Ogdensburg After Hours: The Night Life of a 1970s Small Town

It’s three o’clock in the morning, and it’s colder than a penguin’s picnic outside. While most sane people in Ogdensburg are in bed, dreaming about what the next Blue Light Special might be at Kmart the following day, I’m at Donut King restaurant, eating spicy chicken wings. The mere juxtaposition of a bonafide donut and breakfast place serving spicy chicken wings in the middle of the night should tell you all you need to know about my delicate palate as a young man. It’s the after-the-bar closes crowd, always a quiet gang that is well mannered and respectful to the wait staff, and I’m one of them, having just closed Le Sly Fox - or later on as it was known, Big Ed’s Dallas Lounge - the premier dance and hook up venue in the greater Ogdensburg metro area, a veritable red light district for north country cretins like me. It was “premier” in the sense that it was the only place to dance on a lit floor, with spinning lights, incredibly loud music and actual cocktail waitresses, as if on the set of Saturday Night Fever. You stand next to those bass speakers, and you'd swear your pants were trying to escape your body. Talking with someone was nothing more than a shouting match, with Kool and The Gang winning. Like other would-be studs, I’d go there with Mark, George, Ed (who also DJ’d) or Jim, trying to pick up girls and usually failing miserably, not being able to pick up a girl if she had handles. The competition from Canadian guys didn’t help either as they came over trying to horn in our action, eh? Sometimes there was fights between the American and Canadian guys, a north county version of West Side Story’s gangs, the Sharks and the Jets.

But this night I was alone at Donut King, and I’m a bit drunk, noshing on wings, when suddenly I ask myself what the hell I’m doing there. Nobody is with me, I’m not hungry, and I really should be in bed where other sane people were. I guess it was more of a habituation, as I would do that with the previously mentioned lunatics I counted as my friends. If anything, it was like I was trying to purposefully wake up in the morning with a hangover, heartburn and ringing ears. Culinary treats aside, it was fun to watch who was coming in - specifically, what people were seemingly hooking up that night, the winner’s of the love lotto, that would be getting into their stinky, smoke-smelling dance clothes and heading home the following morning, looking like the whore of Babylon.

Ah, night life in the ‘burg. When we’d get bored with the “B3”, Big Ed’s or - well, that was really all the bars we were interested in - off we’d go to Massena, Canton, or Potsdam….I remember one night going to Watertown, even Syracuse, in search of love. Flights to Miami and LA were hard to come by, our budgets limited to the meager living our minimum wage jobs afforded us.

Then there was the parked cars down at Morrisette Park (a park along the St. Lawerence river for you non-burgers) late at night. What went on those cars were about as secretive and exciting as trading posts in the back alleys of an Algerian street market. Young couples watching submarine races was my guess. Heads would pop up as you drove by, looking to see if it was the OPD; tires occasionally screeching as would-be dragsters sent sonic shock waves at Riverview Towers (a high-rise for seniors) so great, structural engineers would often be called in the next day to check for acoustic damage, and to which compelled the elderly residents to make calls to the OPD rivaling that of the Jerry Lewis Telethon, and the cops would circle endlessly looking for the now-gone Mario Andrettis. As far as I know, the climate impact study done because of these guys still isn’t in.

Then of course there was the drive-in porn theater on Route 37 which drew large crowds on the weekends, providing as much action in the cars as on the screen…so I heard. Talk about a coming attraction. Canadians and Americans were in pretty much equal attendance, an international Woodstock of the XXX genre. Mechanics often had work the following Mondays trying to remove shoe prints from the car interior roofs. How they got there, I’ll never understand. Maybe that’s what Lionel Ritchie’s song “Dancin’ on the Ceiling” was all about.

Having failed finding any love interest at night, we’d just slowly drive the streets of town, listening to a cassette mix tape of Journey, REO Speedwagon and AC/DC, talking about where to find our next adventure, until the wee hours of the morning.

Good night boys.