Newhalem Baseball Teams - Nez

 Newhalem Baseball Teams

By Nez Nesmith

Lyman is one of the few small towns one would pass through when taking Highway 20 east to

cross the Cascade Mountains. Highway 20 is mostly a two-lane east-west highway that crosses

the whole state of Washington from the Idaho border to the town of Anacortes at the Salish

Sea water’s edge in Skagit County. It’s also called North Cascades Highway, as it is the most

northern highway in Washington that you can go across the Cascade mountains over into

Eastern Washington. And from November through April Highway 20 is closed through the

mountains. Too much snow. Of course, it remains open on both sides of the Cascades, so

there’s just about an 80 mile stretch that’s closed.

When I was a kid in the 1950’s Highway 20 didn’t go all the way across the mountains. It

stopped at Newhalem, about 45 miles east and north of Lyman. Newhalem was the end of the

road, and in the mountains. It was and still is a company town owned by Seattle Light and

Power. The town was built for the workers on the Diablo and Ross Dams projects on the Upper

Skagit River. (It’s still the last place to buy anything if you’re going across the mountains to

Eastern Washington.) Newhalem totaled about 400 people, employees and their families back

then. Much less now.

Newhalem had no schools. A town of 400 people with a lot of kids and no schools. And it’s

actually in Whatcom County, but there is no access from Whatcom County to that mountainous

region. You had then and still have to go through Lyman, Hamilton, Concrete, Rockport and

Marblemount, all in Skagit County. Neither did Rockport or Marblemount. Kids from those

towns and Newhalem were all bussed to the town of Concrete, population 705, in Skagit

County. The Seattle Light and Power Company paid the Concrete Schools for the Newhalem

students and provided their school bus and its driver. It was about an hour and a half each way

from Newhalem to Concrete. Can you imagine? Five days a week. That’s fifteen hours each

week spent on a school bus. I guess you shouldn’t have had any homework left to do by the

time you got home. (I wondered what the bus driver did while the kids were in school.)

Although Newhalem didn’t have schools, it did have a nice park with a baseball diamond and

baseball players. Boy, did they have the ballplayers. They always had really good Little League

and Babe Ruth teams. Whenever our team from Lyman, then coached by Mr. Shirley Allen,

played at Newhalem it was an all-day affair, over two hours each direction on Highway 20.

Newhalemites were very friendly people. They didn’t get many visitors. And there was no

restaurant. So, the townspeople rolled out the red carpet for us and fed us. Picnic tables near

the ballfield were crowded with homemade dishes of food, every kind we could think of. Since

it was such a long drive we usually played a double-header. We ate between games. We were

thrilled to win one game against them. They typically easily won both, even when they made

the trip down river to play in Hamilton or Lyman. Those trips were pretty much all-day for them

too, and usually double-headers. Newhalem teams were always exceptionally good.

But here’s the rub. At Marblemount Highway 20 turns north still following the Skagit River and

as mentioned earlier, that puts the town of Newhalem in Whatcom County, by just a couple of

miles. And because of that two miles Newhalem baseball teams weren’t eligible to compete in

Skagit County for Little League or Babe Ruth championships. They were relegated to Whatcom

County which meant they had to compete with teams from Bellingham, Ferndale, Lynden,

Deming and Sumas, which were in the western part of that county. To play any of those teams

would have meant at least a 200 mile roundtrip drive, and that just wasn’t feasible. Thus, they

never played any Whatcom County teams. The Skagit teams even petitioned the two baseball

commissions, Skagit and Whatcom, on their behalf and were denied. So Newhalem could only

play the upriver Skagit County teams in the regular season without being in the playoffs, which

I’m sure they would have dominated regularly.

Even though they knew they were not eligible to win a championship, they still put their best

players on the field and played their hearts out. Every other team admired and respected them.

Coaches, too, especially Coach Allen. He and another coach initiated the petitions. I always

thought Newhalem got cheated just because they were in Whatcom County. Why wouldn’t the

Little League and Babe Ruth commissions have made some sort of exception/concession for

them? I’m sure there were times when they were good enough to have maybe won a State

Championship and competed for the Little League World Series. The last season I played against

them in Little League their team went undefeated. Never lost a game but there was no trophy

for them. They were the best team in the area by far, yet another team was awarded the

championship trophy.

But, you know, I never really knew how they felt about it.