In the summer of 1935, Americans staggered through the depths of the Great Depression. Unemployment exceeded 20 percent. People flocked to breadlines and soup kitchens to stave off starvation. Massive dust storms ravaged the Great Plains, forcing thousands of families to abandon their farms.
Las Vegans experienced slightly better economic conditions, thanks to the construction of nearby Hoover Dam. The federal project provided steady, good-paying jobs and attracted thousands of tourists eager to get a look at the engineering wonder. The dam was almost finished, however, and Las Vegans worried that its completion would end the town’s relative prosperity.
At the time, Las Vegas was a small, remote community of 8,000 people lacking a solid foundation. It started as a railroad stop serving the mining districts of central Nevada. But the gold rush of the early 20th century was long past. The Hoover Dam project gave the town a big boost, supplemented by the state’s decision in 1931 to legalize gambling. Las Vegas would not recognize the full potential of the gambling law for another decade, but a few small casinos on Fremont Street attracted a healthy stream of bettors.
If you weren’t a creature of the city’s nightlife, there wasn’t a whole lot to do in Las Vegas that summer. El Portal Theatre kept busy, in part because it had air conditioning — a rare luxury. Audiences enjoyed G Men, starring James Cagney, and Bride of Frankenstein, with Boris Karloff.
The lawn outside the county courthouse was a popular destination. Lacking air conditioning, the court held its hearings and trials at night. It opened its windows to improve air circulation, allowing residents camped out on the grass to hear and see the legal proceedings.
In the spring of 1935, City Park, a dusty expanse behind the U.S. Post Office and Courthouse on Stewart Avenue, was not much to look at. But its future appeared promising after the Federal Emergency Relief Administration announced plans to beautify the park and improve the baseball diamond.
Almost immediately, City Park became the town’s top attraction. The main draw was fast-pitch softball, a phenomenon of the era akin to the popularity of pickleball today. Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal editor and sports columnist John Cahlan colorfully described the frenzy:
“This softball business, in the city of Las Vegas, is growing all out of bounds, according to reports I gather on the street corners and in the grog shops, and I understand the diamond at the City Park is so cluttered up with ambitious softball players that you can’t find a spot where there isn’t some guy warming up for a game. … Gents who haven’t taken any exercise since they clambered out of the trenches over in Yurrop are out getting their muscles stretched, and there’s barbers, grocery clerks, bank employees, bartenders, and just plain working stiffs out there every afternoon getting ready for the big push around the bases.”
Cahlan reported that a handful of teams had been formed and that games were being played on Sunday afternoons. “Everywhere you go in the city these days, somebody is organizing a softball team, and if the present pace continues, the last gents to organize will be gathering their rookies from the cradle and the wheelchair,” he wrote.
He noted a growing desire to install lights so that games could be played at night during the broiling summer months. He hoped the money could be raised for lights, “for softball will give the lads and lassies of Las Vegas, who don’t know what to do with themselves in the evening during the summer, plenty of entertainment.”
League organizers met on June 3 at the Hotel Apache on Fremont Street. The assembled softball enthusiasts elected an executive committee and approved bylaws. The league would consist of 14 teams, each paying a $10 entrance fee. They would play three nights per week “as soon as the lighting equipment can be installed,” according to Review-Journal coverage.
That began on June 22, with the league securing donated equipment and labor from the Southern Nevada Power Company. Softball players volunteered time and sweat to dig post holes.
With the lights in place, league play commenced in early July. The Review-Journal, which had a team in the league, covered the games with zest and detail — similar in style and substance to a sportswriter covering Major League Baseball. Each game earned an article and a box score, and the paper published standings and players’ batting averages. The R-J also handed the league a nickname: “nightball.”
Some familiar names from Las Vegas history show up in the box scores. Reed Whipple was a pitcher for the First State Bank team. At the time, Whipple was a bank employee, but he would later serve two decades on the Las Vegas City Council.
Bill and Bob Peccole were the young stars of the Big Four bar team. Bill Peccole later served on the Las Vegas City Council and built the Peccole Ranch residential development in western Las Vegas. Bob Peccole went into the casino business, managing resorts in Reno, Lake Tahoe, and Las Vegas.
Nightball games were a major spectator sport, with as many as 750 to 1,000 people showing up at City Park. People came to watch despite the absence of any bleachers. This was a problem because spectators would park themselves along the first and third base foul lines and behind home plate, making it difficult for fielders to catch foul balls without running somebody over.
As the problem intensified, the league’s executive committee decided that “in every game where the men, women, and children crowd around the home plate and the first and third baselines, the game will be halted and not continued until the spectators are removed back of the light poles.”
And then it happened. Not two weeks after league officials voiced concerns about spectators crowding the field, a player identified as J. Miller chasing a foul ball ran over a 6-year-old boy, Victor Santa Cruz. The Review-Journal’s front-page headline was ominous: “Lad’s Skull Is Cracked at Vegas Softball Tilt.”
“The player picked his way as carefully as possible amongst the crowd gathered on the base line and succeeded in getting halfway through when the Santa Cruz boy, watching the course of the ball, failed to get out of the way and was struck. Miller was traveling at such a rapid rate of speed that the concussion was of sufficient force to fracture the skull and depress a portion of the bone onto the lad’s brain.”
Santa Cruz was rushed to the hospital, where doctors performed an emergency operation. The boy remained in critical condition afterward.
The league’s executive committee issued a statement expressing regret about the accident but noting “that every effort had been made to avoid just such an occurrence and that little or no cooperation had been given by the public which nightly turns out for the games.”
The community raised money for Santa Cruz’s medical expenses, and his condition improved. (Newspaper archives show that Victor continued to grow up in Las Vegas, entered the U.S. Navy in 1947, and became a low-level hoodlum in the 1950s.)
Meantime, the accident accelerated plans for the construction of bleachers at City Park. The first set of bleachers was installed along the third base line in September.
As league play wound down in September and early October, plans were announced for a “Little World Series” between the two best teams, the Big Four and the Barbers. Fans who wanted to sit in the bleachers for the best-of-five series would have to pay 25 cents. Cars parked around the field would pay 10 cents per occupant.
The Big Four won the first game, 16-15, and the second as well, 11-7. The second game was a miserable experience for everyone, as wintry conditions usurped the heat of summer. The Review-Journal reported: “With both spectators and players shivering in their teeth of an icy north wind, good baseball was impossible, and the game developed into a raggedly played contest featured largely by arguments with the umpires.”
Although the Big Four prevailed in the second game, they protested before the first pitch was thrown because they claimed the Barbers had recruited players from other teams to fill in for injured or sick players. Further, Big Four captain Bill Peccole complained so vigorously about the umpiring that he was thrown out of the game.
The Barbers roared back to win games three and four, setting up an epic and final fifth game of the “Little World Series.” But the game was never played. It started with a dispute between the teams over when the game would be played, but it expanded into more nefarious accusations from the Big Four team.
Interestingly, the Review-Journal did not chronicle this dispute with the same detail as it had the games played during the season. This appears to be because the paper’s editor, John Cahlan, serving as an umpire, was a target of the Big Four’s complaints. The only way we know about the Big Four’s claims is from a censored advertisement it placed on the newspaper’s sports page.
One of the more intriguing claims in the ad is that the Barbers never should have been in the championship series in the first place — that the team from the Westside, consisting of Black players, had been “maneuvered” out of that slot.
Although the inaugural season of the Las Vegas Nightball Association ended on a dispiriting note, enthusiasm for softball remained high. The following summer, two Boulder City teams joined the Las Vegas league and the lights were upgraded. A playoff game in 1937 drew more than 2,000 spectators to City Park.
With its ballfield, tennis courts, playground, Boy Scout cabins, and library, City Park became a focus of community activity. In years to come, City Park was the primary venue for Midget (youth) League baseball games.
Bob Coffin, whose family moved to Las Vegas in 1951, played on a Midget League team sponsored by St. Anne’s Catholic Church. He remembers riding his bike from the Huntridge neighborhood to City Park for the games. “We played early to stay out of the heat,” says Coffin, 84, who later served in the state Senate and on the Las Vegas City Council.
Mike Fennell, 84, is a Las Vegas native whose Flamingo Hotel-sponsored team won the Midget League championship in 1955. “You’d walk the infield before the game picking out the rocks,” he says of the City Park diamond. “It’s just the way it was. They lined the field, and that was about it. It was dirt. There was grass in the outfield.”
Despite the field’s challenges, the city’s first professional sports team, the Las Vegas Wranglers, played its inaugural minor league baseball season at City Park in 1947. The following summer, the Wranglers moved down the road to the fledgling Cashman Field.
In 1954, City Park was renamed Squires Park, in honor of city pioneer Charles “Pop” Squires. Softball continued to be played at the park into the late 1960s, but the ballfield eventually made way for the U.S. 95 Expressway (now Interstate 11) and the Downtown Transportation Center (now defunct). The U.S. Post Office and Courthouse was transformed into the Mob Museum.
Today, the Las Vegas Valley is home to hundreds of grassy, well-manicured ballfields, producing baseball legends such as Greg Maddux and Bryce Harper, as well as two recent youth teams that won the U.S. Little League World Series.
In 1935, there was just one dusty diamond on the edge of town. But civic leaders saw the potential of City Park to become a community gathering place, and it didn’t take them long to make it happen. The Las Vegas Nightball Association was the beginning.
