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By Root 1361 0

New York, on the northern fringes of the Catskills, and in the morning drove to Cooperstown, a small resort on Lake Otsego. Cooperstown was the home of James Fenimore Cooper, from whose family the town takes its name. It was a handsome town, as handsome as any I had seen in New England, and more replete with autumn colour, with a main street of square-topped brick buildings, old banks, a movie theatre, family stores. The Cooperstown Diner, where I went for breakfast, was busy, friendly and cheap – all that a diner should be. Afterwards I went for a stroll around the residential streets, shuffling hands-in-pockets through the dry leaves, and down to the lakeside. Every house in town was old and pretty; many of the larger ones had been converted into inns and expensive B & Bs. The morning sunlight filtered through the trees and threw shadows across the lawns and sidewalks. This was as nice a little town as I had seen on the trip; it was almost Amalgam.

The only shortcoming with Cooperstown is that it is full of tourists, drawn to the town by its most famous institution, the Baseball Hall of Fame, which stands by a shady park at the far end of Main Street. I went there now, paid $8.50 admission and walked into its cathedral-like calm. For those of us who are baseball fans and agnostics, the Hall of Fame is as close to a religious experience as we may ever get. I walked serenely through its quiet and softly-lit halls, looking at the sacred vestments and venerated relics from America’s national pastime. Here, beautifully preserved in a glass case, was ‘the shirt worn by Warren Spahn when registering win No. 305, which tied him with Eddie Plank for most by a left-hander.’ Across the aisle was ‘the glove used by Sal Maglie on September 25, 1958, no-hitter vs Phillies.’ At each case people gazed reverently or spoke in whispers.

One room contained a gallery of paintings commemorating great moments in baseball history, including one depicting the first professional night game under artificial lighting played in Des Moines, Iowa, on May 2, 1930. This was exciting news to me. I had no idea that Des Moines had played a pivotal role in the history of both baseball and luminescence. I looked closely to see if the artist had depicted my father in the press-box, but then I realized that my father was only fifteen years old in 1930 and still in Winfield. This seemed kind of a pity.

In an upstairs room I suppressed a whoop of joy at the discovery of whole cases full of the baseball cards that my brother and I had so scrupulously collected and catalogued, and which my parents, in an early flirtation with senility, had taken to the dump during an attic spring-cleaning in 1981. We had the complete set for 1959 in mint condition; it is now worth something like $1,500. We had Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra as rookies, Ted Williams from the last year he hit .400, the complete New York Yankees teams for every year between 1956 and 1962. The whole collection must have been worth something like $8,000 – enough, at any rate, to have sent Mom and Dad for a short course of treatment at a dementia clinic. But never mind! We all make mistakes. It’s only because everyone throws these things out that they grow so valuable for the lucky few whose parents don’t spend their retirements getting rid of all the stuff they spent their working lives accumulating. Anyway it was a pleasure to see all the old cards again. It was like visiting a friend in hospital.

The Hall of Fame is surprisingly large, much larger than it looks from the road, and extremely well presented. I wandered through it in a state of complete contentment, reading every label, lingering at every display, reliving my youth, cocooned in a happy nostalgia, and when I stepped back out on to Main Street and glanced at my watch I was astonished to discover that three hours had elapsed.

Next door to the Hall of Fame was a shop selling the most wonderful baseball souvenirs. In my day all we could get were pennants and baseball cards and crummy little pens in the shape of baseball bats that stopped