The Bob Cobb story-Part 4

Note: My next book, No. 6, may focus on Bob Cobb, the owner of the legendary Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood and a Billings man who played a key role in the city getting a professional baseball team 78 years ago. I’ve written a chunk of text for a possible manuscript, and I’m be sharing that during coming weeks. In case you missed Parts 1, 2, 3, or all of the previous ones, they’re available on my website, www.treasurestatepress.com

Your comments are welcome!

Softball enthusiasts in Billings represented another competing interest in the months before the Mustangs began play.

On June 5, 1947, the Billings Times reported on a “heated discussion” of the issue of how softball and baseball could coexist, either at Athletic Park or elsewhere in the city.

Representatives of the Billings Recreational Softball League reminded the City Council that the Athletic Park commission had agreed in 1946 to allow a “weed patch” in the northwest corner of the park to be developed into a softball field.

And now a new pro baseball team coming to town threatened those plans.

Two members of Legion Post 4’s executive committee, A.F. Lamey and Cale Crowley, asked the council to preserve the commission’s ruling that the park would be used exclusively for baseball.

Lamey said the Legion’s junior baseball program had become one of the most successful projects for the national veterans’ organization’s work in boosting Americanism. He said Athletic Park was vital in promoting the city’s junior baseball program. And, thanks to the efforts of the local legion post and other baseball-minded people in Billings, the city had landed one of four American Legion sectional tournaments scheduled in late summer 1947.

(That tournament in Billings earned the city a four-day visit in August 1947 by Babe Ruth, giving residents and others from the city’s growing trade area a look at the Bambino a year before his death from throat cancer.)

Crowley urged the council not to eliminate or curtail junior baseball by developing the park’s secondary field into a softball diamond.

He said the committee was “not opposed to softball, but believes it is not feasible or practical for all players to use this one little field.”