Photos from Lake Placid - 1916 - pages 40

Photos from Lake Placid - 1916 - pages 40 - 43

- December 16, 2020

I'm very lucky to have several of my grandmother Evelyn Clara Call's (1895-1962) photo albums. And perhaps even luckier that she labeled many of the photos - so I know roughly when and where they were taken, and who was in the photos.

My grandmother attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois in 1915-1916, and then Cornell University in Ithaca, New York from 1916-1919.

Photos on pages 28 - 43 appear to all have been taken in the Lake Placid, New York area, probably in the summer of 1916.

Some of the photos were clearly taken at the Lake Placid Club, a social and recreation club founded in 1895 by Melvil Dewey, who is best known for creating the Dewey Decimal system for categorizing books. It was intended to be a place where educators could find "health, strength and inspiration at a modest cost," and was instrumental in the Lake Placid area becoming an international sports destination.

According to information on Wikipedia - based on a history of the Lake Placid Club by David Ackerman, the Lake Placid Club maintained exclusionary membership policies from it's founding in the late 1800s through it's demise in the 1970s.

"For most of its existence the Lake Placid Club excluded Jews and other socially stigmatized groups. A Lake Placid circular explained, "No one will be received as a member or guest against whom there is physical, moral, social or race objection, or who would be unwelcome to even a small minority ... This invariable rule is rigidly enforced. It is found impracticable to make exceptions for Jews or others excluded, even though of unusual personal qualifications." (Wikipedia entry for the Lake Placid Club accessed on Dec 9, 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Placid_Club)

By the early 1920's "the Club had grown to 9,600 acres (39 km2), with 356 buildings (including 110 residences), its own theatre (seating capacity 1,200), library, boathouses, 21 tennis courts, seven golf courses, farms, a staff of 1100, a fire department, and even a school, today known as Northwood School." (Wikipedia entry for the Lake Placid Club). I don't know if Evelyn Clara Call spent the summer there as a guest or as an employee - my guess - based on what I know of the family' economic situation and the photos in the album of the kitchen staff - is that she worked there as an employee.

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