Downhill Plunge, All the Way

By Frank Trippett

One final event as Lake Placid adjusts to obscurity

The torch was out, the crowd was gone.

Gaudy banners snapped with irrelevant verve in an emptied winter wonderland. To the casual eye, it appeared that the 13th Olympic Winter Games were over and done with. Yet one final, unlisted event was under way well before the last athletes had straggled out of Olympic Village. The happening: the great downhill plunge from celebrity to obscurity. The sole entrant: Lake Placid, N.Y. (pop. 2,700), U.S.A.

The course of the descent was so precipitous it would have scared the average downhiller into the snowshoe competition. It was almost straight down, the distance, precisely, from hurrah to blah. The time of the drop was nearly instantaneous. One moment Lake Placid was the most tumultuous news spot on earth, the next it was an amiable litter of vacancy signs. One moment it was the riveting center of the media's eldritch universe; the next it was just another out-of-the-way resort more or less waiting for next summer's convention of volunteer firemen.

The transformation involved far more than the post-party droops, more even than anguish at the loss of customers and of a brief but vivid camaraderie. There was, as well, a sort of collective separation anxiety--a strictly modern malaise that occurs when a place newly spoiled by celebrity is suddenly disconnected from the media's great glory machine. Lake Placid's inevitable plunge began when TV and the whole journalistic shebang unplugged itself and disappeared.

Suddenly the merriment was gone, the cosmopolitan chatter, the exultations of triumph. In the postlude, longtime Mayor Robert Peacock confessed that the biggest event he could now look forward to was "a good night's sleep." Editor Ronald Landfried of the weekly Lake Placid News wrote of a "nagging feeling of melancholy." Librarian Therese Dixon admitted to a "tinge of sadness." She missed the foreigners who dropped in off Main Street to snatch a look at such papers as Le Monde, Corriere della Sera and the Neues Deutschland--publications ordered for the convenience of the Olympic crowd.

Main Street itself was back to being --well, Main Street. On the first post-Olympic day, graying John Jesmer, emerged with a moneybag from the liquor store he manages. What now? "Well, I guess I'll look forward to summer," he said. He headed on toward the Bank of Lake Placid after noting, "At least the traffic is back on Main Street."

That, in fact, was the biggest news in the village the day after it plunged out of the center of the world. Cars and buses and trucks were driving up and down the village's narrow main thoroughfare. Gone was the animated pedestrian mall achieved by blockades, state troopers and an exasperating, temporary one-way traffic system. Gone were the strollers, gawkers, jugglers, hawkers, hustlers, evangels, barterers. Gone were the ski-pantsed snow bunnies and gone, too, were the gaggles of boozy young celebrators lurching about singing God Bless Our Hockey Team to the tune of God Bless America.

And what of the future? Municipal leaders vied with officials of the Lake Placid Olympic Organizing Committee in expressing confidence that all the publicity would carry the village into continuing prosperity. Such hopes, however, contradicted the private mutterings of most townsmen. It was a rare citizen who did not express fears that the gasoline crunch, plus economic conditions generally, will leave Lake Placid exactly what it has long been: merely one of a cluster of competing resorts in one of the chronically depressed areas of New York State.

Still, along with the hoping, there was some planning last week. Lake Placid and L.P.O.O.C. officials said they were talking to some sports officials about the possible use of the village's facilities for world-class competitions. And the L.P.O.O.C. was still working to get Lake Placid designated as the permanent Winter Games training center. Few plans seemed to have matured, however, and all that was sure about the future of the Olympic facilities was that Olympic Village will soon be a minimum security federal prison, and the big broadcast center will become a municipal garage.

Immediate chores kept the village more or less busy last week. Vans and trucks hulked into town to remove tons of equipment that had been lugged in for the use of entrepreneurs and news people. Almost frantically, the L.P.O.O.C. began the herculean task of transforming Lake Placid High School from an international press center back into the educational facility it had been until last January when the kids began a long vacation to make way for some 3,000 media people. Not until the kids are back in class is the village likely to feel quite normal--if ever it does.

In any event, few villagers would disagree with the sentiments of the Rev. Bernard Fell, the president of the L.P.O.O.C., who last week was hard at work on the sermon he would deliver to his 91-member United Methodist Church the coming Sunday. He guessed that Lake Placid would "never again see anything as great" as the Games it just staged. Probably not. Still, the truth is that Lake Placid persisted in an abnormal mood of prideful and nostalgic anticlimax during all the years after the 1932 Winter Games were held there. This year's extravaganza might feed local esprit for another 48 years. And even if it does not, life goes on, pleasantly. The village remains, as always, a congenial interruption of Route 86 in the picturesque vastness of the soaring north country. --Frank Trippett

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