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GOLDEN YEARS : Anaheim’s Glover Stadium Celebrates 50 Years of Treasured Sports Memories

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Times Staff Writer

Joe DiMaggio played there with the Santa Ana Air Base team during World War II.

Connie Mack brought his Philadelphia Athletics there for spring training in 1940. Mack later told The Sporting News it was the best spring training site he had used in 50 years in baseball.

The St. Louis Browns trained there in 1946. Many of the stars of the Pacific Coast League in the late 1930s and ‘40s played there during spring training, including Johnny Vander Meer, who pitched consecutive no-hitters for the Cincinnati Reds in 1938.

The baseball and football stadium at La Palma Park in Anaheim is not unlike a museum: It doesn’t look special from the outside, but it’s filled with history--50 years of it, to be exact. La Palma Park celebrates its golden anniversary this year. The stadium--best known today as Glover Stadium--opened in March of 1939, and the rest of the park in August.

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Many of the best high school baseball players in Orange County have played on La Palma’s field, including Mike Witt of the Angels, Gary Carter of the Mets and Royals’ minor leaguer Bob Hamelin. The stadium has played host to the Orange County high school all-star baseball game the past 22 years.

“The place just has a mystique about it,” Cypress College baseball Coach Scott Pickler said. Pickler, who grew up in Anaheim, played American Legion games at La Palma and later coached his Loara High School teams there.

“I remember when we would host the Loara tournament and we would play the first game of the season there,” Pickler said. “The field looked perfect. It was like we were the first ones to ever play on it.”

The stadium, one of the few multipurpose stadiums for non-professional teams, is maintained by the city of Anaheim’s parks department.

In 1937, area merchants decided some vacant land in north-central Anaheim would be a perfect place for an automobile junk yard. After all, about all that happened there were some Valencia Orange Growers’ Assn. shows and an occasional flood.

The city council, however, thought a rusty pile of cars and scrap parts would be an ugly border for the city, so it decided to ask the federal government for money to build a park. The Works Progress Administration program provided the funds, plus 63 workers.

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Construction began Dec. 16, 1937. There were a few early delays, one to remove nearly 1,000 feet of irrigation pipe that had been unexpectedly unearthed. About a fourth of the work was completed by March of 1938, only to have a fierce storm hit.

The project resumed in early April and grass was planted in June. In July, the Anaheim Chapter of the Lions’ Club held a picnic and grass-cutting party at the park.

The stands and the locker rooms below the stands--which are still in place today--were completed in early 1939. By March of 1939, the baseball field was ready for the opening ceremonies.

During construction, the city held a contest to pick a name for the park.

The only criteria was that the name “publicize Anaheim’s fame as a city of gracious living.” The city council selected La Palma, which is Spanish for The Palm.

The stadium has since been renamed twice. In 1971, it was changed to Glover Stadium after Richard Glover, who was an assistant and head football coach at Anaheim High School from 1931 to 1957. He then worked for the school district as a curriculum coordinator until 1971. He died shortly after retiring.

It was renamed Dee Fee Field in 1987, in honor of Dee Fee, who worked in several positions for the Anaheim Parks Department from 1937 to 1987. Fee is retired and lives in Anaheim.

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“I have a lot of memories of the field,” Fee said. “I was lead worker there for quite a bit of time. It was an honor to have my name put on it.”

The first baseball game at La Palma Park was March 12, 1939. It was a Pacific Coast League spring training game between the Seattle Rainiers and the Sacramento Senators. Sacramento trained at La Palma that spring and played 10 games there. Fans could get a season-ticket book for $3.50 or pay 35 cents a game.

Seattle won the first game, 11-9, in front of about 3,000 fans who filled the stands behind home plate, as well as bleachers down both foul lines, where the bullpens are today. Harry A. Williams, then secretary of the Pacific Coast League, wrote in the Anaheim Bulletin after that first game that if you closed your eyes, it was like being at an opening day in New York or Chicago. That was how nice the field was.

The field, 375 feet down the foul lines and 440 feet to center, remained untouched until 1956.

The park was changed that summer, largely because of the success of the Anaheim High School football program under Coach Clare Van Hoorebeke.

As Anaheim High School grew in size and power, the school needed a place to play that could hold more spectators than the temporary bleachers in the outfield.

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The city council decided it would be cheaper to add grandstands to La Palma Park than to build a football stadium somewhere else.

The grandstands were built across the outfield from left field to right-center, cutting down the once-sizable outfield. Home plate was moved back 20 feet, taking the large foul-ground area and turning it into one of the smallest of any park in Orange County.

The grandstands are nearly 300 feet long, 38 rows deep and as tall as a three-story building. It’s now 370 feet down the left-field line, 352 to center and 359 down the right-field line. The left-center field power alley is only 342 feet.

“I remember the workers were sure under the gun those last weeks,” Fee said. “They had to get the stands done for the first football game.”

Anaheim played Redlands in the first high school football game in front of the new stands, Sept. 21, 1956.

A small story in the Anaheim Bulletin that day asked people to car pool if possible because parking was limited. Now there is a parking lot across Anaheim Boulevard behind the stands.

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A sellout crowd of more than 9,000 saw Anaheim defeated Redlands, 6-0, that first night and the audience also saw the beginning of the park’s most famous legend.

A senior running back--Mickey Flynn--had the game’s only score, a 71-yard touchdown run late in the fourth quarter. After a few games there, he was being called the Ghost of La Palma. He was given the name by the then-sports editor of the L.A. Mirror, Sid Ziff, because Ziff said he was so hard to tackle.

But another version of how the nickname started has circulated around Anaheim for years.

The lighting on the field was not the best back then, and Flynn could disappear into the shadows along the sidelines, then reappear again downfield on his way to a big gain. Flynn averaged 13.8 yards a carry and had 3,681 yards in his three seasons at Anaheim.

High school football games usually involving either Anaheim, Katella, Magnolia, Loara or Savanna are still played at the stadium three nights a week in the fall and community college and college football games also have been played there.

Cal State Fullerton played two football games there in 1983. The Titans were scheduled to play at Anaheim Stadium but because of rain, the city of Anaheim moved the games to La Palma to save wear on Anaheim Stadium’s field.

A prolonged rainstorm forced Fullerton to move its Nov. 12 game against Nevada Las Vegas to La Palma. The game was little more than a sloshing contest and the teams also got into a bench-clearing fight at the end of the game that included players, coaches and trainers and a lot of mud.

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“When we got there, the whole field was covered with water,” Cal State Fullerton sports information director Mel Franks said. “Las Vegas ended up winning because Randall Cunningham (Las Vegas quarterback, now with the Philadelphia Eagles) could shotput the ball better than Damon Allen. It was too wet and muddy to throw it.”

Besides football and baseball, the stadium has played host to soccer games, rodeos, a circus, high school graduations and the annual Anaheim Halloween parade.

“One time, someone was complaining about left field,” Fee said. “They said it looked like an elephant had played out there. And you know what, they were right. The circus had just left town.”

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