CELEBRATE! : Orange County’s First 100 Years : COMING OF AGE : THE BIG A

Oct . 12, 1986. Top of the ninth. Two out. Man on first. The California Angels, leading the Boston Red Sox by two runs, are one out away from their first World Series. Donnie Moore, their best reliever, is pitching to a journeyman outfielder named Dave Henderson who wasn’t even supposed to play. The Angel dugout is crowded with police officers sent there to protect the players from delirious fans who are as hungry as the team for a championship. Moore delivers and Henderson swings. In the five seconds it takes for the ball to travel from Henderson’s bat over the left field wall, Anaheim Stadium experiences both its greatest high and its most despairing low. The crowd of 65,000 sits in stunned silence as the Red Sox go on to win in extra innings. There seems a premonition that the Angels will never recover--and they

don’t. Boston sweeps the last two playoff games at home--and Anaheim Stadium is still waiting for its first World Series.

In 1937, cowboy movie actor Gene Autry journeyed from Hollywood to Orange County to serve as grand marshal of the Fullerton Armistice Day parade, coming close to the site that 30 years later would provide a home for Autry’s expansion major league baseball team. There were no freeways then, and Anaheim was better known for citrus than entertainment.

In those three decades, Anaheim grew up--and one of the principal signs of its maturity is the stadium that has repeatedly won recognition as one of the finest athletic and entertainment plants in America.

A number of people have had a powerful hand in the success of Anaheim Stadium, but there were two visionaries in particular who made it happen.

In the fall of 1963, the Los Angeles Angels base- ball team was unhappily playing its home games in Dodger Stadium. The Dodgers cast a long shadow, and the Angels saw no prospect of moving out from under. The mayor of Anaheim--a shrewd, progressive civic leader named Rex Coons--sensed the Angels’ plight and foresaw both a solution for the Angels and a bonanza for Anaheim.

Disneyland had literally put Anaheim on the map eight years earlier. Now Coons envisioned a sports center to complement the Magic Kingdom. He contacted then-Angels-president Bob Reynolds and majority owner Gene Autry--who was to become sole owner in 1968--and planted the idea of the Angels’ finding their own identity in Anaheim.

The idea flourished as the Angels’ disenchantment with Dodger Stadium grew, and in 1964 the talks got serious enough that Coons sought tentative commitments from the City Council and the Del Webb Construction Co. to build a major-league stadium in Anaheim. (Del Webb, then co-owner of the New York Yankees, prepared preliminary plans for the 43,250-seat stadium at his own risk and was prepared to meet the Angels’ timetable, which meant that the stadium had to be ready to open in April, 1966, because the Angels’ contract with Dodger Stadium would have expired by then.)

Looking back a decade later, Coons, who died early this year, told reporters that it had been a “balancing act” in which he had to keep the proposed deal quiet as long as he could in order to prevent land prices on the tentative sites from escalating out of reach. But the word did get out and land prices did zoom, and 10 days before Coons, City Manager Keith Murdoch and City Atty. Joe Geisler were to offer a specific proposal to the Angels’ board of directors, they still hadn’t tied up the land on which to build the stadium.

Enter the second visionary: an Orange County real estate broker named C. J. Gill. Although he had no connection with the city, he had been thinking exactly like Coons--but with much less visibility. But, unlike Coons, Gill was able to act. He had quietly and efficiently acquired options on the nearly 150 acres of land where Anaheim Stadium rests today. And 10 days before that critical meeting with the Angels’ directors, Gill appeared at Anaheim City Hall and offered the land at a price considerably below that being quoted to Coons.

The day was saved. Or almost. Before the Angels committed to Anaheim, Long Beach came in with a serious bid. But Long Beach made a major mistake: Its officials insisted that the team be called the Long Beach Angels. Reynolds and Autry wanted the team to be called the California Angels, and when they asked Coons if that was a problem, he told them: “I don’t give a damn what you call yourself.” So the California Angels agreed to come to Anaheim--and a stadium was born.

Recalled Coons in a Times interview: “All we had was a handshake, and each entity was out on a limb--the city for the $4 million we had spent on the land, the Angels for possible loss of attendance and Del Webb’s company, which was proceeding with the plans.”

But the deal was formalized in July, 1964, with the stipulation that the stadium would be ready for the opening of the 1966 season--which didn’t leave much room for false starts. Coons chose not to run for reelection and instead took over the job as chairman of the Stadium Commission. Ground was broken in August, and to Keith Murdoch--a member of the Stadium Board since he retired as city manager in 1976--that day still represents his most vivid recollection of more than two decades of involvement with the stadium.

“We held this ceremony in the middle of a cornfield surrounded by orange groves,” he remembers. “People came from miles around, even though they had to walk in from State College Boulevard. I can still see a woman who brought three small children, one of them in a stroller. Over the years, that woman has represented to me the spirit of the whole stadium effort.”

There were roadblocks, but they proved more irritating than substantial. Richard Hanna, then a Democratic congressman from Fullerton, urged that a local contractor be used instead of New York-based Webb. Coons brushed that away by accusing Hanna of dragging politics into the city’s negotiations.

And when the Orange County Board of Supervisors was asked to participate in April, 1964, they stiffed the idea by a 4-1 vote, with Supervisor C. M. Featherly noting: “I don’t think it is the business of the Orange County supervisors to put the taxpayers’ money in jeopardy for the sake of this type of sports stadium.”

Murdoch remembers that “when the county backed out, it was a major disappointment. We had no suspicion of it until just before it happened. And we looked at each other and said, ‘Can the city do it without help?’ And we gulped and said, ‘Yes.’ ”

So the city of Anaheim took the plunge alone. In addition to the five-man Stadium Commission, the Anaheim Stadium Non-Profit Corp. was formed and 15 directors were appointed by the Anaheim City Council. Two San Francisco brokerage firms were hired to float $20 million in municipal bonds to build the stadium, leaving the city on the hook for annual payments of about $1 million for 35 years. Even so, there was a great deal more euphoria than reservations. Said Coons at the time: “We’ll have to hurry, but Orange Countians have never backed off from a crash program yet.”

The stadium was designed to house both baseball and football, as the pioneers knew they needed both sports to make it profitable. But attracting a professional football team would prove elusive for several years. In 1965, Anaheim almost got the San Diego Chargers, who were so ready to move that their owner at the time, Barron Hilton, was involved in the planning of Anaheim Stadium. But at the last moment, San Diego voters passed a bond issue for a new stadium, and the Chargers stayed put.

So when Anaheim Stadium was completed on schedule in April, 1966, the California Angels were its only tenants. When the Angels inaugurated the stadium before 40,735 fans with an exhibition game against the San Francisco Giants on April 9, 1966, a one-time farmer named H. J. Altheide, who two years earlier had been growing citrus fruit where home plate was located, was sitting in the stands watching. So was another citrus grower named Herman Bruggeman, who had agreed to sell his 21 acres of orange trees only if he was provided a lifetime pass to Angels games.

The eventual financial success of Anaheim Stadium--it was considered a white elephant for almost a decade--involved foresight and luck. Without question, one of the best examples of both was the hiring-- right after ground breaking--of Thomas F. Liegler, a former business manager of the Houston Colt 45 baseball team, as director of stadium operations.

For two decades, Liegler packaged Anaheim Stadium so creatively that it became a model operation for similar facilities all over the country. Time and again, Liegler overcame the disappointment of not closing with a professional football tenant by putting on shows ranging from drag races to rock concerts--even religious crusades. As a result, when Liegler finally landed the Rams, Anaheim Stadium truly became the financial bonanza Rex Coons and Keith Murdoch once envisioned.

It took a while. After failing to land the Chargers, Liegler staged a preseason American Football League exhibition game that drew 30,000 fans in 1966, then put the hard sell on one of the participants: the New England Patriots. It didn’t work--even though the Board of Supervisors belatedly got into the act with a personal invitation to the owners. Six years later, Liegler signed a contract with the Southern California Sun of the new World Football League. For one brief shining year, the Sun drew almost enough people to pull the stadium out of the red. The team won its division, then, in the playoffs, went belly-up financially. The following year, the league folded.

Meanwhile, the stadium sorely needed revenue because the Angels weren’t doing all that well at the box office and were paying to the stadium the minimum amount their contract called for. So in 1970, Liegler brought his first rock concert--featuring The Who--to the stadium. What happened depends on who you listen to. Liegler thought the crowd was orderly and law-abiding--and, besides, the event earned $30,000 for the city. Murdoch described the concert as a “travesty,” and there was enough public outcry over the drugs allegedly consumed by rock fans that it was six years before another rock concert was booked into Anaheim Stadium.

Those were difficult years. A Teen Fair flopped in 1971, and the Angels’ attendance hit an all-time low of 744,000 in 1972. Only a Billy Graham Crusade that drew 375,000 people over 10 days and an $840,000 tax rebate from the county kept the stadium afloat in the early ‘70s. Revenues from the Sun football team provided brief prosperity, but when that source was gone, Liegler went back to rock concerts. The Beach Boys attracted 50,000 people in May, 1976, and since then rock concerts have been regularly held in the stadium.

The city makes from $60,000 to $100,000 on each of these concerts. The main negative fallout, at least in the early days, was the crop of marijuana plants that sprang up in the outfield after each concert. Maintenance foreman Joe Morris explained at the time that rock fans didn’t plant the seeds, “they just tossed marijuana butts in the grass and they grew.”

During the ‘70s, the stadium also pioneered between-acts entertainment at rock concerts to keep the crowd under control (example: a 72-year-old man diving 40 feet into 18 inches of water), saw the completion of the Orange Freeway next to the stadium, drew 25,000 people for a performance of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, turned its first profit in 1977-78 (it was the only public sports facility in the nation to claim a profit during that period, according to a Sports Illustrated survey) and opened talks with the Los Angeles Rams.

The Rams, like the Angels a dozen years earlier, were deeply disenchanted with their digs--in this case, the Los Angeles Coliseum. The more disenchanted the Rams became, the more persistent Liegler became.

Finally, early in 1978, Liegler--with the support of Mayor John Seymour (now a state senator) and the Anaheim Stadium Corp.--made a formal proposal to the Rams that called for enlarging Anaheim Stadium to a capacity of about 70,000. Even after it became clear Rams owner Carroll Rosenbloom was seriously considering the offer, Los Angeles didn’t take the matter nearly seriously enough. Los Angeles Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, as quoted in The Times, asked scornfully: “Who’d go to see the Anaheim Rams? Or the Orange Rams?”

But once again, the name wasn’t a sticking point. Rosenbloom didn’t want to give up the name “Los Angeles Rams,” and that was fine with the Anaheim folks. They simply wanted those seats filled.

On July 7, 1978, the Anaheim Stadium Corp. voted to enlarge the stadium and appointed a committee to work with the city in negotiating with the Rams. The deal finally worked out was a three-way arrangement between Rosenbloom, the Anaheim Stadium Corp. and the East Coast development company of Cabot, Cabot & Forbes that would involve the addition of 27,000 seats--to be financed by municipal bonds--and the development of a $200-million, high-rise commercial and office complex on 90 acres of the existing 144-acre parking lot area.

The agreement signed by all parties on Nov. 22, 1978, provided a 30-year lease that projected a profit of $12.6 million to the city of Anaheim over the life of the lease. The euphoria in Anaheim was boundless, with Mayor Seymour already dreaming about a Super Bowl. No one was talking--or apparently thinking--about the seeds of discontent sowed by this agreement, which ultimately would result in a long and expensive lawsuit filed against the city by its first tenant, the California Angels.

Seymour insists today that there was no reason to be concerned. “The Angels were well aware of what we intended to do with the parking lot,” he says. “We felt we had to deliver so many parking spaces, which we planned to do with parking structures. The Angels wanted all those parking spaces at ground level. That, finally, is what the whole lawsuit was about. And I still think it could have been prevented by just sitting down and talking.”

But lawsuits didn’t come into the picture for several years, and meanwhile Orange County was downright giddy over its new football team. Not only that, the stadium--for the first time--had real prospects of bathing in dollar signs. Ground was broken for the stadium addition in March, 1979, the Angels were in first place in May and drawing enormously well, and 1,000 people turned out just to watch workers move the Big A scoreboard structure to a new location in the parking lot. The event, complete with balloons and refreshments, fizzled when the moving rig broke down--and the move was made in relative solitude the next day.

Carroll Rosenbloom died in 1979 in a swimming accident, but his widow who today owns the Rams--Georgia Frontiere--pledged to implement all of Rosenbloom’s Anaheim plans.

The unveiling of the stadium addition--which cost about $33 million and included the world’s largest scoreboard, a $45,000 pitcher’s mound that could be raised and lowered electronically, 113 luxury-box suites and the longest bar in the nation behind the right field stands--was delayed several weeks by a baseball strike. It finally came off on April 15, 1980, and the Rams played their first game in the expanded stadium--an exhibition against the New England Patriots--on the following Aug. 11. Seymour remembers that night with enormous pride: “Seeing it finally all come together and knowing we accomplished it without using any of the taxpayers’ money.”

Although the stadium showed a record profit of $920,000 in 1980, the Rams’ first year, prosperity was short-lived. The Angels lost 26 home games during a 50-day baseball strike in 1981, and signs for the future were not good. After the Anaheim City Council early in 1983 approved plans for the development on the stadium parking lot as set out in its agreement with the Rams, the Angels filed a lawsuit to prevent the development from taking place, claiming that it violated the Angels’ agreement with the city guaranteeing the Angels’ exclusive rights to the parking lot. The lawsuit would drag on for five years and cost the Rams, the Angels and the city more than $15 million in legal fees.

During that period, there were a lot of verbal shots taken by the two sides and more than a few efforts at legal harassment that served only to further inflame feelings. Typical was the effort of the city to double the rent the Angels were required to pay for the seats added in the stadium expansion.

Through the lawsuit years, the stadium returned to profitability despite a lengthy football strike in 1986. Among other things, the indefatigable Liegler came up with the idea of selling guided tours of the stadium for $3 and booking trade shows into the cavernous ramps and concourses of the stadium. A Sport Magazine poll of sportswriters rated Anaheim Stadium as the best baseball park in the country--and so did most ballplayers. And the Angels--who had lost two previous playoff series--against Baltimore in 1979 and Milwaukee in 1982--came oh-so-close to a World Series in 1986.

But had the series come to Anaheim, Tom Liegler wouldn’t have been around to run it. By the mid-1980s, he had become the most visible stadium director in America. His 42-page manual, “The Anaheim Way,” was the bible for his employees and was copied by many other stadium directors across the nation.

Liegler made sure that its thesis--that everything stadium employees do or say is for the comfort and pleasure of the paying customer--was put into practice. He was also highly innovative in the ways he used the stadium. Seymour remembers Liegler saying: “A stadium is like a hotel, where we have to keep high occupancy. Our anchor is the Angels; the Rams will get us over the hump; and rock concerts will provide the gravy.”

Liegler was understandably in demand for other jobs, which he turned down steadfastly for 20 years. Then, in 1985, “the opportunity to help design a new convention center and put my life in better balance” influenced him to accept an offer from the city of San Diego, where he performs his magic today.

One of Liegler’s last acts was to usher the Freedom Bowl into Anaheim Stadium. It was the brainchild of a group of Anaheim businessmen who knew they needed a seasoned pro to elbow Anaheim into the college football bowl picture. They chose the 36-year-old director of the Sun Bowl in El Paso--Tom Starr.

About the only thing Starr knew about Orange County was that it practically never rained here, so, of course, the first Freedom Bowl game in 1984 between Texas and Iowa was played in a torrential downpour that started several hours before game time and never quit. All of this, of course, was duly recorded on national television.

Since then, the Freedom Bowl has prospered slowly but steadily, and in 1990 it will be augmented by a preseason game--one of only two sanctioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Assn.--that will match two of the premiere college football teams in the country. And that translates into megabucks for the city of Anaheim.

Right now, the city needs megabucks to pay for its long legal battle with the Angels. The lawsuit was finally resolved--more or less--on June 14, 1988, when Superior Court Judge Frank Domenichini handed down a decision complicated enough to enable both sides to claim victory. The decision bars development on the current parking lot without the Angels’ advance approval, which is why the Angels were suing. But the judge also ruled that any land left over after the Angels stake out 12,000 surface parking spaces may be legally developed by the city--which will theoretically make it possible to use 20 acres of the parking lot for a high-rise development.

Angels owner Gene Autry said in a statement after the decision was handed down that it was time to “bury the hatchet and stop the fight and (start to build) a harmonious, constructive relationship for the benefit of all.” None of the exhausted litigants appeared to quarrel with that suggestion.

So Anaheim Stadium heads into the final decade of the 20th Century with all the pieces in place that Rex Coons and Keith Murdoch once envisioned--and maybe a few more. Baseball’s All-Star game will be played in Anaheim on July 11, 1989, as part of the Orange County Centennial celebration. And as part of the all-star festivities, the stadium will unveil its new 100,000-square-foot, $6-million exhibition hall built on the concourse behind right center field.

Anaheim Stadium’s new general manager, Greg Smith--exuding the enthusiasm of Tom Liegler 25 years earlier--describes this new facility lovingly: “I want that other half of time when teams are on the road to be utilized, and we already have half of our available exhibition dates filled. But this new space isn’t just to make money; it’s also to provide a facility to the community we didn’t have before, a place to hold local consumer shows that don’t require the kind of space offered in the convention center.”

Smith has literally grown up with the stadium. He started there as a parking-lot attendant when he was an undergraduate at Cal State Fullerton in 1972 and has worked his way up in every facet of stadium operations. He has no intention of breaking the stadium’s record of continuous profit since the first year of the Rams. “But we can’t do it with the Rams and Angels alone,” he says. “We need our three motor sports events and occasional concerts and our exhibitions. That’s where stadium profits lie. And there’s one other thing that will be on my wish list till it happens: a World Series for Gene Autry.”

Greg Smith is solidly in the mainstream of the pioneers who created Anaheim Stadium and made it work. Tom Liegler still visits Anaheim often and says: “Every time I approach the stadium, I get goose bumps and feel so proud to have been a part of it.”

A year before Rex Coons died, he and Liegler met in front of the stadium and stood together, looking at it silently. “Then,” Liegler recalls, “we looked at each other and shook hands. We share memories that can never be measured in money. This structure grew out of a lot of handshake commitments among people who trusted each other--and themselves.”