Oswald D. “Ozzie” Heck was Speaker of the New York State Assembly for 22 years, longer than anyone else.
For everyone but the very few who find the state legislature a topic of passing interest, though, he is best known as the eponym of the of the state-owned day-use island off Assembly Point on Lake George, which for most of its history was known as South Island.
South Island was renamed Speaker Heck Island in 1968 at the request of the Lake George Association, whose leaders at that time were, for the most part, Republican businessmen who had wires to pull in Albany and some influence with the governor, Nelson Rockefeller.
Although Heck hoped to become governor himself – he was a candidate for the Republican nomination in 1938 and again in 1958, the year that glittering prize was snatched from him by Rockefeller – he became a loyal ally once the charismatic millionaire was inaugurated in 1959.
When Rockefeller proposed to balance his first budget by raising the state’s fuel and cigarette taxes – highly unpopular measures, to say the least – Heck duly lent his support.
According to Heck’s 1959 obituary in The New York Times, “the two worked closely in putting the administration program through the Legislature. One of the Speaker’s toughest assignments was gathering the Republican votes needed to enact the Governor’s tax program.”
Upon Heck’s death at the age of 57 in Schenectady’s Ellis Hospital, Rockefeller (from his ranch in Venezuela, which he was visiting at the time) eulogized him thus: “His passing leaves a void in the Republican Party and in our Legislature which will take years to fill.”
Of course, the Republicans would never produce a Speaker as powerful as Ozzie Heck again in large part because the Supreme Court’s “one man, one vote” rulings, which mandated equal representation in Congress, were applied to legislative bodies in the states and counties in the mid 1960s.
Since 1974, without interruption, the Assembly has been controlled by Democrats — a more or less accurate representation of the relative power of the state’s two major parties, when, that is, political power is gauged by party enrollment.
Heck became an Assemblyman in 1932 and was elected Speaker in 1937, after the Republicans recaptured the Assembly in the elections of 1936. The party’s loss of the lower house in 1934 was something of an accident, in part a consequence of the popularity of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and in part the result of the legendary Robert Moses’ disastrous campaign for governor as a Republican.
(“If there was a blunder that could be made, Moses made it,” biographer Robert Caro wrote.)
It’s amazing the number of years the Republicans did control the Assembly. According to Politics in the Empire State a 1948 book by Warren Moscow, a reporter who covered the state capitol in the 1930s and 40s for The New York Times, there was nothing accidental about this.
At the state constitutional convention of 1894, Moscow wrote, “a group of smart upstate Republicans who saw that someday New York City would have a majority of the population of the state were determined it should never have a majority of the Legislature.”
With some adjustments, the arrangements put in place in 1894 to prevent urban Democrats from controlling the legislature remained intact until the mid-1970s.
Heck was born in Schenectady in 1902. According to The Schenectady Gazette, his funeral at Union College’s Memorial Chapel was attended by 1,000 people and four governors.
The son of a newspaper man – his father was editor of the local German-language newspaper – Heck attended Schenectady public schools, Union College and Albany Law School.
Described as “a portly man,” the 255-pound Heck “wielded more power over more years than any other man in New York’s legislative history,” The New York Times stated in its obituary.
And that, rather than any particular contribution to the protection of Lake George, or the fact that he owned a camp on the lake’s east side, explains why a state-owned Lake George island is named in honor of Oswald D. “Ozzie” Heck.
A version of this article first appeared on the Lake George Mirror, America’s oldest resort paper, covering Lake George and its surrounding environs. You can subscribe to the Mirror HERE.
Illustrations, from above: Heck opening the New York State Legislature in 1957; Oswald Heck’s widow Beulah Slocum Heck at the state-owned day use island on Lake George in 1968, shortly after it was renamed in Speaker Heck’s honor (Lake George Mirror photo); Nelson Rockefeller and Thomas E. Dewey enter Heck’s funeral (Daily Gazette, May 26, 1959).
Thanks for this article by Tony Hall, originally in the LG Mirror. Paul Schaefer, the Adirondack conservation leader, often spoke to me of Ozzie Heck and the importance of the Assembly Speaker’s efforts – with Schaefer pushing him hard – to defeat the proposed great dams on the So. Branch of the Moose River – which, had they been built, would have opened the floodgates for many more large Adirondack reservoirs, spelling the end of many of its free flowing rivers.