That tiny patch of Iowa might well have been returned to corn production when the movie makers left town, but was not. It was preserved, haltingly at first, with nothing more than a rusted coffee can nailed to a post to solicit preservation donations, and now has become an industry, a revenue stream for both Iowa and big league baseball.
By Ed Breen
You have heard tell, no doubt, of the Field of Dreams, a simple baseball diamond carved from a corn field once owned by the Lansing family a couple of miles northeast of Dyersville, Iowa. You saw the movie, or read the book, or visited the place and maybe trotted around the bases, or saw it all on television when Major League Baseball came to call a couple of years ago and now seems to have set up housekeeping.
It took shape first in in the mind of W.P. Kinsella, a western Canadian by birth who developed a love for the American game of baseball and Iowa in the Midwest; baseball came first, then Iowa when he was honing the writing craft in the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, about 75 miles from the farm field in which the baseball field was built:
“Is this heaven?”
“No, it’s Iowa.”
In came together – the writer, the story, the place – in 1980 when Kinsella published “Shoeless Joe,” the fanciful story of an Iowa farmer who risks all to build a baseball diamond on which Joe Jackson — “Shoeless Joe” of the shamed 1919 Chicago White Sox, the “Black Sox” – might once again play the game from which he was banned for life.
Then, in 1989, came the movie, “Field of Dreams,” a retelling on screen by Kevin Costner, Burt Lancaster, Ray Liotta and of course James Earl Jones who, as “Terence Mann,” the fictionalized form of J.D. Salinger, delivers that finest of baseball benedictions.
Some will argue that the book was better than the movie, as is so often the case. Whole chunks of books get left on the cutting room floor. For instance, 91-year-old Eddie Scissons, who claimed to be the oldest living Chicago Cub, is absent from the screen. In print, he was buried in the cornfield ballpark in a Cubs uniform.
That tiny patch of Iowa might well have been returned to corn production when the movie makers left town, but was not. It was preserved, haltingly at first, with nothing more than a rusted coffee can nailed to a post to solicit preservation donations, and now has become an industry, a revenue stream for both Iowa and big league baseball.
But, not unlike a religious shrine, the mythical and mystical have endured, have somehow survived success and retain the essence of its origin: “If you build it, he will come.”
And that brings us to an early autumn afternoon a couple of years ago. Late September or early October; the corn crop forming the outfield wall had not yet been picked.
Youngsters from western Iowa piled out of a school bus and milled around the diamond, not so much as baseball fans, but as teenagers agreeing that this was preferable to the classroom at home.
A dozen or so older adults were more purposeful, recalling their own youth and the language of the book or the movie.
All was as it should be. The base paths were groomed and chalked. The small bleacher section from which, in the story, the Kinsella daughter, Karin, had tumbled, putting into motion so many things that could not be retrieved, was in place. Trinkets and soft drinks were being sold. And the outfield fence of matured corn loomed in the distance: 281 feet down the left field line, 262 feet down the right and 314 feet to dead centerfield.
It was just then, just as each vignette was playing out on these few acres of Iowa, that a fellow emerged from the corn rows — recall how the players came forth in the movie and how the flesh-and-blood Yankees and White Sox came from the distance that night in August of 2021. So it was with this fellow.
It was exactly from there that he had come on this autumn afternoon. He strode across the outfield grass, following the contour of the field. He was clad in blue jeans, a Cubs cap, pullover black golf shirt and the boots of a working man. Fifty, maybe 55; no more than that, a few extra pounds, but muscular arms.
He paused, settled in on the top row of the vacant bleachers for just a few moments to consider all this and what he might do.
As he approached, I saw a fielder’s glove on his left hand and another, folded and tucked under his arm. He has come here, he later tells me, from northern Virginia. A sad irony here: We didn’t exchange names. He was on a bucket list mission and I was dumbfounded.
This field, this experience has been on his mind for a very long time.
“Will you play catch with me?” he asks after trotting the bases. He’s winded.
“Sure,” I said. We meet about half way between first and second base. He tosses me the glove from beneath his arm.
“That’s important,” he says of the glove. “That was my dad’s glove. He’s gone now.”
I put on dad’s glove and pound my fist into the pocket, because that’s what you do.
“Lost him before we had a chance to get here.”
We toss the ball back and forth. Not much form and even less accuracy. But that’s not important. What’s important to both of us – the Virginian more than me – is that this is what Kinsella’s story is all about.
A little male chauvinism here. This is what most wives don’t get when they watch their husbands tear up watching the movie. It’s about fathers and sons and unfulfilled dreams and never having had that one day in the big leagues like Moonlight Graham had and it’s about stepping across that baseline like he did, knowing that there was no way on God’s earth to go back, ever.
It’s about baseball and Ray Kinsella and listening to James Earl Jones talk about the game and pronounce that word – base . . . ball – like it has never sounded before:
“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game — it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again. Ohhhhh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.”
And we walk to the foul line between home and first, the Virginian and me. And we – a couple of certifiable old codgers — seriously debate exactly were it was along this baseline that Terence Mann stepped over it, stepped onto the Field of Dreams and walked slowly and deliberately across the diamond, through centerfield to wherever those ball players went all those years ago.
Yes, we understand, we have . . . gone the distance.
Ed Breen has been an Indiana journalist for 50 years. He was a reporter, photographer and editor at the Marion Chronicle Tribune from 1966-1995, when he became Assistant Managing Editor of the Journal Gazette newspaper in Fort Wayne.
