On a typical summer night in the 21st century, the stands at the Hobbs Park ballfield attract a few dozen spectators to softball games.

But back in the 1940s — before ESPN, and before many Major League Baseball teams migrated from the East — a baseball game at the Municipal Baseball Stadium was the place to be. Hundreds of spectators turned out to watch the Lawrence Colts take on other semiprofessional baseball teams from around the region.

“It was a big deal,” Mark Kaplan said last week. “It was a simpler time.”

Now Lawrence residents Kaplan, Dave Evans and George Francis want to revive memories of that golden age. They’re searching for players and spectators with memories and memorabilia of the old municipal stadium.

“We want to preserve it as an icon of small-town baseball,” Kaplan said.

The ballpark was built in 1947, and dedicated in July of that year before a crowd of 2,500 fans. It had concrete dugouts and an 8-foot-tall wooden fence. More than 30,000 spectators attended 55 games during the first season there.

“It was supposed to be run for kids with major league aspirations,” Evans said.

Throughout the next few years, the park played host to the occasional game by Negro Leagues teams, including the Kansas City Monarchs. But baseball petered out after Kansas City attracted its first major league team — the A’s, from Philadelphia — in the mid-1950s.

“Before the A’s came to town, it was a real good draw. There was a real hunger for baseball,” Kaplan said. The A’s “took some of the steam out of what was going on in this park.”

George Francis, left, holds an old photograph of the municipal ballpark at 11th and Delaware streets. Francis, Mark Kaplan, center, and Dave Evans are organizing a campaign to collect local baseball memorabilia to allow future generations to connect with the city's past. All are pictured on Friday.

Over the next few decades, Kaplan said, the ballpark went to seed. The dugouts were filled with dirt and trash. The city, he said, considered tearing down the stands to make room for a roadway — the proposed “Haskell Loop” in the 1970s, and the “Eastern Parkway” in 1990.

In recent years, though, Kaplan was part of a group that helped bring the pre-Civil War-era Murphy-Bromelsick House to Hobbs Park, East 10th and Delaware streets, as a reminder of the city’s “Bleeding Kansas” history. Abolitionist John Speer lived on the site, and Kaplan said famed abolitionist John Brown once rallied a small army near there to repel pro-slavery forces.

Preserving the ballpark, and its memories, is the next step in saving East Lawrence’s history, Kaplan said.

“This neighborhood has always been considered expendable,” he said. “We’re trying to reawaken memories.

“We’re making a kind of mini-Heritage Area out of this site,” he said. “There aren’t too many places like this in Lawrence that have these many layers of history in a particular spot.”

But Kaplan said he couldn’t wait much longer to find players and fans from the ballpark’s glory days. Time is passing quickly.

“The people,” he said, “are disappearing.”