The sparkling souvenir shop at the brand-new, $39-million Mud Hens’ stadium is doing a brisk business.
Against a backdrop of exposed brick and gleaming glass, fresh-scrubbed clerks ring up piles of brightly colored Mud Hens merchandise: ball caps; T-shirts; a plush, canary-colored mascot. It’s a scene straight out of a Chamber of Commerce brochure, or it would be, if a clerk hadn’t agreed to answer a reporter’s question: Why are store employees wearing “Swamp Squad” T-shirts?
“That’s Toledo’s claim to fame,” says a deadpan Nicole Tarver, 27.
“That we were once known as a swamp.”
Welcome to Toledo, the land of the Mud Hens, where modesty is a way of life, self-deprecation is a spectator sport, and a scruffy marsh bird named Muddy is an enduring symbol of civic pride.
The much-ridiculed city on the banks of the murky Maumee River is riding high this summer, buoyed by the return of perhaps its greatest public-relations asset. After 36 years in the suburbs, the Mud Hens, the minor-league baseball team made famous by “M*A*S*H’s” Corp. Klinger, have come home to Toledo.
Newsweek recently named the Hens’ 9,000-seat downtown stadium, which showcases a surprisingly soaring skyline, as the best in the minor leagues. Hens attendance has already broken the 1953 season record. The Hens are even winning games.
And yet, Toledoans remain resolutely unassuming, stoically determined not to toot their own horns.
In a season that has seen strangers hugging and high-fiving each other, celebrating one of Toledo’s greatest civic triumphs in decades, the standard praise for the stadium is so modest that, in many a big city, it might pass for a put-down.
“I can’t believe I’m in Toledo,” the locals say, approvingly.
Self-deprecation has a long history in Toledo, a history at least as old as the Mud Hens themselves.
In the 1890s, the Hens’ predecessors played baseball in a swampy area frequented by a plump, duck-like creature known as the American Coot, or, more familiarly, the mud hen. Opposing teams noted the presence of the hens, according to Hens general manager Joe Napoli, and made light of the situation, calling the Toledoans “mud hens.”
The Toledoans responded by embracing the insult — and renaming themselves the Mud Hens.
Those were the good old days of Toledo baseball. The Hens’ predecessors were a major league team in for two years, including 1884, when they played against the Cincinnati Reds, the Baltimore Orioles, and the New York Metropolitans. That year, the Toledo team had an African-American catcher named Moses Fleetwood Walker, considered by some to have been the first black player in the major leagues.
Another major league season followed, in 1890. And from 1926-1931, the Hens were managed by future Yankees great Casey Stengel.
But by the mid-1970s, Toledo, and its best-known sports team, had fallen on tough times. The city of 310,000 was an economic satellite of the Detroit car industry, and it went into an economic tailspin when Detroit faltered.
This was the era of Toledo’s public-relations disasters: shuttered factories, high unemployment, the John Denver song: “Saturday night in Toledo, Ohio, is like being nowhere at all/All through the day how the hours rush by/You sit in the park and you watch the grass die . . .”
The Hens, currently the Detroit Tigers’ top farm team, spent the 1970s and ’80s playing on a converted racetrack in suburban Maumee, drawing small crowds and winning few games.
But through it all, the team kept swinging. In one of the few public relations triumphs of the era, the late Hens general manager Gene Cook sent a package of team paraphernalia to Jamie Farr, the Toledo actor who played a cross-dressing American corporal stationed in Korea. Cook wrote to Farr, suggesting that he wear Mud Hens attire. The show’s writers liked the idea so much, Napoli says, that they made Klinger a Hens fan.
And the rest is product placement history.
“Here’s the best part,” says Napoli. “When `M*A*S*H’ starts to run in syndication, we begin to get [souvenir] orders from other parts of the world,” including Japan, Australia and Germany. Prior to the Internet, people would write in their native tongue, and they’d write the orders and mail them, so we’d have to get an interpreter to read the order. You can’t make this stuff up.”
The mud hen is not a pretty bird.
“They look like one of nature’s mistakes,” says Toledo naturalist Bob Jacksy. “They look like something you’d see in a book of extinct animals.”
But with their oversized feet, chicken bills and plump softball-shaped bodies, they are ideally suited to a region once known as the Great Black Swamp. They swim, they fly, they walk well on mud. They eat the bugs that live the marshes.
“They’re tenacious, like Toledoans,” Jacksy says. “They stick with their place and they defend their territory. And Toledoans do, too. We’re a proud bunch.”
That pride can be traced back to the 19th Century, when the city sat on a swamp half as big as Florida’s Everglades, a mosquito-infested wetland so forbidding it delayed the settlement of northwest Ohio by about 100 years. The swamp held Toledo back in the competition for regional dominance with other Ohio cities, and it may have contributed to the region’s longstanding inferiority complex.
“We’ll tell you how terrible we are, before you tell us how terrible we are,” says Sandy Isenberg, president of the board of county commissioners for Lucas County, which includes Toledo.
But if the swamp held back progress, it also gave the locals a chance to test themselves against what one early settler described as the most “forsaken” wilderness in America.
As Jacksy puts it, “You had to have that `whatever it takes’ spirit to live here back then. It was a malarial swamp . . . It was nasty.”
Part serious, part tongue-in-cheek, swamp pride runs deep in Toledo, which calls itself Frog Town — another nod to the region’s waterlogged past — and last summer installed 101 artist-decorated fiberglass frog statues in public places.
“Even though people kind of make fun of Toledo, in Toledo there seems to be this sense of, I don’t know, just home,” says college student Megan Summersett, 20.
“It’s kind of like Toledo’s a big family. When you have brothers and sisters, you can sit there and rip on them, and it’s OK, but should somebody else do that? You’re going to pound their face.”
Even Tarver, the souvenir-store clerk who equates the city with a swamp, eventually admits she would miss it if she left: “On vacation, I’m the first to say, I want to go home. [Toledo] has that homey feeling. People here are nice to each other here. It’s not like Chicago and Cleveland. You’re two degrees [of separation] from everyone.”
Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of hometown pride is the way Toledoans seek, endlessly, to boost themselves up, launching highly ambitious plans for civic improvement. In the past two decades, major projects in the city have included a Baltimore-style waterfront mall, which failed, a Cleveland-style waterfront restaurant district, which succeeded, an art museum addition by the world-renowned architect Frank Gehry, a popular new children’s science museum and major additions to an already large and well-established zoo.
It was probably only a matter of time before the forces of community improvement set their sights on the old Mud Hens stadium.
Ned Skeldon Stadium, a converted racetrack in a sleepy suburb, became the Hens’ home in 1965. Never state-of-the-art, by the late 1990s it was an embarrassment.
If a player wanted to go to the bathroom during the game, he had to walk through the crowd to get there, says team historian John Husman, who suspects that “horrible” facilities had an effect on the caliber of play. Attendance figures lagged, with seasonal totals never equaling the record set in 1953.
“The Mud Hens were in the basement,” says Isenberg, whose board led the drive for a new stadium. “And they were playing in the worst ballpark in the league.”
By the 1990s, minor-league teams in other cities were pulling ahead with state-of-the-art facilities that attracted families with young children and sparked renewed interest in fading downtowns. Minor-league attendance has grown 29 percent in the last nine years, according to the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues.
Toledo was slow to jump on the new stadium bandwagon, and an early attempt to fund a new facility with a sales tax was voted down in 1998. But once county officials agreed to scrap the sales tax and pursue a public-private partnership, the well-oiled wheels of the community improvement machine began to turn.
The stadium opened in April, with $14 million in private funding and more than 12,000 fans, some with standing-room tickets, in attendance.
“The energy level was so high,” says Summersett, the college student. “Everyone was excited because it was another turning point for Toledo, and you wanted to be there for that.”
The Hens set a season attendance record of 343,615 tickets within about a month, surpassing the 49-year-old record set in 1953. Total attendance this season is expected to reach 522,000.
On a Sunday afternoon visit, there is unmistakable joy in Henville, with a crowd of 7,000 yelling, cheering, even dancing in the stands. But it is joy Toledo-style, with some locals even questioning the credentials of Muddy, the new, ultra-fluffy incarnation of the team mascot, and others scoffing at “Toledo’s favorite bird.”
“Who ever heard of a mud hen?” chuckles accountant Fred Lintner, 53. “And it’s such a crazy-looking character, that bird.”
