Southport's Bob Rosebrock Fights UCLA Baseball: "A Soldier’s Duty is Never Done."

This story is happening in Los Angeles because of an 82-year-old veteran from the southside of Indianapolis, and because of Sept. 11, 2001.

The Indiana baseball team is part of the story, but indirectly. Understand that. Before all is said and done, you’ll be mad at some folks. Don’t let the IU baseball team be one of your targets. This isn’t the Hoosiers’ fault. They’re playing where the Big Ten has scheduled them to play, this three-game weekend series at UCLA’s Jackie Robinson Stadium.

The stadium is the problem – well, the location of the stadium. It was built on land owned by the federal government, property earmarked specifically for U.S. veterans. But the U.S. Veterans Administration leased the land to UCLA, which built Jackie Robinson Stadium in 1981.

A California judge threatened in September to put a padlock on the property, the first step – perhaps – toward shutting down the stadium and giving the land to the people it was meant to house. A month later U.S. District Judge

David O. Carter reversed course slightly and decided to give UCLA the 2025 baseball season to figure out a solution.

What, exactly, is the problem? According to the ACLU, there are 8,000 U.S. veterans experiencing homelessness in greater Los Angeles. They need a place to live. In 1888, the U.S. government was given land to address the issue.

UCLA is playing baseball on that land.

The Hoosiers play there Friday night, and again Saturday and Sunday.

It’s a convoluted story, baffling really, and it started – the controversy, the lawsuits, the arrests – with a former basketball star from the southside of Indianapolis.

In 1960, Manual beat host Southport for the sectional title. Check the archives of the IndyStar, and you’ll see the Southport All-Sectional team featured the junior Van Arsdale twins of Manual, and a high-scoring senior guard from Southport named Bob Rosebrock. Tom and Dick Van Arsdale went onto share the 1961 Mr. Basketball award, become All-Americans at IU and play in the NBA.

Bob Rosebrock went to Murray State before being drafted into the U.S. Army. He was in Hawaii during the Vietnam War, stationed at Schofield Barracks, serving under Lt. Col. Edward N. Wellems. Rosebrock can quote Wellems to this day, and this is among his favorite Wellems quotes:

A soldier’s duty is never done.Rosebrock moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s and opened a business. He was still living there in 2001 when 9/11 happened. Like so many Americans, he recoiled at the attack on our own soil. He reported to the local Veterans Administration. He was volunteering there, doing what he could, and saw what everyone who came to the VA saw: all those people living nearby, without homes. So many of them, veterans.

Bob Rosebrock got angry. He got arrested. And since then he has made it his mission to shut down UCLA’s baseball stadium, the one where IU will play this weekend.

Veteran asks IU, Purdue not to play at UCLA baseball stadium

This is all documented in letters Bob Rosebrock has written to IU, and as recently as last week to Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita and Sen. Todd Young, asking that IU (and Purdue) refuse to play at Jackie Robinson Stadium.

It’s also documented in a scathing, 125-page report issued by Judge Carter, a former UCLA track athlete and Vietnam veteran who was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart – and whose disgust for the treatment of such hallowed ground is palpable.

“Federal Defendants’ discrimination has irreparably harmed Plaintiffs and will continue to harm them irreparably,” Judge Carter wrote in September 2024, adding:

“Federal Defendants’ agreement with the University of California Los Angeles constitutes a breach of their fiduciary duty as the provision of services to veterans is not the predominant focus of the activities of (that land) while only providing 233 units of housing to veterans.”

The land in question, 300 acres located Santa Monica and Los Angeles, was deeded in 1888 by U.S. Sen. John P. Jones and his business partner, Arcadia B. de Baker, “to the federal government specifically to house and care for disabled veterans in perpetuity.” That’s from the lawsuit filed in 2011 by the ACLU, alleging that “the federal Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has unlawfully misused large portions of its 387-acre West Los Angeles campus and failed to provide adequate housing and treatment for the people it was intended to serve.”

Rosebrock learned of that century-old deed while volunteering at the VA.

“I didn’t know this was deeded in 1888 as a home for disabled soldiers,” he says. “No wonder we had so many homeless veterans.”

He remembered what Lt. Col. Wellems had told him during the Vietnam War.

“A soldier’s duty is never done,” Rosebrock says. “How can I get involved?”

In 2009 Rosebrock founded what he called the Old Veterans Guard – including World War II, Korea and Vietnam veterans – and organized protests outside the stadium.

“Our mission was twofold,” Rosebrock says. “Save our veterans’ land, and bring our homeless veterans home.”

'Get out of there, UCLA'

Every Sunday for more than a year, Rosebrock and his group hung a U.S. flag on the VA property. Over time, deciding the homelessness problem of U.S. veterans qualified as an emergency, Rosebrock began hanging the flag upside down – a historically recognized symbol of distress.

“That’s when I got arrested,” Rosebrock says. “I was arrested for putting up an American flag on the outside, when all the crime’s going on inside! The ACLU defended me and we got it dismissed, and then I said: ‘Thanks for defending how we hung it. How about defending why?”

In 2011 the ACLU filed suit, with little relief until 2024 when Judge Carter threatened to close down the stadium before giving UCLA a July 4 deadline to make a deal with veterans on housing for the homeless.

The games continue this weekend, as does the problem of homelessness. IU officials say they are aware of the dispute over the land – they were made aware when UCLA joined the Big Ten in 2022 – but the games must go on.

Rosebrock, who moved back to the Southside last year – “I escaped,” he says of Los Angeles – isn’t encouraged that July 4 will bring relief.

“UCLA has demonstrated they’re not looking out for the best interest of our troops or veterans,” he says. “The land is the most valuable land you can imagine. It’s a $1 billion property. They have no respect for our veterans. Nothing will be done.

“Let’s just cut to the chase. Get off the VA property and go elsewhere. Get out of there, UCLA.”

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