Engineer Michael Murphy Receives

GOHS’ New Eduard Hofbauer Award

ONEONTA – The Greater Oneonta Historical Society last evening presented its first annual Eduard Hofbauer Outstanding Service Award to Mike Murphy, a board member and engineer who has guided the renovations of the History Center, 183 Main St.

GOHS board member Heidi Hofbauer Buzzy unveiled the plaque that will hang in the History Center permanently in honor of her father, longtime operator of the Alpine Ski Hut in the downtown who was a GOHS board member at the time of his passing in December 2012.

The first award was presented Michael Murphy, a board member and retired engineer with Gilbane Construction, Albany, during the GOHS’ annual meeting in the Unitarian Universalist Church.

Also at the meeting, former mayor John Nader, the SUNY Delhi provost, delivered a talk on “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” showing how census data contradicts commonly held views about the city’s Sixth Ward.    That area wasn’t the first ethnic enclave, for instance; that was the First Ward’s South Main Street area.

Further, when immigrants — Italians, Russians and Poles, and “Syrians,” actually Lebanese, but there was no separate Lebanon in the then Ottoman Empire — did congregate in the Sixth, but voted Republican like the rest of Otsego County.  Until 1932, that it, when only the Sixth voted for FDR; every other precinct in the county stuck with Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover.

The incumbent slate of officers was elected for another year:  Janet Potter, president; Wayne Wright, vice president; Kathy Meeker, treasurer; Cathy Nardi, secretary, and Fiona DeJardin, historian.