While in Cooperstown for our son’s baseball tournament, we of course visited the National Baseball Hall of Fame. I’d been before, but hadn’t noticed Andy Warhol’s 1977 painting of one of my favorite pitchers, Tom Seaver.

We also went to the New York Farmers Museum, where we saw the state merry go round. This was not the first time I’d seen the ride’s hand-carved animals. When I was in middle school on Long Island in the mid-1980s, the merry go round’s founder Gerald Holzman visited our history class and told us all about the project, using this beaver as an exhibit of the intricate designs involved. The tour guide the museum, Patrick MacGregor, remembers our Museum Studies professor, Kate Betz, from her time as an intern there!

We then rode power-assist bikes on the rails of the Cooperstown & Charlotte Valley Railroad. And we got an impromptu private tour of the Leatherstocking Railway Historical Society and its trains—including a well-preserved 1923 commuter train that was based in Hoboken, New Jersey.