Tales of the Sinclair - Hotel Memories Part One - Finding the Perfect Summer Job - June, 1970
A memoir of Bethlehem’s Heyday by Dave Goldstone
Part One –
The Hotel Sinclair at its peak (not shown- Dave Goldstone, Lifeguard)
I took out the Sunday times and turned to section 10. In the 50’s and 60’s the “Times had full pages filled with ads for Bethlehem hotels and resorts. In 1970, one page covered all of New Hampshire and a bit of Vermont and Maine as well.
I began to write letters to all of the resorts on the page. With some I received standard application forms. One evening the phone rang at our apartment in Brooklyn. It was George McAvoy. He was the General Manager of the Crawford House in Crawford Notch. For those who have interest in the history of White Mt tourism, Crawford House is one of birth places of White Mt tourism. For those who love to hike the Whites, the Crawford house is the link between to the 2 great mountain ranges, the Franconia’s and the Presidentials. It was a hikers’ Mecca. I was both of these people… There was no more perfect a place to work. ..and the job he was offering was landscaping. It was perfect.!
Before I could get over my enthusiasm for this first offer, the phone rang. It was Myron Herrman, the owner/manager of the Sinclair Hotel . He called to offer me the position of Life Guard or Athletic Director. The Sinclair was conveniently located in Bethlehem but I did not consider myself to be Life Guard material nor did I have any interest in being the Athletic Director. I don’t think I had been to the beach in years….
The choice seemed so simple to me. The Crawford House was where I wanted to be. For my parents, whom I was still living with it was also a simple decision. The Sinclair was where their 19 year old son needed to be, where I would meet Jewish girls…
My parents were right about one thing. All of the guests that I met at the Sinclair Hotel were Jewish. However, the average age of those guests was about 60….
I has gotten to the hotel a week early to help set up. The waitresses had not arrived yet. When I asked where the waitresses came from, (Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island…Boston??) I was told “Mexico” Mexican waitresses at a Kosher hotel in the White Mts..? Well, yes and no. They were all from Mexico, Maine, twin cities with Rumford in a polluted valley off of US Route 2 in Western Maine.
Right away, the young waitresses were calling the kreplach ravioli’s and the matzo balls dumplings. How would they discern the five different morning herrings..?
The Sinclair Hotel was not only the largest hotel in Bethlehem, it was the oldest, going back to the 1860’s. However, back in the 1930’s Michenoff and Spiwack, the owners of the New Agassiz Hotel, bought the faltering Sinclair, and brought with them those unique clientele who observed the” dietary laws” which they offered. The hotel was now being run by Spiwack’s son, David and daughter, Pauline Leander, and by Michenoff’s nephew, Myron Herrman.
The new modern pool and cabana , “the largest private pool in Bethlehem” was now over 24 years old. It appears that most of the hotels guests had been coming as long as the pool had been here, some longer.
Myron and Dorothy Herman
The rooms were still “air conditioned by nature”. The fire suppression system consisted of fire hoses on the lower floors and buckets of water and sand on high shelves throughout the hallway s of the upper floors. The best rooms, in addition to facing east toward the mountains, had private baths. The Hotel elevator had an electric light and an “electromagnetic” call system but operated like a dumbwaiter. Instead of white gloves the elevator boy was issued work gloves to get a good grip on the steel cable which had to be pulled up or down to get it moving. Occasionally, someone would have to get off if the car did not move after yanking the cable. This often happened after meals….
As the lifeguard was part of the “executive staff”. This means that I ate in the main dining room a half hour before the guests and received a limited menu of food options. It also entitled me a to have room on the top floor of the old Agassiz building, now the night club. The room was a bit shabby with worn and torn wall paper. The bathroom was at the end of the hall. The adjacent room was wallpapered with magazine covers. That was Harry’s room. Harry was the cabana man. He set up the chaise lounges, tables and chairs around the pool, handed out pool towels and ash trays to the guests and cleaned and maintained the pool deck and sundeck where people played cards and board games.
His name was Harry Tugan but everyone called him Harry Pool. Harry Pool represented everything that was charming, nostalgic, and comical as well as distressing, depressing, and outmoded about the Sinclair. He was a short thin Jewish Leprechaun of a man in his ‘60’s. He had worked for the Sinclair for over 30 years, originally as a bellhop. When the new pool was built he was assigned to the job of cabana man and he remained in that position to that day.
As a lifeguard, I was paid $400. for the season. That was $40 a week. Part of the lifeguard’s job was to call Bingo on “Game Night” every Wednesday evening (and also in the lobby on rainy days). Also on Tuesday and Saturday nights there would be a show in the nightclub. It was exclusive for Sinclair guests. So my job was to stamp each guest’s wrist with clear black light ink as they left the main dining room. Then I would sit by the door of the Agassiz nightclub with the black light and check for the stamped hands. Non-guests were charged $1.50 each.
For that amount you could here a comic with a name like “Joey O’Brien” tells jokes right out of the Catskills. Some of the jokes had Yiddish punch-lines. The night club could hold hundreds of guests but rarely needed more than two cocktail waitresses. The most popular drink was probably ginger ale. If you ordered a tall ginger ale with 2 ice cubes It would stay cold and last the entire night. This was a favorite of the “chicken sisters” two elderly unmarried sisters, who got their nicknames from the fact that they ordered chicken every night at dinner, no matter what was on the menu.
On Saturday nights, the entertainer would do shows at two different hotels. Usually they would have dinner at the Sinclair work the 9:00pm show and then race off to the Mt. Washington, work the late show there and sleep over. I became friendly with the waitresses and began to bus tables and wait on “the family”, Myron Herrman’s table. From his table he could keep one eye on the front door and one eye on the kitchen door.
Mr. Herman always had a phone near him. Through the main switchboard he could call me at the pool (there were phones attached to light poles and trees) His partner, Dave Spiwack was in the kitchen directing the food service. You rarely saw him anywhere else
Sinclair Dining Room
Thursday night was traditionally guest and staff talent night. Certain guests and staff always performed for this weekly event, like the ukulele strumming butcher who could play a mean “Bye Bye, Black Bird” when he wasn’t talking about his other passion…meat. Harry Pool would recount earlier days when he and Maitre D’ Larry Bottolatta (“Mr. B”) would do an impromptu comedy routine akin to Martin and Lewis..
Harry Pool
Since Mr. Herrman never hired an Athletic Director, I was that too. That involved raking and rolling and installing and maintaining the nylon striping hammered into what was left of the two old clay courts and handing out the sports equipment to the guests.
Harry Pool proudly announced his annual salary from the Sinclair of $100 per season. He prided himself on making cash tips at the pool independent of what the hotel offered him. To Harry, every towel, ash tray, chair, chaise and table was potential income for him. He was the Maitre D’ of the Pool deck. You could not sit by the pool without seeing him first. He virtually blocked your path and greeted you with a booming voice that could be heard across the property. “Hello Mr. and Mrs. Zuckerman! Yes it’s me, Harry.! Would you like a table by the shade….or no, you’re the sun lovers! I’ll save a place for you here through Sunday and you can see me before you leave…”
The Sinclair Pool, including its tables and chairs and chaise lounges and towels were all free of charge from the hotel, but not to Harry. He was going to provide you with a service of finding you a place to sit, like it or not…That was his business.
After breakfast I would go out to the pool and first dive in and remove the webbed chairs and the Life guard off duty sign that the wait staff and bellmen threw into the pool almost every night. I would then sweep the bottom of the pool and check the filter room, chlorine levels, etc. The Sinclair advertised a “heated pool”. However, the pool did not have its own heater. A pipe leading from the hotel’s hot water boiler could be turned on to add warm water to the frigid waters coming from the reservoir and chilling in the night air. With Mr. .Herrman’s permission I could add hot water to the pool. It was important to remember to turn it off after a while or you could drain the entire hotel of its hot water supply….which happened occasionally.