Babe Ruth and more

BABE RUTH AND MORE

I AM ALWAYS surprised how few Manhattanites know about Cooperstown, in the western part of Upstate New York. They are aware of New England, and they may know the Adirondacks, in the eastern part of Upstate, having gone there for a vacation or to put children in camps, as we did; but, apart from having a vague recollection that the Baseball Hall of Fame is in Cooperstown, hardly anybody I've met knows the place. Certainly, few know that Cooperstown is a jewel of a village, full of beautiful late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century houses, and is also the home of the New York State Historical Association. Furthermore, there is beautiful, clear Lake Otsego for boating and swimming, and a find old-fashioned hotel (the kind that has big white columns in front and wonderful flowers both outside and inside), and also an excellent hospital . . . just in case. In short, Cooperstown is a good place for a family vacation, and there are enough motels, hotels, and so on to accommodate the vacationers, many of them near the water. As for this elderly party, mindful of the days when old-fashioned service was in flower, it is the Otesaga Hotel that is always the establishment of choice.

Though the town is named after James Fenimore Cooper, his ghost hovers but lightly over the place. Now it is the Baseball Hall of Fame that brings in the revenues, and who is to quarrel with an institution where grown men turn misty-eyed when they see the Babe Ruth relics? Still, there is a lot more to Cooperstown than the National Pastime. There is, to start with, the splendid Farmers' Museum, an assemblage of a dozen or so buildings from the surrounding countryside that show village life around the turn of the eighteenth century, before the increased mechanization of the 1830s and '40s. As much as possible, the museum is run with live demonstrations instead of just static exhibits. People show how flax was prepared for spinning, how butter was churned, bread baked, printing done, drugs dispensed, and so forth, in this open-air museum. Museums of this kind, often on a much larger scale, can be found in Scandinavia (I especially remember the Norwegian ones). And here, as there, children like them, probably because they are not aware that they are being taught a history lesson. Grown-ups find them interesting too, even the ones who think our consumer civilization just dandy.

Fenimore House, across the way, is a beautiful mansion on lawns that slope down to the lake; here too, as everywhere else in Cooperstown, the trees are immense and think with leaves. The New York State Historical Association knew what it was doing when it made Fenimore House its headquarters and the main repository of its folk art and pictures. Both, but especially folk art, have to be first-class to fetch me; here they are, and well displayed too. The folk art includes wooden Indians, weather vanes, sculptures both painted and unpainted, toys, quilts, stoneware, and so on, all wonderful and, more often than not, strange to behold. Who would have thought that a large metal grasshopper would make a smashing weather vane, as would St. George slaying the dragon?

My favorites, however, are the pictures in Fenimore House, beginning with some late-eighteenth-century portraits that look like somebody you know and don't necessarily like. To my mind, the women's portraits are far more successful than the men's, except when the artist is a great one, as in the case of Gilbert Stuart's 1786 portrait of one Joseph Brant--a pensive gent with an astonishing feathered headpiece. The portraits of children are touching, if not always artful; but, then, genre painting like Mrs. McCormick's General Store, painted in 1844 by Albertus Browere, gives you an excellent idea of the naughty teenagers of the time. I am especially fond of Thomas Hicks's Peaceable Kingdom, where lions and lambs such as you've never seen lie down together (Mr. Hicks was a Quaker in Philadelphia), and of the grave pictures, where willowy ladies mourn over graves set amidst willows. In short, Fenimore House is a wonderful place to get lost in for a morning and more. I also appreciate the fact that the Historical Association is constantly buying such contemporary folk art as a painting of Noah's Ark by one Isidor Wiener, who signed his work "Grand pa wiener' after the death of Grandma Moses (although Grand pa does not paint nearly as interestingly as that venerable matriarch).

Then there is, some thirty miles out of Cooperstown, the Russian Holy Trinity Monastery, all gold cupolas in the middle of wheat fields: a piece of old Russia about which I wrote many years ago and about which I will write again. Suffice it to say for now that an extremely Russian church now graces the equally Russian cemetery with its tall crosses, each with three cross-bars in the Russian manner. Honestly, you'd never think to find Old Russia in Jordansville, New York.

COPYRIGHT 1986 National Review, Inc.
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