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Friday, May 25, 2007May 25 2007T.J.’s Owner: Downtown Merchants Unite  Hargrove Invites Fellow Store Owners To Form Association By JIM KEVLIN COOPERSTOWN On the receiving end lately – first, of a vending law some object to; then, to prospective parking restrictions – the downtown merchants may be about to fight back to preserve “a healthy downtown with no empty storefronts.” Ted Hargrove, longtime operator of T.J.’s Place, 124 Main St., who decries what he perceives as village hall’s “obsessive appetite to destroy merchants in the downtown,” has issued a call to his fellow Main Street store owners to join him in forming a Downtown Merchants Association that can “speak with one voice” against 22 Main predations. “The common ground we all have is accessibility to our stores and goods being able to be sold,” he said. “It has to be common ground to every downtown merchant.” A final provocation, he said, was the decision to close off the 150-space Doubleday Field parking lot from Friday afternoon, May 18, to Monday evening, May 21, even though the Baseball Hall of Fame Game did not draw a crowd to town until the last day. “I can’t get an explanation from anyone,” Hargrove said. Robin Gray of Essential Elements, the day spa in the Doubleday Field lot, who has collected 1,100 signatures on petitions protesting the proposed “Pay for Space” plan she said would block employees from finding convenient, affordable parking, reacted to the news: “Sounds great, absolutely great. I think it’s something that’s needed very much, because I don’t think anything’s being done for merchants in this town.” John Bullis, Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce’s new executive director, hadn’t heard of Hargrove’s plans by Wednesday, May 23. “We will have to hear what Mr. Hargrove has to say. If his ideas are consistent with the chamber, we would want him to work with us,” Bullis said. The idea of an association strictly for downtown merchants is not new, but there has been no such organization for at least 10 years, since Bullis’ predecessor, Polly Renckens, became Chamber executive and convinced the existing group the Chamber could better represent merchant interests. She recalled that Vinnie Russo, owner of Mickey’s Place, had been the original initiator of the separate entity, which grew into something called the Cooperstown Business Advancement Committee before being absorbed. In the ‘90s, Renckens was with Otsego 2000, and she recalled the issues were sandwich boards, which were being placed on street corners to encourage visitors to patronize merchants off Main Street; they were replaced with the permanent signs you can see on Main Street corners today. Beautification in general was also an issue, and efforts were made to plant flowers and put out flower pots. Vending and parking have been perennial issues, she said, explaining, “It’s all about having a built-out environment ... It requires people to have more patience and to walk. Most of us do not get the number of steps in a day suggested for a healthy heart. “Think Walk,” she said. The effort to limit merchants’ sidewalk vending goes against Cooperstown’s history and mercantile heritage, Hargrove said. “Merchants have always had their goods out on the sidewalk,” he said, bringing out two old photos that showed exactly that. “Danny’s Fruit Market had merchandise out into the street.” The other major issue is parking, and he recognized there is “not an easy solution.” But, he added, “It isn’t helpful by making wrong decisions.” For instance, he said, removing 10 parking spaces, in front of CVS and at Pioneer and Main to create loading zones is one of those poor decisions. As it happened, all the issues Hargrove was discussing the afternoon of Tuesday, May 22, were issues that evening at the village trustees’ monthly meeting at 22 Main, and then some. For instance, Deputy Mayor Paul Kuhn, presiding in Mayor Carol B. Waller’s absence, reported a seven-year “grace period” adopted when neon signs were limited in 2000 is about to expire at the end of June, and it was reported that both Hargrove and Foo Kin John’s Chinese Restaurant will be out of compliance. In a discussion of parking, Kuhn pointed out that the Northeast Mayors’ Institute that Mayor Waller attended last December at MIT had concluded Cooperstown has “too much parking.” There was general agreement that diagonal parking on the southside of Main Street should be replaced with parallel parking, even though it would reduce 63 parking spaces to 30. It was also suggested that the Main Street entrance to the Doubleday Field lot should be closed off. Trustee Milo V. Stewart Jr., suggested perhaps it’s time to look into a parking garage again. All this caused Trustee Jeff Katz to conclude, given that every step in one area has an impact somewhere else, that a “master plan for parking” in the village be developed, then acted on all at once. Meanwhile, Robin Gray, objecting to what she felt was Kuhn’s dismissiveness to the 1,100-signature petition because many of the signers live out of town, said she would start going door-to-door in the village to get more signatures. “When I tell them about (charging for parking downtown), they’re appalled,” she said. “They ask, ‘Are we ever going to have our town to ourselves.’ We want to bring other types of businesses back; therefore, we need to have our people be able to get to these stores.” Photo: T.J.’s Ted Hargrove and Becky Kennedy hold up photos of downtown Cooperstown as it used to be, with awnings and sidewalk vendors. Fans Expect New Biography Will Raise Cooper’s Repute Yale Publishes First Volume Of Life Story COOPERSTOWN  Now, 156 years after the death of Cooperstown’s most famous son, his story can be told. And it has been told. And you can read it.Its official publication date is June 19, but “James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years,” by Wayne Franklin, 708 pages and decades in the making, appeared suddenly and without fanfare on amazon.com in the past week, the $40 list price already discounted by the online mega-retailer to $26.40. That quiet entry into the market belies the reality: Scholars and fans have been eagerly awaiting the publication of the first volume of the first authoritative biography of the nation’s first author of best-sellers. Cooper was the first novelist to capture the Wild West (when it began in Middlefield Center), and the first American writer to fire the imagination of readers around the world with his tales of, if not cowboys, Leatherstockings and Indians. “It’s probably the most important book about James Fenimore Cooper ever written,” said Hugh C. MacDougall of Cooperstown, founder and secretary of the James Fenimore Cooper Society. “That matters because James Fenimore Cooper is one of the most important authors and cultural creators in American history – and one who has never been properly studied before.” Tina Weiner, publishing director at Yale University Press, called it “a definitive book,” and compared it to such recent hit biographies as “Jonathan Edwards: A Life,” by George M. Marsden, “Edith Wharton: A Biography,” by R.W.B. Lewis, and “Marcel Proust: A Life,” by William C. Carter. MacDougall has expressed the hope Franklin’s two volumes will revive Cooper’s standing the way Edgar Johnson’s 1950 two-volume “Charles Dickens: Triumph and Tragedy,” did for that other prolific novelist. Reached in New York City, Henry S.F. Cooper Jr., the writer and president of Otsego 2000, had just dipped into “The Early Years” and was impressed that it credited his ancestor with firing “the opening shot of American environmental thinking,” even influencing Thoreau. “Pretty good stuff,” he said. Wayne Franklin, chairman of American Studies at the University of Connecticut, has been working on Cooper’s life since 1994, and sees the author of “The Pioneers,” where early Cooperstown came to life as Templeton, as a pioneer in his own right. For Cooper was the first American novelist to churn out best-seller after best-seller, from “The Spy” to the huge “Last of the Mohicans,” “Deerslayer” and other “Leatherstocking Tales,” to such novels as “Satanstoe” and “The Adventures of Miles Wallingford,” now largely forgotten. He produced 50 books in all, outstripping Stephen King (31 so far) and Harold Robbins (33). (Danielle Steele leads the pack with 71.) In all, 1,000 editions of Cooper novels have been published. When Judge Cooper died in 1809, James Fenimore and his four older brothers expected a windfall of some $50,000 each, according to MacDougall, who is also village historian. But by 1820, the older brothers had all died, and cheaper land had caused the value of the judge’s vast holdings to tumble. James Fenimore Cooper, who had borrowed on his expectations, was broke. He had had to sell Otsego Hall, the family home on the grounds of today’s National Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame, and fend for himself. In 1821 he published “The Spy,” his second book, a tale of the American Revolution which proved to be an instant best seller. His career as a writer was launched. This need for money “motivated him to produce and produce and produce,” said Franklin in an interview from his home in Hebron, Conn. “At the same time, it made him very ingenious in developing the kind of books he thought people would read and, therefore, buy. By his sixth book, he was able to sell it for $5,000 cash, unheard of at the time.” Cooper “created value that people were willing to pay for. The same thing was happening in Britain through Lord Byron and Walter Scott. Books are acquiring, suddenly, a remarkable economic value. The old patronage system – the vanity system – gave way to this commercial system.” Second, Cooper was important because of his patriotism. “Because he was in the Navy” and merchant marine, said Franklin, “his sense of British abuses on the high seas was very keen. He’d seen men snatched off his merchant vessel by British naval officers and condemned to a lifetime of suffering in some hulk. He saw this as a symptom of British determination to keep America in a colonial frame of mind. And he saw the War of 1812 as exploited by Britain to reintroduced colonization into The States.” “Literal independence had come,” the professor said. “Mental independence had not.” This rankled Cooper. His sense of injustice and “sense of pride in being an American” informed his novels, said Franklin. Cooper was consciously seeking to create a “literary canon and an American literary pantheon.” However, before anyone could write “James Fenimore Cooper,” much work had to be done, said Franklin. For a long time, little information was available. The Cooper family had letters TO the novelist. But a grandson, also James Fenimore (1858-1938), began buying up letters FROM the novelist as they became available at auction. The resulting archive, however, was closely held; only in the 1970s did Paul Fenimore (Nicky) Cooper Jr. (1930-1988) make it available to James Franklin Beard, a Cooper scholar, who intended to write the biography that is only coming out now. Beard sorted out what was there and published “The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper.’’ He then realized that, due to all the different printings and versions of Cooper’s novels, that had to be sorted out before the desired biography could be written. He simply ran out of time: At his death in 1989, Beard was still working on “The Cooper Edition,” but only 14 definitive versions of the 50 novels had been published. So Wayne Franklin picked up the challenge. He said Beard’s “Letters,” in particular, allowed him to construct a day-to-day, week-to-week chronology, the foundation of a comprehensive life story. Here it is, 13 years into the task, and Franklin, who was born in East Worcester, grew up in Schoharie County, and knows Cooperstown well, still admires and even enjoys his subject, calling him “a great, robust-souled man.” “He thought amply. He was remarkably principled. He was not a terribly litigious or possessive man; he was quite generous. He was very social, friendly, outgoing; he knew thousands of people.” Goaded on by unexpected poverty, “the last thing he wanted to worry about was money.” Photo: A jaunty Wayne Franklin poses during a research trip to Ogdensburg. Cooper loved trees, he explained. Food, Beautiful Food To Be Project Prom’s Centerpiece Post-Prom Party Is All About Food  The Project Prom has been enticing enough to graduating Cooperstown High School seniors that there have been no prom-night fatalities since the one in 1983 that prompted its creation.This year, however, Brian Wrubleski, father of senior Alexandra, and his six-member Project Prom subcommittee plan to make the alcohol-free festivities, which continue at the Clark Sports Center until the sun comes up, even more delicious than usual. Wrubleski, a graduate of Johnson & Wales’ noted culinary school and food-service director at Bassett Healthcare, wants to put the icing on the cake. Or the scampi sauce on the pasta. Or, how about the fresh fruit in the chocolate fountain? “Freshness and quality” are his bywords. Prom Project 2007 may be remembered for reaching new heights of gastronomic delight. Wrubleski’s plans are a centerpiece of the 2007 edition of an effort that has been going on for 24 years now, since Linda Shannon, a Clark Foundation Scholarship winner, suffered fatal injuries in an auto accident in the early morning hours following the prom. “The event is a powerful show of the community commitment to its young adults,” this year’s co-chairmen, Kathy Bell and Sandi Soraci, wrote in their introductory letter to parents of the Class of 2007. Each year, graduates’ parents raise thousands of dollars to make the event a success, and so far this year have raised $7,500 toward the $10,000 goal, according to Sarah McGuire, Jason Conklin’s mom and the fundraising chairman. She encouraged the public to contribute now to close the gap. “We need the money now because the expenses are now. The upfront costs need to be paid,” she said. It works like this: After the prom, revelers go from the gala at The Otsego Country Club to the Clark center, where they turn in their car keys and sign in for the night. If someone chooses to leave at any point, the chaperons call his or her parents to pick the partygoer up. All the Clark center facilities, the basketball courts, swimming pool, bowling lanes and so on, are at their disposal. Massages are available. Games are organized. And, of course, there’s food. Photo: Bassett Food Service Director Brian Wrubleski aims to create the most delicious Project Prom ever. Clinton Regatta Veteran Cal Ripken of Canoeing By BRIAN HOREY COOPERSTOWN With Cal Ripken Jr., set for induction into the Hall of Fame, there has been a lot of talk in sports circles about the Baltimore Orioles veteran’s streak: 2,632 consecutive games played, a record that topped Lou Gehrig’s 56-year-old record for durability on the ball field. When the General Clinton Regatta begins this weekend, longtime racers will be thinking, no doubt, of another athlete whose endurance should be just as legendary as Ripkin’s. Every year for 28 years, Quebec paddler Serge Corbin made the annual pilgrimage to Otsego Lake on Memorial Day. Every year he subjected his body to a contest that lasted anywhere from six and a half to more than eight hours with no stops or breaks in the action. There were no seventh-inning stretches or time-outs or even potty breaks. While Ripken played 99.8 percent of the innings, this competitor moved his paddle 70 to 80 times a minute, every minute, non-stop for over seven hours. For those of you rusty on your math, that’s over 33,000 times in a race. That’s an incredible feat in itself but even more remarkable when you realize in each of these 28 years he competed with the very best of the best in his sport. Using six different partners over that span, Serge Corbin not only competed in the longest flat water canoe race in the world, but he won every single race he entered ... 28 out of 28 – 21 of them in a row. “Serge is absolutely the best professional paddler, ever,” said Ed Curley of Sidney, who has raced against Corbin in many events over the year, including the Clinton Regatta. “He IS the Michael Jordan of his profession In canoe racing he is second to no one.” Some of Corbin’s victories were “easy” wins by 10 minutes or more; others were incredibly close. The thinnest margin was a mere two seconds, after over 8 hours of paddling, in 2005. For years Corbin has come to the area to compete in the Ed Wessels event held two weeks before the Clinton. Curley said this year he was with Serge until Wells Bridge, only because Serge had not yet made his move. When he decides to go, nobody can stay with him. Serge is still racing, but he is now over 50, and will not compete in this year’s Regatta. He said he and his partner have not put in enough time to properly prepare for the endurance. Labels: Archives
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