“It’s a beautiful day for a ballgame, Let’s play two”…..Ernie Banks Chicago Cubs.

Sometimes, in little towns like ours threads will cross each other and create a narrative and human fabric from disparate and yet similar experience. This skein is nearly unbreakable and so involved that any one person cannot be addressed without causing ripples.

Vard Loomis was as tied to the sport of baseball as any man who ever lived here. He played with my uncle Jackie and future major leaguer Thornton Lee at little Arroyo Grande high school. Like Thornton he went on to university. His university was Stanford. Known during his time as the “Cardinal,” not for the bird but for the color of its uniforms. Vard was no slouch either, he captained the team in his senior year. It was not a particularly good year for the Stanford nine, but Vard, at least had a winning season and was their ace pitcher. 

When Vard came home from Stanford and entered the family business baseball was in full swing. From the turn of the century until the mid-fifties and the rise of television, amateur and semi-professional teams toured the country and town-ball teams were everywhere. It wasn’t unusual for a little town to have more than one team. Some would be sponsored, other were school ball teams. Our Arroyo Grande high school played Cal Poly and Santa Maria Junior College. Pick-up teams played on weekends and after work in the summer.

My father told me of going down to the high school field to see barnstorming teams play. They played on the old diamond at what is now Paulding Junior High. Kids could earn a nickel for fetching balls hit into the creek or even across it onto the fields of Garden Street.

The famous House of David came through every year or so, playing town teams along the railroads where they could play two or three games a day against teams from different small towns. They could play Paso Robles, Atascadero and Arroyo Grande on the same day. 

The House of David teams fielded one of the most popular baseball teams in the country at the time. Famous professional players occasionally donned fake beards and joined the team for exhibition games. Grover Cleveland Alexander, Satchel Paige, and even Babe Ruth. (They considered signing the Sultan of Swat in 1934, but decided his outrageous lifestyle would be a poor fit for the ascetic, Jewish orthodox team.) The hirsute athletes also popularized the art of the “pepper game,” a collection of Harlem Globetrotters-esque antics where they juggled and tossed balls, bats and gloves, made them vanish only to pull them out of their beards. They even played innings while mounted on donkeys. Playing as far afield as Hawaii and Mexico, the House of David continued to draw crowds into the 1950s, when television and the rise of Major League Baseball led to a decline in popularity of touring professional teams.

They weren’t bush league teams either. They often played against teams of major leaguers or Negro League teams who were picking up extra money in the off season. Babe Ruth and his “Bustin’ Babes toured with Lou Gehrigs “Larruping Lou’s for many years and both took on not only the House of David but also toured Japan 1934.  

That Japanese tour was organized by Kenichi Zenimura, a Japanese-American baseball player, manager, and promoter from Fresno. He had a long career with semi-professional Japanese-American baseball leagues on the west coast and Hawaii. These leagues were very active and extremely popular from about 1900 to 1941. He is also noted for the successful barnstorming tours he organized that brought famed players such as the Babe and the Iron Horse, Gehrig to the west coast and to Japan for exhibition games in the 1920s and 1930s. Zenimura brought his teams to our area during the depression and played at the high school and at the old ball field in Pismo Beach which used to be about where the sewer plant is today. There’s a series of old photographs kicking around taken during one of those games. The all Japanes-American teams dressed in their heavy woolen uniforms playing on a Sunday afternoon, the ranks of automobiles down the foul lines parked facing the field, the fans sitting on the grass, picnic baskets open, adults watching the game and kids running around playing games of their own, all of this surrounded by the artichokes which used to be grown there. Just off to the east the Southern Pacific railroad, where at four o’clock the SP Daylight Limited would thunder past, pulling its even dozen Pullman cars, their bright Red, Black and Orange livery flashing in the afternoon sun. The game pauses, players watching the train, the pitcher, his head down hands on hips, pauses in his work. Kaz Ikeda, the catcher, squats patiently in behind the dish, his brother Seirin stands at short using the toe of his shoe to smooth the dirt in front of him.

Coached by Vard Loomis the Arroyo Grande Growers were playing the Kenichi Zenimura’s Fresno Athletic Club or FAC as it was known. 

Prior to the war, Juzo Ikeda the father of Kazuo and Seirin asked Loomis, to coach a Japanese-American baseball team. 

“There were between 40 and 50 farmers in this area at the time and many had big families, so there were a bunch of boys around here who needed some type of recreation after school. “Vard coached from 1932 to 1942 until the Japanese were forced to had to evacuate to the internment camps.”….Kaz Ikeda

Kaz and his brother were both lettermen at Arroyo Grande High School and attended Cal Poly, a small agricultural and engineering college in San Luis Obispo where they both played ball. Seirin was a crackerjack shortstop and Kaz caught though he was always careful to say he rode the pine most of the time.

He started playing on a Japanese American team from San Luis when he was just thirteen and was the first player Vard chose when the Arroyo Grande “Growers” were formed in ‘32. They played Japanese teams all over the coast from Salinas to as far south as Santa Barbara.

Sent to Gila River, Kaz and his brother continued to play. Kenichi Zenimura had quickly organized nearly 32 ball teams there. Some were for kids, some for teens and some for adults. “Zenny” even built the ball fields in the rocky soil around the barracks in which they all lived. He and the other ballplayers painstakingly removed rocks and pebbles and did their best to make the rough fields playable. There was no grass on those fields. They had to make the bases from scrap lumber left over from the building of the camp, they even put together a grandstand for the primary field. 

For the three years the 10 camps existed baseball was played year round weather permitting. Snow storms at Tule Lake California delayed games as did howling dust storms at Manzanar. Torrential rains at the Rohwer and Jerome camps in Arkansas washed out the fields and games could be cancelled over intense heat or clouds of mosquitos and biting flies. And yet they still played.

Survivors of the camps have stated that the games did much to foster a sense of community and give the internees something around which they could rally.

After the war Kaz and his brothers Seirin And Saburo and their extended families were amongst the first organizers of The Arroyo Grande Boys League. Returning veterans of the military, men who had played at Guadalcanal, Saipan, in the fields England, France and Germany began to have families and the league filled up rapidly with boys eager to play. 

They were the last decades of baseballs dominance. Here at home, boys lay awake at night dreaming of the World Series. There was no superbowl and the NBA could still characterized as a minor sport. The biggest thing in basketball was the seemingly utter dominance of UCLA and its annual trek to the college championships, regular as clockwork. It was still baseball and in the fifties it was still a radio sport with no teams west of St. Louis. Didn’t matter though, kids were wild for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Saint Louis Cardinals and the Giants of New York. 

Not yet did the leagues simply use the names of Major League teams. Local adult and kids leagues used their sponsors names or simply called themselves the Gators or the Growers and Merchants.

In the photo above, made up of players from Santa Maria, Arroyo Grande, Pismo and San Luis are many familiar names including Floyd Hoover and “Mutt” Anderson, owner of the Greyhound Cafe in Arroyo Grande. Butch Simas and Carl Barbettini were big supporters of the Santa Maria Indians. These guys were the fathers of the kids in my generation.

It all changed in 1958 when Walter O’Malleys Dodgers stepped of the plane in Los Angeles. They were to dominate the west coast television market and quickly relegated the Los Angeles Rams, which had been one of only two NFL teams in California to the status of also rans at the box office. 

The All-Star played in the 1959 season was also the first All-Star Game played west of St. Louis. The American League defeated the National League 5-3. Hall of Fame All-Star starters included Dodger pitcher Don Drysdale, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, Stan Musial and Willie Mays. For kids out here is was unbelievable that these players were actually in reach and not at the end of a three thousand mile radio signal.

That same year the Dodgers beat the White Sox in the World Series at the old LA Coliseum and it’s strangely configured ball field behind the great relief pitcher Norm Sherry who saved two and won two. 

During the 1959 World Series against the Chicago White Sox, attendance at all three Dodgers home games exceeded 90,000. Game 5 drew 92,706 fans, a World Series record that will likely remain unbroken. The Dodgers won the series 4-2, capturing their first World Championship on the West Coast.

The sad thing was that it began the erosion of the old town ball teams. It was too easy to watch baseball on TV now instead of heading out to see the locals play. Other than a few high school college summer league teams they have slipped back into the shadows of history.

The San Luis Blues still play every summer but the old Santa Maria Indians with their bright red uniforms and “Scoop” Nunez running the show are probably gone forever. It took a dedicated group of men to operate a team, most of them former players themselves and it seems there are few willing or able to serve anymore.

In the picture above is our own Jimy Williams. Jimy is from a pioneering ranching family and holds the distinction of being the only native ofArroyo Grande who owns two World Series rings as both a coach and manager. The best memory Jimy though is of Coach Eugene “Pee Wee” Fraser hitting endless ground balls at him, over and over until it was too dark to see. Thats the real game behind the game.

Youth leagues are now it if you want to see a game. Little, Pony, Senior, American Legion and Babe Ruth leagues are how kids learn to play today and its always fun to walk on down to Soto field to see them. Those fields are likely a last testament to Arroyo Grande’s athletic past. Designed and built strictly by community volunteers you can see in the names, Porter, Campbell, Ikeda, Santos, Pilg, Volunteer and Don Roberts fields and if you know where to look the autographs of “Bub” Robertson and Tony Janowicz inscribed in concrete.

Literally thousands of Arroyo Grandeans have supported baseball since it’s earliest beginnings almost a century and a half ago. Though things have changed in many ways there is one thing to remember, kids play for fun and it’s not uncommon to see boys and girls down at the fields playing home run derby or three flys up and having a whale of a time. My boys and their friends would come by our house which is just a long block from Soto, pick up a bucket of balls and some bats from my coaches bag and walk down to Santos or Porter field and play until dark. Its best to leave the folks at home. Thats the real game.

Just a little note at the end. Years ago when I was a coach at Arroyo Grande High School, one of the ball players, a big, supremely talented seventeen year old took me aside and said, “Coach, lets take a walk.” 

We ambled side by side out to a spot just behind second base where the outfield grass offered us a whiff of the perfume that only comes from a fresh mowed field. The boy laid down on his back and I sat beside him for a moment just taking it all in, a warm spring afternoon on a ball-field. The crack of Fungo bats lofting balls to the outfielders, the slap of leather as pitchers threw their long toss warm ups and coaches sitting in the dugouts penning their lineups before the game. Sean turned to me and said, “Isn’t this the best Mike? I could die right here today and be happy.”

Just a note. In the photo above, players on the 1997 14 year old Babe Ruth All-Star team, about to play at Sinsheimer Stadium in San Luis Obispo features two players who were coached by Tom Woods, who as a boy played for Kaz Ikeda, who played for Vard Loomis, who played with my uncle Jackie coached by my grandfather. Thats how connections work in a small town.