Last week, when Bunk Griffin snugged into his stool in The Great Downhill Grill in the Sky, he took with him a vast number of stories never recorded or even heard. Luckily for us, and me in particular, he left another bunch of them behind.

Some necessary background: Bunk was seven years older than me, so while I knew who he was from childhood, I never actually talked to him till I was an adult. And that was due to my being besties with his brother Bob.

Bob and Bunk were polar opposites. Bob was outgoing, animated and super-friendly. Wherever he went he chatted up everyone near him — and everyone off in the distance as well. Bunk, on the other hand, was quiet, self-contained and reserved. He never missed anything and he liked to be around people, but to my knowledge, he never initiated a conversation. But once you talked to him, especially about anything Saranac Lake, he talked till the cows came home.

He was a lifelong collector of stories and memorabilia about Saranac Lake — a living library, if you will. So once we became friends, I picked his brain repeatedly, trying to find out this, verify that, or just see what got unearthed in the course of our chats. As a result, I heard tales galore of the days when giants not only walked the earth, but walked out and about our village, too.

Bunk didn’t talk about himself very much, but Bob filled me in on lots of Bunk stories, and now I’ll share one of my faves.

Lots of people believe whatever we send out to the universe gets returned in kind. I’ve no idea if that’s true, but I will say this: For a guy like Bunk, who appreciated the odd, the quirky, the unusual, and the flat-out bizarre, he seemed to find himself in the middle of it more than the rest of us. Such is the case of The Half-Assed Watermelon.

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Crime on the low seas

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What, you ask, was The Half-Assed Watermelon? It was a boat, built by Bunk’s pal, John Buckley, when he was still in high school. John did a good job, in that the boat was solid and watertight, but his lack of boat design skills caused it to have one distinctive — perhaps even unique — feature: Powered by a 10 HP Evinrude, it could achieve a good speed, but it never planed off. In other words, at full throttle, the bow was three feet above the water, hence its name. Moreover, the bow was not only airborne, it also swayed from left to right. As a result, when sailing over the bounding main of Lake Flower, the driver couldn’t see what was in his path, except by fits and starts.

After high school, John went in the Navy (perhaps because due to Thaw’s unique motion, he’d become immune to seasickness) and he sold it to Bunk. First, Bunk gave it a fresh coat of black paint. Then he painted a fearsome shark’s eye and teeth on each side of the bow. I remember walking up Riverside Drive and laughing out loud at Thaw’s oddball handling characteristics, as well as its name (both things riotously funny to a 13-year-old). Little did I know I’d find something really riotously funny later on.

One hot summer day Cap’n Bunk was at the helm of Thaw, bungling its way near Pontiac Bay when he collided with one of Baker’s Boat Landing’s paddlewheel boats. The paddlewheel boats, beautifully crafted, came in either one or two person models, and could be rented for 50 cents an hour. They were a fun and cheap way to ride around the lake. They were also perfectly stable — unless of course some big wooden scow plowed into them. And plow into one Bunk did, tipping it over and sending its occupant flying.

The occupant was a tourist from New Jersey and she was as mad as — if you’ll pardon the hokey metaphor — a wet hen. In fact, she was in a homicidal rage, first because of her unplanned and unceremonious dunking, and second because her purse had sunk, in which she said she had $200. Two hundred dollars in 1960 was a small fortune, more than many men made in a month. So after she dried off, she tore down to the police station demanding justice … and recompense.

She could just as reasonably have demanded two thousand bucks or even two million bucks, because Bunky couldn’t have coughed up two hundred to avoid a trip to the gallows.

But our local constabulary did their duty, more or less. They took the woman’s information, recorded her complaint and dispatched Officer Chuck Pandolph to see that justice was done.

Now a note about Chuck Pandolph. Not only was he not what anyone would consider a punitive kind of guy, but he also had an appreciation for real-life slapstick, even letting himself be the butt of it. So he no doubt thought the whole incident pretty darn funny, and nothing more. Beyond that, he and Bunk were pals, so no actual punishment could have ensued. After talking Bunk, with the wisdom of Solomon, Chuck declared that Bunk had to saw four inches off the boat’s stern.

Why saw off four inches? Why not? OK, so it wouldn’t make the boat more stable, but at least it was doing something. Beyond that, Chuck had no intention of actually measuring the damned thing and following up on it, any more than Bunk had any intention of sawing it in the first place. So, duty done, Chuck returned to the station to close the case, and Bunk went back to Lake Flower, to hobble about nautically to his heart’s content.

But if you thought that’s where the story ends, think again.

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C Note hunt

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Once the word got out that a purse with $200 was resting among the sand, muck and coal tar of Pontiac Bay, every ragamuffin in town became a Jacques Cousteau du manque. Legions of kids dived their avaricious little hearts out till their lungs about burst. But all to no avail. The pocketbook remained undiscovered for the rest of the summer.

Summer came and went, as did the next three seasons, but Pocketbook Fever held its sway: The next summer, when it became warm enough to swim, juvenile hardcore hunters again started searching for the purse. And guess what? Lo and behold — it was found!

Though mucky, slimy and stinky, its contents were all there.

And what were the contents?

There was a soggy pack of Kents and an equally soggy matchbook, a compact and lipstick case, a hairbrush and comb, an address book, two handkerchiefs, a pen and a pencil, a tin of aspirin and a wallet. And in the wallet were a New Jersey driver’s license; a Social Security card; three pictures signed, Love Always, Jerry; and, of course, the money.

But it wasn’t the money we’d been told it was. Uh-uh. Instead, the grand total was two tens, a five, three ones, and 47 cents in change.

Perhaps, appropriately as it turned out, the woman’s $200 was an even bigger farce than Officer Pandolph’s “punishment.”