Doug Robinson is on vacation this week. The following is a reprint of a column he wrote in 1990.
People will come, Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't fathom. They'll arrive at your door, innocent as children, longing for the past."
It's midsummer and Don Lansing, an Iowa farmer, should have a crop of corn some 6 feet tall by now in that plot of land adjacent to his white frame house. As far as the eye can see there are fields of green corn stretching for miles in every direction, but here there is a baseball field. A baseball field in a corn field where baseball games are never played.
This is a Field of Dreams, a place where people from all over the world come to, well, dream and remember and play catch, even marry. ...
You've been here before, you think, and you have. Lansing's farm was the site for the filming of the hit movie, "Field of Dreams."
The corn was plowed under and converted into a baseball field for the movie in July 1988. Lansing fully expected to put the field back in corn the following year. Then the people began to come.
As the movie ends, the camera pulls away into the night sky to reveal a line of car lights backed up for miles, all of them coming to see the field. They're still coming. This is the sequel. This is life imitating art, imitating life.
"I didn't know it was going to turn out like this," says Lansing.
People have come to the field from Mexico, Canada, Australia, Germany, Japan and from around the U.S. As many as 300 people came to Lansing's farm a day. Some 10,000 people came during summer. Children run the bases. Fathers and sons play catch. No one can resist walking into the corn that borders the outfield, as if testing the magic of the movie by imitation. One couple came from Texas to renew their wedding vows on the field. Four brothers gathered from around the country to meet on the field. They played catch and roamed the field for three hours.
Sure wish you were here, Dad," they wrote in the guestbook.
It's all free. There is no fee to stand on the mound or to hold a bat at home plate or to pose for pictures in the outfield. Lansing wants it this way. There is only a donation box and a souvenir stand, which help offset maintenance costs. The small 100-acre farm surely could use the lost 2 1/2 acres for more productive purposes.
"There are a lot of memories here," says Lansing, who is not a man of many words. For sentimental reasons, for the visitors, he'll keep the field indefinitely — until the people stop coming. And yes, Lansing loves baseball and the movie. He's seen the latter five times.
Yeah, it touched me," he says simply.
During the day Lansing works at the John Deere plant in Dubuque.
In the mornings and evenings, he mingles with the visitors and tends the field like a real-life Ray Kinsella. Each morning he drags and rakes the infield, sweeps home plate and sets the bases. Twice a week he manicures the field and mows the grass to playing length. Does it look as good as it did in the movie?
"Better," he says.
The field is fit for games, but there are none. Not yet anyway.
Lansing has refused all such requests, preferring to leave the field open to people who merely want to soak up the atmosphere.
Not everyone has been a believer like Lansing (or is it Kinsella?). His neighbor, Al Ameskamp, who owns the property in left field, plowed his share of the land the following spring and put it back in corn. A corn field is a corn field, he said. To do anything else was silly. But after receiving a number of notes from visitors — "Not snotty notes, just nice notes," he said — Ameskamp changed his mind. This spring he left the field empty. He plans to re-sod left field. Down the road in Dyersville (pop. 7,000), the local area chamber of commerce is enjoying its newest and biggest tourist attraction. Visitors to the farm stop by to talk and to buy souvenirs: Field of Dream T-shirts, sweatshirts, toy car-banks and toy tractors that are replicas of the one Kevin Costner drives in the movie (on loan from Lansing).
"Like the little girl says in the movie, the people will come," says Shirley of the chamber of commerce.
And so they do. Visitors were once so rare that Lansing suspected every car that drove to his farm carried a salesman. Now the visitors come in a steady stream. Only when the sun sets do they stop coming, but they wouldn't if Lansing ever decided to turn the field lights on at night.
It isn't unusual that movie sites attract fans, but this is different, deeper. The movie "struck a resonant chord in the American psyche," wrote Rogers Worthington of the Chicago Tribune.
People come, usually in families, to touch what they saw and felt in the movie. They come for reasons they can't even fathom. They aren't visits so much as pilgrimages. Somewhere in this jumble of emotions lies baseball, the constant, simple tie to the past.
Read the farm's guestbook to discover the field's allure: "Thanks for sharing the dream and keeping it alive," wrote a couple from California.
"Words cannot describe this scene and how I'm feeling at the moment," wrote a woman from California.
"Your farm touched a special spot in our hearts, as did the fantasy," wrote a couple from New Mexico.
"Is this heaven?" Shoeless Joe asks in the movie. No, it's Don Lansing's corn field — and maybe something more.
E-mail: drob@desnews.com