It was at the end of these two weeks that I found myself at Lake George, the dreadful hub of tourism in the Adirondacks that has somehow managed to turn the history and the forests and the wildlife into honky-tonk. --Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me
When I was young, by mid-August the horizon thickened with ominous back-to-school clouds, but now this time of year is more likely to prompt a touch of nostalgia.
Living in upstate New York during the height of tourist season, I am immersed in a latter-day version of what Fleming witnessed during the 1950s. I'm also just a short drive from the wellspring of some of my own childhood "honky-tonk" memories--Storytown, an amusement park near Lake George.
Every year something seems to trigger memories of that place, especially in its earliest incarnation. Since I have four younger brothers, return trips across the border from our home in Vermont were an ongoing family tradition. Earlier this week, I came upon an old photo (me on a slide exiting the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe's house, while my father mysteriously peers into a downstairs window) that prompted a wave of Storytown recollections.
In 1954, Charles Wood invested $75,000 to purchase five acres on the east side of U.S. 9 between Lake George and Glens Falls, N.Y. He launched Storytown USA, an amusement park based on storybook characters--Jack & Jill; Humpty Dumpty; Hickory Dickory Dock; the House that Jack Built; Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater, etc. In the mid-1990s, he sold the hugely expanded park, called the Great Escape, to Premier Parks (Six Flags) for $37 million. A fairytale in itself, perhaps, but not the one I want to tell here.
Lake George was also the setting for Fleming's The Spy Who Loved Me, and this is where my late summer plot thickens. James Bond's creator was no fan of Charles Wood's creation. The book's narrator calls Storytown USA "a terrifying babyland nightmare which I need not describe."
That "babyland" has found its way back into my consciousness many times over the decades. In 1994, I'd only been a bookseller at the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vt., for a couple of years when I read Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital.
Moore grew up in the Glens Falls/Lake George region. Her narrator, Berie Carr, recounts the summer of 1972, when she was 15 and worked as a cashier at an upstate New York amusement park called--wait for it--Storyland. Sils, her beautiful best friend, played Cinderella and "had to wear a strapless sateen evening gown and ride around in a big papier-mâché pumpkin coach."
Having long since left her hometown behind, Berie recalls mischievous adventures, as well as serious and consequential misadventures: "There were rides and slides," Moore writes. "There was the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, which was a large purple boot you could climb to the top of, then coast down its aluminum tongue into a box of sand.... We were conspicuous and out of place--half mimes, half vandals. But most of the tourists smiled and ignored us. We sang along with the tinny, piped-in music, whatever it was--usually 'After the Ball' or 'Beautiful Dreamer'--but sometimes it was just the Storyland theme song:
Storyland, Storyland—
not a sad and gory land.
But a place where a lot
of your dreams come true.
Books come to life and nursery rhymes do, too.
Storyland, Storyland:
Bring the whole famil-lee!
(And Grandma-ma!)"
It's such a great novel, whether or not you have a personal connection to the region. I loved handselling it. If customers happened to have Storytown nostalgia lodged in their own memory banks, it wasn't even a challenge to get them hooked.
And that hook sinks deep because everyone's family is complicated and nobody's life is a fairytale. With her brother, Berie would search through their parents' belongings for clues: "And so Claude and I stepped in and went through stuff.... In this way we gathered information about our parents; we were true and successful spies, for our parents never gathered much about us, we believed, nor cared to, in the way that was so often the case in large families of that time."
Moore had a homecoming of sorts last year when she appeared at the Northshire Bookstore in Saratoga Springs for an event promoting her essay collection, See What Can Be Done. "I feel I'm really an upstate New York girl," she told the audience, which included me.
Last year also happened to be the 50th anniversary of my high school graduation. In the yearbook, there was a "Senior Class Prophecy" page, predicting what each member of the graduating class would be doing in 2018. Mine read: "Bob Gray... famed critic of Ian Fleming."
I was born in 1950 and Moore in 1957. Fleming often traveled through this area in the 1950s and early 1960s. I'd like to imagine there was a moment in the space-time continuum when our paths crossed. Wouldn't that have been a fairytale summer? We were all in the spy game, and Storytown became the Great Escape.
--Robert Gray, contributing editor (Column archives at Fresh Eyes Now)