It was January 1977, the Kingdome was built, and the Mariners were coming to Seattle in April, when three of us were invited to a meeting at the Seattle Parks Department offices: Heinie Pohlman, a Little League district administrator from Shoreline; Stan Cowan, active in north Seattle Connie Mack and Babe Ruth baseball, and me, the state commissioner for Casey Stengel, the post high school organization,

I had never met Heinie, but had known Stan as a tennis player at Central Washington State College when I was a sportswriter in Yakima.

None of us knew why we were invited until the parks people explained.

Sicks’ Stadium, the home of the Seattle Rainiers and for one year (1969) the Seattle Pilots, had been occupied by a minor league team managed by Ray Washburn through 1976. The Seattle Center Commission had run Sicks’ Stadium since the Pilots’ year, but now that facility had been dumped on the Seattle Park Department.

The three of us were being asked to manage Sicks’ Stadium because Seattle Parks had been given no manpower to do it.

The three of us agreed to try to run Sicks’ Stadium,

Heinie designed and built bridges and almost immediately was off to build another bridge. Stan owned a dry cleaning business in Seattle’s Roosevelt District and his front desk help could handle the afternoon traffic. My hours were 6 a.m. to 2 on the copy desk at the Herald in Everett. Stan would be our treasurer.

Sicks’ Stadium may have been a joke for Major League baseball, but it was the answer to the dreams of guys like Stan and me. Basically, the property and everything on it was given to us to use as best we could, including parking lot, offices, concession stand and telephone. The infield had been skinned so softball and youth baseball leagues could not ruin it.

We scheduled everything we could, starting with Seattle University, coached by Frank Papasedero, who held the checkbook to the Stoen Brothers baseball empire – from Little League age through high school. The other immediate tenant was the Seattle Metro League that had more schools than fields.

My contacts with Alpine Burtco, the Mariners concessionaire, led to a bare-bones concession operation: popcorn, hotdogs, soft drinks, and candy bars.

We called ourselves the Greater Seattle Youth Baseball Association (GSYBA). Our list of users included weddings, a circus, a revival meeting, fastpitch softball, all ages of baseball, and we looked forward to a full soccer season – and Park-and-Ride the next season.

League officers and people like Cale Campbell, a former South Kitsap coach and teacher, helped Stan and me keep the stadium open. Heinie was our silent partner.

The first thing Stan and I did every afternoon was hose the pigeon droppings from the folding chairs in what were those nationally famous $6 Seattle Pilots box seats.

An early-season caller told us the Sicks’ lights had burned all night. The power company told us not to worry. The lights could burn 24 hours and not cost more than $75! Seattle Center had been charging users $150 a game for lights. We dropped the price to $100 and everyone thought they were getting a bargain

About the time the Metro League playoffs were to begin, one of our lady visitors picked the only stall in the women’s restroom that had no paper. She was outraged and told her husband, who was a health official. She also called the P-I sports to report her experience. The P-I assigned the story to Seattle’s first woman sportswriter, who made no effort to call any of us, and was not coached to do so. The P-I elected to showcase their new employee with a banner headline on Page 1 addressing the “filthy” and “unsanitary” conditions at Sicks’ Stadium. Obviously we had skipped a beat.

The offended lady’s husband laughed at the whole affair, but his wife could not. She and the P-I forced a full-scale investigation. Seattle Public Schools decided they could not let their students use an unsanitary facility, but relented when they realized they had no place else to go.

However, the Health Department investigation led to closure of our concessions.

McDonald’s had recently opened a Rainier Avenue store across the parking lot from the stadium. We negotiated a promotion with McDonald’s. A ticket stub from Sicks’ would get you free fries and a group discount.

The next hurdle was the drought of ’77; the lights and field water were turned off. We scheduled our events earlier and enforced game time limits.

The crushing blow came in late summer when the Seattle City Council decided to close Sicks’ Stadium Sept. 1, not even keeping it open through Labor Day. We had already booked holiday events and fall soccer.

Early October the Seattle City Council announced it was closing Sicks’ because there had been no demand for its use in September. It was the council’s version of bait and switch.

GSYBA was granted a morning spot on the Seattle City Council agenda. The time of the council meeting was a hardship for our delegation. I had been chosen to make our presentation, but when called my residence was protested. Both Heinie and I lived outside the city. That had never before been questioned.

Our group staged a sit-in in John Miller’s office; everyone else went to lunch. The Parks Department was on Miller’s plate. He had been branded “The Friend of Baseball” because he supported the Kingdome project, but he was trouble for youth ball. We sat until we got a chance to air our grievances, and then paid our parking fines.

We hired an attorney and had the support of a veteran State Legislator from Rainier Valley, the area surrounding Sicks’ Stadium.

When we were assigned a spot on the court docket, our attorney told us we had been assigned an impossible judge and she had no cause for changing venue.

Despite our problems, we had played to 85 percent capacity and after attorney and other fees still had $15,000 in the bank. Anticipating Park-and-Ride for the following year, we thought we and the youth sports community had finally found a place to play and had proved we could manage it.

Our profits did not go to waste. Stan, using me as his consultant, carefully rationed the money to amateur sports groups. It took him three years to spend it!