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PHALON'S FILE - 07/09/2008
(by Joe Phalon - OpEd Columnist - July 08, 2008)
Our field of dreams
If you build it, they will come.
The Lansing Farm is just a short drive away, a short drive if you happen to be in Dyersville, Iowa, as we were recently.
It’s the farm where “Field of Dreams” was filmed. In the movie, an offbeat Iowa farmer named Ray Kinsella hears a voice that convinces him to plow under his corn and build a baseball field. Despite pressures from the “real-world,” he continues his mission. Eventually several people are redeemed, including himself, his father, a novelist named Terrence Mann, as well as “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and Archie “Moonlight” Graham, two people who did exist. The magic happens on that field. Ray and his father reconcile.
I walked that very field with my own sons recently and batted at the plate where Archie got his chance to face down a Major League pitcher. Matt pitched from the mound where “Knuckles” knocked down Archie after Archie winked at him.
Matt and Kevin batted. They both reached deep left, where Shoeless Joe nailed a few. Matt even planted a couple in the corn. Rose connected. “A miracle,” is how she described it.
If there are places where miracles happen this field might be one of them.
Fictional Ray says his field is such a place. And it’s become one in real life.
I saw “Field of Dreams” in 1989, long before my own sons were even a “glint” in my eye, as Ray said regarding his own father. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the theater when it ended.
More than a decade later, Matt and Kevin joined me to watch the DVD. I thought they might get bored quickly at their young age. But they were enthralled by the movie. They both read up on Shoeless Joe. It gave me the first clue that there was something special about this movie.
By then the real field in Iowa had become something of a shrine. Immediately after the filming, the field was plowed up and corn replanted the next spring. But James Earl Jones as Terry Mann was on to something. The impassioned speech he delivers near the end, in which he implores Ray to keep the field, still gives me chills. And he was right. People would come to the field.
And they did. For real. The field was replaced and thousands of people visit it every year. But there is no charge. The Lansing family invites people to their farm for free.
The magic remains 20 years later. People are drawn to it. Everyone takes pictures for other families on the mound, or on the bleachers, where the elderly “Doc” Graham saved Ray’s daughter. We were there on the “perfect afternoon” James Earl Jones described. And I got the same chill when I stood in the very same spot where he said, “This field, this game: It's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.”
We did. And while we were there I called my father back in Jersey. Seemed like the thing to do.
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