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NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
July 8, 1999
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1999 Plains Folk
One of the most common and pervasive folk beliefs in this part of the country is that of the lost cause. There was a time, we say, when things were good, people stuck together, they felt they were part of something. Kathleen Norris, in "Dakota: A Spiritual Geography," has written—with frustration—about all those people who want to turn the clock back to 1960. Now and then you even hear people speak fondly of the Great Depression with comments along the lines of, "We were poor, but we had a good time because we were all in it together."
A new book from the University of Nebraska Press tells the story of another lost cause on the plains, one that figured in communities from North Dakota to Texas. "Take Two and Hit to Right: Golden Days on the Semi-Pro Diamond," by Hobe Hays, is a story of the brief flowering of semi-pro baseball in Nebraska during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It is a story sure to stir recollections in any community of the Great Plains region.
Hobe Hays was part of a brief generation that participated in what he calls the "arms race" of baseball partisans in towns like McCook, Superior, Kearney, Holdrege, North Platte and Lexington, members of the Nebraska Independent League. This went way beyond the occasional use of ringers that had enlivened earlier generations of baseball in the region. First McCook, and then all the other towns, vied to sign two types of players: college stars looking for summer work and professionals sliding down from affiliated minor league clubs or even the majors.
Hays, a second baseman, was one of the college boys. He started playing summer ball for McCook in 1948 and played his last season for North Platte in 1953. Then, not wishing to become a baseball bum, he went on to a long and successful career as an artist and teacher in New York. He is, therefore, one of those expatriate plains authors, who came back to Nebraska in 1997 to prowl the old main streets and playing fields and write his book.
"Since before the Depression," Hays explains, "town baseball had been the number-one sporting interest of all small midwestern communities. The years after World War II became the Golden Age of Nebraska semi-pro ball. On the day of a home game, stand-up signs at downtown intersections read `Baseball Tonight.'"
The imported players entered into the local communities and the regional landscape to a greater or lesser degree. They worked day jobs, ogled and sometimes married local girls, passed the miles on road trips reading Burma Shave signs and watching for a white cow (sign of good fortune), ate chicken-fried steaks in the cafes, hung around pool halls, sprawled on hotel benches. On the various towns' fields of dreams they read the uneven infields, watched for holes in the outfields, stole home runs with catches leaning over snow-fence boundaries. If they were lucky they struck a panel in the outfield fence that read "Hit me and win a free pair of shoes" or some other valuable gratuity.
To Hobe Hays it was only a game. For the towns, however, it was "a contest of survival in a group of small towns where an original idea of baseball for fun had gotten far out of control." The great shake-out of communities on the plains was beginning, and competitive baseball was both a symbol of the competition and a weapon in it. Perhaps that was why, as Hays notes, the smaller towns like McCook and Holdrege competed harder than the larger ones like Hastings and Grand Island, which dropped in and out of the league.
By 1997, Hays realized, "Semi-pro baseball was a memory only for the old in McCook. Town baseball for men was now dusty history."
In his book, though, it lives and breathes.
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136
Click here to download a photo of Tom Isern suitable for printing.
(isern.tif - 512KB)
Click here to download a photo of Tom Isern
suitable for printing.
(isern-h.tif - 426KB)