This boxed note by the Post editor was also on the front page of the story — “This is the l06th of a series of articles on America’s most colorful cities. The next, which deals with Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will appear in the September 15th issue.”

Excerpts from the story:

“Some New York State firemen held a convention a few years ago in the Adirondack Village of Saranac Lake. With more thirsts to quench than fires, they ran their engines up and down the streets one night, ringing bells and sirens. One irate old resident, thinking of the sick in the sanatoria on the nearby hills, asked, ‘Why can’t people decide what this town is a health resort or a vacation resort?’ Someone said, ‘I don’t know mister, but can’t it be both, now and then?’

“Thirty years ago there would have been no such question. Saranac Lake was known, world round, for just one thing, as the best place in America for the cure of the tuberculosis and as the one center in America for research into the problems of the disease. The private curing cottages in town held almost 3,000 sick and hundreds more were in sanatoria on the outskirts.

“New techniques in treatment, more free state sanatoria in America, as well as greater costs of curing have cut that patient load low with the years, but to many Saranac Lake had continued to mean tuberculosis. Not so long ago a healthy New Yorker came to town for a week of fishing and sent a girl in Kansas City a post card with the Saranac Lake postmark. He wrote: ‘Just arrived here. Feel well. Going fishing.’ He got a quick answer: ‘Shocked at your card. Stay in bed, do what the doctors say, and you’ll get over it.’

“The health industry is still the big industry in this village of 6,909 people, and the research on pulmonary diseases continues. Today thousands of summer residents and tens of thousands of tourists and vacationers come to Saranac Lake and never meet with a sick person unless they choose.

“The townspeople would rather boast about the new municipality operated ski run on Mount Pisgah, about the New York Giants pro football team that trains in Saranac Lake every summer, or about the big lake trout juts caught on one of Peter Higgins’ (Sharon Higgins Bishop’s Dad) locally made spoons.

“Increasing numbers of vacationers in recent years have leaned that the chances of any infection are much greater in a New York City subway than in Saranac Lake.”

The following will be random paragraphs because I cannot do justice with any form of continuity to a story with thousands of words.

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Bars and more

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“This place has a modern convention hall (the Town Hall) that seats a thousand, an airfield with Manhattan ninety minutes away; it’s public school system is one of the finest, the town’s General Hospital has the most modern equipment, found only in the largest city hospitals. In addition, here are seven drugstores, and the astonishing number of 65 doctors; 35 in practice, thirty in research and in institutions.

“It also has 17 bars, but maybe the long, cold winter has something to do with that. (The 17 I easily remember include the Vet’s Club, Earl’s Village Tavern, Don’s Melody Lounge, E-John’s Lounge, Alpine Hotel, Top-Hat, St. Regis Hotel, Marc-Mac’s Bar, ‘The Store’, Belvedere, Tuffy’s Tavern, Dew Drop’s, Downing & Cane’s, Mark’s Grill, Little Joe’s, Hotel Saranac and the Lakeview Grill. I decided to name only 17 but there were more.)

“Its library is larger than those in many bigger cities.”

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Veronica Lake?

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“A few years ago a Hollywood press agent suggested to the city fathers that they change the name of the place to ‘Veronica Lake,’ to honor a former resident.” (I believe that the actress Veronica Lake spent a summer here as a member of the cast of the Saranac Lake Summer Theater.)

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Millionaires

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“It has a number of millionaires on the streets at times, in from their forest camps for supplies; they can usually be told from the populace because they wear older and sloppier clothes.”

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Dr. E.L. Trudeau

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“A New York City doctor, Edward Livingston Trudeau, made Saranac Lake a health center. After completing medical school, in 1871, he found he had tuberculosis. In his day that was a death sentence. Fond of hunting, he went along to a camp in the then remote Adirondacks, to spend his last days, doing what he liked most. In those days doctors believed that the disease was noncontiguous and generally incurable. They taught, ‘never open the window, particularly at night, as that will aggravate the cough.’ They said nothing about resting. When Doctor Trudeau thrived on open air and rest he decided to establish a place where the less affluent invalids might come to try the same therapy. He was thereby the first to set the commonest pattern in Saranac Lake history — of coming to the woods to die, but surviving to live out a useful life.

“With a wide acquaintance among rising men of wealth in New York, Doctor Trudeau raised the funds for his first cure cottage built on sixteen acres of land given to him by his lifelong friends, the guides. He added more land later until Trudeau Sanatorium occupied eight-five acres on the east slope of Mt. Pisgah, the first tuberculosis hospital in America.

“Before Doctor Trudeau died, in 1915, he, with the help of Dr. E. R. Baldwin, founded the Saranac Laboratory for Research.”

It’s a great story about Saranac Lake which will be preserved at the Saranac Lake Free Library as soon as I can copy the entire story.

(The copy of the Saturday Evening Post quoted in the two columns was through the courtesy of Marilee Dupree.)