The Triple-A Int’l League Pawtucket Red Sox (PawSox) continued to “honor their late patriarch Friday with the unveiling of a 6-foot bronze statue” of Owner BEN MONDOR, who died in '10, “standing outside his beloved McCoy Stadium, the building he saved from the wrecking ball back when he bought the team" in '77, according to Kevin McNamara of the PROVIDENCE JOURNAL. The statue was sculpted and created by CAROL “TAYO” HEUSER of Narragansett, R.I., and sits “in Mondor Gardens, a strip of landscaped grass and shrubs just beyond the left-field bullpen.” In the garden “are six small statuettes of kids playing catch and enjoying the game -- Mondor’s idea, of course.” PawSox GM LOU SCHWECHHEIMER said, “We felt it was a fitting tribute to him to be out there with the statues of those kids, because for him it was all about families. That garden is our way of letting Ben’s legacy live long after we’re all gone” (PROVIDENCE JOURNAL, 6/23). In Providence, Jim Donaldson wrote Mondor “turned a bankrupt baseball operation into a model franchise, the standard by which all other minor league teams are measured” (PROVIDENCEJOURNAL.com, 6/23). In Boston, Bob Ryan wrote 35 years ago, Mondor “took a bankrupt and untrustworthy franchise known as the Pawtucket Red Sox -- a team that could barely draw 70,000 people annually in a run-down mess of a ballpark -- and turned it into as important a social, cultural, and philanthropic institution as there is in all of Rhode Island.” He did this “by virtue of both his business acumen and his enormous personal charm, and he did it customer-by-customer and business-by-business” (BOSTON GLOBE, 6/24).
