A Home Run at Cooperstown

(Cooperstown, NY: 23 April 2001) Ever since I can remember I have loved the game of baseball. My family retells a story of me when I was 3 or 4. My Dad played softball for the Navy Dispensary team at Pearl Harbor. While the grown ups were playing, the big kids would always get a ball game going behind the bleachers. I wanted to play so bad I kept bugging them to let me play. "You're too young", they said. I bugged them until they finally gave in and let me be the catcher. They instructed me to stay way back from the batter, which I did for awhile, but the ball would bounce before it would get to me, and I couldn't catch it. So I kept skooching forward. A little more, a little more. I got too close and on the next pitched ball the batter cold cocked me above the left eye and I was out like a light. Fortunately there were a bunch of medics close-by. I woke up in the Emergency Room where they stitched me up good as new. I still have the scar to prove it. The first chance I could I was back with the kids bugging them to let me play ball. I finally did get to play and continued to play through my junior year in high school. It took me that long to realize and admit to myself that I wasn't good enough to make it to the Big Leagues, much less the Hall of Fame! I played for a short time, but have been a fan a lifetime. Now I have made it to the hall of fame.
After visiting the Big Apple and having a great time with our friends in Warwick, Joy and I headed north to Cooperstown, a little village at the end of Lake Otsego, NY. In the late 1700's the father of early American writer James Fenimore Cooper (The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohican's, Leatherstocking Tales, etc.) founded this beautiful village at the headwaters of the Susquehanna River, hence it's name. It's association with the game of baseball is almost an accident. As the sport gained popularity in the years following the Civil War, people wanted to know how it got started. A newspaper writer remembered a young Abner Doubleday introducing the game to his schoolmates in Cooperstown around 1839. Doubleday went on to West Point and became a General in the Union Army during the Civil War. The writer wrote in a widely read publication, "No one will remember what Abner Doubleday did at Gettysburg, but they never forget what he did at Cooperstown." Further research has proved that neither Doubleday nor Cooperstown had anything to do with originating the game that would become the nations pastime, but the deed was done and the rest is history.
The museum not only commemorates the individual greats and hero's of the game it documents the colorful people, events, teams, evolution, and development of the game from the 1800's to the present day. The pictures may convey this better than I can in words.
I couldn't play the game I love, but I finally did make it into the Hall of Fame!
For more pictures click this link to go to our new Flickr page.