William F. Madden, Jr., Interview

The following interview with Bill Madden, Jr., present owner of Madden's Transfer and Storage took place on March, 12, 2010 at his office at 187 River Street in Saranac Lake. It came about because Dave Carmicheal, the chief archivist of the state of Georgia, and a friend of Historic Saranac Lake board member Rich Loeber, discovered via this wiki that the Tousley Building in Saranac Lake was the original storage facility for Iron Mountain, an international records storage corporation. Other participants included Amy Catania, the Executive Director of HSL; Mary Hotaling, HSL's Architectural Historian; Marc Wanner, the primary developer of the wiki, and Mike Lynch, a long-time employee of Maddens.

Rich:	Well, the reason we wanted to take a look at the Tousley building is because Amy made a comment to me about it being an important record storage facility at one time, and my friend, David here, is the official archivist for the state of Georgia. He was interested after seeing Marc's write-up about it at the Wiki site.	</img>[[File:Tousley Storage Building.jpg|right|thumb
Dave:
Bill:
Dave:
Amy:
Dave:
Bill:
Amy:
Dave:
Bill:
Dave:
Bill:
Mary:
Mary:	Neither of these buildings was built to be storage buildings, were they?	</img>[[File:NYC Safe.jpg|left|thumb
Bill:	No, this was a Curling Club. There is picture of it here. The one down street was built for all its valuables and government records. |
Mary:
Bill:
Mary:
Bill:	When I was about…(this high) and I went in there and here's two guards with machine guns guarding a car. It was during the bootlegging days…the end of it. It was Dutch Schultz's car. |
Mary:
Bill:
Mary:
Bill:
Mary:
Bill:
Mary:
Bill:	No, No. Anybody, pretty near anybody I went to school with at one time or another worked in one of the TB houses, or like, uh you know, Trudeau San. Any of the private homes or the homes. Every kid worked there either serving tables or serving meals or doing anything.|
Mary:	Well, you grew up around the corner on Lake Flower Avenue. |
Bill:
Marc:
Bill:
Amy:
Bill:
Mary:
Bill:	Since 1895. There's a picture of some of the horses. That was right behind ah, the Quonset hut down on the parking lot.	</img> , undated |
Mary:
Bill:
Mary:
Bill:
Mary:
Marc:	It was also Bombard's one point, Giles Bombard? |
Bill:
Marc:	I think Bombards one time owned it.	</img>[[File:William Madden.jpg|left|thumb
Bill:
Mary:
Bill:
Mary:
Bill:	Yeah, then he moved over to, he had the place where the original Dew Drop's was... before Dew Drop had it, way back.|
Mary:
Bill:
Mary:
Bill:
Mary:
Bill:	There was the Dwyer Drug Store downstairs.|
Mary:
Bill:	No, Dwyers was upstairs and he was downstairs. Then we bought this building, then we bought the LaPan Highway property, then we bought the Tousley. I still refer to it as Tousley.|
Mary:
Bill:
Mary:	Your family house was on the corner of Church Street and Helen, right?|
Bill:	My grandfather built that house, my father was born in that house. Kitty-corner across from the Methodist Church. |
Mary:
Bill:
Mary:
Bill:
Mary:
Bill:
Mary:
Bill:	This one was completed in 1928. The Tousley building was completed in 1928, I think. There had to be a big…'cause it was the year I was born…But the Curling Club was originally across the road. Then they bought that and then they built this because they needed a bigger, a wider one. And they built this one and uh, Walter Cluett from the shirt company, he come down one day and this was all open and they used to have dances. There was like a restaurant, a stove that end. And all this was glass, which looked out over the warehouse, or out over the ice. And uh, it Cluett come down one day just as they were building this addition and he said, "I want a fireplace." And they built…he donated twenty five hundred dollars to build a fireplace, and they tell me today it couldn't be built but for to seventy-five thousand dollars.	</img>[[File:Fireplace.jpg|right|thumb
Mary:
Bill:
Mary:
Mary:
Bill:
Amy:
Bill:
Dave:
Bill:	No…No, I told him you haven't got enough money. But some of those up there are some of the old coin box ones…up on the top there. And they literally drop in and listen, whether it was a quarter or a dime. I have a couple more. We haven't put them up yet. One of them come out of that Howard Hughes airplane that crashed on Johnson Mountain. This was in 1973.	</img>[[File:New Curling Rink2.jpg|left|thumb
Mary:
Bill:
Mary:
Bill:
Mary:
Bill:
Mary:
Bill:
Marc:	What's that?	</img>[[File:Lamella roof.jpg|right|thumb	Interior of the arched Lamella roof structure of the new Curling Rink| ]]|
Bill:	That's an old horn that came off a boat in Upper Saranac Lake we had to pull out. It sunk so they gave me the horn.|
Mary:
Bill:
Mary:
Bill:
Rich:
Mike:
Comment:
Mike:
Comment:
Comment:
Marc:
Mike:
Rich:
Mike:
Mary:
Mike:
Mary:
Mike:
Mary:
Mike:
Comment: