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Don Laskin’s Uncalled for Commentary on Just About Anything That's Often None of His Business

Yet Even More Tales of The Pine Center

Back in the Forties through the Fifties, in the foothills of the Catskills in Upstate New York, my family owned The Pine Center, a small hotel in what the city people called “The Mountains”. These are their stories.

To avoid confusion, the two pictured above are not the Duke and Duchess of Sussex who would not be born for another forty years. No, this pic is of Henry and Corny the night they didn’t make it home. Well almost, but, that story’s going to have to wait for some background not covered in previous Tales of The Pine Center posts.

I was nine or ten when our hotel was so full I had to sleep on a cot in the office beside the roll top desk. Then there were times it was even “fuller” and I slept in the roll top desk — with the top down. Okay, I never slept in the desk. But more than once it was so booked, my brothers and I and even a few guests had to bunk at neighbors. Guests weren’t necessarily nicer in the 1940s and 50s. The ones who agreed to sleep away were close family friends. You could call it the price of friendship.

From what I said about sleeping accommodations, you might come away with the impression The Pine Center was relatively small. And, you’d be right. But, until I started writing these posts I never realized, how many people it took to run even our small place.

Guests were drawn to my father who entertained them with tales of his growing up in a tough Harlem neighborhood and mildly off-color stories that began in English and ended in punchlines in Yiddish impossible for me to decipher, but that the intended audience found hilarious. In addition to playing poker and pinochle with guests, he quelled complaints, hired dish washers, chambermaids, and servers, did the billing and taxes, and once a week took the long trip to Honesdale, Pennsylvania to restock supplies. I tagged along every chance I could get. One time in particular on the way home out of the blue, he turned to me, “Son, you have any money on you?” He’d never asked that before and never did again.

I dug around my dungaree pockets and came up with lint, three singles and another dollar or so in dimes and quarters from selling soda. He pulled the car into the parking lot of a diner. We had apple pie and coffee. And I paid for it — like a real man. It wasn’t the best-tasting apple pie I ever had, but it’s one that left the best taste in my mouth.

My Mom did all the meal planning, food prep, cooking and baking in a pre-air conditioned kitchen in June, July and August heat, generally without a whole lot of help. One man my father hired, though, was exceptional. Then six weeks in, he explained he’d been dry as long as he could stand it. He’d try climbing back on the wagon after a couple of weeks, but couldn’t promise anything.

We never saw him again.

No matter what, somehow, Mom managed to feed the guests — to rave reviews. It caused many of them to request her recipes. And she was willing to share her secrets. However, she never specified how much a dash, dollop or pinch was because she would change things up by the amount of food and number of people, availability of ingredients in season and the like. In other words, Mom did what you could call “improv chefery"— more artistry than assembly line.

During the summer my mother would be up at five and work till eight or nine. This went on without letup till Labor Day after which she’d hibernate for a couple of weeks sleeping days on end.

Local high-school girls got the food from the kitchen to the dining room. And no. Waitressing (No one used the term server) was a plum summer job. There was loads of free time between meals and salary came with generous tips when the guests left.

The waitress I’ll never forget was my first girlfriend, Maria. She was sixteen. I was four. But I was not about to let that difference in age stand between us. Then she met Eugene with that way he had of chewing gum. Every second-and-a-half or third chew, he’d run the tip of his tongue over his upper lip starting at the left-hand corner of his mouth and let it glide around in a graceful arc coming to a halt at the right corner.

When I was old enough to go to school, I'd study Eugene (Narrowsburg Central Rural School buses carried first grade through seniors in high school). I was fascinated. Transfixed was more like it. And I did my damnedest to mimic his moves, never quite getting it right. I switched from Juicy Fruit to Double Bubble. I would’ve even tried Feen-a-ment if I thought that might help and damn the consequences. Look up Feen-a-mint and you’ll see the consequences could be dire.

Six years after Maria and I first met, she threw me over, marrying Eugene. A lot of people, maybe even you, would again point to the age difference. BUT I was catching up. As I said, Maria was sixteen and I was four when we met. She was four times as old as I was. By the time she married Eugene, she was twenty-three and I was ten which only made her a little more than twice as old. Clearly it wouldn’t have been too long before I caught up.* If only Eugene hadn’t been so gum gifted.

After Maria, there were other servers, including Maria’s sister Mildred, but it could never be the same. Perhaps it had to do with my sneaking up behind one of the girls while she was sorting silverware, lifting her skirt and running away laughing hysterically before she could strangle me. I should mention, I gave up this practice before my seventh birthday and long before I could be charged with sexual harassment if I’d known what sexual harassment was — or if I’d known what sex was.

Aided, abetted and egged on... literally…by guests Eleanor and Paul, my older brother, who was waiting on tables one summer, substituted a raw egg for a half apricot in heavy syrup in another guest’s dessert. Waiting on tables could be fun.

Obviously a hotel needs chambermaids. There was Mary, who looked to be about eighty and actually may have been older. Hardly ever saying a word, Mary was famous for drinking prodigious amounts of alcohol, the many empties discovered after the summer a testament to her ability to hold her liquor and do her job.

Then there was Sophie. Asked to help with something…anything, her answer was the same even if the building were on fire. “Zjust ah minute. Zjust ah secont,” It was a phrase that echoed down through family lore for years right up there with “Who the horse?”

It might've been a second or third cousin…could’ve been a distant uncle…maybe a brother-in-law. Anyway he was told about a farmer who was leading a horse into his barn when the animal reared up. He was kicked in the head and died. The second or third cousin…could’ve been a distant uncle…maybe a brother-in-law asked, “Who the horse?”

Zjust ah minute. Zjust ah secont and I’ll tell you about Elisha originally from the Caribbean. Every spring she’d call from the city to tell my father she dreamed he died. Finding he was alive, she’d ask if her usual summer gig were available.

Having spent a good chunk of my working life submitting resumes, going on interviews, etc, I’d have to say Elisha’s way of getting work was unique.

As you know, GE, Maytag and Samsung are the names of dishwashers. What you don’t know is so are Corny, Donald and Tony. Tony or Mr. Ovetchka as he insisted on being called when he was drunk, demanded undeserved respect from a five-year-old who needed him to get a glass off a high shelf so the boy (me) could get a drink of water. A petty thief if an opportunity presented itself, Tony’s major claim to fame was getting so blasted he slept thirty-six hours straight. No one shook him because nobody wanted to be the one to find his dead body.

Over the years, there were probably as many dish washers as the hotel had plates. An employment agency in Monticello, a town twenty miles away, would get periodic shipments of…for want of a better description…bums shanghaied from one of New York’s skid rows. Okay “shanghaied” would be too strong since they could leave any time and usually did after the first paycheck. Then they’d be off on a bender and the process would start over.

Tony and Corny were local but about as reliable as the rest. Still, they were very different characters. Tony was a nasty drunk while Corny was happy-go-lucky, likable and always getting into some kind of mischief or misfortune like the time he showed up with his arm in a sling, the result of a bar fight with an opponent who had him in a tweezer hold.

The guy in the pic with Corny? His name was Henry. Other than that I didn’t know too much about him except he was illegitimate. I had no idea what that meant except it was something people didn’t talk about like getting a bad report card or diarrhea. The other thing about Henry was he had a habit of getting married...often. What one had to do with the other I still haven’t figured out. But those were the two things I knew about him before he and Corny set off on a night of drinking.

The Pine Center was at the top of a three-quarter-of-a-mile long hill. At the bottom were Henry and Corny drunk as proverbial lords. Supporting each other they started up. Progress was labored because for every two steps up, they took three back.

The laws of physics and mathematics might call into question how they could ever have made it to the top. But even physics and mathematics have to take a back seat to empirical proof as any sober assessment would show.

*In the interest of accuracy and truth, I readily admit “borrowing” the age bit from an Abbott and Costello routine.

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