Man follows in father’s basepaths

By Darrell Laurant

Published: July 2, 2008

This wasn’t Kevin McFarland’s father’s City Stadium — not exactly. But it was close enough.

“In a lot of places I’ve been, the ballpark is completely gone,” said McFarland, a Belleville, Ill., resident who has embarked upon the unusual quest of having his photo taken in all the parks where his dad, Bill, played minor league baseball. “I was really pleased to find what I found in Lynchburg.”

Perhaps the owners of the Lynchburg Hillcats would have waited to undergo the ballpark’s massive 2003 renovation had they known that McFarland would be stopping by.

The original City Stadium was raised up on the same site in 1939. The Lynchburg Cardinals of the Piedmont League began playing there in 1940, and Bill McFarland showed up to be their first baseman five years later.

A strapping 6-foot-5, McFarland had been a three-sport star in high school in East St. Louis. Lynchburg showed him, however, that professional baseball wasn’t going to be that easy.

“He was a great fielder, and he had some power,” the young McFarland said, “but he didn’t hit for average.”

Not in Lynchburg, where McFarland hit .205. (For you non-baseball fans, .300 — one hit for every three at-bats — is considered the dividing line between success and mediocrity).

Nevertheless, he spent his summers playing professionally until 1950, when he finally decided to get on with his life. That involved refereeing high school sports events, selling real estate, and raising seven children. Twins Kevin and Dave, now 43, were the last of the brood.

“He was a very humble man, and he didn’t talk about his baseball career much,” said Kevin of his father, who died in 2001. “But there was an old black suitcase in the basement where my grandmother had kept a lot of clippings and photographs, and one day my brother and I started looking through it.”

The McFarland children had also grown up with a framed photograph of their dad in a baseball uniform emblazoned with the letter “J.”

“That picture moved all over the house when we were kids, from one wall to another,” Kevin McFarland said, “and we found out that the ‘J’ stood for “Joplin.’”

So Joplin, Mo., was the first stop of Kevin’s odyssey after his father died.

“What I try to do is exactly re-create the old photographs of my Dad in his various uniforms, at the exact spot where the photo was taken,” he explained.

A slight pause followed.

“I’m not crazy,” he continued. “I’m just a nut for nostalgia, and I loved my father very much. When I was a kid, I never got too cool for my parents.”

McFarland brought a large framed photograph of his father with him to Lynchburg, showing Bill posing at first base in City Stadium. So, naturally, Kevin re-created the shot.

“Usually, somebody with the team I’m visiting will take the photo for me, or somebody from the media,” he said, “but sometimes it’s been tricky.”

As in Fargo, N.D., where the one-time home of the Fargo-Moorhead Twins had disappeared under the concrete of a housing development.

“I went around knocking on doors, asking for somebody to take my picture at the spot where home plate had been,” he said. “I got some strange looks.”

Yet he also has encountered a lot of empathy in his travels, which thus far have involved 30 cities in 13 states. He also visits the local library at each stop to glean clippings of his father’s exploits — but when he arrived in Bartlesville, Okla., the library was getting ready to close.

“I explained to the lady that I had driven 12 hours,” he said, “and she wound up keeping the library open for another two hours, turning off all the lights except the one over the microfilm machine.”

Then there was the optometrist and local baseball historian in Sebring, Fla., who left a waiting room full of patients to slip out the back door and show McFarland where the ballpark used to be.

His family is supportive, McFarland said, especially his wife. And twin brother Dave, who owns a sporting goods store in Belleville, makes the period uniforms and caps that Kevin wears for his photos.

On Monday night, McFarland read a story to his youngest of two sons, fell asleep for a couple of hours, then arose around 2 a.m. to drive 14 hours to Lynchburg.

“It’s not a problem,” said McFarland, a school administrator in St. Louis who uses part of his summer vacation for ballpark hunting. “I get this burst of adrenaline when I’m doing this.”

And he was out the door of Famous Anthony’s restaurant, heading for U.S. 460 and Roanoke. His dad played there in 1949.

Kevin McFarland photographs the spot where his father’s 1945 Lynchburg Cardinals shot was taken.
KIM RAFF/THE NEWS & ADVANCE