Future stars honed their craft at Adirondack theater

Malcolm Atterbury, who later became a popular character actor in Hollywood, married an Amsterdam woman and built a summer theater in the Adirondacks in the 1930s.

Kirk Douglas came up with that stage name when, as Isadore Demsky, the Amsterdam native was a stage hand and actor at Atterbury’s Tamarack Playhouse in Lake Pleasant in 1939 and 1940.