I told my wife that he wouldn't spend another year in the school system there and we set out to find the perfect place to raise young children. After spending several months searching, we decided to re-locate our family to Cobleskill, New York.
At this stage of my life I probably wouldn't do that because Cobleskill is a very cold place. At that stage of my life it was perfect.
Located in Schoharie County New York between Albany and Oneonta, Cobleskill is small town America. There is minor league baseball in Oneonta, great Little League and girls softball in Cobleskill, skiing in easy driving distance, and Howe's Caverns nearby. There is a Summer Fair in Cobleskill that everyone in the County, it seems, attends and enjoys.
I liked the High School in Cobleskill, it was built during the Thirties and had wonderful plaster artwork on the magnificent walls. I understand that since we left a new school was built and the old Cobleskill High now houses Intermediate School classes.
My oldest son played football for the Cobleskill Blue Devils, they lost every game but still, I was their biggest fan. My daughter was the Majorette for the band and I thought, the most beautiful Majorette ever. My youngest son Matt was the catcher and MVP on his Little League team.
We made the move and opened a business in Cobleskill. I got three children raised in the best little town I could have imagined at the time. I sold the business that I had started there, Insul-Mart, an insulation distributing company and moved to Greensboro, North Carolina in 1993. My wife's mother was dying of cancer in Greensboro and Brenda, my wife, wanted to be near her mother during that time.
My son Bill had already moved to Greensboro. He was taking pilot lessons in Winston Salem, North Carolina before going to college at the University of New Orleans. My daughter Amanda ended up going in the Navy as a Corpsman and being disabled during her service in the Middle East. My youngest son Matt never really found himself but attended the University of Texas in El Paso for a time before deciding that he needed to see and save the world.
Matt died in Laos in 2006. He had been teaching English at a Catholic School in Thailand prior to his death.
I am forever grateful to the people of Cobleskill for welcoming our family of outsiders, for teaching my children academically and socially, for the experiences of our time there.
