Like most mornings, I’m forced to get up around 5:30am because the dogs, Mollie and Coco, are getting restless and they need to go on their morning constitutional, otherwise I’d have the constitution stuff all over our trailer. I also try to find an area away from the campground where I can let the dogs run free, since they expend all their pent up energy that way.
This morning I headed for the woods right across the street from the KOA campground, and after I was far enough from the road, I let the dogs go. As always, they went bonkers, chasing each other at high speed and sniffing all the new smells.
All of a sudden I came upon a graveyard of about ten 1960’s era Saabs. Here they were in the middle of the forest, with no visible road, all overgrown. They were put here to rust away into oblivion, and I found them. It was an eerie site, but fortunately I had my camera with me to record this strange apparition.
Our campground was near the northern end of Otsego Lake and Cooperstown was on the southern edge of this lake. The source of the Susquehanna River, it is nine miles long, and although it is geologically related to the neighboring Finger Lakes, it is not counted among them. The lake was known to James Fenimore Cooper as Glimmerglass and was a principal feature in several of his novels, including The Deerslayer, Last of the Mohicans and the famous Leatherstocking Tales.
Cooperstown is not only home to the Baseball Hall of Fame, but also Hyde Hall, an unusually large home, which at the time of its construction, was the largest home in the country. It is neoclassical country mansion, combining the architectural traditions of England and America, is ranked as one of the three or four great buildings in America of its time. Built between 1817 and 1834 for George Clark, an heir to the governor of New York of the same name before it became one of the original 13 states, it is one of the few surviving works of the architect Philip Hooker.
But it is the Baseball Hall of Fame that brings the tourists to this area. Lots of tourists. We had to carefully drive through the town to get to a parking lot that would accommodate our truck and trailer. We learned about the large lot that was on the northwest edge of town that is also a trolley stop for a ride back into town, at the campground.
We parked under the shade of a large tree and put the dogs into the trailer while we caught the trolley to the Hall of Fame.
After four short stops, we found ourselves just feet from the big building right on the town’s main street. The courtyard was filled with people, most of them kids in baseball uniforms since there was a youth baseball tournament happening simultaneously in town.
Marianne wasn’t too keen on going through the museum, so she elected to go shopping instead, which was alright by me, since I’m not that keen on shopping.
Admission to the Baseball Hall of Fame is normally $16.50 per adult, but with my veteran and AAA discount it was only $9. I was amazed that they would compound discounts, but I didn’t argue, since I knew that I would spend at least that much when I got to the gift shop.
There was a line to get in, but it moved favorably, since it was usually a couple adult managers followed by their respective baseball team. It was recommended that the first thing one should see upon entering this shrine is the Baseball Experience, a digitally-enhanced, 13-minute multimedia presentation in the 191-seat Grandstand Theater which prepares visitors for the story of the game's history. It seems that everyone I was in line with filed into that mock-up of a baseball stadium, complete with actual seats, almost totally filling the theater. People sat rapt watching the show, and then everyone joined in singing, “Take Me Out to the Ballpark”, with some people more in tune than others.
When the show was over, I was part of the mad scramble to see the rest of this museum. It was getting hard to move as I was part of the unleashed “bubble” trying to view the exhibits. People were stopping, taking photographs, and even videos, of their favorite player’s memorabilia, in some places it was difficult to even just turn around.
I cured that predicament by focusing my attention on the only full-time San Diego Padres player, Tony Gwynn, and players whose careers took them through San Diego: The San Diego Chicken, Trevor Hoffman, Ricky Henderson, and Gaylord Perry, as well as announcer and former Yankee, Jerry Coleman. Considering the location, San Diego is about as far away from the HoF as any team can get, and it’s reflected in the team’s popularity with the predominately East Coast tourists.
People tell me that they can spend days looking at all the stuff, but I had had enough after two hours, and I was also getting hungry. After a quick stop in their gift shop and picking up a deluxe Baseball Hall of Fame T-shirt, Marianne and I rendezvoused in front of the building and together we found a restaurant in a somewhat German motif that featured hotdogs at a fairly reasonable price.
The trolley took us back to the parking lot, our trailer and the dogs. After walking and feeding the dogs we headed out to find Norwich, NY, where I lived before moving to South Dakota in 1960.
Even though Norwich is less than 45 miles from Cooperstown, I had never been to the Baseball Hall of Fame before. I guess it’s because when I lived in Norwich my dad wasn't much of a baseball fanatic, since we’d only come over on the boat from Germany less then five years earlier. Baseball wasn’t a big deal in Germany. But my dad did buy me my first baseball mitt when we lived in Norwich. I was the only kid on any team I ever got chosen on (last) to have a Gil Hodges autograph model first-baseman’s glove. I really wanted a Mickey Mantle outfielder’s glove, but I guess I shouldn’t complain, I could have ended up with a Yogi Berra's catcher’s mitt.
The road to Norwich was not only winding but hilly as well. This was rural New York State, and by the time we got there I surmised that the economy had been tough on this little town.
Finding my old home wasn’t too hard, heck, I had the address, 52 West Main St. But either my memory was bad or the street numbers were altered in the ensuing 50 years. The actual address turned out to be 53 West Main St. I knew the house was on the south side of the east/west running street, but the numbers on this side of the street were now all odd numbers. I betting it was my bad memory. . .
The duplex house was for sale, but even with a relatively new coat of yellow paint it looked tired. When I lived there is was painted a more respectable white, It looked to me that the neighborhood had gone somewhat downhill, and when I saw the folks from "Deliverance" living across the street, I was sure. They keenly watched me as I shot a series of photographs of the old homestead, and when I approached them to let them know that I had lived in that house a half century earlier, they looked at me as I had just stepped out of a space ship.
After quickly photographing my dad’s former workplace four blocks away, and then my old school another three blocks away, we took one last tour down the main drag before heading further west.
That evening we made it to Cortland, New York, where we stopped at a visitor’s center that wasn’t too much larger than a two-holer outhouse. But what it lacked in size, it made up for in charm. Two very old ladies were sitting on little chairs, absorbed in their reading, when I entered. It was close to 5pm and they were getting ready to call it a day, but they were excited to give me all the scoop of the surrounding area, including where to camp for the night.
I had my choice between the Yellow Lantern Kampground about a mile away, or another campground another mile further away that was home to the New York State Museum of Country Music. Since we were only staying overnight, and wouldn’t even be unhitching, we picked the closer of the two.
The “YLK” as it is known, was relatively large, and we got a large pull-through campsite that was on level grass. We were just one hundred yards from the office, which not only housed a kitsch-filled gift shop, but also a laundry.
Just outside of the campground was a large field where the dogs ran loose, chasing each other, enjoying their freedom, and expending a day’s worth of that pent up energy.
Back at the trailer, they were pooped, but we proceeded to round up our laundry for our weekly purification experience. There were only two washing machines and driers, and neither was as big as we’d been accustomed to. Armed with a roll of quarters we had gotten from the camp office, we crammed our belongings equally into each, deposited our $2 per load, and hoped our stuff would get at least somewhat clean.
Forty-five minutes later, I came back and re-crammed our stuff into the two driers, put in another $2 per load, knowing well that all our stuff wouldn’t get dry in these overstuffed machines. After another 45 minutes we returned to take out the stuff that was dry enough, and put the too damp stuff back into a drier and deposited yet another $2. After $10 our stuff was clean and dry enough for trailer trash.
Back at the trailer, we put away all our clothes and fell asleep exhausted.
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