Who, What, Where, and Why

Good Day!

Did you know why we have a James Fenimore Cooper Service Area on the NJ Turnpike? Better yet, do you know by which Exit it is located? (That’s a New Jersey joke!)

The answer is that way back in 1789 a future world-renowned author was born in Mount Laurel, Burlington County. He did not wait around for the Service Area that bears his name to be built as he needed to travel north to New York State and settle in Cooperstown, a small hamlet that his father bought the land for and then founded the town. I guess that the elder Mr. Cooper was a not modest person. Anyway, young James was only about a year old at the time and as such, had problems living independently, so he had no choice but to follow his parents northward. That is the start of our tale.

If you will recall in my last Post, I promised you all an expanded session on the Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, and the how’s and why’s of their mutual existence. If this topic seems like it is a ‘change-up’ (get the baseball reference?😊) from the usual Travelogue Format, then you would be correct. But it is historical, and I am quite sure that most folks wonder… “Why is the Baseball Hall of Fame in some little town in Upstate New York?”

I will endeavor to relay that to you, devoid of any slants or feelings about this interesting topic.

First, let’s start with Cooperstown itself and some extremely famous and literaturely (I made that word up!) enduring stories. I’m referring to the incredible Leatherstocking Tales by the local big guy, James Fenimore Cooper, who for many years resided right there along Otsego Lake and these lands are all used in his tales of Natty Bumppo and his friends and enemies.

            Ok, so now we know about Jimmy Coop, and we know who Cooperstown was named for, but what we don’t know yet is how all of this ties into The Baseball Hall of Fame, which wouldn’t even rate a “mention” if not for the long-standing argument about who, what, and where the starting point of baseball was purported to be.

            So, let’s set that stage for a moment. Whenever an argument starts about the beginnings of Baseball, where the first game took place, and if, and when, did it morph from the British game called “rounders”, the name of Abner Doubleday always pops up.

            Abner was a successful Civil War Major General, in fact, it was he who fired the first shot against the Southern Rebel Army in defense of Fort Sumter. He was quite accomplished man, even holding the patent for some crazy idea for cable cars in San Francisco! He attended West Point Military Academy between the years of 1838 and 1842. These dates will soon become rather important….. read on.

            Back in the mid 1800’s the sport of Baseball in the United Staes was huge and growing more popular as each season rolled around. Soon loosely organized teams and coalitions of teams became the norm, all with their own throngs of followers (fanatics works here, especially when you realize that the word ‘fans’ is derived from it!). The more popular it got, the more folks wanted (or were given) someone’s fancied or idealized, or even seemingly fact-based notions on the origins of, and subsequent question, “Who did what first”. This exercise, which ran for a few decades, is an example of the classic he said/she said, they said/we said, who said/what said. As you may imagine, this exercise did little to actually solve any mysteries. The key points that drove this argument settled around the ‘what’, the ‘who’, and the ‘where’.

            The ‘What’ being the fact that there were several precursors to Baseball that had origins in England and Ireland with a game called “Rounders” and also a more local contrivance of a game called “Town Ball”. The problem with these is that they got in the way of a very nationalistic thinking group of highly respected Baseball organizers who wanted to claim that Baseball was a strictly American sport, born and bred right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A! These guys went so far as to establish a ‘Commission’ to investigate these issues and to come up with a ruling on all, and put to bed, finally the grumblings of the naysayers and practical sport historians.

            This is the stuff that’s fascinating! We now have the luxury of looking on all of this in hindsight which according to the idiom is always 20/20 and thinking “What’s all the fuss about anyway?” Easy for us to say that now, but back in the day this was Important! Our Nationality was being challenged (as some thought) and it need to be Fixed(!) once and for all.

            Now we get to the ‘Who’ and ‘Where’ of this dilemma and I’m going to warn you; it gets quite murky in there. The contrivance of Commissions, Sports Columnists, League Presidents, Philanthropists, (read men with large sums of money) and even (gasp!) Politicians would be a good foundation for a mini-series! In all of this I’m not so sure that the average Joe in America cared that much. I can hear it now:

Scene: Man sitting at table reading the morning paper.

“Hey Hon! Guess what? It seems that Baseball was started in a place called Cooperstown, somewhere in upstate New York!”

“That’s nice Dear, don’t forget to take that garbage out with you when you leave for work.”

But…. if you are a person of means, and you realize that there’s a bit more at stake here than being on Garbage Patrol, then you kind of make things happen. You don’t wait for them to happen.

“Enter our next Celebrity Contestant, hailing from the small upstate village of Cooperstown, let’s all give a warm, money-filled welcome to Stephen Carlton Clark!”

            Who?

            “You know, the guy who was one of the chief engineers of the plan to bring fame and fortune to his little town in New York… Cooperstown.”

            Oh.

Now I’m confused. Why is he being mentioned in the same story as James Fenimore Cooper. Was he an author too?

“No, not an author per se, more of a participant in a fabrication of sorts.”

Editorial Comment: Ok folks, from here on in it gets dicey, just a few more peeps need to be introduced and then things can be summed up nicely. But I need you to know that it does not get steamy! The folks all involved were trying their darndest to do what they thought was the best thing for their town, country, and sport. And since there is/was no 100% definitive, solid, granite-filled base for these arguments, that leaves just enough room for interpretations of the same. And the Clark family has done incredibly immensely beneficial things for Cooperstown that still resonate today as the family is still there and involved! So…. here we go!

            Mr. Clark’s family was well-off to begin with as his dad became the lawyer for, and partner of, a Mr. Issac Singer…. as in Singer Sewing Machines. To give you an idea of how much money surrounded this family you only need to know that when he passed in1882 his estate was valued at $25,000,000 (million) and his real estate holdings were approximately $50,000,000 (million again!) But hold on… those numbers are just from back then, lets equivalize them to today……. they would be $815,000,000 and $1,600,000,000, (that’s millions and then billions!) I don’t care when it is , that’s a lot of money!

            So now we know that the Clark family is from Cooperstown and their homes are on the land the James Fenimore Cooper used to own. They are very loyal to their hometown, and it shows by the actions and deeds that they took when philanthropizing the area. And Stephen  owns three newspapers in the Albany area.

            Now finally, back to Baseball. By the end of the 19^th century and in the beginning of the 20^th century baseball was a hot commodity. So much so that by now it sort of mattered where the sport began and who actually started it. Really only a few important people cared the extra bit about it but to them it was really, really important because it was Business! It mattered so much that a ‘Commission’ was established to get to the bottom of this issue. Luckily for the few important folks involved, somehow the ‘Commission’ was comprised mostly of members that agreed with the Few. Namely the movers and shakers of Cooperstown and baseball in general. The Mills Commission, as it was known, was ‘called to order’ in 1905 by Abraham Mills, a former president of the American League of Professional Baseball Clubs. It concluded that Abner Doubleday, with the help of a ‘first-person letter” written by Abner Graves, testifying that he saw Mr. Doubleday scribe out in a field the modern diamond shape of the bases and impose a set of rules that helped make the sport what it is today. The year was 1839 or 1840

            Oops! Let’s remember back to those dates that I said would be important later on…. the dates that Abner Doubleday was enrolled in West Point (which was not then, nor is it now, usually in the manner of giving cadets off to play baseball games). Oh…. and the ‘first person’ account was by a five-year-old Mr. Graves because that’s how old he was in 1839. Let’s see 1905 minus 1839 is 71. That’s the age of Mr. Graves and his first-person account. Not sure about you (and I know that my knowledge of my early years is excellent), but I’m not so sure that I could identify and scribe what happened on an innocuous day that long ago. But no matter because the ‘Commission’ took it as gospel and proceeded to name an American Civil War General, Abner Doubleday, as the Father of Baseball!

            All was good in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave!

I’m going to condense the next couple of years and high points of this issue. Around 1920 someone proposed to buy the farm field that Abner Doubleday purportedly had that first baseball game. Major League Baseball was in support of the idea, so Cooperstown went ahead and tried to procure the field. They succeeded in 1923 and the stadium, Doubleday Field, came into being.

The next few years came and went normally until….. until the deceased Abner Graves (actually his estate) entered the picture again, this time with a ‘relic’ from the past. In Mr. Graves home they found an old baseball, old enough to be from back in that 1840’s era, when Abner Doubleday was playing hooky from West Point so he could invent the game of Baseball. To be sure, the baseball was very old and constructed the way that they were back then, mostly all handmade. Well, it obviously(?) came from Mr. Doubleday and that first game (or so it was advertised!)

In swoops Stephen Clark who bought the ball (maybe it’s the first souvenir?) and put it up in Cooperstown as a kind of shrine to Mr. Doubleday and the first game. The heads of the baseball leagues and teams thought that it was quite appropriate for the ball to be displayed there. Mr. Clark proposed having a Baseball Museum there which everyone was in favor of. The president of the National League, Mr. Frick, suggested having a Hall of Fame attached to it and as they say, the rest is History. Stephen Clark paid for the Museum and Hall of Fame to be constructed in Cooperstown and the plan was to have it ready for the Anniversary of that infamous date in Baseball history, 1839/1939. On another note, we must also recognize that these dates encompass another era of time, the Great Depression. Mr. Clark was obviously a businessman and could see the effects of the Depression on his tiny hometown of Cooperstown. He also was a publisher and selling newspapers was quite profitable. One of the major reasons that people bought newspapers was for the Sports Section. Even though the first radio broadcast of a baseball game was back in 1929, not all games were broadcast, nor did everyone have a radio, hence the Sports Section. Put the papers and an ailing town together and you can see another unobvious reason for Stephen Clark pushing for a Museum/Hall of Fame/Tourist Attraction to be placed in Cooperstown.

So 1939 rolled around and the Festivities surrounding the opening of the Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame were held with great success even though the claims that Mr. Doubleday and Cooperstown were not the actual ‘Firsts’ in the game that became to be known as America’s Pastime. There were still huge holes in all of the arguments for these ‘firsts’, so much so that eventually even Mr. Clark admitted that it was more likely that not just a single person had invented the sport. But again, the average guy on the street did not care.

Do you?

I’m willing to bet that the answer is No, you don’t really care.

To be honest, I really don’t care either, I’m good with wherever it was ‘invented’, but I’m always fascinated by the “Why’s” which usually leads to the “What’s” and as you can see, the “Where’s” I have no issues either that the Hall of Fame is where it is, in Cooperstown, New York. As a matter-of-fact Cooperstown may be the perfect place for it, albeit on an existential level.

It’s not easy to get there.

There’s no rail, bus, or air service.

The roads in and out of town are small country roads. You will never just pass by and say, “Hey! There’s the Hall of Fame! Let’s stop in!”

No, The Hall of Fame must be your Destination.

 For the people enshrined within, it’s not easy to get there either, their road is long and narrow for them too, but just like the visitor who finally makes it there the rewards are many and completely satisfying.

Ask anyone who has been there in either capacity.

P.S.  The Clark family have made sure that James Fenimore Cooper’s heritage and legacy are completely entwined in his old hometown. The Fenimore Art Museum and the Fenimore Farm and Country Village both started, and maintained, by the family are as prestigious and unassuming as can be, befitting a truly American author. The family is at the head of the Foundation that owns and operates the Hall of Fame (it is a private institution, not a part of Major League Baseball) Stphen Clark’s granddaughter Jane, is the Chair of the Foundation and Hall of Fame.