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 Looking back over the two hundred years since our village was incorporated, the most important fact is that there are really two Cooperstowns. One is that of us, its residents, living in a picturesque rural community amid spectacular scenery, that has for two centuries served as a commercial and governmental center for a rural county in upstate New York. The second is that of the Cooperstown known throughout America, and indeed throughout much of the world, both as a name, and as a place to be visited for a few days or a few months, and sometimes as a place in which to establish a new home. The “first” community of Cooperstown was established by William Cooper in 1786, and officially incorporated on April 3, 1807. The seat, since 1791, of rural Otsego County, this Cooperstown is not unlike many other small towns and villages in upstate New York. Our physical growth is limited by the lake to our north, steep hills to the east and west, and protected lands to the south, and we are not surrounded by modern suburban ban sprawl. We are “centrally isolated,” equidistant from the metropolitan areas of Albany, Binghamton, and Syracuse, but outside their spheres of influence. Throughout our 200 years, we have not been touched by the canals, the main railway lines, or the superhighways that both link and create New York’s great cities. Despite occasional spurts of prosperity as a center for sheep, for hops, and then for dairy cattle, Otsego’s picturesque but rugged hills have always been a tough place for farmers to make a living. But there has always been a second Cooperstown, the Cooperstown of the wider world. Throughout our two centuries this second Cooperstown has brought visitors to our village who have fueled our prosperity, and sometimes caused jealousy in the towns and villages around us. At first this second Cooperstown was William Cooper’s celebrated success at creating a new community on the New York frontier, whose image was spread by James Fenimore Cooper’s 1823 nostalgic novel “The Pioneers,” one of America’s first international best sellers. It portrayed a multi-ethnic America in which settlers from England mingled with those of Dutch, Palatine German, Scotch-Irish, and Huguenot French origin, as well as enslaved Africans and remnants and memories of the original Native Americans. And, though upstate New York was in fact being engulfed by a tidal wave of Yankees from overpopulated New England, Cooper’s image of America, and of the Village of “Templeton” at the foot of Lake Otsego, was carried by his novel throughout America and, in translation, throughout the reading world. But from the middle of the 19th century until well into the 20th, this second Cooperstown was personified in James Fenimore Cooper himself, his fame as America’s first great novelist, and after his death in 1851 the relics of his long residence here. “The Pioneers,” had defined to the world the village as Cooper remembered it from the 1790s. “The Deerslayer,” first published in 1841, reflected Cooper’s life-long adoration of Otsego Lake. Employing his unrivaled skill at portraying scenic beauty in words, Cooper described the “Glimmerglass,” in the days before settlement, in such detail and with such accuracy that readers around the world felt they had seen it personally. Thousands came to visit, to delight in the scenery of Lake Otsego, to ponder over Cooper’s grave in Christ Churchyard, and to experience what even then seemed an unusually picturesque village. As Cooper himself had recognized as early as 1838, the future of Cooperstown was to be one of a resort for outsiders seeking repose and beauty far from the heat and bustle of the big city. All that were needed, he suggested, were a few more cultural amenities, and perhaps what we now call “bed and breakfasts” to provide more comfortable accommodation than the crude boarding houses of his time. From the Civil War until after World War I, new editions of Cooper’s novels poured off the presses. Translated editions brought him to thousands of overseas readers, especially in Germany, Russia, and Scandinavia. In 1907, when Cooperstown celebrated the centennial of its incorporation, schoolgirls gathered around Cooper’s grave to sing appropriate songs, and to hear a poem especially written for the occasion by Julia Ward Howe, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But, as Cooper’s writing style became more obsolete, as photography replaced pictorial description, and as new American writers rose to fame, interest in Cooper’s stories gradually declined. Though our place as a resort town was firmly established, the international fame of the second Cooperstown was on the wane. In the 1930s, however, Stephen C. Clark, as representative of the Clark family which had provided amenities for the village and surrounding area for almost a century, began the creation of a new second Cooperstown, the one we know today. He led the transformation of our Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital into a major medical institution; he brought to Cooperstown The New York State Historical Association and created The Farmers’ Museum to reflect our rural heritage; and he built on the then widely accepted Abner Doubleday myth to create the National Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame. Together with the more recent Glimmerglass Opera, these are the institutions which today represent Cooperstown around the world, and bring the visitors and new residents who are so important to our daily life and prosperity. Our village lives today, as it has for most of its two centuries, at the intersection of these two Cooperstowns. One is the Cooperstown of the Mohican Club and the Friends of the Library, of the Fire Department and the Veterans’ Clubs, of school buses carrying kids to school and of snowdrifts in February. The other is the Cooperstown of baseball fans, museum lovers and opera goers, of a crowded summer downtown with nowhere to park, of trailers unloading motorboats onto Lake Otsego, of motels and bed and breakfasts, of conventions and baseball stores, even of the occasional visitor from abroad asking what we have done about our famous author. This week we are celebrating our Bicentennial, from the parade on Saturday, Sept. 8, to the closing ceremony on Sept. 16. As we do so, let us remember that our future, like our past, depends on how we put together these two Cooperstowns, and make of them both a wonderful place to live, and a place to which the outside world will continue to flock. So far we have done pretty well, but the balancing act is an unending one requiring constant attention.   At every meeting, there she was in her wheelchair. On those steamy nights, when Cherry Valley people argued hotly over their town’s future, hour after hour, there she was. That night in the yellow-wooded interior of the old high school gym, when wind opponents sat anxiously as the town’s specially hired lawyer droned away, reading the whole state Environmental Quality Review Act form – remember that? – there she was. And then the vote – Big Wind was foiled! Elation! There she was, a tiny lady, weighted down by her 10-year fight with Parkinson’s Disease, but grinning as broadly as anyone else. Who was that woman? And why was her family torturing her by dragging her out to those interminable meetings night after night? It turns out she is Mary Eileen Noonan, and it was all her idea. “I wanted to know what was going on in the area,” she said the other day, Saturday, Sept. 1, her 90th birthday, surrounded by six of her seven children (the seventh had been there the day before, but had to depart) at her son Greg’s farm on Lancaster Street in Cherry Valley. In recent years she’s been living with her daughter, Pam, down on Montgomery Street. “I was very opposed to the wind,” she said. Mary Eileen Noonan packed a lot into those 90 years. Born to Irish immigrants, one of seven children, she ended up having seven children of her own. Her first husband died in World War II, leaving her with a young son, Joe Heim. After the war, she was working as a secretary in the Empire State Building when she met her second husband, Daniel Noonan. After her third child, they moved to Riveredge, N.J., where the final four followed. Raising seven children takes a lot of time, and her children mostly remember her ... raising seven children. But that wasn’t all. Pam calls her “an active working mother.” “She’s an incredibly talented person, very artistic,” her daughter said. “She made all our clothes, taught us to paint, played the piano.” The Rev. Guy Noonan, a priest in Florida, remembers her home-repair prowess. “There was never a saw or a tool she didn’t know how to use,” he said. “She was good, not only at home decor, but at home repair.” Once, she asked him for help with the floor molding on a near-complete project, but was quickly disgusted with his rudimentary skills. “She wanted mitred corners,” said Father Noonan. “Forget it,” she told him. “I’ll do it myself.” Mary Eileen remembers the the challenges of those years, buying milk by the gallons and frozen orange juice, tin after tin. Those were the days of Blue Laws. Supermarkets, and much else, were closed on Sundays. After a certain point Saturday evening, the local supermarket cut the prices on baked goods that wouldn’t make it through the weekend; she and husband Daniel were always there, buying what they could. Pam remembers her as “incredibly organized,” and you can understand that she would have to be. Even all those children weren’t enough. At holidays, Mary Eileen would be sure to invite a couple of children from the orphanage in Patterson for the holiday dinner. (Once, she remembered, a boy named Ralph showed up in his blue suit and went to mass with the Noonans. Since he was in a Catholic orphanage, she assumed Ralph was Catholic. He went up to the altar to take communion with the rest of the family. The priest held out the host, and Ralph bit his finger.) That period in Riveredge also foreshadowed the woman’s recent involvement locally. “As I understood my mother, she wasn’t out there as Jane Public,” said Father Noonan. “She was very involved in all sorts of family affairs. Dad was more the outgoing gregarious type.” But husband and wife were both drawn into civic affairs. She always was a member of the local Republican Club. She actually worked for Alf Landon. The big campaign the kids don’t remember much about, said their mother, was to get New Jersey to allow children to be bused to Catholic schools. Eventually, she said, that campaign succeeded. Also during that time, the family started summering in Cherry Valley. “Many of the Irish immigrated up here because it looks so much like Ireland,” said Pam. A salesman, Daniel Noonan’s philosophy was always, “Sell things that people need,” remembered Father Guy. Working for Georgia Pacific, the father clinched a two-year exclusive deal to supply paper towels and toilet tissue to the World Trade Center when it first opened, a huge contract. As the family prospered, they moved to more affluent Mahwah. The kids were growing up, and the parents started traveling to Europe and discovered an interest in antiques. They later retired to St. Augustine, Fla., where they lived for 20 years. As 80 approached, their healths started failing. Pam marvels at how her parents accepted what was happening. “It’s a very difficult decision to say, ‘We’re going to give our lives over to our families’,” the daughter said. “They agreed to sunset their lives in Cherry Valley.” Eighteen months after moving, Daniel Noonan passed away. And the Irish wake the family threw for him – at his request – is still a fond memory among his children. Even then, Mary Eileen Noonan’s Parkinson’s was becoming manifest. But “she’s had a very, very rich retirement,” said Father Guy. Presiding over the family brood – in addition to Pam, Greg, Father Guy and Joe Heim, there was Gail St. Pierre, a nurse in Houston; Barbara McCoy, a Seventh-Day Adventist pastor in Orlando, and youngest son Daniel, who followed his father into sales and works out of Campbell Hall – you can believe it. With grandchildren and all, there were a couple of dozen people at the barbecue on the lawn that evening, with golden fields stretching south as far as you could see. Even now, she’s teaching the ladies who care for her how to make dolls. “When you stop and consider how many people at age 90 are frittering time away ... She’s very, very active, despite the complications of illness.” Father Guy paused. He noticed skid marks on the rug. “And she IS dangerous in an electric wheelchair.” Most college-age locals folks are gone now, so if you see a half-dozen youngish folks wandering around the village in a pack in the next few days, looking up in the air – or at least cornice-ward – they are probably Professor Philip Bess’s architectural grad students from Notre Dame. The six – Lesley Annis, Will Dowdy, Paul Monson, Samantha Salden, Lenka Schulzova and Jennifer Stenhouse – made their debut in a packed village trustees chambers Tuesday evening, Sept. 4. They are under orders from Bess to – in just a week and a day – come up with their best assessment of how America’s Perfect Village can be just a little bit more perfect. Or will they find that perfection a little overstated? In town for only a day, Bess – he gave the gathering a quick run-through of the latest thinking on building community – had already learned people want more “retail diversity” downtown than the baseball shops offer now; they worry about the lack of affordable housing, and they struggle with “one major employer” – it was unclear whether he was referring to Bassett Healthcare or the whole Clark Estate’s suite. For more on that – neither Bess, his students, village officials or the people gathered were willing to predict in advance where the students’ weeklong inquiry will go – be sure to attend the wrap-up meeting at 7 p.m. this Tuesday, Sept. 11, at 22 Main, and say what you think. Or stop in any day before then to view a “charette” – a deadline-driven architectural design project. The students will go back to South Bend, Indiana, and Notre Dame’s School of Architecture, digest what they’ve seen, and return in early December with a final presentation. In his introduction, Bess quoted Aristotle on “the polis” – communities of 5,000 to 20,000 in the philosopher’s time – whose goal is to seek “the highest good: the well-being of its citizens.” He discussed space and “anti-space” – space would be Main Street, Cooperstown, where buildings, sidewalks, trees and benches create an inviting walkway; anti-space, the homes set in splendid isolation that are beginning to dot our ridgelines around here. He discussed the natural definition of a community, a 10-minute walk from end to end, and five minutes from the center to the edge; sort of like Cooperstown. He distributed “10 principles” for good community planning. Some – a discernible center, prominent buildings and monuments, a discernible edge – which would apply to Cooperstown. Others – a variety of dwellings, a variety of stores – less so. And he finished up by discussing “transect” zoning – which controls “not for use,” as Cooperstown does now, “but for building type and density.” The idea is that current zoning, by separating shopping from housing from offices, separates the pieces of the pizza. Controlling density and building type would, at best, allow synergies – the bookstore to locate next to the coffee shop in the proximity of readers. 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