The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wrigley Field once was in L.A.
Cubs used to train on Catalina Island from 1921 to 1951.
AVALON, CALIF. — Lolo Saldaña jumped on the Chicago Cubs’ bandwagon so long ago it may well have been a covered wagon.
When he was a child, a uniform belonging to Hall of Fame outfielder Hack Wilson was passed down to him. When he was a teenager, Charlie Grimm, who managed the Cubs to their last World Series in 1945, was impressed enough with Saldaña’s golf swing that he invited him to take a few grounders. And after he got out of the military and opened a barbershop, Saldaña used to cut the hair of Cubs owner William Wrigley III, whom he knew as Billy.
But Saldaña does not live in the shadow of Wrigley Field — far from it.
Saldaña made his connection to the Cubs in a bygone era, when from 1921 through 1951 the team regularly made its spring training home in this Santa Catalina Island enclave, about 30 miles off the coast of Los Angeles.
“Even though they were in last place most of the time, they were still a big thing for us,” Saldaña, 87, said last week while he clipped a customer’s hair at his barbershop, a short walk from the island’s crescent-shaped harbor.
As the Cubs resume the NLCS against the Dodgers, the franchises do share some surprising common ground.
Long before the Dodgers bolted west from Brooklyn, the Cubs planted their flag here among the palm trees, movie stars and ocean breezes. And in addition to spring training in Catalina, the Cubs’ presence in the area also included a top minor league affiliate, the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League, who for nearly 50 years played inside the ivy-covered walls of another Wrigley Field, just south of downtown.
In perhaps the most significant transaction between the teams, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley bought the Angels and the old Wrigley Field from P.K. Wrigley in 1957 for $3 million and a minor league team in Fort Worth, Texas. The deal gave the Dodgers a toehold in Los Angeles, expediting their move a year later.
It was P.K.’s father, William Jr., who, after making a quick fortune selling chewing gum, bought a stake in the Cubs in 1916. Three years later, he bought a controlling interest in the Santa Catalina Island Co., which owned the island and set about developing Avalon, improving its infrastructure and building hotels and the circular Catalina Casino.
By 1921, Wrigley commissioned Zachary Taylor Davis, a protégé of famed architect Louis Sullivan and the designer of Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park in Chicago, to build a $1.5 million ballpark for the Angels in Los Angeles at the corner of 42nd Place and Avalon Boulevard, along which a streetcar line ran.
This Wrigley Field opened in 1925, two years before it became the name of the Cubs’ home ballpark in Chicago. It held about 21,000 fans, featured a double-decked grandstand with terra-cotta roof tiles and a 15-story clock tower behind home plate. Lights were added in 1930 — 58 years before they were installed at Wrigley in Chicago.
“It was a beautiful ballpark,” said Dick Beverage, a Pacific Coast League historian. “At the time it was built, next to Yankee Stadium it was probably the best ballpark in the country.”
For years, there was little synergy between the Cubs and the minor league Angels, Beverage said.
But in Wrigley’s other ventures, there was a clear connection. When the Cubs trained on Catalina, the players were photographed taking part in the same activities a vacationer might — fishing, golfing, horseback riding, visiting the bird park or pottery factory — except that they were in uniform.
The photos promoted what was a new concept at the time, the all-inclusive vacation.
Catalina’s relative isolation meant that few other major league teams traveled here for exhibition games. Instead, the Cubs typically spent three weeks or so on Catalina getting in shape, then traveled back to Chicago through the Southwest by train, playing exhibition games along the way. They would also play exhibitions at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles.
The Cubs stayed closer to home for two seasons during the war, decamping to French Lick, Ind. They returned to Catalina after reaching the World Series in 1945, but it was soon becoming impractical. Florida was established as a spring training enclave, and teams were beginning to look to Arizona, where land was plentiful.
“I understand why they left,” Saldaña said. “They couldn’t practice against too many teams, and Mesa, or wherever it was, offered them enough land for five baseball fields.”
These days, there are few signs of the Cubs’ past on the island, which the Wrigleys turned over to a conservancy in the 1970s, shortly before they sold the team.
Several shops along the waterfront sell T-shirts, books and other remembrances of the Cubs’ time on the island, along with the W flags that are omnipresent at Wrigley Field in Chicago. There is also an exhibit devoted to the Cubs at the island’s museum and a plaque on the site of the old field, most of which is occupied by a modern city hall and fire department.
Nuzzling up to the history of the Wrigley Field in Los Angeles can be a chore. O’Malley swapped it with the city for land at Chavez Ravine, where he built Dodger Stadium. In 1961, Los Angeles got a second major league team, the expansion Angels, and they played their first season at Wrigley, where the cozy power alleys, 345 feet in right-center and left-center, helped set a record for the most home runs (248) in a ballpark until baseball expanded into the thin air of Denver in the early 1990s.
In 1963, more than 33,000 people packed the stadium for a civil rights rally that featured the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But by then the stadium had begun to fall into disrepair, much like the neighborhood around it. In 1969, it was razed to make room for a mental health clinic and community center.