Obama Stirred Excitement
On Visiting Hall Of Fame In ’14
By JIM KEVLIN
COOPERSTOWN – The Friday before Thursday, May 22, 2014, then-mayor Jeff Katz was hanging out in the kitchen of his Chestnut Street home with son Robbie, who had just gotten home from SUNY Oswego, when the phone rang.
It was Police Chief Mike Covert. With his son just having arrived, the mayor ignored it. The chief called “twice, three times… It had to be important for him to do that.”
Covert didn’t want to talk on the phone. “You can meet me on the front porch,” said Katz, and it was there he got the news.
“I just got word Obama’s coming,” said the breathless chief, as Katz described it. “Next Thursday. Here’s what we know. There will be more to come. As of now, it’s a secret.”
The next night, Katz was at the Southside Cinemas in Oneonta, watching “Godzilla” with sons Robbie and Joey. “My phone started ringing,” people calling about the rumors he couldn’t talk about. “The next morning, Obama announced it on his Saturday address. So now everyone knew.”
At 25 Main St., Hall of Fame President Jeff Idelson was having a similar experience.
The day before Covert called Katz, Idelson’s office phone likewise rang. It was Ken Meifert, VP for development, telling his boss he’d just gotten a call from the White House.
“It was the White House’s idea; and I can’t think of a better one,” said Idelson at the time, which just happened to be the Hall of Fame’s 75th anniversary year.
The visit would be a historic one, not just for the Hall, but for Otsego County. The county has had several presidential contacts, from George Washington right after the American Revolution ended to George H.W. Bush in 1989, when he was considering buying the Houston Astros.
But only one other had visited while in office: Martin Van Buren in 1839, when he was famously lost for 45 minutes stumbling back to the village in the dark from a Woodside Hall party. (Village Historian Hugh MacDougall is skeptical of that story.)
In Cooperstown, five days of high anticipation followed Obama’s radio talk, as the Secret Service descended on the village with proficiency and stealth. “People were told what they needed to know when they needed to know it,” Katz said.
It wasn’t until a couple of years later that the mayor learned from a doctor acquaintance, “They needed to know what Bassett was like, how best it was to get there. I never knew that. I never needed to know that. I was on the political end.
“I have zero idea how much the sheriff’s department was in the loop. People are told what they need to know, no more and no less,” he said.
“That’s the way to have good security.”
“We all had our assignments,” said county Sheriff Richard J. Devlin Jr., whose department was a piece of a Secret Service plan that included assignments for state police and the state Office of Homeland Security.
“Everything was scripted,” said Idelson.
Day of, word was received early that afternoon that Air Force One, bearing the president, had arrived at Griffiss Air Force Base, north of Utica, then that Marine One had landed somewhere in the vicinity of the Clark Sports Center – south of the sports center, it turned out, rather than Bassett’s visible helipad right on Susquehanna Avenue.
Assigned security at the landing site, all of the sheriff’s deputies were at the scene, Devlin said, assisted by additional officers dispatched from the Delaware, Schoharie and Chenango sheriff’s departments.
From there, the presidential motorcade moved into the village at a brisk clip – Susquehanna to Elm to Pioneer to Church.
In the Presbyterian parsonage at Pioneer and Church, Thom Rhodes had hoped to video the presidential motorcade passing by from an upstairs window.
He went downstairs to say hi to 30-40 people who had gathered on the lawn, when “this rather tough-looking guy wearing fatigue pants told me I had to close the upstairs window – and I had to close it RIGHT NOW.”
He, of course, did so, but was back downstairs in time for a series of black SUVs – Chevy Tahoes, others said – and two limousines, “so we wouldn’t know which one HE was in,” Rhodes surmised.
The motorcade continued briskly up to the Hall’s back loading dock.
Jeff Idelson was waiting for him. “When I learned I was going to be the one to provide the tour, I become quite nervous,” he said the other day. “My depth of knowledge is OK, but not as good as our curators.”
With him was Andre Dawson, a fellow Chicagoan chosen to help the former University of Chicago law professor feel at home, although Dawson was a Cub, Obama a big White Sox fan, his host said.
The president held Babe Ruth’s bat and Joe DiMaggio’s glove, he toured the exhibit, “Pride & Passion: The African-American Experience,” he visited the team lockers, one which included an assortment of White Sox artifacts.
A favorite moment was putting on a White Sox World Series’ ring from 2005. “It fits,” the president said with a big smile, according to one account.
“His intellectual curiosity was strong,” said Idelson. “He had a dozen questions that showed his curiosity and interest in baseball’s links to the Oval Office.”
As mayor, Katz was one of the local VIPs chosen for a “push and pull” with the president, along with state Sen. Jim Seward, R-Milford, Kathy Clark, R-Otego, then chair of the county Board of Representatives and, of course, Jane Forbes Clark, Hall of Fame chair.
Katz and Obama are about the same height, but “when I stood next to him, he looked like a giant. I shook his hand. He talked about flying in over the lake, the golf course, how beautiful it was. I told him he would have to come back and play the course.”
He continued, “I was GOING to make the Chicago connection” – the mayor had moved here from there a decade before –
“and he was very interested in that.”
It seemed like a long conversation, but it must have been brief, Katz said, and the president seemed to know when their time was up, when the push became the pull. “OK, picture,” Obama said, and a portrait of the two men was snapped.
In the Hall of Plaques, the president addressed 300 local VIPs in the tightly packed pantheon of baseball heroes on the importance of international tourism to the balance of trade; of Brand USA, a federal marketing effort; of the Travel Promotion Act of 2010, and National Travel & Tourism Strategy.
“Tourism translates into jobs,” he said, “and it translates into economic growth. When visitors come here, they don’t just check out the Hall. They rent cars; they stay in hotels; they eat at restaurants.
“And that means, for Upstate New York, the Baseball Hall of Fame is a powerful economic engine.”
In 2013, he said, tourism generated $1.5 trillion in economic activity across the country, generating $8 million in jobs.
It was unclear whether any of the programs Obama discussed directly benefited the Hall; Meifert said any federal tourism money probably wouldn’t have been direct, but would have passed through the state’s “I Love NY” office.
In an interview, Idelson said the visibility was great for the Hall. “The numbers in Cooperstown have been very strong since 2014,” he added. “His initiative was probably part of the reason.”
Marine One landed about 3. Around 4, President Barack Obama was gone. That evening he was in Chicago, at a fundraiser.
