Ohio Farmer’s ‘Field of Dreams’
Unlike the character played by Kevin Costner in “Field of Dreams,” the voice that summoned Curtis Drummond didn’t come from a cornfield but from his heart.
“There’s baseball in every little boy,” said Drummond. “I never got to find out if I could hit the fastball or make the diving catch. My dad and the farm had other plans for me.”
Drummond grew up on the family farm half an hour south of Columbus. His father looked with disdain on sports. From the moment they awakened until the sun went down, the lives of Curtis and his five older brothers revolved around the farm. Only when he listened to the Cincinnati Reds games at night was he able to continue his flirtation with baseball.
“I never got to play Mosquito League or Little League or high school baseball because there was always work to do on the farm,” said Drummond. “Hearing all my little chums or buddies talking about the big game--never being a part of that--it hurt. It hurt a lot.”
When Curtis’ father retired in 1970, Curtis took over the grain farm. The summers were filled with planting, cultivating and harvesting the 1,400 acres owned and rented by the family. In the winters, no longer tethered to the day-to-day routine of the farm, Curtis would finish his work and drive a few miles to a nearby small town to play pickup basketball games.
Six years ago, at age 35, Curtis Drummond realized that he could do something about the years he had lost shagging flies and taking batting practice.
He built his own field.
“I decided to put a field right here on the farm so when I did get time to play ball I could,” he said.
First he picked a location, out near a shelter house his father had built. Other brothers had brought their dreams to reality nearby. One brother was an outdoorsman, so he built a lake and stocked it with fish, right next to a 30-acre woods. He had his own hunting and fishing area.
Another tinkered with miniature steam-driven trains. He built a mile-long railway around the farm, complete with a steam-driven locomotive.
Curtis carefully graded the land and crowned it to lessen the effects of summer thunderstorms. “We could get a two-inch rainfall and we could play on it in a couple hours,” he boasted.
The field was laid out to regulation softball dimensions with a dirt infield and grass outfield. One friend donated a home plate. Another gave an extra set of bases not needed by a local Little League team. Yet another provided an orange barricade fence for use as a home-run fence.
The final touch was a large metal scoreboard with slide-in numbers, a piece of Fenway Park in rural Pickaway County.
“We spent a lot of time and effort establishing a really good field,” Curtis said.
Players were not a problem: If you build it, they will come. Curtis invited friends and relatives, neighbors and acquaintances over for a few innings of slow-pitch.
Around 20 people--auto salesmen, city utility workers and farmers--meet at the field at 6 p.m. a couple of nights a week. They usually can play a couple of games before darkness falls. Afterward, they “drink a couple beers, sit around and just blow off steam,” Curtis said.
The games proved to be good preparation.
Curtis got married last September and for a wedding gift, his new wife Alice made arrangements for him to participate in the Reds’ fantasy camp. Maybe it was 20 years later than he might have preferred, but Curtis still got to meet and play baseball with such former Reds as Tommy Helms, Jim O’Toole and Joe Nuxhall.