Idaho-Oregon Border League

Before there was the now-defunct Ontario Orchard Meadowlarks, of the late 1990s there were the Ontario Elks, the Ontario Merchants, Weiser Prospectors, Payette Packers, as well as teams from Emmett, Vale, Nyssa, Wilder, New Plymouth and Homedale. 

The Elks, and later the Merchants, played in the Idaho-Oregon Border League. The Elks were a part of the league from as early as 1927 until 1951 and then played sporadically, as the Merchants, until the league folded in 1957.

One man, who had a big hand in running the Elks from 1934 until 1951, was Ontario native Bill Keele.

Keele, who graduated from Ontario High School in 1932, began playing for the semi-professional Elks in 1934.

“The summer I graduated from high school I was kind of their bat boy,” Keele recalled. “Then in ’33 I got to wear a uniform, but never got to play a game. That fall I went to Whitman College. I came home for the summer of ’34 and started to play with them and never missed a game.”

Keele also played in exhibition games with the Weiser Prospectors and the Payette Packers during his playing days.

Baseball facilities in Ontario were quite different in those days than they are today. There was no Elks Memorial Field, or the quality field at Ontario High School. Instead the Elks played their Idaho-Oregon League games at the Malheur County Fairgrounds, until World War II, according to Keele. After the war, the games were played at what is now Ontario Middle School.

It did not matter where the Elks played, the crowds rarely came to support the semi-pro squad.

“We would get maybe 100 or 150 people in the stands,” Keele said.

How did the Elks settle on their name?

“After the war the Ontario Elks Club sponsored the team,” Keele said. “They put up something like $500 to buy uniforms and balls. Nobody got paid. Before the war there was no real sponsor, we just played on our own. Whatever gate receipts we got were used to buy the baseballs.”

A self-admitted ‘good-field, no-hit’ player, Keele played second base for the Elks and after returning from a tour of duty during World War II, from 1942 until 1945, Keele took to becoming a player-manager with the Elks.

Ontario differed from the other teams it competed with in the Idaho-Oregon League — like Weiser, Payette and Nampa — in that the Elks were comprised of all-local talent.

“It was an all-local team. Now Payette and Weiser got to fighting and they brought in some college ballplayers. Pretty good ballplayers,” Keele said. “Payette had some pretty good ballplayers and we had a pretty good rivalry with them. In the old Idaho-Oregon League (pre-World War II), Emmett was our worst rival. In the post-war, when my brother Bob was playing with us there were some big leaguers that played in the league. Guys like Harmon Killebrew and Larry Jackson.”

Keele said Payette and Weiser’s infusion of college talent may have ultimately led to the downfall of the league.

“Payette and Weiser turned out to be the strongest teams, in the post-war, and they would beat us pretty bad 17-2 or something like that,” Keele said. “We just had local fellas. I think that’s part of the reason the league broke up. It just became too one-sided. Kind of like the Yankees of today.”

Keele recalls every 4th of July taking the Elks to play the Vale squad before the war.

“I don’t think we played in Vale after the war,” he said.

Keele’s involvement with the Elks came to an end in 1951 when, an article which appeared in the Argus, explained the no team would be fielded because of the Korean War and a lack of support from the business community. Plus the league already was full — with eight teams — before the Elks got an application turned into the league.

Ontario ventured into the Idaho-Oregon Border League in 1954, with the Ontario Merchants. The Merchants were a last-minute replacement to the league for Boise. The 14 members of the Merchants were sponsored by a local business and were managed by John Echanis.

There is no denying that Keele is a large part of semi-professional baseball history in Ontario and being a part of that history has left Keele with a boatload of memories.

“The game that sticks out the most is an Idaho-Oregon League championship game with Emmett that was a good one in the late ’30s or early ’40s,” he recalled. “We had the grandstands at the fairgrounds full of people. It was a great time for baseball in this area. Such a unique time period.”

When it comes to semi-professional baseball in Payette no one knows more than Cliff Masingill.

Masingill, who teamed with his brother third baseman Tobe, played shortstop and batted leadoff for the Payette Packers of the Idaho-Oregon Border League from 1947 to 1957, with a hiatus to serve in the Korean War from 1951 to 1952.

The Packers competed against teams from Weiser, Emmett, Wilder, Nampa, Homedale and on occassions — when they fielded teams — New Plymouth, Ontario, Vale and Nyssa. The latter four did not always regularly field a team in the 1950s.

“It was an interesting time,” Masingill said. “It got so every town would try to outdo each other. We’d get a good player, then Weiser would ship someone like Larry Jackson and then Nampa would get some good ones.

“We started before college let out and so if we played Nampa and we didn’t have our college players (Masingill’s father-in-law) Si (Harper) would get a good pitcher to come in from Portland that he knew over there. There would be big bets on the game and in would come this good thrower. We’d bring in a ringer and play Nampa. It was really a big rivalry.”

When the college players did arrive in town, they lived with families in the community.

The Packers played at the Payette Public Park — which has since been torn down — but was located on what is now the track at McCain Middle School.

Masingill, who is the father of Senior PGA golfer Scott Masingill, called Payette a big baseball town and one reason was Payette Public Park. The park featured a rectangular-shaped outfield, which meant a short right field fence and a near-impossible left field wall when it came to hitting home runs.

“It was a skin infield, no grass,” Masingill said of the park which featured a completely-covered grandstand. “We always played in the afternoon and it was always hotter than heck. So when you had it covered more people came and it was just the place to go.”

That meant everyone in town turned out for the ball games.

“I played shortstop and my brother (Tobe) played third base,” Masingill said. “The fans weren’t 10 feet from third base and there was always a group of rowdies right there. They would always yell ‘come alive Masingills’ that’s all you could hear from that group. They would get on the other team miserably. It was something else. But they were a good group of baseball fans.”

With such a distinct home field, Payette pulled off what would now be considered a coup, landing a Major League Baseball exhibition game over Idaho’s Capital City — Boise.

“There were some real caustic articles wrote in the Statesman wondering how Payette could land such a game and not Boise,” Masingill said.

The game was played in October of 1943 and included the Detroit Tigers’ Al Unser and the St. Louis Browns’ Vernon Stephens. The game was staged to promote baseball and in turn the citizens of Payette supported the exhibition.

“We had a short right field fence and they knocked 11 balls out of the park,” Masingill added. “Some 2,500 people came to watch the game.”

The Border League featured its share of future big league ballplayers.

The Weiser Prospectors recruited a pitcher — Larry Jackson — who would become a 20-game winner for the Chicago Cubs in 1964. There was also an outfielder for the Packers — Rudy Regalodo — who played three years (1954-1956) with the Cleveland Indians.

Then there was the biggest one of them all — Payette’s own Harmon Killebrew.

Harmon Killebrew played two summers for the Packers — in 1953 and 1954 — while still in high school — before he signed with the Washington Senators. That one summer produced one of the greatest memories Masingill can recall.

“Only two people had ever hit the ball over the left field fence at our field. Ray Brubaker, who did in 1937 or 1938, and Harmon Killebrew,” Masingill said. “Harm did it against Mountain Home Air Force Base. A scout from the Senators saw it and after the game he measured it and the scout said it ‘was big time.’ That home run impressed that scout. It was quite a night, something you never forget.”

It was not uncommon for players from other towns to come play. Dave Hawk, who later went on to coach basketball in Vale, played in Payette along with Parma’s Dick Birdsall and Homedale’s Cap Norton.

“You took three or four pitchers and a catcher from college, and then they would fill out the rest of the roster with local talent,” Massingill said.

Local players like Payette’s Pat Heleker, who played first base for the Packers, joined the Masingills on the roster.

Locals also managed the Packers, including the last manager ever of the Payette Packers — Mel Debban. Debban worked for the Payette School District and helped build Harmon Killebrew Field, the current home of the Payette Pirates.

“He was a great person and a great manager,” Masingill said.

It would not be a stretch to call the Packers the top team in the Border League and that could be traced to one man — Masingill’s father-in-law, Si Harper.

“We moved here in 1935 and it was just a old rickety stand,” Masingill’s wife, Shirley, said of the Packers’ home park. “The baseball group at that time in Payette built the covered grandstand. It was probably built in ’36 or ’37. My dad was always going out and recruiting good ballplayers. He was quite a recruiter. They formed a group called Sports Incorporated when they set up this Border League. It was a group of businessmen in Payette and they ran the show. They got the players, they made the money and paid the bills.”

Playing in a semi-prefessional baseball league was not an easy task — especially for Masingill, who juggled a wife, kids and a full-time job.

“We didn’t get paid, but we did it for the good of the town,” Masingill said. “The college kids got jobs to come play, but the other reason we played was we had fun.”

The Border League season began May 15 and ran until August 15.

“That was the cutoff, that’s when everything ended and you went to the state tournaments,” Masingill said.

The Border League had no specific rules on who played where.

“Lots of towns had a team, but not everyone was loyal, but then maybe that year they didn’t have a team,” Masingill said. “Maybe they didn’t have the interest, so we would get the good players. We were playing big time, we were playing at a high level.”

The Border League, which came to an end in 1957, was the kind of league, according to Masingill, where everyone was a quality player.

“You played against college kids that were the best in their colleges playing here. The quality of the baseball was big,” he added. “If you didn’t get college kids, if you just played local players, you were going to get killed. So we had four locals and five or so other kids that were really good players. Weiser did the same thing and Nampa did the same thing and it was something else.”

The city of Vale has as rich a sports tradition as any city in Oregon. That sports history includes semi-professional baseball in the Idaho-Oregon Border League. That sports history also includes Kenneth Romans.

Romans played the outfield and was a utility infielder for Vale from 1951 to 1954.

“Had to field a team,” Romans said of his work in the utility role. “Sometimes you had trouble getting enough guys to play.”

Romans batted .340 in his three years in the league and remembers the quality of hitter that terrorized Border League pitching staffs.

“I didn’t have any trouble hitting those guys,” Romans recalled. “I remember how hard those guys hit the ball some of them. They could hit it a lot further than I could. They could really hit it. That’s what amazed me then.”

Romans remembers one hard-hit ball in particular.

“I remember we were playing against Payette at their old ballpark (Payette Public Field) and Harmon Killebrew hit a shot over my head out into a beet field while I was playing center field,” Romans noted. “The thing that was amazing about it was some of those players they could hit the ball a long way.”

Vale’s semi-professional team played all of their home games at the city park and drew good crowds to their Sunday home games.

“In those days we didn’t have television and it was just something to do on Sundays,” Romans said. “We had a lot of people come out to watch in us Vale.”

The Vale squad was managed by Po Johnson who ran the bank in Vale. Baseball in Vale got started, according to Romans, thanks to the Bureau of Reclamation and the Vale Project.

“I think they started that team when the Bureau of Reclamation started the Vale Project. The guy that was the manager of the district really liked baseball and so he would bring guys in to work for him that could play ball,” Romans noted. “I think that’s when Vale got into the Border League. Po Johnson played until he was 55, but he could still drag bunt down first base and beat you. There was a guy named Bill Hauser, he’d been brought in by the Bureau and was a pitcher who played for the Cubs. He had a curveball you would not believe. There was a guy named Leroy Terry, who lived in Harper, but he was brought in by the Bureau and he played with us. The rest of the guys were mainly high school guys.”

Romans recalls playing with guys from Ontario — Carl Willis, Paul Plaza and Melvin Hickey to name a few — and players from Nyssa — Jack Bowen, Dick Wilson, Dick Pounds, Leland Barnes and Wayne Patrick — who all came to play in Vale.

“We had a lot of fun,” Romans said. “It was a higher-level than high school.”

Romans, who went on to raise cattle at Willow Creek, recalls going to play other Border League towns — Nampa, Payette, Weiser and Caldwell — and remembers “playing in an alfalfa field in Fruitland.”

Despite not bringing in players like the Nampas, Payettes or Weisers of the Border League, Romans recalls Vale holding its own against those teams.

“We won a lot of the time,” he said. “Nampa and Payette were not any better than us.”

Playing in the Border League was not for the faint of heart.

“They would throw at you. It was rough, but you played hard,” he said. “You’d take guys out at second and you tried to win. At the end of the day you would come home dirty and tired.”

New Plymouth is not quite the history of Ontario, Payette or the other teams of the Idaho-Oregon Border League, but New Plymouth was there nonetheless.

Bill Carpenter played for New Plymouth’s entry into the Border League in 1947 and again in 1950.

In between Carpenter served in United States Army Signal Corps, spending the majority of time installing a dial exchange for the Air Force and Navy in Guam.

Carpenter recalls playing for pretty good teams in New Plymouth.

“We had pretty good teams,” Carpenter, who now lives in Meridian, said. “Jim Gilmore pitched for us and then went on to pitch for the Boise Pilots of the Pioneer League. Andy Anderson threw for us and then pitched for a pro team in Billings. We had some talent.”

New Plymouth’s home field was located where the park is now situated behind city hall.

“There used to be a fairgrounds and a baseball diamond there,” Carpenter recalled. “If it you hit it far enough you could get it into Noble Ditch. We had an all-dirt infield and grass in the outfield.”

Carpenter said the town supported the team.

“We played every Sunday and New Plymouth came out and supported the team,” he added. “(New Plymouth’s newspaper) The Payette Valley Sentinel covered us really well.”

Carpenter played shortstop and was a pitcher and earned a certificate of merit in 1950 for his play at shortstop.

Harold White was the manager both years Carpenter played in New Plymouth.

“He was a great fella and he also played centerfield for us,” Carpenter said.

Other names Carpenter remembered playing with included Russell Carpenter, Jim and Paul Gilmore, Ben and John Murata, Harold White and Leo Castle.

Carpenter said New Plymouth did not bring in college players to compete with Payette, Nampa and Weiser, all of whom regularly brought in college talent, but instead went with local talent.

“We couldn’t afford to bring in college ball players,” Carpenter said. “But the guys we had played hard.”

Carpenter admitted he was not sure why the semi-professional circuit died out.

“There are certainly good players around,” he said.

From Ontario Argus-Observer- July 21, 2002