May 1992

About this Issue

Note from the Editors

This issue features baseball stories and pictures. Robert Koch offers Baseball Stories from Right Around Here and The Curveball Enters Rochester Baseball. Robert Koch is a baseball fan as well as a broadcaster who may be heard Tuesday mornings at 7:45, Thursday mornings at 7:15, and Saturday mornings at 9:30 from WXXI-FM. We include pictures of the 1925 Lima baseball team and the 1925 Honeoye Falls baseball team, and an advertising bill announcing a 1925 game between these two teams provided by Paul Worboys of Honeoye Falls. The advertising bill is from his own collection of baseball broadsides. The picture of the 1925 Husky Farmers is reprinted by courtesy of the Honeoye Falls-Mendon Historical Society and the picture of the 1925 Lima team is reproduced here by the courtesy of Eileen Rawlins.

John Rezelman describes Mower Power. John gardens and mows his own extensive lawn in Bath, New York and is a long-time scythe swinger who fashions his own scythe snaths and uses different blades for cutting lawn grass, or hay, or brush. In this article he describes what a change power mowers have made in the appearance of this country. He likens it to something like the sweep of the glaciers or the clearing of the frontier in thoroughness. Mowed spaces have grown far beyond dooryard size to the expanse of acres. Cut grass is beautiful, to some of us, and convenient for playing volley ball, croquet, and softball on, and for parking cars and setting up tents for family reunions. Mowing ever more grass with fun-to-drive riding mowers may someday revolutionise farming. It is already bringing a new style of living where husbands, fathers, and families are taking new pride in property and interest in rural living that encourages an attitude of self-confidence and independence.

Richard Sherer provides an item from the July 7, 1855, issue of Moore's Rural New Yorker comparing the cost of cutting grass by scything with using a mowing machine.

Ed Harris tells us how he went about raising the sunken sand dredge from the lagoon at the Valley Sand and Gravel plant in Scottsville in 1948. He also furnished the photograph of the operation. This story is from his book Harpending's Corners.

We conclude with another selection fromJosephine deZeng's 1842 diary,written when she was 19 years old in Geneva, New York.

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