The historic baseball stadium at John Galvin Park in Ontario, where five full generations of youth and adults engaged in a timeless enjoyment of the National Pastime, was destroyed by a fire of presently unknown origin late Thursday night.
A hasty response by five companies of the Ontario Fire Department at around 11:30 p.m. to the park, located at the southeast corner of Fourth Street and Grove Avenue, brought all five teams of firefighters led by five engineers and a fire captain face to face with an 87-year-old primarily wooden structure that was fully engulfed in flames. Despite the best efforts of those responders, including those of the first to arrive, a company from Fire Station 5, located at 1530 East Fourth Street, just about 2,100 feet or four tenths of a mile from the stadium on the other side of the 10-Freeway Overpass, little could be done to arrest the destruction. With the exception of some framework, the stadium burned to the ground.
The baseball field at John Galvin Park dates from the early 1930s. In 1937, the field was augmented with a wooden grandstand. The field was slightly recontoured over the years to replicate the playing fields of professional players at the highest level, those being the major leagues and their Triple A farm clubs. In fact, the field boasts dimensions that are larger than the diamond at Dodger Stadium, with a 402-foot stretch from home plate to the fence in straightaway center field, seven feet further than at Chavez Ravine.
For one season in the summer of 1947, the Ontario Orioles, a Class-C minor league baseball team in the old Sunset League, played at the stadium, posting a 64–75 win/loss record.
Over the years a host of amateur and youth leagues played on the field, and both the field and stadium in 1998 were renamed after Joseph “Jay” Littleton, who was heavily active in promoting youth sports, primarily Little League, Pony League and Colt League baseball in Ontario beginning in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
The field was maintained by the City of Ontario’s Department of Parks and Recreation.
The city’s preservation of the park, which involved volunteer contributions/donations by local businesses, helped it retain a sharp veneer that presented the image of a bygone era, which resulted in Hollywood taking note of it, and it served as the setting for a number of movies filmed in 1980s and 1990s, including Eight Men Out and A League of Their Own, while some baseball action scenes for the movie The Babe were shot there as well.
Ontario Mayor Paul Leon said, “It’s a heartbreaking situation for the City of Ontario to lose such an iconic landmark. I am deeply saddened about what has happened. After we get over the hurt and shock of this loss, we are going to have to decide what we are going to do about no longer having such a prized possession.”
Leon said, “I think we would want to rebuild it to recreate what we had with the original, which was a wooden structure, but we would be required to build it to modern standards, so it won’t be the same. That’s a shame, because of what it was for literally a hundred thousand kids who over the years played Little League baseball and other youth league ball there. Just yesterday, they still had what they had grown up with, but today all that is left are the memories and the pictures.”
The decision about whether to rebuild a stadium around the baseball diamond will be impacted, the mayor said, by the consideration that “we’re building a huge sports complex now in the south part of the city, one with a professional standard baseball stadium and other baseball and softball fields and other sports venues.”
There were reports, unconfirmed ones originating with individuals who are embittered toward the city’s homeless population, that the fire had come about as the result of a bonfire at a homeless encampment inside one of the dugouts at the stadium raging out of control.
Leon said that as far as determining what actually sparked the conflagration, “Nobody has a clue.”
He did say that fire officials told him there was no overt indication of arson. “They went over the site preliminarily,” Leon said. “At this point they have no indication of an accelerant having been used. It doesn’t look deliberate, like someone started a fire and threw gasoline in there to get it really going. It will take some time, but the investigators will figure out what happened.”
Leon said the city was able to salvage the urn containing Littleton’s ashes, which was kept in a place of honor in the backstop behind home plate.
The monument to Littleton – the stadium – is now gone, the mayor said.
He dwelt on Littleton.
“When I first got on the council he would call me, like at two or three in the morning, saying how he had an idea for the stadium or some improvement to the field,” Leon said. “He must have been in his eighties or early nineties. The tribute to him, Littleton Stadium, is gone now,” Leon said, wistfully.
-Mark Gutglueck