Ray “Hap” Dumont

Raymond “Hap” Dumont was born in Wichita in 1904.  He attended Wichita High School (later East High) and was valedictorian of his 1923 graduating class.  He worked as a wrestling and boxing promoter in Topeka and Hutchinson before becoming sports editor of the Hutchinson News.

In 1929, he returned to Wichita to write sports for the Wichita Eagle and sell mail order sporting goods.  He also promoted a baseball game for circus employees who could not work on Sunday because of Kansas’s Blue Laws, but could play baseball.

In 1931, Dumont founded the National Baseball Congress in 1931 and held the NBC State Tournament at Island Park, a wooden ballpark on Ackerman Island on the Arkansas River near downtown.  Sixteen teams played in the tournament, which allowed Dumont to sell sports equipment.

The night after 1933 tournament’s championship game, Island Park burned to the ground.  This was the middle of The Great Depression, but Dumont convinced the City of Wichita to build a new stadium in 1934 along the Arkansas River, telling them that the new stadium would hold a national tournament.

The next year, he offered the legendary Satchel Paige $1000 to bring his barnstorming team from Bismarck, ND to this new NBC National Tournament at the new Lawrence Stadium.  Dumont did not have $1000 but he made it from the tournament, which was helped along with coverage and sponsorship from The Sporting News.

The tournament became a Wichita fixture and gave Dumont an outlet for his innovations and promotional genius.  Among other creations, he invented an automated home-plate duster, employed women umpires, tried orange-colored baseballs and implemented a 20-second clock on pitchers to speed up the game.  

Dumont died in his office at the stadium in 1971 at the age of 67.  In 1978 the stadium was renamed Lawrence-Dumont Stadium.  Today, there are many youth baseball leagues in the Wichita area named in his honor.