Doug Arnold

Jacobus Community Park - Jacobus, PA. Doug Arnold

I'm standing at home plate in a baseball park in my home town of Jacobus, PA. There's a nice grass field, dugouts, bleachers, a backstop, a scoreboard, and all of the other things that make up a baseball park. Every summer this place is filled with sound and activity of all kinds. Down the road someone else standing here may wonder where all of this came from. This book is the story about where it came from...

This book recounts the history of a hometown landmark and community treasure - Jacobus Community Park - located in Jacobus, Pennsylvania, a small borough located in south central Pennsylvania. It weaves some personal threads of the author's but more importantly, threads from the stories of hometown heroes. If you changed the names in this story, it could have been written about any one of thousands of communities across the country from the late 1930's to the mid 1960's. Each had their local heroes, and Jacobus, PA. was no different.

This part of the 20th century was an exciting time for baseball, and its influence was reaching into all of the hometowns of America. It was a very different time from today, where many folks did not take vacations but instead followed their team to games played throughout the local area. Many worked on farms or in various manufacturing jobs during the day but baseball was something else. It was a means of friendship and competition among both players and fans at both the local and national level, and was a unifying theme that all Americans knew and understood.