Gordy and Inez Rudd’s Red & White Grocery Store
Before the small, independently owned and operated Red & White country food stores, with their signature red dot logo, spread throughout the Adirondack Park’s towns, there was usually one family member who distinguished herself as the best baker. Family members might claim her pies, cakes, doughnuts and salt-rising bread could equal or exceed any commercially produced product.
This was in the days when “Saratoga potatoes” originally appeared in the American diet. Anne Gertrude Sneller, who was my mother’s English teacher in 1927 at North High School in Syracuse, remembered those days in her autobiography, A Vanished World. In that world, her Aunt Welt was one of the women in her church who could be trusted to make the new potato goodies. There were no commercial Saratoga potatoes (not yet called “chips”) in the 1870s, so Aunt Welt and two other women were always selected to furnish them for church functions.
“I watched Aunt Welt the first time she ever made them,” Anne Sneller wrote. “There was a large kettle of fresh fine lard boiling away over the wood fire; clean white towels covered the kitchen table; and, standing like a priestess before it, Aunt Welt cut the pared potatoes so thin they were transparent. Next she laid the slices in rows on the white cloths to absorb any bit of moisture, and, when all was ready, she dropped the slices into the boiling fat, leaving them only long enough to reach the right shade of golden brown. Then out they came, crisp and delectable, and were spread again on the cloths. A few less perfectly perfect ones were put aside to taste for salt and flavor, and I was allowed to sample these and report. The report was always favorable.”
These seemingly unconnected thoughts of the country store and snack foods like potato chips come to mind because I clearly recall shopping at Rudds’ Red & White store in Inlet, when my family camped each summer at nearby Eighth Lake Campground from the late 1940s through the early 1960s.
Rudds’ storefront was filled with cases of soda pop, crates of watermelon and cantaloupes, bushel baskets and crates spilling over with vegetables and fruit, and sacks of potatoes. The shelves inside were lined with canned goods, packaged foods, commercial bread, and sweet breads. Mom and Dad swore by the quality of the meat Gordon “Gordy” Rudd kept inside the glass case in the butcher section of the store. I always hoped the grocery basket would also contain a big box of Jean’s Potato Chips.
I remember Gordon telling my father about the Moose River Plains, about three miles from Eighth Lake Campground. Once the private lumber road opened to the public, my parents took a drive through The Plains, while my sister and I sat in the back seat hand-cranking the windows up to prevent clouds of dust from invading each time a car passed us on the narrow, bumpy dirt track.
I don’t recall if we took a picnic lunch on that first trip. I do recall that the backcountry was not like the woods I was used to, where we pitched our tent in the campground. We began at the gate at Limekiln Lake outside Inlet, turned east at the junction to the Indian Clearing or Big Plains, drove past Cedar River Flow and exited onto Route 30 at Indian Lake. At that point we drove to Blue Mountain Lake, where we turned south onto Route 28 and back to our Eighth Lake campsite. It was a long drive. I remember it as a wild but interesting territory.
I never forgot that deep wildland core of backwoods. The Plains was my destination when I had my first deer hunting experience in the latter years of the 1960s. Armed with the state’s official pamphlet, a general map and guide called “Moose River Recreation Area,” and two dated 1954 U.S. Geological Survey maps (Old Forge and West Canada Lake), I quickly became a Moose River Plains enthusiast.
The official guide says the state purchased the core of this area “from the Gould Paper Company in December 1963. Past logging activity and road development have had a great influence on both the natural resources of the area and use by the general public.”
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