On any given day through the heart of the 20th century, blue-collar workers in Saranac Lake could be found pounding burgers at the Dew Drop Inn on Broadway, right alongside bejeweled ladies from Upper Saranac nibbling on seafood platters, boisterous, five-o’clock-somewhere barflies, politicians feasting on New York strips and college kids tossing pizza crusts to the ducks drifting by on the river that flowed a few feet beneath the cantilevered dining room.
“Saranac Lake is an eclectic place,” said Katie Stiles, whose real estate office is a few steps upstream of the old restaurant.
Stiles is managing the property for its new owner, Taimim Li, of Long Island, whose family has connections to Saranac Lake dating back to its days as a cure center for tuberculosis. Li recalls visiting the restaurant in its heyday, Stiles said, and plans a restoration that will include elements of its history, which all told dates back to the building’s construction in the 1890s.
And there are many elements to draw from. Mohammad Ali ate there. Faye Dunaway worked there. From 1947 to 1988 the Dew Drop Inn united these varied personalities, its talismanic neon sign glowing like a Star of Bethlehem above a fort-like brick facade. Mechanic or socialite, tourist or local, clubber or iconoclast, they all passed through its heavy oaken doors, which were fashioned by Saranac Lake artisan Bruce Darring in exchange for a year’s worth of hamburgers.
And then there were the bobsledders, a hard-drinking, death-defying subset of Adirondack culture whose prime roughly overlaid that of the Dew Drop, the sport’s “unofficial headquarters,” according to the local press.
At the helm of this hospitable ship was the lantern-jawed raconteur Forrest “Dew Drop” Morgan, or just “Dew” to his friends, which was pretty much everybody. ”He probably knew more people north of Albany than anyone,” said his son John.
Born in Saranac Lake in 1922, Dew’s nickname was bestowed by a high-school classmate who, in a fit of literary ecstasy, proclaimed his friend to be “as fresh as the dew on the grass.”
“Dew Drop was a wonderful person and people just loved him,” Darring said. “He’d throw parties and the whole town would be invited.”
Dew was a 1959 national bobsled champion, although he downplayed his skill. “The only record I ever set was in tipping over; I’ve broken every bone in my body,” he told The New York Times following the death of his son Jim in a bobsledding accident in Italy.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of bobsledding in the Adirondacks from the 1930s through the 1980s, and it is equally difficult to separate bobsledding from the Dew Drop Inn and a handful of other watering holes that lubricated the crews who had just completed their runs.
It was a different sport then, before it was taken over by elite athletes and track stars who exploded off the starting line, pushing their high-tech sleds to an insurmountable advantage before the driving even started. But in 1950, bobsleds could make Olympians out of fire chiefs and bartenders whose main talent was a bland indifference to sheer terror.
“These were middle-aged men having a great time,” John said. “You would leave the [Mt. Van Hoevenberg] parking lot and go to Purdy’s or the Handlebar or the Dew Drop to drink beers and shots, then you would do it all over again the next day.”
Lake Placid’s first bob run had been built at Mt. Van Hoevenberg for the 1932 Olympics. The four-man gold that year was won by the standard-setting Billy Fiske, who won his first Olympic gold medal at 16, raced a green Bentley across Europe, played polo on motorcycles and became the first American pilot to die in World War II after faking Canadian citizenship so he could join the Royal Air Force.
When the Olympians in Lake Placid were gone, the track conveyed to the community, and like a souped-up race car abandoned in a mall parking lot, the locals naturally came sniffing around.
This led to a cavalcade of Adirondack sliders who were legends on the world stage. Most every community within 50 miles of Lake Placid had a bobsledding club, with their logos and nicknames stitched onto sweaters and patches.
Mechanics who worked on flathead Fords by day tinkered with bobsled runners in their garages at night. Two local radio stations broadcast the runs for the benefit of those who weren’t among the thousands to watch in person.
“It was big time,” said Dave Jones Sr., of Lake Placid, whose uncle was Olympic bobsled medalist Fred Fortune. “Most of them were just hard-working local guys in the rough-and-tumble Adirondacks.”
They had to be fearless, because Mt. Van Hoevenberg quickly gained the reputation of being the fastest, most ticklish track ever built.
“This is the only bobsled run on the North American continent, and it is one of only four in the world still used for big international competitions,” Sports Illustrated wrote in 1961. “Its mile-long chute with the dizzy, plunging curves is quite a bit faster” than other runs. Time magazine said it had “a sinister reputation as the world’s most dangerous course.” By 1966, three men had died on the mountain and scores more were seriously injured.
Which mattered naught to the men and a few women who couldn’t wait for winter weekends to roll around so they could come rocketing down the mountain in a screaming avalanche of rattled teeth and freeze-dried spittle, where even simple tasks such as breathing took a concentrated effort, and barely survivable g-forces sent sensitive internal organs sloshing against skull and bone in ways that were inconsistent with human health. Like flying in the Battle of Britain, as Fiske had written in his journal shortly before his death, bobsledding was “terrifying, but fun.”
And it was accessible. To pilot a sled took considerable skill, but in a sport where downhill momentum was everything, a beer belly was of more use than strength or coordination. So training regimens focused on bars, not barbells.
At the Dew Drop at two in the morning, drivers might apologize for calling it a night so early, with the excuse that they had to be on the mountain later that day. By seven a.m. they’d be drinking strong coffee at Dickies restaurant, dropping dimes into the pay phone in hopes of scaring up three other guys who might have sobered up enough to join them.
Even for the clear-eyed, the risks of bobsledding were well known. “If you were afraid of crashing you were in the wrong sport, because sooner or later everyone went over,” Jones said. The ’32 Olympics ended with six contestants in the hospital. Moms and wives became fixtures in the Lake Placid emergency room as ambulances arrived from the mountain.
Dew himself “was the greatest crash artist in the history of the sport,” John Morgan said. “Nine lives? He had 20. But he was the epitome of the Greatest Generation. He had to jump out of a burning airplane [in World War II] when he was 21—next to that, a bobsled is nothing.”
The same raucous bravado on the mountain echoed through the Dew Drop. “Ah, it was loud,” John said. “It was the place to go [for a drink], but it was the food that made the Dew Drop Inn.” And that was largely due to Dew’s wife, Sheila. Dew kept an eye on his customers, and Sheila kept an eye on Dew. If Dew grew overenthused at a Yankees game and started giving away free hot dogs, Sheila at least made sure they were high-quality hot dogs.
She took what had been a dive of a basement bar and made it into the best restaurant for miles around, said Stiles, who recalls her parents taking her there for Shirley Temples with two cherries. She remembers the piano, the stairs leading down to the dining room, and the lobster tank, which “seemed so big and glamorous to me,” she said.
A Yankees flag was prominent behind the cash register until Dew and the Bronx Bombers had a falling out, after he lost a bet on the World Series that carried with it a jump into the Saranac River. The episode remains one of the most celebrated in Dew Drop lore, described in the Adirondack Enterprise as the “famous 1950s river bath episode when [Dew] walked the plank as bugles sounded taps and a Series bet was paid in icy October waters under the Broadway bridge.”
Dew, known from then on as “the Yankee Dipper,” never lived that one down, nor did he live down his appearance in Esquire magazine in 1975, in a photo essay of Dew Drop Inns across the country, with Dew proudly standing out front of Saranac Lake’s entry, his tie and his smile as wide as the river itself.
Dew opened other restaurants in other communities, but there was something magical about the original that just couldn’t be replicated anywhere else. He sold it in 1988, but tended bar at the Lake Placid Lodge before his death in 2012. (The stories followed Dew to Placid; after struggling at the register with some new credit card technology, he was helped out by a kindly gentleman who got it to work. After the man left, some bystanders excitedly said, “Don’t you know who that was? That was Bill Gates!” Dew stared blankly before asking, “Who did he play for?”)
Taimim Li, the new owner, remembers the Dew Drop fondly and hopes to recapture some of its elan. “The Dew Drop is a local landmark and a significant aspect of Saranac Lake history,” Stiles said. “There are attributes of that history that will carry over into the [remodeled] restaurant, and bobsledding will be part of that.”
So will the Dew Drop Inn sign, which has been restored by Kurt Stender and awaits rehanging when renovation work commences in the spring. The neon no longer meets Saranac Lake’s signage code, but no matter. This was one spot where the town was willing to make an exception for such an icon.
“All of Saranac Lake hung out with Dew,” Jones said. “We miss that place.”
