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The Cooperstown Country Club was founded in 1904, long before the arrival in the Village of the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital and the Fenimore House and Farmers’ museums, by Mrs. Henry C. Potter, mother of Edward Severin, Robert Sterling, F. Ambrose, and Stephen Carlton Clark. Overlooking the sleepy village, the new Club consisted of an attractive house, two tennis courts and a severely undulating 9-hole golf course — the latter of which, it is said, enabled Mrs. Potter to cease traveling 9 miles up the lake to the Otsego Golf Course whenever she wanted to tee off.
When the Clark family opened the Otesaga Hotel, situated in the Village on the shore of Otsego Lake, in 1909, they lent part of the adjacent Fenimore Farm for an 18-hole golf course (brilliantly and devilishly designed by the famous course designer, Devereux Emmet), and then they lent part of that new golf course for the Club, whose members, in 1911, came speedily down off their Irish Hill precipice to a Frank Whiting-designed Arts & Crafts clubhouse, a substantial swim dock (with a 30-foot high chute covered with oilcloth and a 15-foot high diving board), an incipient sailing fleet (seven gaff-rigged dinghies fervently skippered by Bowers, Smith, Johnston, Cooper, Hyde, Savage and Townsend) and four clay tennis courts (watered and swept daily; for adults only), all sitting right on the Lake (Blackbird Bay wasn’t filled in until 1912). As time went on, children were introduced to the tennis programs, the dinghies were replaced by Stars and Comets, with well-attended races every week, membership came to include the doctors at Bassett and the members of the Leatherstocking Golf Course, none of whom was required to pay dues, and the social calendar, though still void of meals, added three major black-tie dances.
All went well until WWII, which forced the CCC to close its doors from 1941 to 1945, during which time the tennis courts and clubhouse fell into disrepair. Again, the Clark family saved the day, with a substantial donation by Mrs. F. Ambrose Clark and the imagination and skill of her cousin, Henry St. Clair (Toody) Zogbaum, to renovate the clubhouse in the Colonial Revival style and rebuild the tennis courts. The Clark family continued in their executive positions — Stephen C. Clark was president from 1945 to 1947, followed by Stephen C. Clark, Jr., from 1947 to 1967 — and during their generous annual bail-outs, the sailing and tennis programs grew outstandingly. Turnabouts, those fat little 13-foot bathtubs, became the yacht of choice for the kids, and member-guest and invitational tournaments brought in ringers and champions.
In 1974, the CCC membership was able to purchase the clubhouse and surrounding property, including the four Har-Tru tennis courts, from the Clark family. Along with the independence of membership separate from the golf course came the responsibility of mortgage repayment, and free memberships for golfers and Bassett doctors went the way of ice harvesting. For the next nearly half-century, during which time the mortgage was indeed paid off, the Club has labored under a steady parade of two- and three-year presidents who left office due to term limits, as well as exhaustion, just as they were figuring out how everything worked.
Today, the CCC looks in many ways as it did in 1911. Sailing, swimming, tennis and beach activities overlook spectacular views of Otsego Lake and the surrounding hills that remain largely undeveloped due to inspired planning by Edward Clark, who might have been motivated by the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. Members also enjoy fine dining on the porch and inside the clubhouse, with sweeping views across the golf course, stadium-like perspectives of the predictably fiery activities on the tennis courts, and vivid panoramas of sailboats gliding across the Lake, sometimes with great speed; other times not so fast. In the end, tradition has its way. It might be said that the Cooperstown Country Club remains as much of a 1911 institution as one could possibly hope. The Club is now in a better financial, structural and organizational condition than it has ever been. And here it stands, grand and glorious, an inextricable part of us all: its importance in our lives, undisputed; its beauty, indelible in our hearts; its history, a fond memory undisturbed – and its future, a protected promise.
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