Hang on and Fly |
Association Island |
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![]() Fishing, sailing, card-playing, shooting, golf, illicit-booze, eating, and drinking were all part of General Electric's first corporate marketing, training, and innovation retreat on a 64-acre island in Lake Ontario. Organized as a fishing camp for top American lamp executives in 1903, summer camp at Association Island eventually became a coveted invitation for thousands of GE employees and their families through 50 years of the company's most prosperous operations. GE leaders used the island as an informal setting for planning key decisions about the company's future.
Association Island was equipped with a large boathouse, a fleet of motor and sail boats, dining hall, town hall/church/theater, cafe/bar, golf course, shooting range, and hundreds of unique sleeping cabins for the rustic camp gatherings on the island. GE employees traveled to the island from factories between St. Louis and Boston, and Philadelphia and Toronto. Executives traveled to the island from GE headquarters in Schenectady and New Jersey, by seaplane. Association Island portrays the GE boats, airplanes, island architecture, fishing trips, celebrity visitors, entertainment, and stories of how campers smuggled booze to the island from Canada during Prohibition. It's part of a bygone era of American corporate history and summer island life. Henderson Harbor |
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![]() Hidden among the fertile farmlands and rocky shoreline of eastern Lake Ontario is a natural deep-water port and fishing village that has long been the quiet refuge of world-famous politicians and industrialists. And it hasn't changed.
Henderson Harbor is an often overlooked gem of a small resort community as vacationers travel between New York's Finger Lakes, Adirondacks, and the Thousand Islands. Still, home to many vintage Lyman wooden boats, Henderson Harbor was the summer home for American statesmen and women of the Foster, Lansing, and Dulles family, who once controlled foreign policy, post-war German affairs, and espionage. It was also the summer refuge of a scion from a world-famous piano manufacturing family, and the manufacturer of custom caskets in which Presidents, sports celebrities, and musicians were buried. Henderson Harbor includes photographs and short stories of fishing, boating, cottage architecture, boot-legging and booze smuggling, drama and tragedy among motor-boaters and sailors, and tales of lake rescues by surfmen and coast guardsmen. It was once the summer home of a beer baron, and his son, who raised a world-class breed of dogs, and left a one-thousand-acre waterfront tract of land for a public park. Henderson Harbor is a photographic look at a small-town resort with history as deep as its cool, fertile waters. |