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By Rick McCorkle

The days of tenuous cinderblock dugouts and leaning fences will soon be a thing of the past for the girls playing softball at Tam O’Shanter Park in Kelso.

The softball section of the park is getting a major overhaul, thanks to Kelso native David Heerensperger and his wife, Jill. The couple recently donated $150,000 to the city of Kelso to convert one of the softball fields at Tam O’Shanter Park into a stadium similar to the Stan Rister Stadium baseball field located at the front of the park.

In the late 1940s, a young Heerensperger played Little League baseball at Tam O’Shanter Park.

As he got older, Heerensperger’s interest shifted to playing men’s fastpitch softball and later sponsoring area teams. After graduating from Kelso High in 1954, he embarked on a business career that included buying and selling billion-dollar businesses and owning race horses.

With all of his business dealings, he never forgot his hometown roots.

“When we came to Kelso for David’s class reunion, we went to find his mother’s grave and couldn’t locate it,” Jill Heerensperger said by phone from their winter home in Arizona. “We wanted to do something in memory of his mother (Leona Bailey Heerensperger), and that’s where the idea came from.”

David Heerensperger declined to comment on the donation or the project.

“I’ll wait until it’s done because you never know what could happen along the way,” he said. “There’s a lot of loose ends yet, and I want to see that things get done in the proper way.”

Heerensperger’s foray into the business world shows he likes to get things moving. His dealings began in Longview in 1959 when businessmen Stan Thurman and Bob Grover of T&T Electric set him up in a store in Spokane called Eagle Electric and Plumbing. In 1969, T&T and Eagle, along with Heerensperger, was acquired by Pay ‘N Pak, which was founded by Thurman. A year later, a rift developed between Thurman, Heerensperger and another longtime T&T employee, John Headley, and Thurman left the group.

Heerensperger developed Eagle Hardware and Garden, and later retired as the chief executive officer of both Pay ‘N Pak and Eagle. He sold Eagle to Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse for an estimated $1 billion, and later founded the Bellevue-based World Lighting.

In addition, he’s also part-owner of the Emerald Downs horse race track in Auburn and Woods Creek Farm in Bellevue. His interest in horses started in the late 1970s when he and his wife purchased a trip to the Kentucky Derby at a charity auction. They later bought horses which ran and placed in the Breeder’s Cup and Kentucky Derby

Heerensperger also dabbled in hydroplane racing as owner of the Pay ‘n Pak and Miss Eagle Electric boats, and was the first Unlimited class owner to win a race with turbine power in 1982.

“This guy’s a real go-getter,” Kelso Parks and Recreation Director Tim Mackin said. “He used to sponsor men’s fastpitch teams, and softball was an easy gift for him when he realized the fields were more than 30 years old with tilting fences and old wooden bleachers.”

The cinder block dugouts used by hundreds of teams though the years will also be replaced.

“When a couple of volunteers came in and took the roof off one of the dugouts, the sides collapsed,” Mackin said. “We’ll also get new dugouts along with fencing, a backstop, new irrigation system for the field and bleachers to seat 500 people. There will also be a plaza where you’ll walk through a gate to get in, like at Stan Rister Stadium.”

The stadium will enable the Kelso Girls Softball Association to bid on major weekend summer tournaments, including state championships in different age levels.

“An average of 40-50 teams will play in a four-day tournament, and that’s about $150,000 in revenue for area businesses,” KGSA treasurer John Reichert said. “This is the second phase of a project we started a few years ago to upgrade the fields at the park.”

The first phase of the park improvement project was construction of a building for the group’s clubhouse, restrooms and storage.

“We applied to the city for money to rebuild the restrooms,” Reichert said. “With a combination of volunteer help, donations of materials and funding from the city and KGSA, we were able to complete the project.”

Reichert said the group needs to raise about $40,000 to upgrade the other softball field adjacent to the new stadium.

“If we can get the money raised soon, we can get the supplies needed at the same time as for the other field so we can purchase at a discount,” he said.

In addition to KYSA, the Lower Columbia College softball team which also plays its home games at Tam O’Shanter Park, will benefit from the field renovation.

“It’s a big bonus for me being the coach of the team because it’s really hard, we’ve got to take just whatever the league can provide for us as far as the field,” Mackin said. “The college provides a rental fee for its use of the field because they have no field on campus.”

Reichert said the field work is scheduled to be completed by March 1 when LCC begins its season.

“We’d like to have a celebration when the field is opened but we haven’t picked a date yet,” he said. “KGSA has its kickoff tournament in mid-April, and we’d like to tie the celebration in with the beginning of our season.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 10:56 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.