Six degrees of Batavia
I never could figure out that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. Am I one degree or two degrees removed from someone a friend or acquaintance of mine knows? Whatever, as kids a generation ago used to say. Through political eminences I have known, I suppose I’m semi-adjacent to various world rulers of yesteryear, but the challenge is to see how far back in time one can go. This is my best shot. When our daughter was one year old, she sat on the lap of my friend Henry W. Clune, the Rochester novelist who was then 105 years of age. Henry’s father grew up in a neighborhood whose luminaries included Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist orator who called the Flower City home from 1847 to 1872.
