Published: March 11, 2008 11:45 pm            

Enid: A baseball town

Among Enid’s several other bragging points, one of the most enduring over the past 100 years has been our prominence as a baseball town. From the Frantz brothers and their winning baseball team around the turn of the 20th century to our present spectacular downtown baseball park with its manicured lawns and videoboard scoreboard just one block off our downtown Square, Enid residents always have been drawn to the crack of the bat and the cheer of the crowd.

But Enid’s ballpark has not always been downtown, and its baseball powers have not always been made up of rosy-cheeked amateurs playing for a trophy and bragging rights. The baseball teams I remember played were in a big wooden stadium with covered grandstand and open bleachers along the first and third base lines. It was on the northwest corner of what now is Oakwood and Garriott — just about where Kmart sits.

In those days Oakwood was a narrow, sandy section-line road. It was out in the country.

These were semi-professional teams. The players were not rosy-cheeked but for the most part grizzled veterans of the baseball diamond wars. The players had daytime jobs, usually with the company that sponsored the team.

I remember Chet Woodruff, the catcher, as I recall, for both Eason Oilers and Champlin Refiners. Chet was a veteran semi-pro catcher, as evidenced by his twisted and gnarled fingers injured by errant pitches and streaking foul balls ricocheting off hitters’ bats.

Then there was Jug Thesenga, a right-handed pitcher, and Vance Cauble, described as a “crafty left-hander;” Dallas Patton in left field; Howard McFarland in center; and Frank Clift in right field.

Nick Urban was the manager and played third base. When Nick stood at the plate his knees always were slightly bent, which made him look as if he was about to sit down.

Everyone always said Nick never struck at the first pitch — never.

Three times over the decades these semi-pro veterans of the Sunday Night Lights if you will, were crowned national champions by winning the National Baseball Congress Semi-Pro Tournament in Wichita, Kan.

I don’t know who was the more skilled, the players or the radio announcer broadcasting the game over radio station KCRC back in the 1930s and ’40s. The announcer was in a studio on the ninth floor of Broadway Tower, but he could make it sound as if he was in the press box atop the grandstand at the ballpark at Wichita — an eyewitness to the action on the field.

The details of the game were transmitted by ticker tape from the stadium at Wichita to KCRC studio. The announcer would read the tape, and dramatize the play-by-play action — his voice rising and falling depending on what the ticker tape told him was happening on the field. He had a pencil and a hollow wooden block in front of him, and he would hit the block with the pencil to mimic the sound of the bat hitting the ball.

There also was a recording of people cheering, and he would turn this sound up and down, depending on what was happening.

I don’t think the announcer was fooling anyone. I think everyone knew what was going on. In fact I’ve heard listeners say “Boy he can really make it sound real, can’t he.” You have to remember this was years before television. The broadcast was faked, but listeners could hunker down in a sling chair on the front porch on a hot summer evening, get a big glass of ice tea, turn up the radio, close their eyes and conjure up their own picture of the game in their minds — in living color too, and without commercial interruption.

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The giant strides we have taken in the communications field, and especially in entertainment, during the century just past are graphically illustrated in a photo I saw a few years ago of cars parked in front of the newspaper building, probably in the 1920s, awaiting the latest score in what apparently is a World Series baseball game.

At that time the newspaper was in the building on the alley just east of the present News & Eagle building. The photo shows an open touring car parked in front of the building. There are other cars angle- parked against the curb, but the touring car is what we called double-parked behind them in the street. A man is leaning against the touring car.

On the plate glass window in front of the newspaper a big inning-by-inning score sheet has been attached to the window. At the end of each inning someone in the newspaper building pencils the new score on the big score sheet in the window.

There was no radio, no television and only wealthy people had telephones. If you wanted to tell someone something, you went out and literally cranked up your car, drove to wherever the person was you wanted to talk to, and talked to him or her face to face.

If you wanted to know the score of the baseball game, you drove downtown and parked in front of the newspaper office.



Brown is a former managing editor of the Enid Morning News.