Bill Gluesing

By Vincent Schaefer


I met Bill Gluesing - a bachelor, - one of those who tried to catch Pancho Villa in the Mexican War - and lecturer par excellence of the "House of Magic" at General Electric when he joined the Mohawk Valley Hiking Club in the early Thirties.

One of my first memories of Bill was when he invited me to help him make photographic enlargements in Scotia where he was renting a room. That was the beginning of a long friendship with him which only ended with his death at his farm near Quaker Street where he had retired from the Company.

He had a camp above Fultonham in the Schoharie Valley - an old farmhouse he had renovated. It was not a productive farm, perched on a hillside with steep slopes in all directions. These abandoned hay and pasture fields were ideal for growing trees, so a small group of us from the Hiking Club spent weekends planting thousands of tiny trees in an effort to restore the original forest which had been mistakenly and with much labor removed in a vain effort to

establish a productive farm.

Bill had a venturesome spirit. Shortly after joining the Club he had plans with another club member, Bob Cromie, to take a long canoe trip toward Hudson's Bay. His plan was to explore the Albany and Abatibi Rivers of that region over a period of several weeks.

Before leaving, I made plans to meet them upon their return on the shores of Round Pond in the Adirondacks where I had scheduled an exploratory camping-canoeing trip for the Hiking Club.

Early in the afternoon of our first day at Round Pond, Bill and Bob met us at our camp site! They were full of stories about their highly successful adventure and showed us items they had purchased from some Indians encountered

one of his highly popular House of Magic Shows at the local high school. As part of his show Bill would make a strong pitch toward getting the local citizenry to cooperate in providing truck or bus service to the head of Pete Gray and Rabbit Pond Runs. The first run ended along the Hudson River, the other in what is now called the North Creek Ski Bowl. He would emphasize the slogan "Ride Up - Slide Down" and transportation would be available when the Snow Train arrived.

Everything worked out perfectly! An overflow crowd greeted Bill at the High School and a host of trucks were ready to take the Snow Train riders to the Barton Mines when the first train arrived on March 4, 1934.

Bill became so popular that it ended with the presentation of a log cabin and a small piece of land to Bill located at North River along the lower part of the stream which originates at 13th Lake.

One other amusing anecdote related to Bill and North Creek merits mention.

A few years later when New York City began to run trains to the Creek Bill and a few henchmen took a stuffed black bear up the side of Pete Gray Mountain at a time when the New York City skiers were taking their first run down the Pete Gfay Trail. As a neophyte skier would start to slow down after a nice ride down the mountain, the "bear handler" would push it out from behind a tree so the skier

saw it.

Needless to say - pandemonium occurred - the skier strapped into his or her bindings would fall and then try to run with skis still attached. Meanwhile Bill operated a movie camera to catch the action! Fortunately no one got hurt and when the victim recovered from the initial fright he or she would hide along the trail to watch the antics of the next innocent! We had lots of fun in those days!

more members of the Club fabricating mumny type sleeping bags each of which would contain three pounds of down. This was a fascinating learning experience for most of the male participants who had never before operated a sewing machine.

Many hilarious experiences ensued during that 1931 summer the most amusing being when Matt Bruhn stripped to his shorts on a humid, sweltering summer day and started to fill the muslin tubes which segregated the goose down in the lining of the bag. He was doing this in his closed garage. The technique followed in doing this was to reverse the flow of a vacuum cleaner, placing the suction tube in the storage bag of the down and the outlet pipe at the furthest end of the muslin tube, starting the motor and then withdrawing the pipe as the down feathers from its end. In some manner the pipe fell out of the tube and the free end continuing to emit a cloud of down soon filled the garage with a dense mass of floating feathers. Matt's sweaty body was a logical target for many of these feathers and he was soon completely covered to resemble a newly hatched

gosling! This episode was one of many which were frequently retold at Club gatherings.

As the Olympic Games period approached, everyone and the media were greatly concerned with a dearth of snow. Ordinarily at this time of year (February) the region would be covered with several feet of fluffy snow.

Despite the gloomy forecasts our group gathered and using whatever autos we could obtain, drove to Heart Lake. To our joy we found increasing amounts of snow after leaving the bare ground where the games were to be held and by the time we reached our camp site found we could just manage to plow through the accumulated snow.

I was with Bill Gluesing in his open air Model A Ford. We were properly clothed and had no problem with the cold air. Parking the car we hauled out our toboggan and loaded it with a three tiered pile of pack baskets, rucksacks and similar packs. Heading for the Leantos our overloaded toboggan

We drove to the Barton Garnet Mines, the drivers continuing down to meet us at the lower end of the trail where we had camped.

We had a marvelous downhill run finding that the old roads while being somewhat narrow had a grade which permitted very enjoyable skiing. On the way down we made plans to join them the following week to brush out the Rabbit Pond Trail on the northeast side of the mountain.

The following week I got a larger group to join us and we spent all Sunday working on clearing the old road. At lunch I made the suggestion that we form a loosely held group to be called the Gore Mountain Ski Club to consist of the active Trail workers of the North Creek Ski Club and the Schenectady Wintersports Club we had recently formed. This was agreed to. However for some reason (perhaps the name) the North Creek Ski Club seemed to disappear and the Gore Mountain Club was adopted by the local people as their organization.

During this period of rapidly developing projects we in Schenectady had been exploring the possibility of running Snow Trains as the B & M operated out of Boston. I contacted Fred Grant, Chief Passenger Agent of the B & M. He agreed to run a trial train out of Scotia, N.Y., to the vicinity of Wilmngton, Vermont, where we had previously found some excellent cross country territory. That winter of 1931 was a calamity as far as snow was concerned. For six consecutive weekends we planned a trip and then had to cancel it. We finally gave up! In 1934 we tried again - this time with North Creek as our destination working with the D & H Railroad.

Previous to making this decision Bill Gluesing and I "cooked up" a plan to get the townspeople of North Creek interested in our Gore Mountain plans. As our plan went -- I would approach Ken Bennett and several others of the local leaders of North Creek and suggest that they approach Bill Gluesing to give

tipped over strewing its load into the snow. We rectified that situation and soon had everything at the several leantos we planned to occupy for the duration of the Games.

A fascinating time was had! We slept warm (even with a temperature one morning of -40° F. ( ), had good campfire meals and wonderful companionship.

Since none of us had enough money to buy tickets to the formal competition, we contented ourselves with watching the practice runs, meeting some of the cross country skiers and the German bobsled team (at the Lake Placid Hospital after their accident). We went ski joring on Mirror Lake being pulled by Bill's Lizzie, skated with some of the professional skaters but in general found that the attraction of the deep snows at Mts. Marcy, MeIntyre and at Indian Pass were

so attractive that we spent more time there than around the hauled in snow at the ski jump and other events at Lake Placid. 

As a special Correspondent to the Schenectady Gazette I managed to write a daily account of our activities which was published the next morning.

As a result of the widespread radio and newspaper account of the Olympic Games, several members of the North Creek American legion decided to clear some ski trails on Gore Mountain and its satellite peaks. I saw an account of their plans in our local Union Star newspaper and immediately made contact with Ken (Judge) Bennett, the head of the North Creek group, and volunteered to have a group of skiers from our hiking club help them in clearing trails. These were graded wood roads which were all over the Mountain.

We were invited up to meet them and to be the first to ski the Pete Gray Trail which had just been brushed and had a good base of snow. Accordingly, Bill and I and several of our friends went up to North Creek on Saturday, camped in the snow along the North River Road and met the North Creek group Sunday morning.

along the way. This rendezvous was typical of the exciting and enjoyable activities which marked the early phases of our Club's programs. To my great pleasure this same sense of fun and companionship still pervades our still active Club after more than sixty years!

A year or so after I founded the Mohawk Valley Hiking Club I saw the need for an organization which would concentrate its efforts on encouraging winter sports such as skiing, skating, ice sailing and snow shoeing in our region. I assembled the leaders of the many outdoor clubs in the Schenectady area and out of the meeting emerged the Schenectady Wintersports Club.

As part of this activity Bill and I and several of our friends surveyed a number of mountains in the North Creek-Newcomb area for cross country skiing trails. One of our first objectives were the trails to the summits of  Vanderwerker and Goodnow Mountain near Newcomb. We camped in the snow close to the spot on the Newcomb Road where it crosses the Boreas River. While there we were visited by a Flock of Boreal chickadees, the : brown caps in sharp contrast to our companiable black capped variety.

We found the trails to the summit quite skiable and in a few weeks Guy Suits published my sketches of the trails in his weekly Ski Column in the Schenectady Gazette.

One of our most ambitious projects during this early period was a plan to establish a winter camp in the Adirondacks during the 1932 World Olympic Games.

Bill and I went to the Lake Placid Club in 1931 to seek permission to occupy the open face Adirondack Lean-tos at Heart Lake adjacent to Adirondac Loj which was

their property. This permission was granted and the Hiking Club embarked upon a very ambitious program of constructing down filled sleeping bags following the Apperson-Langmuir design. I bought bolts of balloon cloth, many yards of muslin, great quantities of first class grey goose down and we soon had about twenty or