| Welcome to the Cooperstown Crier |
|
||||||||||||
|
|
|
10-25-2007 The dinner, which will be served from 4:30 until 8:30 p.m., will be by donation, all of which will go directly to the Cooperstown Food Bank as the food for the dinner has already been donated. We attended the last Oktober Fest at St. Mary's and highly recommend it to anyone who is a fancier of German food and festivities. The dinner was absolutely delicious. And we fully expect this year's will be equally good and thus should not be missed. We recently attended a CCS school board meeting in which there was a presentation regarding the soon to be up and running new school website. And while we suspect that the new website will be a vast improvement, we were dismayed to discover that the presenter was unable to correctly identify the school's mascot. On the sheet of paper on which the home page of the website had been printed for the school board's edification, there was a picture at the top of the page of the Indian Hunter, the statue located in Lakefront Park. The presenter asked everyone to note the picture of the "Pathfinder" which will appear on the website. We tried to do so, but alas, did not find a picture of the "Pathfinder" on the print out of the website. Nor did we find a picture of Natty Bumppo, Leatherstocking, the Deerslayer or Hawkeye. We only found the picture of the Indian Hunter on which the school's mascot is based. We can't help but think how sad it is that in Cooperstown, named for the father of author James Fenimore Cooper, there seems to be little understanding of the difference between Cooper's works, which includes the character Natty Bumppo who is also referred to as Leatherstocking, the Pathfinder, the Deerslayer and Hawkeye, and the statue in Lakefront Park of the Indian Hunter. Perhaps we need to improve either our teaching of local literature or local history or both. When we pointed out this misunderstanding to village historian and Cooper authority Hugh MacDougall, he added "... the Indian Hunter statue, the mascot of CCS, is in fact a portrayal of a Plains Indian (not a New York Indian) and has nothing what so ever to do with James Fenimore Cooper or his novels. It is a copy (made 1898) of an 1860's statue by John Quincy Adams Ward which is in Central Park." And, should anyone wish to see not the original statute in Central Park, Hugh provided two websites on which the Central Park statue can be viewed. They are: http:// www.nycgovparks.org/sub- your-park/historical-signs/ hs-historical-sign. php?id=11249 and http://www. leeandkristin.net/NYC/IndianHunter. html. Hugh also points out that there are other copies around the country, including one in Buffalo which can be seen at: http://www.ci.buffalo. ny.us/files/1-2-1/ public%20art%20website/ web%20pages/ Indian%20Hunter.html. As usual we thank Hugh for his wealth of knowledge on both Cooper and Cooperstown history. Normally we are able to relate positive stories about the good people of Cooperstown and its surrounding areas. However, every so often, we come across an incident which does not paint the area in a good light. And unfortunately, just such an incident, which happened the weekend of the Pumpkinfest, was related to us by friends who live in the Cooperstown area. Our friends' daughter, sonin- law and two grandsons were visiting for the weekend from their home in the state of Delaware. The friends motored into Cooperstown for the festivities in their car while their family drove in in their vehicle which, of course, sported Delaware license plates. As the two cars were parking, a gentleman, who was walking his dog, said to the son-in-law, who had just gotten out of his vehicle, "Why don't you go back to f---ing Delaware where you belong." Needless to say our friends were horrified by the comment which was made not only in front of their daughter and son-in-law but also in front of their two young grandsons. And while the family was able to shrug the incident off, our friends were not able to easily do so. They were, and still are, unable to understand why anyone would make such a comment. And frankly, we don't understand it either. We give our friends and their family credit for not confronting the gentleman. We are not at all certain the Ellsworths would have been so kind. In fact, we asked the weewe, who would be sporting Ohio plates, what he would have done had the incident happened to him. He told us that he thought he would probably have explained, in no uncertain terms, how grossly inappropriate the comment was. And we suspect, given the wee-we's ability to express himself, he would have missed the entire Pumpkinfest as it would probably have taken him that long to explain his exact position regarding the incident. We can only hope that the gentleman, and we use the term loosely, realizes how out of line he was and, if he can not be more welcoming in the future, we would hope he would at least keep his thoughts to himself. Behavior such as his does not speak well of our fair community. In closing, we must admit that we have found the weather this fall to be on the pleasant side. In fact, our normal date for allowing ourselves to turn on the heat, namely Oct. 15, came and went without our even wanting, let alone needing, to turn on the heat. And that means we have managed, thus far, to keep our oil use below that of previous years. Unfortunately, since we are well aware that the temperature always has to average out, we will, no doubt, pay for the relatively warm fall with a relatively cold winter. And that we will not find to be on the pleasant side. We remain, In these Otsego hills, The Ellsworths The Ellsworths may be reached by mail at 105 Pioneer St., Cooperstown, N.Y. 13326, by telephone at 547- 8124 or by e-mail at cellsworth1@stny.rr.com. They look forward to hearing from you. |
Copyright 2007, Cooperstown Crier, Cooperstown, NY All rights reserved