AT LEFT: “George A. Woods, a former Lake Placid resident and mow Children’s Editor of the New York Times Book Review, has written his first novel. ‘Vibrations’ (Harper and Row Junior Books, $3.95) is the story of a 17-year-old small town boy and the pains of growing up. Mr. Woods is the son of the late George Woods, Sr., who once owned the Mirror News Room in the Lake Placid Hardware building. He was graduated from the Lake Placid High School and from Fordham College with a degree in journalism. He has been a Times Editor since 1963. Mr. Woods lives in New Jersey at present, with his wife, Nancy and their children.” (Photo provided)

Yes, yes, history it is — even when I am forced by my own lackadaisical approach to any journalistic rules of order, I am backing into a story because I always have trouble getting down the lead paragraph.

So here I am, and don’t stop me if you have heard this before, I want to hear it again.

I am reading the Lake Placid News of Nov. 24, 1970, 53 years ago. Ellen George was the News editor. She had started as a reporter for the Enterprise when I was editor of that wonderful daily newspaper where I began my 23-year newspaper career in 1949. Her stories were very long, detailed and accurate in every sense; and honest to god, I remember saying to her, “you should be a lawyer.”

Jump ahead a few years and I am on the phone with my friend Peter Cox, former Enterprise editor who moved to Maine and founded the award-winning weekly newspaper, The Maine Times.

Peter says, “Hey, remember Ellen George? She is the environmental attorney for the city of Portland, Maine.” Well, “shut the door,” “get outta town” or “golly gee,” as Gomer Pyle would say.

This 53-year-old Lake Placid News has an editorial by Ms. George (long before her attorney career) that was more than 2,000 words long, talking about the North Elba and Essex County budgets.

Excerpt:

“Anyone who has ever seen our bankbook will realize the extent of our audacity in attempting to read and interpret the Essex County budget.

“For anyone, we think, reading a town or county budget is an adventure in wonderland, a trip in a forest of figures which can never quite explain themselves. We attended the town budget hearing with only two other Placid residents and Supervisor Bill Hurley and the board did explain why this figure was in this column, and that one over there.”

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The Enterprise, Nov. 29, 1967

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Never mind that Lake Placid News of 53 years ago, how about this Enterprise of 56 years ago and a column by another journalist, J. Ripley Allen. He also fell into a word mill at a young age, graduated from Cornell with a degree in English Literature, went on to serve in the Peace Corps and published a novel.

I, as mayor in 1967, inherited a “Master Plan” authorized by the village board from my predecessor, Mayor John Campion.

First ever Master Plan for the village and who knows whatever happened to it; maybe Rip was correct at the time writing about it as just a big pile of paper.

From Rip’s column entitled, “For the Time Being”:

“Hot off the presses with 25 copies sent to Albany by law, more than two years joint effort on the part of the village and the town planning boards is a mighty work indeed. If we dropped a copy of the report out a second-story window, it would kill a big, full-grown policeman and likely crack the sidewalk.

“What Albany wants with 25 copies of the thing we don’t know, but the bureaucratic metaphor of being buried under paperwork has suddenly taken on new meaning for us.”

Then Rip adds this to a great column:

“The planners put on the best show they could but the brightly colored maps kept flashing by on the screen and nothing on the maps really ever changed. After a while the colors, lines and dots started flashing and jumping around by themselves and the planners voice started to sound like Ravi Shankar’s sitar droning out some Indian Sunset Raga in the background. Local officials sat politely through a solid period of three hours for the presentation. When the lights finally came on some appeared quite shaken to find that they were still in Saranac Lake and all agreed that it had indeed been a mystical experience.”