Local History

One of only 17 major-league players never to have spent a single day in the minors, Johnny Antonelli was a highly coveted phenom who signed a “bonus baby” contract with the Boston Braves for $52,000 a few days after graduating from Rochester’s Jefferson High School in 1948.  It wasn’t until six years later, when he was traded to the New York Giants, that the stylish left-hander began realizing the potential the scouts had seen in him.

Susan B. Anthony called her the ideal business woman of whom she had dreamed fifty years earlier. Playwright Eugene O’Neill saw her as the symbol of greed and emasculating ambition. Kate Gleason, groundbreaking nineteenth-century industrialist, mechanical engineer, and real estate developer, was her own best invention. The truth of her dynamic life, in all of its complexity, is revealed in Janis Gleason’s biography of this legendary American woman.

About the Author

Sports icons Muhammad Ali, Mickey Mantle, Arnold Palmer, Jim Brown, Sandy Koufax and Joe Namath were among the athletes who wore this belt made from genuine alligator skin featuring a five-pound, solid gold buckle, encrusted with diamonds, rubies and sapphires. For a quarter of a century, from 1950 to 1976, the S. Rae Hickok Belt was the most coveted and respected individual award in all of sports. It was given annually to the professional athlete of the year at an award banquet held in Rochester, N.Y. which became known as “the Academy Awards of Sports.”

This book chronicles the dynamic life span of an important Rochester institution, a mutual savings bank, that by definition, was owned by its depositors and operated for their benefit. At one time in the U.S., there were more than 4,000 savings banks most having started in the 1800s. By 1990, many of these had dissolved, since they had achieved what they were created to do, and eventually fell prey to the changing and frequently unstable economic times. It also chronicles the contribution of some of the Presidents and Trustees to the Rochester community.