This Day in American History: August 21st - The First Little League World Series (1947)

On this day in 1947, twelve teams of Pennsylvania kids -- and one lone squad from New Jersey -- kicked off a tournament so small it was played on a field wedged between a levee and a city street. Nobody involved could have guessed it would still be running, on national television, eight decades later.

Little League Baseball itself had been founded eight years earlier, in 1939, by Williamsport, Pennsylvania oil-company clerk Carl Stotz, who wanted local kids to have an organized version of the sandlot games he'd grown up playing. By 1947, the concept had spread to a handful of nearby towns, and Little League's board decided to organize the first-ever tournament among them -- not yet called the "World Series," but officially the National Little League Tournament, since that name wouldn't be adopted until 1949.

The tournament opened on August 21, 1947, though rain forced a couple of first-round games to be pushed to the following day. All 12 participating teams were from Pennsylvania except one outlier from Atlantic City, New Jersey -- as Sports Illustrated later put it, "it took temerity to call this first event a World Series." Games were played at Original Field in Williamsport, on a sliver of land squeezed between a city street and a levee built to hold back the West Branch Susquehanna River, with the levee itself doubling as makeshift seating for the crowd.

The tournament wrapped up on August 23, when the hometown Maynard Midgets thrashed the Lock Haven All Stars 16-7 in front of roughly 2,500 spectators, a runs total that stood as the championship-game record for the next 40 years. Star outfielder Jack Losch went on to play football at the University of Miami and briefly in the NFL for the Green Bay Packers before joining the Air Force -- Little League later named its Series sportsmanship award in his honor. Within 15 years, teams from Canada, Mexico, Europe, and Asia were making the trip to Williamsport, and the tournament that started as a hometown affair between a handful of small Pennsylvania towns now draws a worldwide television audience every August.

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Also on This Day in History

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1858 — The First Lincoln-Douglas Debate Takes Place

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1878 — The American Bar Association Is Founded

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1912 — The Boy Scouts Name Their First-Ever Eagle Scout

Arthur Rose Eldred of Rockville Centre, New York earns the honor that's since become synonymous with scouting excellence.

1959 — Hawaii Becomes the 50th U.S. State

After more than 60 years as a U.S. territory, Hawaii officially joins the Union.

Source: Little League Baseball, HISTORY.com, Sports Illustrated