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Field Of Dreams Scores A Grand Slam With Baseball, Movie Buffs

© Kevin Reed

"People will come....They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past....The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that was once good, and that could be again. Oh people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come."

- Terence Mann (James Earl Jones), Field of Dreams

And they have come, time and again.

Along a stretch of one of the scores of gravel roads that criss-cross this rich, rolling farmland you will find it. A place to which you are drawn for reasons you can't explain.

Within the basepaths of this simple diamond lies a mystic fountain of youth that rekindles fond memories of times long since past. It's not heaven, as the ghostly visage of "Shoeless" Joe Jackson inquired, no. It's Iowa. Welcome to the Field of Dreams.

For over a decade this rural area of Eastern Iowa has been a Mecca for baseball fans and the mildly curious who's yearly pilgrimages now number in the thousands. All welcome with open arms by farmer and part-proprietor Don Lansing.

It was Lansing's farm that caught the eye of representatives from the Iowa Film Commission who were scouting locations for the movie adaptation of W.P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe. Retitled Field of Dreams, the film stared Kevin Costner as a farmer who, upon hearing a mysterious voice, constructs a ballpark and finds himself host to a team of phantom players who emerge from within his cornfield.

After signing a lease to use a portion of Lansing's 100-acre property, including the now famous farmhouse which served as the home for the lead characters, the film crew set about transforming a thriving crop into a pristine baseball diamond, a task that was accomplished in only five days.

Filming took place in and around the community of Dyersville and lasted for 14 weeks. When production wrapped, Lansing planned to keep the field as is for the enjoyment of family and friends, at least temporarily, with the notion of reverting it back to farm use the following spring.

Field of Dreams opened on April 21,1989 to critical and commercial success, sparking interest among fans as to the whereabouts of the unlikely landmark.

Just two weeks after the movie's release,the first visitor arrived at the Lansing farm, a fellow who had taken a detour on a drive from New York to California who explained that he had to see the field for himself before it was plowed up. Soon after, plans for ever farming the plot fell by the wayside as more onlookers streamed in.