LOCALadk Magazine

game a certain touch of class, an indefinable lift in cul- ture, brains, and personality." He'd served in the chem- ical warfare division in WWI, and was diagnosed with TB in 1920. He stayed in Saranac Lake at the Santanoni Apartments briefly, where he recovered, and was able to return to playing baseball. But during Spring Training in April of 1925, he caught a bad cold that wouldn't go away, so he was prescribed bed rest. He, along with his wife Jane Stoughton and son Christy, Jr, moved back to Saranac Lake and had a house built for them. The Christy Mathewson Cottage, located on Old Military Road, was built by architect Harry Hill, a baseball fan who wanted to add some clever touches just for Matty. It has two large cure porches on either side, and there is a man-made knoll in the back of the lot. Interestingly, "the relationship of the knoll to the intersection is, in fact, evocative of the relationship of a pitcher's mound to home plate." His second visit to Saranac Lake would be his last. Just six months after moving into his cure cottage, he passed away at the age of 45. In front of his cottage (as I try my best to see the pitcher's mound that likely every baseball fan can see in a glance) his words are in my mind: "You can learn little from victory. You can learn everything from defeat." I don't see that Mathewson was ever defeat- ed. At twenty-one years of age, in 1927, Martha Re- bentisch (later just Reben) was sent to the Trudeau Sanatorium in Saranac Lake to take the cure. She was originally from New York City, and had lost her mother to TB. She had tried curing in Pennsylvania and in the Catskills without success. After three more unsuc- cessful years of traditional curing, she was presented with the option of a last resort procedure known as "the rib," which is the collapsing of the chest wall through rib resection. It was then that she came upon an ad in the newspaper that read, "Wanted-To get in touch with some invalid who is not improving, and who wants to go into the woods for the summer." The ad was placed by Fred Rice, a local boat-builder and Ad- irondack guide, who believed that there was no better way to improve health than to be active in nature. He was not expecting a young woman to answer the ad, but decided (with the advice of his wife Kate) to take the work. Over the next ten years, Fred and Martha would spend each summer on the Saranac Lakes and Weller Pond taking fresh air and exercise, and Mar- tha kept a journal throughout. One entry reads, "All at once the silence and the solitude were touched by wild music, thin as air, the faraway gabbling of geese flying at night. Presently I caught sight of them as they streamed across the face of the moon, the high,

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