Sharon Oberriter, November 10, 2021

Title

interviewee

Sharon Oberriter

interviewer

Megan Good

Date

2021-11-10

Subject

Community

Cool Papa Bell

Cooperstown, NY

Family

Moving

Pee Wee Reese

Restaurants

Sandy Koufax

Small business

Ted Williams

The Cooperstown Bat Company

The Cooperstown Food Pantry

The National Baseball Hall of Fame

Tourism

Upstate New York

Utica, NY

Description

Sharon Oberriter was born Sharon Murphy in Utica, New York on October 13, 1942. After spending the beginning of her life moving around central and western New York, Sharon settled in Cooperstown, New York with her husband Don. The couple opened and eventually sold two successful and iconic local companies and Sharon continues to be an active member of the community through her church and the Cooperstown Food Pantry.

Cooperstown is a small town that is constantly striving to find the balance between tourism and community, modernity and tradition. Blessed by its geography and unique in its history, the village has undergone many changes since its founding in 1786, but continues to maintain its status as a vacation destination and the holy grail for baseball lovers.

Sharon is very in tune to the many facets of Cooperstown and has shaped the community just as much as the town has shaped her. Her love for the village is visible in her words, using anecdotes about Main Street’s numerous changes to illustrate a much larger point about the area as a whole. She emphasizes the importance of remembering the past while also embracing the future.

I interviewed Sharon at her home just outside of Cooperstown. We talked about her experience moving around upstate New York, as well as attending college and settling in Cooperstown. In addition to her insights on a changing environment, Sharon included entertaining stories about running her businesses, specifically the Cooperstown Bat Company. My personal favorite is the story about Ted Williams.

Some edits were made to the script for the sake of clarity. False starts were omitted and punctuation was added to create a clearer narrative. Additionally, Sharon’s words contain more passion and emotion than can be reproduced in words. To fully grasp the meaning of her story, it is encouraged to listen to the audio recordings

Transcription

SO = Sharon Oberriter
MG = Megan Good

[START OF TRACK 1, 0:00]

MG:
This is Megan Good interviewing Sharon Oberriter for the Cooperstown Graduate Program Community Stories Project. This interview is taking place on November 10th, 2021 and is at Sharon’s house. Okay, Sharon, just to get started can you tell me a little about your childhood?

[TRACK 1, 0:17]

SO:
[Laughs] My childhood! That’s going a long way back. I started in central New York. I moved to western New York. Went to probably one, two, three, four, five, six schools in the process of getting from K[indergarten] through twelve. I bounced around a bit, but my dad’s family is from central New York, my mother is from western New York. They met while he was in college. Had the great joy of being in small communities where we could play on our own, things that don’t happen for little kids anymore. Wonderful imagination games, designed our own fox and geese around an empty foundation hole, slid in farmers' pastures in the winter. Did all kinds of wonderful, easy, no cost things and all without total adult supervision. [Laughs]

MG:
What was your family like?

SO:
We had a small family. I had one living grandfather on my mother’s side and I had a pretty full family on my dad’s side with grandparents, great aunts and uncles, and aunts and uncles. Had one brother, excuse me, who is now deceased. Did an awful lot of neighborhood play. My mother was into arts and crafts. We made our own Christmas ornaments, we took long walks, we looked at butterflies in the field, we did all kinds of fun stuff.

MG:
Sounds really fun.

SO:
Excuse me.

MG:
Oh no worries, and we don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to talk about. We can move on.

SO:
No, it’s alright, I happen to do this when I get into interviews, so don’t worry. Okay, what else would you like to know?

MG:
So, you mentioned you moved around to a lot of schools, what was that like? Was it hard?

SO:
I guess I don’t remember it being super hard. I was young enough that little guys slide in and out easily. My schools, four of them, were all in the same general community, so that I was familiar with the area, and was just meeting new people within the context of a more familiar area. I have to say that probably college was the most fun because that was start to finish with the same group of kids. We graduated together so that was fun. It was always interesting to meet new kids. I met a Mormon without knowing it was an unusual, in New York State, an unusual religious organization. He was a classmate when I was in 7th grade. He talked about it a little bit, but I don’t think either one of us understood much about it. [Laughs]

MG:
So where did you go to college?

SO:
Utica College in Utica, New York.

MG:
And what was that like?

SO:
Small college, started out in what would be considered really an urban campus. The area that the college occupied was borrowed turf, so to speak. We were in a small mid-city Utica location. We called it the old campus and then during my time at college we moved to a brand-new campus, which was much smaller than it has become since. But I was one of those transition groups to go from borrowed to our own.

MG:
Sounds fun, so what did you do after college?

SO:
I taught high school English for six years. Met and married my husband, then ended up being in business with him for the rest of the time, forty some odd years.

[TRACK 1, 4:47]

MG:
How did you meet your husband?

SO:
At his restaurant. I was teaching. We would get together, colleagues, and go out for T.G.I.F, I don’t know if that is a term people understand anymore, but on Friday evenings we would sometimes go out for a light dinner, or just drinks, etc. It was a local restaurant and that’s where I got to know him. And the funny story is I still don’t know who he was calling for our first date because one of my best friend’s name was Karen and mine was Sharon. My dad was slightly hard of hearing so when he answered the phone, he just assumed what he heard was Sharon and he hollered for me. Don later admitted that that’s when he found out for sure what my name was, but I’m not sure he was 100 percent sure which face went with the name, but we got along just fine anyway. He didn’t confess to that until much later, once our relationship was really cemented.

MG:
Once it was safe.

SO:
It was safe, that’s right.

MG:
Was his restaurant in Utica?

SO:
It was in a place called Washington Mills which is a suburb of Utica. I was teaching in a place called New Hartford, another suburb of Utica, and they were actually only five miles apart.

[TRACK 1, 6:06]

MG:
Oh wonderful. When did you decide to move to Cooperstown, when did that process start?

SO:
He and his mother had decided the restaurant they were running should be closed. She wanted to retire. It was a 24/7 operation and he didn’t want to undertake that with trying to be a father and a husband so our determination was that we would start a new style restaurant which would be smaller and be a little easier for us to handle as a family. It was okay when we had two or three different households involved in the family, but we were now going to be one household. So, in that process we explored a number of places in the environment around Utica and we had friends that lived here. We would come down for Winter Carnival, and spend time and in that process our friends said, “well, you know I know there’s a couple of places available in the village, why don’t you look?” So we did, and we found one that worked. So that’s what we did. We weren’t living here initially. We travelled back and forth for three years before moving here and we’ve been here ever since.

MG:
So, you opened the restaurant in Cooperstown before you moved here?

SO:
Yes, we did

MG:
What was that like?

SO:
That was fairly interesting. Don got to know more of the locals than I did because I would come down in the morning. We were able to put our son into daycare here, but I needed to leave obviously early enough to take a one-, two-, and three-year-old back home so I would leave by midafternoon and he would run the rest of the day with staff. We were open from eleven in the morning until nine, ten, eleven o’clock at night, the usual restaurant thing. At that time there wasn’t as much available in the area for the food services. In fact, in looking back at one point I figured there were only seven places in the area where one could get food that wasn’t prepared in one’s own kitchen. That included takeout as well as restaurants. He had travelled to Europe a long time ago to ski and he had become familiar with the rathskeller style, small operations of Austria and Switzerland, and so his dream was to do something of that sort. At the same time, the malls were impacting restaurants and there were just sandwich places as opposed to full- service restaurants so he combined those concepts and came up with what was “Obie’s Brot und Bier” which means bread and beer. Because he wasn’t going to be doing really traditional German fare, he called it a slightly German restaurant. And we ran that from 1976 until 1989 when we sold it. And it is now Pioneer Alley, the Pioneer Patio. And the fellow that owns it, his wife worked with us, so it was a logical segue for them and they bought it in '89 and they’ve been running it ever since.

MG:
Awesome. When in that process did you officially move down to Cooperstown?

SO:
In 1979 I think it was. No, it was '78 because Megan was born here in '79. So we came down in the Fall of '78.

MG:
And what was that transition like?

SO:
Interesting, including a dog that had contact with a skunk. And we had cleaned him up wonderfully except for that the day we had moved it rained. So, he was in one car doing his wonderful exuding [laughs] and his sister who had not had the skunk was in the other car. So, we basically moved ourselves and settled into a nice little house and enjoyed being here. It was a good place for kids.

MG:
And did you have one kid at that time of moving?

SO:
When we moved, we had our son and then our daughter was born here. So she’s a true Cooperstonian. The rest of us are still trying to be here long enough to meet the 50-year qualification.

MG:
So, what was it like running Obie’s after moving to Cooperstown? What was your involvement?

SO:
My involvement was really pretty much front of the house. I helped train some of the staff. I was a waitress. I did minor easy things in the kitchen and kept track of the kids. Filled in if there was a need, but for the most part I was the parent at home, so I worked the short hours, and he worked the long hours.

MG:
Was that hard?

[TRACK 1, 11:35]

SO:
It was hard but it wasn’t so hard. This a really very supportive community, so we developed our friendships and that made things easier. If you needed help with something, there was always a friend nearby, not unlike what’s happening right now.

MG:
Can you talk a little bit more about those friendships and the relationships in the community, especially after you moved here?

SO:
Well, the heart of the community for us as a young family was the school. So we made our friends based on the children who were in each other’s classes. Got involved with things in the community through friends and I still suspect it’s the doorway for a lot of people moving into the community. It's that kind of thing that helps you learn who’s here. It was a smaller community at that point. More locally based in some ways than it is now because Main Street was the kind of Main Street that we needed. It had the shoe store, the clothing store, it had all of the locally needed services for daily living as opposed to being the tourist Main Street that it is today. So, we would run into one another on the streets as well. You would bump into your local pediatrician at the card shop. At the restaurant you would see the local teachers and coaches out in the community. So it was an easy way to get to know a lot of people. You’d go to the school meetings, PTA [Parent Teacher Association] meetings. I was part of a group that started the PTA here because we wanted a place to talk about and deal with what we needed to do with and for the school.

MG:
Do you still have a lot of those connections or have they kind of changed over time?

SO:
They’ve changed over time. People have moved away; people have passed away. The biggest change is that a lot of the kids’ friends have gone elsewhere: California, Pennsylvania, Maine. [Laughs] They’re all over the place, so it changes. Now the circles are really through church and volunteer organizations as opposed to the school, but there’s more time now that they're not raising children actively to do such things. They were always there. It's just that we are now the older group that does it.

[TRACK 1, 14:17]

MG:
So, tell me a little about Cooperstown Bat Company. How did that come about?

SO:
[Laughs] A man who doesn’t sleep well at night, whose mind never shuts off and he really at one point thought well, “maybe we should expand the restaurant.” So, we gave some thought to a slightly larger location, but he said, “it just won’t work just as a restaurant. We really need something else. So maybe we should give it a baseball theme.” At that point the Hall of Fame had a really tiny gift shop. There was one fellow who sold baseball cards out of his home on upper Pioneer Street. There was the batting range. Let’s see, I’m trying to think what else there was in town. Oh, F.R. Woods, of course. And people would be drawn here because of the Hall and we’d get to chat with them at the restaurant and they’d say, “well, why can’t I do this” and “why can’t I find that,” and he thought “well, it's baseball. Let's do something with baseball bats.” So we started that in 1981, basically at home with the concept that we would do décor and we would do souvenir items, etc. for those folks who were visiting the village. So, we initially launched it through the restaurant and then had, next to what is now the Farmers Market there was what had been an old pipe shop for what was McEwan’s Hardware on Main Street at the time and they backed into the alley that we were on, Pioneer Alley. So, we arranged with them to take over the space and use it for developing the company and from there just a whole lot of good luck things happened to us, getting to meet some folks who were good in baseball and having fun with customers who just were excited they could get something in town.

MG:
Wonderful. So, I read a little bit online about the chemical process that you used for these bats, kind of unique?

SO:
It was an adaptation of a decaling process and in the world of baseball it had been done in the early 1900s and Louisville Slugger and a few other places would put decaled images on bats for souvenirs, little guys as well as full sized. We learned with working with a friend who was a graphic designer, we learned how to actually source the decaling and then how to apply it. We had to be very careful because there had been changes in the availability of finishes. We went from the petroleum-based urethane finishes to water based which changed what we had to do. They all had to be hand applied very carefully so it was a slow process, so we didn’t do lots of bats in the beginning.

MG:
How did that grow, like when did it really start to take off?

SO:
That really was a result of a crash in the stock market. That was Black Friday in October of, I forgot now what the year was [1989]. Was it the early eighties? 1980s that people became very skittish about investing away from home. They didn’t know where their money was and what was happening to it; it was out there in the ether someplace. It was not that the people weren’t responsible but the market wasn’t propitious. So, people started looking for hard goods. They wanted to have their money invested in antiques and collectibles and because we had already started with the decaling process to make images on bats and art on bats, it was a logical segue to then move in that direction and of course Cooperstown is a perfect spot for it. Once a year you have all these people in town who are very well known in baseball both in front, out on the diamond, and behind. And so, we were lucky to meet a few of those folks and the one who really helped us launch was Pee Wee Reese. He gave us a shot and didn’t want any money for it. That was the interesting part and we refused, we said, “no, no, no, you have to be paid for this.” But because he had a very good friend at Louisville Slugger and that fellow liked what we were doing, and Louisville wasn’t doing it, he connected us. So, we did our first really truly collectible, a signed bat with him, and from there he said to Ted Williams next “it’s okay, they’re good people to work with, you’ll be fine,” and so Ted Williams agreed and then there were a number of them after that.

MG:
And that’s how the induction bats kind of came to be?

SO:
And the induction bats became a part of it because we needed and wanted a relationship with the Hall and then we had a very talented young man join our firm. His name was Tim Haney, and he now owns the company and with his expertise in woodworking we learned to then do engraved bats which allowed us to open up the number of items that we could in fact offer to the public. All the way from just something for the kids to play with to the higher-end collectibles

MG:
When did the relationship with the Hall start?

SO:
Oh, well, now let’s see. I haven’t thought about that in a while. Don has a much better memory for the dates. We started that, '81? We were working with the Hall off and on really from the mid-eighties forward. Small community you know, personal relationships with individuals who were interested in what we were doing. We actually were working with the Hall before they did the big library addition. So, it goes back before that because they actually asked us if we knew how to make baseball bats big enough to be the columns in the Hall and we said no we didn’t own any thirty- or forty-foot lathes. So, we have a very long and very comfortable relationship with the Hall of Fame.

MG:
And what about the community? Did you feel a lot of support from the community?

SO:
Oh yeah, when people know you, if they like you and like what you’re doing you get the support. People would say, “oh yeah, there’s an interesting company over here. Take a look at it.” We had people work with us. We had, in both businesses, we had a lot of young people that worked with us. In the restaurant business we had a lot of the gals that waitressed and a number of kids that cooked for us, and so we had a lot of connections there and they just continued on into the Bat Company. We’re fortunate enough to be able to take the steps that we needed to at the time that we needed. We didn’t have to buy property in town initially, we could lease and rent. Then when we had grown enough that we could in fact buy places to work and build places to work, we were able to do that. We bought land out here in Fly Creek and built a factory out here and we were eventually able to buy the location that the bat company is in now and settle in.

[TRACK 1, 22:14]

MG:
So, you mentioned Main Street changing, a lot of the stores, can you tell me a little bit more about that and what you noticed over time?

SO:
It’s a really interesting change. When we first arrived, as I said earlier, it was very much a typical small town. Not totally typical because Cooperstown’s been a resort community since the 1850s so people have been in and out of town as visitors all those years. So, there were always things that appealed to them, primarily the museums. It was the Hall of Fame, it was the Fenimore [Art Museum], and The Farmers' Museum. There was a small Indian museum down on lower Fair Street. There were small operations of that sort that were interesting for people to come and visit. The fascinating thing at that stage was a number of our visitors would come into this town and they’d be caught in Main Street. Now you know how they come in: they come down Route 80, they come in 28, they were coming in primarily from Route 90, the interstate. There were some, I don’t know how they came along 80 without knowing this and maybe these people didn’t, but they would not even know there was a lake here. They didn’t know about James Fenimore Cooper, many of them. Our European visitors did; he always played better in Europe than he did in the United States. But they would come into town and they’d be just taken by the architecture, the history. Then in 1989 we had a big celebration here. And that was the 50th anniversary of the Hall of Fame and the purported 100th [150th] anniversary of the inception of baseball. So, there was this great big parade that literally wound its way around the village, it was so huge. And a great number of people who were interested in the business of baseball came. Now some of them were already here because autographing is such a big part of collections and people would come and in the early years the Hotel Otesaga would house the Hall of Famers, but it was open to the community at the same time. So, people would hang out at the hotel and interact with the ball players. There was a tent in the side yard of the hotel where they could get autographs during an autograph session. But eventually everything grew so, that that couldn’t continue. For instance, the Hall of Fame’s inductions were in the park [Cooper Park] in front of the Hall, the library. It was a big crowd of 3,000 people who came and went to the game. Now that’s considered a no-show Hall of Fame weekend [Laughs]. So there were interesting things. There were artists in the area that had their products on Main Street that had a more diverse appeal at that point. In 1989 that changed and became predominantly baseball. Now some of the economy just was ripe for that because the malls had already begun to lessen the interest in and the competition of Main Street businesses for the dollars that flow in any community. It was a day away, it was an adventure day to drive to Albany or to Utica to go to a mall to shop and so we didn’t see as many small shopkeepers offering the usual items. I remember we had a shoe store in town and the gentleman that ran the shoe store was having a terrible time and finally had to close. He could no longer buy enough variety of shoes, because there were minimum orders now placed by the manufacturers that were easy for mall shoe stores to meet. And even after working in conjunction with a shoe store in Oneonta. He said, “it doesn’t work,” he said, “I have to buy too many shoes of the same style in order to get what I want and not everybody wants that style.” And the shoe store in Oneonta, the buyer base there was looking for a more diverse kind of shoe. They wanted dress shoes, they wanted non-sports shoes and people here were more interested in the outdoor shoes. So that forced some changes in Main Street. It was the laws of supply and demand kicking in. So, we go from the malls taking away business to increases in cost and the interest of people because of the crash of the market combined to make people more interested in following something like baseball collectibles. So, the cost of leasing a place in town grew larger than the locally based businesses could maintain. So, the ones who moved into the spots who could afford to be there because they had better cash flows were baseball related. So, we saw a switch from a typical classic Main Street to a new classic tourist Main Street.

MG:
When did that, I don’t need the exact year obviously, but when do you think that shift fully happened? Was it like through the [19]80s?

SO:
When did it complete and become what we are not seeing so much now?

MG:
Yes.

SO:
That happened through the [19]80s and into the [19]90s. Then we got [the Cooperstown] Dreams Park. And Dreams Park was another driver of change. It changed the way people visited the village. Prior to Dreams Park the accommodations had one-to-three night visits. People came, they did the museums, they did the shopping, they might explore the countryside and then move on. Once the Dreams Park came in people stayed, initially they stayed seven and ten days, they would. The family would come and that was a brand-new thing. The families would come and it would be combined with a vacation. So, they would come do the five days at the park, spend two to three more days just exploring the area. So that changed how many people came. It changed the number of people going through the Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame had more visitors when they were here for two days and replaced by another two-day group than when they were here for five days with only the same group available to visit. It changed the way people shopped. Some of the business that was on Main Street did very well in the early years then did not do as well because some of the things that were being offered on Main

[START OF TRACK 2, 0:00]

SO:
Street were also being offered at the Dreams Park. They were now in competition with Main Street in many cases. So that's one of the changes, that was another driver of change here, I think.

MG:
How did Cooperstown Bat Company kind of fit into the change? Did you feel like it helped?

SO:
I think we were among the early ones, along with those earlier businesses that did well, and because we did well other people said I can do well as well. The normal thing that happens, any idea that can be expanded is always expanded in the world of competition and cash flow.

[TRACK 2, 0:54]

MG:
Oh, I remember, so how does Cooperstown, you kind of had experience all over central New York, how does Cooperstown kind of compare to other communities in the area?

SO:
Interesting question. I think it's a healthier, at least until the pandemic, I think it's been a healthier community economically. I think it has been an artistically enriched community because of the backgrounds of many of the people who settle here. Interestingly, there have always been, even among the shopkeepers in town. Sometimes they've had very interesting first careers that were in the arts, sometimes in the sciences. So, it's been a very rich community. Not as wealthy as some people assume in terms of monetary wealth. We've had the benefit of some very wealthy benefactors who settled in the area. The Clarks are the prime example of that, having settled here in the 19th century and continue to this day to value the community. The fact that we were close enough to a rail line in the late 19th century is part of what brought people here. Have to take it all the way back to Judge William Cooper because of his influence and his connections we continued to have even political connections. We've had presidents, we've had Secretaries of State, we've had all kinds of people who've spent time in this community. There were other communities in the area that were equally probably benefited by tourism in the early years. Richfield Springs is an example. Sharon Springs is an example. Who then fell on very hard times and those communities did not have the benefit of the kind of benefactors that we've always enjoyed. So, we've managed to ride some of those ups and downs a little more smoothly. It's a very warm community. Let's see, how else do I characterize it? It's a very supportive community, at all levels. It's rare that we find ourselves in huge social conflicts around here. Perhaps a little bit less homogeneous than some communities which has helped us maintain that stability, but perhaps without experiencing some of the richness of fabric that can go with a more diverse community. But I see that changing. I see the staffing at the hospital has a huge influence I think on that and it's only to our benefit.

[TRACK 2, 4:08]

MG:
Where am I at? So, when did you sell Cooperstown Bat Company?

SO:
We sold it in 2009.

MG:
And what was that like, what was behind that decision?

SO:
[Laughs] It was a long time coming, but it was an easy one to make when Tim and Connie were interested in the company. We'd had other opportunities to sell and one opportunity would have been an easy one to take, but it was not one we wanted to take. Financially, it would have been beneficial, but it would have taken the company out of the area and that's something we didn't want to see happen, and we had people who worked with us who were going to be better served by an inside buy. Not only the ones who bought it, but the people who worked with us in that context. So, it was a much easier decision to make than it might have been and we did not want it to be just a monetary decision. Because Tim had been with us, oh my gosh, by the time he bought it he'd been with us at least 10, maybe 15 years, so everything could flow and then he was able to take it in new directions that were beneficial for the company. Don and I've talked about we're not sure we would have done that well with it as things changed, whereas Tim had a more diverse approach. We were strictly very interested in collecting and then doing bats for kids, that kind of thing. Tim’s view was let's go beyond that to the adult players and the professionals. We were lucky; we were one of the really small companies that was able to obtain MLB licensing, which was a huge benefit for us. We could never have done our collectible business without the licensing because we never could have used the logos and the insignias that were possible. It was an expensive arrangement, but it was a beneficial arrangement, and we all made some money on it.

MG:
So, with both of your companies you sold to people who were involved and worked with you a long time.

SO:
Yes, we did.

MG:
Can you talk a little bit more about the motivation behind that?

SO:
Oh, I don't know if we were just too lazy to try to sell it any other way [laughs]. That's being kind of funny. The benefit was that we always had a good relationship with the people with whom we worked. And I think that played into the continuity within the company rather than outside the company. We always liked the people that worked with us.

MG:
Makes sense. Are you still involved, you and Don, in the Bat Company at?

SO:
No, we're not, it's their baby now. It's like, you know, when your kid gets to be 21 and finishes college. [Laughs] It's his or her life now. We still have connections. We still talk every now and then and sometimes we'll get a phone call about something that arises in a context before their direct control. But as [for] any official, nothing official. It's better that way for them; it’s their company.

MG:
Makes sense.

SO:
Yeah.

[TRACK 2, 7:41]

MG:
And then kind of a fun question. Do you have any good baseball player stories? Like any fun celebrity moments?

SO:
[Laughs] Some are fun and some I probably can't tell. We usually did a pretty good job of relating with these fellows. One of my favorites involves Ted Williams. He was our second famous player and he was in town. He was a wonderful supporter of the Hall. He was always here. And he came into town for the weekend and his rep [representative]. We had set up a time to meet with him and that morning, actually that morning started the night before. Our two boys, from Ted Williams' point of view our two boys. They weren't. Our son and his best friend, I believe they were 10-11 years old at the time, had wanted to go to—this was when we still had the autograph signings in the tent of the Otesaga—they wanted to get up and go to the autograph signing. To do that, to be in line without being way, way out in the back, they knew they should be there by probably 3:00 or 4:00 o'clock in the morning. So, they said, well, “Gee, can we sleep at the office?” And at that point we were at 25 Chestnut St. “Can we just stay overnight at the office? Then we can just get up and walk over.” So, the two families said yes if you take care, are responsible, that can happen. Well, the two boys stayed up until 1 o'clock and then they fell asleep. Each family tried calling to awaken them, because we knew we'd have to do that and they wouldn't answer the phone because they were sound asleep. At 7 o'clock the next morning, the fellow who was the rep who knew us, knew the place well, knew who the kids were, came in and said, “Mr. Williams is here. He wants to see your mom and dad.” And our meeting time with him was at 8 o'clock or 8:30 as I recall, and we got this very, very panicked phone call, “Can you, can you come, can you come down now? Mr. Williams is already here.” Now, my husband was standing in front of the mirror with half his face shaved and shaving cream on the other half, and I was still in my nightgown. We managed to make a 10-minute trip from that point to town in order to meet with Mr. Williams. Well, all the time they were there before during the waiting period, Ted spent time, he loved kids, he spent time talking with the boys and he had apparently a good time doing it. By the time we got there they were all very calm and very comfortable with one another. And any time we saw him after that, it was, “Well, how are your boys doing? How are your kids doing anyway?” And he always remembered that. And I think he always had that kind of a mind; he always remembered a lot of people. Then the other one was. We knew Pee Wee Reese pretty well. We met with him a number of times and I can't say we were close, personal friends, that's not what happens in that business, but we used to see him off and on. And I remember once being at a show and I learned something about Pee Wee Reese that I had never seen before. He was the sweetest man in the world. But we were waiting at an elevator and we were chatting and he was there chatting with us and a fellow came up to him who was a little too forward and obnoxious. And I had never seen a person do this before, but he just changed from this very way open fellow to this very closed, very formal man and a very firm man. Polite, he was a southerner, after all. Very polite and told the gentleman that he was busy elsewhere and couldn't be with him and I've never seen that side of him. And it was so far from the birthday cake he did for me once, which we then reciprocated with birthday cakes for him. And then let's see, who was it we did this with? Oh, I'm blocking on this. I just remember we did a signing. Was it Frank Robinson? No, I don't think it was, Frank. It was another fellow who got us all jogging in place. He says, “we’ve been sitting too long!” It's just that kind of thing or just the common folk kind of things if you spent any time with them. And if you weren't pushy and weren’t demanding. If you could just treat them with respect and just enjoy a little time with them, it really worked well. So, there are a lot of funny little stories. Don's much better. He could tell you a lot of stories. He's much better at this. But we traveled a lot, meeting them. Oh, I remember Sandy Koufax, we worked with him once. He had the most beautiful, two men with beautiful hands and they were both pitchers. They were Sandy Koufax and they were Cool Papa Bell. Wonderful, long, graceful fingers. And we did a signing with Sandy and Sandy and I chatted about everything but baseball. We talked about literature and all kinds of things. Don said, “I've never done a signing where we didn’t talk baseball.” And it was just that that was the kind of thing that he liked doing. And Cool Papa Bell sat on the bench in front of what is, let me see, he was on Main Street in front of what was Auguer’s at the time, and we just sat there enjoying people walking up and down the street and he was talking to me and I watched him as he talked and his hands moved so beautifully.

MG:
Wow, those are really fun stories.

SO:
Yeah.

[TRACK 2, 14:08]

MG:
So you sold the bat company and was that the start of retirement for you?

SO:
I'm sorry?

MG:
After you sold the back company was that the beginning of retirement?

SO:
That was for me, yeah.

MG:
And what was that like?

SO:
[Laughs] Busier than working. And that's not an uncommon response, I'm sure. We spent a little time just relaxing, but the kids in college. Did a little bit of traveling, not a lot. We just settled in and got really involved with that, very involved in things like the [Cooperstown] Food Pantry and doing more at the church I belong to. I'm still trying to complete my summer as a tourist in town. I still haven't had time to just hang out and wander around and do the things that all the tourists come to do. So that's still ahead of me.

[TRACK 2, 15:04]

MG:
When did you get started at the Food Bank?

SO:
That's interesting you call it that because it was the Food Bank when I started out. It's no longer the Food Bank, it's a Food Pantry. And I got involved actually because my son had volunteered for a little bit when he had some free time and one day, he needed someone to work with him and then a couple of times he needed someone to sub for him and I started that way. And we worked with Ellen St. John who was the only reason it's here. Then a gal named Audrey Murray moved into the area and she’d had experience in several different communities working, volunteering with food-based operations. It was about that time that we started formalizing the operation a little bit more. It had started literally in a kitchen closet, moved to a cupboard in the village offices, and then to the Presbyterian Church who were very willing to support Ellen because she was a member, a very well-respected member, not just the church with the community. So, we started. We were in the basement of the church house at that point. And Audrey and I started working more with Ellen to work on all the details. And Audrey with her background was just seminal in that. It grew as these things unfortunately have a tendency to do, especially in poorer areas, and Otsego County is not a wealthy county, in spite of the perception of Cooperstown as a wealthy town. So, we have a lot of need here, and so we just worked together for a long time. Worked on getting it upstairs so that older people could come because everybody was walking up and down the stairs. Our volunteers were trying to carry food up and down the stairs every day, and as you know, many volunteer organizations are comprised of the older members of communities who have time to deal with a volunteer need. And it's been really interesting, illuminating, fun, exciting, [laughs] and it makes you feel good, yeah.

MG:
Are there any other things you do in retirement, or is it a lot the Food Pantry?

SO:
We used to do a lot of skiing. Don't do as much of that anymore. It's a little harder on our bodies, but we very much enjoyed skiing. People say to us, “Oh, why don’t you go away in the winter?” Well, we happen to like winter [laughs]. We enjoy being here year round. I like the season changes so I don't want to move someplace where there's no change of seasons and until very recently we skied and our family, our daughter’s family is very involved in outdoor sports and winter sports so we still get together and we watch them ski now.

MG:
Do your kids live nearby?

SO:
Our daughter lives in New Jersey and our son actually has a business in town. He has the Cooperstown Wine and Spirit, but he lives in New Hartford where his wife’s family is. So, he travels, he does what we did in the very early years of business. He now travels the hour back and forth to work and I keep in touch with the community by working with him one day a week down there and filling in odd gaps. But most of my time really is with the Food Pantry.

[TRACK 2, 18:46]

MG:
We're almost at the time, but we talked a lot about how Cooperstown's changed. What do you see for it in the future? Do you think it's kind of changing right now?

SO:
That's a really interesting question. We've always been blessed with stability. We've had changes. I suspect that we may see another change which moves us a little away from a one approach town with the dominance being baseball. I don't see us not being tourists. We've been that way since the 1850s, I don't see that going away. I think that there's a lot more competition for people in the world of tourism. My wish would be to be able to stabilize the cycle of the economy. We are rural. It's tough for us to develop those stabilities. It's very important that the hospital is here. It's really very important the government is here. It's good that we're near the I-88 corridor. We're not too far off the [Interstate] 90 corridor, so at least we're not positioned badly. We are kind of a stepchild to a lot of areas. We are considered Leatherstocking, we're considered central New York, we're considered Southern Tier and Upper Appalachia, and we actually fit into all of those so it's hard to sometimes clarify our identity. We're very adolescent in that way. We keep changing a little bit here and there. I think we’ll always be a fairly solid community. My wish is that we could have more access to the internet and to the new world of technology here. We are limited basically to the access in Oneonta and Cooperstown. Up along the lake out in the rural areas it's harder to get the stability of internet access and cell phone service that I think is going to be really critical to all of the economies everywhere in the world going forward. I think we're where we were in the late 19th century when we became an industrialized economy as opposed to agriculture. I see us moving from, how do I want to say it, a bricks and mortar need of development to the virtual. We've experienced it at the Food Pantry. Until this pandemic hit, we did very little with the internet in terms of our own interfacing among our volunteers and with other entities. Our meetings were always in person. We now Zoom meets, which is making it easier for some of our committee work to happen. We are a community that is summer focused and so a great number of very valuable people to this community are away in the winter. Now they are no longer gone in the winter, they are still integrated with us because of our ability to reach them via email and via text messages and things like that. I would like to see that strengthened for our community so that we can be a more integrated part of the new world.

MG:
Awesome, that makes sense. OK, we are pretty close. Is there any last things you wanted to talk about. Anything I didn't cover? Anything that stuck out from earlier? I'm trying to remember.

SO:
I don't think so. I think you did a good job of covering all of that.

MG:
You did a good job of answering my questions.

SO:
Well, I hope it's fun, that it works out for you.

MG:
Yes, thank you so much.

SO:
You're most welcome.

Coverage

Upstate New York

Cooperstown, NY

1942-2021

Creator

Megan Good

Publisher

Cooperstown Graduate Program, State University of New York-College at Oneonta

Rights

Cooperstown Graduate Association, Cooperstown, NY

Format

audio/mpeg

28.8mB

22.5mB

image/jpeg

119 KB

Language

en-US

Type

Sound

Image

Identifier

21-006

Abstract

Track 1, 0:17 - Life in Upstate, NY

Track 1, 6:06 - Cooperstown, NY

Track 2, 14:08 - Retirement

Item

Sharon Oberriter, November 10, 2021