The Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table will be inducting seven new members into its Hall of Fame on Monday, Sept. 16. The Induction Class of 2024 includes five athletes, a coach and a special achievement honoree.
To purchase tickets to the Hall of Fame event at the Cabrillo Pavillion, click here.
The late Caesar Uyesaka and Jerry Harwin, co-founders of the Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table, were a double-play combination that transcended all sports in Santa Barbara.
“They used to call us ‘The Gold Dust Twins,’” Harwin once said of the philanthropy and boosterism they brought to the area’s athletic scene for more than seven decades.
They started a minor league baseball franchise as well as the Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table, raised the funding for a recreational park off Las Positas Road, and even helped build a baseball stadium at UC Santa Barbara
They were among the first community leaders to gain induction into the Athletic Round Table Hall of Fame. Uyesaka received the honor in 1969 and Harwin joined him in the Hall of Fame two years later in 1971.
Uyesaka became involved in Santa Barbara’s sports community at the tender age of 19, in 1935, after he had opened Caesar’s Auto Repair Shop on the corner of State and Haley streets. He directed his first efforts toward the teams at Santa Barbara State College, the precursor of UCSB, which had been left in dire need of support by the Great Depression.
“Back in the late ‘30s, times were tough,” Willie Wilton, the Gauchos’ late basketball coach, once said in a newspaper interview. “But Caesar would always come up with money for our program. He was the only one who contributed to the program regularly.”
Uyesaka did recruit others for moral support in a group he called, “The Buck-a-Month Club … We had about 300 members who paid $12 a year.”
He also gave free room and board in his own home to the Gauchos who were most impoverished by the Great Depression.
“A lot of my former players owe their diplomas to this man,” Wilton said.
Harwin teamed with Uyesaka after moving to Santa Barbara in 1944, opening both a jewelry store and trophy shop. Together they formed the Gaucho Hoop Club.
Uyesaka, who had been sponsoring and coaching city baseball and basketball teams since the 1930s, also joined forces with Harwin to bring minor league baseball to town. They formed Santa Barbara Baseball Club, Inc. and coaxed the New York Mets — which Major League Baseball had just approved as an expansion franchise — to place their California League affiliate at Laguna Park in 1962 under the name of Santa Barbara Rancheros.
Santa Barbara’s affiliation was switched to the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1963. The team played at the Class A level with Uyesaka serving as club president. Harwin was an active member of its board of directors.
“I was the guy who erased the marks off all the baseballs so we could reuse them,” Harwin once said.
The Gold Dust Twins looked for new endeavors after the Dodgers, realizing that several extremely foggy summers had dampened Santa Barbara’s attendance, moved their farm club to toasty Bakersfield after the 1967 season. The two businessmen sat down at Uyesaka’s Crescent Coffee Shop with News-Press sports editor Philip Patton that autumn to, as Harwin put it, “brainstorm the concept” of the Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table.
Their mission was to provide support for the sports teams of all local schools. The organization has raised millions of dollars in that pursuit during its 57 years of existence.
“The first thing we did was to raise enough money to buy basketball foul poles — you know, the things that light up to show how many fouls a player’s got,” Harwin said.
The Athletic Round Table held its first banquet in 1968 while inducting its inaugural Hall of Fame class. The organization’s weekly press luncheons started two years later, in the fall of 1970.
Harwin, who retired from his jewelry business in 1976, resisted his doctor’s order to “take it easy” and accelerated his already decade-long effort to develop the old city dump into a recreational park. The first phase — six tennis courts, restrooms and a practice wall — had been completed in 1972. His renewed efforts allowed the park to add two soccer fields in 1985 and three softball diamonds in 1988.
The street through the new park, which now covers 230 scenic, rolling acres with picnic areas and hiking trails, was appropriately named “Jerry Harwin Parkway.”
“I can’t think of another person who’s still breathing who has had a street named after him,” former Athletic Round Table president Larry Crandell said at the time.
The name Las Positas Friendship Park, meanwhile, was changed to Elings Park in recognition of a $1.5 million endowment from Virgil Elings and another major donation from his former wife, Betty. It’s now the largest community-supported, non-profit public park in America, providing year-round outdoor recreation for more than 200,000 visitors annually.
Uyesaka, meanwhile, toiled for a different kind of park: a baseball stadium on the UCSB campus. He got the ball rolling with a $25,000 donation and used his close ties with the Dodgers to recruit baseball celebrities such as Tommy Lasorda, Maury Wills, Orlando Cepeda and Ron Perranoski for stadium fund-raisers.
Caesar Uyesaka Stadium opened in 1994. Former Gaucho baseball coach Al Ferrer said it took three attempts for him to talk the self-effacing Uyesaka into allowing the stadium to be named after him.
“Who could you find who has given more to this community and to the kids and to the athletes over the years than Caesar and his wife, Reiko?” Ferrer said. “It’d be awfully tough to top all what they’ve given.”
Uyesaka passed away one year later, at age 79, in 1995. Harwin died at age 100 in 2011. Their legacies, however, will live for as long as sports are played in this community.
