HISTORICAL
DOCUMENTARY CELEBRATES TOWN TEAM BASEBALL
AND
ITS IMPACT ON EARLY KANSAS
TOPEKA,
KS – A new documentary film premiering in Topeka, KS May 28th
captures both the heart and the historical importance of town team
baseball on early life in Kansas. “Town
Teams: Bigger than Baseball” examines
baseball at
the turn of the 20th century,
when hundreds of small Kansas towns formed teams to play for pride
and love of the game.
That
passion, and the fierce competitiveness of the players and fans,
became part of the culture that helped build Kansas. “Town Teams”
explores the role baseball played in
everything from assimilating immigrants, to labor relations, to its
function as a powerful tool in the battle between towns for economic
supremacy.
The
documentary short (40 minutes) was written and directed by Kansas
City filmmaker Mark Honer.
Honer
portrays the heart of the game when cameras capture Bill Hesse, a
former town team player from Rossville, as he watches film of himself
playing ball from some 70 years earlier.
“When
I started researching the film, I fell in love with the players,”
said Honer. “Most of them put in 70 hours a week at their jobs. But
when the weekend came, they put on these heavy, wool uniforms and
played baseball in the scorching hot sun. Now that’s
loving the game.”
The
film brings the drama of a long-forgotten era back to life, with
photos that reach back over 100 years, and a reenactment of a 1919
baseball game played near El Dorado. It features footage of the
Topeka Westerns vintage baseball team, and rarely seen film of the
‘Silver Ball’ trophy that was awarded to the first Kansas state
baseball champion in 1867. It was the Kaw Valley team from Lawrence.
Cultural
context is provided by an all star cast of baseball authors and
historians. “The amateur baseball players reflect the real
America”, says Dorothy Seymour Mills, who
co-authored the first scholarly history of the game. Her
three-volume history, Baseball:
The Early Years (1960), The
Golden Age (1971),
and The
People’s Game (1990),
still stands as the benchmark against which other baseball history
books are measured. Honer
also interviews state and local baseball historians, like Steve
Dodson, a history professor at Allen County Community College in
Iola.
Town
Teams: Bigger than Baseball is produced and distributed by
Destination Hope LLC, d.b.a DHTV Digital, a film and video production
company in Shawnee, KS. It premieres
at 7 p.m., May 28 at the Jayhawk Theater in Topeka, KS.
Admission is free with a panel discussion following the film.
Additional screenings are scheduled in El Dorado, Shawnee, and
Wichita.
