Millerton’s Eddie Collins: The Hall-of-Famer with academic distinction
From Further Afield

Jim Mackin Photo submitted
Baseball is back. The delay from the contract talks between owners and players is another one for the books. Starting the season a few weeks late is like a “rain delay” in a game between the Yankees and Boston. No one is leaving the stadium; America’s pastime is intact. Before the crack of the bat is heard when the season begins in mid-April, some local baseball lore is offered here for the enjoyment of fans and readers.
The baseball great Eddie Collins was born in Millerton and lived in the house on Main Street that is now the Millerton Inn restaurant and hotel at 53 Main St.
Some baseball writers consider Eddie Collins the greatest second baseman of all time. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall-of-Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., in only its fourth year of 1939. He was inducted that year along with George Sisler, Al Spaulding and Lou Gehrig.
Sisler and Spaulding along with Charlie Gehringer, Larry MacPhail and Barry Larkin all attended the University of Michigan.
Gehrig along with Collins, John Montgomery Ward, Walter O’Malley and Sandy Koufax all attended Columbia University. Thus, Columbia and the University of Michigan — until 2021 — are the institutions of higher learning that can claim association with the most players in the Baseball Hall of Fame, namely five each.
Collins graduated from Columbia’s traditional four-year undergraduate program. Gehrig and O’Malley attended Columbia but did not graduate. O’Malley (damn his eternal soul, say older Brooklynites, for sending the Dodgers to Los Angeles) attended Columbia Law School but switched to Fordham Law School.
Ward, a player-manager in the latter part of the 19th century, went to Penn State at age 13 but was kicked out for an infraction and later graduated from Columbia Law School.
Koufax took classes at Columbia in his rookie season of 1955 when he pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Jacob Ruppert Jr., who was the owner of the New York Yankees and acquired Babe Ruth from Boston, attended Columbia Grammar School and was accepted into Columbia, but went into the family brewery business instead.
Collins had very impressive statistics of 745 stolen bases, 3,315 hits, and a .333 lifetime batting average. He is the only non-Yankee to be part of the same team winning five or more World Series. He is the only player to play on two teams for at least 12 seasons each. He is the only player to steal six bases in two separate games. His 516 sacrifice bunts is still the major league record.
The tie between Columbia and University of Michigan for the most students in the Baseball Hall of Fame was usurped in 2021 when the New York Yankee’s Derek Jeter, who attended the University of Michigan but did not graduate, was inducted.
Michigan’s six baseball Hall-of-Famers now trumps the five of Columbia University.
Notwithstanding this fact, the records of Eddie Collins continue to honor him and his hometown of Millerton.
Author and historian Jim Mackin is president of the Friends of Taconic State Park, which operates the Copake Iron Works Historic Site, one of the most intact examples of 19th century industrial iron making in the Northeast. Jim is also a New York City historian, co-leader of the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group and author of 2020’s highly acclaimed “Notable New Yorkers of Manhattan’s Upper West Side: Bloomingdale — Morningside Heights” (Fordham University Press).
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Webutuck’s Spanish for Educators program provided teachers at the district with weekly Spanish lessons intended to improve communication between teachers and students.
AMENIA — The Webutuck Central School District will continue to offer the Spanish for Educators program, which instructs teachers on basic principles of the Spanish language, during the 2025–2026 school year, citing the program’s success during the last term.
Webutuck offered the optional class of ten weekly sessions to faculty members beginning in February as part of an effort to address communication issues between faculty and the high percentage of students with a limited command of the English language.
According to Lauren Marquis, Director of Curriculum, Instruction and Technology at Webutuck, around 22% of Webutuck students possess a knowledge of English insufficient to learn effectively in an English-speaking classroom.
The goal of the program is not to train faculty to lead specialized classes entirely in Spanish, but rather to make existing classes taught in English more accessible to Spanish-speaking students. “We are not a bilingual school — the primary language that we utilize is English,” Marquis said.
The Spanish for Educators program is intended to complement existing measures, such as translation devices and bilingual visuals, intended to make classes learnable for Spanish speakers, while still catering to the district’s majority English-speaking population, Marquis said.
Students at Webutuck may not speak English fluently, but they are not necessarily proficient in Spanish, either. “We have a large Guatemalan population who speak K’iche’ as their first language; Spanish is technically their second language and English may be their third,” further complicating the ability of teachers to provide accessible instruction to all students, Marquis said.
In spite of the inherent challenges of being a firmly English-speaking school with a population of students not proficient in the language, the Spanish for Educators program facilitated basic dialogue in the classroom and helped build relationships between students and teachers, Marquis said.
“We had some students in the last session come in to speak Spanish with our faculty which was a really valuable experience for our staff; they formed great bonds with their students,” being able to communicate in the same language, Marquis said.
The ability to engage more easily with their students was the aspect of the program which faculty found to be the most meaningful. “We had 18 staff members who participated in the course … The providers said that the participants were very enthusiastic, they were committed and they were taking risks in learning the language of our students,” Marquis said.
The entrance to the private Silo Ridge Field Club on Route 22 in Amenia.
AMENIA — The Housing Board has considered an application from Silo Ridge and issued its recommendation to the Planning Board at a regular meeting on Thursday, July 17, to require that workforce housing regulations are met.
Because Silo Ridge is seeking to amend its Master Development Plan through an application to the Planning Board, and because the Silo Ridge Development consists of more than 10 dwelling units, workforce housing requirements must be accommodated either through construction of designated workforce housing units or through payment of a fee to the town to substitute for those units. Administration of workforce housing requirements is the responsibility of the Housing Board.
The Housing Board voted 3-0 to approve its recommendation. Housing Board member Juan Torres recused because he serves on the board of Silo Ridge Ventures, and Housing Board member Mark Hussey, Silo Ridge employee, abstained because he felt that the number of units total of 220 was inaccurate as stated in the recommendation.
“We’re taking information given to us by the Planning Board engineer, stating 220 approved units in connection with an application to change the site plan, reducing the number of units from 13 townhouse units to 10 condominium units,” explained Housing Board chairman Charlie Miller.
“We need to base our recommendation on what the Planning Board gave us,” Miller added.
Reviewing the status of Certificates of Occupancy, Miller noted that 114 COs had been issued as of the end of April, and there have been two COs issued since for a total of 116. In addition, six building permits are active.
A workshop session with the Planning Board, requested by Silo Ventures Consultant Patrick O’Leary, has been scheduled for Wednesday, July 23, expected to provide clarity on the numbers of units completed and planned. The public hearing on the change from 13 townhouse units to ten condominium units will then continue at the Wednesday, Aug. 13, meeting of the Planning Board.
“We’re saying that they have already reached the 50%,” Miller said, referring to the point at which the workforce housing regulations come into effect.
“This board’s responsibility is to apply the law as it is,” Miller added.