Batter Up - Baseball in Palmer
June 9th, 1935, marked the first baseball game between Palmer and Anchorage. The Alaska Railroad ran a special train, and about 150 spectators from the city came to watch.
PLAY BALL
Advertisement in the Anchorage Times, June 8th 1935.
ANCHORAGE PALMER TO PLAY BALL
From the Anchorage Times, June 4th 1935.
To give an idea of how fast things were growing in Palmer, on June 4th the Times advised spectators for the ball game to pack lunch, “owing to unsettled conditions and lack of facilities in Palmer for taking care of a large number of visitors.” Four days later, two new restaurants in Palmer were taking out advertisements in the Anchorage Times.
Clippings from the Anchorage Times, June 8th and 10th 1935
In its usual sunny, boosterish editorial style, the Times reported “OPTIMISM PREVAILS” in the “veritable Eden of the North.”
Anchorage Times editor Bob Atwood, interviewed six decades later for the documentary Alaska Far Away, noted that he tried to balance out the sensationalism and naysaying about the Matanuska Colony and Alaska in the national press. “The bad stories about the failure of the Colony got most of the space in the newspapers, of course, so the whole nation was getting the idea that the thing was a bust. . . . So I figured my job with the newspaper was to give the positive side more emphasis, not ignore the negative.”
In late May a letter appeared in Time Magazine from former Alaskan Andrew Christensen, who had surveyed the townsite of Anchorage and laid out the streets, in which he predicted that sending farmers to Alaska would be “an absolute waste of money,” “a great injustice to the poor people that they are shipping there” and a “fiasco.” The Anchorage Times took umbrage at the slandering of Alaska’s potential and spent the first week of June bristling with editorial rebukes and indignant letters from Anchorageites. One even suggested changing the name of Christensen Road, as “Mr. Christensen would not want his name associated with so worthless a proposition as Anchorage.” The writer proposed the name be changed to Denali Way.
Clipping from the Anchorage Times, June 10th 1935.
Atwood anecdote from his interview appearing in “Where the River Matanuska Flows”, Juster Hill Productions.
Quotes about the Christensen letter and rebuttals from the Anchorage Times, June 5th 1935.
“The Giant team contains a number of widely experienced players, who with proper support, will form a hard combination to buck.” The Times is likely referring to Charlie Warter, ARRC commissary manager, former professional ball player, and one of the organizers of the June 9th game. Nine years earlier, the Seward newspaper had described Warter (then working as postmaster on the Copper River & Northwestern Railway) as “one of the best pitchers who ever stepped on a Cordova mound.”
Charlie Warter would not be pitching for the Palmer Giants at their rematch with the Anchorage All-Stars in two weeks’ time. Stay tuned to find out what sticky situation he wound up in instead.
Article from the Anchorage Times, June 10th 1935.