DUBUQUE (IOWA) TELEGRAPH HERALD - OCTOBER 22, 2002
SABR REVIEW
SIOUX CITY JOURNAL - NOVEMBER 11, 2002
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER - JANUARY 7, 2003
CNN.COM - JANUARY 20, 2003
CNNSI.COM - JANUARY 20, 2003
The Chuck Schoffner AP article picked up by CNN.com, MSNBC.com, and CNNSI.com was also reproduced in:

the Cincinnati Enquirer,	the Cedar Rapids Gazette,	the St. Louis Post Dispatch,
the Memphis Commercial Appeal,	the Charlotte Observer,	the Biloxi Sun Herald,
the San Fransisco Chronicle,	the Boston Globe,	NorthJersey.com,
the Quad City Times,	the Whittier Daily News,	the Canton Repository,
the New Orleans Times Picayune,	the Cleveland Plain Dealer,	Covers.com,
the Bergen County Record,	the Olympia Olympian,	the Oakland Tribune,
the Almeda Times-Star,	Sportserver.com,	the Daytona Beach News-Journal,
The Chicago Sun-Times,	the San Gabriel Valley Tribune,	the Pasadena Star News,
the Sarasota Herald-Tribune,	the Dubuque Telegraph Herald,	azfamily.com,
The Daytona Beach News-Journal

NPR WEEKEND EDITION - MARCH 30, 2003
FORT FRANCES TIMES ONLINE - JULY 9, 2003

Voice tells baseball author: If you write it, they will read it

DUBUQUE TELEGRAPH HERALD - OCTOBER 22, 2002

By JIM LEITNER
Column: More Than the Score

Brett Mandel heard a voice, too, when he visited the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa.

He didn't return to Philadelphia and tear up his backyard in favor of a baseball diamond, instead he decided to write a book about the magic at the Field of Dreams and how life truely imitated art. More than 13 years after the release of the film, people still flock to Dyersville to soak in the atmosphere of the diamond located on the Lansing and Ameskamp farms.

Diamond Communications, Inc. released "Is This Heaven? The Magic of the Field of Dreams" this month. The 224-page cloth book sells for $24.95.

"The tale of the continuing pilgramage to the Field of Dreams is more than just a tale of camera-toting tourists or souvenir-seeking movie buffs," Mandell writes. "It is a tale of people who seek something significant in a world that often denies the spiritual, of people who seek ways to communicate powerful emotions, and of people who visit a baseball field, not for batting practice, but for redemption."

The Field of Dreams attracts an estimated 50,000 to 55,000 people per year, and Mandell's book attempts to explain why people travel from around the world to visit it. Mandel, a former professional baseball player who still maintains a love for the sport and authored a book about minor league life, tried a different approach while writing the book. He took batting practice and ground balls with visitors while he conducted his research.

"There may be no magic in the site itself," Mandell said. "But there is magic in people's hearts, and maybe it takes something like the Field of Dreams to draw it out."

Reviewed for SABR by Tim Rask

Midway through the summer of 1989, two friends (Ross Burkhart, currently of Boise, Idaho, and Glenn Richardson, now of Kutztown, Pennsylvania) and I took a break from our graduate studies and embarked on a mini-baseball pilgrimage of sorts. We spent a long weekend in Chicago, taking in games at Comiskey Park (the old one, not the park currently known as U.S. Cellular Field) and Wrigley Field, and capped the weekend with a side trip to County Stadium in Milwaukee.

On this brief trip, we managed to cram in a bundle of great baseball memories. We saw the White Sox defeat an imploding Yankees squad in the first game of a scheduled doubleheader, while a seething George Steinbrenner stewed in his luxury box. As we glimpsed him through our binoculars, we fantasized that any minute he would place the call to the dugout that would doom manager Dallas Green’s job (although it would be another month before Bucky Dent stepped in to replace Green).

During the rain delay that would wash out the second game, we relaxed with our fellow baseball fans as we had the surreal experience of watching the Cubs-Dodgers game on the scoreboard’s big screen. (Since when has any non-derogatory reference to the North Siders been welcome at 35th and Shields?).

The Cubs returned to Chicago the following night, and we saw the Cubs top the Giants in a thrilling, come-from-behind 4-3 game. Pitcher Les Lancaster, of all people, drove in the winning run in the 11th on a double just inside the third base line. Too bad for us Cubs fans that the North Siders didn’t come out on top of San Francisco when the two clubs later met in October of that year.

From Chicago, we moved on to Milwaukee where we tailgated with the Brewer faithful, then moved inside a sold out County Stadium to witness a spirited border battle as the Twins pounded the Brew Crew, 6 to 1. For my friends and me, it served as a memorable climax to weekend spent in three classic Midwestern ballparks. I’m sure any baseball fan could offer up a similar tale (or two or three).

But our trip didn’t end there. After an all-night drive back home to Iowa from Wisconsin, we decided to make one last stop before returning to Iowa City—the movie set of that summer’s hit film, "Field of Dreams," located just outside Dyersville, Iowa. After the film had wrapped production the previous year, farmer Don Lansing, who owned the land where the baseball diamond sat, decided to leave it alone, so that the curious could come to see where Hollywood had worked its magic in this corner of northeastern Iowa. My friends and I arrived shortly after noon. The field was curiously askew (neighboring farmer Al Ameskamp, who owned what had been left and center fields, had decided to replant corn on his portion of the baseball field). Despite the oddly asymmetric dimensions (a row of corn grazed the top of the infield between second and third), the field was clearly recognizable as the magic diamond from the movie. The small backstop caught stray balls. A few spectators lounged on the tiny bleachers along the first base side. And the white farmhouse stood watch atop a small hill.

What were three baseball-loving friends to do when confronted with this scene? We reached into the trunk of the car, fished out our baseball gloves, and took the field. As one hour turned into a second, then a third, we melted into the landscape of the field and just enjoyed baseball. We turned double plays, albeit not as gracefully as Dunston to Sandberg to Grace. We fielded a few pop-ups, and perhaps dropped a few more. We ran out grounders and cheered as our shots to left field landed in the corn (it didn’t matter to us that “left field” began even before the outer edge of the infield on this diamond). We lobbed fat, slow pitches to toddlers so their fathers could help them make contact, then we slowly fielded their feeble hits and tossed the ball in great arcs to first so that the happy running youngsters could beat out the throw for a single. We left the field late that afternoon with sore arms, parched throats, and happy souls.

As it turns out, my two friends and I were on the leading edge of a trend. The summer of 1989 marked the beginning of the transformation of a little baseball diamond outside a little town in northeast Iowa, from erstwhile movie set into a national pop icon, a regular “corn cathedral” that continues to attract thousands of fans every summer. The story of how this transformation occurred, and how the Field of Dreams continues to tug at the hearts of both baseball fans and non-fans alike is the subject of Brett H. Mandel’s book, Is This Heaven? The Magic of the Field of Dreams (Diamond Communications, 2002).

Regardless of what you think of the movie, "Field of Dreams" (and my own love of the film has waned over the years), there is no question that the movie has come to represent something very special to a great many people. With the film’s basic message of reconciliation, redemption, and the image of a simpler, bygone era, it’s easy to see why people would want to visit the place fictional events were acted out. In a slim volume that can easily be read the next time your favorite team is rained out, Mandel skillfully manages to illustrate just how this movie managed to work itself into the American popular consciousness.

Mandel provides an excellent background to the field’s existence. He gives us the hard facts of how writer/director Phil Alden Robinson adapted W.P. Kinsella’s novel, Shoeless Joe, and also introduces us to a host of ordinary folks who have felt the lure of the Field of Dreams. Most of the stories really yank at the heartstrings, so if you have a low tolerance for sentimentality, you may want to steer clear. But, if you are one of those folks who felt a bit weepy when Kevin Costner’s Ray Kinsella asked his resurrected father if he’d like to have a catch, then this book will further explain just why the Field of Dreams has been such an enduring attraction.

And what exactly is the nature of that attraction? Is it a matter of people trying to capture their own version of the film’s story of a father and son coming together? Is it a natural extension of baseball’s status as a quasi-religious institution? (My own reference to my baseball trip with friends as a “pilgrimage” would seem to support that one). Or does it have something to do with Americans’ seemingly endless inclination to reflect upon a simpler time?

Ultimately, each reader can decide on a final verdict, but I’ll take Mandrel’s comment that, “In the end, the Field of Dreams has not declined into a playground for a chosen few. It has not become about well-heeled visitors enjoying a private spectacle or rich fans enjoying a tour of a private game reserve or baseball safari. It is an open and unpretentious pickup game that goes from dawn to dusk, involving the athletic and the awkward, the young and the young at heart, and the mainstream and the marginalized.” Or, perhaps better yet, as the late Al Ameskamp put it, the field is “a bunch of strangers playing together like they’d known each other all their lives. That’s just the way it works out here from morning to night.”

Where’s my glove?

SIOUX CITY JOURNAL - NOVEMBER 11, 2002

By TIM GALLAGHER, Sioux City Journal

DATELINE: SIOUX CITY, Iowa

A new book about the magic of The Field of Dreams in Dyersville has an odd starting point, make that starting points: Two fields in Sioux City. Both are nearly 250 miles from the famed cornfield in Iowa from where Shoeless Joe Jackson and his teammates appear throughout the 1989 hit movie "Field of Dreams."

The first is a Sioux City cornfield near Sioux Gateway Airport. It's the one that served as a landing strip when United Airlines Flight 232 crashed and rolled, killing 112 passengers, while miraculously allowing 184 to live.

One of the victims was 12-year-old Matt Bohn of suburban Pittsburgh, who had taken the flight from Colorado after visiting relatives. Bohn, a little league baseball player, perished with his grandmother, Lena Blaha, who accompanied him on the flight. Back in Western Pennsylvania, Matt's parents, Jim and Cindy Bohn, were at the airport in Pittsburgh when they learned of the crash caused by hydraulic failure. The Bohns returned home and tried for hours to learn the condition of Matt and his grandma. Finally, a Sioux City hospital reported that a boy fitting Matt's description was being treated. Positive identification, though, was not yet possible.

Desperate for news, Jim Bohn boarded a United flight and headed for Iowa, preparing himself to either care for his son or identify his remains.

Bohn went from place to place in Sioux City once he arrived. Matt was not among the survivors and soon his father, who also coached the boy in baseball, knew the awful truth: His son was gone. Bohn stayed for three days and two nights, put up in a dormitory room at Briar Cliff College. He stared out his window, grieving the loss of his son. All the while staring down at the other Sioux City field the book mentions - the baseball field at Briar Cliff.

Brett Mandel, director of financial and policy analysis for the City of Philadelphia, saw "Field of Dreams," in April 1989, just three months before the crash of Flight 232. The hit movie starring Kevin Costner appealed to Mandel immediately for its themes of redemption, its look at baseball and for unleashing feelings of hope which reside in us all.

The movie inspired Mandel to leave his post in Philadelphia for a holy trip of sorts to the hallowed farms in Dyersville from which "Field of Dreams" was cut.

Mandel's book, "Is This Heaven? The Magic of the Field of Dreams," he writes, "presents the remarkable accounts of those who come here to the cornfields near Dyersville, Iowa, what they are searching for, and what they find ...

"Whether people are seeking some kind of redemption or second chance, reconciliation, or simply a time to summon memories, the movie set has been transformed into a true pop culture holy site."

Summon memories. According to Mandel, that's what the Jim Bohn did in visiting the Field of Dreams a year after the crash of Flight 232. Bohn and his family came to Sioux City on the first anniversary of the crash. They made the Field of Dreams an important stop on the trek.

Here is a letter Bohn wrote to one of the landowners in Dyersville:

"You don't know me; my name is Jim Bohn. My son Matt and mother-in-law Lena Blaha died in the crash of United Airlines Flight 232 in Sioux City on July 19.

This past spring I had taken my son and family to see the movie "Field of Dreams." We loved the movie. I had no idea the "field" was still there. I figured that after the filming it had been replanted. To my surprise and delight, I read an article last evening in our Pittsburgh Press newspaper that you have been maintaining the field. How long do you plan to maintain it as the baseball field? Will you still receive visitors next summer? We are planning to visit Sioux City next summer for the anniversary of the crash and would love to stop and visit the field.

"Matt was 12 and loved baseball. So do I, as my father before me did. I've always coached Matt's team. For the past six years we have had a great time enjoying each other and baseball.

"As you may know the plane crashed in an Iowa cornfield. I found the whole idea very ironic; the story of an Iowa corn farmer who plows up his corn to make a baseball field where dreams come true and my son, who loved baseball, dying in an Iowa cornfield. My dreams came to an end.

"When I was in Sioux City after the crash, I stayed at Briar Cliff College. From my room the most prominent object in the landscape was a baseball field. I could not stop thinking about the movie, the crash and a cornfield in Iowa. There was a message there.

"When I read the article last evening I knew I had to visit the "field." Please let me know of your plans for the field. I hope I will have the chance to walk with my son one more time.

"Can I come?"

Mandel notes that Jim Bohn's letter to the landowners was basically a question: Can I come? It's much like the movie scene when Shoeless Joe shows up and asks Ray Kinsella if he - and others - can play. Kinsella says the field will remain for them as long as they show up.

Bohn got a similar response from the families, the Lansings and the Ameskamps, who own the farms at the site. And since that time, an estimated 55,000 fans have made the trek to Dyersville's Field of Dreams annually.

Mandel simply tracked some of their stories, asking if they really thought they were seeing Heaven, as the movie suggests. He caught up with Jim Bohn years after the family's 1990 visit.

Bohn described the visit as "comforting, healing, rewarding."

He left a bat that he and Matt used at the field, as well as a few baseballs. And he placed one of Matt's ball gloves in the rows of corn that surround the outfield. The trip, he added, actually drew Jim and daughter Stephanie closer. And, he concluded, "I didn't get that real, deep, emotional feeling. But I did come away in peace."

The Bohns story is only the first Field of Dreams connection Mandel shares in his new book, published by Diamond Communications. Mandel, himself a baseball player years ago, finds fathers reconnecting with sons at the site; he sees the final trip for an aging man and his family; and he meets tourists from all around Iowa, Chicago and, get this, Japan.

"My favorite encounter was with a Japanese tourist," said Mandel, 33. "The man told me that for 10 years he wanted to come here. It was his dream."

That man from Japan flew 12 hours to Chicago before driving to Iowa. He saw the Field of Dreams and headed back home. No Mall of America; no Wrigley Field or Sears Tower. Just the Field of Dreams in Dubuque County.

"It's an awful long way to go to have a catch on a piece of grass," Mandel admitted.

"A lot of people are just looking for a place where time could slow down a little," he added. "Those stories are equally as touching because I suppose for all in this world we maybe need a place in life to walk around, or just spend time looking at our kids."

"Is This Heaven?" To Mandel, it seemed to approach it.

"It's beautiful, people think it's just beautiful," he said. "People I'm close to are amazed to think that up to 75,000 people are going to the middle of Iowa for a movie set. But people have internalized the theme of that movie; it's about redemption. The people who read this are charmed by the stories and they come away feeling Iowa is some special place.

"Maybe we need to have a little more of that in our lives."

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER - JANUARY 7, 2003

By Robert Strauss
For The Inquirer
Photo  WILLIAM F. STEINMETZ / Inquirer

Brett H. Mandel's cramped office on the 12th floor of the Municipal Services Building in Philadelphia is about as baseballed-up as a city official's nest can be.

There are balls of various types on stands along the windowsill, Phillies paraphernalia on the walls, a Larry Bowa baseball card by his computer, even a baseball protest - a "Stadium Out of Chinatown" shirt - over a bookcase.

But sitting on his desk, only inches from his workspace, is a most treasured object: a vial of soil from the infield of the diamond on Becky and Don Lansing's property in Dyersville, Iowa.

"Yes, real dirt from the Field of Dreams," Mandel said, proudly. "Lots of people seem to want this."

During normal daytime hours, Mandel is director of financial and policy analysis for the Philadelphia City Controller's Office. "I'm a policy wonk," he said, at least as proudly. Primarily he prepares documents on taxes and spending and other fiduciary whatnot for City Controller Jonathan Saidel.

But really, even now, in a city gripped by football fever, Mandel is a baseball wonk, and a sentimental one at that (though he admits to being a casual Eagles fan, too). And he hopes his latest book, Is This Heaven? The Magic of the Field of Dreams (Diamond Communications, $24.95) will appeal to all those like him who find soul and fulfillment in all things sentimentally baseball.

Is This Heaven? looks at the remarkable appeal that draws roughly 75,000 people a year to visit the baseball diamond on the Lansings' farm, where the movie Field of Dreams was filmed in 1989.

The movie, based on the book Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella, tells the story of a middle-aged farmer (played by Kevin Costner) who seeks to reconnect with his late father through baseball. To that end, he plows down part of his cornfield to build a baseball diamond, as instructed by a disembodied voice speaking the movie's catchphrase: "If you build it, he will come."

There are fantastical side stories involving James Earl Jones playing a J.D. Salingeresque hermetic writer; Ray Liotta as barred star baseball player Joe Jackson; and Burt Lancaster as a Minnesota doctor who in his youth played one inning in the major leagues.

But essentially, the movie revolves around baseball as a humanizing and uniting force in families and society. Over the movie's final credits rolls film of a long line of cars driving up to this ball yard in rural Iowa.

"Well, this book is about that phenomenon - essentially, that is what has happened since the movie ended," Mandel said. "You can go to the Field of Dreams and you can sit there on the field or in the bleachers and watch, not bumper-to-bumper cars, but a continuous line of cars coming up morning, noon and night."

Mandel fills his book with the stories of fans of the movie who claim to have found redemption by coming to the field. There is Jim Bohn, whose 12-year-old son Matt died in a plane crash in Sioux City, Iowa, and who came to the Field of Dreams from his western Pennsylvania home, hoping to connect somehow, some way.

There is Becky DuBuisson, who was a big fan of the movie and made a pilgrimage to the site after her husband died - only to find a new husband, the diamond's owner, Don Lansing. And there is Haruyoshi Hori, who has built his own little Field of Dreams near his home outside Hiroshima, Japan, in homage to his favorite American film.

Mandel, 32, doesn't completely buy the idea of a movie-set ball yard in Iowa as a pilgrimage equal to Fatima or Lourdes, but it is clear he likes the idea that this romanticized patch of America, bathed in clean, country air, can be a place to at least cleanse the soul a bit.

"People are traveling from all over the world to this little nowhere in Iowa, not just to see the world's largest ball of twine but because they think that they can experience some of the magic they saw in the film," he said.

"Is it possible to capture what everyone in their hearts knows is fiction? Well, you walk on this movie set, and it is not going to make you have a better relationship with your father, to be sure. But people all over the world have come hoping that."

Is This Heaven? is Mandel's third book. His first was Minor Players, Major Dreams, in which he used the modicum of skill remaining from his time on the Northeast High School baseball team to play for the independent minor-league Ogden (Utah) Raptors in 1994, and record the ups and downs of young guys trying to make it to the big leagues.

Mandel is still the commissioner of - and a gradually slowing second-baseman in - the Greater Philadelphia Men's Adult Baseball League (www.gpmabl.com for those able-bodied and interested). His second book, in a completely different vein, was Philadelphia: A New Urban Direction, which the Controller's Office brought out in hopes of spurring discussion on issues in the last mayoral race.

"I like both aspects. It's fun to be able to write about what you like and what you think you know," he said.

After Northeast High, Mandel went to Hamilton College in Upstate New York and came back to study public policy in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked for the Charter Commission in 1993, attending as many Phillies games as possible, which led to the first book.

The latest book came after a fortuitous conversation with former Phillies pitcher John Morris. Morris wanted to write a book himself about his experiences in baseball and had read Mandel's first book and liked it. Morris called one day for advice, and the two called back and forth over the years. Morris' publisher liked the idea of a book on the Field of Dreams, and Morris suggested Mandel as the writer.

Though the book was published this fall, hoping to catch holiday gift sales, Mandel would have preferred a push toward Father's Day.

"The whole idea of Field of Dreams is fathers connecting with sons," he said. "If I were a network TV executive, I'd put this movie on every Father's Day."

Next up, though, isn't baseball, except to root for the Phillies. "No, I think I'm interested in helping reform the city's antiquated tax structure right now," he said. But then he looked longingly at his vial of Field of Dreams dirt. "But my colleagues know that if a baseball call comes in, there is always time to answer it."

New book tells story of cornfield, journeys

CNN.COM - JANUARY 20, 2003

By Chuck Schoffner
Monday, January 20, 2003 Posted: 11:28 AM EST (1628 GMT)

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) -- The moment Brett Mandel stopped his car at the farm where "Field of Dreams" was filmed, the manicured infield and the corn surrounding the lush outfield grass called out to him.

He grabbed his glove and raced onto the field to join a pickup game and share in the two powerful forms of magic -- baseball and movies -- that draw about 75,000 people a year to the diamond in northeast Iowa.

"It really did look like showing up the day after the movie ended," Mandel said. "I was expecting the Kinsella family to come out of the house and the ballplayers to come out of the corn."

In his book "Is This Heaven? The Magic of the Field of Dreams," Mandel tells the stories of people who have found peace, hope and renewal at the baseball diamond carved out of a cornfield near Dyersville for the 1989 movie, based on W.P. Kinsella's novel "Shoeless Joe."

Many felt drawn to the site, including Takeshi Horie, who made the 17-hour trip from Osaka, Japan, to see the field.

A dream compelled Becky DuBuisson to ring in a new year on the field while eating a hot dog and drinking a root beer. Seven months later, she married Don Lansing, the part-owner of the field who lives in the white farmhouse prominently featured in the movie.

"It makes people feel like they want to be kids again," said Mandel, director of financial and policy analysis for the Philadelphia controller's office.

"Senior citizens bring a glove even though they haven't thrown for ages. Guys who haven't swung a bat for years step up to the plate. Somebody in a wheelchair is being pushed around the bases. There's something very neat about this field. It brings out something in people: 'I'm going to actually participate."'

In the movie, the ball field that Ray Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner, is inspired to build draws Shoeless Joe Jackson and a host of other ball-playing ghosts, ultimately including Kinsella's father. Similarly, connecting with lost loved ones is a common theme among visitors.

One man told Mandel he thought he could see his grandfather, dead for 15 years, standing in right field. A woman felt her dead mother's presence at the field and thought "You've been here, haven't you?"

"It just seems to be that kind of place," Mandel said. "It draws enough people who are willing to discuss something incredible. They come looking for something to happen and they actually feel something."

Along with turning Dyersville into a tourist mecca, the movie has rekindled interest in Jackson, who was banned from baseball after the 1919 Black Sox scandal. In the movie, Jackson is the first player to appear on the field, and asks Kinsella: "Is this heaven?"

No, replied Kinsella, it's Iowa.

Mandel, who also has written a book about minor league baseball and another about the city of Philadelphia, said the ball field uniquely connects people with the movie.

"You can run up the stairs of the Philadelphia Art Museum like Rocky did, but it's not the same feeling," Mandel said. "At the Field of Dreams, if you are willing to suspend disbelief for a second, you can almost convince yourself you've stepped into the film."

'Field of Dreams' site inspires stories for book

CNNSI.COM - JANUARY 20, 2003

By Chuck Schoffner
Posted: Sunday January 19, 2003 11:26 PM
Updated: Monday January 20, 2003 1:12 AM

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) -- Brett Mandel succumbed to the magic the moment he stopped his car at the "Field of Dreams" movie site.

The manicured infield and the corn surrounding the lush outfield grass seem to call out to him. So he grabbed his glove and raced onto the field to join the pickup game already under way.

"It really did look like showing up the day after the movie ended," Mandel said. "I was expecting the Kinsella family to come out of the house and the ballplayers to come out of the corn."

At this point, it would be a great story to report that Mandel was so inspired that he wrote a book. But that's the trouble when dealing with fact. It just wasn't so.

Mandel already had started researching the book and had traveled to the famous field near Dyersville in northeast Iowa from his home in Philadelphia to interview visitors.

His work produced Is This Heaven? The Magic of the Field of Dreams, a book that tells the stories of people who found peace, hope and renewal at the baseball diamond carved out of a cornfield for the 1989 movie Field of Dreams.

"It makes people feel like they want to be kids again," said Mandel, director of financial and policy analysis for the Philadelphia controller's office.

"Senior citizens bring a glove even though they haven't thrown for ages. Guys who haven't swung a bat for years step up to the plate. Somebody in a wheelchair is being pushed around the bases. There's something very neat about this field. It brings out something in people: 'I'm going to actually participate.'"

Mandel's book recounts the story of the Pennsylvania father whose son was killed in the crash of United Flight 232 in Sioux City on July 19, 1989. The family had gone to see Field of Dreams two months earlier, on their son's 12th birthday.

Nearly a year after the crash, the family visited the movie site and Jim Bohn placed his son's bat, his glove and baseballs they used to play catch with in the corn beyond the outfield.

Then there's the story of Becky DuBuisson, who after a dream in 1994 felt, for some inexplicable reason, that she had to be at the Field of Dreams at midnight on New Year's Eve, eating a hot dog and drinking a root beer.

She did exactly that, and seven months later, she married Don Lansing, who owns part of the field and lives in the white farmhouse featured so prominently in the movie.

Mandel also tells of Takeshi Horie, who journeyed from Osaka, Japan -- a 17-hour trip -- not to see the Grand Canyon or Yankee Stadium, but solely to visit the Field of Dreams.

A Minnesota man told Mandel he thought he could see his grandfather, dead for 15 years, standing in right field. A woman felt her dead mother's presence at the field and thought, "You've been here, haven't you?"

At the end of the movie, farmer Ray Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner, reconnects with his dead father, who shows up as a young, handsome catcher. In real life, Mandel found a Florida man who whose first meeting with an 18-year-old son he had never seen took place at the field.

"It just seems to be that kind of place," Mandel said. "It draws enough people who are willing to discuss something incredible. They come looking for something to happen and they actually feel something."

Mandel, who also has written a book about minor league baseball and another about the city of Philadelphia, was contacted by an agent in 1996 about doing a book on the movie site, which had become major tourist attraction drawing 75,000 people a year.

He liked the idea but did not find a publisher until 2000. With that arranged, Mandel intensified his research and visited the field. Once he finished pitching batting practice and taking a few cuts at the plate, Mandel dug out his tape recorder and notebook, and started talking to visitors.

"Some of the stories, when I encountered them it was almost like I had to pinch myself," Mandel said. "I'd find myself saying, "This is great.'"

Others he encountered did not want to talk about their experience on the field because it was too personal.

"They were like, 'If I tell you, you tell the world and then it's not mine anymore,'" Mandel said. "I respect that."

Along with turning Dyersville into a tourist mecca, the movie has rekindled interest in Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was banned from baseball after the 1919 Black Sox scandal. In the movie, Jackson is the first player to appear on the field that Kinsella builds.

The line "Is this heaven?" is still used in promotional materials to this day. Iowa's state slogan is "Fields of Opportunities."

And in Chisholm, Minn., two $500 scholarships are given each year in the name of Moonlight Graham, who spent 50 years as a doctor in the town after playing a half inning in one major league baseball game and never getting to bat. In the movie, Graham comes back as a young player and gets that chance to face a major league pitcher.

The scholarships are funded through the sale of Moonlight Graham baseball cards. Sales spike every time the movie is shown, said Mike Kalibabky, who oversees fund raising.

"I'm expecting something from the book, too, depending on the success," Kalibabky said.

Mandel is an unabashed fan of the movie and, after his visit, of the field.

"You can run up the stairs of the Philadelphia Art Museum like Rocky did, but it's not the same feeling," Mandel said. "At the Field of Dreams, if you are willing to suspend disbelief for a second, you can almost convince yourself you've stepped into the film."

Listen to Weekend Edition - Sunday audio

Mar. 30, 2003

In the film Field of Dreams, actor Kevin Costner built a baseball field on his Iowa farm, and people came from all over to see it.
Writer Brett H. Mandel has written Is This Heaven?: The Magic of the Field of Dreams (Diamond Communications; ISBN: 1888698411), and talks to host Liane Hansen, about the people who still journey to the site of the movie.

Fort Frances Times - July 09, 2003

By Joey Payeur

Maybe it didn’t rank right up there on a historical level with the children of Israel reaching Canaan.

But when my friend Diane Lively steered her car up the long driveway toward the big white house and the picture-perfect baseball diamond, I knew I had reached my Promised Land.

This past Saturday was the culmination of a 14-year ambition to travel to the place where my all-time favourite movie, “Field of Dreams,” was actually filmed, on the outskirts of the small Midwestern U.S. community of Dyersville, Iowa.

If you’re unfamiliar with the 1989 cinematic classic (and from someone who has watched the movie a legitimate 68 times, that seems unfathomable), it’s based on the W.P. Kinsella novel “Shoeless Joe,” and starred Kevin Costner as a corn farmer who follows the instructions of a mystical voice who advises him, “If you build it, he will come.”

What follows is a truly touching story of redemption and reward intertwined with the 1919 Chicago “Black Sox” gambling scandal, where eight members of the team where banned from baseball for allegedly throwing the World Series that year.

One of those was the great “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, whose lifetime .356 average is still third highest in history. It was never proven in court that Jackson took any of the gamblers’ money, and despite hitting .375 for the Series and hitting its only home run, he was forced to bear the same fate as his teammates.

I’ll save a future column for this topic. But suffice it to say the second Pete Rose gets inducted into the Hall of Fame (a man who was actually convicted of a crime), Jackson had better be one step behind him or the Hall’s voting committee will face my wrath, guaranteed. But I digress.

After the movie was filmed and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture (I’ll never accept “Driving Miss Daisy” as the actual winner), it was decided to leave the property, which is actually shared by two families, as is to remain as a tourism site.

But for those of us who love the game, this is no Grauman’s Chinese Theatre or even the Great Wall of China. It’s so much more than just something to slap on a postcard.

This outdoor tribute to America’s national pastime has become a haven for those searching for solace from life’s tribulations, and those who cherish the joys of youth, whether they still be children themselves or not.

My brush with magic almost never happened. Consumed with fear as a thunderstorm raged at 4:30 a.m. that morning, I woke two hours later to find the clouds clearing and the sun breaking through.

By the time Diane and I reached our destination, the sky was a dazzling blue and the sun shone with all the warmth that the field itself exuded.

My first steps upon the sacred ground were most reverent in nature. I almost felt like I hadn’t earned the right to be there.

After throwing a pitch from the mound, a small blond haired boy no more than four years old named Keston from Emporia, Kan., who was there with his older brother Brandon and mother Karen, approached me and asked if I wanted to play.

I took position behind the plate and Keston proceeded to deliver pitch after pitch from 12 feet away. Some were straight down the middle, some were high and outside, some were in the dirt. But every pitch was a strike in my book, and Keston’s face glowed increasingly with triumph after every delivery.

Suddenly, five-year-old Jacob and his father Don took the field, with Don pitching and Jacob and Keston taking turns at the plate. The ball might have travelled mere feet from their bats, but as Don and I combined for a series of defensive “lapses” to allow the mini-Mantles to round the bases, it was tough to tell who was enjoying themselves more: the adults or the kids.

When Jacob collided with me at home and I accommodatingly sprawled on the shale surface as though I had been hit by Ty Cobb in his prime, our subsequent high-five after I called him safe was a priceless moment—but hardly the last one.

There was little Caci Croft from Pardyville, Wisc., who could have just as easily been Karin Kinsella, Costner’s fictional daughter in the movie. Her sense of innocence and her unbridled awe as she held the softball and the glove I had brought along was a treasure to behold.

There was diehard St. Louis Cardinals fan Drew Young from Linden, Ind., 12 years old who cracked a smile as wide as the Mississippi River every time he connected with the ball or made a catch.

There was eight-year-old Kayla from San Antonio, Tx., who shyly looked on as the game unfolded in front of her. After some gentle coaxing, she consented to step up and take a few swings herself.

Six pitches came, and six pitches were missed, but Kayla wouldn’t quit. And when she knocked the seven pitch 25 feet and outran the pitcher to first base, you could have sworn she was walking on air.

There was Middletown, Ohio native Darrell Wilder and his fiancée Audrey Swartz from Champaign, Ill. and Audrey’s mother Linda, taking in the sights.

The baseball lovebirds met at Lambeth College in Jackson, Tenn., and Audrey recalls Wilder’s unique proposal last Fourth of July.

“He brought me breakfast,” she chuckled, “and there was a ring inside the bagel.”

There was Angie from Carol Stream, just outside of Chicago, watching her grandson do his Sammy Sosa impression at the plate.

“I’m not much of a baseball fan myself,” she admitted. “But I’m here for my grandson. He just loves the game so much.”

There was Brett Mandel from Philadelphia, Pa., the man who came up with the gem of an idea to do exactly what I was doing, except he took it one step further and wrote a book (Is This Heaven?), telling the experiences of those who travelled to this baseball Mecca.

“There’s millions of baseball fields that nobody stops to play at,” said Mandel. “But for so many reasons, people keep coming here 14 years after the movie. It’s so special to so many.”

And there was me, memorizing every step I took around the hallowed field, pretending to fade into the corn like the ghosts in the movie, standing where “Shoeless” Joe had shagged flies off the bat of Ray Kinsella, sitting in the bleachers where Terence Mann made his Gettysburg-like speech at the movie’s climax.

It was a time that means little or nothing to many I know. But to me, my moment on that one field, carved out of a sea of corn in smalltown Iowa, will last a lifetime.

Or, as Moonlight Graham (rest in peace, Burt Lancaster) so eloquently put it in the movie:

 “Once a place touches you like this, the wind never blows so cold again.”