By Vincent Schaefer 
Compiled and Edited by Don Rittner

Published 2013


One of Langmuir's closest friends was John Apperson, who we affectionately called "Appie." Appie met Langmuir when he first came to Schenectady, found him to be a kindred spirit and  introduced him to Lake George, the place that was to become Langmuir's "second home."

From their first contact the two men found many of their long-held interests were identical. Thus within the year they were climbing mountains together, especially in the wintertime using skis. When Langmuir and his wife Marion went to Lake George, starting around 1911 or so, they participated in the adventure of island camping, in the Narrows, where Appie had developed a sort of base camp, on Dollar Island. They, along with lots of other enthusiastic volunteers, helped haul rocks, using a big sponson canoe, and rip-rapped the shores of several islands. 

By 1920, Appie had purchased a small lot In Turtle Bay, allowing him to safely store his camping equipment in a safe place. Then he purchased a large property in Huddle Bay, known as the Lake View House, as a joint venture with G. Hall Roosevelt and William Dalton. Within a few years Langmuir acquired land adjacent to Appie on the south, and some years later bought a substantial part of Crown Island. 

I first became involved with Appie early in 1929 before I was offered a new job at the Research Laboratory. Shortly after I organized the Mohawk Valley Hiking Club on January 6, 1929, I "discovered" Appie. He was a unique person and his character embodied all of the beliefs and attitudes about conservation that my brother Paul and I, and quite a few of our other members had. Within a few months we were involved in helping him with his projects- taking and editing films of lumbering devastation on Boreas Mountain, the erosion of the Lake George islands, the improper use of the Lake George Dam at Ticonderoga, the girdling of huge deciduous trees on private lands in the heart of the Adirondacks, and the terrible erosion still occurring on the glacial polished rocks of the steep mountain slopes in the Adirondacks following forest fires.

A number of us would spend our weekends at Huddle Bay with Appie, helping him with one or more of his projects. He had a routine that was quite predictable. On the way north in his car, he invariably would stop at a favorite butcher shop and stock up with lamb chops of first grade. He was a fine cook and we always had excellent meals between jobs. We all would get up about daybreak and head for a swim off his dock. We would then eat and find out what the project was for the day. Sometimes it would involve a rip-rapping job on a State island, it might be a quick trip to some mountain for photographs, or it might be an inside job of film editing, something that I frequently was asked to do. His fast Chris-Craft motorboat, which he had christened "Article VII Sec 7, referring then to the "Forever Wild" section of the New York State Constitution. It made our lake trips adventuresome and effective.

The last thing Appie did when we were about to leave on Sunday evening was to coat his huge trestle table of polished maple planks with a liberal covering of boiled linseed oil. This treatment, carried out virtually every weekend of the year, had imparted an incredible polish to the table that seemed to be as hard as steel. 

Appie was a bachelor (he often referred to Lake George as his bride!) and as fine an individual as I have ever known. He started working for GE back in 1900 or so, and lived for many years in a boarding house (118 Park Avenue). When I met him, his bachelor's quarters, in Schenectady, consisted of a substantial two-story house near the Ellis Hospital, 1079 Teviot Road, (just a few blocks from Langmuir's). One of its largest rooms in its center was devoted to sleeping-bag and skate sail fabrication, with a large rugged sewing machine.

 With the cooperation of Langmuir, he developed the down-filled sleeping bag built in such a way that no seams joined the inner and outer layers of the bag. Rather a simple and ingenious procedure for making muslin tubes joined the two layers together. After many field tests with thermometers placed in strategic locations, he and Langmuir had developed the near-perfect bag. He then taught us how to make them. 

Before the year of 1931 had ended, our group had made more than twenty-five such bags using Egyptian cotton balloon cloth, three pounds of gray goose down for each bag, and a reversed vacuum cleaner to fill the muslin tubes. After 55 years my bag is still intact and serviceable!

He had also devised climbing ropes for skis, to provide reliable traction on bare icy slopes of the Adirondack peaks. These were made of 3/8-inch hemp rope, knotted in such a manner that they presented a criss-cross of rough hemp fibers that slid onto the ski, with a loop over the ski tip and firm fastening at the tail of the ski.

I had occasion to compare Appie's climbing ropes with sealskins when a Swiss friend and I climbed Mount Marcy in the dead of winter in 1933. As we started up the summit cone of Marcy, after climbing out of Panther Gorge to Four Corners Lean-to, my friends sealskins came off just as we reached a critical slope on Marcy. Fortunately my ropes held and I was able to help get the sealskins back on, although they were nearly useless on the icy surface.

The Boss and Appie were a formidable team. Langmuir, especially after he received the prestigious Nobel Prize, had a name and reputation that was noticed by the newspapers.

Appie would frequently work up news stories and turn them over to Langmuir for public presentation. Many successful projects developed with such cooperative effort.

Dr. Katherine Blodgett had a camp adjoining the north edge of Appie's Huddle Bay property, and we saw her frequently.

The conservation ideas espoused by Apperson were often very unpopular with land developers, some of them having power at high levels in industry and government. In a number of instances, such persons would try to have Appie fired from his engineering job at General Electric. Whenever this was tried Langmuir would defend his position and Appie would continue to operate as usual. 

We all learned a great deal about politics, the environment, economics, publicity, and many other side issues in our association with Appie and Langmuir. These were exciting times, and we were quite successful in protecting the Adirondacks from the erosion of its protective clauses in the Constitution, and in the process had a fascinating time.

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Pages 259-260

John Aperson was a remarkable man. Not large physically but wiry with a firm set jaw, steely eyes and a dominant passion for the well being of Lake George and the Adirondack Wilderness. He was a Virginian, but when he came north as an electrical enginer at General Electric, he adopted Schenectady and the North Country with a fervor that was contagious.

I was one of several dozen young (and older) men of the Schenectady area who joined him on his endeavors. He purchased a choice piece of land on the shore of Huddle Bay on Take George, just south of Bolton Landing. There he acquired a simple, but extremely well-built camp, with a big fireplace, an ice house, a lakeside dormitory, and a place to store his boats. He had a sleek, well kept Chris-Craft that he loved to run on all sorts of missions, and a number of fine canoes. 

Before I joined forces with him, he had spent a number of years hauling large rocks that he used to fortify the shorelines of some of the State islands in the lake. A lumber company had for years manipulated the level of the lake to favor its hydro operation- keeping the level of the lake unusually high in the springtime, long after the natural spring freshet would have drained into Lake Champlain. While the lake was high, the windstorms common in April and May would cause erosion damage to the gravely islands that Appie's rip-rapping sought to stop.

For several years I, and a handful of other young folks from the Mohawk Valley Hiking di, would spend many weekends at Appies Camp doing various things to help him in is campaign to protect the lake and the Adirondack wilderness.

Appie was a confirmed bachelor, and as such, had developed routines that rarely varied.  We would gather at his house on Teviot Place late Friday afternoon, pack our sleepier shop a i cada head for the lake.en the way, we invariably stopped at a butcher  where he had a standing order for lamb chops. His butcher friend saw to it that he gar choice cuts!

Reaching camp, we would get in a stack for dry wood, start the fire in the fireple. and, before long, would sit down to a fine meal of mashed potatoes, some vegetable, col those luscious lamb chops. Throughout all of this activity Appie would carry on a rapid in talk of past adventures, current strategy, and plans for the weekend. It was an exciting timk Sometimes several of us would take off with notebooks and movie cameras to record some sort of activity that would assist us in our campaign to alert the voting public on the facs about some activity that we believed was threatening the integrity of the wilderness.

One of my special jobs was to edit the movie film that was obtained in this manner. Some of our movies turned out to be of great importance in defeating attempts to modify the State Constitution.

While most of our activities at Appie's Camp were carried out in the summertime, we occasionally went there in the wintertime too. I remember one weekend when we were shown how to use a skate sail for ski sailing. We went north from Huddle Bay, through the Narrows, and up toward Rogers Rock. While the speed with skis driven by the wind is not as high as with skates, it is great fun and it eats up the distance quite remarkably. At the end of the day I discovered that my skis that did not have metal edges, and were quite the worse for wear!

While our activities with Apperson were intense for several years, we were followed by others who were more dedicated. Our "apprenticeship" with Appie was never to be a forgotten experience, and in fact after more than fifty-five years, we have never lost the "faith."