Times are different than they used to be, for better or worse.
There was a time when, if you had water in a bottle, it was because you put it there for free. If you got a trophy, it was because you had to earn it. If you wanted to watch a baseball game, why, you couldn’t just sit inside and turn on the TV.
And it was then, as many aren’t even aware now, that Leavenworth had Minor League baseball. So prominent, in fact, were those teams that no fewer than 31 of their players were at one time Major Leaguers.
None today would remember those who played in Kansas’ First City around the turn of the 20th century, but there are some who could still envision the ghosts of summers past near what is now Ray Miller Park, where a stadium seating 4,000 people once stood. Wadsworth Park, as it was known, was home to the Leavenworth Braves of the Western Association from 1946-1949. It was only a C-level Minor League — comparable to what would now be Low-A — but Leavenworth’s team had a working agreement with the Boston (now Atlanta) Braves to farm some of their players through the system.
Several players ultimately married and settled here, and why not? The town had caught baseball fever. The first game on May 2, 1946 — preceded by a parade that all the kids were let out of school for — drew 2,800 people that seating hadn’t even been installed for yet. Willard “Buck” Elliott was the leadoff man for the Braves that day, and Ray Lippman batted cleanup, and to this day they still live in Leavenworth County.
“We had pretty good crowds here...” remembered Lippman, who married local girl Blanche Becher. “It was all the young people that really came out, and especially the women, with all those young boys out there playing, you know.”
“Right after the war, they didn’t have drive-ins, and they didn’t have TV,” said Elliott, who married Ruth Dawes, team vice-president Joe Dawes’ daughter. “They didn’t have anything to do but go to the ballgame.”
For Lippman and Elliott, who were respectively 21 and 23 years old at the time, it was about more than finding a place to make their life. It was about living the dream of a pro baseball player, and Leavenworth was the place to do it.
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The Braves weren’t the first pro baseball team in Leavenworth. That distinction belonged to a Western League team called the Leavenworth Soldiers, who played from 1886-1888. There were no farm systems for affiliations with Big League teams then, but nonetheless, the Soldiers had at least 19 one-time Big Leaguers, one of whom was Jake Beckley. “Eagle Eye,” as he became known, came to Leavenworth in 1886 at age 18, played for the Soldiers for two years, and by the time he was done with his MLB career in 1907, he’d amassed 2,934 hits and would day be inducted in Cooperstown.
Leavenworth would again get a team in 1903 in the Missouri Valley League, a D-Level league that moved up to C-Level the next year. Originally called the Leavenworth White Sox, that team would later be known as the Orioles, the Old Soldiers, and finally the Convicts. They played games at 10th and Shawnee — now known as Knights Field where the Immaculata football team practices — and had nine one-time Big Leaguers, one of whom was Kid Speer, who would one day pitch for the American League champion 1909 Detroit Tigers.
Speer, a 5-foot-9 lefty, came to Leavenworth in 1905 at age 19 and won 24 games for the Old Soldiers the next year. The 1907 Convicts didn’t fare so well, however. They had 14 players bat under .210, and the ace of the staff went 8-25 for a team that, as the most complete records available indicate, went 26-83 and eventually folded.
It wouldn’t be the last pro baseball experience for Leavenworth, though, as the lights of Wadsworth Park which lit up the First City’s nights brought the pros back 39 years later.
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Buck Elliott started professionally at age 18 in Welch, W.Va. in the independent Mountain States League, and he was soon sold to the Boston Braves and assigned to their team in Hartford. World War II took him away from baseball, though, and his bomber was shot down over Europe. He was held as a prisoner of war in a Nazi camp from 1943-45.
“Miserable,” Elliott now says of those years. “We lost a lot of weight, they didn’t feed us very well at all. ... What a German soldier (would have) out in the field, they were supposed to have that kind of food for you, but they didn’t.”
Ray Lippman joined the Marines at age 17 and was in the South Pacific for many of history’s transcendent battles. After growing up in Detroit, he came back to the US following the war and went to Tampa to try out for the Braves. They offered him a contract, and he said he believes he was the first player they assigned to Leavenworth’s new team in 1946.
“I had the world on a string,” Lippman said. “I felt like I could do anything, really. I was probably one of the fastest runners in the league. One of the reporters from Salina said, ‘If you want to look for speed, look at that Ray Lippman from the Leavenworth Braves. He could run in front of a deer and tell him what’s wrong with his pace.’”
Elliott was liberated a few days before the war ended and returned for the ’46 season, where he had to agree to be optioned to Leavenworth in a lower level of the Minors than he’d been before. His yearly salary that year was about $230.
“Everybody was just glad to be alive, I was for certain...” Elliott said. “They sent me to Leavenworth, and of course right away everybody said, ‘Yeah, you’re going to be in jail.’
“And this is the God’s truth, I got into this town on a train on a Sunday morning, and I got in a cab and said, ‘Take me to where the ballclub is...’ I go out there, and (the manager) says, ‘I’ll get you a uniform, Buck, and we’re going to play the prisoners at one o’clock...’ And so I was in that prison at one o’clock in the afternoon.”
Elliott and the Braves weren’t in jail for long, as they shined in their first season. The team went 76-56 and had an average home attendance of 1,175, meaning that a whopping six percent of Leavenworth’s population were there on a nightly basis.
“Trotting around those bases (after) you knock one over the fence here in Leavenworth,” Lippman said of playing in front of those big crowds, “it feels pretty good.”
Elliott made the Western Association All-Star team that year, leading the Braves in home runs and taking advantage of a cavernous right field at Wadsworth Park to the tune of a team-leading 14 triples. The next year he was promoted to Triple-A Indianapolis, but he only played a couple exhibition games, and was optioned down again before finishing his pro career in his hometown of York, Pa. in 1948.
Lippman moved on as well, playing in Topeka in ’47 and finishing in the North Atlantic League the following year. He worked all over the country afterward but eventually returned where the Braves had continued playing. In ’47 they had one-time Big Leaguer Joe Bowman as a player-manager, and he went 5-4 with a 2.96 ERA all while batting .275, but the team limped to a 50-88 record. One of those struggling players was 19-year-old Virgil Jester, who went 2-9 with a 5.97 but would one day have a career 3.84 ERA in the Majors.
The next year was better for the Braves. The most complete available records indicate 57 wins and 60 losses, as they were led by an 18-year-old Del Crandall, who hit .304 with 15 HR. Crandall would go on to play 16 years in the Bigs, winning a World Series ring and making eight All-Star teams, but without him in 1949, Leavenworth faltered. Their team HR total went from 83 to 17, ace Ralph Rosengarten went 7-17 after having gone 22-6 with a 2.30 in ’46, and the team finished a dismal 25-112. Still, there were 1,500 fans at their final game.
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The 1950s saw the advent of TV, and with it came a new way for baseball fans to see the game.
“It killed off a lot of the Minor Leagues,” said Elliott, now 87.
Even with pro baseball escaping the small towns in America’s heartland, however, Lippman said it was still a fine place to come back to and live out the rest of his life.
“You couldn’t beat this town, really,” said Lippman, 85. “It’s got everything close, right at our fingertips. Everything you want ... and you’ve got this history here, you might as well as flaunt it. ... That’s why we came back. There’s a lot of things here that you don’t have in other places.”
Though the days of pro baseball in Leavenworth are long gone, the memories endure. Most of Buck Elliott’s days are behind him now, but as he looks back and thinks about what was and what might’ve been, it’s hard for him to imagine his life without the summer days on buses to and from places like Leavenworth, living the dream of playing a child’s game.
“I really would’ve liked to have had a college education. I regret that I didn’t get one...” he said. “But at the same time I wouldn’t want to give the memories of playing ball.”
