The park has been a part of Little Rock for generations…
Posted on Sunday, September 3, 2006
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/165423/
Carl Eldridge was a young man when Travelers Field first opened, on April 13, 1932. And he was there.
Today, as the Travelers get ready to walk off the diamond at Ray Winder Field for the last time, he’s 94. And he says he’ll be there for that, too.
In between, Eldridge has been there a lot.
Through the empty-pocketed years of the Great Depression. Through two marriages. Through the sickness and what passes for health of old age. He’s seen countless victories, and even more losses.
“This was like heaven, coming here to something like this,” Eldridge said recently as he sat in the grandstand and recalled the first opening day, 74 years ago.
“Baseball was the most important thing we had here in Little Rock.”
The Little Rock resident has been almost as much a fixture at Ray Winder Field as its wooden outfield walls and latticed, steel light standards. He is one of a number of fans with more than passing connections to their team and their ballpark, which is closing as the Travs move to their new home in North Little Rock next year.
Right up to the final weekend of this last season, Marguerite Gamble, who attended her first game as an 8-year-old in 1938, was keeping score, batter by batter, from her seat a few rows up from the third base line. On the other side of the diamond, next to the Travs’ dugout, Darlene Avery was still setting out a little basket of candy for the players. She’s done that since inheriting that role from another fan in the early 1990 s.
But not many go back as far as Eldridge. He was already a ballpark rat when the field opened.
It was a year behind schedule, expensive — its $ 100, 000 price, about $ 1. 5 million today, was a Depression-era fortune — and imperfect.
Some parts of the ballpark, like a planned arched-brick entry, were never finished. The playing field was full of hills, holes and low spots from day one.
And the baseball has always been a mixed bag.
Arkansas is on its way to its 60 th losing season since 1901 — the year the team was founded. Maybe as a consequence, winning has never been everything at Ray Winder Field. “They’d stay until that last ball was pitched,” Eldridge said, recalling an era before TV, when half-day holidays were declared for Travs’ openers, the governor always threw out the first pitch and every decent-sized town in Arkansas had a team.
PAINT AND HOG WIRE Those first seasons, Eldridge had to get creative to get around the 50-cent general admission ticket price (those seats cost $ 6 now ) and get into games. He lost his Western Union job in 1932 to a layoff three years into the Depression, and his 42-year career with the Missouri Pacific Railroad would start later.
Ray Winder, the Travelers business manager whose name the stadium would take on in 1966, strongly appreciated the bottom line. Eldridge would stand outside the stadium, shagging foul balls to give back to Winder in exchange for admission. Winder would either put the balls into the hopper for batting practice, or back into games if they weren’t too scuffed.
Winder ran the Travelers when minor league teams had only loose working agreements with major league clubs. This left the smaller clubs with a great responsibility for buying talent, hiring managers and building teams. Most of his resources went into finding players. So a lot of the ballpark’s problems were fixed with paint and hog wire, while flattened cans were nailed over knotholes in the outfield wall.
What the Travs and the ballpark sometimes lacked in polish they made up for in potential.
Eldridge shot pool and played sandlot ball with future New York Yankee and Hall of Famer Bill Dickey, who caught for the Travelers in 1928 before he was called up to the major leagues. The Travs played in Kavanaugh Field at the time, which sat on part of what’s now the Central High School campus.
“I watched Bill all down through his career,” Eldridge said. “He was just like a brother to me.”
Dickey returned to Little Rock with the 1937 Yankees, the defending world champions boasting Lou Gehrig and Joe Dimaggio, when they lost an April exhibition to a Travelers team that would win a clubrecord 97 games and the Southern Association pennant.
Dickey also managed the Travelers to their worst-ever record, 51-103 in 1947, after his big league career ended.
Dickey-Stephens Park, the Travs’ new home being built in North Little Rock, is named in part for Dickey.
As bad as that ’ 47 season was, 1959 was worse. The struggling Travelers were sold and moved to Shreveport. The ballpark stood empty.
“It broke my heart,” Eldridge said. “I said if they ever put ball back in Travelers Field, I’d never miss a game.”
Sure enough, a public sale of shares generated the money to land the bankrupt New Orleans team. The new owners brought it to Little Rock in 1960, and Eldridge was back in heaven.
He tried to keep his word, but life sometimes intruded. He married his second wife, Ona Rae, in 1948, and between them the couple had seven children from previous marriages. He, Ona Rae and the kids saw plenty of games, he said, but not all of them.
“With seven kids you’ve got to do something,” Eldridge said.
Through the years, Eldridge said, he had a heart attack, as well as an ulcer that eventually forced the removal of more than half of his stomach.
But it was Ona Rae’s medical problems, starting in 1999, that kept Eldridge away from Ray Winder Field more than anything else had ever been able to do. She died in May. “She was a big Travelers fan, too,” he said. ‘SMOKE ’EM IN, SMOKE ’EM IN’
Not long after Marguerite Gamble saw her first Travs game, she figured out that she needed a way to pass the time without bothering her father. William Gamble was an avid fan who didn’t want to be bothered at the ballpark.
She learned to keep score from a family friend.
“I’d come out and I was bored with the game, and keeping score made it easier to keep track of things,” Gamble said.
Not so bored, though, that she didn’t keep coming back, again and again.
“Win or lose, whatever the score, there was always at least one play that I was glad to have seen.”
Gamble now sits on the thirdbase side of the field because it is the only smoking area left at Ray Winder. She remembers sitting with friends on the firstbase side in the old days, lighting up when the Travelers had base runners.
“We’d say, ‘Smoke ’em in, smoke ’em in, ’” said Gamble, who lives in Little Rock.
Gamble uses homemade scorecards now, but remembers them going for 10 cents at Travelers Field. Programs with a scorecard inside now cost $ 2 at Ray Winder. Cokes, which go for $ 2 today, were 10 cents too, she said, though they were a nickel everywhere else.
Though she’s filled out who knows how many, Gamble said she never saved her scorecards.
At different times in the 1950 s she was an Arkansas Gazette society writer and fashion columnist at the Arkansas Democrat. As a result, “I have enough paper in my house,” she said.
Still, a lot of what Marguerite Gamble, now 77, recalls from her almost 70 seasons of Travs games is scribbled into her memory from those scorecards.
She rattled off the names of the lineup of castoffs that the team assembled in three weeks in 1960, when the bankrupt New Orleans franchise moved into Ray Winder just before the season started. Players like shortstop Mel Geho and right fielder Ace Reynolds.
“They all had something to prove,” Gamble said. “[Rival ] Birmingham had cut a lot of them loose, and every time Birmingham came here to town they played a lot harder.”
The’ 60 Travs played hard enough to finish third and reach the Southern Association playoffs, then won the league championship by beating Birmingham. It was one of just seven titles the Travs have won in their 74 years at Ray Winder Field.
Gamble doesn’t plan to cross the Arkansas River to follow the team when it moves. And she won’t be at Ray Winder today.
“It’s too sad,” she says.
WIN OR LOSE “I like to see them win, but I’m here just to support them whether they win or lose,” Darlene Avery said. Avery, 63, has been going to games since her son, former Travs scorekeeper George Avery, took her to her first doubleheader in 1991. She said because she sits next to the tiny, openair home dugout — practically in there with the players — she’s gotten to know the players in a way that wouldn’t be possible at most ballparks. “Some of the players, we’ve gotten very close to them and their families,” said Avery, who lives in Jacksonville.
Along with the candy, she’s also given Travs players and coaches baked goods and homemade quilts. She recalled getting a signed ball from former manager Rick Mahler, and a bat signed by the team, both as thank-you gifts.
“I wanted to give back to them,” said Avery, who said she’ll go to games in North Little Rock, too. “They’ve given so much to us.”
Mainly memories.
Eldridge probably has more of those than just about any fan.
Memories of 6-cent streetcar rides, and the old Model T he bought and built wooden benches into — sort of mobile bleachers —to drive to the ballpark for games.
Then there was the time, long ago, when Eldridge and a friend knocked back a bottle or two of wine before the game. They didn’t go in, but climbed up an oak, long since removed, just outside the ballpark and watched from there.
But neither could climb down, and as darkness fell, they had to be pulled from the tree by Eldridge’s father.
“We were drunk as a skunk,” Eldridge said. “They poured us on that streetcar and we went home.” Information for this article was contributed by Karen E. Segrave of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.