history
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John McGraw
One of the great things about baseball is how deeply it is rooted into America’s past. For example, the National League is celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2026. There are current-day MLB teams like the Braves, Reds, and Cubs, that were founded prior to the end of Reconstruction. The downside of having such a long… Continue reading
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The Cardiff Giant Revisited
Last June, while visiting Cooperstown, I visited a museum featuring a display of a stone figure known as The Cardiff Giant. The TL;DR version of The Cardiff Giant’s story is that in 1869, a religious skeptic named George Hull created a statue of a giant man, buried it on a farm in the tiny hamlet… Continue reading
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A Museum You Can Ride On
My previous posts covering exhibits at Fenimore Farm & Country Village ranged from goofball Americana (The Cardiff Giant) to a high-minded attempt to convey the history of the region in a tangible, interactive way (The Otsego Herald). Occupying the intersection of those two concepts is another Fenimore Farm exhibit: The Empire State Carousel. The carousel… Continue reading
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National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
This past weekend, I travelled to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown. I could go on and on about my history of visiting the Hall of Fame going back to childhood or wax poetic about the place of baseball in the fabric of America. Or I could just share some photos… Continue reading
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Stanwix Redux
My wife and I have decided that we want to, over the course of however long it takes, visit all 429 sites in the U.S. National Park System. No, really. To butcher an old proverb, a journey of 429 sites begins with a single step. For our first step in this undertaking, we chose to… Continue reading
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Classics Every Day: Mid-Year Update
Back in January, I took it upon myself to start reading some classic fiction, poetry, philosophy, or history every day for an undetermined period of time. I called the project “Classics Every Day.” Now, in this first week of June, I’m happy to report that Classics Every Day is still an ongoing project. I have… Continue reading
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SPQR
Central New York place names are chock full of allusions to Classical Antiquity. We’ve got Homer, Cato, Cicero, and Brutus. You’ll also find municipalities named for Ithaca, Carthage, Syracuse, Marathon, and Utica. With all that, it should go without saying that our region contains a city named Rome. It is said that 19th-century travelers on… Continue reading
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Time Passages
One of the many odd byproducts of moving back to my hometown to raise a family was that my kids attended the same elementary school and the same high school that I did. When I would go to those buildings as a parent for open-houses, parent-teacher conferences, or performances, some ghosts of the past would… Continue reading
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I Knew Her When She Was a Health Center
The medical building on the SUNY Oswego campus is called the Mary Walker Health Center. When I was a student there, we used to refer to it simply as “Mary Walker,” as if we were talking about a person rather than a building. If you told someone you were running a fever and experiencing flu-like… Continue reading
About Me
Researcher. Marketer. Teacher. Father of adult children and dogs. 20th Century holdover. Central New York native. Long-suffering Buffalo Bills fan. History nerd. Traveler. Vintage advertising enthusiast. Hat wearer.
a.k.a. V.J. 