Meet Bacall, buy a 'Buddy,'
By ROB PRICE THE COURIER-ADVOCATE

Ray Olenzak, a co-owner of The Chocolatier in Hammondsport, demonstrates the allure of a 'Bacall's Buddy' with his dog, Bacall. The Boxer-Staffordshire terrier mix played an insrumental role in the founding of the chocolate store.

HAMMONDSPORT - Meet Bacall, a 40- pound Boxer-Staffordshire terrier mix who oversees traffic in The Chocolatier gift store in Hammondsport and, until recently, the Captain's Cottage bed and breakfast.

Bacall is also the inspiration for a new fundraising effort in support of the Finger Lakes SPCA. "Bacall's Buddies" are packages of chocolate dogs and cats combined with carobdipped dog bones and cat treats. The chocolate is for the human member of the animal pack; the carob treat is for the four-legged member.

Every time a Chocolatier customer buys a Bacall's Buddy, the store contributes a can of dog or cat food to the SPCA. The store averages one box of pet food every six weeks, according to owners Ray Olenzak and Deborah Rader.

The couple moved to the Hammondsport area in 2006, opening The Captain's Cottage bed and breakfast on Shethar Street as a retirement investment. That's when Bacall's limited skills as a bed and breakfast host became evident. "We rented our first room, then the dog chased away the one customer we had," says Olenzak. "That forced a change to the basic business plan."

Olenzak and Radar were contemplating the impossibility of running a bed and breakfast with a rambunctious dog on the premises when a friend who makes his own chocolate called from New Jersey.

The couple changed their business plan on a dime, turning a floundering bed and breakfast into a chocolate retail operation. Currently importing the chocolate from the New Jersey-based chocolatier, Olenzak says he has long-range plans to begin making local chocolate in the Waneta Lake area.

For the time being, though, Olenzak and Radar are happy running The Chocolatier and raising Bacall, whom they adopted from a New Jersey animal shelter three years ago.

"She's a very happy pooch," Olenzak says of Bacall. "And now we're in the chocolate business."