When Babe Ruth stepped up to bat in the first Hall of Fame game, time stood still on Doubleday Field.
It was June 12, 1939, the centennial of baseball and dedication day for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Almost a half-century later, the setting remains frozen in time. Cooperstown, a peaceful village of 2,360 in upstate New York, has changed very little from that day.
In 1939, almost any small town in America would have been a good spot to build the Hall of Fame. In 1986, few of them still can project the ageless feeling of serenity that surrounds Cooperstown. Many of the Hometown USAs that Norman Rockwell painted have since faced a hard choice between slow decay or transformation into cloned suburbs, crowded with fast-food joints, billboards, traffic, people and pollution.
Not Cooperstown, a unique pocket of tranquility on the southern tip of Otsego Lake. The village still looks, feels and sounds the way it did that festive 1939 afternoon when fans pleaded for one last home run by the Sultan of Swat to put the perfect finishing touch on baseball`s 100th birthday party. Alas, Ruth was fat, fading and 44, so even though pitcher Sylvester Johnson tried hard to groove one for him, all the Bambino could do was hoist a feeble foul pop.
”Guess I`m gettin` too old,” Ruth grumbled, heading for the locker room to take off the uniform he`d worn on a triumphal 1934 tour of Japan.
It didn`t matter. George Herman Ruth`s legend is secure, along with the 192 other Hall of Fame members, on bronze plaques in the National Baseball Museum.
A few years ago, plaster casts that had been used to mold about 70 of those priceless one-of-a-kind plaques turned up in a Long Island dump. Embarrassed Hall of Fame officials, charging ”blackmail,” had to pay about $25,000 to get them back and prevent the sports trivia market from being flooded with replicas.
”That will never happen again,” vows Howard Talbot, Hall of Fame treasurer and director. ”Now the mold is destroyed after each plaque is cast.”
Quietly, the plaque payoff was made by the guardian angel that keeps Cooperstown intact. It`s called the Clark Foundation, a $200 million charitable and philanthropic trust that helps 2,000 village residents to survive the yearly onslaught of more than 200,000 baseball fans.
The Clark family, founder of the fortune, is woven into Cooperstown`s past, present and future as tightly as James Fenimore Cooper, whose novels of Indian lore first made the area famous. The foundation works behind the scenes to preserve Cooperstown`s 200-year heritage and prevent it from being overrun by fast-food franchises, trailer camps and neon signs.
”There`s no McDonald`s in town because the residents discourage them,”
says Ed Stack, Hall of Fame president and head of the Clark Foundation`s Wall Street office.
The absence of such things has a visible effect on the vanloads of people wearing Mets` caps and Springsteen T-shirts who strain the village`s seams all summer. They come to tour the Hall of Fame, but the striking beauty of Otsego Lake, visible through the trees, is an unexpected diversion.
In a world where change is a way of life, how can things stay the way they always were? What magic formula enabled Cooperstown to emerge almost intact from World War II, the era of the atom, space, microchips and vanishing institutions?
The answer rests with twin dynasties, the Cooper and Clark families, who have owned and controlled much of Cooperstown during its two centuries of existence.
Take a stroll down Main Street, past the expanded baseball museum, and you`ll begin to realize why Judge William Cooper had a vision in 1786, when he first saw the land around Otsego Lake. Cooperstown still reflects his foresight, blending the past and present in a delicate balance. It found a way to both tolerate and prosper from the yearly swarms of visitors who descend on the Hall of Fame.
”Yes, that balance between prosperity and privacy works,” Stack agrees. ”It`s almost like two worlds coming together, with neither the tourists nor the residents deeply affecting the other.”
Though it was chosen for the wrong reasons, Cooperstown turned out to be the right place. You can`t get here from anywhere, at least by direct transportation, but that doesn`t stem the tourist tide, especially on Hall of Fame Day when the newest members are inducted. Baseball fans fly to New York, Albany, Syracuse or Utica, then drive in on Route 80. Nobody can miss Main Street, because when you drive up to the only red light in town, you`re there. ”You don`t stumble on this place by accident,” points out Tom Heitz, Hall of Fame librarian. ”You have to want to come here.”
It doesn`t matter, either, that this museum should be in Hoboken, N.J., instead of Cooperstown. Hoboken was where the first recognizable, documented game of baseball was played in 1846, a fact that even Cooperstown residents cheerfully admit.
”Who cares?” says Elizabeth Ott. ”This is the right place for the baseball Hall of Fame, and everybody knows it.”
Ott and her husband, Ted, operate the Worthington House, a bed and breakfast tourist haven just a Texas League single from the baseball museum on Main Street. Despite that rooting interest, her verdict is as correct as any of the thousands made by Hall of Fame umpire Bill Klem, who never called one wrong in his heart.
The flimsy evidence supporting the claim that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 on publisher Elihu Phinney`s cow pasture–where Doubleday Field now stands–is as error-prone as the Dodgers` defense. The late Stephen C. Clark, the man who started the baseball museum with a few glass-encased exhibits in 1936, when the Hall of Fame`s first members were elected, never tried to distort the facts.
”Nobody invented baseball,” Clark said. ”It grew out of town ball and rounders and similar kids` games.”
Ford Frick, then president of the National League, shrugged off the notion that the Hall of Fame should have been located close to a bigger, more accessible city.
”Cooperstown is the sort of typical American village where the game of baseball could have been invented,” Frick insisted.
Frick`s logic might be flawed, but his judgment was shrewd. With a unique array of opera, theater, museums, historic buildings and a 187-bed hospital, all bankrolled by the Clark Foundation, Cooperstown is far from a typical American village. Baseball was not invented here, or anywhere else, by Abner Doubleday. Yet, it provides an unmatched setting for the Hall of Fame.
The main entrance to the baseball museum on Main Street is the same door that admitted all 11 living Hall of Fame members to the 1939 centennial celebration. Ty Cobb, cantankerous as ever, showed up too late for the ceremonies.
”Same old Cobb,” snorted Ruth, still burning because the Georgia Peach had slipped an insulting golf challenge (”I can beat you at the Scottish game any day of the week”) into his baseball shoes.
Clark began organizing the museum in 1935, housing exhibits first in the Village Club (now Cooperstown`s municipal building) until they were moved across Main Street in 1937. The Clark Foundation poured $44,000 into the old village gym, a two-story, red brick building that became the permanent Hall of Fame after its dedication ”to all America” by commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
Since then the museum has been expanded in 1950, 1958, 1968 and again in 1980. The separate Hall of Fame wing, dedicated in 1958 to display the members` bronze plaques in niches framed by Vermont marble, became an instant magnet for fans from all over the world.
In that dignified setting, with high ceilings and indirect light, the plaques inspire a feeling somewhere between respect and awe. Most Cooperstown residents, even those with little interest in baseball, are impressed by first-time visitors` reactions to the Hall of Fame wing.
”When friends come here to visit us, we usually point out the Hall of Fame and tell them, `See you later,` ” says Jerry Ellsworth, co-chairman with his wife, Cathe, of the Cooperstown Bicentennial Commission. ”It sounds like Chamber of Commerce stuff when I tell you none of them ever said they were disappointed, but it`s the truth.”
Another truth, readily recognized by the Hall of Fame, is that Babe Ruth still lives in the memory of baseball fans, even though the Yankee slugger died in 1948. As always, the Bambino is the top drawing card in Cooperstown, greeting museum visitors at the front entrance in the form of an imposing statue by Armond LaMontagne.
Carved from a single block of basswood, the lifelike sculpture depicts an unshaven, glowering Ruth, in his prime at the age of 34, ready to uncoil from a compact batting stance.
At first glimpse of the statue, grandfathers with long memories start recalling Ruthian swats, each one more prodigious than the last. But only serious baseball scholars, who bone up at the well-stocked baseball research library next to the museum, can explain why Ruth was labeled ”the Sultan of Swat.”
It seems that the ruler of Swat, a province of India, was known as the Akond of Swat. He was totally obscure until British poet Edward Lear whimsically noted:
”Someone, or nobody, knows, eh wot,
Who or which or why or what
Is the Akond of Swat.”
With that kind of ammunition for writers like John P. Carmichael, Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice and Warren Brown, plying their craft in the Golden Age of sport during the 1920s, the rest was easy. Ruth`s towering homers soon made the Sultan of Swat his personal label on America`s sports pages, and the Akond was never heard of again.
The decision to turn right or left from the Ruth statue is up to the ticket buyers ($5 for adults; $2 for kids 7-15; tots free). Some dedicated fans go the distance from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., with a break for lunch at the nearby Short Stop restaurant.
Their first move usually is toward one or more plaques in the Hall of Fame wing, grouped by the year of election. Cub fans look for 1977, find the Ernie Banks plaque and read the exploits of Mr. Cub, under a likeness that doesn`t look too much like him. Neither does Stan Musial`s, though the sculptor commissioned to make a clay relief of every new member`s head–the image that eventually is cast in bronze–gets a photograph to work from.
Most of the plaques do resemble the player, so Sox fans won`t have trouble recognizing their brilliant shortstops, Luke Appling and Luis Aparicio, or pitchers Ted Lyons and Ed Walsh. For some reason, seeing their individual heroes get equal billing with Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Connie Mack, Walter Johnson and other all-time greats is a matter of personal pride to the visitors.
Watching the expressions on the faces of fans reading plaques can be as much fun as the exhibits themselves. Long-forgotten games and exploits are flashing through their minds, so the atmosphere in the Hall of Fame wing tends to be quieter than elsewhere in the museum.
But this is not a somber spot. Far from it. Every plaque has a different story to tell, recalling the careers of gifted athletes who were not always that flawless off the field.
”By the time some players are elected, their bodies are old and broken,” librarian Heitz points out. ”The fans want to remember them the way they were.
”Don`t forget, these people were no saints. They had human failings, but they`re being honored for the way they played baseball. We don`t apologize for them.”
Strolling through the sunlit majesty of the Hall of Fame gallery, where baseball`s elite are immortalized, it`s hard to imagine the dark side of these heroes` lives. Anyway, fans don`t come to the baseball museum in search of sad tales. They want to rekindle youthful memories, recall the mighty feats of Ruth, Sandy Koufax, Lou Boudreau, Jackie Robinson, Dizzy Dean and Gabby Hartnett and see the bats, balls, gloves, spikes and uniforms these men used. The Hall of Fame has them in abundance on four floors overflowing with exhibits from almost every ballpark that is or was. If the Smithsonian Institution is America`s hall closet, then this place must be baseball`s attic, crammed with memories of the kids` game that most visitors never outgrow.
The youngsters already have discovered Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, doing their ”Who`s On First?” comedy routine. It`s shown on monitors to the right of the Ruth statue, with another statue of Boston`s Ted Williams against the nearby wall.
