My journey with my boys to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa, the first week of September, was a dream come true.It was an 80th birthday gift from my sons, Michael, 60, and Danny, 57, as they covered the cost of the five-day trip, including airfare and accommodations inside a 1,200-ft bungalow that overlooked Main Street in downtown Dyersville.
For a writer and a baseball historian, it turned out to be a swan song, so to speak, an accumulation of 74 years of playing the game of baseball -- from Little League, to high school, to college, followed by two decades as a member of the 60-and-over Tucson Old Timers (TOTS). This amateur baseball club plays three days a week, all 12 months of the year, at Udall Park, located on Tucson's eastside.
A fan of my sports articles, Glen Brown, called me from long distance and asked me to be the honorary coach at third base on his 50-and-over California Orioles' team, which would be one of 18 teams set to play in the Moonlight Graham Classic, Sept. 5-7.
The teams we ended up competing against were of high caliber, almost pro-like, with rosters that included men who wore MSBL World Series rings on their fingers and were quick to share their 'war stories' on how they obtained the coveted hardware.
These players, in some cases, were 30 years younger than yours truly. I looked into their eyes at the local eatery as they recalled how they had garnered championships and the plays they had made to accomplish such a feat.
It reminded me of the 1970s when I was a baseball junkie, bouncing from one ballpark to another, playing America's Favorite Pastime, leaving it all on the field of play, the cuts, the bruises, the broken bones -- all of it in search of the championship trophy.
My playing days are numbered now. It's hard to take the field and make the play. But I'll die trying as I return to the TOTS next week and continue to play for the love of the game.
We drew two of the top teams right off the bat -- a team from Puerto Rico, which featured a big fella batting cleanup who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1992, and our second game was against the eventual winner of the tournament, the East Coast Cardinals.
The big guy from Puerto Rico, Joe Calder, hit a 350-foot home run to beat us in Game 1. In Game 3, we lost to a Florida team from Ft Myers. By late Saturday morning, we were eliminated, and I had the rest of the weekend to find some local characters to write about.
I was definitely in heaven as I began my search.
Photos of downtown Dyersville below...
My son, Danny, had his photo taken with Calder, the former Pirate.
I ran into an 85-year-old gentleman at the Palace Bar, which was located about 300 feet from our little bungalow. He turned out to be a local legend.
"Yep. I have 125 acres just one mile from the Field of Dreams. I leased the farm to my nephew a few years ago. My wife of 62 years passed away in May."
Jerry Kramer (photo below) deals with the loss of his wife daily and makes a routine stop at the Palace on the weekends. He lives just around the corner. Kramer has witnessed many changes in downtown Dyersville over the past three or four decades, since the movie The Field of Dreams appeared on the silver screen.
I had a pleasant conversation with a younger man named Brian later in the day. His family owned most of the feed stores in the area, but he went into the heating and cooling business. "There aren't a lot of homes with air conditioning in town. But heating that's another story. We are all family around here. I recently took care of an elderly lady whose furnace went out. I repaired it, but she can only pay ten dollars a month toward the bill. That's how we handle things in Dyersville."
I could live in Dyersville, but soon it'll be winter and the white stuff will eventually cover the cornfields.
Instead, I have returned home. Back to the desert, the mountains, and a much different life.
Was I in heaven for a week?
Maybe.
