By Kate Hill
Staff Writer
On July 29, the historic Lincklaen House in Cazenovia unveiled its recently refurbished telephone closet, which has been temporarily filled with stacks of books by local author Jerome Mark Antil.
Through the Lincklaen House and the Madison County Sheriff’s Department, Antil and his wife, Pamela, will be donating all of the books to local schools.
According to the author, multiple copies of the first edition of “The Pompey Hollow Book Club” novel will be delivered to every elementary school in Madison County. Complete sets of “Tall Jerry: The Delphi Falls Trilogy” will be delivered to every middle school and high school in the county.
Antil grew up on the property that is now Delphi Falls County Park..
According to Antil, his father, Michael Charles Antil Sr., regularly used the Lincklaen House telephone to conduct business in the 1940s and early 1950s.
“Sometimes we forget what a historic hostelry Cazenovia’s Lincklaen House hotel is,” said Antil. “We forget that the building across its driveway was a vintage movie theatre, where most of Cazenovia and the surrounding area got their WWII world news. Many people aren’t aware of the historic ‘telephone closet’ in the hotel’s lobby . . . I remember my father sitting in the phone closet with his cup of coffee and waiting for Myrtie, the telephone operator in New Woodstock, [to connect] him to his bakeries in Homer and Carthage. The Lincklaen House ‘telephone closet’ is featured in [my] novels about growing up at the Delphi Falls in the shadows of WWII. The ‘telephone closet’ was used [by] the Pompey Hollow Book Club kids to solve crimes on more than one occasion.”
According to Lincklaen House co-owner Dan Kuper, the telephone closet renovation involved painting the space and installing a new retro-style payphone.
During the unveiling ceremony, Madison County Sheriff Todd Hood presented Kuper with a bronze plaque documenting Antil’s connection to the space and its role in his novels.
Antil reached out to the sheriff’s department for help with the book distribution after learning about Hood’s work promoting literacy.
“Sheriff Todd Hood has a passion for reading to children in schools, and now he appears in each of the ‘Tall Jerry’ novels,” Antil said.
The pair first met at the opening of Delphi Falls County Park in 2018.
“During the course of meeting him, he told me that he was a writer . . . and the next thing I know he has me listed as one of the characters in [his books] — as the sheriff who comes into town and solves the crime,” Hood said. “I’m a big advocate for children’s literacy. Jerome volunteered to go into every school in Madison County and [give each one] a set of books, and he wanted our deputies to hand them out to the kids as well . . . The teachers can read to them, hand the books out, and share a little Madison County history. It’s a very nice [initiative].”
For more information on Antil and his work, visit jeromemarkantil.com/index.php.
