My Ticket to Cooperstown

Posted by on Mar 1 in Baseball Memories

Last August, my son Bob Jr., two grandsons, granddaughter and I flew to Cooperstown to tour the Baseball Hall of Fame, then to New York to see the Yankees play the Boston Red Sox.

We stayed in Cooperstown at the beautiful 150-year old Otesaga Resort Hotel that sits on the shores of Lake Otsego – referred to as “Glimmerglass” in James Fenimore Cooper‘s book of our childhood: “The Last of the Mohicans.” The village of Cooperstown, population 3,000, tucked away in upstate New York, was named after Mr. Cooper and is as quaint and historic a site for a museum as you could ask for.

I remarked to Bob Jr. as we were driving from Albany to the Hall of Fame about 10 years ago on a father/son trip, that if you closed your eyes you could hear the British troops of the Revolutionary War in the foothills above Cooperstown mingled with the war cries of the Mohican tribes – there’s so much history in this part of America.

As a teenage pitcher, I went to sleep at night writing my acceptance speech to be given at my Hall of Fame induction. As an adult, I was reminded by my son-in-law that the only way I’d get into the Hall of Fame was to buy a ticket … So I bought a ticket.