Tag: #chautauqua

NOT THAT KIND OF CASINO; BEMUS POINT, NY

Crank up your search engines.

Now Google Count Basie, Lena Horne, Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, Buddy Rich, Old Blue Eyes (Frank Sinatra), Sammy Kaye, Ozzy Nelson (of Ozzie and Harriet fame), Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman.

You’ve just surveyed the most famous entertainers from the 1930’ and 40’s, world renown performers of music and theater, classical big bands, jazz musicians, stand-up comedians, multi-talented entertainers. People who could book and fill any arena in the country from coast to coast, Carnegie and Radio City Music Halls, The Cotton Club, The Biltmore.

One of the prize bookings of these famous artists was The Village Casino, right here in Bemus Point, New York. Every person from the above list, among others, performed in that building.

It’s a behemoth, “The Casino”, sitting lakeside like a fortress, guarding the middle of Chautauqua Lake on the Bemus side, the natural half-way point for vehicle and boat travel between Mayville and Jamestown, New York, on a prime spit of land. As you enter the narrows from the water, its unmistakable profile welcomes you to the recreation focal point of the lake. It was built in 1930, purportedly on old local Indian tribal meeting grounds, next to the Bemus Village Park. Pittsburgh industrialist James Selden had the recreation center constructed for the Village of Bemus Point, riding the momentum and popularity of the Celoron Park movement, huge hotels rimming the lake and steamboats transporting people up and down Chautauqua. Like the Celoron pavilion, he equipped it with a dining presence, a dance hall, and bowling alleys on the second floor. During the 1930’s and 40’s that building was one of the most “if these walls could talk” venues in all of New York State.

Through the years, The Village Casino has gone through several iterations, but always comes back to defining itself as a place for food, drinks and entertainment. In the fifties and sixties, it had a carnival park atmosphere as a beach house and bowling alley. In the 80’s, back to a bar and restaurant, accessible by lake traffic. Entertainment picked up again and the facility hosted popular bands like Rusted Root and The 10,000 Maniacs.

And then came the chicken wings.

In 1982, as the wing became popular in Western New York as a meal, rather than waste, the Casino jumped on that phenomenon. At least 14,819 chickens sacrificed the gift of flight so that 29,638 of their wings could be eaten in a twenty-four-hour period. It was a Guinness World record at the time and restored Bemus Point on the map of popular culture, if only that particular slice that enjoys a spicy chicken wing and eccentric world records.

In 1999 the Carlson family took charge of the restaurant, bar and entertainment. They did a comprehensive remodel, added a game room, ice cream parlor, a deck for lake-side dining of about 120 guests, inside and bar seating for another 200. There are forty dock slips and wait-staff restaurant service right out to your boat. The banquet hall where the legends from the past performed is available for events and seats another 300.

Bemus Point has been the summer entertainment mecca on Chautauqua Lake for decades. It’s the product of its central location, especially with the Veterans Memorial Bridge as an east-west access conduit. The Village Casino has served as the anchor for Bemus, sitting hard on the shores with a rich history of service to patrons that stretches back as far as can be remembered.

It’s owned and operated by local entrepreneur Andrew Carlson, and still hosts live entertainment by local and regional acts every Friday and Saturday evening through Labor Day. As their web site states: We continue our commitment to be the area’s best and most affordable in casual waterfront dining, with an environment that allows you to relax, enjoy, make new friends, and reacquaint with old friends!

The Village Casino is located at 1 Lakeside Drive in Bemus Point. For more information call 386-2333 or visit www.bemuspointcasino.com.

Postscript: In 2018, when the sober esteem of 1982 Guinness record had worn off, the Carlson family served up another 42,210 chicken wings breaking their own record. It was not a good day for poultry in Chautauqua County.

IT’S THE TEETH!!

It’s the teeth. And that jutting jaw, the epitome of arrogance and brutish malice. Long muscular torso, thick in the middle, piercing, uncaring eyes. Bigger, stronger, faster than everyone else.

But the teeth. You notice immediately, five hundred at least, more in some of the larger beasts. The fangs are tightly positioned, small and needle-like, angled inward to keep prey from escape, razor sharp to shred live food that struggles.

     Then there’s the behavior, predatory, vicious, lurking, springing from the weeds, leaping to attack and eat the first thing that moves, carnivorous, cannibalistic, devouring its own kind if opportunity presents, even the metal of something man-made, it simply doesn’t care in its frenzy to feed. There’s no discretion, no apologies. It’s hungry, it eats, a notoriously fierce fish (anglers say it will attack the propeller of a trolling motor, while every other life form in the lake will swim from it.

Todd Young has been chartering muskie expeditions on Chautauqua Lake for eighteen years, hosting bucket-list enthusiasts from all over the country looking to battle the largest member of the pike family; catching a muskellunge is that much of an adventure on Chautauqua Lake. It’s a daunting, wildly rewarding industry (the nickname of the muskie is “The Fish of 10,000 Casts”). Todd knows every square quad of Chautauqua Lake. He knows the water; he knows the fish.      

     “We go where the fish are, lower lake, upper basin. I’ve taken hundreds of people onto the lake to catch muskie.”

Dude knows his fish, especially the prize catch on Chautauqua Lake, the muskellunge.

Muskie are intentionally established on Chautauqua Lake (one subspecies is named The Chautauqua Muskellunge). Muskie management became a thing in the late 1800s, when the first hatcheries in the country were built along the shores near Bemus Point. The local hatchery effort, overseen by the state DEC, is now located at Prendergast Point. It’s a calculated process stocking the lake with an apex predator. In 2022, 13,000 fingerlings from six to nine inches long were released into the lake, understanding that about a third of those will survive a season; too many muskie eating the fish supply could seriously disrupt the lake ecosystem. That management, and the general stewardship from fishing charters like Todd’s Muddy Creek Fishing Guides has made the 13,000 acres of Chautauqua Lake a premier muskie fishing destination.

     “We are completely catch and release,” Todd says. “There are fish we catch that I recognize that I’ve caught before. We’re very careful about bringing them onto the boat. We only fight them for a few minutes, it can be a great battle they’re so big and strong, but if you exhaust them you might kill them.”

And muskie get big, it’s not uncommon to pull in one thirty-five pounds or more. The largest on record was sixty-nine pounds, fifteen ounces, average usually less than forty inches long and might weigh from seven to fifteen pounds. Muskie can live up to thirty years.

     “We use heavy equipment, put six lines in the water, and hope to average two catches a day.  There’s a small window for catching them when they are in a feeding cycle. Once they’ve eaten, sometimes up to twenty percent of their body weight, they sit still for up to five days digesting. But when they eat, they are very aggressive.

     During their feeding cycle, they’ll eat other fish up to a third of their own size. More than once I’ve seen one floating on the lake that tried to eat another fish that was just too big. They’re not particularly smart fish, when it’s time to eat they don’t much care what they go after.”

Todd thinks the lake has seen a bit of a resurgence, more fish are living longer, getting bigger. “We were seeing red spots on the fish the past few years, an unhealthy sign. We don’t see that on catches now. A four-footer can be twenty years old. That takes a lot of care from fishing to get one to be that old. But that’s the future of our lake, fishing for sport and letting them go.”

You could spend a worse day on Chautauqua Lake than in the care of Muddy Creek Fishing Guides. Check them out at https://mcfishnguides.com), or give Todd a call at 724 674-3839.

FROM PAIN COMES HOPE

“Initially it was only pain for me, and there’s still a hole that won’t go away. It took several years to accept that the hole wouldn’t go away. Eventually that loss also became a source of perspective and peace that I have drawn on as strengths in other challenging situations, both personally and professionally. She taught us to always stay positive….so…that’s what I try to do.”  

                                                                                    Todd Weatherby

Measuring time in a white blood cell count is as excruciating as it sounds, a lethal diagnostic benchmark. Those are heavy days, heavy hours, barely bearable waiting for the stock ticker to report in the day’s highs or lows. Registering your mortality like the temperature of your body, of your life.

Todd Weatherby is a local product, graduating from Southwestern High School. Two months ago, he joined Siemens AG, an $80 billion global technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, transport, and healthcare. He is CEO of their professional services division, Siemens Advanta. On his way to this position Todd held leadership roles in several technology companies you might recognize: Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon. He was responsible for the launch of Amazon Web Services ProServe, that ubiquitous AWS brand you see everywhere on TV.

Sharon Kunkel (Weatherby) was his mother. She was an intensive care nurse at WCA Hospital in Jamestown and attended nursing school at Jamestown Community College. In 1984 Sharon died of acute leukemia.

     “Acute seems like an understatement,” Todd says. “From the time she complained of symptoms that she described as feeling like mono, or the flu, she was gone in just twelve days. Most of that time was spent at the hospital in Erie where they were guessing at the cause and the treatment. Easily the most traumatic experience of my life. Impacted me in ways that I’ll never fully understand.”

It was tragedy on a titanic scale for the people who knew and adored Sharon, and it’s impossible to say for certain if her death informed Todd’s success (though you don’t have to be a psychologist to suggest such a thing). But from her death, as from so many others whose memories deserve cherishing, came a glimpse of hope.

The Chautauqua Region Community Foundation (CRCF) is a major depository of philanthropic giving and scholarships in the county. It administers over seven-hundred endowments in support of emerging community needs, charitable organizations, and local students pursuing higher education. The organization has a community-wide, big-net mission to do more than process donations; they are also “deeply committed to creating a vibrant region where every resident feels connected and has the opportunity to thrive” (per their website).

In 1978, a group of Chautauqua County citizen commissioned a national expert on community foundations to explore the possibility of setting up an endowed fund to support the area. That originating group included some important names in the cadre of Chautauqua benefactors; Carl Cappa, Barbara Carlson, Betty Erickson, Francis Grow, Miles Lasser, Elizabeth Lenna, Marion Panzarella, Richard Parker, Samuel Price, Sr., John Sellstrom, and Kenneth Strickler. The expert inferred that the area was too small to support a significant endowment but was impressed enough with the level of charitable giving here that he endorsed the creation of a foundation in Chautauqua. The history of the CRCF reads, “The Chautauqua region was very fortunate to have a forward-thinking group of individuals who saw the need for a community foundation. These individuals gave their gifts of time, dedication and leadership, in seemingly endless amounts and are the very reason CRCF exists today.”

Nearly 40 years after her passing, the memory of Sharon Kunkel lives on in the spirit of her two sons Todd and Tim, their families, and in the Sharon Kunkel Nursing Scholarship. In those four decades, there have been 48 students awarded, twelve of which were awarded multiple times (62 total awards) totaling $32,379.

     Lisa Lynde, the Donor Services Officer at CRCF gives a recent history of the scholarship: “In 2022 we had eleven qualifiers, in 2023 we had nineteen. Last year our Healthcare Scholarship Selection committee, made up of a group of volunteers with healthcare backgrounds really liked the applicants, one stood out, and two others were great candidates, so they decided to give the biggest portion to the first choice, and then divide the balance between the remaining two.

Todd and his wife Lynda have two kids Kyle and Dana. Tim Weatherby and his wife Mary have two kids Lynn and Maxwell.  They continue to support nursing students in WNY via this CRCF scholarship in their mother’s memory.

Donations to grow the Sharon Kunkel Nursing Scholarship Fund can be made online at crcfonline.org/give or by mailing a check to Chautauqua Region Community Foundation, 418 Spring St., Jamestown, NY 14701.

For more information visit www.crcfonline.org or contact Lisa Lynde, Donor Services Officer at 716-661-3390 or llynde@crcfonline.org .

A Really Good (not Great) Lake

In the northern part of Chautauqua County, between the lake there and the Great Lake Erie, there’s a place where the earth curves. Actually, there’s many such hills, but this one’s special.

The Chautauqua Ridge is a demarcation of confluence. It plays a small part in splitting the continent in half, between north and south. It’s a rare geological marvel, and it’s right here, where we live. The old saw goes that if there was a building built in the middle of the ridge, that rain falling on the north side would end up in the Atlantic Ocean (Lake Erie to the Saint Lawrence Seaway), and a rain falling on the south side would eventually be deposited in the Gulf of Mexico (Chadakoin to Conewango Creek, Allegheny, Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, past New Orleans into the gulf).

Along that southern route is Lake Chautauqua.

Chautauqua is fed by a dozen or so arterial creeks (Ball, Bemus, Big Inlet, Dewittville, Dutch Hollow, Goose, Lighthouse, Little Inlet, Maple Springs, Mud and Prendergast). At its widest Chautauqua is about two miles. It has a northern and southern basin that squeeze together roughly in the middle. The narrows at Stow and Bemus Point is where the lake is most bridgeable, crossed now New York Interstate 86, and by the Bemus Point ferry on the water. The lake is 17-miles long, a straight-line run from Mayville to Celoron. About forty-one miles is lakefront property, all but about three miles of that privately owned.

     Most people who live on the lake have an attitude of stewardship toward this valuable local resource. It is a prized geological, glacial-built wonder. It is a beacon, and a challenge. The beacon part is obvious, a recreation designation for boaters, fishermen and fisherwomen, and all the entertainment that goes with an easily navigable, accessible body of water.

The challenge? Well, that’s a little more complicated.

The reliance on a lake for the overall financial health of a population can be tenuous. Currently Chautauqua Lake provides the money, the resources, the sustenance of life for much of the south-county population (intermixed with agriculture and manufacturing to be sure). According to the Chautauqua County Office for Media Information, sixty-six percent of visitors to the county use the lake, raising just over $282 million a year. Lakeside municipalities reinvest about $3.2 million back into the lake. The rest of the revenue helps keep businesses open and food on tables via hospitality commerce, and taxes (about 47% of county sales tax is generated annually by lake-border municipalities).

The natural evolution of lakes, what becomes of them in geological timeframes, is that they become forests. Just as water seeks its level, so does the earth. It’s a function of gravity pulling everything down to the lowest points available. Lakes fill in, that’s their natural lifecycle. Runoff from watersheds brings silt and seeds and debris. It settles into the deeper parts of any body of water. Human beings have always been hard on lakes. They invariable get used by populations as depositories for waste. Developing land around lakes, usually the most attractive property, strips a lake of its watershed vegetation and replaces it with construction and chemical residuals. Man-made chemicals cultivate lake weeds that are usually harmful to lake-life.

But as much as man can contribute to the decline of a lake, so can we delay that process, and Chautauqua has champions, people who care for it. Randy Holcomb has been professionally involved with the area around the lake for 47 years (38 in the town assessor’s office and the past nine on the Lakewood Village board). Safe to say he has a feel for the health of the lake, and he is confident in the future of the lower basin as an entertainment and recreation resource. “We welcome the challenge of maintaining lake as a great place to live and visit, Lakewood and Celoron in particular.” His enthusiasm for the future of the lower basin is infectious. “Last year was one of the best we’ve had on the lake in a few years. We’re looking forward to another great summer.”

Chautauqua Lake isn’t in jeopardy of filling in any time soon.