Marek Warszawski
This Fresno baseball park is named for a KKK member. City College needs to change it
The other evening, after hearing about the death of Fresno sports icon Tom Seaver, I typed the Hall of Fame pitcher’s name into The Bee’s archives hoping to learn more about his roots.
What I discovered startled me — only the revelation wasn’t about Seaver. It was about someone else synonymous with local baseball: John Euless, namesake of Fresno City College’s Euless Park.
One of the search results turned up a July 1991 article in which longtime Bee sports columnist Bob McCarthy argues Euless Park should be renamed in honor of recently retired Rams coach Len Bourdet.
McCarthy gave several reasons why Bourdet is more deserving than Euless, none better than the one he provided, almost offhandedly, toward the end of the piece:
“Today (the name Euless Park) may be inappropriate for an entirely different reason. A 1922 newspaper article identified (Euless) as a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Fresno.”
Reading that, my eyeballs nearly popped out of their sockets. Fresno City’s baseball facility, and former home to minor-league baseball from the early 1940s to the late 1980s, is named for a KKK leader?
How can that be?
After not finding any other Euless-KKK references in the archives, I cast a wider Internet search. Sure enough, Google turned up two newspaper articles, one from the May 1, 1922 edition of the Fresno Republican, that included Euless’ name on a Fresno KKK chapter membership list seized by police during a raid in Inglewood and released to the media by authority of the Fresno County district attorney.
Quite the scandal ensued. Six police officers who had pledged oaths to the klan were forced to resign. Also among the outed were “five dentists, a former city trustee, a member of the Fresno fire department, a member of the public works department and several prominent businessmen” including Euless, described as a local real estate broker.
My mind immediately began to fill with questions. First, though, I wanted to know if the Euless-KKK connection is something Fresno City is aware of and, for whatever reason, chose to ignore.
Ron Scott, the Rams’ head baseball coach for more than three decades, insists that’s not the case.
“You really caught me by surprise,” Scott said. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”
Same goes for Woody Wilk, the school’s retired sports information director and unofficial athletics historian.
“I don’t know anything about this,” Wilk said.
Deep dive into KKK, Euless
Scott and Wilk were at Fresno City in 1991. Both told me they were avid readers of McCarthy’s columns.
Still, any association between Euless and the KKK seems to have faded from their memories. Just like it has for a lot of people. Or else Euless Park would’ve undergone a name change a long time ago.
Right?
That’s a question Fresno City College President Carole Goldsmith and the State Center Community College District Board of Trustees are probably asking themselves at this very moment.
My research included a deep dive into the KKK’s history in the San Joaquin Valley (a fascinating subject) and one John M. Euless, who moved to town in 1906 from Tennessee. Euless became a raisin farmer, a real estate and fire insurance broker and helped start an oil enterprise in Coalinga.
The 1922 newspaper articles, in the Republican and Oakland Tribune, were the only references I could find that tied Euless to the white supremacist group. Still, the association didn’t prevent him from becoming a prominent businessman who advocated for grape growers in Washington, D.C. or joining several business and fraternal groups. Nor from commissioning a large bungalow house with a distinctive hooded dormer that has become a city historic site and is currently on the market.
In 1941, Euless led a subscription drive to construct a baseball park adjacent to Ratcliffe Stadium for the arrival of the minor-league Fresno Cardinals. Euless served as club president and acquired the nickname “Mr. Baseball” from newspaper writers of that era. Sixteen years later, after the Cardinals’ affiliation ended, Fresno State College Park was renamed John Euless Ballpark.
It has been Euless Park ever since. But now that its namesake’s KKK ties have been re-revealed, by me stumbling across them, that has to change.
Baseball park needs new name
In 2020, we don’t look the other way at racism. What might have been excused or even condoned in the 1940s and ‘50s, or buried in the 17th paragraph of a sports column in 1991 and soon forgotten about, can no longer be ignored.
Euless Park shouldn’t be called Euless Park any longer.
“If the allegations are true, it is really disappointing to learn that we’ve played all those games in a park named after someone who was in the KKK,” said Scott, who has helmed the Rams since 1989.
Fortunately, there are others in our community who deserve the honor of having a junior college baseball facility named after them more than Euless. Two, actually.
One of them is Scott, whose career record of 1,054-394 leaves him just 19 victories shy of having the most wins of any JC coach in California history. The other is Bourdet, who went 722-374 during a 31-year run at Fresno City from 1958-88 and is still active at age 94.
Since Bourdet preceded Scott — compiling 37 conference and four state titles between them — I propose Euless Park be renamed Bourdet-Scott Park in time for the 2021 season. (Keeping fingers crossed on that.)
Yes, I understand the SCCCD has a lot on its plate right now. Matters of more urgency than the name of an old ballpark. But this one can’t be shuffled into the dustbin of history. Not anymore.
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