02/22/2023
An iconic photo of baseball Hall of Famer Ferguson Jenkins and Bill “Spaceman” Lee at Cambridge’s Dickson Park in the 1990s.
I saw Jenkins last fall, and mentioned I once had an old photo of him that I had taken at Dickson Park, but noted that the photo had been lost to time. Some weeks later the photo turned up, after being missing for more than two decades. Jenkins, a Chatham, Ontario native, was the first Canadian to win the Cy Young Award (1971). He told me that although he played two seasons for London in the Intercounty following his retirement from the Majors, he had never played a game at Dickson Park.
He retired from the Majors in 1983, which was the last year the Terriers, one of the Intercounty’s founding members in 1919, played in the InterCounty. They won the league title that year and then folded, ending a remarkable 60-plus year tenure that included 13 league championships.
In the early years of the Intercounty, future Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson, and his brother Vaughan, played with the Guelph Maple Leafs at Dickson Park; though he was an all-round athlete, baseball was Pearson’s true passion. Later he won the Nobel Prize.
Many great players have played at Dickson Park, including homebrews like Rob Ducey, Scott Thorman, Jason Gooding, Tex Kaiser and Bob McCullough. Others include Jim Bagby, the pitcher who ended Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, and Manchester, New Hampshire’s Tom Padden, playing coach of the 1949 Galt Terriers. Padden had gone up to the Majors with the New York Yankees when Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Bill Dickey were his teammates. Other prominent players included Negro League pitching star Jeff Shelton from Buffalo, who also played for the Terriers, as did Toronto native Goody Rosen. Rosen led the Dodgers in batting in 1945–he led the NL for most of that season—and finished with a .325 average.
In 1950 a young player by the name of Bill Horne came to town to play with the Terriers. His real name was Bill Hornsby and he was the son of baseball immortal Rogers Hornsby.
There are many others of note, including Jesse Orosco, who pitched a no-hitter in 1977 for the Terriers in a 15-0 win over Guelph, and went on to a stellar Major League career in which he held the record for most games pitched.
Many of these players are chronicled in my book Terrier Town: Summer of ‘49 (WLU Press, 2003).
The photo of Jenkins and Lee, taken at Dickson Park, was captured during a Legends promotional tour, so even though Jenkins didn’t play a league game at the famed Canadian park, he was there for one day in the late 1990s. With the two Major League standouts was another by the name of Vida Blue.
