Stadium’s Baseball Roots Go Back Half a Century

With its shady trees, barbecue pits, benches, covered picnic shelters and new playground equipment, La Palma Park seems a convenient and attractive place for a family outing.

An urban oasis, as the clich e goes. A place to tune out the stresses of whatever is causing people stress these days.

But on the south side of the triangular park, the angle defined by the east-to-west La Palma Avenue, there is a baseball stadium whose history in the sport goes back more than half a century.

Today, it is used for high school football, baseball and soccer. In the 1940s, it was the spring training headquarters of the Philadelphia Athletics and, a few years later, the St. Louis Browns, now the Oakland Athletics and Baltimore Orioles, respectively.

The legendary Connie Mack, who owned and managed the Athletics for 50 years, called La Palma the best training site he had ever seen.

The area now occupied by the park was first used as a swimming hole in the 1880s and ‘90s, largely because the Santa Ana River often overflowed its banks, according to a 1939 newspaper account.

About 1920, then in private hands, the property became the site of the California Orange Show--a kind of fair--and a golf driving range. In the 1930s, when the owner wanted to turn it into an auto wrecking yard, the city acquired it in a trade for other property.

In the mid-1930s, Anaheim’s park superintendent, Rudy Boysen, and landscape architect Ralph Cornell convinced the City Council that a community park was needed. Boysen, already known for having developed the berry now named for him, contacted the WPA, a Depression-era jobs program, and the stadium was designed.

Ron Robertson, the current park services manager, said that a 1938 flood that left the project under four feet of water caused major damage to the half-built park and set the timetable back considerably.

Work resumed a month later and the Seattle Rainiers of the Pacific Coast League accepted the city’s offer to establish a spring training base there. On March 12, 1939, with more than two dozen mayors, other politicians and chamber of commerce representatives on hand, the Sacramento Senators, also of the PCL, defeated Seattle at Anaheim before a capacity crowd of 3,000.

Before heading back to the Pacific Northwest, the Rainiers played 10 games in Anaheim, facing league rivals Hollywood, Los Angeles, Portland and Sacramento, all of whom trained in Southern California. A book of 10 tickets cost $3.50.

In 1940, Anaheim officials convinced the Philadelphia Athletics to train in Orange County. While other major league teams had worked out in nearby Long Beach, Los Angeles and Hollywood, none had ever been in Orange County. The Chicago Cubs trained in Avalon, the Chicago White Sox were in Pasadena, and the Pittsburgh Pirates were in San Bernardino. With several minor league teams also still in the area, it seemed a perfect location.

The Athletics set up in the Angelina Hotel, were guests at an Anaheim Elks Club dinner, and Mack told an Anaheim Gazette reporter late in February, 1940, that the park “is the greatest setup my club has ever had in a training camp.”

The Athletics returned in 1941 and in 1942. But World War II had begun, and teams were forced to cut back on spring training in 1943 for the duration of the war.

After the war ended, the Athletics went back to train in Florida. The St. Louis Browns trained in Anaheim for one year, 1946.

La Palma Park had its own regular-season team for just more than a year. Before TV brought major league baseball into everyone’s home, minor leagues flourished in every state of the country and even spilled over into Canada, Mexico and Cuba. The Sunset League was established in 1947 with teams in Riverside, Ontario, Las Vegas, Reno, El Centro and Anaheim. The Anaheim team was called the Annies. Nobody knows if the name was a factor, but the Annies drew only 16,452 fans in about 70 home games--an average of fewer than 250 a game.

Early in 1948, when Anaheim got off to a similar slow start at the gate, the team moved to San Bernardino. It finished in last place, and the Sunset League quietly went out of business in 1950.

The Hollywood Stars of the PCL made La Palma their spring training site for several years before the Brooklyn Dodgers moved west, keeping their spring training site in Florida and putting the Stars out of business.

Amateur and semi-pro baseball teams used the baseball diamond for several years, and, in 1956, with enrollment in Anaheim high schools growing, it was enlarged and remodeled to hold football games as well. The early redwood bench seating was replaced with metal seats, lighting has been improved from time to time, and an electronic football scoreboard was installed.

The park has undergone a number of changes. A 90-foot by 220-foot concrete-bottomed casting pond was part of the original development in 1939. It was used for model sailboat regattas and was stocked with fish. Children caught the fish with barb-less hooks and then returned them to the pool.

About 20 years ago, perhaps with interest in model sailboats and casting at an ebb, the pond was replaced by additional parking.

Toward the north end of the park, car clubs hold shows, recreation vehicles are exhibited, and carnivals and benefits--such as Cinco de Mayo festivals--are held.

Curiously, the park has three names. Everything bounded by La Palma Avenue on the south, Harbor Boulevard on the west and Anaheim Boulevard on the north and east is known as La Palma Park. When the stadium is used for football, it is known as Glover Stadium, in honor of the late Dick Glover, former Anaheim High school athletic director.

When it is used for baseball, it is called Dee Fee Field, for Dee Forrest Fee, a 49-year Anaheim parks employee.

Connie Mack died 35 years ago. The Philadelphia Athletics left that city nearly four decades ago and--after a stop in Kansas City--have been the Oakland Athletics since 1968. The St. Louis Browns have been the Baltimore Orioles for nearly four decades. The Hollywood Stars and the short-lived Anaheim Annies won’t be found in any telephone book. Neither will Anaheim’s Angelina Hotel.

But La Palma Park/Glover Stadium/Dee Fee Field, with its cast concrete WPA exterior recently painted, its updated stands and scoreboards, is still important to Anaheim.

Ron Robertson, the park services manager, sees the field as an integral part of an expanded La Palma Park. While Anaheim, La Palma and Harbor limit its expansion to the south, east and west, a small amount of land on Swan Street, just north of the park, is being studied by city officials.

“Ideally,” Robertson said, “we’d like to acquire the land to the north and have a whole sports complex--soccer, softball, everything. It’s very much in our long-range plans.”