Editorial On Being Polite Since the pandemic, and probably a bit before it, our once-comfortable world has been in a constant state of change. For some of us this is a very good thing; for others, possibly those of an older vintage, such changes are at times more difficult to understand. In the end, though, change is a good thing. It means we are learning, growing, improving and, at the very least, thinking, although we may not particularly agree with…
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Editorial Decoration Day 101 In spite of the incessantly confusing and mildly annoying weather patterns we have been confronted with recently around here, we have come to Memorial Day weekend, reputedly the harbinger of summer, though we have hardly seen spring. It’s supposed to be warm and pleasant, a packed weekend filled with family and friends, parades, taps, salutes, speeches, frost-free gardens, canoe races, and tag sales.…
Editorial What Do May Flowers Bring? The old rhyme about spring—April showers bring May flowers—was most likely intended to buoy the soggy human sprits of those last muddy weeks of winter, especially in places like Otsego County, where there have historically been only two seasons: winter and Fourth of July. Now it seems that Otsego County may be more representative of the school-kid joke that followed up on the rhyme—April showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring?” Pilgrims.…
Editorial If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother Aside from being known as the start of nasty-little-black-flies month, this, the second Sunday in May, is by tradition and proclamation Mother’s Day. In this country it’s a commercial event of staggering financial proportions that has held the nation’s pocketbook in its grip for more than 100 years. It’s this way now, but it wasn’t this way in the beginning. The initial seed for honoring our mothers was sown before the…
Editorial Discovering Oneonta Two women met in Oneonta a few Fridays ago, old friends and workmates reconnecting over dinner. One, a bit of a Luddite, remembered her phone but had very little battery remaining. The other, a bit more of one, forgot her phone entirely. They had made arrangements to meet at a restaurant, the Indian Grill on Main Street. The first woman—we’ll call her Sarah—did not visit Oneonta’s Main Street very often. Her trips to the City of the…
Editorial It’s Not Johnny’s Bench,But He Can Sit On It Early in the freezing morning of Saturday, November 11, 1961, a terrible fire began in a building on the northwest corner of Main and Pioneer streets in Cooperstown. Fires had long been a part of the history of the village, with some big enough to threaten its very existence, and others ending the existence of a plethora of shops, restaurants, and houses. One killed a resident; John Lippitt lost his…
Editorial Clever Plan Deserves Our Full Support W e are thrilled to report the exciting and insightful efforts of the Otsego Land Trust to preserve and protect the beautiful but vulnerable 668-acre tract of land on Crumhorn Mountain. The Leatherstocking Council of the Boy Scouts of America has put the defunct Henderson Scout Reservation up for sale and it is in danger of being compromised by development. See the story on page one for further details. The project is an…
Editorial Into the Woods with Merlin Spring has arrived in Otsego County—at last. The birds are flying around, trying out their songs and leaving their feeder seeds to the squirrels, the daffodils are peeking up through the dirty remains of snow and mud, there’s a big black bear or two sneaking around the bird feeders on Glimmerglen Road, and there’s water pouring off the hills everywhere.…
The Results Are In As many of our readers are aware, we recently sent out a survey in an effort to get a better sense of what readers are thinking as we prepare to launch a new—and much improved—website. We were pleasantly surprised to have heard from more than 200 respondents, the vast majority of which were quite enthusiastic about recent improvements in our print and digital publications, and also expressed a true and invigorating interest in our efforts going…
The Elephant in the Ambulance Back in mid-October, shortly after General Manager and Senior Editor Darla M. Youngs was hired—and just as staff writer Ted Mebust came on board—our offices received a call from a volunteer EMS worker in northern Otsego County. This person spoke at length with Mebust, laying out concerns about lack of coordination and cooperation between Otsego County’s paid EMS service and its volunteer squads, general discontent among the rank and file, and real worries that these…