For many years a fiberglass statue from Amsterdam’s Mohawk Carpet Mills was used to depict the mascot of Hudson Valley Community College in Troy.
Hudson Valley sports teams adopted the Viking as a mascot some time after the college was created in 1953. No one knows why the Viking was selected.
College spokesman Eric Bryant said a fiberglass Viking statue was obtained from Mohawk Carpet Mills in Amsterdam in the 1960s. Bryant said the statue apparently was made by a company that produced similar somewhat larger than life-size fiberglass figures for muffler shops and other businesses.
Bryant speculated that the Viking could have been holding a roll of carpet in Amsterdam but isn’t sure.
At the college, the fiberglass Viking was placed in the end zone of the Hudson Valley football field.
“The statue remained there for a number of years but blew down in a wind storm (along with the baseball scoreboard and football field press box) in the early 1990s,” Bryant wrote in the spring edition of the college alumni magazine. “Since the Viking’s legs had been filled with concrete to stabilize it, the statue was sheared off at the kneecaps in the wind storm—an ignominious end to the symbol that stood silently over so many Viking football games. His final resting place remains a mystery.”
If you have information to solve the mystery of why Mohawk Carpets in Amsterdam had a fiberglass Viking statue to begin with, please contact Focus on History.
SPORTSMEN SHOWS
Larrabee’s hardware and sporting goods store on Market Street was selling Ike Walton fishing boots for $6.95 in March of 1937 as over a thousand hunters and fishermen attended the annual Sportsmen’s Show in Amsterdam.
Sponsored by the Amsterdam Fish and Game League, the shows were held in the gymnasium and auditorium of the former Theodore Roosevelt Junior High on Guy Park Avenue during the school’s annual Easter vacation.
The league formed in 1931 and the annual shows began in 1933, first at the South Side armory then at the junior high. Some years were missed during and after the war but the event resumed with an entire week of activities in the late 1940s, attracting tens of thousands of visitors. Proceeds went for fish stocking and other conservation work.
There were log rolling, canoe tipping, ax wielding, fly-casting and sharp shooting competitions and demonstrations, along with professional exhibits. The men of the sponsoring league became famous for hearty pancake suppers served in the junior high cafeteria.
In 1946, the show featured state lumberjack championship events. In a program ad, the popular Bigler’s Tavern across from the junior high urged sportsmen to make Bigler’s their “headquarters…before and after the show.” There was no show in 1947 but in 1948, the event ran for eight days, featuring live bears and trick log rollers from Michigan. An estimated 25,000 attended. Larrabee’s sponsored a live radio broadcast by station WENT. In the 1950s Adirondack hermit Noah Rondeau used to put on a demonstration each year at the show.
Local native Charles Wharton, who died in 2004 at the age of 97, preserved the memorabilia that form the basis for this story. A banker, Wharton was an accomplished Adirondacks outdoorsmen who was founding treasurer of the fish and game league.
The shows ended, according to historian Hugh Donlon, after professional entertainment companies that competed with the volunteer event asked for a state Education Department ruling on whether it was proper to hold these shows in a public school. Donlon said the state frowned upon the idea and the Amsterdam shows came to an end in the 1950s.
