The
day began at nine, but I made sure every morning to get through the staff
entrance by 8:45, in order to spend at least a few moments watching the sun
rising through the windows of the plaque gallery. The morning sun bathed the
bronze faces of past heroes in a soft light that matched the soft silence of a
room normally bustling with sound and activity despite inspiring an awe
reserved for [church altars] and cathedrals.
Soft cushioned benches, like church
pews, lined the hall, beckoning me to sit and reflect for a few moments before
heading upstairs to my internship in the library of the National Baseball Hall
of Fame. I have had my share of disappointments, of idols brought down to earth
and the true face of heroes exposed. Long ago I gave up any notion of expecting
anything from ballplayers that I would expect from any person. But the plaque
gallery in the morning was a place where I could suspend reality for a short
while and get lost in the mythos.
The stairwell to the second floor of
the library took me to a hallway at the end of which was my office. It led past
the file room, overwhelmed with dozens of stacked file cabinets filled with
alphabetically arranged folders on every man and woman to play or be associated
with the game. Crammed into those drawers were the real lives strewn on paper
of the gods’ one floor below.
My job did not require a moment of
Zen in order to prepare – every facet of the work was a joy. Though I often retreated to the file room to
conduct a quick survey of a player or team’s file to support a finding aid or
prepare for a museum talk, I spent most of my time in the tiny office down the
hall. There I processed collections and wrote draft obituaries, talked baseball
with permanent staff and gazed out the window that looked over the small town
of Cooperstown.
From that window I could see the
rooftops of the cafés, souvenir shops, collectibles shops, hotels, and
churches. I could see a tiny glimpse of Pioneer Street as it sloped down to the
banks of Lake Otsego, and I could see the end of the short alley running from
the staff entrance of the Hall of Fame along the side wall of Cooley’s Tavern.
Unlike many of the interns that
summer, I had decided to stay in downtown Cooperstown rather than the student
housing offered in nearby Oneonta. This meant that I could walk to work and
avoid a half hour drive every evening down Rt. 28, past the Dreamparks and cow
pastures, barns filled with antiques and the waterfall, and instead stop in to
Cooley’s for a beer.
Though occasionally overwhelmed with
summer tourists, the staff and regulars that typically comprised the crowd were
genuine and engaging. Besides talk of the Mets or Yankees, the place was an
island in a sea of baseball history, a welcome refuge to escape from the ghosts
of heroes and periodically to reality.
It was there during Hall of Fame
weekend that several octogenarian fans of Dick Williams got into it with some
thirty-something fans of Goose Gossage. The reality of the pavement hit the
Gossage fan harder than the fists of Williams’ buddies.
However, like my daily sojourns to
the plaque gallery at dawn, I was not in Cooperstown necessarily for the sake
of reality. As much as I enjoyed hours in the file cabinets lost in the
detailed history of forgotten leagues and anti-heroes, the whole town was
steeped in myth, surrounded by hills and set on a lake, like something out of a
fairy tale. Traveling to the town is an almost medieval adventure, and the goal
of the journey is more often than not to revel in all things heroic, legend,
and fantasy. So when Cooley’s was too
crowded, I would head to the water and the Glimmerglass Queen.
*****
“Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let your hair
down.” The tinny quality of her voice was the result of the overused recording
bursting out of the speakers loud enough to rise over the sound of the breaking
waves. The trip lasts about an hour.
Up and back from the banks of the Otsego
to Kingfisher Tower at its epicenter, the voyage of the Glimmerglass Queen
takes you off the solid footing of Cooperstown and into the mystic lake that is
ultimately the reason for the existence of the town that houses the legends of
baseball.
Council Rock, a meeting place of
Native American tribes long before the arrival of the Coopers, as in James
Fennimore and family, still resides in the same place as it always has, only a
hundred yards from the dock of the Glimmerglass Queen, a tour boat running up and
down the lake on the hour. The rock brought civilization, which attracted the
settlers, attracting Cooper on down the line to Edward Clark, who made his
fortune as the money man for the Singer Sewing Machine Company.
Edward Cabot Clark, you see, had
died during the construction of his masterpiece, the Dakota apartment building
on Central Park West. But not before establishing a home base along the shores
of late Otsego and leaving all of his money to four grandchildren, including
Stephen.
Stephen turned the home base into a
town bestowed by Clark money. In 1939, he had worked with the fathers of Major
League Baseball to turn his small baseball exhibit based on Abner Graves dreams
into a Depression-era celebration of baseball mythology. Only decades and
decades of chipping away at those legends left the Hall what it is today,
serving to promote a true history of the game amidst the pageantry of its lore.
But not too long before Stephen was
born, Edward had bestowed upon the town something equally magical. Jutting out
at the midway point of the lake, just across from Three Mile Point at Point
Judith, he built a sixty-foot gothic revival tower that played a starring role
in the girlhood dreams of the pilot of the Glimmerglass Queen.
You learn of her dreams over the
loudspeaker as the vessel drifts out of the small dock next to a breakfast
joint and meanders past the Leatherstocking golf course at starboard and the
tree lined Route 31 off port side. It’s an old audio recording of the pilot
meant to narrate the sites, but that quickly delves into the fantasy world of
her past.
It’s easy to get lost in the
fantasy. My dreams of being a ballplayer melting into my dreams of meeting
ballplayers finally melting in grounded dreams of working, in some way, around
them and their legacy. I no longer looked up to those ballplayers as idols, as
gods, but couldn’t help but worship them despite my better instincts.
As the Glimmerglass Queen approaches
Kingfisher Tower, you learn that, as a girl, the pilot would climb the rocks
and wander about Point Judith, all the time seeing herself in the high tower
waiting to be rescued. She builds the story into a dizzy rapture before singing
“Rapunzel! Rapunzel!” as if she is still that young girl dreaming on the shore.
Every visit to Cooperstown is
dreaming on the shore. Me in my castle
at dawn watching the sunrise illuminate bronze tributes. Alone at my desk, a
lowly intern looking over the rooftops of tourist traps and memorabilia shops. Together
at the bar, drinking a beer and letting it all sink in.
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