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Courtesy UM Duluth Library Archives & Special Collections
Chisholm's Love for the All-American Game
Chisholm, Minnesota’s beloved baseball stadium was rebuilt with community donations after a 1908 fire decimated the town.
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"Moonlight" Graham
Dr. Archibald "Moonlight" Graham, immortalized in popular culture by W.P. Kinsella's novel "Shoeless Joe" and the movie "Field of Dreams," practiced medicine in Chisholm, Minnesota, for more than 40 years after his two-inning big league career.
When it comes to baseball and fishing, the truth should never get in the way of a good story.
In that light, let me relate this story of when the legendary Shoeless Joe Jackson played ball in Chisholm, Minnesota, in the early 1920s after his fall from grace in the 1919 Chicago White Sox game-fixing scandal. Banned from organized baseball, Joe still traveled with a barnstorming team that came one day to Chisholm.
It’s the top of the ninth and the Chisholm home team has a one-run lead with two outs, as Jimmy Keenan of the Society for American Baseball Research recounts it. Joe, playing under an assumed name, steps to the plate and smashes a long fly ball deep into right field. Chisholm’s right fielder, the local doctor, leaps to intercept and as he’s falling backward, he snatches the legendary hitter’s ball out of the air, making the winning out for the home team.
Sounds far-fetched, and it might be, but it certainly was possible since Chisholm’s local doctor – Dr. Archibald Wright Graham – had been a professional ballplayer. Thanks to a 1982 fiction novel about Joe Jackson, Doc Graham would become something of a legend himself, but I’m getting ahead of the story.
Chisholm, incorporated as a town in 1901 with 250 residents, was named for Archie Chisholm, who discovered a mine nearby in 1900. The growing community started early in its love for baseball, which held its first modern-era World Series in 1903.
The Chisholm Baseball Association was formed in 1905, soliciting funds from local business owners for park upkeep, equipment and uniforms. It remained only loosely organized; during one 1907 game, the manager was so busy securing meal tickets for the team, he forgot to run the scoreboard.
In September 1908, Chisholm was decimated by a huge forest fire that swept through the town with 60-mph winds, leaving only two businesses standing on Main Street. By early the next year, money was already being collected to rebuild the baseball stadium. A list of those who donated to fund a new ballpark appeared in the newspaper with the Range Lumber Company as top donor at $25 and various citizens at $5 (or about $120 today).
With $365 of the necessary $850 raised to “put things in shape for the season,” the Chisholm Tribune Herald beseeched those who had not yet donated: “Don’t be a piker, but get your name on the list at once and help a good thing get along.”
The campaign was successful – a Fourth of July doubleheader attracted almost 10,000 to the new ballpark (impressive when the town’s population was only about 4,000).
A nickname for the team was the Flyers, it is said, because if an outfielder went back too far, he’d “fly” into the mine pit next to the ballpark.
The year after the fire – and the same year that the new ballpark opened – also heralded the arrival of Chisholm’s most famous ballplayer. Doc Graham was a North Carolina native drawn to Chisholm after attending a medical conference at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. He suffered from respiratory problems and, when told of the invigorating Iron Range air, bought a train ticket and headed north in search of better health.
In Chisholm, Dr. Graham is known for his generous ways and for more than 40 years of practicing medicine. He was a frequent sight on the town streets, striding in his signature black hat and overcoat. In the wider world, he is most famous as a storyline in the W.P. Kinsella novel Shoeless Joe, made into the 1989 movie “Field of Dreams.” In that movie, Doc Graham was played by Burt Lancaster.
Moonlight’s major league baseball career lasted only two innings of a 1905 game in which he fielded for the New York Giants. He was called in at the bottom of the eighth inning and was left on deck in the ninth at the final out. He was sent back to the minors, never having batted in a major league game.
His true love, though, may never have been baseball. It’s said his nickname of “Moonlight” may have come from his moonlighting as a medical student while playing ball. He graduated from the University of Maryland medical school and came to Chisholm in 1909.
Doc Graham got plenty of chances to bat and field in local games. The year after he settled in town, 1910, was a big year for baseball in Chisholm as the team won the Iron Range championship with a record of 21-9, earning the $50 top prize.
There were many highlights for the Chisholm team in the mid-1900s. Minnesota Governor Adolph Eberhart threw out the first pitch in a home game against Hibbing on June 19, 1914, and July that year brought the professional barnstorming All-Nations team, led by heralded pitcher John Donaldson. The local nine lost a close game, 5-4. Admission was 25 cents.
In September 1916, Chisholm made it to the State Independent Baseball Championship Series against Hibbing with a $1,000 purse on the line. The Chisholm Tribune Herald reports that the deciding game, which Hibbing won 1-0 in the 11th inning, was “one of the greatest exhibitions of baseball ever played on the Mesaba Range in which the excitement of the contest caused spectators to forget the cold and dismal day.”
Baseball continued to thrive in Chisholm beyond the Roaring Twenties through affiliation with various Mesaba Range leagues. Today residents still play on VFW and American Legion teams and the town’s high school baseball team made it to the state tournament in 2005 and 2009. Field of Dreams Park near the Minnesota Museum of Mining in Chisholm honors a sport whose history is entwined with the city’s own.
But the town’s best baseball player left a bigger legacy off the field and hit it out of the park with his chosen career in medicine, so much so that the Mayo Clinic Heritage Films is doing a documentary on Doc Graham this year. Producer-director Mark Flaherty says it’s been a privilege to research the truly good doctor. Mark has heard many stories of Doc Graham giving toothbrushes, toothpaste, glasses and even meals to needy local children.
“He was a very generous man,” says Mark. “He was just very generous to everybody.”
Mark will be in Chisholm on May 8 and 9 to do filming for the documentary, scheduled to come out July 7.
Dr. Graham, along with other doctors from the Mayo Clinic, authored a groundbreaking paper on the importance of checking children’s blood pressure that was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.
Mark can’t verify the Joe Jackson in Chisholm story, but Ted Williams, another famed baseball star, did come north to fish with the doctor.
In “Field of Dreams,” a character laments that Doc Graham had only “five minutes” of major league play time, to which Graham’s character responds: “Son, if I only got to be a doctor for five minutes, now that would have been a tragedy.” Fiction, but Chisholm knows those words are more than true.
Curveballs
- The 2014 seasons for the Duluth Huskies and the Thunder Bay Border Cats both opened with home games on May 27. Follow the teams at www.duluthhuskies2.com and www.bordercatsbaseball.com.
- The Duluth-Superior Dukes – a 1993-2002 revival of the original Duluth Dukes – won the Northern League pennant in 1997. The Duluth Dukes got TV air time during the 1982-83 run of “Tales of the Gold Monkey,” in which lead character Jake Cutter was a former Dukes pitcher and often wore a Duluth Dukes shirt.
- The Lake Superior basin was a strong supporter of minor league baseball around the turn of the 20th century. Among the most regional team names were the Duluth Whalebacks, the Superior Longshoremen, the Ishpeming-Negaunee Unions, the Sault Ste. Marie Soos and the Lake Linden Lakers.
Writer Sarah Johnson is a lifelong baseball fan and member of the Society for American Baseball Research Minnesota chapter.