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Take a trip to Cooperstown, tour the Baseball Hall of Fame, then go sit in the grandstand at the old ballpark down the street from the Hall in the quaint New York town where baseball’s artifacts are enshrined.
It is here, in this old wood-enclosed edifice, that one can envision the setting for minor league baseball in Waterloo decades ago, before World War II. The old Waterloo baseball stadium, while in no way a carbon copy of Cooperstown’s green-painted wood ballpark, was a typical small city baseball park of that era.
It was at that old field in those pre-war days that I was to witness games that instilled in me a lifelong preference for baseball over any other game or sport. The first baseball game I saw probably was in 1939 or ’40. I remember none of the statistics, not even the score nor who Waterloo played that day. I do know I was there with my dad and it was a Three-I (aka Three-Eye) League game.
The Three-I League is legendary. A history of the organization, written by Bill Kemp and available on-line, commemorates it this way: “The Illinois- Indiana-Iowa League was a national force in minor league baseball for the first 60 years of the 20th century. The Three-I was a Class B loop, the highest level of ‘low’ minor leagues…Organized in 1901, the Three-I League survived six decades, holding its own in the competition for leisure time and entertainment dollars against new-fangled inventions such as the motion picture, the automobile, radio and, most infamously, television”.
The pre-war ballpark in Waterloo was located approximately where the John Deere electric foundry is today. It fit into a complex of recreation venues that included the Electric Park Ballroom and an adjacent outdoor professional wrestling arena, the popular Spider Kurth tavern-nightclub and a roller skating rink with its traditional fold-up wood windows that let spectators outside in their cars watch skaters go round and round.
Intentionally symbolic or not, a large gas storage structure across Westfield Avenue from the ballpark resembled an iron baseball.
The old Waterloo Stadium opened in 1936 as the home of the Waterloo Hawks of the Western Baseball League. A year later, Waterloo joined the Three-I League as a farm team of the Cincinnati Reds. In 1940, Waterloo became a Chicago White Sox farm team and adopted the name White Hawks. We moved out of Waterloo in mid-1942 in what proved to be the final year for baseball in that doomed stadium. World War II already had dictated that the Three-I League was to suspend operations during the war; a bunch of “hobos”, as they were called in those days, put a final touch – or torch – to the Waterloo ballpark.
Sometime in the early evening of Nov. 1, 1942, a Sunday, a fire started in or near the wooden ballpark. The prevalent theory was that it was started by some homeless people.
“It was possible,” wrote the Waterloo Courier the following day, “that hobos might have started a fire for warmth or cooking”.
Another possibility was that kids playing around the stands somehow set off the blaze. Waterloo fire officials listed the fire “of unknown origin”. Coincidentally, the relatively short-lived Waterloo Stadium of 1936 had replaced an 11-year-old ballpark that also burned, on March 9, 1933. Baseball people in Waterloo by now had learned; their next stadium was to be constructed of steel, and it remains standing today, more than 60 years after it was erected.
The 1942 stadium blaze was labeled by the Courier as “the most spectacular of any recent fires” in the Waterloo area. Even the non-wood parts of the structure – steel beams supporting its roof – couldn’t withstand the heat and were bent over “as though they had been candy canes,” the Courier described.The huge fire caused $15,000 in damage, about half of the loss covered by insurance.
Waterloo and most of the rest of the nation were starved for organized professional baseball after the war. Major league baseball had struggled on, but its quality was diluted by the absence of its big stars who were in the military.
On May 18, 1946, Waterloo’s new steel stadium opened with fanfare — 1,937 spectators and a storybook game, an 8-7 victory over Springfield (Ill.) when White Hawk leftfielder Harry Schmeil hit the second pitch in the last half of the ninth inning over the leftfield wall for a 340-foot walk-off homerun. The Courier that day sent a photographer up in a plane to take an overhead shot of the new stadium that the paper splashed across the full front page of its sports section.
A sign of that war-recovery time was a published “urgent request” from the White Hawks front office that the fans both inside and out of the stadium return foul balls because of a baseball shortage. So severe was this issue that on the new stadium’s second day, a Waterloo police officer ran six blocks to chase down a youth who tried to flee with a baseball that landed outside the stands.
The cop caught the kid and hauled him back to the game where he surrendered the baseball. The boy was released after a stern warning. Contrast that to today where, in the major leagues, players and coaches routinely toss baseballs into the stands for fans to fight over.
The 1946 season – by now I was back in the area – was the beginning of a glorious era for professional baseball in Waterloo. By July the White Hawks were drawing upwards of 5,000 rabid fans a night to the ballpark where game tickets sold for 60 cents to a dollar. The following season, Waterloo drew 147,000 people to its games, a single-season record. Many fans came from outlying towns up to 40 miles away.
Late in the 1950s, however, the Three-I League began losing teams to the Class D Midwest League. Waterloo left in 1956 and the Three-I folded after the 1961 season.
For those few glory years immediately after the war, the Waterloo ballpark was the place to be on warm summer nights in Waterloo. Friedl’s Café on East Fourth Street downtown was a favorite after-game hangout for players who soon became local celebrities.
Counted among them were players such as shortstop Luis Aparicio, later a star with the White Sox and a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. The most popular White Hawk in the early post-war era, however, was a gangly infielder who struggled to bat .200. It was the spectacular fielding plays, his flair for showmanship on the field, his Italian suave looks and engaging personality that made Dominic D’Alessandro the darling of the day, especially with the women White Hawk fans. He eventually moved on, up possibly as far as Class AA ball, but his anemic bat made for a short-lived career.
Waterloo baseball fans were treated to the talents of many aspiring major leaguers on the Three-I teams that played in the city – eventual National League stars Carl Erskine and Del Crandall come to mind – and occasionally a noted major league player in his waning years would finish out his career in the league on his way down from stardom.
It was just one more facet of the game that endeared itself to the Cedar Valley a half-century ago.
Jack Hovelson worked for the Waterloo Courier for nearly eight years and was a Cedar Valley correspondent for the Des Moines Register from 1968 until retiring in 1996. He is a graduate of Iowa State Teachers College (now UNI) and still lives in Cedar Falls.
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