Glimmerglass Queen
Dream Comes True
For Captain Paula
At 18, She Bore Witness As The Paula Lee
'Burned To Water Line,' Had To Replace It
Cooperstown, and Caroline Jenner, a friend visiting from
Pittsburgh, soak in the scenery from The Glimmerglass Queen’s observation deck. (Jim Kevlin/AllOTSEGO.com)
By JIM KEVLIN • Special to www.AllOTSEGO.com
COOPERSTOWN – It’s kismet. Or so it seems, that Paula Wikoff was born to be captain of The Glimmerglass Queen.
Her grandfather, Alfred Engelman, built the original Lakefront Hotel & Restaurant from Quonset huts he bought at an auction of surplus World War II materiel. At the same auction, he bought a surplus World War II landing craft.
He converted it into a double-decker that echoed a Mississippi River paddleboat, and put it in the waters of Otsego Lake a year before today’s Captain Wikoff was born.
Engelman named it “The Paula,” after his wife. But a year later, when his darling granddaughter was born to their daughter Haidy and her husband, Bill Zoeller, she was named for both her grandmothers.
And the joyful granddad renamed the boat “The Paula Lee” after the newborn.
She grew up with The Paula Lee. Then, in 1973, just before her 18th birthday, it caught fire. From the family home in Lakeland Shores, “We watched it burn down to the water line.”
Time went on, Paula Zoeller went to college, then moved to the Midwest, and met future husband Terry Wikoff. She missed family, came back to Cooperstown, and the couple created the Red Nugget ice cream stand and developed it into the second biggest Hershey outlet in New York State.
