Last week I received a phone call from Tim Slack. Tim
is the guidance counselor at La Farge Schools and also is the coach of the
Wildcat baseball team. It seems that he
had just talked to a sports reporter at WKBT-TV in La Crosse who was interested
in doing a story for his sports show about La Farge’s baseball field – Calhoon
Park. He wanted to know all about the
history of the ball field and since Tim has only been around La Farge for a
couple of years, he didn’t have much information on the baseball field. I said that I would help.
I started
digging into the research notes for my La Farge history and found some
information on the construction of the ballpark, which took place back in the
1930’s. I copied some material that I
had included in the first volume of my La Farge history. The construction of the park makes for an
interesting story because it did not come easy.
The driving force behind getting the ballpark completed was Ray Calhoon
– a legendary figure in the history of baseball in this little river town. I also had information on Calhoon so I made a
copy of that story as well.
On Thursday
afternoon, Charlie Clifford, the WKBT (Channel 8) reporter and a cameraman, Greg White, met
me at the ballpark. Roger Hooker joined
us. Roger had the original plans for the
ballpark as drawn up by Ray Calhoon. (It
is said that Calhoon used Chicago’s Wrigley Field as the model for the ballpark
in La Farge. Ironically, Charlie had
been at Wrigley Field the night before to watch the Cubs-Mets game.) Roger was also the LHS baseball coach for
nearly two decades so he had his share of stories to tell about the
ballpark. The cameraman filmed the
baseball game going on that day between North Crawford and La Farge from every
angle imaginable. He particularly liked
shooting the game from the football press box beyond the centerfield fence. Charlie Clifford conducted several interviews
with people about the ballpark.
So what’s
the fuss all about to draw all of this media attention about La Farge’s old ballpark? We will need to go back to the 1930’s, to a
time when Works Progress Administration (WPA) federal funds were available to
use on local projects. La Farge, like
many of the villages along the Kickapoo, made use of the WPA funds to hire
local men to work on a variety of projects.
Arch Davidson, the village president of La Farge at that time, used the
first influx of WPA money to hire crews to fix up the village’s streets.
But another
federally supported project in La Farge would have an even more lasting impact
on the village. Using money from the WPA,
La Farge would construct a new baseball field that would be a marvel lasting to
the present. The new field was the dream
of Ray Calhoon, a longtime player, manager and backer of baseball in La Farge,
and the new ballpark was named in his honor when it was completed.
The
Kickapoo River flood of 1935 played a large role for La Farge to get the new
ballpark. The town’s old baseball field
was located south of La Farge on ground right next to the river, which made it
very susceptible to flooding by the Kickapoo.
That ball field, originally a pasture on the Slayback farm, was rented
and maintained by the La Farge Athletic Association. (The group would later incorporate as the La
Farge Baseball Association with Ray Calhoon as a prominent member and
officer.) That group laid out a baseball
diamond along the river, built wooden grandstands with seating for several
hundred people, and mowed the outfield and a parking area for automobiles. Periodic flooding from the river caused a
near yearly battle by Calhoon and others to keep up the ball field. The 1935 flood was the last straw as the
field was devastated by the record high floodwaters. The grandstands were wrecked beyond repair
and the baseball diamond was completely washed away by the floodwaters. The La Farge town baseball team, which was in
the process of trying to win a county championship that summer, would never
play on the old ball field next to the river again after that great flood of
August 1935. (The story of how that 1935
La Farge town baseball team went on to win the county championship without the
benefit of a home field to play on is an amazing one.)
In the
summer of 1936, the town team played all their games at the baseball field
located to the east of the school – what was then known as the high school
field. Perhaps that location gave Calhoon
and Village President Davidson the idea for the new ballpark because in October
of that year the village purchased six and one-third acres of land to the west
of the schoolhouse for a new athletic field.
Using WPA funds, work was begun
immediately on the new facility. Twelve
men working with six teams of horses broke ground that fall on the new athletic
complex. Original plans called for a
baseball field with covered grandstands and dugouts, a six-lane, quarter-mile
cinder track for holding track & field meets, and a swimming pool to be
located on the grounds. The baseball
field and track were to be constructed first with the pool coming as a later
phase of the project. The athletic
complex would lie adjacent to the new high school gymnasium, also being built
with the help of WPA funding, which was nearing completion in the fall of 1936. In two months of work before the snows came,
the work crews leveled the area, moving thousands of feet of dirt for the track
and ball field areas.
The plans
called for the ball field to “rival even those in the big leagues”. The dimensions for the new fields were 365’
to the left and right field foul poles and 472’ to dead centerfield. A cement amphitheater with a wooden cover was
constructed in an oval shape directly back of home plate with cement wings,
which included more seating extending along each baseline towards the
dugouts. Seating capacity was to be just
under one thousand at the new park, with ample parking for automobiles behind
the grandstands. Calhoon had a local
artist paint a wall-sized mural of the new ball field. The painting was displayed in the Chase
Brothers store (where Calhoon worked) on La Farge’s busy Main Street
intersection and it showed a ball field that would be the show place of western
Wisconsin.
1937 was a
tough year for WPA projects all over the country as the newly elected Congress
in Washington D.C. struggled with the various spending bills. The La Farge ball field project stalled when
federal money didn’t come through as promised and eventually the track and pool
construction was shelved due to this lack of federal funding. To keep the new ball field project going, La
Farge President Davidson spearheaded an appropriation from the village to help
pay for worker’s wages and materials for the new ballpark. The use of local tax money on the project
caused a furor from opponents of the new ballpark. Once again letters appeared in the La Farge Enterprise newspaper condemning a “work
welfare” project and the use of local tax dollars on the “Big Mud Hole” next to
the school. One letter writer referred
to the project as “Calhoon’s Folly” and the editor of the newspaper called for
a new village president. The 1937 spring
election races were heated and the local newspaper supported Lester Wood for
village president to replace Arch Davidson, who was running for reelection. In a campaign letter published in the Enterprise, Wood voiced guarded support
for the new ball field project, but questioned the use of local tax dollars for
the project. With the most voters ever
participating in a village election, Davidson retained his village president
position by a mere handful of votes.
In 1938,
the village would have to spend additional money on the ball field project, but
as that summer ended most of the stone work on the grandstands, walkways,
retaining walls and dugouts was completed.
The following spring, the finishing work of grading and graveling the
parking areas and putting up the fence around the ballpark was done. On April 28, 1939, the La Farge town team
played its first baseball game at Calhoon Park.
(The local lads lost that inaugural game in their new ballpark to a team
from Melvina.)
Ray Calhoon helped manage the local
nine that day at the new ballpark; his dream had become a reality.
