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Friday, January 11, 2008January 11 2008 ‘Goose’ No Ripken, Merchants Declare 2008 won’t bring another 82,000 fans to the National Baseball Hall of Fame induction. Rich “Goose” Gossage is no Cal Ripken/Tony Gwynn mercantile power hitter. But he’ll be OK. Not bad. That was the assessment of merchants on “Baseball’s Main Street” at the news Rich “Goose” Gossage, clean-up pitcher for the Yankees and other teams, would be the sole player inducted on the Sunday, July 27, on the field by the Clark Sports Center. “We won’t going to see numbers like last year’s until (Derek) Jeter gets elected,” said Barry Renert of Seventh Inning Stretch. “We’re not going to be as busy, but we’ll definitely have ‘Goose’ shirts.” “It’s an off year,” said Vinnie Russo, proprietor of Mickey’s Place and dean of the baseball merchants. “We’ll have to wait and see what happens.” The Boston Red Sox’ Jim Rice – he tallied 72.2 percent of the ballots, just short of the required 75, to Gossage’s 85.8 – “would have had the greatest financial impact,” Russo said. Think about it, though: Thousands of warring Red Sox and Yankee fans filling Cooperstown for three days? What a weekend. Gossage, 56, the 286th inductee, will be joined on the podium by Dick Williams, one of his former managers, who the Veterans Committee elected in December. The veterans also tapped former owners Walter O’Malley and Barney Dreyfuss, former commissioner Bowie Kuhn and former manager Billy Southworth, all deceased, for enshrinement. The J.G. Taylor Spink Award for baseball writing will be bestowed on the late Larry Whiteside. The Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasting will be announced on Feb. 19. During his career, Gossage had a 124-107 record with a 3.01 earned run average and 310 saves in 1,002 games for nine clubs, according to the Hall of Fame. His best seasons were with the Chicago White Sox, New York Yankees and San Diego Padres. A hard-throwing righthander, he led the American League in saves three times, twice won the Sporting News’ AL Fireman of the Year Award and was selected to nine All-Star teams. He was closer for the Yankees’ 1978 World Series championship in the 1981 World Series for the Yankees and the 1984 World Series for the Padres. Chicago White Sox roommate Tom Bradley once told him, “You look like a goose when you throw.” The nickname stuck and the media soon picked it up, according to the Denver Post, who also dredged up these highlights of his career: • Gossage first grew his Fu Manchu mustache to tick off Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. • His most memorable game was the 1978 playoff between the Yankees and Red Sox, which the Yankees won on Bucky Dent’s home run. Gossage earned the save when he got Carl Yastrzemski to pop up for the final out. • It was Gossage who threw to George Brett in the notorious 1983 “Pine Tar Incident.” Yankees manager Billy Martin examined Brett’s bat and declared an obscure MLB rule prohibited pine tar, which major leaguers put on bats to improve their grips, could only extend 18 inches. On Brett’s bat, it extended 24 inches. He was declared out, to a major uproar. Inductees are elected by the Baseball Writers Association of America. Writers cast 543 ballots, including three blanks, were cast by BBWAA members with 10 or more consecutive years’ service. Gossage was listed on 466 ballots to win election in his ninth year on the ballot, a gain of 14.6 percent over his percentage in 2007 when he finished 21 votes shy of the necessary 75 percent. Dale Petroskey, Hall of Fame president, announced Gossage’s selection at 2 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 8, in a Webcast on the HoF and MLB Websites. HoF chairman Jane Forbes Clark presided the following day at a noon press conference at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria. Now the action shifts to Cooperstown. “Jim Rice would have had the greatest financial impact out of everybody on the ballot,” said Russo. “We could see a decent size crowd if the New York fans embrace the induction.” “It would have been nice to see a few others elected, like Jim Rice or Andre Dawson maybe, but Gossage is a good guy and he deserves it,” said Renert, who has met Goose during past induction weekends.”  State Sen. Jim Seward said “not all the political action is in Iowa and New Hampshire.” He then introduced “America’s Mayor,” the real “America’s Mayor,” Carol B. Waller, and she announced she will be seeking a third term at Cooperstown’s helm. The announcement, at 7 p.m. Monday, Jan. 7, in the village trustees’ board room where she has presided for many hundreds of hours, was before 30-some political supporters and village departments heads, and it was a good-humored event. Seward, a fellow Republican, remembered highlights of Waller’s eight-year tenure. The time she showed up at a Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce annual dinner in “Cooperstown-purchased attire.” The time she was photographed sweeping up trash with the village crew during the 2007 Hall of Fame weekend. The time she bargained down the Notre Dame graduate students who yearned to develop a plan for Cooperstown from $10,000 to zero. (Ed and Margie Landers, however, did contribute lodging at their White House B&B.) The senator urged her, “run, Carol, run ... and I don’t mean out the door.” The mayor devoted much of her remarks to thanking people by name for the help provided over the years, ending up with “last, but best ... and you know Bill’s my speechwriter,” and thanking her husband, who, as chairman of the village Republican Party, emceed the gathering. Mostly, she said, much remains to be done and there’s no logical successor in the wings. (It had been anticipated Deputy Mayor Glenn Hubbell would succeed her, but he stepped aside due to illness. Hubbell’s successor, Paul Kuhn, has decided not to seek another term.) The mayor’s announcement launches an election season that will culminate with village elections March 18. No other mayoral candidates have yet emerged. In addition to Kuhn, Trustee Jeff Katz’s seat is up for election, and he is expected to run again. Neil Weiller, downtown merchant and an activist in the recent successful drive to limit paid parking downtown, is also expected to run. The village Republican and Democratic parties will be caucusing at the end of the month, and may be proposing slates. Cooperstown’s first female mayor, Waller, 61, was elected to the village board in 1992 and again in 1996. She was elected mayor in 2000 and again in 2004. Four Republicans who would be Congressman came to town the other day. And one – Sandy Treadwell of Lake Placid, vice president of Cooperstown’s Clark Foundation – left with the backing of the Otsego County Republican Committee. The morning after the Tuesday, Jan. 8, meeting, county GOP Chair Sheila Ross said Treadwell, a cousin of Jane Forbes Clark and a frequent visitor here, was the only candidate who spoke to issues like gas prices, taxes and health care, issues she said had a personal impact on local voters. John Wallace and Mike Rocque focused their remarks on more national and philosophical issues, she said, and Rich Wager struck the group as “a little young,” although they anticipated he will be coming into his own. Wallace is a retired state trooper from Chatham, Columbia County. Rocque, from Whitehall at the foot of Lake Champlain, is a retired Green Beret. Wager, a lawyer, lives in Millbrook, near Poughkeepsie. They are seeking the Republican nomination in the serpentine 20th Congressional District, which winds from the east end of Cooperstown, down into the Hudson Valley, up and around Albany and into Essex County. It is now represented by first-term Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand of Hudson, a Democrat who defeated incumbent John Sweeney in the 2006 Democratic sweep. The 20th includes most of Otsego County east of the Susquehanna River. The rest is represented by Rep. Michael Arcuri, D-24. The 24th includes most of the county west of the Susquehanna. Richard Hanna, who owns a home on Otsego Lake, is seeking the Republican nomination in that district. Earlier in the day that he appeared here, Treadwell, who was New York secretary of state in the Pataki Administration, then chairman of the GOP state committee, had received a similar endorsement from the Essex County GOP committee. A spokesman for his campaign said he was attending a similar session in Saratoga County the evening of Wednesday, Jan. 9. Ross said the candidates spoke individually to the committee members for 15 minutes, then returned together for a round-robin discussion. After they left, the committee agreed to endorse Treadwell by a wide margin, said Ross, although she declined to provide specific numbers. Regardless of the county committee endorsements – there are 10 counties in the 20th – the race it likely to end up in a primary. Treadwell is currently president of the Lake Placid Olympic Organizing Committee, which is seeking to bring the Olympics to the Adirodacks for an unprecedented third time.  Poverty Defined Outlook When Jim Powers isn’t presiding over the Otsego County Board of Representatives, or tending a 80-Holstein herd – 50 milkers – at his Town of Butternuts farm, he’s raising bees, which he sells up and down the East Coast. That’s his hobby. As he drives along country roadways in the spring, he loves to see which flowers are budding, knowing what each will mean to the residents of his awakening hives. Yes, he appreciates those drives, but he appreciates a lot of things: his farm, his family, politics. “Being poor” – and as a boy on a farm in Cooperstown, his family was desperately so – “makes you appreciate things for the rest of your life. If more people had been there, you’d have a lot fewer people complaining.” Still, life isn’t just one bowl of cherries after the other. For instance, Jim Powers has history with the Democrats, not all of it pleasant. His father Fred, who with wife Nina raised nine children on a Hartwick farm, was a Democrat and the son followed the father’s lead. “The Democrats believed the workingman took care of himself,” the father told the son. When James P. Powers first joined the county Board of Representatives in 1999 – he was elected chairman on Jan. 2 – he was a member of the party of FDR. As chairman of the Town of Butternuts Planning Board, he had been a Democrat, and had twice run unsuccessfully against incumbent county Rep. Dick Daniels, a Republican, before Daniels retired and Powers, who had been inching closer and closer, claimed the District 2 seat. But the honeymoon in Cooperstown didn’t last long. “They called me down to Oneonta,” Powers said during an interview on a recent snowy Saturday afternoon in the County Route 18 milking barn. “They even wrote me a letter: You will do what we tell you to do.” Even then, whether to create a county-manager position was an issue. On that, and issue after issue, Powers found himself voting with the GOP majority. “They (his fellow Democrats) didn’t understand me. I didn’t understand them,” he said, sounding like the spouse in a unhappy marriage. “This just wasn’t working.” The final straw for him was when the Democrats organized a lecture where a college professor spoke against genetically modified crops. The question was whether local Democrats should take a position. A representative sitting in front of Powers turned around and said, “Jimmy, he’s got me convinced.” It wasn’t too long before Carl Higgins of Edmeston, the longtime Republican chairman of the county board, approached him: “You’re not one of them. You never will be one of them. You better face it.” And so Jim Powers joined the Republicans, and has been there ever since. Like most people, however, Jim Powers is much more than a party label, and he talked about that for an hour, leaning against the silver evaporator in a side room while Earl Hodges, in the barn, barber shears in hands, was trimming the hair off four-dozen cow tails. He has vowed to control county-government spending, and he learned frugality during a poverty-stricken boyhood in Hinman Hollow. He remembers the despair on his mother’s face, not knowing where the next meal for her children was coming from. Still, he and his eight brothers and sisters all qualified for Clark Foundation scholarships, and every one of them went to college. Jim – third child and oldest son – went to Delhi, then Cornell. On graduation, he went to work on a sizeable farm in Trumansburg. Anyone outside agriculture might not think of a farm as a social hub for young people, but that farm turned out to be “a great place to meet a gal,” a mecca for good-looking female veterinary students learning their profession. Soon, he met his wife Pam, whose specialty these days is bovine embryo transplants; she travels the state, working to raise the quality of herds. Married, with son Andrew soon part of the mix – he is now 25 and a pre-med graduate student at Tufts – the young couple began scouting farms. Applying lessons they’d learned – “buy the ground and worry about the buildings later” and testing for good water – they settled on 90 tillable acres on the Otsego side of Unadilla Creek near South New Berlin. As Ellie, now 20 and at Cornell, and Alexis, 16, at Unadilla Valley High School, came along, Pam nudged her hard-working husband into driving over to the Lutheran Church in Norwich with the family every Sunday. He was soon asked to join the church council and found he liked it. He served for six years until term limits kicked in. Available again, he was approached to get into public politics. “I was thrilled,” he said. “I liked the idea of running for office.” Looking ahead today, Powers foresees good things for Otsego County. “The Southeast and California are going dry,” he said. “The politicians will divert the water to the population and away from agriculture.” Dairy “is only going to get better.” Beef and goat meat are in increasing demand. The good soils in the bottoms lands are ideal for crops that will feed the animals grazing the hillside. “How can you not have wind power?” he continued, given the energy challenges American society is facing. A proponent of “home rule,” Powers said the county Planning Department can still play a role to guide wind development to optimum sites in communities that want it. He sees high-tech possibilities, and appointed Jim Johnson, Cooperstown and Town of Otsego’s new county rep, to chair the Telecommunications Committee, which is leading efforts to put a Broadband Internet system in place countywide. A successful entrepreneur who “retired” by age 40, Johnson is “smart” and “a good people person,” said Powers. “I think he will have a big part in this government.” He sees his vice chairman, Rep. Greg Relic of Unadilla, and Rep. Betty Anne Schwerd of Edmeston as kindred spirits in keeping government as small and lean as possible. (In particular, he voiced admiration for Schwerd’s ability, when necessary, to say no.) The conversation came around to the county board’s disunity – not only didn’t the four Democrats vote against Powers’ chairmanship at the organizational, several Republicans broke with their party on key issues, including reappointing Oneonta lawyer Jim Konstanty as county attorney. Powers’ defended the Konstanty choice because of the lawyer’s 18 years experience in the job before the Democratic-controlled board dismissed him in 2005. A lack of experience – county Treasurer Myrna Thane was new; veteran former Rep. Ron Feldstein, D-Otego, was preparing his first budget as Adminstration Committee chair – contributed to last year’s budget fiasco, Powers, believes, and he wanted to avoid a repeat. Besides, he said, Konstanty is 65, and – if he plans to retire – will be able to train a replacement over the next two years. As to the Democrats, Powers said he approached them and invited them to dinner, to begin developing a new understanding before the new board convened. He was rebuffed, he said. Further advised not to change horses in the middle of contract talks, he said he asked Rep. Cathy Rothenberger, D-Oneonta, to continue chairing the Negotiations Committee, but she declined and the duty fell to Johnson. Part of the Republican sweep in November was luck, he said: The Democrats happened to be in control when those grievous budget errors occurred – the representatives thought they were increasing the levy 2.5 percent, only to find to their dismay the number was 22 percent – and paid the price. Powers said Thane, a Republican, simply gave the representatives the wrong information – “she’ll swear on a stack of $100 bills she didn’t, but she did” – and the Democrats took the hit. “The Democrats were in charge of the budget process,” he said. “They thought we had a lot of money and spent like we had a lot of money. And we didn’t. And that really hurt them.” Still, he said, the Democrats poisoned the well by allying with maverick Republican Don Lindberg in 2005, taking control of a county board the Republicans had won legitimately at the polls. “They shouldn’t have done that,” he said. Sporting goods merchant Moses Maschke knew how to draw attention to his weekly ad in The Freeman’s Journal. On Sept. 5, 1878, Maschke’s message to readers invited potential customers to “Buy a revolver and SHOOT THE TRAMPS, if they need it.” The ad continues with Maschke’s customary tag line: “Moses Maschke Sells the Best Made, and keeps a full line of SPORTSMAN’S GOODS.” In the 19th century, the word “tramp” suggested an itinerant, homeless person, lazy and shiftless, looking for hand-outs, prone to thievery, drunkenness and occasionally violence. Though the thrust of the advertisement can be seen as “tongue-in-cheek,” Maschke’s appeal to vigilante instincts in the local population was not unfounded. In the 1870s and 1880s, Cooperstown and surrounding communities were troubled during late August and through September with an influx of itinerant laborers. Mostly men, but also women, they came to harvest the hops crops, most by train but some by foot. During the harvest, the hops pickers lived in barns and temporary shelters, worked long days and weeks for low wages. Most had departed by mid-October. Hops, the chief flavoring ingredient for beer, was then Otsego County’s primary agricultural product and the foundation of the economy. Cooperstown was a center for the hops trade and numerous hops brokers profited from the lucrative, though highly speculative, international commodity trade. The county was also a major target for temperance reformers, anti-alcohol activists and abstinence advocates. The temperance efforts were centered in the village churches and those who saw alcohol as a source of evil, condemned the production of hops as immoral and sinful. In temperance circles, hops pickers were suspect, and any criminal behavior connected with hops was likely to be laid to the account of tramps, a term that some equated with hops pickers. Samuel M. Shaw, The Freeman’s Journal editor and a devout Baptist, faithfully reported incidents involving those termed “tramps” during the hops picking season. One short list of tramp-related offenses includes cases of highway robbery, thievery, burglary, rape and attempted rape, attempted child molestation and arson. Apart from these serious offenses, there were many cases of drunken brawls and assaults. It is not entirely certain whether the perpetrators in all cases were connected with the hops trade, however. The problems with hops pickers and tramps persisted for several decades into the 1890s. In July 1887, nearly a decade after Maschke’s ad, James A. Lynes, a lawyer and local leader of the temperance forces, who was then acting president of the village board of trustees, placed a legal notice in The Freeman’s Journal to reassure residents that appropriate steps were being taken to protect them and their property during the coming hops harvest. The notice read in part: “The energetic measures adopted in this place to get rid of tramps have been productive of good results – the tramps are kept tramping. Volunteers are assisting the small paid police, and the Trustees and Citizens Committee are acting effectively and in harmony.” A circular issued by the committee stated: “The citizens of the village are requested not to harbor or feed Tramps, but to report all such persons to the Sheriff or Police Officers at once.” The circular adds that the sheriff “has placed a Patrol on the lake shores who will see that all persons are protected from insult and annoyance…” (Resources for this articles and the illustration have been provided courtesy of the New York State Historical Association Library.)
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