Griffin, better known as Bunk, was an unofficial town historian of sorts for his hometown, and shared the photos, stories and memories he collected through his website bunksplace.com. His family and friends describe him as a quiet, creative, passionate, witty and sentimental guy.

“He was everything to us,” Bunk’s grandson Chris “CJ” Lawless said.

Downhill Grill owner Ken Lawless called him “One of our last true Saranac Lake characters.”

On Sunday, after a burial in the Harrietstown Cemetery at 12:30 p.m., there will be a celebration of Bunk’s life at the Downhill Grill starting around 1 p.m.

Philip “Bunk” Griffin with his daughter Kelly Griffin Petrie at the 2018 Historic Saranac Lake gala at the Hotel Saranac, where Bunk was the guest of honor. (Provided photo — Historic Saranac Lake)

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A source

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Bunk’s friends claim to fame was his extensive knowledge of decades of Saranac Lake history.

“Clearly, Bunk knew more than we ever will,” Historic Saranac Lake Executive Director Amy Catania said. “He grew up here, and he just paid attention to everything Saranac Lake.”

HSL is one of the community’s main resources for artifacts and information about Saranac Lake’s past. Bunk was someone HSL staff would go to when they needed to find something out — obscure information, folklore and oddities. That level of knowledge cannot be replicated, she said, and he was always gracious to share with them.

“He listened more than he talked,” Catania said.

Even his rich, hearty laugh was soft and quiet.

When he was younger, he always listened to older people tell stories.

“He was very quiet until you got him going,” Ken said.

Bunk’s daughter Kelly Griffin Petrie said her father was obsessed with Saranac Lake her whole entire life.

But it wasn’t always that way. After growing up in Saranac Lake, Bunk — a fourth-generation townie — wanted to get away from the small town. There weren’t many opportunities here and many people of his age left. Some never came back to live again. After graduating in 1958, he hit the road and hitchhiked around the country. For a few years he lived in Florida, but eventually he was drawn back home. Years later, when he created his historic website, it became an online pilgrimage for Saranac Lakers who lived elsewhere to get a taste of their past.

His Mountain Al cartoons, which centered around a bearded man of the woods and lampooned local issues with an absurdist and light tone, were published in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise and the Lake Placid News for years.

When the Hotel Saranac reopened in 2018, HSL snagged the honor of holding the first event there, a 1920s-themed gala celebrating the reopening of the historic building.

Catania said they knew it would be a huge event, and they had no second thoughts about who to have as their guest of honor. It was Bunk.

“We were just like, ‘Oh. Bunk. Of course.’ It was just a no-brainer,” Catania said.

She said he was the last guy to expect that honor, quiet and unassuming, but having a big impact on his town.

Bunk worked for the government laying gypsy moth traps, in a federal job in Washington, D.C. and eventually, at Saranac Lake General Hospital for 45 years.

Bunk married Paula Gardner in 1969 and had two daughters, Karry and Kelly, together. Paula died in 2012.

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A regular

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Every day, Lawless said Bunk would come in shortly after the Downhill Grill opened for the day — carrying his own coaster from Ireland and a koozie bartenders Maddy Sweeney and Kaitlyn Smith made for him with a photo of the trio printed on it — and take his seat at the far corner of the bar to people watch, talk with friends and tell tales.

In 2019, a brass plaque was installed at his stool designating it in his name.

To Ken, Bunk told the best kinds of stories.

“They were so close to being something plausible that they made you think ‘Did this happen?'” he said.

People would stop in to pay their respects. Catania was one of those people.

“The day that I went in there and he wasn’t in his chair, it just gave me such a sinking feeling,” she said.

In the days after his death, friends and employees of the bar created a shrine at Bunk’s seat, filling it with his favorite things. Many people left notes for him, written on napkins.

“Bunk would communicate a lot on bar napkins,” Ken said.

CJ said when Bunk got bored, he would write notes and sketch drawings for people at the bar.

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“Literal magic”

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Kelly said Bunk was best friends with his grandson CJ, who said his grandfather was a loving, supportive and caring man who instilled him with a deep love for nature and history.

CJ is Ken’s nephew. Ken said he already liked Bunk, but he gained a new respect for him after seeing how great a grandfather he was to CJ.

They did everything together — hiking, canoeing, fishing, visiting museums.

When Bunk decorated for Christmas, “It was like literal magic,” CJ said.

He introduced CJ to bobsledding and took him to his first World Cup race. Every year, they’d make coffees with hot chocolate, listen to Creedence Clearwater Revival all the way over to the Mount Van Hoevenberg track and watch the sliders in the freezing cold. CJ remembers seeing ice growing on his grandfather’s mustache as he held a video camera at the event.

Bunk was dedicated to making childhood special for CJ. He built a bobrun in the backyard of his house, signed his cards with unique Mountain Al cartoons and would bury “artifacts” in the yard for CJ to dig up and discover.

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Bunk’s Place

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Many here and abroad knew Bunk for his website bunksplace.com, a time capsule for all things Saranac Lake. After teaching himself how to work on the early internet, he created the first website of Saranac Lake history in 1994, a site referred to as “Your mountain home companion.”

The history he collected wasn’t just the names and dates — who was mayor and when a building was constructed and all that. It was characters, folklore, criminal intrigue, big moments, small moments and reunions.

It was interactive, crowdsourcing photos, stories and tales from anyone who called this village their home. People would send in photographs, which Bunk paired with cheeky titles — a display of his dry sense of humor.

The site is dripping with nostalgia, excitement and love. It’s not often you can feel love through a website.

“That one, you did,” Ken said.

Surfing Bunk’s Place is like stepping into a Kodachrome world of sports, music, celebrations, long days at the bar and quiet evenings at the lake. He would spend long hours cataloguing thousands of photos, writing history on topics ranging from timber and tuberculosis to bobsledding and bootlegging.

The website is a place for people who move away to connect and recollect, a place for newcomers to learn about the town and a place for lifelong residents to learn something new about their home.

An error with the site’s servers has made it defunct in recent years, but screenshots of it are still saved on the Wayback Machine where visitors can still be greeted by the iconic phrase “Welcome home, Saranac Laker! Great to have you back!” amid a busy web 1.0-era homepage. The Wayback Machine was offline at the time of publication, the result of a cyberattack earlier this month. A screenshot of the home page can be found at another internet archive website at archive.ph/RPFR4.

CJ has recently created a Facebook page to store screenshots and photos from the website at facebook.com/bunksplace.

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Part of history

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While he spent countless days preserving the tales of the past, Bunk had some tales himself of his life in Saranac Lake.

He worked as a cook at the Dew Drop Inn, the Mar-Mac and Tyson’s. During a 2018 interview with Catania and Kayt Gochenaur from HSL, he laid out the backstory for the origins the now infamous “Hot Sara” sign created on special occasions by turning off the “el nac” letters of the lighted “Hotel Saranac” sign on top of the hotel. Bunk’s mother, Sara, also worked at the Dew Drop. In his interview, he said she always required that everything from the kitchen came out piping hot. One day, a friend stopped in and told them to step outside and look at the Hotel Saranac sign, which for the first time read “Hot Sara.”

He once ripped a hatchet out of a drunk and irate man’s hand at the Journey’s End bar during Saranac Lake Winter Carnival.

“I never thought I could react that fast,” he told Catania and Gochenaur.

During the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid he designed Mountain Al t-shirts which read “Welcome to Saranac Lake, Parking Lot of the 1980 Olympics,” a stunt he said earned him a cease and desist letter from the IOC, which he obeyed after he sold off his merch.

Bunk was crowned as the Winter Carnival king in 2019.

A framed photo of Bunk now sits at his place at the corner of Saranac Lake’s Downhill Grill.