Caffe Lena: redux

Fifty years of memories II

By THOMAS DIMOPOULOS

John F. Kennedy was basking in the afterglow of a primary campaign victory in West Virginia that would help to eventually propel him to The White House.

Lois Hellman, who graduated from South Glens Falls High School a year earlier, was celebrating the completion of her freshman college year with some friends in downtown Saratoga Springs.

"One of my friends said, ‘Hey there's this new cafe that opened,' " said Hellman, who laughingly admits that the night of revelry has fuzzied the memory of who specifically performed on stage on that night in May 1960 when Bill and Lena Spencer first opened the doors of their new cafe.

"To my 19-year-old way of thinking, it was pretty cosmopolitan. It wasn't like going to a bar on Caroline Street," she said.

"The stage used to be on the other side of the hall from where it is now," said Al McKinney, who has worked in a full range of capacities at Caffe Lena for the past 29 years.

"There was a big table where Lena would sit and play Scrabble. They had all these things around that said: Be quiet! Meanwhile, Lena would be playing Scrabble and you'd occasionally hear this voice screaming out: ‘That's not a word!' "

Lena Spencer and her husband, Bill, opened the doors to their Phila Street cafe May 20, 1960. Bill, who taught sculpting at Skidmore College, would soon be out of the picture, however, leaving town with a student of his that he eventually would marry.

The early 1960s ushered in a new era with the construction of the Northway. Skidmore College relocated their campus from downtown to North Broadway, and plans were being drawn up for an amphitheater which eventually opened as the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.

"Lena arrived just before everything started happening," said local historian and former cafe board member Field Horne.

"Lena introduced espresso and Italian pastries to Saratoga. She ran it as a beatnik cafe," said executive director Sarah Craig. "The city fathers were certain this was a den of iniquity."

Fifty years later, Lena's cafe has become an institution for performing artists, its history on display on the entryway walls in a sepia-toned collection of concert posters, and in the stories told by patrons, who continue to come and listen to the music.

"The ghosts of their heroes talk to them through these brick walls," Craig said.

A lot can happen in a day. Imagine what occurs over the course of a half-century.

Three things this reporter recently learned when researching Caffe Lena for an article:

1. Bob Dylan. The songwriter who inspired a generation performed at the tiny Saratoga Springs café between one and three times between the years 1961 and/or 1962, depending on who you ask. History tells us that the legend-to-be was not well received.

2. Don McLean appeared at the café a decade after Bob Dylan’s performance. Stories that insist he scribbled the lyrics of his early-70s anthem “American Pie” on a napkin at a Caroline street bar, then ambled around the corner to Lena’s café on Phila Street to debut the as-yet-unrecorded song for the first time makes a fine story. As for whether there is any truth to the tale, well, consider it a part of Saratoga folk-lore in the same vein as the legendary tale that insists Edgar Allan Poe wrote his poem “The Raven” while visiting the future grounds of Yaddo in the 1840s.

3. Lena Spencer operated her Phila Street café for nearly three decades.
In 1989, Lena took a nasty spill down the stairs of the café, suffering injuries that would – about six weeks later – result in her untimely death.

George Ward, who has been a patron of the café since 1960 as well as a member of its board since “before there was a board,” remembers that night well due to the unfortunate series of circumstances that occurred while transporting Lena to Ellis Hospital in Schenectady. First, the ambulance transporting the café founder broke down while en route to the hospital. A second ambulance had to be summoned, causing a delay in the transport, recalls Ward who followed the ambulance to the hospital.

When the second ambulance arrived and Lena was brought in to the hospital, it became apparent that her medical records had inadvertently remained in the first ambulance, causing yet another delay in her being treated.

“She was lucid in the ambulance and in the emergency room. In the transfer of Lena from one ambulance to the other, her records were left behind, so when she got to the emergency room, there were no records of medication she may have been taking or her medical history,” Ward said.

“It created a delay of several very important hours for someone with a head injury and internal injuries. It cost time,” Ward said. “One can imagine that otherwise, she might have survived.”

Fifty years after attending the cafe's opening night, Lois Hellman lives in Gansevoort.

And while her opening-night memories may be a little fuzzy, the past 50 years are a lot clearer, during which Hellman served on the cafe's board, wrote the grant application for funding that led to the purchase of the building and regularly attended shows at the cafe from 1962 on, while dating the man who she would marry. The Hellmans are approaching their 47th wedding anniversary and Lois' reasons for going to the cafe can probably stand as testament for many of the cafe's patrons who have, and who continue to visit 47 Phila St.

"It was probably one of the things that made us realize we liked the same things," she said.

Portions of this story were published in The Post-Star, May, 2010.