Dreams For Sale

(First published on GazetteXtra, 5-16-2010)

How much does it cost to buy a dream?

The answer is $5.4 million.

That's how much the Lansings, the owners of the farm where “Field of Dreams” was filmed in Dyersville, Iowa, are asking for their property.

I have to admit that the potential sale of the field bums me out a little. “Field of Dreams” is my favorite movie. I love everything about this film – from the wonderfully cast actors (Kevin Costner, James Earl Jones, Burt Lancaster, Amy Madigan, Ray Liotta) to the dialogue to the soundtrack to how blue the sky looks in the shots. Burt Lancaster in particular, as Doc Graham, is the kind of gentle, grandfatherly figure that you wish was a real person that you knew. And dammit, I always cry at the end when Costner, as Ray Kinsella, asks his father's ghost if he'd like to “have a catch.”

I know it's not a perfect film. For one thing, Shoeless Joe Jackson wasn't right-handed, as portrayed by Liotta. For another, the script gets criticized for being corny (no pun intended) and in spots, it probably is. I don't care.

This movie strikes a chord with a lot of folks, myself included. As James Earl Jones' character tells us, it reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again.

And it has always seemed right to me that a rural Iowa family owned the farm and continued to live there, even after a huge chunk of their cornfield was turned into a baseball field. A family whose name is on the rural road where the farm and the field sits. A family who never bothered to charge admission to visit.

Not long after the film came out, my wife and I were spending a weekend in Galena, Illinois, about 45 minutes east of Dyersville. While she spent a morning shopping, I hopped in the car and drove west.

The field wasn't a huge tourist attraction yet. At the time, there was only one tiny souvenir stand behind home plate. Down the left field line was a homemade wooden sign on which plastic-covered snapshots of the film shoot were mounted. There were also little plastic vials with hand-typed labels containing dirt dug up from left field, where Shoeless Joe roamed. The dirt was free, but donations were encouraged. I grabbed a vial and threw some cash in the box. That vial has resided in my office for 20 years.

I was the only one there that first time I visited. So there was no playing catch, no swinging the bat. I simply roamed around, looking at this place I had only seen before on a movie screen. I wandered the field, kicked at the dirt, stood at home plate imagining.

I sat in the bleachers and saw where Costner had carved “Ray Loves Annie” in the wood. And I stared out at the cornfield, dreaming. Wondering whether, if I dreamed hard enough, the ghost of my own deceased father would wander out of the corn and want to play catch.

I've only been back to the Field of Dreams once. A larger, newly built souvenir store had replaced the quaint displays that were there on my first visit. Other than that, not much else had changed. This time, however, I didn't visit alone. My son, about 10 at the time, was with me. As we got out of the car on a windy, unseasonably chilly Sunday morning, he delivered his line perfectly without prodding.

“Dad...you wanna have a catch?”

Did I ever. And we braved those cold winds on that field to do just that.

In a move that was either incredibly coincidental or brilliantly planned, the real estate agent chosen to list the Field of Dreams property is former Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Ken Sanders, who led the AL in saves in 1971. If the field has to be sold, it seems right that a former major leaguer is the guy to do it.

I just hope that whoever ends up with the field continues to keep everyone's dreams alive.