Thursday, July 18, 2024 – SUMMER IN THE COOL CATSKILLS

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Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar

&

Marking Borscht Belt History

ISSUE # 1275

NEW YORK ALMANACK

Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar & Marking Borscht Belt History

July 12, 2024 by John Conway 

Mel Brooks was 14 years old and still known as Melvin Kaminsky when he began working as a busboy in the Catskills at the Butler Lodge in Hurleyville, Sullivan County, hoping to be in the right place at the right time to start a career as an entertainer.

In his 2021 autobiography, All About Me: My Remarkable Life in Show Business, Brooks wrote that whenever he finished his duties as a busboy at the Butler Lodge he would travel to some of the larger hotels nearby to watch their comics perform.

“I loved the Mountains,” he wrote. “The Borscht Belt was so important for my training in comedy. I think it was there that I first learned my craft. The audiences were very tough. They didn’t give it away. When you got a laugh, you really earned it. Those audiences sharpened your ability to survive and sometimes triumph over disastrous performances.”

While there is little doubt that performing in the Mountains at an early age played a major role in the development of Mel Brooks’ career, a relationship he formed while working here proved even more significant.

At one point, his friend and mentor, Don Appell, the social director at the Avon Lodge in Woodridge — and the man who got Mel the job at the Butler Lodge in the first place — introduced him to a young man named Sidney Caesar, who had just graduated high school and was working as a musician at the Avon.

“Six foot two with lush dark blond hair and the shoulders of a lifeguard, ‘Sid’ didn’t look like the usual Jewish boy from Yonkers,” Patrick McGilligan wrote in Funny Man, his 2019 biography of Brooks.

“Younger than Caesar by four years and shorter by six or eight inches, Melvin was instantly smitten by such a physical specimen. ‘Sid was the Apollo of the Mountains, the best looking guy since silent movies,’ Brooks recollected in one interview. ‘He’d stretch himself out on a rock by the lake, and we’d all just look at him.’”

Although they were just casual acquaintances at first, the two would soon form a comedy team of writer and performer that helped make television an instant hit with the American public.

Mel Brooks is one of the most famous entertainers who cut their teeth in the Sullivan County Catskills, but he is just one of hundreds who performed at hundreds of hotels during the heyday of the Borscht Belt. Some of those men—and a few women—went on to become household names, while many others are long forgotten.

Long forgotten too, are many of the hotels that employed those entertainers, and that’s one reason why the ongoing Borscht Belt Historic Marker Project is of such monumental importance in preserving the heritage of the Mountains.

The project — spearheaded locally by photographers Marisa Scheinfeld and Isaac Jeffreys – will dedicate its seventh marker on Sunday, July 21 in Hurleyville, and the stories of Mel Brooks and his brief tenure at the Butler Lodge will likely be in the spotlight.

But Hurleyville was home to many hotels over the years, and although little remains of most of them, they all deserve to be remembered.

From the ill-fated Shindler’s Prairie House to the Majestic and the Morningside and the Paramount Manor, there were dozens of small and medium sized hotels in and around the hamlet, so even without the Mel Brooks connection, a historic marker in Hurleyville would be appropriate.

The marker dedication, scheduled for 1 p.m. in front of the Hurleyville Performing Arts Centre, is part of a much larger celebration in the hamlet that day that will include an Author’s Row at the Morgan Outdoors shop at 234 Main Street from 2 to 3 pm.

The curated author and artisan line-up will feature a selection of Catskill authors, including this columnist, myself (Sullivan County Historian), as well as artists, books, art, and merchandise.

The Collaborative College High School at 202 Main Street will be hosting “Catskilland” from 1:30 to 4:30 pm, and organizers tout the slideshow as presenting “iconic Sullivan and Ulster County billboards documented for over six decades by Keller Signs, now part of the collection of the Sullivan County Historical Society.”

In addition, the Hurleyville Performing Arts Centre will present a ticketed performance of Sam Sadigursky’s “Solomon Diaries” at 3 pm, and there is much more, with all the events except for the ticketed performance at HPAC free of charge.

It promises to be a real Happening in Hurleyville, with the history of Sullivan County sharing the main stage, so mark your calendars for Sunday, July 21.

MY FAMILY CONNECTION, JUST REDISCOVERED TODAY

Distant relatives owned The Luzon Lodge

in Hurleyville, NY.  As my grandmother described it:
The entire family got one room.
The dining roOm had refrigerator boxes for each room, every family had one burner on the communal stove and the seating was in a booth for the entire family.
This was in the 1920’s!!
A joy for mom to go on vacation in the mountains!
(I remember seeing the lodge in the 1970’s and it was in a sad state and closing down.)

CREDITS

John Conway will be one of the speakers at the dedication of the Borscht Belt Historic Marker in Hurleyville at 1 pm on Sunday, July 21, and will take part in the Author’s Row at Morgan Outdoors at 2 pm, as well.

Photos, from above: Mel Brooks and and Sid Caesar in the early 1950s (courtesy Mel Brooks); Imogene Coca and Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows, 1952; and a Borscht Belt Historic Marker.

All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.

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