1946 Material Added; 1954 Delayed

The work on the 1954 Western International League pages has come to a temporary stop again. There’s a web-site where I get the Tri-City material and it’s down for another weekend (it was up for 3 1/2 days last week). So, I’m working a bit on 1946 material on this page which will eventually be transfered to its own page. You can now go back and find:

• All but a couple of Clancy Loranger’s stories on the Capilanos games for the Vancouver News-Herald, and all of his columns dealing with the Caps,
• All of Alf Cottrell’s On the Sunbeam columns which dealt mainly with baseball,
• Daily standings through July 3.

Alf’s columns—there are eight or so—range from the light to the serious. He has one on Bob Snyder, another Clarkson has written for him, yet another deals with the horrific Spokane bus crash. And there’s one on the NIMBYs of 62 years ago upset at having a baseball park anywhere near their homes. Some things never change.

The columns are always interesting, and eventually, I’ll get around to posting Ken McConnell’s columns from the Province. What’s really cool is the sports cartoons I stumble upon. The Sun and Province always had great cartoonists going back before World War One. This one on your right (click on it to enlarge) accompanies McConnell’s piece I’ve posted from May 20, 1946. The cartoonist by this time is someone named Ray Tracy. This one uses some clever drawing tricks; to avoid trying to do a good caricature of Vancouver’s manager, he has him hidden. Brown is done from a profile shot of an old photo. Tommy Turner ran the Capilano Brewery at the time. The tattered W.I.L. pennant (from 1942) is a nice touch. My guess this cartoon’s supposed to deal with the Caps’ puny offence under Johnson, who finally had enough and walked away from the job in mid-season.

The standings, of course, have been a pain to do as it turned out there were a couple of late games not picked up by the newspapers so I didn’t know they existed. I think there’s still one W.I.L. game for which I cannot find a score. That’s in addition to the papers getting them wrong.

While adding the standings, I corrected some misspelled names in the linescores. But there are two names I’ve just left from the AP linescore; I can find no record of the players though I think I know who they’re supposed to be and made a note for that appropriate date.

I’m also going to flesh out a few of the Victoria game stories where there’s just a sentence. Sid Thomas had columns in the Colonist involving the Athletics, but I don’t think I’ll post any. All I’ve seen so far is constant spin (after a litany of the bad play of the previous evening) that management was doing all it could to make the team win. Unfortunately, he has no player profiles or funny stories or anything like that.

In the meantime, the 1954 page remains on hold as of August 23rd due to the availability problem mentioned above.

1954 WIL Season On-line

The first half of the soap opera that was the 1954 Western International League season can now be re-lived on the 1954 site (conveniently in the link tree to your right).

The second half is in draft form but I won’t be adding to the site until I can access some additional material and, right now, my source is down for repairs. I don’t know for how long.

Len Tran’s son Mark sent me this yellowed clipping from the Vancouver Sun. For at least one season, and maybe two, Jack DeLong composed a bunch of these rhymes about Capilanos players; if the microfilms at the local library weren’t so chewed up and were readable, I would have posted a bunch of them for ‘52.. The game in question was July 11, 1952 (click on the doggerel to enlarge). Lansdowne, by the way, was a race track of the day; my grandmother used to go there and said it was the best of the three local tracks. The site is now a large mall which bears its name.

1954 was the last year of professional baseball for both the popular Trans.

There are people stopping by this site after doing a web search on a specific player. Within the last week, some searches were done on Bob Moniz, Danny Holden and Virgil Giovannoni, among others. If you’re doing a search, please drop me a note and say hello, especially if you’re a former player or the offspring of one.

The Vancouver contingent of the Northwest SABR Chapter will be meeting on Saturday the 23rd at Capilano Stadium (now Nat Bailey Stadium) from 1-3pm. I’m hoping a few of the former Western International League players will be able to come again.

Emmett Ashford’s Quote of the Day

This little item finished out Dick Beddoes’ From Our Tower column in the Vancouver Sun of September 11, 1954.

Emmett Ashford, the only Negro umpire in organized baseball, and a graduate of the Western International League (Class of ’53), is now considered the toast of the Coast League. Now the rumor is out that he may pass to the majors next year. Asked by Emmett (Seattle P.I.) Watson how white ball players had responded to a colored arbiter, Ashford said:
“A good job done can change people’s minds about a lot of things. The better job I do, therein lies the good I can do my people. A good man’s example is better than all the soap-boxes ever made.”

1954 Site Underway

Well, if you head over to the 1954 page, you’ll notice it’s finally starting to get some content. There'll be four categories of material you’ll eventually see:

• Pre-season, beginning in September 1953.
• Spring Training (April 1954).
• Regular season.
• Post season and League folding.

So far, I’ve finished the pre-season and spring training game stories and roster moves, and have started on the regular season. The most interesting pre-season stuff (and there isn’t much) is the WIL meetings (where Bob Brown was summarily dumped) and Colonist sport editor Jim Tang’s All-Victoria WIL team. As the Tyees folded in the ’54 season, I don’t think he would have made any changes. And there’s lots on the Calgary soap opera.

Research for this blog involves, mainly, going through reels of a minimum of two newspapers at the library, as well as a couple of on-line sources, followed by transcribing of stories and columns. It takes time.

And what happened in that final year for the WIL?

Some of the season highlights you’ll read:
• Vain attempts to save the Spokane and Calgary franchises, which folded in June.
• Victoria finally succumbing to years of financial problems and little interest in baseball and packing it in at the start of August.
• Vancouver winning the crown over Lewiston.
• The league imploding almost immediately after the championship series.

Oh, and I may find some unexpected odd stuff.

There’ll be the day-by-day game highlights of the regular season, or at least (I hope) a linescore for each game, depending on what I can find.

After that’s done, I may take a breather, but I’d like to restructure some of the yearly sites and then start on 1937-1942, though it looks like most games will be limited to a score only due to an unfortunate lack of available source material.

Some Pictures From the Vancouver Capilanos

First, my apologies for not doing much with the blog lately (specifically, the 1953 season). I explained the situation in the post below and am overwhelmed doing other things. In fact, it was only last Thursday I had a chance to take in a game for the first time this season at Nat Bailey Stadium. And, unfortunately, my time to work on this will be limited for the forseeable future, notwithstanding the fact my old laptop I need to transcribe information is finally frapping out.

I've got the rest of the 1953 season in draft mode to put on that page. The problem is the standings have to be done for each game and the AP wire of the day royally screwed them up so I have to manually calculate them. And I want to flesh out some game stories and dig up a few missing linescores. That all takes time.

However, during the away-time I've received a couple of e-mails from Mark Tran. Mark's dad is Len Tran and his uncle is Ray. As WIL fans know, the Tran brothers were fixtures in the Vancouver Capilanos infield for several years and were probably the finest keystone combination in the city's history (though Lenn Sakata and Ed Romero had a good year in 1979). Mark has graciously sent me some photos which I'd like to share with you.

















This picture is of the 1947 Capilanos at Vancouver's Athletic Park, autographed by none-other than Mr. Baseball, Bob Brown. If you can't see the names, Len is at the bottom right and Ray is next to him. The team had some great players and won the pennant by percentage points and raindrops.

















A spring training picture from 1947 in Sunnyside, Washington. Len is on the left, and fellow Washington State boy Buddy Hjelmaa is on the right. Buddy played on several clubs in the league. Whether he's still with us, I don't know. Mark points out his dad had a spike wound under his nose.
The Vancouver Library has this and other 1948 spring training shots in its photo collection, but none specify who is in the picture. They were taken by Art Jones. They're in the public domain, so perhaps I should post some.

















Here are the 1948 Caps at Athletic Park. At least, I'll take the photo's word for it. But the background and topography don't look like Vancouver, even of the 1940s. There would be houses on three sides of the park and the north view would overlook downtown with the mountains in the background.
Len mentioned to Mark that the field went down hill (it was built on the hill coming up from False Creek). One of the columns in a Tri-City paper I've posted refers to this as well.

The one on the right's pretty self-explanatory. And 14¢! The current Vancouver Canadians programme goes for $5. Albeit, you get an article written by me. Hmm. Come to think of it, I got paid less than 14¢ for it. And you also get a nice piece from Kit Krieger on opening night at Cap Stadium in 1951 (with a box score that came from a certain blog), which also mentioned the Tran brothers.

Mark didn't supply this picture of the programme from the following year—I think I got it off eBay or something—but I don't think I've put it up, so here it is. The programmes certainly aren't as elaborate as what you find today, but there are shots of all the players and the previous year's stats; the basic stuff every baseball fan would want. Oh, and quaint ads for small local stores.





I'd like to thank Mark for taking the time to send these to me. If he decides to send anything else to share with you, I'll certainly put them up. Perhaps he can get his dad to send a note about how he was signed by the Seattle Rainiers and his musings of life in the Western International League (including his departure from Vancouver to Tri-City).

During the dead posting time, a nice e-mail came in from Jim Wert's son. Jim played first base with both Vancouver and Victoria in the WIL. Judging by various newspaper pieces I've put on the year-to-year blogs, he was much in demand.

Peace and Quiet in WIL-Land

You can see the blog has been quiet for almost two months and work has come to an abrupt halt on the 1953 game stories. It's certainly not for lack of interest.

About the time of the entry below, the Secretary of an organisation to which I belong was taken to hospital. He is having heart and breathing problems. He is now at home, but recovery is very slow due to his age. So I have assumed his duties as Secretary at his request until he's better. Which, I'm hoping, is by the summer.

I am also Secretary of three other groups and this, combined with a full-time job, has eaten up my spare time.

As well, one of my sources to obtain additional information was out of commission for about a month. So that didn't help.

Anyway, the gist of it is there probably won't be a lot of activity here until the groups I'm involved with take their summer hiatus and I can get back working on this again.

However, I've still been getting some nice notes via e-mail. One was from a newspaper in the Bremerton area which wants to use material here about the Bluejackets. It seems there isn't a lot of information about the old pro ball team there and now they can check out every game ever played here. And I was surprised to receive a kind word from legendary (and he really is) sportscaster and writer J. Michael Kenyon, now living in Oregon. I remember him being at KVI in Seattle (I think that was after he was at the P.I.) and if you want to know anything about old-time wrestlers, he's probably the guy to ask.

People have asked me about pictures. I'm afraid I don't have a picture or card collections (something tells me WIL bubble-gum cards wouldn't have been a huge seller) or anything; I'm sorry I don't as it would add a lot. It's a shame photos from newspaper archives in former WIL cities aren't digitised and available for viewing.

The WIL That Was Forgotten

When everyone thinks of the Western International League (and I know you all do constantly), they think of the league that was around from 1937 to 1954, interrupted for a few years because of the war.

There was a Western International League before that. It operated only in 1922. I've always thought of it as a new name for the Pacific Coast International League of 1921 which, more or less, was the old Northwestern League. But it appears the first WIL was something different. It appears to have been an attempt to merge the PCI League with the Western Canada League, which had attained B status by 1921. The WCL had clubs in various cities in the prairie provinces, including Edmonton, Calgary, Regina and Saskatoon.

I came across this wire story from 1922:

TACOMA, March 14—The Western International Baseball League will have only four clubs this year, Russell J. Nelson, business manager of the Tacoma Tigers, said today on his return from a league meeting in Calgary. Saskatoon and Regina were unable to enter the league under satisfactory conditions, and it was decided to perfect an organization with teams in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Tacoma, Mr. Nelson said.
A tentative four-club schedule is now in the making, and the season will open about May 1, with Edmonton playing in Tacoma and Calgary in Vancouver.
Directors of the league, Mr. Nelson said, agreed on a list of 18 players to June 1 and 14 thereafter.
Managers of the teams are announced as follows: Tealey Raymond, Tacoma; Gus Gleichman, Edmonton; Bob Brown, Vancouver and Bill Rogers, Calgary.

The first WIL folded in mid-season due to an odd set of circumstances. Baseball Commissioner Landis got POd at Bill Klepper, the owner of the PCL's Portland Beavers, who was also supporting the WIL's Tacoma Tigers. The Commissioner suspended him in a player tampering case, Klepper withdrew his support of Tacoma, and the league collapsed.

It seems odd that there was no pro baseball in the Pacific Northwest (other than the PCL teams in Seattle and Portland) for the next 15 years, but that's what happened until the WIL we all know was put together for the 1937 season.