Who We Say We Are

"Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are."

-John Wooden

At my desk at 7 a.m. pondering the folly of my career choices, as I have more days than not for the past quarter century. It's paid well enough, but on balance really wasn't worth all the parade of human folly and misery that are the fuel that makes a lawyer's practice thrive. I should've done something better with the blessing of this life, but here we are.

Also pondering the meaning of what I've observed the last couple weeks on our wanderings around the hills of western New York and Pennsylvania, enjoying the spectacular late summer weather with cool mornings and sunny yet not oppressive days. But it's not so much the weather as discernment, what the universe is telling us.

A few days ago on my run, during my abortive training for this half-marathon in October, I came across the historical marker a block up from the house, remembering Corning's favorite son, Amo Houghton.

What they have to say is the tip of the iceberg, but what's more interesting is what they omit. The wealthiest member of Congress when he served. Ivy League educated. Scion of an incredibly wealthy and influential family that included two U.S. ambassadors. Instead, the town remembers his service. It tells you so much about what they value, and stands in contrast to the hucksters, petty criminals, and con artists who have always populated the leadership roles in these parts. They were good in their own way, some of them at any rate, but it's always been so much about the money, to the exclusion of all else, that the venality crowds out everything else.

I guess I've absorbed a little of that, just trying to make enough to stop, to leave. Not a great attitude with several more miles of this marathon left to run.

Last weekend Peg and I drove down to Factoryville, Pennsylvania for their annual celebration of Christy Mathewson Day.

Never heard of Christy, or "Matty" as he was known (as well as "The Big Six" and "The Christian Gentleman")?

Christy Mathewson may have been the greatest pitcher of his age, a guy who threw three shutouts in a single World Series, in 1905 I believe. He was one of the original five inductees to the Baseball Hall of Fame. When he died of tuberculosis in 1925 at the age of 45, flags were flown at half-staff, and the entire country fell into mourning over the loss of one who was arguably, to use today's overshared acronym, the GOAT when it came to pitching.

But he wasn't just mourned because he was a great ballplayer. Hell, Babe Ruth played at the same time, dominated both as a pitcher and a batter, but his drinking and whoring always cast a pall over his legacy.

Unlike Ruth, Mathewson was a nice guy, a "college boy" as they called him. He promised his mother if he went to the Bigs he'd never play on Sunday, and he kept that promise. Although he was wooed to the major leagues from the time he was 14, a sort of prodigy, he stayed and graduated from Bucknell. And he didn't just pitch, he wrote books mostly using baseball metaphors as a way of conveying lessons to young men about character and perseverance. He overcame the tragedy of losing both his brothers, one to suicide and another to TB. He quit baseball to serve his country in World War I because it was the right thing to do; his exposure to mustard gas in a training exercise likely set the stage for the TB that killed him seven years later.

In sum, a great guy who deserves to be remembered more than he's been.

So in his hometown of Factoryville, population 1,146, they honor Christy Mathewson every August. There's a parade down Main Street, ending at Christy Mathewson Park. The jazz ensemble from Keystone College, the little liberal arts school on the east edge of town, entertains as the small crowd makes its way across the old wooden bridge from city hall to the park.

The bridge shades its own marker honoring Factoryville's favorite son.

Inside the park craft sellers display their wares. A microbrewery from Scranton sells a passable Pilsner on tap. The Keystone College Giants baseball team mills around before putting on a baseball exhibition in the diamond that anchors the park.

There's even an antique car show. We particularly loved this '57 Chevrolet pickup, which I understand bore a vague resemblance to one Paul Bowen used to drive around the farm.

That evening we attended a performance of the play "Matty" on the bucolic grounds of Keystone College.

The college nearly closed this past summer due to declining enrollment and financial viability, but was rescued by a nonprofit that saw promise in the old school. Good. Very good.

The play was pretty remarkable, a one-man show by a fellow who's a voice actor in LA. He fell in love with the Christy Mathewson story in the 1980s, and has been performing as "Matty" for over three decades now. He never leaves character, and at the end of the play answers questions from the audience directed not to the actor but to the title character, explaining how he learned to throw a screwball, comparing the toughest hitters he faced over a hundred years ago, and telling stories replete with detail about the goings on in a Boston hotel lobby while the team was on the road to play the Red Sox. Truly a labor of love.

There were maybe fifty of us there in the audience. My worrying set-point left me wondering how long this treasure would continue in a world that's moved on to other things.

What does it say about the people around us these last few weeks, their love of Amo and of Matty? I find myself thinking, even as I wince at the Trump flags fluttering in front of crumbling trailers out in the countryside, that there's still the seed of what makes America a magical place abiding there in the Endless Mountains, the Alleghany Plateau, and the Drumlins among the Finger Lakes. If there's anything left of "Americana" these days, it's there and not in the traffic choked, financially stressed, frenetic world our generation has created to imprison ourselves. These people, for all their faults, still care deeply about character, of which success is just a byproduct.

Of course, it's a gross oversimplification to say "all good there, all bad here". The Bay Chamber has its Merriam Award, named for a good friend's father and given every year to folks who devoted their working lives to making this a better place to live and work. Little kindnesses abound; people raise nice families along the coast just as they do in the Southern Tier. And things aren't perfect there--it's not called the "rust belt" for nothing.

And yet, the values, the air, the cadence of life there seems a better fit. Sorry we found it so late, but at least we found it.