Bruce Lees was 11 years old when the first ball game was played at the then-brand new Marcusen Park.

Friday, June 23, 2000

Bruce Lees was 11 years old when the first ball game was played at the then-brand new Marcusen Park. He lived a block away. According to him, he practically lived in the park as a young baseball fan.

"I swam there," he said. "We – about 25 or 30 of us – would dive off the bleachers into the floodwaters and then crawl out and do it all over again. The fence kept us enclosed, so we couldn’t drift away with the current."

More often, however, the 11-year-old was at the ballpark to watch ball games. The first year he didn’t get to see the end of many, however, because the city had a 10 p.m. curfew.

Back then baseball ruled. There was no television, so the games were entertainment for the masses. Marj Carroll would take her three small children down to watch; if they didn’t get there early, they wouldn’t find a seat and would have to sit on the ground.

Former center fielder Ray Riley played there from 1947 through 1950. He was on the first team to play in the park, and on the 1949 State Championship team. A Cincinnati, Ohio, native, Riley came here so he could play baseball. He’d already played three years of pro ball.

"Emil Scheid called me and my brother-in-law Earl Mosser to come up here and play ball for him and learn a trade," he said. "I married a girl from Adams and I never left."

Riley remembers the crowds, too.

"They used to fill the park," he said. "There were benches clear down the sidelines and sometimes, for the special games, we’d have three or four rows of people sitting inside the outfield fence."

There wasn’t always a ballpark there. In 1925, the baseball park area was an open acreage that usually flooded in the spring. Hans Marcusen, who came to Austin from Denmark in 1910, bought the acreage and the new home at the end of Main Street in 1927.

Esther Plehal, the former Esther Marcusen, recalled in a 1982 Austin Daily Herald article how her father Hans got a team of horses and landscaped the home area. He built a filling station and some tourist cabins on the south side of what was then U.S. Highway 218, running through Austin.

It wasn’t too long before the first ball diamond was marked out behind the gas station and bleachers were built. Players had to be dedicated. It was up to them to take care of the ballpark. They mowed the grass, limed the diamond and dragged the infield. Fans would pay 50 cents sometimes to see a game.

As the popularity of the game grew, the need for a more permanent ballpark became evident. Mrs. Elsie (Hansen) Marcusen offered the 9-acre baseball site to the city in 1944. It wasn’t until 1947 that the transaction was completed. In the meantime, other locations were considered: Todd Park was one, city-owned land north of the Austin Country Club was another possibility. In the end, despite a last-ditch effort by some area residents claiming "the noise and traffic congestion would make living there unbearable for residents," the council decided to go with the site down by the Cedar River.

"It was just as nice a park as some of those I played pro-ball in," Riley said. "We had some great teams then. I’d hate to see them get rid of it … but the parks aren’t the main thing, it’s the people."