Chattanooga Baseball — Joe Engel

Chattanooga Baseball — Joe Engel. . Born in the District of Columbia in 1893, Joseph William Engel served as batboy, mascot, pitcher, and scout for the hometown Washington Senators before owner Clark Griffith tapped him in 1929 to oversee the club's new southern farm team, the Chattanooga Lookouts. By 1930 the team's ballpark, Andrews Field, had been replaced by a new 12,000-seat stadium bearing Engel's name., No mere master of self-aggrandizement, Joe set about to fill Engel Stadium through legendary promotions that forged his national reputation as the “Barnum of Baseball.” After the “Great Light Switch Throwing” for the stadium's first night game attracted only 4,000 fans in April 1936, a house giveaway in May drew nearly 25,000 spectators. Amid the Great Depression the entrepreneurial Engel also lured paying fans with the spectacle of a base-running and egg-laying ostrich, haircuts and shaves, and car raffles., For some, Engel's antics garnered a less flattering moniker, the “Baron of Baloney.” One opening day featured a reenactment of the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn. In Engel's retelling, however, George Custer and his soldiers emerged victorious over their Native American foes. The 1938 season opened with a long-touted and racially-tinged “Wild Elephant Hunt” featuring an African jungle scene, a herd of costumed elephants, “savage bushmen,” dancing “cannibals, dressed only in white shirts and carrying long spears,” and white hunters riding hobby horses and firing rifle blanks. Engel's hijinks also could be unnecessarily cruel. In 1931, decades before the advent of free agency and players unions, Engel traded a Lookouts shortstop for a turkey. Joe Engel's creativity and enterprise, however, prevented the relocation of the Lookouts in 1937 when he raised over $100,000 to purchase the team by selling ownership shares to hundreds of Chattanoogans for as little as $5., Engel's thirty-five-year reign as team owner, president, and general manager came to a frustrating end in 1965 after his “Save the Lookouts Night” filled only 355 seats in the aging ballpark. That entire final season drew a dismal 25,707 fans, only slightly more than had packed the grounds for Engel's house giveaway nearly three decades earlier. Residing in Chattanooga for four more years, Joe Engel died in 1969 at the age of 76 and is buried in historic Forest Hills Cemetery., Captions: , Top left: Joe Engel at Engel Stadium. source: UTC Special Collections , Bottom left: Pitcher Joe Engel in 1913. source: Wikimedia Commons , Bottom right: Rare picture of daring Joe Engel capturing elephant source: Atlanta Constitution, May 31, 1938 , This series is funded by a UC Foundation community engagement grant and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga , and prepared by faculty and students of the UTC Department of History.