VALLEY HAD ITS OWN FIELD OF DREAMS

(This article about my mom and dad appeared originally in the
Los Angeles Daily News, Valley Section, October 12, 2004.)

As far as youth baseball fields go, Marks Field wasn't much. Just an old cow pasture behind a converted chicken coop on Addison Street in Van Nuys, where the Marks family lived in 1946.

There was no grass on the field. Just a lot of dirt and rocks.

But to the neighborhood kids - kids like future Hall of Fame pitcher Don Drysdale and CSUN basketball coach Pete Cassidy - Marks Field was one of the best ballparks they ever played in.

Because it was their first.

"There was no Little League yet, no youth baseball fields in every community like there are now," says Cassidy, who retired from CSUN in 1996. "There was only Marks Field for kids in the Valley who wanted to play organized baseball."

A cow pasture that Harold and Mary Marks turned into a ball field so their sons, Ned and Gene, could play organized baseball with the other kids in Van Nuys.

A "paradise for boys," Valley Times sports columnist Claude Newman called it back in 1947, when he threw his support behind the fledgling eight-team Valley Junior Baseball League.

"No place in this part of the country will you find a league of this type - a circuit formed for boys between the ages of 10 and 14," Newman wrote.

"The league must play its game on private property, Marks Field, because there are no other baseball diamonds available for such things."

It's all in the scrapbook Mary Marks left her sons. Yellowed pages of newspaper clippings, box scores, baseball photographs and local sports columns that detail the earliest days of organized youth baseball in the Valley.

They don't tell you the full story, though. For that, you have to sit down with 68-year-old Ned Marks, and have him take you back to when he was 10. His family had fallen on such hard times that they had to move into a renovated chicken coop behind the main house in the 13000 block of Addison Street in Van Nuys.

"A friend of dad's, Buzz Whidden, owned a big, sprawling piece of ranch property on Addison Street with barns and big chicken coops in back. He told dad he could renovate one of the coops and move his family in there if he wanted.

"It was 700, maybe 800 square feet. Dad put in a toilet and dug a cesspool. My brother Gene and I shared a small bedroom, and Dad and Mom had another. There was a small front room and kitchen. That was it.

"We lived there for about five years," Ned said. "Some of the happiest times of my life were spent in that converted chicken coop.

"A lot of the neighborhood kids hung out back there because there was so much room to play. One day my dad asked Buzz if he minded if he built a baseball field out back. Buzz told him to go ahead."

Harold Marks made a metal dragger and hooked it on the rear bumper of his old Plymouth. Then he'd drive around the 1-acre lot for hours, smoothing out the dirt, while Mary and the boys cleared the rocks.

"When Dad was back working again, Mom would drag and chalk the field so we could play," Ned said.

Pretty soon, word spread that there was a baseball field for kids being built on an old cow pasture over on Addison Street, right next to the cornfield.

Scotty Drysdale brought his young son, Don, over to play. He wound up staying to help Harold coach the team and start the fledgling Valley Junior Baseball League.

They even got the neighborhood paperboy to sign up and play.

"I'd deliver my paper route, then go play baseball," Cassidy said. "During the summertime, I halfway lived at Marks Field. Harold and Mary poured their hearts into that field for us kids."

After the games on weekends, Mary would put out a spread of chicken and corn from the local fields for all the players and their parents.

"Marks Field had become the best place to spend a lazy summer afternoon watching baseball in the Valley," Newman wrote in his sports column.

By 1950, the league had added fields and teams in the Valley from as far away as Canoga Park - then the last bastion of civilization heading west to Thousand Oaks.

"Mom would take our entire team to Canoga Park in her car," Ned said, laughing. "She'd cram seven or eight of us inside, then pop the trunk so three or four more could sit back there."

By the mid-50s, even the popular Marks Field could not stand up to the sprawl of tract homes being built in the Valley.

"The field kind of died a natural death, and we moved on," said Ned, whose brief professional baseball pitching career was cut short by an arm injury.

"Dad got a letter from Little League officials in Williamsport, saying they had heard about his league, and wondered if he wanted to head the league they were starting out here."

Harold Marks said thanks, but no thanks. His boys were growing up and moving on now. Ned, the youngest, had just graduated from North Hollywood High, and been signed by the Dodgers as a pitcher.

Besides, he was too busy building custom homes and making up for all those years his family had lived on hard times.

Still, he and Mary had talked about it and agreed.

They wouldn't give up one day of their lives together with the boys in that converted old chicken coop with the baseball field out back for the nicest home in the Valley.

By Dennis McCarthy