Brian Wright was a senior at CSAS in 2010 when he wrote this. He fell in love with Engel Stadium when he broke into the ballpark one summer day out of curiosity. He made the restoration of Engel his senior project and continues to be a passionate advocate to this day. He’s never seen a baseball game there.
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When you sit in the stands at an empty Engel Stadium, you can almost see 24,000 people cramming into a stadium that only had 12,000 seats just for the slightest chance of winning a house in the middle of the Depression. You can almost feel the astonishment people felt when a 17-year-old girl struck out the “Great Bambino” and the “Iron Horse,” both legends among men.
You might almost imagine the sorrow an aging Joe Engel must have felt when his last attempt to save baseball in Chattanooga, “Save the Lookouts Night,” saw only 355 people see the final game of the 1965 season.
You need not have gone to games at Engel or even know its history to be blown away by the aura of the place. Its magic is what has kept it alive for a decade, despite neglect. Now, as the bleak reality of each day continues to depress us, Chattanoogans need Engel Stadium once again to make the little boy’s dreams come true and bring to life an old man’s memories of a much simpler time.
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### Joe Engel: The Man Behind the Stadium
Without Joe Engel, there is no baseball in Chattanooga. To know the history of Engel Stadium, you must first know its namesake.
A first-generation American, Joseph William Engel was born in the nation’s capital in 1893. He quickly fell in love with baseball and went on to sign as a pitcher with the Washington Senators. About his playing days, Engel was quoted as saying, “I led the league almost every year in wild pitches and stolen towels.”
After his playing days, Engel became chief scout for Washington, which made him the perfect choice for owner Clark Griffith to give Engel the job of finding and operating the Senators’ first minor league club.
Initially, Engel went to Atlanta with cash in hand to buy the Crackers. Then, for reasons still unknown, Engel backed out and came to Chattanooga, where he not only purchased the Lookouts but orchestrated the building of a state-of-the-art 12,000-seat stadium at the corner of East Third and O’Neal streets.
Engel Stadium would be one of the first to contain a press box on top of the roof, along with a hill built in deep center field, with the name “Lookouts,” and a rose garden at the apex of the hill.
By 1940, 10 years after becoming president of the Lookouts, Joe Engel’s legend grew to the point where he was featured in Time Magazine, being called “The Barnum of Baseball.”
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### Engel’s Stunts and Legacy
Before the first game was even played, Engel opened his doors and fed 11,000 Chattanoogans during the winter of 1929; the event became an institution during the Depression.
In 1931, Engel sold shortstop Johnny Jones for a 25-pound turkey, saying, “the turkey was having a better year.”
Engel’s greatest stunt came on April 2, 1931, when the great New York Yankees came to town for an exhibition. Engel wanted to take advantage of the moment, so he hired 17-year-old Jackie Mitchell, a girl who lived just down East Fourth Street, to pitch to Murders’ Row. She struck out both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig before walking Tony Lazzeri.
The next day, Baseball Commissioner Landis voided Mitchell’s contract, but Engel wasn’t done yet.
On May 2, 1936, the largest crowd in the Stadium’s history—24,639 people—showed up for the chance to win a house being given away by Chattanooga Times publisher Everett Allen. The holder of the winning ticket was not present at the game.
For weeks in 1938, Engel warned Chattanoogans of big happenings come Opening Day. Residents complained of hearing elephant noises late into the night, and on Opening Day the capacity crowd witnessed Joe Engel’s “Wild Elephant Hunt.” It was such a success, that Engel took it to ballparks throughout the South.
Even with all these antics, the Lookouts managed to win their only Dixie Series title in 1932, behind star third baseman Cecil Travis. Engel had put himself on the national stage, and his Lookouts were just as well talked about as any major league team.
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### Love for Chattanooga and Baseball’s Decline
Despite the fame, Engel loved the city of Chattanooga just as much as he loved the fame. He showed this by twice buying the club from the Senators when they attempted to dump the team.
However, as Joe Engel made his final attempt to secure a team for the 1966 season, only 355 people came to see “Save the Lookouts Night” on the final day of the 1965 season. Joe Engel’s magic was no more.
In his final days of watching baseball at the corner of East Third and O’Neal, Engel told friends, “When I die, I want to be buried beneath the LOOKOUTS sign in centerfield and I want the band to play, ‘Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone’”; it never happened. The “Barnum of Baseball” died on June 12, 1969.
Times columnist George Short memorialized him by saying, “Engel was the perennial jokester, a man whom everyday is Christmas and every night is New Year’s Eve. He loved people and it was contagious—they loved him, too.”
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### The Stadium After Engel
Engel Stadium would sit empty for 11 years. News Free Press columnist Allen Morris wrote in 1972 that “paint is peeling off the walls and seats, the floor is filthy, the roof is falling down, and it looks like a tornado hit the place.”
Then along came Woody Reid, a local businessman who agreed to pay for the $150,000 in needed renovations so long as an affiliate was found. Times Free Press columnist Ray Deering called Reid a “quiet gentleman who pursued ownership of the franchise just because he loved baseball and wanted it for the fans of Chattanooga.” Reid sold the team after three years, citing health reasons.
The Lookouts would be owned by five men over the next decade and a half and saw four different affiliates during this time before finally settling on the Cincinnati Reds in 1988.
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### Final Renovations and Frank Burke’s Era
The stadium underwent its final renovation to date in 1988; General Manager Bill Lee orchestrated the project that totaled nearly half a million dollars. Bleachers down the foul lines were replaced by the front office building down the first base line and a restaurant down the third base line.
In the winter of 1994, a young man from Maine with a degree from Harvard, whose father was president of Capital Cities, bought the Lookouts. Frank Burke came to Chattanooga and did things in a way that had not been done since the days of Joe Engel.
Burke introduced the Lookouts’ new mascot, the Trash Monster, brought two camels from the Zoo and put them behind the outfield wall, and then there was the pregnant donkey who delivered the game balls to the umpire.
However, there was a white elephant in the room: Engel Stadium.
“Finding Engel Stadium was a bit like falling in love,” Burke said years later, “Initially, you don’t see some of the downsides.” The downside was Engel Stadium was becoming so costly to keep up that Burke could not make a profit.
He agreed to fund a $10,000,000 ballpark if the city gave him the property on Hawk Hill, in the heart of downtown. Mayor Jon Kinsey agreed and, shortly after the 1,800th season ticket was sold in 1999, construction began on the Lookouts’ new home, BellSouth Park.
“Many Chattanoogans believed that Burke was desecrating the memory of Engel and the Lookouts and told him so,” wrote Ray Deering. Burke countered by saying, “I just thought it was our way to keep his legacy alive. If I sold the team, it would have been moved, no doubt about it. This is where the Lookouts belonged.”
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### Rediscovering Engel Stadium
For the past decade, nobody noticed Engel Stadium, but people are slowly being drawn back to their old home.
For over three decades leading up to the 1988 movie *Field of Dreams*, ballparks were being built like concrete monsters. Then, *Field of Dreams* and later Camden Yards in Baltimore made people fall in love with the intimacy that the game once offered.
“Ballparks were (once) built on a human scale,” said writer Lawrence Ritter, “that allowed spectators and players to share a common experience.”
In *Field of Dreams*, Terrance Mann tells the main character Ray Kinsella that people will come to his baseball field because it will be “as if they’ve dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces.”
He goes on to tell his friend that “the one constant throughout the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good and that could be again.”
Baseball is the perfect fit for this imperfect society we live in. A baseball park is the place where peace calls home. It is where, as writer Tom Stanton calls it, “we find our treasured memories and replenish our hungering souls.”
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### Memories That Bind Us
Tom Stanton had lived in Detroit his whole life, as had his father and grandfather. They had one common bond: Tigers baseball. So as the longtime home of the Detroit club, Tiger Stadium, marked its final season in 1999, Stanton set out to go to every game and discover why baseball fans feel so attached to their hometown ballpark.
He came across a fan who wanted to sleep at the stadium overnight, someone who snuck in one night to spray his father’s ashes throughout the field, and a broadcaster whose voice was the heartbeat of the stadium for nearly 60 years.
Stanton wrote, “This ballpark challenges the notion that you can never go home.” Some of his fondest memories of sunny days with his friends watching their heroes, and starlight nights with his father teaching him the game he would learn to love, were at Tiger Stadium. It was a place he could go and recapture life as he once saw it, when peace and happiness rang supreme.
“Old buildings bring life to stories,” Stanton wrote. “They put a foundation to memories. They link us to the past and help us feel rooted.”
Even without having grown up in a ballpark, Stanton makes the case that you can still feel the history in your veins and see the faces of fans living and dying with every pitch.
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### Engel Stadium: Chattanooga’s Heart
The way people feel about Engel Stadium is no different than what people felt about Tiger Stadium. For decades, Engel Stadium was the place to be if you were anyone in Chattanooga.
Not just to spend time with family and friends, but at every game you were assured to see something you had never seen before that would become the talk of the town.
And as children of the Baby Boom generation come back to the stadium, those memories still resonate.
“Engel Stadium is the place, more than any other, where childhood memories flood back,” said lifelong baseball fan Ray Deering. “Where childhood memories of my father and of my baseball heroes come flooding back to life as in a perfect dream.”
During his tenure, Joe Engel orchestrated his own “Knothole Gang” of young kids who, if they worked hard, he let them play on his field. It created lifelong memories for the children of Chattanooga.
While watching a baseball camp at the Stadium in October 2009, an older gentleman made it a point to say that he had played on the very same field in 1934, just like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig had.
People in Chattanooga have such a deep affection for Engel Stadium because it is a place where dreams were fulfilled, and if it were to be demolished, as former Chattanooga Mayor Kinsey put it, “We’d never get it back.”
Words and pictures cannot do justice to what Engel means to so many; writer Willie Morris called them “terrains of the heart.”
Lawrence Ritter, in his book *Lost Ballparks*, tried to explain it by saying, “Yesterday’s ballparks had their faults, no doubt, but they had magic as well, magic that will live for years in the memories of those who were lucky enough to have passed through their turnstiles.”
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### The Present State of Engel Stadium
However, many in Chattanooga would argue that Engel Stadium, though yesterday’s ballpark, is also today’s ballpark and tomorrow’s ballpark.
Today Engel Stadium still sits at the corner of East Third and O’Neal streets, just as it has since 1930.
As hundreds of people drive by it every day on their way downtown for work, they see the same ballpark they always have. But when one ventures inside the gates, the heart is broken.
Structurally, the stadium is safe, but it is barely clinging to life. Advertisements along the outfield wall that once brought energy to the park lie bare, instead displaying a tournament that took place over five years ago.
The awnings are torn. The wooden seats reflect more of a rainbow as they show the paint of every shade since the 1930s. The box seats have weeds growing from under them and spider webs connecting the bottom of the seat to its back. There is absolutely no plumbing and the roof is slowly falling apart.
The worst part of the stadium is the front office building, which is only a little over 20 years old. The windows are broken, toilets and sinks are on the floor, and it is a hotspot for the homeless.
The one part of Engel Stadium that remains intact is the field, despite the fact that there is a temporary fence shortening the distance to hit a home run.
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### Ownership and Future Plans
Over the past decade, the city of Chattanooga and Hamilton County have jointly owned Engel Stadium. They have been leasing it to Tennessee Temple University for their baseball team to use, under the condition they take care of the stadium.
In 2004, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga received a large donation to build a track and field complex and sought the large parking area outside Engel Stadium for the site.
The city and county agreed to transfer ownership of the parking lot alongside the Stadium under the condition that they allow Tennessee Temple to play their games there.
UTC still has not officially claimed the land because a strip of land they need for the complex is owned by the railroad company next door. A deal between the two parties was recently agreed upon, and the University is expected to take ownership any day now.
UTC has no intention to use, operate, or maintain the facility, so once they do take ownership, they will then lease the stadium to either Tennessee Temple or the Engel Foundation.
The decision UTC makes will alter the future of Engel Stadium for better or for worse.
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### Lessons From Other Historic Ballparks
There are two other baseball parks in America that have faced similar circumstances.
One was Tiger Stadium in Detroit, where devoted fans wanted to turn the stadium into street-level retail stores and multi-story condos, with the diamond preserved for youth baseball.
The City of Detroit gave the organization, Michigan and Trumbull LLC, a deadline to raise enough funds for the proposal. When the deadline passed without enough money, the city accepted an offer by a Sports Collector’s company to tear down the stadium and take what they wanted. Tiger Stadium is now a vacant lot.
The other example is in Birmingham, Alabama at Rickwood Field. After the hometown Barons left in 1988 to open a new park, the city didn’t have enough money to tear it down; so it sat and rotted.
Then, in 1992, the “Friends of Rickwood” organization was created, dedicated to restoring the historic ballpark. They raised $2 million and successfully restored the park to its original shape.
Since 1996, the Barons have played an annual “Rickwood Classic” throwback game, in addition to over 200 amateur games a year at the park.
“Friends of Rickwood said this is a treasure that needs to be saved,” said director David Brewer. “We think it’s a project worth doing. It’s become a cultural and economic asset to the city.”
So much so, that MILB.com says the “Rickwood Classic” is the best minor league event annually and 101 Baseball Places ranks Rickwood Field as the sixth best baseball attraction in the country.
Just a two and a half hour drive north from Rickwood lies Engel Stadium, where baseball has not been played since the Lookouts left in 1999.
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### The Engel Foundation and Revival Efforts
In April 2009, the Engel Foundation was formed to restore, preserve, and revitalize the historic stadium. Board member Ray Deering says he has hope in the success of the organization because “in the few months that the Engel Foundation has been in existence, so many people have shown interest in the revitalization process.”
Executive Director Janna Jahn compared two viewpoints saying, “Some people look at the Stadium as a problem, we see an irreplaceable community asset with a whole lot of untapped potential.”
When and if the Foundation secures the lease from UTC for the stadium, they are ready to begin raising money, restoring the stadium, and ensuring baseball is played there for many years to come.
Already in the Foundation’s short existence, they have managed to get Engel Stadium approved as a member of the National Register of Historic Places.
On October 30, 2009, they hosted a Great Spaces Open House where 100 people attended the first public event at the stadium in 10 years.
Corresponding with the Open House were two Legends Baseball Camps with over 200 kids; the events were orchestrated by former big leaguers Rick Honeycutt, Willie Wilson, Jay Johnstone, and Steve Trout.
These events, while minor, are just a stepping stone to the big goals the Foundation has for the near future.
Prior to the Engel Foundation, Tennessee Temple and the UTC Club Baseball team played at the stadium, and presumably they would continue to do so in the future.
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### Upcoming Events and Future Vision
In 2010, the Foundation plans to host another Legends Baseball Camp led by local resident and Los Angeles Dodgers pitching coach Rick Honeycutt.
Honeycutt, in partnership with the Foundation, is also planning on sponsoring a local chapter of the RBI (Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities) League, an initiative by Major League Baseball to promote the game in inner cities.
Plans are also in place for Dizzy Dean Baseball games and tournaments to be held at the site.
These activities are geared to fulfilling what Joe Engel thought was the purpose of his stadium. He wanted to make little boys’ dreams come true, and this is a way of helping to make that happen.
However, there is also an event planned that will bring the little boy out in all of us.
On June 27, 2010, the Lookouts will face the Birmingham Barons, a historic matchup between two longtime rivals. It will be of special significance because it will be played at Engel Stadium.
With Frank Burke’s blessing, the Foundation will host the game, receiving ticket sales and parking receipts, while Burke will collect the concession sales.
This event will not only bring attention to the Foundation and the stadium but will in turn create a flow of donations to further restore the stadium.
The “Throwback” game will be modeled after the “Rickwood Classic” with vintage jerseys and an old-time feel.
Engel Foundation executive director Janna Jahn says longtime fans “will be excited to come back to a place they love and have missed for a very long time.”
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### New Ideas for Engel Stadium
Going forward, it is hard to predict what other events can be brought to Engel Stadium, as there is little precedence for what the Engel Foundation is trying to accomplish.
The best way to honor the stadium’s namesake is to do something no one else has even thought of.
There is no better place in the world to start the first professional women’s baseball league than the place where Jackie Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth.
That would send quite a message to young women everywhere as to what is possible.
In New England and parts of California, the Vintage Baseball Federation League has been growing rapidly, with the backing of former pitcher and current author Jim Bouton and having been featured on *Late Night with Conan O’Brien*.
The league plays baseball just as it was played in the 19th Century (rules, jerseys, equipment, etc.); even the fans join in the act!
That can be done in the South too, in historic parks like Rickwood Field, Durham Athletic Park, and Engel Stadium.
These are two examples of unique ideas that can set Engel apart, and give it its own identity again going forward.
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### Honoring the Past
In addition to new and innovative attractions at the stadium, there is also a place where Engel needs to honor its past.
There are local collectors like Dan Creed and Andy Broome just waiting for a place to display their memorabilia.
There are also hundreds of artifacts in the Joe Engel Collection at the Baseball Hall of Fame that were donated shortly after his death.
What better way to honor the man, the team, the town, and the game than establish a Chattanooga Baseball Museum at Engel Stadium, a place that is a museum in itself.
Most importantly, Engel Stadium should be open to the public for free use when no other events are scheduled.
Rickwood Field has done this for years; every day fathers and sons and teenage friends come to play catch because it’s just that much better on the grand scale of a historic ballpark.
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### The Purpose of Engel Stadium
So, what is the purpose of Engel Stadium?
It is a case that cannot truly be compared to any other stadium.
There is no other city like Chattanooga and there is no other team like the Lookouts.
Writer David Lamb wrote, “The Lookouts remain as deeply ingrained in the culture of Chattanooga as barbecue ribs and bread pudding.”
Just the same, Engel Stadium is as implanted into the foundation of Chattanooga just as deeply as the Walnut Street Bridge and the Chattanooga Choo-Choo.
There is something about the stadium that makes you feel at home.
“I love the intimacy of the stadium,” said Janna Jahn. “There’s something about the curve of the seats and the wooden roof overhead that makes me feel nurtured and safe, connected not only to the game but to the other fans sharing it with me.”
It is a magical experience that makes us call a place “home” even though we don’t live there.
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### Dreams and Memories
There are two things in life that never fail to make us happy: dreams and memories.
The dream could be hitting a long drive to the deepest center field in the country, watching it roll up the “LOOKOUTS” hill as you round second, hustling to third, and diving head first into the bag to be called safe for a triple.
The memory could be of a warm Sunday afternoon, with the sun beaming in your seats down the first base line, with a glove in one hand and a hot dog in the other, your father by your side, watching ordinary people perform extraordinary feats right before your eyes.
These are, as Bart Giamatti called them, “The Green Fields of the Mind.” They make life worth living.
Engel Stadium has a literal purpose: to serve as a stage for people of all ages, genders, and sizes to play the game they love day in and day out, while teaching them about its rich history.
It also has a figurative purpose: to serve as a backdrop where we can look out onto an empty Engel Stadium and see Jim Lemon hit a mammoth home run over the scoreboard, or see Dick Sinovic get an inside-the-park homerun, or see a young kid full of life playing where his heroes played just hours before.
In the movie *Field of Dreams*, Ray Kinsella asks his father what heaven is like. He responds by saying, “It’s the place where dreams come true.”
Well, maybe Engel Stadium just is Heaven.
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