Baseball Rooted in Fullerton Site

Pittsburgh outfielder Paul Waner stood at first base on a sunny March day in 1938, chatting with Portland first baseman Bill Sweeney.

It was a routine moment in a spring training game, but a photographer, his name since lost to time, captured it and provided what is now a vivid example of the history that surrounds Amerige Park.

People have been playing baseball at Amerige, earlier called Commonwealth Park, for nearly 70 years. It has survived a fire, a bout with termites and--very early on--municipal disagreements that threatened to keep it from being built.

Amerige Park, at the southwest corner of Commonwealth and Highland avenues, is also the site of the Fullerton Senior Multi-Service Center, basketball and tennis courts, horseshoe pits, a shuffleboard area and picnic tables under a variety of mature shade trees.

A frame building which bears the sign, “Amerige Brothers, real estate, loans, insurance,” and the date of 1887, sits adjacent to the left field stands. The building, now used as part of the senior center, was moved from its original site on Harbor Boulevard in the 1950s.

Fullerton High School had been built at Commonwealth and Highland in 1910, but burned to the ground two years later. The first talk of placing a ballpark there was raised in a City Council meeting at that time.

It was proposed that $3,831 be spent to develop the corner as a park. City leaders did nothing then, some saying the expense was too great for recreational use, and it remained undeveloped until the late 1920s.

Fullerton resident Lee Kavanagh, now 73, recalls, however, that he often went to the park with his father “around 1928 or 1929.”

“It was just a lot that was used for baseball,” he said last week. “No stands. No fences. There was a cornfield there. But all the ballplayers in town came there to play.”

By 1933, Kavanagh was attending Anaheim High School and was playing on Sundays at a still-undeveloped Amerige Park. He remembers that baseball was more of a year-round activity than it is today, saying “we could play all winter and only have maybe two rainouts.”

Development was not far away.

A businessman and baseball fan named Charles McGaughy had proposed construction of a covered grandstand, outfield fences and other features of a modern ballpark in 1932. Home plate was moved from the southeast corner of the lot to the southwest, where it remains today, and the stadium was built in 1934.

Retired Fullerton firefighter Roe White was on the first team to play at the new Amerige Park. Prompted by McGaughy, who was to be the team’s first manager, Orkins Department Store in Fullerton supplied pin-striped wool flannel uniforms. In three-inch letters, the shirts read “ORKINS DEPT. STORE FULLERTON,” but newspaper accounts of their games usually referred to them only as the Fullerton Merchants. In their first game, on April 25, 1932, the Merchants defeated a team hastily put together for the occasion, 7-4.

Southern California was a primary spring training site for major league and minor league teams at the time. No big-league team ever trained at Amerige, but the Hollywood Stars of the Pacific League held their spring workouts there in 1935.

A newspaper article on Nov. 6 of that year reported on an agreement between the City Council and the team for use of the park the following spring.

“Expenses figured on the basis of $35 a week,” the article read, “resulted in an agreement to permit Hollywood to use the field five weeks for $175 with an option for an additional week.”

The team did return in 1936, but by then it was no longer in Hollywood. It had moved to San Diego, as the first club to be called the Padres.

The Philadelphia Athletics trained at La Palma Park in Anaheim from 1940 through 1942; the Chicago White Sox were headquartered in Pasadena from 1933 through 1942; the Chicago Cubs held their spring workouts on Catalina Island from 1922 through 1942; and the Pittsburgh Pirates were in San Bernardino from 1937 through 1942.

It was because the Pirates were in San Bernardino in 1938 that they happened to be playing Portland on March 31 of that year, when the photo of Waner and Sweeney was taken. But Waner, a member of baseball’s Hall of Fame, is only one of many stars to have played at Amerige.

White, the retired Fullerton fireman who celebrated his 85th birthday last week, recalls that Hall of Fame members Walter Johnson, Arky Vaughan, Satchel Paige, Joe DiMaggio and Bob Lemon all played there, as did a likely future Hall of Fame member, Gary Carter.

New York Yankees star Joe DiMaggio and his brothers, Vince and Dom, played in exhibition games in the 1930s when they were still with the San Francisco Seals.

Johnson, who attended Fullerton High School and starred with the Washington Senators, played exhibition games at Amerige late in his career. Paige, who pitched in the old Negro Leagues and then went on to the majors, often participated in post-season “barnstorming” games at Amerige, White remembers.

Vaughan, a Fullerton High School star, had played weekend ball with White as a member of the Merchants. He went on to play for the Pittsburgh Pirates and hit .318 in 14 seasons in the big leagues. Lemon, later a star pitcher for Cleveland, was a third baseman from Long Beach when he played at Amerige as a teen-ager.

“A man named Vern Wilkerson got together $1,200 to bring Satchel Paige’s team to town,” White said. “Paige, who was the star of the team, got $500 and the rest of the team split the other $700.”

In all, according to baseball historian Bill Weiss, Portland trained at Amerige from 1937 through 1940. The Sacramento Solons were there in 1941, 1942 and 1944, and the Los Angeles Angels (who share nothing more than a nickname with the current American League team), trained there from 1946 through 1955.

The Vancouver Mounties were there in 1956, their first year in the league, and the San Francisco Seals were the last PCL team to be based there, in 1957, their last year of existence, before the National League came to Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“When the Angels trained at Amerige,” White said, “some of the rookie players stayed at the fire station. The veteran players stayed at the Fullerton Hotel at Harbor and Wilshire. “We (the fire department) were over on Wilshire Avenue then, and we bought 14 beds. We would charge the players $1.50 a night for a bed. We would then take the money and buy things for the department.”

Amerige Park also was the site of a major motion picture of the time, “Alibi Ike,” which was filmed in 1935 and starred comedian Joe E. Brown as a baseball player. Coincidentally, Brown later became a part-owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

In 1951, when Pacific Coast League teams were still using Amerige, additional grandstands were constructed. By this time, the diamond also was being used for high school and collegiate games. Cal State Fullerton’s Titans continue to play their home games at Amerige Park today while they await completion of an on-campus stadium.

In 1965, a portion of the wooden grandstand was removed because it was discovered to have termites and was declared a fire hazard.

By this time, the minor league teams were gone, but youth league teams were using the field regularly, and it also was being employed for soccer.

Several Fullerton officials began calling for its restoration throughout the 1970s and into the early ‘80s, but a lack of grant funds was cited in 1985 as the reason for the delay in beginning the project.

Four years ago, the City Council approved a $1.4-million rehabilitation, and in July of that year, a fire set by vandals destroyed what was left of the historic grandstand. Since the area that burned was about to be demolished, no dollar figure was assigned to the loss.

The rehabilitation continued, and the park was rededicated on July 18, 1989. The grandstands, ticket booths and fences are new, but flagstone and mortar pillars, called “pilasters,” still surround the field as they did in 1934.

A bronze plaque, marred by gang graffiti, declares that the ballpark is now Duane Winters Field, named for a former mayor of the city. But to most of the people who played there, the landmark stadium continues to be known as Amerige Park.