Blais memoir
The Front Page
Afternoon Update
Tuesday, October 5, 2021
By Ken Tingley
Lake George Mayor Robert Blais announced earlier this year he would retire when his term expires in 2023.
It was time to write his memoirs, I thought. Only, Mayor Blais had already written his memoirs seven years earlier with the book “A view from the top.”
The book is one of those self-published efforts with lots of scrapbook photos and a surprising amount of honesty for someone who has held political office for more than a half-century.
Blais found his way to Lake George as a college student in 1956. That was one year before I was born, yet, I’m retired and he is not.
The value in the mayor’s literary effort is the honesty and the memories of what Lake George was like in the 1950s, and 60s and 70s. He got to see quite a transformation.
Blais described his first trip to Lake George as a college student desperate for a job. Because he stood 6-6 and weighed over 200 pounds, the police chief immediately hired him as a police officer and handed him a revolver.
The 1950s were a simpler time. No training was necessary.
Blais was directed to stand at the corner of Beach Road and Canada Street between 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. and direct traffic when needed.
“I was terrified,” Blais writes in the book. “I never held a pistol, much less shot one, and prayed that no occasion would ever demand it.”
Blais had always dreamed of being a police officer so Lake George was his heaven during those college summers. After graduation he was hired as a Warren County Deputy Sheriff before taking a higher paying job in the insurance industry.
But Lake George eventually lured him back where he worked as a police officer again and then ran the local bowling alley.
His predecessor, Mayor Robert Caldwell, believed he not only was the mayor, but the chief of police and regularly responded to calls. On one particularly wild Fourth of July, Caldwell called out the local fire department at 1 a.m. to disperse the crowd by dousing them with water. Because it was so hot, most of the young people enjoyed the spraying and it drew an even larger crowd to the center of the village. Headlines in the Times-Union the next day said there were “Riots in Lake George.”
That’s when Blais, then 33, decided he would run for mayor.
Caldwell, the long-time mayor, was a little overconfidence and didn’t even bother to campaign. It was then that Blais got his first real taste of politics. A friend of the mayor’s asked to meet with Blais. He told him if he defeated Caldwell, the business owner would turn Blais into the New York State Liquor Authority and have the bowling alley’s liquor license revoked. He believed that since the mayor was also the chief of police, Blais would not be allowed to hold a liquor license.
“This was a threat,”Blais wrote in the book. “And it bothered me to think that even in small town politics could initiate such a threat.”
Blais won the 1971 election 250 to 207. And every election since.
Blais laid out his political philosophy:
“I usually group local politicians into two categories - caretakers and movers and shakers.”
Blais considered himself the latter.
I learned a lot from the book about how Lake George used to be, especially the east end honky tonks that drew college kids from all over when the drinking age was still 18.
Blais also addressed the regular problems that the mayor has to face from the business community willing to do anything to make a buck during the short season.
“It’s the nature of the beast,” wrote Blais. “Lake George Village is a melting pot of owners, lessees, visitors and residents of all ethnic backgrounds and cultures. They change with the season. Business owners are stressed and intimidated by the short window of economic opportunity. They stretch and bend laws, seek loopholes, plead ignorance or just look for ways to beat the system.
“Those that sense failure begin to take liberties, chances and opportunities that are not acceptable and some are actually prohibited. One store owner who lacks visibility places a large blowup ice cream cone on the sidewalk, another places flashing lights in the windows, while still another runs through downtown with flyers placing them on parked cars.”
You learn a lot about the mayor’s friends, family and his love for Lake George.
But ultimately, Mayor Blais will leave Lake George a better place than how he found it.
But I’m still not convinced he won’t run again.
Letters to editors
One of the great services that local newspapers provide is to allow its readers a voice for its opinions - political and otherwise.
On Sunday, the newspaper announced on its editorial page that it would not be publishing election letters this year. While the value of election letters was dubious at best, it is still something regular citizens should worry about.
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