United Way of Delaware and Otsego Counties’ Volunteer Coordinator Valerie Adams, left and Executive Director Kimberly Lorraine (right) show the boxes, decorated by United Way volunteers, they will use to collect warm hats, gloves, mittens and scarves as well as non-perishable, instant food items for those in need through Thursday, Jan. 17. Volunteers will hang bags of the donated food and the clothing in trees in Huntington Park on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Monday Jan. 21. (Jennifer Hill/AllOTSEGO.com)
By JENNIFER HILL • Special to www.AllOTSEGO.com
ONEONTA – The season of giving may have officially ended, but United Way of Delaware and Otsego Counties (UWDO) is continuing it with a “Keeping You Warm Inside and Out!” donation drive.
“The holidays when people donate a lot are over,” UWDO Volunteer Coordinator Valerie Adams, who is overseeing the drive, said. “But there are still people who are hungry and need warm clothing, and the end of January, beginning of February is our coldest time of the year.”
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Monday, Jan. 21, volunteers will tie ribbons around packets of food and warm clothing and hang them from trees in Huntington Park, inviting community members to take what they need.
The second of two storms this week will created dangerous blizzard conditions with a foot or more of snow forecast from northern Pennsylvania through Otsego County into northern New England this weekend, AccuWeather reported a few minutes ago.
A first storm, forecast to swing quickly from west to east spanning late tonight into Friday morning, will be more of a nuisance with up to a few inches of snow, the weather service said.
A much more dramatic, disruptive and dangerous storm will follow approximately 36 hours later from Saturday to Sunday. Errands should be completed before the storm hits, the forecasters advised.
FILM SCREENING – 6:30 p.m. Beat Cabin Fever with “A Quiet Place” (2018) set in a post-apocalyptic future. Free with donation. The Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown. 607-547-1400 or visit www.fenimoreartmuseum.org
Library Director Tina Winstead in the Community Room, which will be revamped with new carpeting and furniture as part of a $200,000 renovation, starting Tuesday, Jan. 22.
ONEONTA – The Huntington Library is about to get a little work done.
“The third floor is going to get a real facelift,” said Tina Winstead, Library Director.
The Huntington Memorial Library will be closed for three weeks starting Tuesday, Jan. 22 for considerable remodeling and reconstruction, including asbestos abatement, insulation upgrades and new furniture.
“It will get worse before it gets better,” she said. “but we think people will really like the results.”
The main affected area consists of the first floor entry or “computer” room and the two stories above it, which was built in 1959.
Mike Zagata’s column of Jan. 10-11 expresses perspectives that are fast becoming archaic. To suggest renewables aren’t ready to replace gas is short-sighted, parochial and myopic.
Of course, the 5,000 flights a day that circle the earth can’t by powered by green energy, but that’s exactly the point. Conserving them now will insure availability later.
The gas and oil reserves will have to yield some day to alternate energy (the earth isn’t making them as fast as they are being consumed – not by a long shot), so wouldn’t it be wise to begin now to wean the global society off oil, so reserves will remain when they are essential?
Vision of future needs has proven to be obsolete repeatedly through human history, most recently in the last century when horse-powered transportation was deemed a pollutant in cities that had to clean streets of manure in favor of gasoline-powered cars.
Essential as that shift was, just one century later the innovation of the past has become the pollutant of today, as witnessed by contamination of the atmosphere with exhaust fumes leading to an accelerated climate warming.
Too often the legitimate issue of contamination from conventional energy sources is politicized, so if Obama proposed it, it is rescinded. Likewise, ill-informed perspectives are
Painted As Figure Of Fun, Susan B. Anthony Went On To Make History
Editor’s Note: Here is The Freeman’s Journal Feb. 9, 1855, account – in prose and poetry – of Susan B. Anthony’s appearance in Cooperstown, to be commemorated with a State Historical Marker that has just arrived at the village’s First Presbyterian Church. The tone marks the flippant attitude in some quarters at that time.
Mr. Editor:
Your readers should be apprised that last Friday was a great and eventful day in the history of human events. It was one of these epochs whereat Time pauses to set down a stake from which after generations may measure his further flight.
Henceforth, let it be noted in Phinney’s calendar that the 9th day of February, 1855, was the day when the memorable “Woman’s Rights Convention” was held at Cooperstown! – and let the mothers of Otsego, in all coming ages, teach their children to revere its anniversary, as the day when “the strong-minded women” gave the horn of liberty such a rousing blast among the echoing hills of our county.
…A gentleman was called to the chair, and a secretary and two vice-presidentesses were appointed. The president, after a few appropriate remarks, introduced to the audience, Miss Susan B. Anthony, who took the rostrum.
• Her theme – the wrongs that patient woman bears; To sew, to spin, to mop and darn her lot; To do the drudg’ry, while man takes the pay. She all the pangs of Eden’s curse endures, While man her pleasures shares, but not her pains. Give woman but the right of suffrage, she Will soon have equal laws, and what is wrong Will speedily set right.
•
And so it begins.
Day one of the new Democrat majority in the state Senate began, in many ways, as expected.
A new leader was elected (from just outside New York City) and immediately outlined the policies the Democrats would be pursuing in the coming year.
This is how a change in majority works, and I take no issue with that. However, I was deeply concerned on several fronts.
I have consistently voted for a permanent property tax cap, and I was pleased to hear the new leader mention that as a priority. The problem was that no other Upstate concerns were detailed, and that is a major disappointment.
Economic development is lagging behind in many counties outside of the five boroughs of New York City, but that fact is being swept under the rug by the new leadership regime.
I have previously outlined New York State’s population loss, and the news is filled with stories about Upstate businesses closing their doors.
We need to focus on policies that will cut taxes, eliminate burdensome government regulations, and lower the cost of doing business across the state. Those are the steps needed to create an environment conducive to job creation.
My Republican colleaguesand I have advanced a number
of initiatives in recent years to address our state’s economic shortcomings. We will continue to
In a run-up to Martin Luther King Day, local historian Tom Heitz discusses slavery in Otsego County with a CCAL class at First Presbyterian Church, Coopertown. Behind him are two just-approved State Historic Markers, one commemorating the church’s 1827 celebration of the end of slavery in New York State, the other Susan B. Anthony’s visit to Otsego County.
2 Historic Markers
Commemorate Freedom
By JIM KEVLIN
COOPERSTOWN – Just in time for Martin Luther King Day, two state Historical Markers commemorating the United States’ march toward freedom – and Otsego County’s – have arrived at First Presbyterian Church here.
One marks Susan B. Anthony’s Feb. 9, 1855, appearance in a building where the church’s chapel is now. During her visit, she formed a local committee to advocate for the women’s right to vote.
The second commemorates July 4, 1827, when about 60 blacks gathered in the church, “with music and banners flying,” to celebrate the end of slavery in New York State.
The markers will be unveiled to the public at the church’s MLK Day celebration at 7 p.m. Monday, Jan. 21, at 25 Church St. and erected on the front lawn in the spring.
These were little-known events until
In Governor Cuomo’s Dec. 18 CFA announcements, Otsego County entrepreneurs did just fine.
You may have noticed that Dec. 15 piece in the New York Times, “The Hard Truths of Trying to Save the ‘Rural’ Economy.” In it, reporter Eduardo Porter wrote: “I’ve lived most of my life in big cities. I don’t pretend to understand what it’s like to live in a small town or a family farm, or how it feels when all the jobs in a community seem to be fading away.”
You might expect what follows: It sounds like one of those stories Times reporters periodically transmit from Timbuctoo or some similarly exotic locale. All impressions. As if rural economic development – the War on Poverty, if you will – is all about feelings.
Here’s a more concrete objection: Porter equates Upstate New York – criss-crossed by four lanes, peppered with international airports, abounding with excellent colleges and universities, a couple of hours from the largest metropolitan economy in the country that also happens to be the center of the financial universe – with Harrison, Neb., wherever that is.
