A true 'Field of Dreams' in Dyersville, Iowa (original) (raw)

Ray Kinsella is walking through his cornfields when he hears a voice. “If you build it,” the voice whispers, “he will come.”

And Kinsella, the protagonist of W.P. Kinsella’s novel “Shoeless Joe” and of Phil Alden Robinson’s 1989 film “Field of Dreams,” indeed does build it.

He sacrifices a large portion of his farm, and the corn that’s meant to be grown on it, to build a baseball field. And in the process, through the magic of Kinsella’s words and then Robinson’s visuals, one of the most inspirational baseball stories ever imagined ends up being told.

That’s the fiction. Here’s what most people don’t know: The baseball field is real.

It sits just outside the Iowa town of Dyersville. In 1988, during pre-production for Robinson’s film, an Iowa high school teacher named Sue Riedel had been part of a group formed to help attract movies to the state.

Soon she was scouting for locations that would fit Robinson’s film. The producing team, she told an Iowa radio station, “wanted a white clapboard house, a long lane up to the house and enough land to build a field, and be entirely surrounded by corn.”

The winner ended up being a farm owned by a man named Don Lansing, whose grandparents had bought the land in 1906. “Field of Dreams” was shot on the Lansing farm and part of a field owned by a neighbor.

In the decades after the film crew finished their shoot, the field underwent a number of changes, many of which are detailed in a 2002 book titled “Is This Heaven – The Magic of the Field of Dreams.” Activities held on the site since its construction have included celebrity baseball games, Alamo Drafthouse movie screenings and occasional “Ghost Players” games to emulate what occurs in the novel and the film.

Today the site claims to be open “from sunrise to sunset year-round – weather permitting.” Not only does the field still exist, so do the farm house, a restaurant (called the Dugout), a snack bar and an ice cream stand. Tours of the house are available, and the house itself can be rented between March and December.

On a day in late April, my wife, Mary Pat Treuthart, and I visited the field. We’d been in northeastern Iowa to attend a memorial for one of Mary Pat’s cousins, and we took advantage of the occasion to see a bit of what that part of the country has to offer.

While the memorial was held in Elgin (including an event at the town’s American Legion Hall), we stayed at the Lavender Fields Inn, a cozy bed-and-breakfast located in the nearby town of Calmar. In what little free time we had, we drove through Decorah, home of Luther College (established in 1861) and had Whippy Dip ice-cream cones. And we had a final-night dinner at the Gunder Roadhouse, famous for its vaunted one-pound Gunder Burger.

It was on our final day, as we made our way back to the Eastern Iowa Airport in Cedar Rapids, that we stopped just short of Dyersville, site of the National Farm Toy Museum. We pulled off Iowa Highway 52 and drove down a dusty country road, past farms and fields bare of pretty much anything as planting season had just begun.

From afar, you can see the Field of Dreams layout, sitting small just past a new $80 million baseball complex under construction. We pulled into the parking lot, which was empty save for a couple of dozen cars bearing license plates from various states.

We then walked to the field itself. Children were skipping around the bases while older men, maybe their fathers, took turns swinging a bat at home plate. We took photos of the farm house, the same one in which the movie version of Kinsella – played by Kevin Costner – lived with his wife (played by Amy Madigan) and daughter (played by Gaby Hoffman).

We avoided the restaurant and snack bar, still full of the breakfast served by Barb and Jeff, owners of the Lavender Fields Inn. We did stop at the gift shop, but I already have enough souvenir T-shirts, caps and hoodies to last a lifetime. So no purchases there.

Since our flight home was just a few hours away, we were pressed for time. But as we turned to go, I took one last glimpse of the field. And I imagined what it might look like when the fields of corn, green and tall as an elephant’s eye, stood just beyond the outfield.

I squinted and pictured “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, Buck Weaver, Eddie Cicotte and the other real-life players depicted in the film. I saw them step out of the rows of corn, ready to again play the great American pastime.

And I saw Kinsella, too, glove in hand. He was living out his dream, playing catch.

With his dad.