Neighbors: Remembering a 1920s-style baseball banquet from 1959

We’re into the new year. So, while it doesn’t look like it now, spring is around the corner, which means the baseball season is coming up.
Which brings to mind a local baseball memory to pass on. It concerns the old Fargo-Moorhead Twins, predecessors of the current F-M Redhawks.
It came from Lee McMaines, Fargo. Regrettably, Neighbors didn’t get it in before he died last fall. But belatedly, here is the story Lee said he got from Merle “Bill” Benshoof, a player for the Twins who became a local barber.
Bill told Lee about a banquet held in 1959 to honor former Twins players and team supporters.
The team’s current players were to attend also, dressed in 1920s-style uniforms, which included pillbox hats, and they were to wear handlebar mustaches.
Halsey Hall, a well-known Twin Cities radio announcer, was called in to emcee the event.
Now, Hall was known for having somewhat “colorful” stories, to put it politely. So the F-M players decided to have a little fun with him.
They explained their plan to the team’s manager, a young woman named Marlys Davis. Yes, the team had a female manager back then.
Marlys, never one to pass on a little harmless fun, went along with the plan. She, too, suited up in an old-type uniform with the pillbox hat and put on a handlebar mustache, then sat with the players as the program began.
Hall began telling his story, and yes, it was becoming very colorful.
But just as he was about to deliver the raunchy punch line, Marlys stood up, removed her hat and mustache and reported loudly, “This is certainly no place for a lady!”
Bill said you could have heard a pin drop, and Hall’s face became as colorful as his story.
But his discomfort didn’t last long, Bill said, as Marlys and her players laughed and applauded. Then the audience joined in the fun and everybody had a good time.
“Sadly,” Lee wrote, “that was the last banquet for the F-M Twins baseball team as the team was dissolved in 1960. The ‘boys of summer’ and their ‘field of dreams,’ Barnett Field, have long since disappeared.
“Sometimes, on a quiet summer’s eve,” Lee concluded, “I remember how it was when I was young, and it was good.”
Lee’s wife, Catherine, wrote recently that her husband “had many great stories to tell from his youth years in Fargo.”
After he and Catherine were married, they attended F-M Twins games and met manager Davis.
So, while sadly, Lee is gone, his story of that 1959 banquet lives on.