Spring training

LITTLE ROCK — Steve Arrison, executive director of the Hot Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau, is at it again.

Arrison is the man who brought the World’s Shortest St. Patrick’s Day Parade to the Spa City. The parade down Bridge Street, proclaimed in the 1940s by Ripley’s as the shortest street in the world, attracts up to 10,000 people to downtown Hot Springs each year.

The parade is a prime example of how Arrison constantly is thinking of innovative ways to promote the city. One of his best ideas is a series of postcards highlighting famous residents of and visitors to Hot Springs. Previous postcards have featured President Bill Clinton at his Hot Springs grade school, Babe Ruth at Oaklawn, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson tap-dancing down Central Avenue, President Franklin D. Roosevelt visiting the city, gangster Al Capone riding a donkey cart at Happy Hollow with his brother, Ralph “Bottles” Capone, and a photograph of Capone with his wife, Mae.

“It’s extremely rare to find a photo of Mae Capone,” Arrison said when the postcard was released last year. The photo, which was discovered by Mike Shaw of Shaw’s Antiques, also shows the donkey cart. The gangster apparently loved to have his photo made on the cart.

Hot Springs was considered neutral ground for mobsters. Capone was such a regular that he had his own room at the Arlington Hotel, which guests can still request.

The postcards, used as a sales promotion tool, have become popular with collectors. Arrison recently released one that shows baseball greats Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner and Tris Speaker at spring training in Hot Springs.

Spring training in Hot Springs? That’s right, Arkansas was a favorite location for pre-season practices before teams began going to Florida and Arizona.

Mike Dugan, a Hot Springs native, is the expert on the city’s baseball history and believes the photo was taken in 1915. He found the photo at the old North Star Liquor Store on Park Avenue. Leon Dodd, a retired firefighter whose family owned the liquor store, had purchased the photo at an estate sale at a home once occupied by Billy Jack Maurice of the Maurice Bath House.

Mark Gregory, associate editor of The Sentinel-Record at Hot Springs, says Maurice was involved in the company that produced DeSoto Water. That’s the brand promoted on pennants and the sashes worn by several women in the photo. Dugan thinks the photo was taken at Whittington Park after the annual parade that marked the opening day of spring training.Members of the Brooks Robinson-George Kell Chapter of the Society of American Baseball Research have worked with Dugan to determine the year the photo was taken.

“The photograph has been taken before the group on three occasions and examined,” Gregory wrote. “Members have determined that, knowing Ruth’s personality, he would have pushed himself to the front had he known a camera was around if it had been taken in his later years. It was likely taken during his first year with the Red Sox.”

The parade traditionally would begin near the Majestic Hotel at the end of Central Avenue and make its way up Whittington Avenue to Whittington Park, a baseball field that’s not to be confused with the current recreational Whittington Park to the west.

Dugan says the Red Sox and the Pittsburgh Pirates held spring training in Hot Springs for many years. The tradition had begun in 1886 when “Cap” Anson, who was both a player and manager for the Chicago White Stockings, brought his team to town for a ritual that came to be known as boiling out-taking advantage of Hot Springs’ hot mineral waters to recover from the winter break.

According to Dugan, the players would practice in the morning, take time for lunch and play a game in the afternoon. Evenings were spent taking the baths or simply hanging out in downtown Hot Springs.

As Florida began to develop, Hot Springs declined in the 1920s as a spring training destination.

“The players were gambling a lot, they were drinking a lot and a lot of times the owners felt like they had taken them back up North in worse shape than they brought them here,” Dugan told The Sentinel-Record. “We did have a wonderful heyday of doing that, starting in 1886 and lasting off and on up through about 1929.”

Sixteen major league teams stopped off in Hot Springs at one time or another. Now Arrison is using that heritage to promote the city as a tourism and convention destination.

Free-lance columnist Rex Nelson is the senior vice president for government relations and public outreach at The Communications Group in Little Rock.