The heyday of Cedar Rapids softball

Editor's note: Bill Johnson is a Cedar Rapids historian who spent 30 years working for the U.S. Navy. This is the third of a five-part series on softball in Cedar Rapids.

By Bill Johnson, community contributor

The Fleck's Falstaff story is inextricably linked to the explosion of softball in Cedar Rapids.

Bob Michael not only is a veteran of those Flecks teams, but in his lifetime he has been privileged to see the entire gamut of softball in town.

Michael had started as a baseball player, part of the 1957 Hall's Clothing team in the M&J League, and through connections with Dick English and a future International Softball Congress Hall of Fame pitcher Dick Brubaker, joined Flecks Falstaff on the 1961 Major Open circuit. That team had begun a decade earlier under varying sponsorships that included Danceland and Whitey's Auto - both state champs - then Thedes Chat and Chew, and finally Flecks Falstaff.

Regardless of the sponsor's name on the uniform, though, that team was the first Cedar Rapids squad to capture a regional title and compete in the national tournament.

Under Manager Lou Dvorak (another M&J alum and veteran of a year of professional baseball with the Chicago White Sox Class D Lima Terriers in 1947) Flecks returned to the regional finals in 1962 before losing in the championship game. More importantly, the quality of the softball began to draw top level traveling teams to Ellis Park. Players like Iowa Softball Hall of Famer Vic Kadlec, and others of that caliber, were simply too talented not to compete on the bigger stages.

By the late 1960s, with M&J baseball just a memory and Major Open softball attracting top players from all over the Midwest and dominating the local summer sports landscape, a new power began to emerge, this time sponsored by Welty Way. A local metal fabrication machinery manufacturer, Welty Way was but one example of the changing economy of Cedar Rapids and, with its resources, chose softball as a vehicle for spreading the brand.

In a stroke of either luck or genius, or perhaps a little of both, Jim Caviness was named manager. It was the first of a series of moves that elevated Cedar Rapids softball to the absolute pinnacle of the sport.

Caviness had started in softball in 1956, playing for Nordstrom Oil in Cedar Rapids, and remained with the club through sponsorship changes from Robinson Wholesale, Midwest Janitor and finally Welty Way. By 1970 he was managing Welty Way, and his teams not only won the Iowa state title five times and the national title in 1971, but also represented the United States in the 1972 World Championships in the Philippines.

Caviness understood the pool of available talent, not just locally but across the state, and wasted little time in building the team. One of his many early acquisitions was a former UNI baseball player, an infielder with a total of one year of fast-pitch softball experience for Larry Lange Ford from Cedar Falls named Bob Timmons. Larry Lange Manager Dick Zuccato recommended Timmons to Caviness and, by 1971, both were in the lineup for Welty Way.

Legendary University of Iowa baseball coach Duane Banks is fond of saying 'great hitters can hit with a ballpoint pen,” meaning it doesn't matter whether they are swinging a bat, a table leg or pen at a baseball or softball, talented hitters can hit. Timmons was one of those savants. Another in that category, slugger Mike Pallesen, is considered perhaps the finest power hitter to ever play at Ellis. Both were critical pieces of the 1971 Welty Way team that won the ASA national championship that year, capped by an undefeated run in the tournament against the best in the land.

Pitcher Jerry Ralfs (considered by many to be one of the top two or three pitchers ever to play in Cedar Rapids), Dick Zuccato and outfielder Pallesen were all named first-team all-tournament, with teammates Richie Stephen, John Muench and Cliff Rice on the second team. Add to that roster players the caliber of Mount Vernon's Steve 'Rookie” Andrew (who later played on another Cedar Rapids national champ, Teleconnect, in 1987, and a runner-up in 1980 with Midwest Galleries), Ed White, Ray Sturm, Timmons and Jocko Hinderks, it appeared to some that Caviness' greatest challenge in filling out the lineup card may have been remembering to get it to the umpire.

Andrew won the Major Open batting title twice and was selected to two all-World teams. Timmons went on to coach Mount Mercy and Coe to a collective 927-366 record before retiring in 2014. Almost every member of that team has been enshrined in the Cedar Rapids Softball Hall of Fame, and many also are in the state Hall of Fame.

The success of the 1971 and 1972 Welty Way teams, the latter earning an invitation to Manila, Republic of the Philippines, to play for the world championship, expanded Cedar Rapids' softball reputation even more widely. That same year, 1972, in Sioux Falls, a gifted young left-handed pitcher named Gregg Bosch paced his C&R team to a Brass Rail tournament title over Minnesota champs Whitaker Buick. In addition to playing with his local team, Bosch also played ASA during the summer of 1974 for the elite LeBlanc Barrons in California. One of the umpires at the Brass Rail, John Millis, mentioned to Caviness there was a pitcher up there who might be able to help Welty Way. Bosch was a teacher by trade, and when Caviness offered him a spot on a team in a larger town with more schools, the lefty and his family made the move east.

By 1975, after a couple of lean years, Caviness had rebuilt Welty Way into a team that, if possible, was even better than they'd been in 1971. The team still had Timmons, Pallesen, catchers Larry Anderson and Steve Calvert, and most of the other bats, but had added former Norway High School star Donald 'Max” Elliot, who reached the Class AA Texas League with the San Diego Padres, along with Bruce Hotchkiss, who had batted .261 in 'A” ball in the Phillies organization. Caviness replaced Jerry Ralfs with a formidable righty-lefty pitching tandem of Al Rausch and Bosch, and added Denny Linderbaum as a backup. The Major Open loop not only fielded the Welty Way team, but also Eastside Maidrite, Collins Radio and a few others, any of which would have competed well at the national level, which made Welty's run through the season that much more remarkable.

It may have been the best team in the nation, but late season injuries to Rausch and Bosch meant Linderbaum was forced to carry the entire pitching burden. In many places he would have been enough by himself, the team was that talented, but without the one-two punch of the other two pitchers, Welty was unable to recapture the national ASA crown.

After the next season, 1976, Welty Way relinquished sponsorship, and Jim Caviness' own firm, Modern Piping, took over. The team continued to play to packed houses at Ellis Park and produce an elite, championship caliber of softball rarely rivaled across the country. At the same time, though, the softball landscape was again shifting, this time toward replacing fast-pitch with the even more popular, and more easily accessed, industrial slow-pitch variant.

Two of the other significant Cedar Rapids teams were the 1980 Midwest Galleries squad and the 1987 Teleconnect team.

Rick Davis was a softball impresario who had brought several New Zealand pitching stars to Cedar Rapids in the 1970s, a move that strengthened the quality of Iowa's game even more. He was a lead sponsor of the 1980 Midwest Galleries team that defeated Caviness' Modern Piping in the regionals. The team brought a now-available Gregg Bosch over to pitch and, with players like Denver Dixon, Steve Andrew and Steve Anderson, it made it all the way to the national championship game against a team from Seattle. That title contest lasted 14 innings, ending when Seattle squeaked out a two-out run to win 2-1. Bosch, Anderson and others think that Midwest Galleries team could have given the 1971 Welty Way squad a run for its money.

Seven years later, and 15 after Welty's showing in Manila, Cedar Rapids Teleconnect assembled a squad that included not only Andrew and Anderson, but added LeRoy Wegmann, Canadian Jody Hennigar, slugger Kevin Hartwig and New Zealand pitcher Michael White. That team, managed by Andrew, posted an 88-24 won-loss record in 1987 and earned a spot in the International Softball Congress world championship tournament in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Teleconnect prevailed over a field of 48 teams to bring Cedar Rapids the ISC world championship after defeating the Pride of Decatur, Ill., 6-2, in the final game. White was named Outstanding Pitcher after posting a 6-0 record and 0.31 ERA and Hartwig and Hennigar were named to the all-World second team.

But the times continued to change, and attitudes toward recreation began to shift. There was now baseball on television most nights and youth sports began to demand more and more time from adults. Through no fault of its own, softball in Cedar Rapids was changing.