Sixty-three-year-old Olympic Center manager Denny Allen was walking briskly along the Herb Brooks Arena concourse this March, when he paused at a concession booth. There was an unusual image on the soft rubber chuck-a-pucks, the ones fans fire toward center ice during intermissions at the 2018 ECAC Hockey championship.
Normally dead serious on game day, Allen was nearly overcome with emotion. There, on the face of several thousand faux pucks, was a two-inch image of Denny himself, portrayed with a smile below his salt-and-pepper mustache. The concessionaire also happened to be wearing what looked like a political pin, but instead of "Vote for Me," the pin had an even simpler message over the Allen visage— "Thank you Denny."
An employee since the formation of Lake Placid’s Olympic Regional Development Authority back in 1982, Allen had been a fixture at the downtown Olympic Center, serving as its general manager for the past 24 years. At the end of April, ORDA’s longest-tenured employee was finally calling it quits, and the gang at the "Winter Sports Capital of the World" used the pins and pucks to show its appreciation for the man known throughout the region as "Denny."
