Evelyn Outcalt Interview

My name is Gerry Waterson and today we are interviewing Evelyn Outcalt. The date is December 28, 2010. This part of the Historic Saranac Lake old history project and we are located here at the Saranac Village at Will Rogers in Saranac Lake, NY. (Also in attendance was Skip Outcalt, Evelyn's son, and Priscilla Goss, a Board Member of Historic Saranac Lake. They asked a few questions in the interview.

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EO:	Sort of. When I told the man at the head of the New Jersey Press Association that I was moving to Saranac Lake and I was feeling kind of depressed about it because Saranac Lake had just had a lot of trouble in their schools and I said I don’t know, I think we’re being banished to Siberia and he said, oh don’t feel like that, Saranac Lake isn’t so bad, he said, in fact I know the editor of the paper up there. How would you like to go to work on a paper? And I said that sounds pretty good and he kept his word. He wrote to the editor of the paper and the editor of the paper called me in, Roger Tubby, and Jim Loeb was there too, there were two owners, but he knew Roger. They called me in and there was an opening, I think it was a part time job at first, oh now I remember, they wanted someone to work as the editor of a little weekly they put out in the Winter called the Schussboomer, it was about Winter sports and I said oh I can’t do that I’m sorry, I’d love to try it, but you’d be disappointed in my work. I don’t know anything about Winter sports, I never went skiing, I don’t anything about, I didn’t know what a bobsled was, so they said well you know, thank you for being frank and oh they wanted me to do that in the morning and work in the afternoon in the front office and so anyway, then they called me back and they, and I guess I said I didn’t want to do office work either, so then they called me back and said would you want to just work half a day just on the newspaper part and I said yes and so I took the job and I don’t know, I worked there until I retired really.|
GW:	What other jobs did you have at the Enterprise? I mean you started off at the low end.|
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EO:	Proofreading, yeah. I did some proofreading and wrote little articles about things going on in town and kept the calendar and I don’t know, gradually I just got, I guess I did that and I kept doing more in the way of reporting, but I always was interested in the state and national news and we had an Associated Press machine and usually in the summer they’d hire a college girl to come, and they’d usually put her, I think it was always a girl, maybe once a man, put him on the press machine and I’d go on during my regular job so one year when they were getting ready to hire, I asked my boss, by this time the paper had been sold and a man named Bill Dolittle owned the paper, so I said you know, you’re going to hire someone to do the other job, the main desk and I’ll go on doing what I always do. I said why don’t you let me do that for the summer and just hire someone to fill in for me. So he said, well I had never thought of that, okay. So anyway, I got over there and I guess I never got back on the other desk again, I stayed.|
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EO:	Yeah, I always worked at my church. Presbyterian Church.|
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EO:	Well, it was with another woman, Judy Kratz and I, let’s see, we both were working, there came a time when they couldn’t afford to have a secretary at church and different women in the church were volunteering and I was one of them and my friend Judy Kratz was one and, oh as we worked we found we couldn’t, we were trying to straighten out the records because in the Presbyterian Church you keep a record of the time someone joins the church and all the different offices they held up until the present and we were trying to bring that record up to the present and we found we just couldn’t. The records were so bad. So what we needed were all the old books that had been sent to Philadelphia to the Presbyterian archival place and asked, we kept, first I guess we called them and asked them questions and finally we asked so many questions we decided we needed to see the books ourselves and our minister wrote and he got them for us and that was very interesting, we had from the very first meeting we had all the records and we had, I think we had everything but the financial records and someone had thrown those away. They thought they didn’t need them anymore and they had thrown them away, but we had all the others and we spent about two years going through them, did I tell you this before, I had a card table set up in a little extra room I had at home and we called it the Presbyterian Historical Society because we just left the card table up and the books were always open and we didn’t have to close them up and every night when we got though our work, so we just left them there.|

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GW:	I bet you the present pastor, Joanne is very happy that you did all that.|
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GW:	Yeah, I was a resident, my boyhood was spent here in Saranac Lake and I had a doctor that I didn’t know was very famous, his name was Francis Trudeau and I didn’t even know that he was related to this cartoonist, I had to look it up one day, but my home really is Saranac Lake still. I didn’t live here that long, but it’s always been my home and I just wanted to know, you know, you’ve been here for years, I think people come here and then they love it if they didn’t to begin with.|
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