September 8, 1985: My 1st Visit to the Baseball Hall of Fame

September 8, 1985, 40 years ago: I visited the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York for the first time. I was driven there by my grandmother, Grace Golden. She was from Queens, New York City, and a Brooklyn Dodger fan who became a New York Met fan. My grandfather, George, who had died a year earlier, was from The Bronx, and a New York Yankee fan. I was from East Brunswick, New Jersey, and Grandpa got to me before Grandma did, and I became a Yankee fan.

Cooperstown is hard to get to. It's tucked into Central New York State, between the Catskill Mountains and the Finger Lakes. It's the seat of Otsego County, but it's a small town of 1,800 people, in a County of 58,000 people, only a little bigger than the Yankee Stadium of the time.

There's no close airport. There's no Amtrak service. Trailways runs one bus a week there. And driving isn't easy, either. As someone said in a newspaper article written shortly before my first visit, "Nobody happens upon Cooperstown by accident. You have to want to come here."

I was 15 years old. Before setting out, Grandma told me, "It's a fur piece," meaning a long distance. From the house where I grew up to the Hall's front door, taking the New Jersey Turnpike, the Garden State Parkway, the New York State Thruway, U.S. Route 20 and New York State Route 80, it was 246 miles.

So why was Cooperstown chosen as the location for the Hall of Fame? Because it was believed that baseball had been invented there, in 1839, by Abner Doubleday. Doubleday was a real person, a hero of the Battle of Gettysburg.

But he was a Cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1839. At the time, Cadets were not permitted to leave the Academy grounds for any reason. If had gone to Cooperstown then, he would have been expelled. And he wasn't.

The story was written up in 1907 by a commission that was seeking to establish a purely American origin for the sport, as opposed to the idea that it had descended from the English game of rounders. Doubleday died in 1893, and so was conveniently unable to deny it. Baseball was actually invented by a group of volunteer firemen, including a surveyor named Alexander Cartwright who mapped out what he thought were proper field dimensions, in Manhattan in 1845. That would have been a much more convenient location for the Hall of Fame.

(A similar thing happened with the invention of rugby: The alleged inventor of that sport, William Webb Ellis, was a real person of some renown, a prominent clergyman, dead by the time the story spread.)

There are things to do in Cooperstown there that don't revolve around baseball. There are nearby museums, some antique shops, a fantastic classic bookstore, and Lake Otsego, with camping and boating. But the town, the Village of Cooperstown, is kind of frozen in time. A law prohibits chain restaurants.

There's a supermarket in town, Price Chopper. But the nearest shopping mall, McDonald's, Jersey Mike's, Dunkin and Starbucks are all over 20 miles away, in Oneonta. Despite Wegman's supermarkets being a Western New York-based institution, and having now reached New York City and New Jersey, the nearest one to Cooperstown is 85 miles away, in Johnson City, outside Binghamton. By a weird coincidence, Johnson City and Oneonta are both former homes of Yankee farm teams.

The Hall of Fame itself opened in 1939. I've been there 6 times, but the last was 25 years ago. There had been a snowfall right before my January 2000 visit. I thought I had taken a great picture of Doubleday Field, the 10,000-seat ballpark that surrounds the supposed location of Doubleday's invention, blanketed by snow. But while I was on the bus going back through the Catskills, I checked my camera to see how many pictures I had left on the roll of film -- and discovered that I had no film in it. I didn't get the picture. I was mad. Due to various circumstances, I haven't been back since.

I've been to 3 Hall of Fame induction ceremonies: In 1986, 1988 and 1994. My advice: Don't go during Induction Weekend. The town was not designed to hold 100,000 visitors at once, and getting a hotel room anywhere between Albany and Syracuse is next to impossible. Go, but go any other time.