Try to imagine what it was like trying to adopt a village budget during the depression. [As an aside, the Social Security Act was not passed until 1935.] That is what was facing Mayor Seaver Miller and his Board of Trustees: George Carson (later mayor), Henry Homburger, James LaPan and Grant ...

St. Bernard’s School has a prayer service led by one of the kindergarten through fifth grades each Friday to crown the week. The fifth-grade students in Mrs. Danielle Fitzgerald’s class recently focused on the school’s monthly virtue of honesty. In preparation, each student had drawn ...

Parents of infants have been asking me some colorful questions about the color and frequency of their baby’s poops or bowel movements. Well, let me see if I can flush out some information on this topic. - Most colors are OK - As it turns out, most babies produce bowel movements of ...

Something that bugs the bejammers out of me is people complaining about our winters. You know their rap: They’re sooo long. They’re sooo cold. They’re sooo snowy. Oh yeah? Listen, as far as I’m concerned, if you’re under 50, you don’t even know what a real Adirondack ...

Abraham Lincoln foresaw many problems we face in America today. Now we use terms such as “racism” instead of slavery, but the ideas are the same. His famous Lyceum speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois (Jan. 27, 1838), was titled “The Perpetuation of Our ...

It has been nearly a year since we were able to feel comfortable. Such a challenging year, and it’s not over yet! At some point in time, thoughts of “normal” seemed to fade away. The “new normal” became something to hope for, even though no one can define what that might be. Well, a ...

400,000 dead in the US from COVID. And the national rate of fatalities has been increasing. Vaccinations have started. I am in the newly eligible group of those aged 65-plus and have an appointment for the end of February in Plattsburgh. My second dose would then be the end of March. ...

In the bloody wake of an insurrection on the Capitol by hordes of armed white supremacists and naive Trump supporters, the president-elect issued the following statement on Twitter: “No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protestors yesterday that they ...

Robert Louis Stevenson, the invalid, saw a lot of doctors in his time. They were scattered about the globe. Everywhere the ailing writer went, he had to check in with medical practitioners. But in retrospect, few of them stood out as worthy of special biographical inclusion, the eminent Dr. ...

If you drove through Lake Placid parked at the High Peaks Information Center for a hike over the past weekend, the only way you’d know we were in the middle of a pandemic would be all the face masks. The Tri-Lakes region and the High Peaks seem as busy as they would be during any year ...

Let’s call this column “Reading in a time of COVID.” No, this won’t be anything like Daniel Defoe’s “A Journey of a Plague Year.” However, I will say that one of the few upsides of living through this pandemic has been the extra time I’ve had to read. I can’t go very ...

I read John Salamy’s letter in the Tupper Lake Free Press on Dec. 29. John’s letter was well written and raised some good concerns as regards the proposal here in Tupper Lake by a group of businessmen and community members. The plan comes in four phases, focus is on the first phase for ...

On the stove, a steamy pot simmers, waiting to warm you up.   It’s that time of year again. A cold winter day in the North Country is a great time to cook up some hot, steamy, flavorful soup! Make a pot in the morning, and reheat when coming in from a day of outdoor winter fun. ...

We live in an old farmhouse, and somewhere listed in our deed I’m sure to find a sentence indicating that our space will be shared with wildlife at one point or another. Wildlife can be loosely defined as any undomesticated animal, right? No, I’m not talking about my family.  I ...

Response to Thomas Jorling’s restraining order against the Adirondack Park Agency and LS Marina LLC: Lower Saranac Lake encompasses 2,285 acres with one marina and about 30 boathouses along the shoreline. Its neighbor Lake Placid encompasses 2,173 acres with three marinas, over 150 ...

A couple of weeks ago I covered what was called the biggest snowstorm ever in Saranac Lake — 3 to 4 feet in some locations in the area and temperatures dropping under 50 below in hamlets along the Canadian border. That story was carried from an early January 1925 copy of the Enterprise. I ...

A recent article (Jan. 1 by Christina Goldbaum) in the New York Times spoke to a deadly consequence of the pandemic — a significant increase in traffic deaths. When the pandemic hit New York City, cars seemed to disappear from many streets as the lockdown brought urban life to a halt and ...

Parents have been asking me some tough questions recently about their teenagers being stressed to the point they might try to hurt themselves or even try to commit suicide. This is a topic that should be stressed for all parents, so let me try to provide some helpful information. Suicide ...

Any bureaucracy’s rank-and-file workers are almost all competent, because if they’re not, they get canned. But the higher you go up the food chain — and salary scale — the more it’s clogged with pompous asses and blazing incompetents. I first learned this in the Navy watching The ...

The first medical system to care for soldiers wounded in battle was created by Dominque-Jean Larrey (1766-1842), a surgeon in Napoleon’s Grand Army. Larrey saw that men were dying of treatable wounds because there was no mechanism for retrieving them until the fighting was over. He organized ...