Gods of Wood and Stone

by Mark Di Ionno

  This land is my land. This home is my home.

  Horace sat until twilight became night. The infinite blackboard of stars, and blue wisps of cigarette smoke dissipating like a last breath, made him desperate to find something to hold. What did he have? He had history. Family history, right here. He would stay, and dissect the failures of his father and grandfather and find justice for them through the long lens of historic perspective. They were good men, but men in the wrong place and time. He could redeem them through the study of the unkind unraveling of Rural America by Industrial America in the early twentieth century, followed by Industrial America’s postwar shuttering by Global Economy America. Horace knew the national story could be told through one family narrative. When it came time for college, he could see his future in his past.

  Horace was smart and got accepted into Cornell’s Agricultural College, the land-grant, public part of the university. He was a rural sociology major walking in the door, and out. For the next six years, he collected data, studied trends, and explored theories. He became educated and armed to write and teach, with reverential knowledge, about America’s lost agrarian past. His master’s thesis, called “The Rise and Fall of the Hops Industry, and Its Lasting Economic and Social Impact on New York Farm Regions,” was written from a firsthand perspective, seen from the sullen rooms of his father’s split-level.

  And his talks at the Farmers’ Museum were a continuous update on the loss of small-town country life and character.

  In the last ten years, forty million acres of farmland was converted to strip malls or housing development. . . . In the 2010 census, less than fifteen percent of Americans worked in agriculture. In 1910, only fifteen percent of Americans worked outside of agriculture. . . . The rural village spawned small businesses, like the blacksmith shop, which embodied the spirit of invention. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, all started with small shops in small villages that shaped our nation’s industry and history. . . . Invention turned into manufacturing and factory towns were born and thrived . . . and, well, you know the rest. Now they’re in China.

  And now here he was, Cornell-educated, a craft blacksmith, moving junk out of a barn in Pompey, named like the lost city buried under Vesuvius. The farm, to complete the dismal metaphor, was on Cemetery Road, and overlooked an old graveyard where sandstone markers of the settlers were worn beyond reading. The old church next to it had been abandoned for years; now the building held an antiques shop. Horace found a warped scythe with a rusted blade—there must have been a hundred in the “collection.” He broke the splintered handle over his knee and threw it down in the hay. He found an old butter churn, the wood rotted and soft, the tin bands brittle and cracked with rust. He figured it dated back to 1910, the same vintage of three on display at the museum and another half dozen in storage. He tossed it into a stall. Fewer things to move. The rakes and pitchforks went into the same pile. He was tired of lugging dead people’s junk.

  He loaded the Econoline with just enough stuff to prove he was there, and drove out to Route 20 East. The winter winds infiltrated the van’s door seams, shaken loose by miles and time. The heat was blasting lukewarm air and the sweat that soaked his long underwear turned chilly on his back and chest. To make matters worse, the clutch was shot, and Horace had to pump it two or three times on every shift, as the choking smell of burning automotive fluid filled the cab as he headed back to Cooperstown.

  Cooperstown, Horace liked to say, was the birthplace of American mythology. James Fenimore Cooper started it with Natty Bumppo, the lone wanderer, the great white conqueror, the “rugged individualist going against the grain.” The cliché was built on Natty Bumppo’s broad shoulders, from The Deerslayer to The Last of the Mohicans. Every frontier legend—Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Wyatt Earp, even the outlaw Jesse James—was a Bumppo knockoff. Hollywood followed with Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, one for every generation. But in Cooperstown, baseball overran that history. Even now in the dead of winter, when the lake ice was ten feet thick and snow-covered golf courses looked like a barren Saharan landscape with airborne white particles whipped up by the Otsego Lake winds, baseball was king.

  It was on Route 20, some ten miles out of town, that he saw the new “Cool, Cool Cooperstown” billboard, and it spat right at him. Surrounded by winter’s gray and bare-limbed trees, the color and summer theme were even more assaultive and ridiculous; like a puked-up splatter of Day-Glo colors on a subdued Hudson School painting.

  They were putting up dozens of them, on every road into town, and Horace fantasized about torching them all on some windy night, to make the fiery point that his staid, historic town would never stand for a cartoon spokesman.

  But there he was, “Coop,” the grinning baseball, with black shades and a hat on sideways, popping out of a sky-blue background.

  “Cool, Cool Cooperstown” was printed in brushstrokes of race-car yellow on royal-blue background; NASCAR colors for the camper crowd, Horace thought. Below it, in smaller letters, were the words Home of Baaaseballl! That was the signature line, played on the TV and radio versions of the ads; a comic scream by a cartoon character. The image belonged in some Jersey boardwalk town or a Daytona spring break beach strip, not in Horace’s old, dignified, steepled Cooperstown.

  The old tourism signs cast Cooperstown in a shadowy Victorian streetscape; a line drawing of an Italianate mansion with a mansard roof and widow’s walk, fronted by a wrought-iron fence and gate, all illuminated by a gas lamp. “Welcome to Cooperstown, the Village of Museums,” it said, in understated, elegant script. Other old signs had a collage of the museums themselves: the Ivy League–like facade of the Baseball Hall of Fame, the neo-Georgian mansion at the Fenimore Art Museum, and the edifice of the massive stone dairy barns of the Farmers’ Museum. Back then, those museums counted. Not now. Not in the Home of Baaaseballl!

  The museums were run by the Clark Foundation, started by the first family of modern Cooperstown. Stephen C. Clark began the Baseball Hall of Fame, and the Farmers’ Museum was converted from the estate of Edward Severin Clark. All were first-class operations, but only the Hall of Fame paid its way. School groups made up most of the farm museum traffic, yawning at exhibits on barn building, crop planting, and family life.

  Past the barns were a dozen transplanted historic buildings, laid out to be a typical—but compact—New York rural village, circa 1845. It was all there: the church at the center, the general store, an apothecary, a print shop, a schoolhouse, a physician’s office, and the blacksmith shop, all painted in conservative shades of the day. Living historians like Horace, dressed in period clothing, worked their shops. Others performed traditional chores in the working farm just beyond the village. Fields were plowed by draft horses and reaped by antique tools. Cows were milked hand to bucket. And the chickens roamed free before bedding down in the henhouse. It was a beautiful place, a valley hamlet with a view of the lake and the mountain beyond, where Horace lived.

  Horace, the historian, started in the archive, thinking the foundation’s deep pockets all but guaranteed him lifetime work. But the economy tanked, taking foundation money and donations with it, and Horace, now the blacksmith, entered the modern world of the American workingman. Insecure and changing. The guy who played pastor was first to be cut to part-time with no benefits, and the church became a “special event” facility, booked by corporate event planners as a quirky place to hold a meeting. Next to go were the schoolmarm, the doctor, and the apothecarist—actors, like the pastor, with no special craft or skill. They were replaced, if at all, by interns—usually undergrads or even graduate students from SUNY, working on some obscure mid-state thesis.

  The message of the new “Cool, Cool Cooperstown” ad campaign was clear. The Village of Museums—educational, cultured, genteel—no longer appealed to families. Sports had taken over, so the town doubled down on baseball. The old signs were left to fade, battered by the Otsego winters, while the Chamber of Commerce plotted a new direct
ion. When the signs were sufficiently wrecked—demolition by neglect, as they say in historic preservation circles—they were torn down and replaced by the screaming Coop cartoon, a twenty-first-century ad campaign for a nineteenth-century village. And on this winter day, the cheesy signs, with their forced sunny merriment, blared against a backdrop of steely skies and cold, snow-drifted fields, where dead hay and cornstalks poked up like some broken promise of summer.

  Cool, Cool Cooperstown.

  Home of Baaaseballll!

  Not home to anything else.

  Just baseball. Out on Route 28, just a few minutes outside the village in Milford, a pantheon to kids’ baseball called Cooperstown Dream Park was carved into two hundred acres of fertile valley soil. Horace remembered the dairy farm there; maybe there were two. Yes, one had yellow barns, he recalled, and also had a Black Angus herd for meat. But the verdant pastures were turned into twenty-two lighted fields, with manicured infields with red clay base paths and green outfield fences, and snack bars, souvenir shops, a youth baseball Hall of Fame (whatever that was), and bunkhouses for teams that came from all over America. At least ten thousand Little Leaguers swarmed the place, from June till Labor Day, with their parents, coaches, and siblings. The stretch of highway around it became an alley of chain hotels, pizza, and wings and ice cream joints. They took shuttle buses into the village, toured the baseball museum, and, along with all the other baseball tourists, dropped millions into the economy. Cooperstown counted the money, but you couldn’t put a price on what was lost, Horace thought. The soul. The culture. The mission. The nuance of art. Americana. America itself. Call it what you want. It was dying. Worse, nobody seemed to care.

  Home of Baaaseballl! bugged Horace on two fronts.

  First, it was historically inaccurate propaganda aimed at souvenir-buying tourists. Like Yankee hats made in China, the label was ironically counterfeit. This offended Horace as a historian. Baseball, the so-called national pastime, had no singular home. Cooperstown could not lay claim to being the Home of Baseball any more than Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park, or any Little League or sandlot field in America could.

  And Cooperstown’s claim as “birthplace of baseball” was long ago exposed as a fraud. Horace actually enjoyed telling visitors to his shop the truth.

  “If you want to see the real home of baseball, go to the intersection of Washington Street and Eleventh Avenue in Hoboken, New Jersey, and look for a marker in the road,” Horace would say. He told them that Cooperstown’s life as “Home of Baseball” was not only built on a lie, but the Hall of Fame was built on an artifact from that lie: the “Doubleday Ball.”

  Stephen C. Clark bankrolled the Hall after he bought the “Doubleday Ball.” It was a Frankenstein-stitched, misshapen sphere of leather stuffed with wool and cotton yarn, found in an attic down the road in Fly Creek. Somebody hoodwinked old Clark into believing it was used in the historic first game, which, of course, never happened. Its only historical significance, Horace said gleefully, was this: it was the first piece of junk to be sold as “baseball memorabilia” at a price far exceeding its value. This always got a laugh from the silver-hair crowd.

  But, like it or not, the hard truth was baseball is what brought people into town. The Hall drew an easy quarter million a year, ten times more than the Farmers’ Museum and the Fenimore Art Museum combined. Worse still, most visitors to Farm & Art were only in town to visit the Hall, which generated 85 percent of the hotel and restaurant revenue. “Farm & Art only” visitors were school groups or geezer bus trips (Farm & Art for old farts, as they said in Clark Foundation circles), none of whom stayed overnight or ate in Cooperstown’s restaurants.

  Each year, the farm and art museum staffs would be gathered to discuss budget initiatives, a foundation euphemism for cuts. The meetings would be conducted by old William F. Strothford, a thin octogenarian who wore bow ties and lavender or blue seersucker in summer with a straw hat.

  Just a week before Horace’s trip to Pompey, Mr. Strothford came and gathered the farm staff. Horace looked around at his co-workers, dressed, like him, in period garb, like a carnival collection of farmhands and milkmaids. They knew what was coming, and looked down at their weathered, period footwear, as Strothford explained new cuts.

  “I know this is a hardship,” Mr. Strothford said. “But with some innovative outreach programs and inclusive exhibits, we are confident this museum can find ways to become more relevant . . .”

  Horace raised his hand.

  “With all due respect, Mr. Strothford, this museum represents how the region thrived and grew into what it is today. Why is that no longer relevant?” Horace said. “We need more from the foundation. Not less. Cutting our budget, cutting our programs, well, it tells people we are not relevant. How can we stay relevant, when it seems this whole town, including our own foundation, is hell-bent on making everything but baseball irrelevant?”

  There was a patter of applause from the farmworkers, started by a new intern, a big-boned girl with a Slavic face in a milkmaid’s dress, who smiled and nodded with approval at Horace. Natalie? No, Natalia. Natalia Pia-something. She finished her master’s course work at Empire State in Rochester and was immersing herself in her thesis, something about rural transition in the Industrial Revolution. Horace had just met her the week before. It was an unremarkable introduction, on the path between the cow barn and smithy, except that he noticed an Eastern European accent. Ukraine or Belarus? Horace forgot. But when he remarked how the foreign-born seemed more interested in their new country’s history than regular Americans, she smiled and said, “Yes, Americans seem to take their historic freedoms for granted, but we find it fascinating.”

  Horace liked that, and now he raised his chin toward her, in appreciation, and she continued smiling.

  Ah, the approval of a woman, so hard fought for—in life and at home—now came to him at the least expected time from a girl born behind the old Iron Curtain. Horace thought of the pioneer days when a man alone on one hundred tilled acres of the Great Plains would take out “matrimonial prospect” ads in papers back East, finding an audience among Civil War widows looking to escape the sad loneliness at battle’s end. Grief is love that has lost its home, and the women took trains into the remote West to find a new one in the arms of a frontier stranger.

  A man, too, needs a place to put himself, and suddenly there was this Natalia, offering an inkling of a romantic prospect out of the blue, and unexpectedly Horace’s irritation with Sally’s cool distance from him dropped a notch. Just like that, there was the hope of a future warm place. Just like that. His eyes dropped reflexively to the cleavage above the hand-stitched lace border of her milkmaid dress and she caught him. Still, a smile. Horace gave a little apologetic shrug. You got me. She didn’t seem to mind.

  Horace’s fantasy was disrupted by Strothford, who raised a hand to put down the mild sedition.

  “I admire your passion, Horace, I really do,” he said. “But we must face certain realities. The foundation, and the town in general, must put resources into the entity of greatest return, for the greater good of the community. The Hall of Fame is synonymous with Cooperstown. Twenty years ago, the downtown was filled with antiques shops and art galleries. Now more than half the stores in town sell baseball souvenirs. The Hall is what attracts the conventions and the business groups.”

  That’s when John Grundling, the Farmers’ Museum director for all of two years now, piled on.

  “And also, Horace, let’s not forget it was the Clark Foundation that put us here in the first place, and continues to underwrite our very existence.”

  Grundling had the annoying habit of stating the obvious with authority. Casual Dress Grundling, Horace called him behind his back. He was boyish in the face, still blond, and wore pressed khakis and a cream-and-dark-green Clark Foundation golf shirt. They’re everywhere, Horace thought, these fucking guys with corporate logos on their shirts.

  “Let’s all remember,” Grundling added, “we’re al
l on the same team.”

  Horace muzzled the urge to shoot back, “No, John, we’re on the wrong team. The ‘team’ is up the street in the Hall.”

  Instead he kept his mouth shut and collared Grundling after the meeting.

  “John, you’ve got to fight for us. We tell the story of America,” Horace said. “Why are the relics of dead or washed-up ballplayers more relevant than the traditions and crafts that built this country?”

  “Follow the money,” Grundling said.

  “Okay. Then let’s latch on.”

  “How so?”

  Grundling’s ignorance about the landscape he supposedly managed irritated Horace, but he tried to explain it without a condescending tone.

  “You know the ‘Sandlot Kid’ statue down at Doubleday Field?” Horace said. “Look how he’s dressed. Straw hat, overalls, bare feet. He’s a farm kid. Maybe we can create an exhibit on baseball’s relationship to farm life. Games played in fallow fields. ‘He couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.’ ‘Can of corn.’ Beer and baseball! The Busch family hops, grown right here in this valley. And all that Opening Day sportswriter pap of ‘spring hope’ comes from a farming mind-set. Seeds were sown with optimism, before the droughts, the floods, the bug infestations, the losses.”

  Grundling surprised him at first—“Not a bad idea. I’ll take it up with the board”—then quickly put on his company face: “But we don’t want to step on the Hall’s toes.”

  * * *

  NOW HERE WAS HORACE, double-clutching the Econoline to throw a downshift each time the truck had to climb a hill. The weary engine compression couldn’t overcome gravity, and the truck slowed miserably. Horace had to grind it out, and the smell of burned clutch fluid overpowered the usual fumes of the oil-tinged blue exhaust. “Shit truck,” Horace said out loud. Bet the Hall guy didn’t drive a shit truck.