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In The News This Week Feb.22, 2008 |
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 Hillary, Arcuri Join Fight
To Keep HoF Game Alive MLB Move Under Study, White House Tells Seward OTEGO It was nearly hidden away in the back of a corner cupboard on Cooperstown’s Chestnut Street, almost out of sight. But discovered, the 19th-century stoneware cooler belonging to the late Margaret (Jane) Merrick, former manager of The Otesaga, sold for a record $58,300 Saturday, Feb. 16, at the Hesse Galleries here. The cooler, embossed in dark blue with an American eagle and 13 stars, was imperfect, but that didn’t dampen the ardor of eight bidders, five who were competing over the telephone. When the hammer finally went down – following a phone bid from Richmond, Va. – “the audience burst into applause, having witnessed an exciting moment in auction history,” according to Jackie Hesse, auction house owner.Mrs. Merrick met her husband, Skip, in 1931, when he was manager of the Nittany Lion Inn, State College, Pa., and the two co-managed Treadway Inns across the country. During World War II, while her husband was in the Armed Forces, she managed The Otesaga and Cooper Inn single-handedly until he could rejoin her. Age 98, she died last May 11. Hesse Galleries has another Cooperstown estate – Dorothy (Campbell) VanLeuven’s – coming up for auction on March 15 and 27. Also at the Merrick auction, a country cupboard brought $2,530 an Oriental rug, $3,300; a Sheraton card table with eagle inlay, $2,860; and a signed Emile Galle art glass decanter, $1,210. Hesse said the Merricks collected antiques during extensive travels on the East Coast, New England in particular.   280 Polar Bear Plungers RaiseRecord $56,000 To Help Kids By JIM KEVLIN GOODYEAR LAKE The 13th annual Goodyear Lake Polar Bear Jump was over, and daughter Dana Waters – with cousin Jennifer Dutcher – decided to play a little joke on her parents. “They told us we didn’t break last year’s record,” said Jamie Waters, Dana’s dad, who with his wife Brenda have been tending the annual icy plunge since the beginning. The Waters couldn’t believe it. What a blow. By this time, the afternoon of Saturday, Feb. 16, they were exhausted, even though they still had the post-plunge party ahead of them at the Tally-Ho Restaurant in West Davenport. Emotionally drained after a day where a record 312 signed up to jump through a hole in the ice – and a record 280 didn’t chicken out – Brenda and Jamie looked at each other. Then, they began to tear up. Dana and Jennifer realized they’d gone too far. Just kidding, they declared. Then the two of them and April Koren, the official tallier from NBT Bank’s Cooperstown office, told them a record $56,000 had been raised, $24,000 more than the year before. The $56,000 was almost half of the $114,000 the event had raised since the Waters had begun collecting funds for ailing children a dozen years before. “This is making me choke up,” Jamie said a few days later in recalling the moment. It’s hard not to get emotional when you learn about the children the effort helps. This year, for instance, the money will repair 6-month-old Isaac Cotten of Milford’s cleft lip. The baby also has a congenital heart defect. Christian Michele Pagillo, 15 months, of Morris, will get some relief from his cerebral palsy.Another beneficiary, Grace Utter, 6, of Cherry Valley, was able to make it to the event – although not for long – even though she had just returned from thrice-weekly kidney dialysis at Albany Medical Center the day before. Grace got to see her dad Matt and her older sister, Kaitlyn Graham, 21, take the plunge. Matt said Grace was fine until she was 3, when her kidneys began to deteriorate. At some point, the idea is to get the girl kidney transplants. Matt and wife Jodi will be meeting with a nephrology team at Boston Children’s Hospital in March. For now, though, dialysis is the only option. Last year, 171 people jumped. This year, the number of registrants at www.pbjump.com/ kept climbing. Jamie and Brenda watched. 230. 240. The night before the jump, it passed 300. While there were a lot of new participants, many of the old stalwarts were back, too. One veteran, Ed Gwilt of Cooperstown, raised the most in pledges, $2,876. Doris Sherman of Guilford, at $2,300, wasn’t far behind. But there were new participants, too, including sponsors. Royal Chrysler, Oneonta, underwrote a TV advertising campaign. Because of the large crowd, the event was moved from the west side of the lake – near the boat launch across from the Colliersville Taylor’s Mini-Mart – to the east side. There’s a big field up there, and Herb Krol let the organizers use it for free. And Royal Chrysler again came forward, providing shuttle vans to get people from the parking lot to the event. Very Few In Arms At Reval  COOPERSTOWN Owners of only 2.7 percent of the 1,056 properties revalued in the Village of Cooperstown’s first comprehensive reassessment in two decades have raised any objections about the results. “If people think they are fairly assessed, there’s no reason to grieve,” remarked Steve Child, Otsego County director of real property, the morning after Grievance Day, Tuesday, Feb. 19, when only 18 people showed up before the village trustees to challenge the outcomes. Still, he said, you would expect perhaps a 10 percent appeals rate in a standard assessment. Village Clerk Teri Barown was more specific: “I think it’s a vote of confidence in Al.” Al is Al Keck, the zoning enforcement officer who, intrigued, assumed the re-sponsibility for inspecting and valuing all buildings and land within the village limits, both on the Town of Middlefield side, east of the Susquehanna, and the Town of Otsego side. Overall, Keck has said, land on the shores of Otsego Lake went up most – as much as six times – and two-family and commercial property dropped relative to everything else. Tax-exempt property, while still extensive, went down as a proportion of the whole. Still, the 18 people who grieved to the village board – it sits once a year as an assessment board of appeals – fell into a range of categories. Ed Smith, whose home is at the bottom of Pioneer Street, pointed out that his lake frontage was assessed at 50 percent more per square foot than some other lakefront properties. Plus, he said, there is often nighttime rowdiness in nearby Lake Front Park.. Dan Hage, who tore down 80 percent of that yellow ranch on Pioneer Street for less than $300,000, replacing it with modern construction, said he wouldn’t be able to sell his home for the $700,000+ for which it is assessed; he argued 80 percent of the original value should be knocked off. After buying his Pioneer Street home, Dr. Herb Marx said, his neighbor painted the adjacent home multiple Disneyland-like colors and added a two-car, two-story garage that looms over his backyard, reducing his property’s value. And Claire Satriano said the fact her Beaver Street home, near Susquehanna Avenue, is adjacent to that ramshackled property – one of only two or three in the village – and that should be taken into account in her assessment. Keck generally held his ground, and the trustees didn’t make any decisions that night anyhow. The assessor said later he learned a couple of lessons from his months of detail-oriented work, and will make two recommendations to the village trustees. One, there is too much unused or underused commercial space downtown, which could be converted to housing for young families or older people who wanted to move out of bigger homes. Plus, it’s lost assessment and, thus, lost revenue. Two, only two senior citizens qualify for the 50 percent property-tax reduction because the income limit is $14,000. That should be raised, Keck said, to $20,000 or perhaps more.  Stoneware In Cooperstown EstateBrings Record $58,300 At Auction On the shores of the deep blue Glimmerglass, Paula Wycoff is considering going green. Owner and captain of the Glimmerglass Queen, she plans to refit the tour boat to run on soy-bean oil this summer, not the odorous deisel it has run on until now. Owner of the Lakefront Motel at the end of Fair Street, she hopes to get permission from the village Planning Board to erect a 10-foot-tall wind turbine to provide 10 percent of her establishment’s electrical needs. She has identified a vendor, ODAC Wind of California. The turbine, she said, which would not have propellers, but vertical elements with the 8-foot wide structure, would cost $69,000. “This company is an alternative to the big boys with the big windmills,” she said. “There is no sound,” she added. Wyckoff appeared before the Planning Board Tuesday, Feb. 12, to give a preliminary briefing. She will be returning with a more formal application. If all goes well, she said, the village might consider doing something similar. Fairy Spring Park, she noted, might be an ideal site for one or two of these relatively unobtrusive turbines. The businesswoman said she is motivated in both these ventures by an urge to do something to help the environment, not by profit. The turbine will produce 26,000 Kw of electricity, she said; but her motel and restaurant complex uses 230,000 Kw a season. Diesel oil is going for $2.99 a gallon right now; soy-bean oil, $4.80.  Hi, I wanted to draw your attention to this important petition that The Freeman's Journal is sponsoring: "Save Hall of Fame Game" http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/savehofgame/ The National Baseball Hall of Fame announced Tuesday, Jan. 29, that Major League Baseball has unilaterally cancelled The Hall of Fame game, a revered 70-year tradition. Please help the Cooperstown sports' community in petitioning MLB Commissioner Bud Selig to change his mind. And, please, forward the petition to anyone you know who may be sympathetic to the cause. 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