The William G. Pomeroy Foundation: For History, For Life | A New York Minute in History

In this episode, Devin and Lauren sit down with William G. Pomeroy, founder of the William G. Pomeroy Foundation, and Bill Brower, the new Executive Director of the Foundation, to discuss the origins of their shared love of history and how the Pomeroy Foundation is increasing its marker program presence in New York and beyond.

Interviewees: William G. Pomeroy, entrepreneur, philanthropist and Foundation founder, and Bill Brower, Executive Director.

A New York Minute in History is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio and the New York State Museum, with support from the William G. Pomeroy Foundation. This episode was produced by Elizabeth Urbanczyk. Our theme is “Begrudge” by Darby.

Further Reading:

For information on the Pomeroy Foundation’s grant programs and to apply for a New York State Pomeroy Foundation Historical Marker: https://www.wgpfoundation.org/history/nys-historic-markers/

For information about the Pomeroy Foundation's National Education Program: https://www.wgpfoundation.org/history/education/

New York State Museum: History of the State Marker program.

Teacher Resources:

Stop the Drive-Bys: A Teacher Makes the Case for Local Historical Markers, American Association for State and Local History.

Not Your Usual History Lesson: Writing Historical Markers, National Council of Teachers of English

Follow Along:

Devin: Welcome to a New York Minute in History. I'm Devin Lander, the New York State historian,

Lauren: and I'm Lauren Roberts, the historian for Saratoga County. This month, instead of focusing on just one marker, we have the opportunity to introduce the new executive director for the Pomeroy Foundation, Bill Brower. We were lucky enough to sit down with both Bill Brower and Bill Pomeroy, the founder of the organization, and we got to learn more about what got them interested in markers in the first place, and how the foundation got started, and where they see themselves going in the future.

Devin: Okay, well, let's jump in, because I know everybody's busy, especially on your end, I'm sure. And, and I'm going to say “Mr.” So I'm not calling everybody “Bill,” but I can call everybody “Bill” if we want to, but, but anyway, if Bill, Bill Pomeroy, could just introduce yourself and just just tell the audience a little bit about who you are and how you came about to create the foundation.

Bill Pomeroy: Hi. My name is Bill Pomeroy, and I am the founder of the William G Pomeroy foundation back in 2005. I moved to the Syracuse area in back in 1974 after coming off of a two year Volkswagen camping trip through South America to explore history that I had never seen before. But with an RPI engineering degree and a Wharton MBA and four years of experience with IBM selling mainframe computers in Silicon Valley, I found the greatest opportunity right here in Syracuse. And so within 30 days of starting the job that I had achieved, I had thought I'd died and gone to heaven, I was finally doing something that was absolutely fun for me. One of the things that I wasn't too well prepared for, though, was office politics. And so after four years, I was fired, and so I had a lot of ideas, and by the time I got home, I had an idea for my own business, and that was back in 1978. And by 2016, I'd grown the business to over $100 million in revenue, but a couple things happened along the way.

I had a bad case of leukemia in 2004 which changed a lot of the direction of my life, which resulted in the formation of the foundation, because I thought that, wow, this is such an incredibly difficult to deal with disease. If I can survive this, and I didn't have much chance of doing that, according to the statistics at the time, but if I could, what can I do to help others that follow in my shoes? I had a stem cell transplant which saved my life, and I had a totally unrelated stranger who was a perfect match to me, donate his cells, and that enabled me to finally conquer this disease. I'm still in remission, and it's been nearly 20 years. It's been quite miraculous. So what we found out was. I thought it was quite normal to be able to find perfect matches, and it wasn't the case. It turns out that half the people at that time that were looking for a stem cell donor couldn't find one. And if I had fallen into that 50% I would not have been here today. And I said, Okay, what's wrong? What's going on here? So we thought we’d better start working on helping improve the probability of people finding a match on the registry. And so we concentrated on conducting bone marrow drives amongst the underrepresented populations. And over the life of that project, honestly, we've lost count from the computers at the National Marrow Donor Program, but over 30,000 people on the registry, and we've had over 300 donor matches made.

So a little… that was a little of the background, but I got interested in history, because that was my passion, and that's what brings me to the historic marker program. We kind of fell into that quite by accident, with a project with the Pompey Historic Society where we helped them refurbish all of their original New York State markers, which were totally unreadable. And the thing that surprised me was that once those were all refurbished and the Highway Department got them reinstalled, the pride and the celebrations that were going on in that community with their historic markers, actually, it just surprised me and said, Wow, these folks really like their markers, so we said, well, we'll buy a couple of more. And we had dedication the recipients had dedication ceremonies and, holy cow, it just reinforced in our minds what's what's really in people's hearts in their communities. And that then evolved into the historic marker program that we're involved in today, and our entire, most of our foundation now are dedicated to expanding that historic marker program, and our long term plan is to do it nationwide.

 Devin: That's great, 

Bill Pomeroy: I guess, I guess I gave you the long version of my introduction.

Devin: No, that's, that's great, and I think that's what we were looking for. And we'll, we'll circle back to your love of history in a minute and where that began, but I'd like Mr. Brower to be able to tell us um, introduce yourself to our audience, and tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up at the Pomeroy Foundation.

Bill Brower: Sure. Bill Pomeroy, thank you and Devin and Lauren, thanks for having us. We're appreciative to be here with you. So I'm going to rewind the tape back to the early 60s. So I grew up in Southern New Jersey, and I have these incredibly poignant memories of my father and my grandfather taking me into the Pine Barrens and visiting Historic Batsto Village. So if you think about Williamsburg, [or] Sturbridge, but on a much smaller scale. And I can't count how many times I was taken there, and they imbued in me the beginnings of a fascination with history. And I remember probably when I was eight years old, I got a gift of a board game called “Your America.” And it was a roll and move trivia game focused on American history. And it didn't take me long to start beating the adults in my family at this game, which kind of gave them a sense that I was into this. And then I started to get gifts of history books, and probably in fourth grade, someone gave me Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes, and that just rocked my eight year old world. I just couldn't get enough, and it just - it was a romance. So I came up to New York state from Southern New Jersey to go to college. Was a pre med student, clearly, here I am with you. So that didn't go as well as some had hoped, but I was at a liberal arts college, and so I was encouraged to pursue what I loved, and I love history. So I majored in history, wrote my thesis on black athletes as potential catalysts for social change. I'll brag a little bit I won the Darling prize at Hamilton for having the highest cumulative average in US history. Courses… still didn't get me into med school, but it was a heck of a lot of fun to study.

And I had never been to Boston After falling in love with Paul Revere and Johnny Tremain and the Sons of Liberty and the Tea Party and all that history, and I moved to Boston and worked at the Perkins School for the Blind, which is another US institution that's full of history going back to the early 1800s; first, I worked with students who are deaf, blind, and then I started a career in institutional advancement, fundraising at Perkins, and have been in higher ed advancement for, you know, about 30, years, including moving back to New York State and working at my alma mater, and then I met Bill Pomeroy, and as they say, the rest is history. Three months in, so I'm learning so much about New York state history, and we do these marker meetings every Monday where we work with our professional historians, and they're the highlight of the week, right? It's just, it's just like going to school. And as you said before Devin, we continue to do a lot of markers in New York State. We also have programs all over the country, but that's - that's really my origin story, and I never in a million years thought I would have the opportunity to work at a place like the Pomeroy Foundation and do the kind of work we're doing.

Devin: Well, thank you for that. That's you know, your story of going to historic sites and being engrossed in history as a youth. I think all of us on this call can certainly relate to that. It set us on our path. But I think one of the most interesting things about what the Pomeroy Foundation does, among all its other great things, is really highlighting the importance of local history, and Mr. Pomeroy noted how the Foundation began and how it was kind of eye opening for you to realize how much people loved their markers. Let's circle back to Bill Pomeroy. How did you get the history bug and where did that kind of come from? You mentioned even going to South America to tour their historic assets. So just tell us a little bit about that story.

Bill Pomeroy: Well, there's a, there's a couple of highlights in my background that history really came forward on. I was raised in Binghamton, and my my dad was a manufacturer's representative, and he drove around Central New York, calling on customers. And I would go along with him on some of these trips. And he liked history, and he knew that I really did, because we would stop any place there was the sign and we would stop, and we would read it, we'd spend a few minutes, or we might spend a while, or we might go exploring, and it might even be a museum. So my dad really was pretty key in, in seeing that I was interested and making sure that, you know, I got a lot of stimulus on that. You know, then over the years, it was casual but, but probably the next big thing that woke me up was understanding my history education in high school, because later, and of course, often in engineering school, there might be a history professor someplace, but we never saw him. But you know, at the end of that education, my wife and I took a summer, almost four months and we drove all over Europe in a in a Renault 10 with the sleeping bags in a tent. Oh, it was really something. And just history was everywhere. But then coming back off to IBM in California, four years I really had that itch, and when I left IBM, I said, I don't really know what I want to do, but let's take a trip. So I bought a Volkswagen camper. We drove to South America, and what an eye opener that was to see the cultures, the ancient cultures and civilizations that were in Mexico, Central America, Peru. It was fascinating. I've got hundreds, 1000s of photographs from that trip.

And then, you know, at the end of that, I end up coming back, and as I said earlier, I got my dream job, and kind of put history to the side. But, you know, with the foundation and with us up and running with our “For Life” side, and then seeing what happened in Pompey and how those folks just loved their markers, all that came rushing back into my head, and I said, I see another mission here. This looks pretty good. So I think we can have fun here, and that's what we want to do. We always want to have fun.

Devin: I would like to talk a little bit about the marker program as it is now. And can you just tell us a little bit about some of the programs and maybe how that's evolved over time? 

Bill Brower: Sure, and you know, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna share with you and your listeners with with my fresh eyes, as new as I am at the foundation, but we have six signature marker programs and their grant programs, right? We want to remember - We want to remind people that we are making grants to organizations to celebrate their local history. So part of, part of what we want to say as we get into the detail and the color of some of these programs is we really want to follow the grantees and what their interest is in their local history, right? We're not in the business of telling them what they should be celebrating. Our historians work very closely with them, and as you and your listeners know, there is a focus on primary source historical research, right? So because of that, we know that our markers are the gold standard. Yes, if you see a Pomeroy marker, you know that what you're reading is historically accurate, period, right? So, so that's really important as we start to get into the detail. So we've talked about the New York State program. I think that's the one people are most familiar with. And we also do a Hometown Heritage Program, which is a national program. So if you think about exporting the New York State program to other states, that's the one that we use to do that. It commemorates, again, local history, people, places, events and things. Some of these markers now are getting the U.S. 250th badge as we approach our 250th anniversary. So if the subject matter is related to that period in our history, people can apply anytime for those markers, and we are going to be working hard to get the word out about that program around the country. Another one is our Hungry for History Program, which is really a heck of a lot of fun. I think the first marker was the salt potato here in Syracuse. And I think you may have done a segment on that. Yeah, we just had students down in Binghamton apply for and receive a marker for the Speidies sandwich down in the Southern Tier. And right now, we are working with Betty Haines and her students at Cleveland Hill Middle School in Cheektowaga. And you want to guess what they're working on in Cheektowaga, as far as hungry for history? It's a suburb of Buffalo.

Devin: Is it the Buffalo wing?

Bill Brower: It is the Buffalo chicken wing. Okay, so we've, we've got students through our educational program working on a Buffalo, Buffalo chicken wing marker. You know the Arnold Palmer, the drink Arnold Palmer's from La Trobe, Pennsylvania. So we're going to, they want to look at that. And they've, they've also talked with us about Johnny Appleseed, and that would fit in our probably fit in our Legends and Lore program, which is another really popular program that we do with 15 state partners. And those folks are representative of folklore societies in those states. So that program takes place primarily through those state partners and perhaps, you know, Bill Pomeroy wants to talk about the Historic Transportation program. I think that's one that we're really focusing on. It's another nationwide program. 

Bill Pomeroy: Oh, yeah, that that has been actually developed over quite a long period of time. Our first idea was with the Erie Canal, you know, coming right across the state, and then all the feeder canals that were built here. Why, let's have a marker that celebrates canals. And so after running this program for five or six or seven years, we realize that we're really talking about transportation here, so let's just take that program and expand it into Historic Transportation, so that includes now canals and bridges, tunnels and railroads and aircraft, and there are a lot of railroad buffs we're getting - and covered bridge buffs. So we're getting covered bridges, we're getting railroad trestles, we're getting all kinds of really interesting stuff. It's a fun program.

Lauren: Bill you mentioned that you always want to have fun while we're learning about history, and I think that your Legends and Lore marker program really is a great opportunity to look into stories that have been handed down through a community. And maybe there are those instances where you might not be able to use a primary source to talk about something, but there's a reason that these stories have been handed down and people in the communities feel strongly about them. I'm thinking in particular - Devin several years ago, we did an episode about Natty Bumppo, who is a character in the Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper. And there are two different communities in New York that claim that someone from their community was the inspiration for Natty Bumppo and the Pomeroy Foundation funded both markers. It's a great friendly competition to talk about their history and to talk about their claims. It's fun, and I think that keeping those types of stories alive, along with the primary source backed history, which is very important, but it does give people an opportunity to tell those stories that don't necessarily have that background. So I just wanted to mention that it's a little bit of a different program, and it's a lot of fun. Some of my favorite markers that I've put up in Saratoga County are actually the legends and lore markers, including one that talks about a gentleman who went to a seance and the spirit of Benjamin Franklin told him where to drill for a mineral spring in Ballston sSpa that would have the power to heal the nation after the Civil War. I mean, it's a great story. We have a great marker. People are really interested in that one, but so much fun the and this, it still tells you about the history, especially, you know, in this case, our community with the mineral springs, it talks about spiritualism, you know, after the Civil War, so we're still talking about history, but we're using an individual story that is entertaining to to open that door for people to learn more. 

Bill Pomeroy: And it's also interesting, because you're pointing out an example of how our marker programs have evolved, and how we have learned and gotten ideas from our applicants. And it was they were making an application for New York state historical markers. And hey, this isn't primary source evidence here, you're talking about some kind of a story, and we would have to turn them down. Well, after turning a couple of them down, we thought, gee, those are great stories. Can't we figure out a way to celebrate those stories for these communities? And then we were sitting in the conference room, we designed a Legends and Lore marker with the indicia at the top and the logo and everything, and we're off and running and having fun, then that's what's going to happen to us over the next 10 years. You know, certainly the historic markers I expect to be around, but I also expect that there'll be a lot of other ways, and as you suggest, you know, technology will probably be a big part of that and and we want to be visible to the community, so that the community can see it, you know. So it's, it's been, it's been a nice run, you know, particularly there with the Legends and Lore.

Bill Brower: It's the other thing, if we have a couple more minutes, I just like to talk a little bit more about the education program. It's a really wonderful opportunity for high school teachers to get their students interested in local history through a grant application. So if you think about it's a three week curriculum. Students come up with the idea. They do the primary source research, they do the grant application. They receive the grant, they purchase the marker, they organize for it to be installed. They organize the dedication ceremony. Get local press to come. Often, the students are the ones who are speaking at those ceremonies. So it's when you think about all the experience that a high school student could get in bringing local history to life for themselves and their communities. It's a wonderful program, and I just think the more teachers who know about this, the better, because, you know, part of the mission is, as Bill Pomeroy said, to have fun with this. And if young people have fun with history when they're in high school and they don't see it as a chore, they're going to be interested in history as adults, and they're going to be engaged in their community as adults. So that's an important program that we offer as well.

Devin: Since we've been doing this podcast in partnership with the Pomeroy Foundation. And really since I've been New York State historian and been involved directly with not only the Pomeroy markers, but also with the State Education Department markers that were erected beginning in the 1920s and really becoming more in tune to how that program came about - I see these markers really as an opportunity to essentially be a portal to local history, which then can be expanded into statewide history, national history. Some of these stories are international in scope, and we know that these markers are limited in the amount of information that they can get across, but what they do is provide that spark, that Bill Pomeroy talked about, that spark to want to go and learn more, and that's really the point. I think of this whole podcast as well. We talk about a topic for about 30 minutes, but really what we are hopeful, and that's why we put resources on our web page and further reading and links, is to really spur on that that interest and expand it and and maybe light that spark for other people who want to learn more about their local history. To me, that's what's important about these markers, and that's what makes the work of the Pomeroy Foundation so vital to New York's history and so vital to the national history. 

Lauren: Yeah, I've been a county historian for the past, yikes, 15 years, and I was a municipal historian for a small town before that, and these markers are a really important tool in your toolkit as a municipal historian, to give the people in your community a way to be proud of their local history. This is an actual deliverable that is seen by the public, that people take pride in, they can point to, especially, you know, we talked about the education programs they offer for the kids in the schools that are doing the research, and then they get to drive down the street with their parents or their grandparents and know that they had a part in contributing to that marker and to learning more about the history of their community. I think that's something really special. And without the Pomeroy foundation, these markers are not attainable for most municipal historians and small historical societies because of the expense of it. So they really are the reason that communities and historians and historical societies are able to keep putting these markers up and to keep this research going. And I think the whole municipal historical community in New York State really owes the Pomeroy Foundation a debt of gratitude for keeping these programs going.

Devin: Since 2005 the Pomeroy Foundation has funded over 2,600 grants for historic markers nationwide. Each grant covers the entire cost of the marker, pole, and shipping. To learn more about the foundation and their historical marker grant programs such as Hungry for History, Legends and Lore, and Historic Transportation, please visit their website at WGPfoundation.org, that's WGPfoundation.org