EDITORIAL: Sam Nader Takes Proper Place In Hall of Local Heroes

What can anyone say about Sam Nader?
He’s like Oneonta’s equivalent of Mount Rushmore:  The rock people have turned to and depended on for almost nine decades now.
Sam Nader has received many, many awards and recognitions, as the walls of his home at 95 River St. make manifest.
When asked about it though, he was particularly delighted with the honor he will receive Saturday, April 11:  The Eugene Bettiol, Jr., Distinguished Citizen Award at the Otsego County Chamber’s annual Dinner & Celebration of Business.
“I served on the board with him, and he was a very fine young man,” the older man said of the younger Bettiol, who was stricken by cancer and passed away when still in his 40s.

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One quality that distinguished both men was accomplishment, so the award to Nader, as it was last year to Judge Robert Harlem, to former mayor Dave Brenner the year before, and to Bassett President/CEO Bill Streck the year before.
What do all these men have in common?
A determination that, unflagging, spans decades.
Take Bill Streck, for instance.  This year he marks his 25th anniversary at the helm of perhaps the greatest medical undertaking in Central New York, one of only two hospital systems in the state that stays in the black year after year, come what may, as it continuously innovates nonetheless.
Take Dave Brenner.  It’s hard to know where to start considering his accomplishment, whether as innovative chairman of the Otsego County Board of Representatives, or as Oneonta’s mayor for a dozen years, or for his years of contribution to SUNY Oneonta; he retired with the rank of dean.
Take Judge Harlem, a mainstay of local jurisprudence for decades.  His accomplishments are all around us, but to take just one:  As attorney for the Goodyear Lake Association, he intervened at the hair-raising last minute, blocking a utility from breaching the dam that impounds that lovely body of water.  Think of him every time you drive by it.

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Sam Nader rightfully takes his place in this hall of local heroes.
Look at SUNY Oneonta.  His crusade to push through the utility lines that allowed the campus’ greatest period of expansion in the 1960s may seem a mundane battle, but it was an essential one that continues to pay dividends today.
It is typical that, in determining to bring baseball back to Oneonta, he was inspired by a larger vision.  Baseball is fun, sure, but Nader saw it as a way to repair the community’s fabric that was wrent during the protests of the 1960s.  Baseball as celebration is a community unifier for sure.

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It’s hard to take Sam Nader for granted, he is so much larger than life.
Northern Eagle Beverage, to be honored with the NBT Bank’s Distinguished Business Award, keeps a lower profile as it performs its mercantile mission.
Its response to the Great Flood of 2006, however, when the company truck-lifted in immense amounts of clean drinking water to ensure rescue workers didn’t go thirsty, was a dramatic example of the simple services the company had been quietly doing for the community for decades, unheralded.
There are few better ways to enjoy than to celebrate lives well lived and jobs well done.  It’s going to be quite an evening.