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A native son on the history, literature, culture, and characters of the Upstate New York he loves.
Over the last three-plus decades, Bill Kauffman has written about and interviewed upstate New York novelists, politicians, and civic activists who have given the region much of its pith, vitality, and distinctiveness. Upstaters collects the best of these, including profiles of upstate novelists Walter D. Edmonds, John Gardner, and Henry W. Clune; a portrait of congressional legend and World Bank president Barber Conable; appreciations of underknown writers Josephine Young Case, Martha Treichler, and Warren Hunting Smith; and a cast of characters that includes dying men and enterprising women, enfants terribles and eminences grises, doomed folksingers, and the cheapest man in America. These men and women do not exist in isolation; they give life to and draw life from their little places, and so their communities also slip into profile, from the literary capital of New York State (Utica) to the flame-tender of an all-but-extinct Olympic sport (Angelica). Kauffman, former vice president of the minor-league Batavia Muckdogs of the New York-Penn League (extinguished by Major League Baseball), writes also of the fight to maintain baseball in a Rust Belt town in a bottom-line age. His tone throughout is by turns amused, hortatory, wistful, angry, and earnest, but most of all animated by love for the part of New York that has nurtured, annoyed, and entertained him for a lifetime.
"What Upstaters is is a collection of pieces written over several years, for several different outlets, profiling many of upstate New York's places and several of its remembered, forgotten, but always colorful characters … Buy, read, dog-ear, and reread this book. And, come Christmas, give a copy of it to everyone you know." — Front Porch Republic
"I’ve admired Bill Kauffman's books for years. Appealing, elegantly written, and entirely American." — Howard Frank Mosher, author of A Stranger in the Kingdom: A Novel
"Bill Kauffman is one of America's wisest and funniest writers." — Tom Bissell, author of Creative Types: And Other Stories
"Kauffman thinks and feels as a man fully awake; he writes like a dream." — Thomas Mallon, author of The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983–1994
"Kauffman and I are the original patriots." — Gore Vidal, author of Lincoln: A Novel
Bill Kauffman is the author of many books, among them Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town’s Fight to Survive, which won the 2003 national Sense of Place award from Writers & Books, and Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism. He also wrote the screenplay for the feature film Copperhead, set in upstate New York. He lives in his native Batavia, New York.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
People: Portraits
1. Henry W. Clune Knew His Place
2. Walter D. Edmonds: Our Stalwart
3. Barber B. Conable Jr.: Our Statesman
4. John Gardner: This Bud's for Us
5. Warren Hunting Smith: The Quintessential Genevan
6. Tim Tielman: The Buffalo Saver
7. Greg & Jackie & RaeAnn & Richard: Waitin' on a Friend
8. Jim Owen: A Saver's Grace
Snapshots
9. Harriet Tubman: In a Child's Eye
10. The Brisbanes: The Burgher and the Dreamer
11. Mark Twain: Morose and Irritable in the Queen City
12. Josephine Young Case: After Midnight
13. Samuel Hopkins Adams: The Muckraker
14. Edward Crone Jr.: Billy Pilgrim Turns Fifty
15. Martha Treichler: Black Mountaineer
16. Jackson C. Frank: Radio Free America
17. Midge Costanza: The Democracy
18. Danny: Vanishing Point
19. Steve Huff: Grave Matters
20. Wanda Frank: The Play's (Not) the (Whole) Thing
21. Coleen Dwyer: Coffee with Coleen
22. Thomas: Life in a Cage
23. Bill Clune: My Marlboro Man
24. Pat Weissend: Dead Presidents
25. Granville Hicks: Hicks's Town
Places
26. The Oneidans
27. The Utica Club
28. A Syracuse Idyll
29. Armenians in the Falls
30. The Roquers of Angelica
31. The Schope Must Go On: The Chautauqua Institute
32. Shorty Doesn't Live Here Anymore
33. Ten Years After a Place in Time: Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette
34. Thirty Years After a Place in Time: Every Man a King
35. Moon Java: Satellite of Love
36. In This House that I Call Home
37. The Empire Versus Our Town: A Speech to the Fox Hill Bruderhof Community of Walden, New York
38. The Tolling of the Bell: On the Bicentennial of the First Presbyterian Church of Elba
39. Where at Least a Few People Know Your Name
40. There Is Always Baseball in Batavia
Index
About the Author