Above, clockwise from left: Ontario Orioles, Illinois State University (Normal) Redbirds Wichita Falls Spudders and Denver Bears.

I’d never heard of the Ontario Orioles, but the minor league team dated to the days before the West Coast had a major league ballclub. The Orioles, in the Sunset League, lasted all of one season, 1947, compiling an unimpressive 66-73 record, according to baseball-reference.com, which has a full roster and stats for the team. (The Internet, man. Whew.) The Orioles played in Ontario Baseball Park, now known as Jay Littleton Field.

This comes up because reader Don J. alerted me to the existence of Ebbets Field Flannels, a Seattle company that produces authentic reproductions of uniforms, caps and jackets for vanished baseball, hockey and football teams. According to its website, you can currently get caps for such teams as the 1951 Kansas City Blues, the 1933 San Francisco Seals and the 1947 New York Cubans, generally for $40 each.

And according to its Facebook page, you can now buy a cap for the 1947 Ontario Orioles. In the photo above, it’s the cap at far left. For whatever reason, the cap doesn’t seem to be on the company’s website yet, but they say they’re selling it.

Just think, you could own a hand-crafted (and made in America) Ontario baseball cap! You could even outfit a whole team in them! As long as you had $360. Seems like the ultimate niche product, but cool that there are enough baseball nerds to support something as out there as this.

Just like a real Ontario Oriole, you could wear your cap to Littleton Field. The all-wood stadium itself is considered so vintage-looking that an “X-Files” episode, “The Unnatural,” set in the 1940s was filmed there in 1999.

Loyal? Stubborn? Whichever, I flew in and out of ONT for my vacation. They were so happy to have me, my first flight was canceled in an effort to keep me there longer. Sigh. Wednesday’s column has the details.

Sunday’s column rounds up comments about the end of the line for Ramon’s Cactus Patch in Ontario, which closed after 75 years. Many people ate there for decades. My favorite is the woman talking about her parents’ first taste of Mexican food!

An L.A. Times editorial last week said Ontario’s airport ought to be renamed, inspiring a blog post here last week. Some of your responses, as well as letters to the editor about the editorial, inspired Sunday’s column. Thanks for the help!

In an editorial Sunday advocating the long-discussed new runway be built at LAX, the L.A. Times ended by also advocating a new name for ONT:

“As for the so-called regional solution, it will at best be a supplement to a modern, efficient and safe LAX. And for goodness’ sake, before trying to do anything else with Ontario airport, change the name so unhappy passengers who get rerouted there due to heavy coastal fog will at least know they’re not being flown to a wind-swept wheat field somewhere in central Canada.”

Ha ha! Of course, perhaps the Times is bitter after last month mistakenly reporting that ONT is “30 miles west of downtown.” If they don’t know where Ontario is, then obviously no one else must, either.

The Times may not realize that ONT is officially LA/Ontario International Airport, a change made a few years back to ensure travelers know the airport is in wheat field-less Southern California.

Still, there’s always room for improvement, and I’m not going to say Ontario International Airport couldn’t benefit from a new name. Especially when throwing it open to you readers results in a blog post.

On Twitter I threw out Jack Benny International, under the assumption that if Orange County can honor John Wayne, we could do the same for a local-identified celebrity (“Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga!”). A reader came back with Ovitt Family Community Airport, adapting the Ontario library’s unwieldy moniker. Your turn!

Sunday’s column is a tribute to Ramon Sanchez, proprietor of Ramon’s Cactus Patch restaurant in Ontario, who died Thursday at age 98.

Ramon Sanchez, the founder and proprietor of Ramon’s Cactus Patch, the oldest restaurant in Ontario, died Wednesday evening at home at age 98, according to his family.

Sanchez on March 30 closed his Mexican restaurant, which he opened in 1938, due to illness. He was suffering from colon cancer. I wrote about that earlier in April.

Services will be private, at Sanchez’ request, and he also told his family he didn’t want an obituary or any fuss. “No fanfare. That was his way,” daughter Claudia said.

That said, I’ll be writing about him anyway. (That’s my way.) His family is fine with that and I’m sure he would be too. In the meantime, farewell to a local institution.

When Ontario officials told me (upon the opening in December of the first licensed tattoo shop within city limits in recent memory) that they didn’t believe there had been a tattoo parlor since the 1950s, I was skeptical and made sure not to treat that as fact.

Good thing, because two readers soon contacted me to say that a man named Franco had a tattoo shop on East Holt Boulevard, two blocks east of Euclid Avenue, in the late 1970s-early 1980s. Note that this puts his shop within blocks of both City Hall and the Police Department, so if he was hiding, he was doing so in plain sight.

One reader said she got her second tattoo there circa 1979. (She asked me not to use her name because “my mom would cringe if she read that as she still hates my tattoos!”) Another said Corey Miller, now of the Six Feet Under tattoo shop in Upland, apprenticed at Franco’s.

Indeed, Miller’s website gives this history:

“A year later [1984], Corey went to Franco’s, the local tattoo parlor in Ontario, California. Franco was a 360-pound Sicilian with gold teeth, a Mohawk, and a .357 magnum slung in a shoulder harness. Corey and his buddies would go to Franco’s after school to drink beers and do whatever else they wanted to do. By summertime, Corey was drawing designs and taking out the trash at the shop, and Franco and the boys started calling him the shop hand. Franco’s soon closed after what Corey describes as some ‘pretty insane nights of fights, drunkenness, gunfire, arrests, and tattooing,’ but not before Franco sold Corey what he thought was a broken tattoo machine that turned out to work just fine.”

Continue reading →

Sunday’s column has items about the daredevil’s 1971 jump in Ontario, cultural events this week and the death of a frequent letter writer to the Bulletin’s Opinion page.

Evel Knievel’s Feb. 28, 1971, jump over 19 Dodge vehicles (18 cars, one van) at Ontario Motor Speedway is seen in the photo above. And here, you can see a short video: the opening of the “Evel” biopic that mixes a few seconds of the actual jump with stuntwork, stand-ins and scenes with George Hamilton as Knievel. The jump was part of the entertainment at the Miller High Life 500 at the speedway. There will be more in Sunday’s column. Do you remember the jump? Were you there?