O is for Otter Lake, N.Y. Fifteenth of 26 posts in the April 2024 Blogging From #AtoZChallenge. Theme, My Life: The Prequel (in Snapshots) — adding my parents’ story to the family history mix. Please join me on the journey.
My mom Peg Laurence connected with nature in Girl Scout Camp at Caroga Lake near her Gloversville, N.Y., hometown.
However, my dad Norm Charboneau grew up in the midst of nature in Otter Lake, N.Y.
From 1929, when Dad was five years old, his parents Wm. Ray and Mary (Owen) Charboneau operated the Otter Lake Hotel, situated amid 2,000 acres of Adirondack forest.
Growing up, I always thought of the hotel as my grandparents’ business and assumed the family lived elsewhere. But when I interviewed Dad in 2003, he set the record straight.
A hotel becomes a home
According to Dad he, his parents and his four older brothers actually lived in the hotel, at least during the summer months.
“I lived on the second floor of the hotel, across from one of the shared baths,” Dad told me. “I shared a room with Fred [his next oldest brother], and there was a curved back stairway down to the hotel kitchen.
“There was a hotel chef to prepare meals,” Dad continued. “So everyone would take a plate and sit down at the long kitchen table, which was covered in oilcloth. Boarders, the help, and we kids all ate together.”
Below is a 1929 ad for the hotel, placed in the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper in NYC, which describes some of the amenities and activities offered in the bucolic forest setting. In this environment Dad learned to fish and swim, and ski — and like Mom, he also belonged to a scout troop.
Rustic winters in the cabin
Each year in October, after the last hotel guests left, Dad’s family moved into the guest cabins located behind the hotel — which were rustic indeed.
“We filled the walls with sawdust to keep out the wind,” Dad said. “There was no basement, and when the wind blew it would lift up the rugs. We got our water by filling pails from a hand pump by the hotel, and used washbowls to wash up.” Fortunately, the hotel laundry service washed their clothes year-around.
Dad remembered this time fondly — when Otter Lake would freeze so solid you could drive a car on it and the men cut ice to stock the hotel coolers in the summer. He described the process in his novel “Labor Day Mystery: A Red Flannel Yarn.”
“When the ice on [Otter Lake] reached twelve-inch thickness, the men of the town cleared snow off, and with horse drawn markers and saws, cut a pattern of cakes onto the surface,” Dad wrote. “Then they cut a hole near the shore and inserted a conveyor to carry the ice blocks to the door of the main ice house.” Each cake was packed in sawdust, layer upon layer, to be stored until needed the next summer.
Well, no wonder Dad was so rough and ready when it came to the outdoors — making sure we kids also learned to swim, ski, ice skate, and enjoy the natural environment the way he had growing up.
Up next, more about my mom in P is for Potsdam Sorority. Please stop back!
© 2024 Molly Charboneau. All rights reserved.
Sounds like a great way to grow up. Even the rugs blowing up on the floor.