It’s only ‘Natural’ that baseball would draw me closer to home
Worumbo Park, Lisbon Falls, Maine, opened in 1924
next to the Worumbo Mill complex.
The death of actor Robert Redford prompted a text exchange among my three sisters and me.
Lisa thought of his movie, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” I went straight to 1984’s “The Natural,” in which Redford plays mysterious slugger Roy Hobbs, who emerges from national-pastime purgatory to become an overnight legend in the big leagues.
My sisters were unaware that a real-life inspiration for Hobbs had spent the early part of his career in our hometown, Lisbon, Maine.
It was that text exchange that prompted me to dig into the tragic real-life story of Eddie Waitkus. In the process, I gained a far greater appreciation for Lisbon’s history and resilience in the wake of a devastating economic setback in the 1960s.
Worumbo mill
By the time that my siblings and I were growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, Lisbon perhaps was best known for horror author Stephen King having attended our high school.
But King wasn’t studied in class. We didn’t learn much about Lisbon’s past, either, and I was too young and dismissive to go looking for it.
Lisbon (comprised of Lisbon, Lisbon Center and Lisbon Falls) had once been a bustling mill town: “Maine’s most industrialized town,” one article said.
The most prominent among them had been Worumbo Mill in Lisbon Falls, next to the mighty Androscoggin River. Begun in 1864 as the Little River Manufacturing Co., Worumbo Manufacturing Co. grew to become the town’s largest employer.
In the 1920s, Worumbo was the largest woolen mill in Maine, a maker of fabrics for West Point cadets and Annapolis midshipmen, for limo interiors and “America’s greatest overcoats.”
Worumbo burnished its reputation by earning gold medals at two iconic world expos: the 1876 Centennial Expo in Philadelphia, where the arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty were on display to help raise money for the statue’s pedestal, and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, during which serial killer H.H. Holmes preyed on women as documented in the book, “Devil in the White City.” (Holmes is buried near Philadelphia.)
In 1920, Worumbo opened a massive white concrete building that dominated the corner where we turned to take the shortcut across the river to Freeport, two towns over and the home of L.L. Bean’s flagship store.
State champs
It was on the west end of that building, in 1924, that the company erected a ball field called Worumbo Park. The mill had sponsored a team in the previous two or three seasons, but townspeople wanted something of a higher caliber. They raised money for the cause, which the mill matched.
The park promised a better playing surface and offered portable stands for fans and nearby showers for the players. The semi-pro Worumbo Indians would rattle off three state championships at the end of the 1930s.
A gifted first baseman named Eddie Waitkus, from Cambridge, Mass., joined the Indians in 1937. That season culminated with the Indians participating in a national tournament in Kansas.
Eddie Waitkus playing for the Worumbo Indians, late 1930s.
Despite falling short of the championship, the team members returned to Lisbon Falls as heroes, celebrated with a parade and a dinner of “lobster and the fixings.”
The team’s manager said that several major league teams were interested in acquiring Waitkus. In December 1938, after his second summer with the Indians, Waitkus signed with the Chicago Cubs, outbidding the New York Yankees.
Waitkus played three years in the minors before a 12-game call-up to the Cubs in 1941. He lit up the Pacific Coast League in 1942, prompting the Pasadena (Calif.) Post to describe him as “a natural if ever there was one.”
World War II service interrupted the career of Waitkus and many other players. He saw intense fighting while serving in the Army in the Philippines, earning four Bronze Star combat medals.
He became a full-time major leaguer for good in 1946. By 1948, he was an all-star, but that off-season the Cubs traded him to the Philadelphia Phillies.
Upon his return to Chicago with the Phillies in 1949, Waitkus received a note at his hotel. A woman asked him to come to her room regarding an urgent matter.
Steinhagen and the letter she used to set up Waitkus.
Ruth Steinhagen, 19, a “six foot, dark haired typist,” as one report described her, had become obsessed with Waitkus as a Cub. She had even moved to a rooming house in the same neighborhood as her parents.
“I guess she wanted to be alone with her pictures of Eddie,” her mother said.
Steinhagen shot Waitkus with a .22 rifle, the bullet lodging near his heart. She told police that she wanted to “do something exciting in my life,” and called the incident “just a simple shooting.”
Waitkus recovered and resumed playing in 1950, when he was named comeback player of the year and helped lead the “Whiz Kid” Phils to the World Series. (See Waitkus take a practice swing at the :50 mark of this video.) He declined to press charges against Steinhagen, who upon her release from the hospital lived a low-profile life in Chicago until her death in 2012.
In 11 major league seasons, Waitkus compiled a .285 career average and was a two-time all-star. He was a renaissance man, too, fluent in four languages and with a passion for Civil War history and ballroom dancing.
But the shooting haunted him: The back of a 1955 Waitkus baseball card, when he played for the Baltimore Orioles, began, “In 1949 I was shot by a deranged girl.”
Waitkus, who suffered from alcoholism and depression, died in 1972 of esophageal cancer. The father of two children, he was 53.
Cheap imports
My love of “The Natural” once prompted me to visit some of the filming locations in Buffalo, N.Y., but it also has brought me closer to my hometown.
With my recent research, I discovered that a one-two punch had staggered Lisbon within months in 1964. First came the announcement that the Farnsworth woolen mill in Lisbon Center was closing, eliminating 300 jobs.
A town official was confident about the town’s outlook.
“We’ve got enough industrial diversification here to absorb part of the lost jobs,” he said. “The local economy will feel some of the effects of the mill closing, but it won’t be as great as some people fear.”
From the front page of the Lewiston (Maine) Daily Sun, September 1964
But that fear soon became fact, announced in all-caps in the same newspaper I would deliver as a kid two decades later: WORUMBO MILL CLOSING STUNS LISBON AREA
And just like that, another 600 jobs were gone, 900 between the mills in a town of 5,000 people. The mills assigned some of the blame to cheap imports from Japan.
Both mills would operate again — Worumbo, under different owners and names, even into the 2000s — but not at the scale of their heydays. Lisbon seemingly never recovered.
Most of the Worumbo complex burned to the ground in 1987, sparing the 1920 building until it fell to a wrecking ball in 2016.
Stephen King worked at Worumbo and incorporated it into his novel, “11.22.63,” in which the protagonist enters a time portal through a closet in a diner near the mill in an attempt to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy.
I’d like to travel back to 1937 when Worumbo was still bustling. I’d grab a seat at Worumbo Park to watch an Indians game.
I’d have my eye on the highly touted newcomer, the swift-fielding first baseman by the name of Waitkus.
They say he’s a natural.