Bound Volumes, Hometown History
February 26, 2026
90 YEARS AGO
Guidance, or helping each pupil make satisfactory adjustments to his present environment and plan definitely for a happy and successful future, has come to be an important high school function. And, extensive work along this line is now carried out at Oneonta Junior high school which recently received its charter from the New York State Education Department. Guidance functions have been organized into three divisions—educational, personal and vocational—and each teacher is responsible for doing everything possible for each pupil in his or her classes. To meet the need of more personal service than any teacher can provide for the 100 or 200 boys and girls in all his classes, each child is assigned to a home room teacher. Each home room teacher takes a helpful, personal interest in all the 30 or 40 pupils assigned to him or her. Teachers make home visits and give advice about appearance, habits, studying, and getting along with fellow students and other teachers. Home room teachers keep attendance records, make reports, and develop school citizenship, leadership, and personality. All eighth year pupils meet once a week for a class in occupations.
February 1936
50 YEARS AGO
Old Main will be sold at public auction on Tuesday, February 24, at noon. An auctioneer from the New York State Office of General Services will turn the keys over to the high bidder. The bidding will start at $15,000. Old Main was once the center of the Oneonta State campus. The building has been vacant for more than a year.
Oneonta’s Homer Folks facility is now one of three sites in the state being considered for a job training center that would house up to 300 people and provide 100 area jobs. James Seward, aide to Assemblyman Peter Dokuchitz said the assemblyman is “cautiously optimistic” that the Oneonta site will be chosen. The other sites under consideration are in Albany and Rochester. If Oneonta is chosen, the center will provide vocational education for people from sixteen to twenty-one years of age and offer training in fields such as television repair, auto mechanics and possibly nursing.
February 1976
40 YEARS AGO
About 550 people are currently on the Huntington Memorial Library’s most wanted list. They are all wanted for the same crime—unreturned, overdue books, about 2,000 of them in all. Under the library’s Law Week Amnesty Program, running from March 1 through 8, perpetrators can return their overdue books with paying fines, according to Marie Bruni, library director. “A lot of the books, we can’t replace, especially the children’s books, since they are out-of-print. That’s why we are desperate to get them back,” she explained. Prices for books missing from the library’s shelves range from $13 to $24. “We only have so much money with which to purchase new books. If we use that money to replace unreturned books, we can’t buy new ones,” she added.
February 1986
20 YEARS AGO
State spending during Gov. George Pataki’s last term will grow by more than 28 percent if his budget plan for next year is enacted as is, according to the analysis of the Manhattan Institute’s Empire Center for New York State Policy, a conservative think tank. That would be the biggest four-year increase since Democratic Governor Mario Cuomo’s second term. Pataki’s proposed budget for 2006-2007 would boost state-controlled spending by 7.1 percent, the second highest percentage since he took office in 1995. The increase would be more than double the 2.7 percent rate of inflation projected for the fiscal year beginning April 1.
February 2006
