Precious Memories – Wolf Point’s 1966 Jaycee’s Little League
“Because She Could Beat Me Up”
• For the 1966 Little League season, the Wolf Point Jaycees hired 19-year-old Vida resident Larry Van Atta as program director.
• Van Atta was given free reins to organize the 180 Wolf Point boys eager to play baseball. Van Atta was a member of the 1965 Wolf Point state American Legion B baseball champions, and state Class B basketball titleholders, Circle Wildcats.
• Given just one canvas bag stuffed with bats, balls and catcher equipment, Van Atta ran the 9-12-year-olds through a variety of drills, then selected captains, and eventually organized the boys into several teams.
• Since he ran the entire program by himself, he scheduled several three-inning games with a constant rotation of teams and games. The season ran from June 15 to Aug. 15. Later that summer, 6- to 8-year-olds began their season.
• Today, Van Atta lives in Billings and remembers some of the older and more skilled players – boys such as Larry Monson, Danny Bartel, Tim Cody and Carmen Birdsbill — all future players for the American Legion team and Wolf Point High School.
• Danny Bartel was 10 years old in the summer of 1966, and a member of the Mets, a team captained by Carmen Birdsbill. Their T-shirts were bright yellow, with black letters proudly proclaiming the worst team in Major League Baseball at the time: “Mets.”
• Other Mets that year were Johnny Adams, and the only girl in the program — Lee Ellen Hveem. “We were losers,” remembered Bartel from his Lewistown home.
• The boys practiced and played in what is now the right field of Burkie Field — the American Legion and Babe Ruth park on the northside of Wolf Point that was completed in 1965.
• Before the regular season began, Van Atta noticed a brown-haired girl with a bob-haircut watching the boys go through base running, hitting and fielding drills. He approached her after one practice and asked if she wanted to play. Eleven- year-old Lee Ellen Hveem said yes. “Well, let’s get permission from your parents,” said Van Atta. They threw Hveem’s red Schwinn bike into the back of Van Atta’s pickup and drove to her home on Third Avenue North. Her mother okayed the proposition and Lee Ellen Hveem became the lone girl in Wolf Point Little League baseball for the summer of 1966.
• “I was happy as could be,” remembered Hveem today from her Billings home. Hveem would go on to be the 1973 valedictorian of WPHS. She won the John Phillip Sousa Award — the most prestigious national honor a high school band student can receive. She eventually majored in music performance education at Concordia — a nationally ranked-liberal arts college in Moorhead, Minn.
• Eventually, Hveem secured a professional position with the Fort Wayne Philharmonic. She ended her musical career as an associate radio producer for the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
• “It is tough to forget Lee Ellen,” remembered Bartel. “She had a bob-haircut.” Indeed, she did, as Hveem remembers her dad taking her to Hank’s Barbershop on Wolf Point’s main street for the usual trim. “There were a lot of men in that barbershop,” she recalls.
• Asked how he felt about Lee Ellen being on the team, Bartel said, “It didn’t bother me, because she could beat me up.” And speaking of physicality, Hveem credits team captain Carmen Birdsbill for shielding her on numerous occasions from bullies. “Carmen protected me,” remembers Hveem.
• Fielding was Lee Ellen’s forte, as she can remember Van Atta praising her for her ability to catch high fly balls – better than some of the boys on her team.
• But facing some of the talented Wolf Point pitchers was a bit daunting for Hveem. She remembers Larry Buettner as one of the best — and forbidding. “He threw fast,” she remembers.
• Asked about dugouts, Hveem remembered sitting on benches with no protection, but Bartel thought the players simply sat on the grass.
• The year before, the little leaguers played near the Stockyards, south of U.S. Route 2. The field was a grassless, cinder sticker patch near the railroad roundhouse. Bartel recalls dugouts with a makeshift roof from roughcut lumber — with no side protections. The boys drank out of one coffee can that hung from a spigot a few hundred feet from the field. A single line of several dozen boys waiting to quench their thirst on a relentlessly hot summer day is a common memory of many players and parents.
• The Bartels lived on 520 Dayton — where half of their home was a shack moved from Wheeler — one of the shanty towns that sprouted from the Fort Peck Dam project.
• A few weeks before Danny began baseball, his older brother Wayne won the state Class A 880-yard run and set a Wolf Point High School record in doing so.
• Carmen Birdsbill would go on to shine in baseball, football and basketball at Wolf Point, and eventually pay for Dawson Community College.
• Birdsbill, Monson, Bartel, Cody and several of the 1966 little leaguers would play for the Class A-state runner-up football Wolves — who lost to Butte Central in November of 1972. Eight months prior in March, Wolf Point placed third in state Class A basketball. These same athletes would also take second place in American Legion baseball in 1972 and 1973. And some of the 1966 little leaguers were on the 1974 team that captured third place.
