LANESBOROUGH, Mass. — Right alongside an athletic shoe retailer where today's high school baseball stars would feel at home, the stars of Berkshire County's yesteryear have a new home.
"Baseball and the Berkshires: A County's Common Bond" holds its grand opening on Saturday and Sunday and will be open Friday through Sunday for the foreseeable future at its new digs at the Berkshire Mall.
After spending parts of the past two years at Arrowhead in Pittsfield, including last year's run as a traveling exhibit, curator Larry Moore hopes the mall location will be a permanent home for the exhibit, which features artifacts celebrating the game's connection to the region and area residents' connection to the game.
Moore and his partners started the exhibit in 2015 and have watched it grow each year since.
"We had 280 artifacts at Arrowhead, and in order set up here, I've bought 80 more frames," Moore said Thursday as he took a break from putting the finishing touches on the exhibit.
"While I've been setting up, I've had the door open, and people will come in and say, 'Do you know I have this or that.' "
Moore credits the owner of the mall with giving the non-profit museum a year-round location, and he hopes the relationship will benefit both sides.
A high-profile address, complete with window displays onto the mall, can drive interest for the exhibit. A new offering in a formerly vacant storefront might help drive traffic to a mall that has seen several highly publicized retail departures in recent years.
The museum plans special events both in its own space and in the adjacent mall court, starting with this weekend's appearances by local baseball luminaries to sign autographs: Tom Rizzo and Ryan Cameron on Saturday and Jonah Bayliss and Pasquale Arace on Sunday.
The museum also gets more space and the ability to set up more than a dozen thematic "rooms" that ring the former retail floor space.
Exhibits include salutes to coaches, Pittsfield's Wahconah Park, women, African-Americans, Major Leaguers, legendary town teams and professional scouts with ties to the Berkshires.
In the back, in a former retail fitting room, the museum has set up a "locker room" where young visitors can try on pro uniforms and measure themselves against hand- and footprints of local former pros.
The locker room also will include an complementary education exhibit that Moore, an educational consultant with the National Baseball Hall of Fame, created for local schools.
The hope is that some of the youngsters who visit the exhibit today will be inspired to truly follow in their heroes' footsteps and earn their own place in the museum — in 30 or 40 years or even sooner.
"As kids accomplish things with their teams, we want to bring them here and honor them," Moore said.
"Baseball and the Berkshires: A County's Common Bond" is open Fridays from 3 to 9 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from noon to 6 at Berkshire Mall. The museum will have a satellite exhibit at the Old Stone Store in Sheffield from May 13 to July 2.
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Berkshire Wind Power Cooperative Corporation Scholarships
LUDLOW, Mass. — For the third year, Berkshire Wind Power Cooperative Corporation (BWPCC) will award scholarships to students from Lanesborough and Hancock.
The scholarship is open to seniors at Mount Greylock Regional High School and Charles H. McCann Technical School. BWPCC will select two students from the class of 2024 to receive $1,000 scholarships.
The scholarships will be awarded to qualifying seniors who are planning to attend either a two- or four-year college or trade school program. Seniors must be from either Hancock or Lanesborough to be considered for the scholarship. Special consideration will be given to students with financial need, but all students are encouraged to apply.
The BWPCC owns and operates the Berkshire Wind Power Project, a 12 turbine, 19.6-megawatt wind farm located on Brodie Mountain in Hancock and Lanesborough. The non-profit BWPCC consists of 16 municipal utilities located in Ashburnham, Boylston, Chicopee, Groton, Holden, Hull, Ipswich, Marblehead, Paxton, Peabody, Russell, Shrewsbury, Sterling, Templeton, Wakefield, and West Boylston, and their joint action agency, the Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Company (MMWEC).
To be considered, students must submit all required documents including a letter of recommendation from their school counselor and a letter detailing their educational and professional goals. Application and submission details will be shared with students via their school counselors. The deadline to apply is Friday, April 19.
MMWEC is a not-for-profit, public corporation and political subdivision of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts created by an Act of the General Court in 1975 and authorized to issue tax-exempt debt to finance a wide range of energy facilities. MMWEC provides a variety of power supply, financial, risk management and other services to the state's consumer-owned, municipal utilities.
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