West Bend's Field of Dreams

This year the local baseball teams in West Bend started to play ball on the new Carl M. Kuss Memorial Field at Regner Park but 100 years ago baseball was played in farm fields around West Bend. In his teens and early twenties (around 1915-1925), my dad, John Bohn, played on the Highway 55 baseball team made up of local farm boys from the West Bend area.

Dad lived in the same house that I did, just south of the city of West Bend on Hwy 55 (currently Hwy P). City teams were only for the guys who lived in the city proper. So, the farm boys were in their own league, playing other area farm teams. Some of the competing teams were the Richfield Badgers, Keowns, and Fuge Hardware.

The Highway Boys, as the Highway 55 team was fondly called, were mostly young men from the farms on Hwy 55. Hugo Minz, Lester Nehrbass, Dan Ollinger, and Dad and his brothers, Albert and Arnold, all lived on Hwy 55 within a mile or so of each other.

Dad used to talk about Glen Taylor and Clark Potter who were also on the Highway 55 team. I’m not sure where they lived, but they lived somewhere around West Bend. I guess they could get people from West Bend to play on the farm teams, but the farm team players could not play on the West Bend teams.

That changed over time, but during Dad's baseball years, that's how it was. The Highway 55 team did import a few players from elsewhere once in a while to round out the team, and they may have even had a few players from Milwaukee once in a while.

The area farm teams didn't have a real baseball field to play on, so they played in a farmer's cow pasture, as the cows had eaten the grass off short. My brother Tom recalled that the Highway 55 team had its home field at the Nehrbass farm, just down the road.

During this time, people mostly used a horse and buggy for transportation (a little bigger than the buggies the Amish use). Dad never said where they put all the horses and buggies during the games, but they must have had something figured out.

The games were all played on Sunday afternoons. Lots of people came to watch the game as there was nothing else to do and it was a good place to catch up on news with the neighbors.

I don't know if they stood, or sat on blankets, or if they brought old chairs with them to the games. I know at our farm, we always had old chairs that were for outside use, so maybe they just loaded them up in their buggies and brought them with.

The games were a big deal, and they were always exciting. The scores were reported in the local newspaper as the teams were all from the local area. Dad said in his day, baseball involved quite a bit of physical contact and games were rarely finished.

If there was a disagreement over a call by the umpire, the team that didn't like the call would just quit and go home. Even though officially no one won or lost, I’m sure each of the teams thought they won.

Sometimes there would be a physical fight that would break out. Living in small rural areas, there just weren't many ways to keep things under control during a ballgame. Those farm boys were tough. My Grandpa Bohn was an umpire in those days.

My brother Tom remembered that Grandma would tell us the story a lot about how one game got so out of hand that Grandpa was on the ground and got his throat stepped on. He couldn't talk for a week. He wasn't a big talker anyway, but it just goes to show how physical the games got.

My Dad's sister, Meta Bohn Wagner, saved newspaper articles about the Highway 55 team. This is a story that ran in the local West Bend newspaper in 1921:

Did Not Finish Game

The game of baseball played Sunday between the Richfield Badgers and the Highway 55 team of the town of West Bend ended in the sixth inning, the score at that time being 4 to 2 in favor of Highway 55. The Highway boys claim they had no chance to finish the game, the Badger fans chasing them off the ball field with bats. "Enough said, boys."

The farm teams had all the uniforms and equipment they needed. In order to raise money for the Highway 55 baseball team, Dad and his sisters did a little acting. I remember Grandma and Dad telling us kids that he, his sisters, Clara and Meta, and his brothers, Arnold and Albert, acted in some vaudeville skits and plays.

There was a tavern and hall in the little burg of Katzebach (now, Mayfield) where they performed. They also performed at Weinand's Hall at Keown's Corners and Franke's Hall in Cedar Creek. These types of little shows were common in rural areas at that time and were performed by local people in the side halls of taverns. Lots of taverns had small halls connected to the bar for the local people to hold celebrations, not real big.

There was an "Uncle Louie Show" that did live vaudeville performances in Ozaukee and Washington counties at that time (around 1920). After the show, the performers would play music for dancing. My dad and his sisters’ performances were similar to those of the Uncle Louie Show.

My dad, my aunts and some other local people would put on the shows in their locality. They put on these plays to raise money to buy uniforms and equipment. They didn't play the music after the show, they just did the acting. This was when they were young, before my time, so I never saw those shows, but Dad and Grandma told us kids about them.

A little later, in the 1930s and 1940s, one of the big baseball fans was a gentleman by the name of Fritz Heipp. He was part of West Bend and everyone knew him. He would go to every baseball game played in West Bend. He had a real booming voice and was very verbal, in a good way. He was a single man, never married, with a deep voice that you could hear a long way off.

I guess his family ran a grocery store in West Bend, Heipp General Store at Fifth Avenue and Walnut and he would make the deliveries for them. He would make the deliveries with a horse-pulled wagon all over town. At this time, when I was a kid, automobiles were beginning to become common, but you could still have horses in town. Fritz Heipp kept his horse in a barn somewhere. I think it was at the horse dealer across from the back of where Tennies Hardware is today.

My dad was always a big baseball fan, too, so he would take us to games even when I was just four or five years old. That's how I got to know about Fritz Heipp. Dad knew most of the players on the West Bend teams and he continued to go to games until he passed away at 90 years of age.

During those early times, the official ballfield in West Bend was at the West Bend High School, now Badger Middle School. Baseball games in the city were played there until the ballfield at Regner Park was dedicated in 1939.

The baseball field we went to as kids with Dad was at the old West Bend High School, near Oak and Sixth Streets, behind the school building and to the north of the drive that now comes off 6th Avenue. The school building at that time was nowhere as big as it is today.

A small creek ran through the outfield and formed a pond on the outer edge of center field (maybe an acre or two of water). The batter would hit towards the pond and if it was a good hit, it would put the ball in the pond.

When this happened, the fielder would have to wade in to get the ball and the game would go on. The pond was shallow, at least where the ball would land, so the fielder would just walk in with his shoes and socks on and play the balance of the game with wet feet.

Sometime later, the creek was put in an underground pipe and the pond was filled in. Once the Regner ballfield was built by the WPA program, Dad would take us to games at Regner Park. We’d sit on the bleachers and root for the West Bend team.

Today, West Bend has several new modern baseball fields. A lot has changed from those days 100 years ago when games were played in the farm fields of Washington County. Those were the days of the real Field of Dreams.

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