July 30, 2026 —
Growing up in Ticonderoga in the 1950s and ’60s was the opposite of today’s helicopter upbringing – or so Fred Provoncha tells it.
“You would go out in the morning,” Provoncha said. “Mom, maybe she gave you some sandwiches, maybe not. When it got dark, you came back.”
He says that what happened in between was their business: “They didn’t want them to know, and they didn’t want to know.”
The freedom they had was incredible and they took advantage of it. But Provoncha said they also have to work for it. As children, their job was to earn money.
Fred Provoncha keeps a list of all the jobs he has had. Photo: Ana Williams-Bergen
“If I had wanted money, like pocket money,” Provoncha said, “my father would have laughed for about six or seven minutes and then I would have left the room.”
If you wanted money, Provoncha said, you had to put in the work.
“If there was a way to make money, legal, moral, whatever, we did it. If there wasn’t a way, we invented one.”
“We went into the old abandoned mills and mined iron and copper and things like that and sold it at the local scrapyard,” Provoncha said. “We found newspapers, we returned bottles…”
Provoncha got a job as a newspaper boy and remembers driving sweatily up the steep hills of Ticonderoga to deliver the newspaper. He also worked as a “mop-up boy” at a store called Dorian’s in downtown Ticonderoga.
In the winter, he and his friends asked local landowners for permission and then cut down their evergreen trees to sell at Christmas time.
They also host baseball games. Provoncha says they go to other cities and insult people, making them so upset that they want to play against them in baseball. They built bleachers and charged a nickel for admission to a game.
“My grandchildren don’t believe it,” Provoncha said, but back then, “a nickel was actually money. You could walk into a store here, get a bag of candy, give them a nickel and get change.”
They had another system for earning nickels: pigeons.
“There were old buildings everywhere,” Provoncha said. They would be given permission to enter the abandoned buildings, “and then you capture these poor little baby pigeons just before they can fly and after they’ve been weaned.”
Provoncha and his friends brought the pigeons home and taught them tricks. Then they went into a field and charged people a nickel to watch as they sent out and called back the herd.
They taught the pigeons to land on their shoulders. “Move your shoulder, they get on your head. Move your head, they get on the other shoulder,” Provoncha said. “They’re smarter than me, so it was easy to do.”
A list of all the jobs Fred Provoncha has held, from kitchen assistant in a cafeteria to senior systems programmer at Mastercard. Photo: Ana Williams-Bergen
Provoncha said they will do anything to make money – but it has to be legal.
“For a while my dad was a city judge,” Provoncha said, “so we didn’t want to get arrested.”
Provoncha said his father warned him and his brothers: “If you are ever dragged before me, you will never see the light of day again.”
“We didn’t believe him,” Provoncha said, “but we didn’t doubt him either.”
Provoncha said that while it’s difficult to choose a favorite job, he has a fondness for Johnson’s Apple Orchard, where he worked as a farm hand for a season.
He got to work before the sun rose, and he said they were greeted by “a very, very old woman who was stronger, meaner and more knowledgeable than all of us kids put together.”
Provoncha remembers how her legs were wet up to her knees from the morning dew.
“You play in the trees, you prune trees, you avoid bees,” Provoncha said. “When that was all done, we all went in and picked apples for a while.”
Fred Provoncha’s father, Fred Provoncha III, was a plumber in Ticonderoga.
Provoncha loved his childhood in Ticonderoga, but left town at age 17 and didn’t move back for decades. So I asked him: If you liked it here, why should you leave?
Provoncha is the fourth Fred Provoncha in his family. Everyone called him “Sonny” to distinguish him from his father, and he wanted to be his own person.
“I was Fred Provoncha, right? But I wasn’t. I was Sonny,” Provoncha said. “Dad ran everything he had to do with. Boy Scouts, church group, town. When I was home, I had no real existence as a human being. When I was out in the field, I was myself, but I was still Sonny.”
So Provoncha moved to New York City to make a life for himself (or, as he puts it, “make my fortune and marry the girl”). He raised a family and worked as a programmer at companies such as Mastercard, IBM and Estee Lauder.
Fred Provoncha in his office at Estee Lauder around 2000.
When he retired and returned to Ticonderoga, he was his own person: Fred Provoncha, not Sonny. He still loved Ticonderoga just as much. He was a long-time coordinator at the Ticonderoga Heritage Museum and wrote a book entitled Ticonderoga.
“Ticonderoga was and is magic for me,” Provoncha said. “Brigham Young brought a whole bunch of Mormon pioneers to Utah, and he says The is the place.”
“For me, The is the location: Ticonderoga. I know this place, I know every blade of grass and every cemetery full of my relatives.
When he looks back on growing up here, Provoncha says it was like heaven.
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https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/53652/20260730/north-country-at-work-the-money-making-schemes-of-ticonderoga-teens
