Team Player Honored for His Dedication to Building Ballparks

Charles Hibbits, an 83-year old Camarillo man who organized volunteers nearly 30 years ago to build the city’s first two Little League ballparks, has been honored with a playing field in his name.

The Pleasant Valley Recreation and Park District dedicated the Hibbits Field at Pleasant Valley Park in Camarillo on Saturday as about 50 friends watched. A bronze plaque is on order.

A man characterized variously by his friends as a doer, an artist, a college-educated thinker, a “typical farmer-type,” and a man with “a heart as big as all outdoors,” Hibbits accepts little of the credit for his part in building the fields.

“Everyone worked on them, but of course they name it after me,” he said. “It was one of the finest community efforts in any city.”

But others, like friend and Camarillo businessman Bob Kildee, who spoke at the dedication, said Hibbits was a motivated leader as well as one of the chief workers on the project.

“Charlie loved people and he showed it by building the fields,” Kildee said.

Almost three decades ago, Hibbits helped form the Camarillo Youth Council, which organized fund-raisers, such as the “thieves’ market” to sell donated goods.

“We never actually stole anything,” Hibbits said. “But we were interested in anything that could be gotten for nothing.”

Hibbits, a commercial harvester of lima beans, negotiated with growers for cheap land to build the ball fields on Temple Avenue next to what is now Los Altos Intermediate School.

He attributed his success in buying the land with limited funds to being there at the right time; the lemon orchard he procured was old and the growers were ready to move, he said.

But friend Evadne Johansen, whose sons played ball on the fields Hibbits later built, attributed the acquisition to Hibbits’ power of persuasion.

“They just couldn’t say no to Charlie,” she said.

Hibbits and his young sons, Paul and Dave, drove the Hibbits company tractors through the field, pulling up the trees. Hibbits found people to donate or sell used materials for the backstops.

Hibbits helped found the Pleasant Valley Recreation and Park District in 1961, and was on the original board of directors.

In 1969, the district moved the original two fields that Hibbits helped build when the Los Altos Intermediate School was expanded. The school and the district now have an agreement to share the seven ball fields on school and park property, said Eldred Lokker, district general manager.

Until now, it was the district’s policy not to name fields after living people to avoid potential political conflicts, Lokker said. But the board of directors, on which Hibbits served for 10 years, made an exception for Hibbits, now crippled with arthritis.

“Charlie was one of the pushers,” Lokker said. “He was quiet, not showy at all but a very intelligent and educated man. He was a doer and he got other people out there to go along with him.”

Once the fields were done, the games became the big social event of the day, Johansen said.

“Charlie always used to say that baseball is a good sport because it kept the parents off the street,” longtime friend Kildee said.