CREDIT: Peter Battistoni, Vancouver Sun

Hastings Little League alumni Morrie Rentmeester (coach 1960-65), Angelo Bordignon (player 1972-75/coach 1985 to now) and Scott Browning (coach and manager 1972-86).

CREDIT: Vancouver Public Library 1777

A man and his child enter Hastings Park for internment in 1942.

It's a frigid evening in February and a small group of fanatics has convened in Scott and Grace Browning's East Vancouver basement to plot their next move. They're baseball fanatics, and the topic on the agenda is the 50th-anniversary reunion of the Hastings Little League planned for Saturday, April 26. As the members of this tight-knit group arrive, the conversation grows louder and the beers from Scott's vintage 7-Up machine flow freely.

"I started back in '61 as a coach," says Morrie Rentmeester. "Don't ask how old that makes me."

Morrie still umpires for the league, which has its home field at Hastings Park, across Hastings Street from the Pacific National Exhibition grounds.

"He was our coach," adds Angelo Bordignon, a big Italian boy from the neighbourhood. "Actually, I still have trouble calling him Morrie. We always had to call him Mr. Rentmeester."

Angelo's brother, Vito, nods in agreement. The fact that these "boys," now in their late 30s and built like WWE wrestlers, are so obviously in awe of their diminutive ex-coach speaks volumes about what it was like to play Little League baseball in East Van in the '70s. "We played to win," Vito says. "We were very dedicated, and we worked hard."

Angelo pipes up. "We were taught to respect our coaches. None of this calling your coach by his first name."

Apparently, kids don't taking baseball as seriously as they once did. Morrie is philosophical about the changes. "It's just that the kids have more choices now. They're less dedicated to one activity. They have video games and all that stuff."

But despite this apparent lack of dedication on the part of "kids today," the Hastings Little League continues to do what it has done for the last 50 years. In a neighbourhood that has always had a reputation for being tough, playing baseball and T-ball has helped thousands of kids to learn to keep their eyes on the ball -- and take pride in themselves and their roots.

Vito explains that "as kids, when we'd play teams from Shaughnessy or the west side, we'd always feel a bit self-conscious. Maybe insecure because we were all from working-class families. But that just made us try harder."

Scott Browning, who coached in the '70s, remembers that "we had kids on the team whose dads were bikers." He's referring to the long-standing motorcycle-gang presence in the Hastings-Sunrise area. "But we treated them just the same as all the other kids, and we never had any problems."

Although a field beside East Hastings Street may not be everyone's definition of paradise, the community takes pride in the park. Over the years, the field, with its backdrop of mountains and rides at the PNE and its smell of barbecued smokies, has been a powerful neighbourhood fixture.

"There's no better place on a sunny day," asserts Angelo Bordignon. The Little League has seen many young kids through their difficult pre-teen and adolescent years, and helped keep them out of trouble.

Current league president Richard Saunders' two sons came up through the league. "My one son was a bit on the wild side, you could say. He was a really fast-moving boy, so we always kept him involved in sports ... If he wasn't in some organized activity, he'd be out with his friends, and some of them got into trouble."

His other son won a baseball scholarship to a U.S. university, so Saunders feels he "owes the league a lot."

He's not the only one with a debt to the Hastings Little League. Neil Beaumont, of 1960s B.C. Lions fame, is among the many kids who grew up in the Hastings-Sunrise area, playing baseball at the park, and then went on to excel at professional sports. Asked about the social climate of the neighbourhood in the early '50s, he says, "We knew we were tough and it was part of our mystique. The players on the teams weren't a bunch of goodie two-shoes. They were good athletes, but a few of them might've been into other things, like breaking and entering, car theft, fighting, or drinking."

However, he remembers that "the parents and coaches put in a lot of time getting the kids to games and practices. They were all busy people with jobs, but they put in hours with us. It taught the kids some discipline."

Baseball reunion organizer Grace Browning boasts that "actually, lots of our kids went on to be really successful. That's why it's going to be so neat to see them all at the reunion, see what they've done with their lives, and think about how we helped them along."

Other notable Vancouverites among the Hastings Little League alumni include Brian Griffin (manager of operations at BC Place), Ken Kasuya (B.C. Lions equipment manager), Dave Easley (former B.C. Lions player) and Vancouver RCMP officer Chris Ridge.

Hastings Park itself is steeped in history, the darkest period of which was undoubtedly the use of the field to "repossess" Japanese Canadians' automobiles and other belongings during the Second World War. The adjacent racetrack served as a dormitory for people waiting to be shipped off to internment camps in the Interior.

On the brighter side, there's a little-known fact -- the first-ever parachute jump from a plane in Canada.

On May 23, 1912, U.S pilot Phil Parmalee shipped his homemade two-seat biplane to Vancouver and stored it in a big tent on the infield at Hastings Park. Back then, parachute jumpers often went by the handle "Professor," since, according to Richard Mackinnon, writing in a Little League newsletter, "it was such a short-lived occupation that no-one ever questioned the source of their degree." The next day, (Professor) Charlie Saunders volunteered to jump out of the plane and land at the park

Mackinnon writes that "it's difficult for us today to visualize that no harness or any other attachment fastened the parachute to his body, as with modern chutes. This brave man simply clung to a hefty trapeze bar, to which the parachute was fastened with suitable lengths of strong cord."

It was a dangerous game. Parmalee was killed a month later in Yakima, Wash. Fortunately, the Hastings jump was successful, although they had to try it twice before Saunders could manage to land between home and first plate and collect his reward money.

And so a commemorative pin is being created for the grand 50th reunion of the Hastings Little League, which organizer Grace Browning thinks will fill the gym at the Hastings community centre. The logo? A baseball player descending from the air with a wide-open parachute. 

Jennifer Moss is a Vancouver writer who lives a short fly ball from Hastings Park.