To the editor:
My wife and I made our annual visit to our favorite Lincklaen House this past week, and I read your letters to the editor about the ALDI that has come to town and of the feeding frenzy that could very well turn Cazenovia into the next “big box” shopping destination drawing people from as far away as Cortland and Syracuse.
I headed up the marketing for a $1.19 million steak house chain and I’ve seen a time when paying for the paving of two city streets and a stoplight would get a zoning change.
“Big Box’ has its eye on Cazenovia — truly — and if Cazenovia blinks they will all come and open and fill parking lots. And here’s their strategy:
ALDI is very likely their pioneer. Once an ALDI gets approved, the town will have set a legal precedence and then Wal-Mart, Kmart and Target, cannot legally be stopped. The town fathers and mothers will have set a precedent with ALDI — and the town will never in 100 years have enough money to answer a legal defense this precedent will have caused. One gets in, the die is cast.
Is there a way out of this mess you’re about to be in?
It’s a pickle, it surely is, but the answers lie in your past. Cazenovia’s own control of its future will stand tall and stay as it wishes to be — if Cazenovia starts remembering its past.
Of all the near 100 cities, town or villages I have had to research to include in my writing, Cazenovia is the only one I’ve come across, nationwide, that doesn’t have a historical society. (You might go on and read that line again.) Cazenovia has no historical society. New Woodstock has one. Pompey too. Fabius, Tully.
Raise your hand if you thought Robert Fulton invented the steam engine and tested it on the Hudson. Now raise your hand if you didn’t know the steam engine was tested on Cazenovia Lake and it wasn’t by Fulton? Raise your hand if you knew that Chittenango Falls was the inspiration for the book “The Wizard of Oz.” Raise your hand if you knew that the creator of the Duncan Hines baking brand was a Cazenovian.
Well he was. He was my dad and we lived at the Delphi Falls — right in our back yard to be exact. Now raise your hand if you knew that the falls, Delphi Falls, wasn’t even in Delphi Falls at all but in Cazenovia.
So where do I donate all of the Duncan Hines history, photographs, stories, legends?
Ain’t no home in Cazenovia for such trivial nonsense … why they got seasons coming, outdoor markets and stuff. No time for old news.
Well, if I was the senior vice president of Wal-Mart development, I’d be announcing a $5 million local museum — just before I bought up the entire south side of Route 20 clear to Hamilton and sent in the bulldozers.
Until the history of Cazenovia is identified and documented and celebrated, Cazenovia is up for grabs.
Jerome Mark Antil
Dallas, Texas
