A collage of Town Ball memories
Decades later, a newspaper story triggers a reunion at a field of dreams
Forty-three years ago this week, I wrote my first story for the old Minneapolis Tribune, the first of thousands I would tap out for the newspaper over 27 years while it morphed into the Star Tribune of the Twin Cities and I grew into a veteran scribe and unmistakable Minnesotan.
Back on September 4, 1978, Labor Day, I was a newbie Minnesotan, barely 24 years old, having landed here a week earlier from the wilds of big-city Philadelphia to assume the role of “outstate sports correspondent” for the Trib. My mission: to find stories in all 87 of the state’s counties.
As Managing Editor Frank Wright told me, “We’re going to give you a Chevy Camaro and an expense account. Now get out of town.”
And I did before I knew an Ely from Edina, a bag from a sack, a soda from a pop, a passive from an aggressive, or a Lund’s from a Rainbow. I was an alien and could barely speak the language.
My first foreign assignment was to Faribault — pronounced “Faribo”, I would learn — about 50 miles south of Minneapolis. The event was the Class B “Town Ball” championship between Miesville (population around 130) and Chaska (with a population then of about 7,000). Town Ball is what it sounds like: baseball teams attached to their small-sized cities comprised of, generally, aged-out high school and college players, but often, farmers, teachers, and insurance salesmen representing their communities while attempting (still) to hit curveballs and avoid hamstring pulls.
Anxiously in search of a story on my maiden Tribune voyage, I quickly found myself sitting next to a friendly farmer named Raymond Welter, 68, whose sons, Dennis, then 33, and Dale, then 35, were the veterans on the Chaska Cubs. Dale and Denny were teachers and coaches in Chaska-area schools.
Ray Welter was so entertaining and the idea that his thirty-something sons were still playing amid younger kids — particularly with gimpy Dale recovering from two broken bones in his left leg as the result of a hook slide in 1977 — that the family turned into my story.
I mean, other than the score, who in the world really cared who won this game? But, alas, there was a score. Miesville beat Chaska, 8–4, and my story — “They came, they saw, but didn’t conquer” — barely mentioned the winners … only twice, actually, in a 900-word piece that should have been 700.
My coverage triggered a few angry letters to the newspaper wondering why I wrote about the losers and slighted poor Miesville. Fact is, the article presaged my difficulty as a Minnesota Twins beat writer a few years later; I often got to the Twins’ score in the fifth paragraph after some sort of silly backing-in musing. I was never meant to be a baseball writer.
Anyway, after my Miesvile debut, time passed. Like four decades of time, and here came a voicemail last January from Dennis Welter, now 76 years old, retired teacher and coach, married to Pam, the daughter of the Chaska Cubs’ longtime and Town Ball Hall of Fame manager, Ted Nikolai.
When he called, Welter wondered if I remembered him and my immediate response was, “You betcha,” because I’d become a Minnesotan since we’d first met and learned the language.
But why the call? I learned that from his teaching days and now in retirement, Denny is a master of collages — photos, news clippings, and handwritten quotations, laminated and pasted on large poster boards.
To complete one of his collages, he told me he needed a copy of my 1978 Miesville-Chaska article. It meant a lot to him and his family.
I was delighted to oblige. I sent him a real-life clipping of the piece, and soon after received a lovely email from Pam Welter inviting me to a game in Chaska, the small town that has ballooned into a suburb of nearly 23,000.
It took us a while to sync our schedules, but last Saturday, my wife, Ann, and I drove the 35 miles from St. Paul to Chaska, landing first at the Welters’ home. Denny showed me his collection of collages which transforms his garage into a folksy art museum. Besides my Faribault story, he had a few other of my articles among his collages. Who knew my typing would ever wind up in a museum?
Then it was on to the Cubs’ home, Athletic Park, a green-striped field of dreams wrapped in the alluring smell of cheese curds and the crackling sounds of sporting purity that time has forgotten. The Cubs, unfortunately, lost earlier during the 98th Annual Minnesota State Amateur Baseball Tournament — the Town Ball championship — to nemesis Miesville. But Chaska was hosting the tournament and we got a chance to visit with Denny and Pam and with older brother Dale, who is 78, Chaska High School’s coach from 1981 to 2008, and known as “Mr. Baseball” in Chaska.
The Ortonville Rox were playing the Young America Cardinals in a Class C tournament game and Dale honored us with a more-exciting-than-expected pre-game trip on his golf cart to help drag the infield dirt to perfection. I was riding shotgun and Ann was bumping along in the flatbed of the cart. Dale’s son, Eric, who also works on the meticulously groomed field, worried his father was taking our lives into his hands, but we enjoyed every minute, traversing a perfectly manicured field and its environs, one that is beautifully absent of outfield advertising, save for one major sponsor.
Dale, Denny, and Pam showed us Athletic Park’s sculpture garden, which includes a tribute to the Welter parents, Lorene and Ray, the centerpiece of my 1978 story, who died at 70, just a couple of years after that first Tribune story.
We toured the concessions stands, where hot dogs were a non-inflation-adjusted $3 apiece and a pop $1. We watched a batboy no older than four years old and shorter than most bats retrieving equipment for Young America. We sat among the 500 or so folks in the grandstand, most cheering for nearby Young America, and had a friendly, generous, apolitical, nostalgic, good, old-fashioned, Minnesota time.
I learned this: baseball — all sports — still exist on the most local and community of levels. We scoff at the salaries and reject the commercialism of big-time sports, but at the grassroots — be it youth, high school, or Town Ball — there is a vibrant heart still beating. You must seek it out, or be lucky enough to be invited to it by those who are keeping it alive, but it’s there and worth embracing.
I learned another thing that I’d forgotten and that all journalists should keep in mind: our stories impact people’s lives and their deepest memories. Do not take your words lightly. People put them on poster boards and gaze at them in their garages for decades after your fingers have touched the keyboard.
We now have two Chaska Cubs T-shirts as souvenirs from a memorable, sun-drenched afternoon in 2021 that celebrated the first time I met those Chaskans in 1978 and wrote an article that we all can’t and won’t forget.
