PRINCETON — Of the unending list of things to experience in this world, it would be safe to say that Lyle Huntington has checked off quite a few.

“By the time I'm through, I don't think there's going to be anything I haven't done,” said the Princeton community activist and retiree, in an interview this week.

A lofty statement, indeed, but in Huntington's case, it seems it just might be true. After all, he did spend part of his childhood living it up in New York City nightclubs, surrounded by the likes of stars including Earl Stanley Bulger and Robert Ripley. As he grew older, his varied career path saw him do work as a clothes salesman, a farmer, a retail manager, a service station owner, a Rockwell employee and more. He became a husband, a father and a grandfather.

And, he has worked with the Mob. Yes, that's right, the Mob.

The story begins in Schenectady, N.Y., where Huntington was raised for the early part of his life by his grandparents. When his grandmother was diagnosed with malignancy, the young Lyle moved with her to New York City, where she could be treated and he could be cared for by his mother, a dancer on the NYC entertainment scene.

“That's slightly where I became acquainted with the guys (from the Mafia) for the first time,” he explained. “With the entertainment industry and things in the big city, you ran into some of them from time to time. I don't even remember anyone calling it the Mafia back then, but you would run into those people.”

It was common to run into other well-known people, as well. Today, Huntington's scrapbook is filled with signed black-and-white photographs of the celebrities of the day, mid-twentieth century stars like Xavier Cugat, Bulger, Ripley, the creator of Ripley's Believe It Or Not with whom Huntington stayed for a time, and many others.

“My mother was involved with the Ziegfeld Follies, and I was exposed to a lot of the talented people in show business who at that time lived in New York City,” he said.

It was a nonchalant occurrence for the boy who can be seen throughout the scrap book, happily dancing with his mother at the Village Barn Restaurant in Greenwich Village and casually sitting around nightclub tables, surrounded by adults in scenes where a child his age seems far out of place. And, that was the life he lived for several years of his youth, after a major back injury made it impossible for him to travel back to Schenectady with his grandmother when her surgery and recovery were complete.

“Her surgery and the follow-up ended up lasting six to eight months, but in the meantime, I broke my back, and I had to stick around a lot longer,” he explained. “I ended up with probably three to four years in New York City with my mother. After that, though, I went back home to Schenectady.”

And that's where his real association with the Mafia began.

“We had Lefty Favato, the president of the union at American Locomotive living next door to us, and he was affiliated,” he said. “At that time, there were no Red Cross blood drives or anything like that, and Lefty had started a registry at Ellis Hospital, where they listed people from the union by blood type so they'd have a pool on hand. I was in the Air National Guard at that time, and one meeting I walked right into the commanding officer's office and told them that we should do what American Locomotive's doing, and we started doing the registry thing, too.”

Maybe it was that fortitude that made the men of the Mob stand up and take notice of him, or maybe it was simply the fact that the 17-year-old Lyle often spent time with friends near the Schenectady group's headquarters at what was called the Puritan Restaurant. For one reason or another, though, they chose him.

“At lunchtime we'd go out and horse around, and sometimes these guys would be out there and they'd point to one of us and say 'Hey, kid, come here,'” he said, mocking the accent and vocal inflection of The Godfather's version of the Mafia. “They'd just give us a handful of change and say 'Buy you and your friends some candy.' They were good people.”

“I don't know why they recruited me,” he continued. “It could have something to do with my mother, because she knew them in Schenectady as well as New York, or maybe it was just because I went to school right around the corner from the Puritan and they saw me, or because I had a car. But they recruited me, and at that time, I don't think there was a name for what I did.”

What he did, or, at least, what he thinks he did, (Mafia members are not known for their forthrightness about things like this) was to deliver policy slips and prize money for the Mob's very own early-day version of the lottery. At that time around Schenectady, four-digit numbers were sold in grocery stores, gas stations, barber shops and other places of business. The money from those sales was collected by members of the Mafia, who chose the winning numbers based on a random selection of receipt numbers from racetracks around the country.

“About two to three days a week, I would go to the Puritan Restaurant, shoot darts, play shuffleboard, maybe drink a beer,” said Huntington. “They would go out and put something in my car in a built in place that they had made and I didn't know where it was; I didn't want to know. There'd be a piece of paper on my seat with a number on it, and by that number I would know where to go. There were four different locations I would go to.”

When he traveled to his destination for the day in his '38 Plymouth, he says, things were just as discreet as they were at the Puritan.

“First, when leaving the Puritan, I would mosey around town a little, and then I'd go where they had told me to go,” he said. “When I got there, I'd go in, hang around a little while, and they would go out and get what they wanted out of my car, and I would leave.”

For that, he'd get paid $35 a day, big money in that time and as much as he made in an entire week at the clothing store where he held his regular job. And he continued at it, quietly making his deliveries without asking a single question, for the latter part of his teenage years.

“I never inquired about what I was doing; I didn't talk about it, not even with the people I was doing it with,” he said. “You just didn't ask questions. You didn't really associate with those guys; you might see one on the street and say 'hello', and they might say hello to you, or they might not. You just had something to do and you did it, and that was it. But, that's how people lived in those days. If you said something, that's what you did, and you didn't need a 10-page contract.”

He was quiet about what he did out of a respect for his under-the-table employers, he insists, but not out of fear. In fact, Huntington maintains that the men immortalized in today's films as a breed of no-nonsense, no-conscience criminals were actually good guys.

“They did a lot of good things for people who were in need,” he said. “For a family maybe with the dad out of work for whatever reason, they'd just have somebody go by and give them money. If you went to the hospital and couldn't pay your bill, they would take care of that. The people who were friendly to them, they would certainly help them. And, they weren't into the drugs or prostitution or things of that sort back then; they stayed away from the dirty stuff until later. They were good people.”

But, he acknowledges, even he as a young teenager knew that the Mafia men had their ways of persuasion within the community.

“I bought this suit one time from the clothing store where I worked, and it ended up having a faded spot on it, but they wouldn't give me my money back,” he said. “I just brought that up in casual conversation to one of the guys at the Puritan, and a week later, he came to me and said, 'Here's your money, plus $10 for your inconvenience.' I guess they went back and told the store they hadn't treated me right, and they must've decided they would treat me right.”

Of course, those associated with the Mob had their way of persuading more authoritative officials, as well.

“It was the gambling they were into at that time, and of course they weren't paying taxes on all of that money,” said Huntington. “I'm sure they paid off certain public officials so they wouldn't have to go to jail, but I think if they had been paying taxes on the money, the government would have allowed them to keep it up.”

In fact, he believes, the Mafia's number system might just have been where the government found the inspiration for its own lottery of today.

“The Mafia would pay $475 on the dollar in that numbers game, and nobody could control the payout or the winning numbers; it was totally random. Is that where the government learned to do lottery tickets? Only with them, they control the payoff on it,” he laughed.

As for Huntington, his association with that early-day lottery system ended in the early 1950's, when he followed his mother and grandmother to Philadelphia. Later, his wife's family ties brought him to Princeton, where he as lived ever since.

Now, the easy-going Oakvale Road Public Service District retiree and well-known community consultant is far removed from those few years he spent working with the Mob. In fact, he only brings it up casually in conversation, as if it's nothing particularly out of the ordinary at all.

“We didn't call it the Mafia back then; we just didn't think of it that way,” he said. “In hindsight, you look at it and say 'yeah, it was the Mafia'. But, as a kid back then, you just didn't think about those things.”

As an adult, though, he does think back on them, fondly, along with the many other experiences that have thus far filled his life to the brim.

“I've had various things that have happened in my life, some of them that some might consider to be a tragedy,” he said. “But I have no regrets about anything in my life. There isn't anything that I would go back and change about any of it. It's been very interesting. I just really have no regrets.”

— Contact CharLy Markwart at cmarkwart@ptonline.net.