(Archival photo/Rene Torres)
By RENE TORRES
As the summer of 1937 approached, the crack of the bat and the smell of leather were in the air. America’s game became the center point of almost every community in the Rio Grande Valley, which played a role in one of the most popular forms of entertainment of the era.
Sunday afternoon double headers drew healthy crowds, which were not only there to root for the home team, but to participate, one might say, in a cultural center environment.
According to the Raphael and Virginia Galvan Papers [Texas A&M Corpus Christi], “The ballparks throughout Texas were where people registered to vote, citizenship information was distributed, union dues were collected, war bonds were sold, and where announcements were made of economic boycotts of downtown businesses that refused to serve Mexican Americans.
And, yes, the bleacher landscape provided for the opportunity for money to change hands, as wagering was part of the baseball culture, as it is today.
Juan Coronado, PhD., wrote, “The sport became, in many ways, a focal point and a fundamental component of the social fabric that influenced the development of South Texas.”
Realizing that baseball was a good proposition, not only for fans, players, and the city, the San Benito Kiwanis Club invested $2,000 in re-constructing the old ballpark.
It was towards the end of the Great Depression that such an amount was spent, which had the equivalent purchasing power of about $43,800 today.
Opening ceremonies began with a parade through the business section of the city leading to the ballpark. Prior to the game, which started sharply at 3:30 p.m., Mayor E.L. Barmore threw the traditional first pitch.
The park was adorned with a new fence, grandstands, an improved playing surface, and lights so that games could be played at night too. The softball games started a week prior, but Sunday’s game was the first hardball encounter of the season.
San Benito, for years, had been a good baseball town, but since the storm of 1933 wrecked the regulation baseball park— the only available field at the time was at the old softball park at the end of North Dick Dowling.
The Deltas had a solid bunch of boys in their line-up that included Pena or Pequeno swinging a mighty hickory, Brown at first, Vera or Hewlett at second, Cadena at third, Lopez at short, and Pigott, Contreras and Tijerina in the outfield.
San Benito had a steep history of baseball going back to the early 1920. It was then that the San Bene saints dominated the diamonds of the Rio Grande Valley.
Baseball spread from the grassroots, and progressed steadily with the growth of America. The appearance of America’s pastime inaugural game in the Rio Grande Valley was played in Brownsville in 1868. The encounter pitted the Rio Grande Valley baseball team from Brownsville against the Union boys from Matamoros. The boys from the other side of the river won, 49-32.
By 1940, the RGV girls, including the Kiwanis and Mexican American girls from San Benito, took center stage. They filled the vacuum left behind by the men who rushed to join the war effort. Hardball games took a pause until after the conflict, so the Valley girls left the kitchen behind and organized fast-pitch softball teams.
Their games became extraordinarily popular, attracting hundreds of fans to the diamond. In one case, there were 2,000 fans witnessing an encounter between the San Benito Kiwanis versus the La Feria Bombers. The Valley girls kept the ball rolling for the duration of the war and up to the late 1940s.
Rene Torres is a retired University of Texas-Brownsville, and Texas Southmost College assistant professor. He has a long history in the Rio Grande Valley as an educator, sports historian, and humanitarian, with a wealth of community service to his credit.
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