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Post by pooka on Jun 18, 2015 0:05:45 GMT -5
Well I didn't realize until I was on my way home from my brother & sister's house & stopped at a gas station near my house. The ball field was shooting off fireworks like they always do after a game. I told the clerk the game must be over. She said, "it's the 100th anniversary". I knew it was coming up, but today is the date of it's original opening 100 years ago. Our local Bosse Field "is the third-oldest ballpark still in regular use in the United States, surpassed only by Fenway Park (1912) in Boston and Wrigley Field (1914) in Chicago" according to the Wikipedia listing. Bosse Field Wikipedia listingIt's an source of local pride for the town. Unlike Fenway Park & Wrigley Field, Bosse Field it's a more intimate setting than the other two, since it's seating Capacity is only 5,181. The other two seat 37,499 & 41,072 respectfully. It feels more like your going back in time when you go to a game there. Here's a few pics I've collected of it. These two are post cards from the time period. This is an aerial view from the local newspaper, the Courier & Press by photographer BOB GWALTNEY. One note about this pic is the white building across the street from center field. It was The Never Split Toilet Seat factory in the late teens. It was the largest of it's kind in the country at the time. This is a screen shot from Google Earth. According to my mom, the house on the corner in the top right was the home of the winner of the first national soap box derby. I don't know if that's true or not. At the top & right is Garvin Park. It was built a few years before the ball field. The little roof you see at the very top, just above & to the right of the turquoise colored fountain is the oldest band stand in town. This was on the north edge of town at the time. My house is about nine blocks north of the field. For comparison, here's a Fenway Park. And here's Wrigley Field. The movie A League of Their Own was filmed here in 1992. Bosse Field was used as the home of the field for the Racine Belles if i remember correctly.
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Post by vaporvac on Jun 18, 2015 4:39:24 GMT -5
Thank you for posting that, Pooka. Fascinating. Evansville looks like a charming town from what you've posted today and in the past.
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Post by mach12 on Jun 18, 2015 17:01:09 GMT -5
That's so cool to see. Too many places like that have fallen victim to the wrecking ball. That really brings back memories of our local park, Cheney Stadium in Tacoma, WA, when I was a kid. It's not near as old but the pieces are older than the stadium. In the late 1950's they completed Candlestick Park in San Francisco and tore down the old stadium so the people building Cheney Stadium shipped the bleachers, light poles and so on up to Tacoma and used them to build the park. When JFK came to speak in Tacoma he spoke at Cheney Stadium and my Boy Scout Troop was selected to be there to help out so that was pretty cool. The park manager that we were helping took us around the week before and told us all about the history of baseball there in the open field where the stadium now stands, the bleachers coming from San Francisco and so on. I remember him saying that people used to sit in those bleachers and watch Joe DiMaggio play. It's also where the Soapbox Derby track was! Do they even do soapbox derbies anymore?
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Post by pooka on Jun 19, 2015 6:00:01 GMT -5
That's interesting that Cheney Stadium used second hand parts from the old San Francisco stadium.
It must have been a great experience as a boy scout to help out for JFK visit. These are the stories that enrich the legacy of these old buildings & places.
Bosse Field is owned by the city, so even when the last farm team that used it folded, it was given to the local school corporation to use. Different high schools got to use it until we got another team. Since it's not a huge stadium, it didn't cost a lot to do minimal upkeep. Another little detail about the field is that there was apparently was a bit of graft that went on between the politicians & the construction company. They use substandard concrete for some of it, so a lot of it had to be rebuilt not many years later. You can see on the first post card that the facade was originally stucco, whereas it's now red brick. Like I said before, it's such a small facility that there's really not a bad seat in the house. There are no luxury boxes or anything like that, so it's a park for the people.
I'm not much of a sports fan myself, but I'm gratified that it has endured for all these years. About the only thing that's changed about it, is that they replaced the old wooden seats & bleachers with aluminum one some years ago. I believe when they filmed the movie, they installed a nicer old fashion scoreboard & left it when they packed up.
Another historic event happened last night. They had a ceremony to relight the neon running dog sign on the restored 1939 art deco Greyhound Bus terminal downtown. They say it's the only one left in the country. They are wanting to put some kind of restaurant in there, but the one they had lined up to move in backed out of the deal. They are now in search of another. It's such an iconic building, the city bought it when Greyhound vacated it 2007. I've read that at it's peak it had 106 buses coming through it a day. That's one about every 15 minutes.
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Post by nana on Jun 19, 2015 19:54:41 GMT -5
The city of Glens Falls near me holds an All American Soap Box derby every spring. You can google it. They shut down a city street and make a big deal out of it in the newspaper. I think the national Soap Box Derby is in Akron Ohio this summer. All the winners from the local derbies get to go to the nationals. Soap box derby is alive and well, Mach12!
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Post by vaporvac on Jun 20, 2015 1:26:08 GMT -5
I didn't know you were from upstate, nana. We use to get the best blackberry ice cream on our way there in the Summer. I've never had better. That place is probably long gone.
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Post by nana on Jun 20, 2015 19:23:12 GMT -5
What place is that? If it's Martha's, they're still there and still going strong. In fact, they are expanding. But we have lots of good ice cream up here. I am always surprised that there don't seem to be any roadside ice cream stands in Florida, where it's hot all year, but up here we are lousy with them. I guess when you have 10 months of winter and 2 months of mighty poor sleddin' you make the most out of what summer you do have!
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Post by mach12 on Jun 20, 2015 22:27:38 GMT -5
"Mighty poor sledding" - I like that! Kind of like here in the Pacific Northwest where we get 10 months of rain and 2 months where it's getting ready to rain.
We have quite a few roadside ice cream (and frozen yogurt) places and I think there's a roadside coffee stand every 10 feet.
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Post by nana on Jun 21, 2015 9:58:22 GMT -5
You need the coffee to stay awake through all the gloomy rain?
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Post by mach12 on Jun 21, 2015 12:22:53 GMT -5
Yup. Around here the first step for drinking your coffee is to take a napkin and dab off the rain drops that got on the lid as they hand the coffee to you thru the car window. Beats having to chip the frozen layer of ice off of it though. I don't know why the Army has their cold weather test center clear up in Alaska when upstate NY is so much more convenient.
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