofen's blood-red Fokker Triplane and Britain 's Sopwith Camel, the Nieuport was a favorite World War I plane among air struck boys. With its rubber band motor wound up just tight enough not to snap and shred its fragile fuselage from the inside, this one flew pretty well. My much older and smarter brother Pete (John Taintor Foote Jr.) and our friend Jimmie Crump convinced me to glue a 3-inch salute (small firecracker then easy to obtain) to its undercarriage, wind up the propeller, light the fuse and launch the plane from the apex of our roof. Late one day, teetering there above the garden and lawn, I did that.

Aerial view of Clear Lake circa 1965. Looking west, in the foreground one can see the Foote property; in the middle of the picture, the roof of the Clear Lake main house; and towards the upper right, the roof of what was Hartwell cottage. See the map on page 151. Enlargement

The Nieuport chugged away for about twenty feet, then banked right, parallel to our driveway. The lit firecracker fuse left a satisfying trail of sparks. Most satisfying of all, in the blast that came when the 3-inch salute went off, the whole plane, made of Japanese paper, dope, banana oil and balsa wood strips, vanished in a ball of flame. Moment of awed silence. Bits of paper sifting toward the lawn.

This picture was taken in the late summer of 1926 at a beautiful rented house on a trout stream in Wales. From left to right: me as baby, a bit less than six months old, Jessica Foote, John Taintor Foote with my brother, Peter Foote (actually John Taintor Foote, Jr.) age four plus, standing in front of him. Enlargement

In that silence, still atop the roof, I looked out over the whole valley, green, yellow and gold in the slanting sunlight of late afternoon. I could see Mr. Kinch's white house and the dusty road leading down past it. I could see the river and the Golf Links Pool and a good bit of the golf links, and Fred Banks's big barn and the top of Trout Valley Farm Inn surrounded by maples and the beautiful curve of the Banks' broad hay fields, swooping up from the barn to the stately line of hard maples along the Manor Road that Fred used for syrup. (In winter we would be driven up there and ski the whole way down to the inn. Skis without bindings; you could not turn, you just slammed the toe of your hunting boot into a strap and tried not to fall down.)

What lay before me on that memorably destructive day was a peaceful, picture-perfect rural valley. A landscape where as some poet or other has doubtless more elegantly put it, the hand of man had improved on the hand of nature just enough. All there, removed from time. Ready for a John Constable to paint.

Back then, even from our porch 20 feet lower than the roof ridge, you could see a good deal of it. A slice of silver river, most of “Lone Tree Hill” (to the north, across the Beaverkill and up behind Liz Hamerstrom's house) so named because it had only a single tree; the rest served as Frank Kinch's spare pastureland. Today Lone Tree Hill is a forest. You'd never believe I was once driven up to the top of it backwards, in a Ford Tin Lizzie. The road was so steep that the only way a Model T Ford had a low enough gear ratio to make it was backwards. Today, even from the apex of our roof, all you see is trees. The near ones belong to me, to be sure. But even from a hundred feet up, or from a plane, most of that 1930s vision is now packed with the not very attractive evergreens planted by NY State's attempt to make the valley “forever wild.”

This must be about 1934. I am standing and Kerr Collingwood, of the Trout Valley Farm Collingwoods, is rowing our St Lawrence skiff. Kerr was older, an acquaintance of my brother’s. We are going past a bunch of Miss Tobey’s rowboats, the contrast showing off the fine lines of our skiff! We did a lot of happy messing about in boats on Clear Lake. The sail in the background is our red sailing canoe, also shown on page 112. The spars, sail and rigging still sit in one of our closets; the canoe still hangs in the garage. Enlargement

In the early 1930s mixed farming could still provide a living, especially in the hands of a small dynamo like Mr. Kinch. We bought “raw” milk from him direct in bottles that came a third full of “top of the bottle” cream, though most of the valley's raw milk went into huge cans left at a platform across from Miners', to be picked up for daily delivery to a creamery in Livingston Manor. People also made a living in the woods. (A few still do). But the local economy already depended a lot on boarding houses, the presence of summer renters like the Simpsons, plus a sprinkling of folks like my parents with more or less money who owned year-round houses up and down the Beaverkill. My father's friend Lou Borden – the first house across the bridge on the Beach Hill Road , later bought by Jack Juhring – the Knapps, Mrs. Marks, the Willichs. And an assortment of trout clubs, most notably the Beaverkill Trout Club on the road to Lew Beach , the Iroquois, opposite the Marbles' house, and the famous Brooklyn Fly Fishers beyond the Hardenberghs' (now the Campbells') on the road to Roscoe. That last club famous, to me anyway, for member John E. Woodruff's tall stories and consumption of applejack. (He was my father's friend, the creator of the Woodruff, a spentwing fly, and he kindly gave me my first axe.).

As a small boy I did not know of anyone who actually lived in the valley who had to “go on relief.” But if you did have to go on relief, in those days the place to go locally was Livingston Manor and the store used for it was a grain dealer named Johnson & Johnson, in a substantial building where The Manor Maid now perches. Besides the owners' names, its facade bore a subhead: General Merchandise, Flour, Feed and Grain. The first letters of these words were capital letters, and done in a different color. Over time all the caps had washed away, leaving eneral erchandise, lour, eed and rain , a change that struck my brother and me as totally hilarious. It was apparently no joke though, to those who did line up there. A friend my age who lives on the DeBruce Road remembers that his father applied for relief there at the appointed time and came away so ashamed and humiliated that he never went back even though the family had a hard time putting food on the table.

The author at age 14 or 15 with the legendary 1928 La Salle Convertible. It had a little door in its left rear side so the rumble seat space could be loaded and unloaded. During sudden rainstorms with rumble seat closed, if the front seats were filled by grown-ups or elder brothers, a small boy could crawl in there and ride, cramped but dry, This picture was taken during World War II because the windshield carries an A stamp, the one that allowed drivers an absolute minimum of gas. The La Salle got 7 miles to the gallon! The gorgeous, graceful figurehead-like radiator cap was not for a La Salle but for a Cadillac; Mrs. Foote had it specially ordered. Enlargement

My father was a writer and well off. In 1924 my parents bought a one-storey poured-concrete house and 155 acres. The next year they went to England taking with them a small son and some hope the trip would mend a shaky marriage. My mother loved England and I, at least, have to applaud their trip; in any case they came back with two sons. And with a house to expand into a two-storey place that looks like a cross between an English country place and an Adirondack club (they designed it themselves and furnished it at auction sales in New York) they managed to make the marriage last more or less until about 1933. Even after my father went to Hollywood for good in 1936, they stayed married de jure until his death in 1950. Divorce was not easy in those days, especially in New York .

From Hollywood my father continued for a long time to provide cars (a Ford V-8 joined my mother's famous La Salle ) and everything else. He left behind some flyrods and some of his 17 rifles and shotguns. Prices were different, as everyone knows, but the mix and match of figures then and now is sometimes illuminating. A brand new bolt-action single-shot Mossberg .22 rifle cost $4.95. My brother, who was a crack-shot from the start, had one, but dropped it over the side of our Chinese red canoe because he was keeping his eye on a duck. A Ford V-8 in 1935 cost about $570; World War I veterans who had at least been promised something like a $600 bonus, could take a new Ford instead. The biggest car dealer for miles around was Bob Ainsley's Ford, in the large, long-empty, yellow brick building opposite and just beyond the Post Office on the way into Roscoe. Ford dealer mechanics wore matching khaki shirts and black celluloid bow ties back then, perhaps because it suggested military precision.

Ainsley's repair men were well thought of. Yet the universal genius of auto repair in those days was Cliff Stewart, a man often covered in grease but with a mad diagnostic gleam in his eye as he listened intently to the sound of ailing engines. Cars were hauled for treatment into a big bay in his Lew Beach garage, just this side of Shin Creek. Thanks to Larry Rockefeller, the building looks much as it did in the 1930s, though it is now a store, presided over by Florence Good. Modern customers who would like to listen for the ghostly vibrations of jalopies long-past should stand quietly where Rockefeller now markets top of the line Patagonia gear.

In Beaverkill my parents had hired help, as well as a remarkable man named Leamon Hornbeck who worked for my father for years and might be called a caretaker except that he was also a friend who hunted (partridge, woodcock)`with my Dad, and fly fished with him too. He became the nearest thing to a hands on father that I knew. It was Mr. Hornbeck who really taught me to throw a fly and blaze away with my single shot, full choke 28 ga. shotgun at departing partridge (always in vain) or, with somewhat better results at rabbits rousted into flight by his big hound Don. When we dug potatoes together in the vegetable garden down where our drive meets the Craig E Clair Road, he also introduced me to a rare rural sport: with your jackknife you cut a straight, stiff but just bendy enough, young maple branch, sharpen its tip just where a smaller branch splits off, until you have two pointy prongs at the tip. Impale a tiny spud firmly on this forked tip and snap, as if cracking a whip. The potato flies off at whistling speed, seemingly headed for the next county.

Well-off or not, everyone had to do things differently in those days. Mostly by hand. Chain saws did not exist, or if they did nobody in Beaverkill had one. My mother kept me out of school for years but was an ace teacher. Not being trapped in the schoolhouse gives you a lot of time to fish, plink around in the woods for squirrels and crows with a .22, read, make plane models, or be lonely. Lots of that, except on long holidays when my brother was back from boarding school.

I was always a sucker to work. From fairly early on I got to help (at first by watching) at whatever needed doing outdoors. Like the cutting of ice. Most people bought their ice from Perry De Witt, who had a big ice house on the road to Deckertown. But we cut it on Clear Lake with a huge saw, then hauled the blocks home on sledges with a team of horses, to be stored in our own ice house, layer by layer, with plenty of snow and sawdust in between. Later I became an expert on how to unload a block 12” by 20” by 12” onto a wheelbarrow with tongs, bring it to the house, wash off the sawdust, cut the blocks in two with an ice pick and then hoist both halves into the top of our ice box. (One wall of the area way outside the kitchen still is full of ice pick holes, because we “hung up” the pick by driving its tip into the wood.) By fall, even in the cool, shadowy ice house, the 12x20x12s had melted to about 4x16x10, but they always lasted till cold weather set in.

Mr. Hornbeck also taught me how to cut down trees at the other end of a two-man saw. You first notched the chosen tree with an axe to direct its fall. Once the sawing was over and the tree had crashed to earth, you trimmed it out with a double-bitted axe, one blade kept as sharp as it could be, the other dull, to use when in danger of grubbing the blade in earth or against a rock. You started at the butt of the felled tree and moved toward its top, trying to slice each branch off near the bole with one stroke

Felled and trimmed, the trees were chained together at the butts, three or four at a time, and snaked out of the woods, yes, by Frank Kinch's Blackie and Barney. Barney was white and old – about 18 in those years – and wise. Blackie was young, enormous, tremendously strong, and a simpleton. When their feedbags were put on, between bites Blackie would give out with huge snuffles, sending a cloud of oats skyward, and losing much of his lunch.

Back of the garage the trees were sawed up, split and stored in a long wood house, now, like the ice house, gone but not forgotten. Though there was a coal furnace for the dead of winter, the wood fed three fireplaces and often the kitchen stove (a Glenwood), which also could burn fine chunks of coal. Serious heat for the house came from the basement furnace, with a steam radiator system that creaked, groaned, hiccupped and hissed as pressure slowly built. For auxiliary heat, especially for heating bathrooms in winter, everyone used stand-up kerosene heaters which gave off a distinctive hot smell (I didn't run into that smell again until 1955 when I was doing a story for LIFE in Israel). Through their tops such heaters cast a circular, Swiss-cheese like pattern on the ceiling.

There was one crank-up wall telephone on a four-party line. Our call was one long and two shorts. People sometimes listened in clandestinely – a source of much amusement in later movie scenes but irritating to my mother. In those days she could, and did, order groceries by phone each day after long consultations with Wesley Sipple, who ran the main grocery store in Roscoe. Purchases were then delivered the 7 miles up here each day in Sipple's panel truck. (Mr. Sipple, and anyone at his checkout counter in those days, could jot down rows of figures with a pencil and add them up with lightning speed, a skill no longer imparted even to high school graduates.)

My recollection is that the other main grocery store, the Victory in Livingston Manor, derided as being a “chain” store (and thus a wave of the threatening future) would not deliver. The Manor, though, had Mr. Fontana's fruit and vegetable store, just beside the new movie theater, where I became infamous at five or six for yelling “Don't do it!” out loud to Jim Hawkins (Jackie Cooper) who was about to give up his pistol to Long John Silver (Wallace Beery). The Manor also boasted Allen's Hardware (in the same building where a hardware store is still located). And, after 1933, near where Dick Sturdevant's Electric Shop (now Hamish & Henry) stood, there was a bar called Art's Blue Room, a mysterious shadowy place I never got to go into.

Doctors still came to patients. (The last time one did this for my family was about 1960 down in Rockland County . He was a young Swiss trying to establish himself and was soon absorbed into the small local “medical center” – i.e. a nest of doctors who could not be stirred abroad for anything short of Doomsday.) The main doctor in these parts was Dr. Bourke. He had a comfortable Dutch colonial house with what looks like a cobblestone flying buttress, still there in Livingston Manor on Dubois Street just past what used to be the railroad tracks. There was no penicillin. If you got an infection you could lose an appendage; my brother almost did get separated from a big toe after getting barefoot into rusty barbed wire. I got a strep throat. Fever raged but there was nothing Bourke could do. Kids and grown-ups died regularly of pneumonia. Polio scared everyone but seemed confined to the cities.

Cars, ours anyway, were used sparingly. You always made sure that there was enough water in the radiator, checked the oil and tire pressure, and before setting out looked at the level of distilled water in the batteries. We didn't buy distilled water; a pure enough equivalent was obtained by putting a big porcelain bowl out on the lawn during a rainstorm. Once collected, it was administered by a clean, non-metallic syringe of the kind used to baste turkeys.

New York , rarely attempted, was more than five hours of exasperated driving away down Route 17. In winter this involved lap robes (cars had no heaters) and often hip flasks. Winter and summer, rain or shine, direction signals were given to the cars behind by sticking your arm out the window. Along route 17, a bus stop and a place of refreshment called The Red Apple Rest lured travelers (it only recently closed). We eschewed it; most often the trip was broken by a bespoke meal at the Mitchell Inn in Middletown , which was full of clocks and portraits of famous trotters who ran at nearby Goshen . Or, until a few years after WW II, you could take the Ontario & Western which stopped in Livingston Manor just beyond Charlie Fuhrer's pharmacy, now alas gone like Charlie himself. His pharmacy sat on the left, a little way past the traffic light and the bridge and bit beyond the Laundromat. No house or office has yet replaced it. Behind his slightly raised stretch of sidewalk where passengers for trains (and later buses) used to collect there is only grass. The O & W left you at Weehawken , N.J. where you got the ferry across the Hudson to Manhattan .

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The land my parents bought in 1924 began in the middle of the Beaverkill river and extended in a straight line through the eastern tip of Clear Lake , thence straight to the top of the hemlock-clad mountain that plunges down into the lake, forming one shore. The mountain gives a great echo from the near side and is officially called Mt. McGuckin , though I rarely heard anyone refer to it as that. The steep angle of its fall is thought to be the reason why the lake, fed by dozens of icy springs, is 60 feet deep in places.

Old Mrs. Tobey had a giant influence on the history of Beaverkill. Enlargement

In 1924 all of the mountain and the lake and the land between it and the river, belonged to “Old Mrs. Tobey,” a tiny woman, but one who, like Jay Davidson, had a giant influence on the history of Beaverkill. Born Martha Stone in Elmira , N.Y. in 1850, and a proud Daughter of the American Revolution, she came to Beaverkill in 1884. Whatever else the wilds of Clear Lake in the 1880s could have provided, it was hardly a place where a 34-year old spinster might have expected to find a husband. A romantic novelist might speculate that she came to hide herself alone in the wilderness and brood upon some great, lost love. But she seems to have had practical vision and cash, enough of both almost to match Jay Davidson as an entrepreneur.

Laurel Lodge in 1911, purchased by the Footes in 1924 Enlargement

Quickly she bought the 200 or so acres described above, built a tiny house and lived there alone, planting a small garden and acquiring some chickens. Within five years, still Martha Stone, she had made a start at what evolved into “Clear Lake Cottages.” She became known as “Old Mrs. Tobey,” not only by getting married and living so long, but from the practical need later on to distinguish her from “Miss Tobey” – there being no convenient “Ms” in those days to blur such distinctions. Miss Tobey was Marian Tobey, her formidable niece, to whom, in 1928 Martha turned over the running and ownership of Clear Lake Cottages. This transfer of management was the occasion for an illustrated brochure (pages 56-60) that somewhat floridly describes the tranquility and charm of the place as it was, and would remain all during the 1930s – and remains for me, indelible and happy, as a boyhood memory.

A look at the brochure's text and pictures, combined with a glance at the 1930s map reproduced on page 61, makes clear that its buildings were strung out East to West alongside Clear Lake from one end to the other. They all sat beside the old road to Roscoe (when Martha Stone came the only road to Roscoe) which then began at what is now our driveway, continued past the lake, then slanted down to the future site of Jim Marble's yellow house on the present Roscoe road. As the brochure notes “There is no traffic through the estate.” In the early 1900s when the road was relocated along the river's edge by a lengthy cut into the steep bank, the old section fell into disuse, except for hikes and skiing. Unfortunately, the new section, known locally as the Dugway, has been prone to yearly mud and stone slides ever since. 

The actual “cottages” were few, some owned outright, some rented. For me the most memorable one, built at the extreme western end of the lake beside the overflow outlet that flows (a spring torrent, a summer trickle) down to the Beaverkill, was a little brown wren of a place belonging to Miss Julie Farrar. After the war it was torn down by Jane Lott Hollister, to make room for a larger, squarer more practical dwelling, though it still has Miss Farrar's pond and arched stone bridge over the overflow stream. My mother and I used to play Billy Goat Gruff on and under that bridge. “WHO'S THAT TRAMPING ON MY BRIDGE!” GROWLED THE TROLL.

Kate Haney had a cottage where the Shaws' little house now stands, and around 1937 Marian Tobey let Mary and Ralph Hartwell put up a modest summer place (now owned by Bury). But the heart of Clear Lake Cottages began with Grove Cottage, not a cottage at all but a big three-storey, multi-room box with peaked roof and surrounding, rocking-chair studded porches, only a few hundred feet through the woods from our house. From it a neatly kept gravel path led past a rough and ready dirt croquet court to the Main House, also three storeys, a rambling, comfortable cross between inn and a country boarding house, flanked by huge pines. It was big and white, with broad porches overlooking the lake, plus a large dining room where three meals a day were served. Occasionally we lunched there. As one who actually enjoyed the food in the US Navy (1944-1946) I'm not qualified to judge. But I remember that the young waitresses were pretty and the butter was served in elegant round balls which I knew took time to prepare.

Just behind the Main House was Old Mrs. Tobey's original cottage, eventually used by the inn's cook, as well as a tiny, peak roofed coal shed, and across the road a big rust-red hen house with ramps for the hens to reach a series of wooden boxes full of straw where they obligingly provided the “fresh eggs” the brochure boasts of. The only writer I know who begins to convey the nostalgic power of a boyhood spent on a mountain lake is E.B. White in the chapter of “One Man's Meat” called “Once More to the Lake.” But when White returns to the lake with his own small son, he blessedly finds the place the same. Not so with Clear Lake Cottages . Grove Cottage was torn down, years later replaced by a smaller private house now belonging to Ed and Sally Cerny. Where the Main House stood there is only grass, still marked by those big pine trees.

Like the people who have lived in Beaverkill for decades but – as Bill Sharpless and I were shocked to discover – have no idea that an inn and a golf course once lay between the church and the campsite, friends who walk around Clear Lake with me now can hardly believe that the Main House existed. Or that the scraggly patch of hemlocks, in the flat space just at the corner where the road comes up to Clear Lake from the main road (passing what is now the Smyth house but in the 1930s belonged to Rachel Syms), was once a rough and ready grassless croquet court. On that court you were allowed to blast an opponent's ball practically out of the county. About 1938 I was playing in a large contentious game when it began to get dark. Guests brought their cars around to park in the road with headlights directed at the court so we could finish.

Ingenious Mrs. Tobey had a one-stroke gas powered pump installed at a virtually inexhaustible spring on the far side of the lake. Daily it pumped water 200 or more feet up to a big cedar-stave cistern located high enough on the side of the mountain so that, through a pipe that ran down and across the lake bottom and uphill to the houses, it provided gravity-fed water to the whole establishment. Down where the Cernys now keep their boats was a big dock with a diving board and a raft supported on four oil drums and anchored a hundred feet offshore, to which you swam (if you could) to haul out, stop shivering and sometimes look down into the depths of the lake and see a trout snap up a passing leech. (In 1930 my father stocked the lake with 500 yearling rainbows, soon depleted by local folk fishing with worms at night; the leeches still thrive).

Looking at the brochure after years of forgetting that it existed at all, I see that the woman and the little boy supposed to be casually strolling into the pictures from time to time are my mother and my brother Pete, then age seven. She was one of 16 social references listed in the brochure by Clear Lake Cottages, and a friend of Marian Tobey, but for Pete sashaying around having his picture “took” with his mother was clearly a chore. He lags behind as they take the path to Grove Cottage from the Main House, is dutifully beside her heading down the path from Grove Cottage to what is now the Cernys' beach, and looks grim by the diving board – which has its support frame up but has yet to be put in place for the summer.

That dock and the diving board – which looks rickety though was perfectly effective – were one center of life in the 1930s. Somehow it never seemed crowded, though guests used it and assorted Beaverkill friends of Miss Tobey. My mother often came with an elegant small parasol or a big garden party hat. Of the others I remember only a few now: My hero Tom Benedict, then a teenager who kept a grey canoe on the lake – the only other canoe besides our Chinese red Old Town which, still hanging in our garage, has waited half a century for some wooden boat zealot to refurbish it. Tom later gave up a bright career in New York to live and work near Beaverkill and, with Davis Hamerstrom, form a successful architectural firm here. Tom's red haired sister Barbara, already an actress, came now and then, and usually talked theater with my mother. Grace Van Nalts sometimes came, less often than her father the Rev. Mr. Derby, who when he swam slapped the water smartly with open palms, and Grace's mother who, like many ladies then, never ventured into the water without first delicately dabbing a few drops on the back of their necks to ease the shock.

Another delicate dabber was Alice Miller Crump, a fine portrait painter in the difficult medium of water colors. She was married to Leslie Crump who did many oils of the lake at sunset, and was the author of a remarkable little book called Directing for the Amateur Stage . The Crumps (brothers Leslie and Irving – he was the editor of Boy's Life Magazine) in fact took over Grove Cottage with their families each summer. Our house faces the valley one way, Clear Lake the other. We had guests from both places. But curiously enough, the lake and the golf course people rarely mixed, or knew one another. Perhaps because golf is a busy sport and, as the brochure insists, Clear Lake was dedicated to tranquility.

The people with whom we played games (the kind played in the early 1930s) were most often from the Lake , and most often the Crumps. Attesting to the new power of advertising, one of them was “Slogans” (also called “Standard Brands”). You sent someone out of the room, picked a slogan, assigned one of its words at random to each of the seated guests, let the banished person return to ask random, conversational (sometimes personal and titillating) questions of each one. The job of the seated guests was to reply in a way that sounded normal, but somehow “bury” their assigned word in distracting, informal verbiage. Their ingenuity often made it fun, though most of the slogans became so familiar that the game ended swiftly: “Not a cough in a carload” – Old Gold cigarettes; “I'd Walk a Mile for a Camel.” It was hard to use “carload” and “camel” casually. “Ask the man who owns one” – slogan of the now gone Packard (though might have been Buick) was easier, but casually working the word “drop” into your answer could be hard, depending on the question. “Good to the last drop” was the slogan of a coffee I no longer recall. Maybe Maxwell House. Around that time the coffee that was more or less coming in the windows was Chase & Sanborn, because it sponsored beloved Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy. Advertisers in the flossy magazines my parents subscribed to were then trying to convince women that smoking cigarettes (even in public!) was both sexy and elegant and a sign of freedom, especially if you used one of those long, sophisticated holders that FDR wielded with such savoir faire at his press conferences.

A postcard made from a moody shot of Clear Lake Cottages’ Main House from across the lake shows multiple chimneys which gives an idea of its size. The leaves are gone from trees so it is either very early spring or late, late fall. This is an unusual picture, since the brochure clearly states that the season stopped on October 15th. Enlargement

Miss Tobey had a half dozen well built, flat-bottomed wooden rowboats kept in slips so guests could walk out alongside a boat and climb in. There were only two other rowboats on the lake – Miss Farrar's and our very old but elegant Saint Lawrence skiff, kept beside our dock which then extended into the lake in an L shape, with a bench facing shore. I early learned to fish for pickerel by dragging a big plug 60 feet behind the skiff and rowing around the lake just out far enough to skip the tips of the ancient logs that stuck out from shore, where pickerel lurked. Pickerel are covered with goo, full of bones and not full of much fight after a spectacular strike, as well as ghastly to unhook.

Leslie Crump, in return for my rowing him slowly around the lake, showed me how to fish for them with a flyrod, bucktail and spinner. I was soon happier to watch him fish than to try myself – I was good at slow rowing but not at casting while sitting down in the back of a rowboat. Besides, he was a great raconteur and sometimes would even talk about the war that fascinated me and every boy I knew, but was rarely allowed to be subject for general conversation. He had been a second lieutenant of infantry at Belleau Wood . With regret and in a low key, he once described the standard method of what was known as “mopping up” after an enemy trench had been taken. You got out a hand grenade and shouted down into each dug out: “Come out. Hands Up. I'm throwing this down at the count of five.” He described the need of putting a .45 to the head of a soldier still cowering in the mud after an “over the top” attack, not yelling, as was the case in war movies, but as calmly and quietly as the noise of battle permitted, saying “Son, I've got to use this if you don't come.”

It was Mr. Crump, too, though he himself smoked now and then, especially when we went bass fishing in the East Branch of the Delaware (now 50 feet or so under the Pepacton Reservoir), who one day did me an enormous favor. “Tim,” he said. “Go into the house and get a clean handkerchief.” I did that. He got out a cigarette, lit it, held the clean white handkerchief in front of his mouth and exhaled. There was a rich dark brown spot on it. “Every time you inhale,” he said, “ that goes right on the surface of your lungs.”

The 1928 brochure notes that the season ran from May to mid-October. Thereafter Clear Lake and the lands around it were ours for hunting or, later, skating (and cutting ice). Often in real winter, when the air was still, the ice was glassy smooth and even a sift of light dry snow could be skated through – or brushed away with brooms in erratic patterns usable for skating. For months we saved up all the cartons and boxes that came to the house, and after Christmas made a huge pile out on the snowy ice not far from our end of the lake, and lit it. The fire crackled and the flames danced light high against the overhanging hemlock branches. Pete and I would skirmish with snowballs, ducking this way and that, and firing at each other through the shifting flames.

This is a memoir, mostly of childhood in the 1930s. But it seems to need some accounting of how and why Old Mrs. Tobey's Main House and Grove Cottage later were subtracted from the world. In one sense the reason was World War II, and the changes it brought to family life and ease of travel, that made Clear Lake Cottages, like Trout Valley Farm, no longer financially viable. In 1945 Miss Tobey was looking for a buyer for the place. The one she found was James Marble (that yellow house on the road to Roscoe again), an executive of the Minwax Corporation and a mainstay of the Iroquois Fly Fishing Club. Whether he had in mind something like the Clear Lake Corporation I do not know. But he soon went about blocking off the road past our house with a chain where our line met his. Tore down some of the buildings and had workmen pile loads of shingles and debris in our dock area to cut us off from use of the lake. That was in 1950. We told him we'd just clear it out, and I did that.

Mr. Marble then died. His son was not interested in his project, even disapproved of it.

The land and lake were on the market for some years. No takers, a thing hard to imagine now! Eventually word got around that the state might be going to buy it, and turn Clear Lake into an extension of the Campsite. To prevent that, a group including the Lotts, the Shaws, Russell Hodge and his wife Alice, the Simmons, Mr. Brush and others bought it, and formed the Clear Lake Corporation. Whatever the long range implications of their private agreement may be, for decades now the immediate effect has been to keep lake and land wild, private and uncluttered. And there, so far happily, the matter stands.

Old Mrs. Tobey lived until 1940. Like everyone in the valley I went to her funeral in the Methodist Church . As a very small boy in the early 1930s, I used to visit her with my mother. She once told us a story about what it was like being a woman living alone in the woods that I've never forgotten, partly because it involves a revolver, a short-barrel weapon I've never been able to hit the broad side of a barn with.

In the very early days, she said, she used to sit on the porch of her little cottage, to write letters “and keep an eye on the chickens,” fenced in beside the garden. She kept a .22 revolver on the desk, mostly as a noise maker to scare off hawks and woodchucks if need be, but she admitted she was a bit afraid of it and had never yet managed to hit anything.

One day as she sat there writing a man approached, and, standing “too close” beside the porch, asked if she needed any work done. No, she replied. She conveyed to us that he was bearded and unkempt and very rough of speech. And that, unimpressed by her repeated rebuffs, he kept on pestering her to let him cut some wood or weed the garden or kill a chicken for her. Soon she was scared, she told us. And not knowing any other way how to discourage him she simply picked up the revolver and fired away – in the direction of the chickens. To her great relief – and total astonishment – a chicken dropped in its tracks, shot clean through the neck! I can still remember the triumph and pleasure in her voice as she told us “The fellow ran off – and never appeared again.” Soon after that she got married to a tall farmer named William S. Tobey.

Eventually they moved down to a house on the flat by the Beaverkill, just to the left of the driveway that leads to Steve and Maureen Lott's place. After she died, a fly-fisherman named Henry Warren bought it and left it to his son Richard. It seems particularly appropriate to me, though, that of those she built, the only structures still there are the hen house, the tiny peak-topped coal shed and Martha Stone's 130-year-old cottage, rented for years now to Robert Giegengack, and by now, surely, some kind of historic monument.

Footnote about John Clum

John Clum (1883-1947) lived in Beaverkill and /or Lew Beach from 1901 until his death. His obituary, in the Walton Reporter (reprinted in Beaverkill Valley, a Journey Though Time, eds. Joan Powell and Irene Barnhart, Lew Beach, 1999) describes him as “one of the best known men in Beaverkill”. His career can be sporadically traced through the Powell & Barnhart book, starting when he went to work for Jay Davidson in 1901 at Trout Valley Farm, where he mowed the fairways and drove the stage and horses to take guests to and from the Livingston Manor railroad stop of the O & W line. Clum later drove the mail stage from the Manor to Turnwood and eventually became the caretaker and much loved de facto manager of the Beaverkill Trout Club. He owned and bred dogs, dabbled in real estate, was a noted hunter and storyteller, who would pause to heighten the suspense at dramatic moments, punctuating his narrative by emitting a quick jet of tobacco juice.