The Hits Keep Coming in Downtown Beloit, Wisconsin
Long foul balls from this new Wisconsin stadium could land in Illinois.
BELOIT, WIS.—Minor league baseball is about coming and going.
No one wants to stay put.
But after the ABC Supply Stadium opens on Aug. 3 with the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers taking on the Beloit Snappers in downtown Beloit, the ballpark will be there for years to come. Fans will walk through the centerfield gates along the bed of the timeless Rock River. Located on the Illinois-Wisconsin border, long foul balls hit over the first base facade could land in the Illinois zip code. Hopefully, they won’t get super taxed.
The privately funded stadium will seat 3,500 people with additional standing-room-only space. The $35 million ballpark was birthed by Beloit area resident Diane Hendricks. She is the owner of the ABC Supply Company, America’s largest wholesale distributor of roofing, siding, and windows. Hendricks is on top of the 2020 Forbes 100 richest-self-made women in the United States. Her net worth is $8 billion, placing her ahead of Oprah Winfrey and Madonna.
Hendricks has spent millions of dollars investing in downtown Beloit. She turned over forsaken buildings to open a sushi restaurant, the upscale Lucy’s #7 Burger Bar with Wisconsin craft beer, and contemporary apartments. Hendricks and her late husband Ken Hendricks spent $40 million to purchase and renovate the former Beloit Corporation foundry building along the Rock River. Now known as the Ironworks campus, the 24-acre parcel features 13 different businesses. Ken Hendricks died in December 2007 from injuries as the result of falling through a subfloor under construction and into the garage of his home in Afton, Wis. He was 66 years old.
Featuring an all-brick facade, the ABC stadium’s main concourse wraps 360 degrees around the field. Home plate faces the Illinois-Wisconsin border. A ball traveling into Illinois might be a stretch but Snappers President Jeff Jurgella said it would be possible with a hooked foul ball from left-handed mega power hitters like the Snappers Griffin Conine (the son of former Florida Marlin Jeff Conine), who leads all of minor league baseball with 21 home runs.
Mr. Snapper Griffin Conine. His father Jeff is Mr. Marlin.
The Snappers are a Miami Marlins affiliate and there’s no doubt Beloit would have lost its connection with major league baseball without the new stadium.
“They started digging in June (2020),” Jurgella said. “It’s remarkable knowing that the stadium was built during a full-blown pandemic. And they turned around a $35 million stadium in 14 months.” The team’s new owner is Quint Studer, a Janesville, Wis. native with strong Chicago ties. For more on Quint, read my November profile here. His Pensacola-based Studer Entertainment & Retail also co-owns the Pensacola Blue Wahoos, a Class AA affiliate of the Marlins.
New ballpark neighbor Jason Staack has seen it all in Beloit. He is the owner of Tin Dog Records, a wonderful little vinyl record store at 312 State St. in downtown Beloit. His store is a block away from the new ballpark.
In a fast-paced world of arrivals and departures, Staack has lived in the Beloit area for all of his 44 years.
I wandered into his store a couple of weeks ago. I was moved when he told me that as a teenager he was a clerk across the street at Stanton Shoes (still in business with a great neon sign.) The rewards of travel are not always found in how many steps you take.
His father Tom was a freight train conductor on the Union Pacific railroad for more than 40 years. His mother Ginger was a homemaker and occasional waitress. They graduated from Beloit Memorial High School, the same school that Staack graduated from.
I’ve been to downtown Beloit many times, often to visit my friend Jackie Gennett at her Bushel & Peck’s Local Market, 328 State St. Gennett and Rich Horbaczewski own Grass is Greener Gardens in nearby Monroe. It is a 130-acre organic farm where they grow vegetables and flowers and raise grass-fed lamb and free-range chicken. They opened Bushel & Peck’s in 2008 in a former Woolworth’s building. I was always in a hurry to either get to a Snappers game or the Butterfly Supper Club in Beloit and missed the storefront record store down the block.
Staack is the third owner of Tin Dog. He bought it in August 2017. “I was going to go into IT consulting,” Staack said in an early July interview. “I had done that forever. But I saw a way to own a record store. My two passions are music and technology. There are not too many paths to make a living in music so I figured this would be something to try.” Staack attended Beloit Memorial with the original Tin Dog owners.
Store photo courtesy of Tin Dog Records.
He increased the inventory of the previous owners to about 2,000 LPs. Tin Dog does have a couple of hundred ‘45s, a handful of local CDs, and about two dozen new cassettes. He does not sell used cassettes. Many of the Tin Dog records come from area estate sales, rummage sales, and customers. Staack looks for items online but avoids eBay.
I scored Stonewall Jackson’s “All’s Fair in Love n’ War” (with hard country like a cover of Roger Miller’s “I Pawned My Past Today” and “Blues Plus Booze (Means I Lose)” for a dollar and a CD of original songs by local country songwriter James Carratt that was recorded in Beloit (pop. 36,800.)
“Right now people are buying classic rock,” Staack said. “When I have ‘80s, ‘90s metal in here it goes real quick. Some hip-hop goes pretty quick. Grunge. And a few new releases here and there.”
Stonewall Jackson was a steal for a dollar. “That kind of stuff you can find at Goodwill,” he explained. “It’s not bad music because it was a dollar. There was just so much of it pressed and so much of it out there. That Stonewall Jackson came from a large collection I didn’t pay much for so I priced it for a dollar instead of having it sit here and hoping that somebody would pay five.”
The red brick Tin Dog building has a colorful past.
During the 1960s and 70s, it was the Voigt Music Center that sold instruments to tin ears. The building was established around the 1850s as a tavern, according to Staack. “There was an upstairs Chinese restaurant at one point in its history,” he said.
Staack worked at the shoe store across the street when he was 15 and 16 years old. “When I was younger it was pretty busy downtown,” he said. “Then it went to nothing. It’s getting back to something.”
The past is steps away in downtown Beloit.
Staack is the only employee at Tin Dog. He made it through the pandemic. He closed on March 12, 2020, about an hour before Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers issued a “Safer at Home” order.
“I stayed closed until the end of May (2020) when they said we could open up,” he said. “I did shorter hours and a shorter week. I hadn’t gone out to get much inventory. I went to a (record) show in Milwaukee but stayed in most of the year. I had been growing the business. Not getting rich by any means, but now there are more and more people in here.”
ABC Supply Stadium can only enhance the Tin Dog operation as well as other downtown businesses. The stadium will be used year-round. An artificial FieldTurf field allows for uses outside of baseball that include youth sports and concerts. The vision for ABC to become a community center. “The stadium is right behind my building,” said Staack, who lives in nearby Janesville. “I’m hoping it will bring a lot of foot traffic. I can sell t-shirts because I have a logo that people like and it says Beloit. The word will get out that there’s a record store here and record people travel to check out record stores.”
Staack has never seen Hendricks in his store. I suggest that he stock some ‘45s of “Up on the Roof” (The Drifters, James Taylor, and the Cryan’ Shames versions for sure) for her. Hendricks’ Commercial Properties did build the new Hotel Goodwin, a downtown boutique hotel. “They put turntables in every room and they purchased all their albums from me,” he said.
Hendricks’ devotion to Beloit is apparent throughout town. In 2011 she renovated the downtown city library into the Hendricks Center for the Arts for Beloit College students studying dance and music. In 2016 Hendricks was appointed to President Donald J. Trump’s economic advisory council. A bronze statue of her late husband stands along the downtown riverfront.
The downtown Tin Dog is a golden departure from the older grumpy used record stores I often encounter. “Our vibe is less intimidating,” he said. “I got grumpy in the IT world. I see why record store people get grumpy but I try. I’m not a social person (he did not want his photo in this story) but if somebody talks to me I engage in conversation.
“But I had a guy come in the other day and I think he was trying to start something. He kept asking about Bill Cosby. I’ve had a few people push my political stance. Those people make me grumpy. I try to help everybody. Someone was trying to start a record collection. I wrote down some things and gave him the links to some articles. I know if he went into a record store with the grumpy guys he would get turned off real quick.”
The cheerful vibe of downtown Beloit will extend into the ballpark. Concessions will be operated by the Geronimo Hospitality Group of Beloit (Hotel Goodwin, Lucy’s #7, the Bottleworks hotel in Indianapolis, and more.) Jurgella said, “There will be state fair type foods indigenous to Wisconsin, specialty sausage and local beers.” From the Snappers to the Tin Dog, there’s a new tune in Beloit and it plays out beyond baseball.
Out of the ballpark once again. Nicely done.
Thanks, Elliott for keeping an eye on this out here. Your friend, Dave