Cubs spring training at Catalina Island a real paradise

The newsreel camera pans across a group standing or kneeling at attention and wearing uniforms with the word "Chicago" emblazoned across the front.

Manager Charlie Grimm, crouched in front of his 1934 Cubs, hands them a pep talk. "Let's go out here and hustle like the devil and let's bring that pennant back to Chicago."

In the collection of newsreel outtakes, available through the University of South Carolina University Libraries, the scene abruptly shifts to a huge round white sign decorated with baseball stitches and bearing the legend "Chicago Cubs Catalina Island." Within seconds, the laughing Cubs players crash through the sign.

Next you hear the sound of balls hitting mitts and players yelling encouragement, as well as see a close-up of catcher Gabby Hartnett warming up a pitcher and exercising his famed vocal chords amid a backdrop of a row of trees.

The footage is a relic of an idyllic time in Cubs history, when pennants arrived every three years and players like Hack Wilson, Phil Cavarretta, Stan Hack, and Billy Herman left a trail of glory on the Wrigley diamond.

Years before Cubs fans associated spring training with Arizona, the team's preseason home was Avalon, on Santa Catalina Island, off the Southern California coast.

Cubs owner William Wrigley Jr. bought a majority interest in the 48,000-acre island in 1919 for more than $3 million, according to the Los Angeles Times on Feb. 13, 1919. The deal included the St. Catherine Hotel, two steamers and 10,000 head of sheep.

The Cubs made this island paradise, cradled in the Avalon hills, their spring training home from 1921 to 1951, with the exception of the war years, when travel restrictions had the team train in Indiana.

Johnny Evers, of Tinker-to Evers-to-Chance fame, was Cubs manager in 1921, the team's first year in Catalina.

When he arrived, Evers told reporters Feb. 28, 1921, "The training arrangement so far as I have seen are the best I ever experienced. I can see no reason why the battery men should not get into condition without delay."

The Cubs' association with goats can be traced to 1921 as well. A newspaper photo showed pitcher Jim "Hippo" Vaughn posing with a goat he caught in the mountains on Catalina Island.

"Nobody'll get my goat this year," he said.

Each year, the team made the three-day pilgrimage from Chicago by train. On Feb. 22, 1938, the Tribune reported a five-piece band played "My Wild Irish Rose" at Hartnett's request before the train pulled out of Dearborn Station.

While on the train, Grimm would strum a banjo, while other players like infielder Woody English, who liked to interrupt passengers in their reading by setting newspapers on fire, would indulge in practical jokes.

After the train reached California, the players boarded the SS Catalina steamship to ferry them on the three-hour trip from the mainland to the island, where the players spent three weeks preparing for the pennant push.

In a 1937 spring training profile, Carter "Scoop" Latimer wrote, "The Cubs romp on a training field carpeted with the green of fresh grass and flanked by orchards of almond trees ..."

Manager Grimm, he wrote, set no training rules "other than to be out in the open as much as possible to fish, golf, ride, hike and take all the exercise possible."

A 1928 photo shows trainer Andy Lotshaw leading the team in stretching exercises, assisted by 14-year-old Bill Veeck, son of the Cubs president.

The players brought along their families, and in 1929 Hartnett honeymooned there.

The players engaged in horseplay as well. According to Jim Vitti in the book "Chicago Cubs: Baseball on Catalina Island," some players sent a rookie named Roy Hansen on a "snipe hunt" with a burlap sack to a canyon bottom. He returned after a fruitless afternoon and evening pursuing nonexistent game. He did earn the nickname "Snipe."

The proximity to Los Angeles also garnered interest from the film community.

A frequent visitor was film actress Gail Patrick, who later was executive producer of the Perry Mason TV series, and who co-owned with husband Bob Cobb - inventor of the Cobb salad - a piece of the Hollywood Stars in the Pacific Coast League.

And in one case, one movie career - which later blossomed into two terms as president - was launched.

Ronald Reagan arrived as a radio reporter with WHO in Iowa and wound up taking a successful screen test at Warner Brothers.

In 1983, Grimm told sports writer Jerome Holtzman the print reporters did not take kindly to their radio counterpart. At a party at the St. Catherine Hotel, one scribe from the Chicago American, Jimmy Corcoran, threw a punch at the young Reagan, but his fist landed instead in the gut of the Tribune's Ed Burns.

In 1952, the Cubs moved spring training to Mesa, Ariz., to "get away from a seething metropolis with its many temptations," as the front office explained.

Today, Catalina Island still celebrates the Cubs' legacy, displaying memorabilia at the Catalina Island Museum.

Local businesses fly the W flag, and in 2016, the Catalina Chimes, which have been tolling on the quarter of the hour between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. since 1925, rang out with "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" in honor of the Cubs' World Series victory.

Too bad Grimm couldn't accompany on the banjo.