Elka Park

Elka Park lodge in 1909

October 10, 1992
Schoharie Creek, near Elka Park, NY
Entered water below bridge. Water was high, murky. Went down stream about ¼ milefound a nice placid stretch with holding water. No sign of fish anywhere. An occasional sculpin.



There were certainly trout in that river. If there were sculpins to feed upon, you can be sure that the higher ranking fish on the food chain would be there to feed upon them. The one thing that is certain is that where there are resources, there will be consumers to exploit them.



Schoharie Creek is a classic Catskill creek. I was there visiting a place called Elka Park. This was a mountain-top group of cottages that were built in the 1890’s by industrial titans from New Jersey and New York. While most people think of Newark, New Jersey as a place of race riots during the 1960s or Italian delis and pork stores as depicted in the Sopranos series, back in the 19th century, Newark was an industrial powerhouse that kept pace with New York, Brooklyn and Philadelphia in terms of economic output and wealth. Elka Park was probably balanced between Newark and New York in its wealth base. The cottages would be called mansions or at the very least large homes by modern standards. These were strictly homes were summer homes and the main activities were hiking in the woods, swimming in the streams and playing tennis. The Elka Park association which is still in existence has rougly 20 homeowners who maintain the gravel roads, the small clubhouse, tennis courts and an old tower on the property that accords views of the surrounding mountains overlooking the famed town of Woodstock.



Tina Constable’s (nee Zabriskie) parents owned the Victorian style Gingerbread cottage where we stayed. If memory serves me, the cottage had been in their family for nearly 100 years and Tina and her husband Rob have now taken on the burden and joy of maintaining the property. Nearly 15 years after this entry Rob Constable and I work for the same conglomerate – IAC – owned by Barry Diller, which encompasses hundreds of businesses, and brokers nearly any transaction you can imagine on the Internet from colorful rings on the Home Shopping Network to concert tickets to see the Dalai Lama on Ticketmaster.com and time-shares in Cancun.



Rob is a product of the East coast Northern Jersey prep-school set, though his 6’ 4” frame, wire-rimmed glasses and booming voice makes him a bit of an anomaly among the standard blue-eyed square jawed lacrosse players most people associate with prep schools and country clubs.



Rob recently revealed to me the factors that contributed to his somewhat humorous take on his surroundings and social scene. While at the Kent School in Northwestern Connecticut at the age of 13 Rob was kept back a grade. This was before his adolescent growth spurt that resulted in his shooting up 8 inches over one summer. Consequently he says he was viewed as a bit of a clod and was treated accordingly in the rough and tumble world of an all male boarding school. In his junior year after the growth spurt occurred he became more athletic and his new found physical size, along with a finely tuned sense of humor and self-deprecation allowed him to overcome some of the social stigma of being left back, though his wholesale reinvention would have to wait until college.



He went on to Lafayette College, a classic “B” list, sub-potted Ivy school in Easton, PA. There he was able to “parlay” (a common Rob Constable term) his new height, athletic ability and prep-school pedigree into this new and improved version of himself.



His wife Tina, I had met while working for Crown Publishers which was acquired by Random House. Tina and I started in the publicity department under former nun Nancy Kahan, a woman with a flair for promotion. She had launched the careers of Judith Krantz, Jean Auel and Martha Stewart. Tina is now a force in her own right having worked with authors like Deepak Chopra and budding presidential candidate Barak Obama. A one woman power plant she is constantly on the go and has the stamina of a tribe of marauding Vikings.



The seasonal parties at Elka Park became legendary among a small set of bond traders, publishing types and business school students who angled for invitations to these weekend festivities. I was glad to be along for the ride and spent many nights creating elaborate pranks, participating in large pasta dinners and imbibing in massive quantities of beer, wine, whiskey and pot. Without this community of light-hearted preppies my days in New York would have been much drearier.



I started out in New York in the world of book publishing. My first job was at Crown Publishers (now part of Random House) in 1986 making a paltry $13,500 per year and all the books I could steal. I wandered into publicity because I figured that was the group that threw the parties.



Publishing in New York was still an old school business in 1986. The big publishers (Random House, Simon & Schuster, Doubleday, and Harpers) were still the powerhouses and small imprints like St. Martins Press, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Norton but a handful of others were still taken very seriously. This was prior to the big media buyouts by Time Warner and Bertlesman.





Editors and publishers still went out for two martini lunches and there were dozens of restaurants and bars in mid-town Manhattan that catered to the publishing and advertising crowds. The book publishing crowd considered themselves more British than Yiddish so it had the trappings of generally darker restaurants with older furniture; ancient waiters and hat check girls that probably remembered V-day celebrations. Il Cardinale and The Monkey Bar come to mind as some of the frequent haunts, as well as down and dirty spots like Wes Joice’s The Lion’s Head in the Village and Pete’s Tavern in Gramercy.



One night at Il Cardinale, Michael Pietsch (an editor that went on to prominence publishing David Foster Wallace and Rick Moody among other literary stars) and Mark Leyner, one of Michael’s authors, sat around the table and polished off three or four bottles of wine, not to mention a few whiskeys and whatever else had been laid down upon the white starched tablecloth that night.



It was probably nearing 10pm and Michael was getting ready to catch the train back to Ossining when he made us a bargain. He said – “I’ll tell you how much money I make a year if you tell me how much you make – cards on the table.” At first I balked because I knew that I made far less than the others at the table. Mark Leyner was working as a copywriter for medical and pharmaceutical companies and made a bit more than me – so I figured what the hell. I’d reveal what I made.



I went first – “$29,000 a year” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. Mark Leyner was next and said with little emotion and a straight poker face -- “$55,000 a year”. Michael Pietsch waited and had a little dramatic pause. This was the equivalent of whipping our dicks out and laying them on the table for the young male ego. Michael had brilliantly played his hand in this game of truth poker -- “$95,000” Pietsch said.



Putting it mildly, I was floored. I didn’t think anyone in publishing made more than $60,000 unless you were the publisher or a print production manager who took a bit of graft on the side. I could hardly keep my head from spinning. I realized at that moment that I had to get out of publishing as fast as I could or I was going to be broke for the rest of my life. You see, Michael was a publishing prodigy – a Harvard graduate who had gone to work at Scribners right out of college, he had the audacity to try to edit Ernest Hemmingway’s unfinished work The Dangerous Summer and damned if William Kennedy (of the Albany trilogy fame) didn’t say “Mr. Pietsch has done a wonderful editing job” -- in the New York Times of all places. He was in a different league.



Michael again played his hand well at Scribners and when Betty Prashker, the top editor at Crown came over from Doubleday, she brought Michael with her. He had a penchant for the literary obscure like Pynchon as well as the wild eyed rock criticism from its early writers like Nick Tosches, Richard Meltzer, and Lester Bangs among others. Today Michael is the head honcho at Little Brown and to the best of my knowledge has given up drinking.



Leyner has become a well-regarded writer for magazines and movies and has penned at least four well reviewed books and a best-selling series of paperbacks with a Doctor about confounding questions such as “Why Men Have Nipples.” It is the perfect sort of book to stock next to the toilet paper – my underlying suspicion is that he decided at some point, like myself that if you wanted to make some cash in the publishing business you’d need to “ignore all the classes if you want to sell to the masses” as the old retailing saw goes.



So the lesson of the day on the Schoharie was -- where there are resources there will be predators to prey upon them. The secret to success is figuring out what kind of predator you want to be, and then find the place where the resources are and prey upon them.



Looking back at the lesson of Rob Constable and my own journey westward, sometimes a change of environment is needed. Through no fault of our own we may unwittingly become prey or are preyed upon. If the fleas are biting hard in the swamp, you just might want to move to higher ground.