When most people think of Fenway Park in Boston, they think of the Red Sox.

The 100-year-old baseball temple was built for the Red Sox, after all, and is seen on national TV as the team’s home field.

But the place has a far richer history. As one of the oldest public venues in Boston, it’s part of the region’s cultural history. The place has hosted boxing matches, high school football championships, college and professional football, concerts, and even a reception for elephants.

Not to mention all the great baseball moments that have happened there.

The detailed chronicling of the park’s non-baseball past is one of the things that makes the new book “Field of Our Fathers: An Illustrated History of Fenway Park” stand out among the many other Fenway history books. The coffee-table sized book was written by Richard A. Johnson, curator of The Sports Museum at TD Garden in Boston, and a 1978 graduate of Bates College in Lewiston.

The coffee-table-sized book is full of great old pictures, detailed history, and lots of fun extras, including replicas of old game tickets and programs. The book came out late in 2011, just in time for the park’s 100th anniversary, in 2012.

Q: Were you trying to show in this book there was more to Fenway’s history than just baseball?

A: I knew there were a number of competing books coming out around the centennial. I knew most of the books would be Red Sox-centered, so this would be a way to separate myself. Plus I had already co-authored a book that had a lot about the park’s Red Sox history, “Red Sox Century.” But the history of the park is so much more than the history of the Red Sox. So I put on my researcher’s helmet with the light on it and went into the coal mine that is the microfilm room at the Boston Public Library, and it really became a voyage of discovery for me.

Q: What’s an example of something that happened at Fenway that a lot of people today might not know about?

A: There were two national high school football championship games there, in 1912 and 1914, when Everett (Mass.) High School was a power. One year Everett outscored opponents 600 to nothing and then won the championship game, 80 to nothing, against Oak Park, Ill. There were 10,000 people there for that.

Another great event was in 1914 when there was a reception there for three circus elephants. They were purchased by the schoolchildren of Boston, who collected dimes and nickels to buy the elephants for the Franklin Park Zoo. The Red Sox allowed the city to hold a reception there for them on a Saturday morning, and some 50,000 people jammed in to see them.

Another thing I found very interesting was that starting in 1920, there were a series of boxing events at Fenway that headlined black boxers. And this was more than 30 years before the Red Sox had their first black player.

Q: It seems like that in Fenway’s early years, it was used for more than just baseball, and that the current owners are beginning to do that as well. Do you agree with that?

A: Yes, it’s come full circle. The current ownership seems to be revisiting the time when it was a true people’s park, when you’d just as likely see a concert as a ball game. At one time, if you lived around Boston, you were likely to know someone who had played at Fenway. The most inspiring story I found was about a semi-pro football team that played the New York Giants at Fenway in 1927, as sort of an audition for the city of Boston to acquire an NFL team. These guys worked as longshoremen or laborers during they day, and then played football on weekends.

Q: Where did you get all the tickets, scorecards and programs you reproduced in the book?

A: I’ve collected stuff since I was 8 years old, so most are artifacts I collected. A few things are from the sports museum. And I was going on eBay to see what I could find there, and I did find some things, so eBay deserves some credit.

Q: Are there any surprises in the book?

A: I tried to include some things you wouldn’t find in the public relations material about the park, including its gambling history. Gambling is such a part of life in Massachusetts, and it’s been a big part of the park’s history.

It was the first park to have an electronic scoreboard, and there was a section of the stands where people bet on balls and strikes. I found a newspaper story from 1936 about a raid by Boston police, and how they arrested guys for betting at the game.

Staff Writer Ray Routhier can be contacted at 791-6454 or at:

rrouthier@pressherald.com

 

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