Cooperstown

The village is named for its founder, William Cooper, the father of American author James Fenimore Cooper. The chamber of commerce's tag line is "America's Most Perfect Village." I concur.

It's very small, less than 2,000 persons. It sits on the shore of Otsego Lake (pronounced Ott -- as in hot -- say go) in the rolling hills of New York's Leatherstocking District. The Adirondacks are to the north, the Catskills to the east, the Finger Lakes to the west. The Otsego is the headwaters of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The Susquehanna River, which flows from the Otsego, barely qualifies as a stream in Cooperstown. James Fenimore Cooper described Otsego quite eloquently in The Deerslayer. He uses the phrase "glimmerglass" to capture the lake's essential appearance.

I stayed at the Barnwell Inn, which is within walking distance of everything. Given the size of the village, everything is within walking distance of everything. The Barnwell Inn, a bed and breakfast run by two of the nicest people you would ever want to meet, Mark and Tara Barnwell (long time friends of Rossi Selzer), is in the new part of Cooperstown. The new part was built in the middle of the 19th century. Anything built after 1800 is considered new. The old part of the village nestles close to the lakeshore and dates from the early 18th century.

For the golfers, I was able to play 18 on Monday evening on the Leatherstocking Golf Course. The course is part of the Otesaga Resort. I don't know the date of the resort. The course was built in 1909.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the food at the inn. Mark is a superb cook. Breakfast on Tuesday and Wednesday morning consisted of a casserole, a fruit cobbler, and fresh fruit, juice, and coffee. The Wednesday breakfast was my favorite. The casserole was egg, spinach, feta cheese, and fresh tomatoes.

The inn has a well-stocked library. I especially enjoyed The Canterbury School yearbooks. There on the third row, at the end, in Father Maurais' third grade class, stood young Rossi Stanton in her neatly pressed private school plaid jumper. I had trouble discerning whether the expression on her face was pious or quizzical.

The Baseball Hall of Fame is a sizeable structure with a well-displayed and extensive collection. I've known of the Hall of Fame's existence and its place in the game's history, lore, and mythology for all of my adulthood and most of my childhood. It could have failed to live up to considerably high and overblown expectations. It did not.

I took my time and read each and every exhibit carefully. My head is now more full of baseball trivia than you can or should imagine. The baseball history time line was impressive. It set baseball in the context of stick and ball games played in other cultures from around the world. Evidently, we humans have been throwing and catching balls and swinging sticks at them for a very long time. The museum effectively draws a line between baseball and the young, emerging nation in whose soil the game grew forth and bore fruit.

A word about baseball's origins. Evidently, the local boys played something called "town ball" in a pasture where Doubleday Field, home of the annual Hall of Fame Game, now stands. Abner Doubleday, local boy, West Point graduate, and Civil War hero, modified the game to include a diamond and bases, thus the name "baseball." Spalding, the sporting goods magnate, appointed a commission to determine the origins of baseball once and for all. His commission concluded the game was indeed invented by Doubleday in Cooperstown in 1839. In fairness, you should know that there are other stories that suggest forms of "baseball" were being played far and wide in our young republic in the decade prior to 1839.

Favorite quote from the museum: "The secret to managing a baseball club is keeping the players who hate your guts away from the ones who are undecided." Casey Stengel, Manager, New York Yankees.

Peace,