GWL-1930s

Breaking the Color Barrier

Ruth’s stays at Greck’s included frequent visits to a camp where up-and-coming boxers would train for their next big bout amid the mountain air and fresh water. Joe Murchio opened the training camp at Greenwood Lake in 1939; over its 30-plus years of operation, big names like Floyd Patterson, Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Joe Louis perfected their punches. The camp was known for welcoming trainees of all races, setting an example for future integration in all sports. The now-weekly Warwick Advertiser has reported on the town of Warwick and its villages—including Greenwood Lake—since 1866. In 1941, it detailed an eventful visit by Louis that took place on the lake waters: The legendary boxer was a guest on a friend’s speedboat when a nearby canoe capsized. Louis helped yank aboard one of the wet but uninjured canoeists “as though she were a featherweight,” the article said. Murchio sold the camp in the 1940s to new owner Eddie McDonald, who renamed it The Long Pond Inn—upstairs was a bar and nightclub, and downstairs was the training center where visitors such as Ruth would watch the fighters.

Gloria

Modern refrigeration may have eliminated the need for lake-harvested ice, but the frozen expanse remained the center of community action with skating and ice-fishing; and on February 9, 1936, 500 spectators gathered on the ice to see something no one had ever seen. An “airplane,” roughly six feet from nose to tail, with a wider wingspan, sat on a triangular steel structure, its nose pointed towards the New Jersey end of the lake. In fact, it was a rocket with wings, powered by liquid oxygen and denatured alcohol. Inside asbestos bags in its nose were 6,148 pieces of mail. The goal? To have the first airmail delivered over state lines by rocket.

The February 1936 Airpost Journal described the scene: Five-year-old Gloria Schleick—the rocket’s eponym—christened the airship with a tin cup of snow. Asbestos-suited rocket scientist Willie Lay lit the fuse. A 30-foot column of fire burst from the rocket’s tail, but alas…the weighted catapult failed, and it did not launch. A second attempt got the rocket off the catapult, but it skidded to a stop short of its goal. Two weeks later, though, two more launches proved successful, sending the rocket plane a few hundred feet and just over the state line, where the Hewitt, NJ, postmaster happily postmarked the delivery. Gloria (the rocket, not the girl) now resides in a museum at Teterboro Airport.

Source: https://www.chronogram.com/hv-towns/greenwood-lake-the-liquid-playground-turns-100-19299566?fbclid=IwAR0uWnCMapY8zl7wEOTFezh1UvJM2wRueZX3Xd_zaglNQfFpdPymD_DU8yY