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future of baseball on his mind.
    At first, the villagers of Cooperstown were bemused by the discovery that they were living in the Bethlehem of baseball. It had been almost eighty years since Abner Doubleday had been in town—if he ever was in town—and nobody remembered him. But it gradually began to dawn on folks that there might be money in the baseball connection. In 1917, five villagers kicked in a quarter of a dollar apiece to set up a Doubleday Memorial Fund. Their idea was to establish a “national baseball field” and a players’ retirement home, which would attract tourism to the town. The Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce sent a delegation to New York City to ask the blessing of Major League Baseball, and National League president John Hey-dler promised his support. By 1919, a little cash was raised, enough to begin—but not complete—the construction of Doubleday Field in a swampy area on the exact spot Abner Graves had cited in his letter. The project might never have come to fruition if it hadn’t caught the attention of the Clark family.
    The years after World War I were tough on Cooperstown. A blight destroyed much of the hops crop, the agricultural mainstay of the area. Young people began leaving for the city, as they were doing all across small-town America. The depression hit hard. Cooperstown had once been a summer destination for wealthy New Yorkers, but with the economy in shambles, fewer and fewer could afford the excursion.
    By the early thirties, the war between the Clark brothers had come to a close. Sterling was preparing to pack up and leave his stodgy younger brother and the village of Cooperstown to each other. Stephen, it seems, had won the war, and Cooperstown seemed to have gotten the better end of the stick, too. The younger Clark was a generous and civic-minded man and felt a sense of noblesse oblige toward his village. If Cooperstown was to fulfill the prophecy of James Fenimore Cooper and become a substantial town, it had to find a reliable source of income.
    It was Alexander Cleland, one of Clark’s se nior executives, who came up with the idea of cashing in on baseball. Cleland had immigrated to the U.S. from Scotland at the age of twenty-six, and he neither knew nor cared much about his adopted country’s national pastime. But he saw that Cooperstown’s claim to be the birthplace of baseball was worth something. In 1934, he wrote Clark a letter proposing to establish a baseball museum that would draw fans. “Hundreds of visitors would be attracted to the shopping district right in the heart of Cooperstown, each year,” he predicted.
    The idea appealed to Clark. He didn’t care much for baseball, either, but he saw the possibilities of tourist attraction. In the spring of 1934, he dispatched Cleland to New York City to discuss the matter with Ford Frick, newly installed as the president of the National League.
    Frick was a former baseball writer and publicist, a man who thought big. As far as he was concerned, if Cooperstown got some tourists, fine, but the real goal was to build baseball’s brand with something that would engage the imagination of fans everywhere, even the ones who didn’t have the money to reach a museum way out in the sticks. What about a place that celebrated the players themselves—a baseball hall of fame? And what better place to build it than alongside the baseball museum in the hometown of Abner Doubleday?
    Frick’s hall of fame idea wasn’t original. It was inspired by a recent visit to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, founded in New York City in 1900 by Henry Mitchell MacCracken, chancellor of New York University. Its goal was to celebrate the eminent men and women of the world’s ascending economic and cultural colossus. The constitution of the hall specified the sort of people who would be eligible: authors and poets, educators, men of the cloth, missionaries, social reformers, scientists, engineers and architects, physicians, inventors,