Adirondack Daily Enterprise, July 26, 2003
You know what…
By Howard Riley
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You used to be able to get as many cabs as you wanted in Saranac Lake any time of day or night - 24/7 as they say today.
Best job in town
In 1948 when I graduated from the Petrova High School with Herb Davis, we both turned 18 a month later, got chauffeur licenses with photo attached and a chrome badge the size of a 50-cent piece. This was issued by the village, had a number on it and it was to be worn on the shirt when we were working. If a customer had a complaint they could report you by the badge number. It was the best job a teen-ager could- have back then. All we wanted to do was drive, so, we get this job and are paid to drive around all day and night in a new car with a lighted sign on the top — were we Kings of the Road or What? I'll tell you, we were at the top of the food chain. A hamburger and coffee was a quarter at the One Minute Lunch, so we "ate out" most of the time and slept on a cot in the taxis stand.
The famous speakeasy
Driving cab is how I got to meet Bert LaFountain. When the bars would close in town at 1 a.m. some of the patrons would call a cab to go out to the most famous speakeasy in these parts, Bert LaFountain's in Gabriels.
However, at that hour you could only buy beer, you could not go in and sit in the living room as at other times. The couple of times that I went at that hour, Bert was tipped back in a chair just inside, the kitchen door. You knocked, told him what you wanted and he put the bottle's of beer loose in a brown, paper bag. There was no such thing as a six-pack back then.
I also met Bert when I went there one Saturday with Dean Lynch in the summer of 1949. We were in the Veteran's Club Drum and Bugle Corps, and had played at a fireman's parade in Massena. There was quite a crowd there and Hank Stern stopped to see Bert to ask him if he wanted to hire a bouncer or some such story . He wanted Bert to meet Stubby Martin, Stubby was a bobsledder from Massena, married to Peg Baker from Saranac Lake. Hank called Bert in from the kitchen and Stubby, who was 6' 7" and weighed 300 pounds just about filled up that living room, with the low ceiling Stubby was an impressive man in any circumstance but Bert was just speechless, as he stood there staring up at him, much to Hank's delight
Taxi town in the 40s
We worked for John Brewster, who was a paid driver for the village but owned the taxi- company next to the Riverside Inn where the Tops Express is now. The cabs entered the alley from River Street and parked along the side of Sir Speedy which was then the Saranac Lake Hardware.
The Riverside housed Dick DeSantis Bar and Pop Walsh's newsstand. Art Dora, Kareen Tyler's father, later owned the hardware store and Pop Walsh was Peggy Toohey's grandfather.
John had two new Plymouth cabs going all the time and could keep tabs on us because he worked odd shifts at the firehouse. We were honest about writing the calls in the ledger but sometimes when we forgot John would check the book and remark, "I saw you go by the firehouse at 5 a.m. but the trip isn't in the book."
There were two phones at our stand and occasionally Orville Paye managed the little office. He would reverse the receivers on the two phones so when one phone rang you would pick it up but only hear the voice faintly because it was coming through the receiver still on the other cradle. You have to think about that one for a minute.
The TB hospitals were all in full swing in Ray Brook, in Lake Kushaqua, Trudeau and Will Rogers and all the local cure cottages. We had "standing time calls" to pick up nurses and other staff workers. There were hundreds of workers and hundreds of patients who used the cabs.
Trudeau San provided a DeSoto limo that took patients to town every, half-hour and had a reserved parking place in front of Endicott Johnson Shoes. Carl Myatt was a driver for a while in his younger days and maybe took the job so he could meet the student nurses from Rochester and Buffalo who were interning there before the rest of us could.
The big resort, hotels at Saranac Inn and Whiteface Inn also had lots of employees and guests who used the cabs. Some in town like Bob Bouck, a huge man who had been a boxer before he got TB, had only one car and his stand was at the back of the Masonic building. However, Red Hoyt had a fleet of Kaiser and Fraser cabs and owned the dealership for those cars. At almost every alley in town there was a sign with the company phone number and a bell in the center of the sign. Ring the bell and a cab would pull up to the top of the alley.
Ray Brundage had a fleet in one corner of the Newberry parking lot, Charlie Smith had cabs behind Bernie Wilson's and Ben Balsam had taxis and ran a driving school. It seems that Ben was doing that into his 80s. He had the dual clutch and brake installed on the passenger side of his "driver ed" cars and did quite well because other drivers, would give him a pretty wide berth when they saw him coming.
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