The Sheila Variations

A re-post for Cool Papa Bell’s birthday

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Baseball: A Literary Anthology

Author Donald Honig worked in many genres. He wrote mystery novels, Civil War books, books for kids, as well as baseball books. One of his mysteries was titled The Plot to Kill Jackie Robinson. So baseball was an ongoing theme.

Honig read Lawrence Ritter’s classic The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It (thoughts and excerpt here), Honig was inspired to follow suit and pick up the story. The result was his 1975 book Baseball When the Grass Was Real: Baseball from the Twenties to the Forties, Told by the Men Who Played It. It’s an unofficial sequel to Ritter’s book, picking up where Ritter left off. Ritter interviewed ballplayers whose heyday was in the late 1800s, early decades of 20th century. Honig focused on the 20 years between the two World Wars. He set out on his own lengthy journey around America, tracking down these old-timers and getting them on tape. Honig interviewed Wes Ferrell, Pete Reiser, Lefty Grove. Since it’s an oral history, you get the voices untouched, and they feel unedited, too. Memories lead to other memories, or asides, or thoughtful statements of philosophy, nostalgia, a “damn things have changed” exclamation. Baseball When the Grass Was Real came out in 1975, and brings back an earlier time, not necessarily more innocent (baseball lost its innocence in 1920, when the revelations about the 1919 Chicago White Sox broke), but simpler. Salaries were lower. Ticket prices were low. A simple and happy national pastime for all. But, as the excerpt below illuminates, the “happiness” of the pastime hid an ugly truth. African-American players were shut out of major-league baseball entirely. It’s a stain on the sport’s history, on the culture, and many ball clubs were shamefully late in integrating (hello to my team, the Red Sox). The Negro Leagues had the same set-up as the major leagues, and drew the same audiences – white and black – because who can ever get enough of baseball? – but was sidelined, culturally, financially, and all the rest. Some of those guys were among the best players to ever play, in any league.

I’ve never been, but there’s a Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in St. Louis, and it looks great, I’d love to visit. The Negro Leagues faced similar challenges to those of African-American musicians in the same era, who may have been “allowed” to sing in white night-clubs in the South, but could not drive into town without being pulled over, could not rent a room in a hotel, could not stop for gas. The situation of playing white clubs for white audiences where the performer had to enter through the kitchen door, and where African-Americans were not allowed in as audience members, ended up being part of the breaking-down of racial barriers: Performers – like Ray Charles, like Sam Cooke, like many others, as well as some white musicians, started refusing to play in such clubs. Money talks louder than principles, sad as that may be. There are some chilling stories about Sam Cooke’s early gospel tours in the South, the terror that came over his gospel group if they ran out of gas on a country road in Mississippi, or how they had to pack their own food since they weren’t allowed to eat anywhere, etc. It made the South so unwelcoming that many singers were like, “Fuck it, let’s just skip that whole fucking region in our tours.” Not that the North was integrated, but there were hotels in New York or Philadelphia or Boston where the singers could stay, there were restaurants that served them, those details that made it easier to travel to those regions. Sam Cooke grew up in Chicago, in a black part of town, in a completely segregated world, but even he was freaked out by trips to Alabama, etc. Since African-American baseball players were barred from the major leagues, they organized themselves into their own teams, and would “barnstorm” around the country, playing anyone who wanted to play, in empty fields on the outside of town, wherever.

In 1920, this world shifted when a couple of former players and managers created the Negro National League. With the Negro League came an official structure for all of the talented African-American ballplayers out there. Once the National League was formed, other Leagues formed in other regions, so now, whaddya know, you got a national pastime, albeit on a completely alternate track from the mainstream. Whites, who may have had all manner of racial prejudices politically and socially, loved to see baseball, no matter the race of the players. It was a messed-up situation, unfair, outrageous, but from the players point of view: they just wanted to play. The whites won’t let us in? Let’s do our own damn thing. Once the Negro Leagues were set up, the level of play itself improved, due to more incentive, more competition. That’s always the way it is. Baseball was good economics for African-American communities, too – similar to what happens in any town that has a ball club. Jobs are created. Entire offshoots of business enterprise based on baseball spring into being. Newspapers, journalists, radio stations devoted to the Negro Leagues blossomed everywhere. Black-owned radio stations (not white-owned with black “talent”, an important distinction: the first black-owned black-run radio station started up in Memphis, no surprise there) started to make their mark. As one African-American DJ from Memphis at the time observed: you couldn’t segregate the air waves. The decades between the two world wars also saw the explosion of radio, the technology getting better and better over the years, until WWII helped develop radio technology that could reach the entire nation, making a national conversation possible. You could be sitting in Alaska and listening to a New York Yankees game on the radio. (This was one of the many reasons that Elvis Presley became possible, whereas even 10 years before he would have been a regional star only. It was that radio could now REACH the entire country.)

Segregated baseball continued for decades until 1945 when the Brooklyn Dodgers recruited Jackie Robinson. A triumph. But Jackie Robinson, and the opportunity he represented (it was just a matter of time before other ball clubs followed) also meant the Negro Leagues went into eclipse, as African-American players started gunning for the Majors. Change was still slow, and so many Negro League ballplayers found themselves job-less, forgotten, still hustling the barnstorming circuit, but with less official focus on their efforts. The overriding structure was dissipating. It would be another 20 years before the Negro Leagues folded. A lot of players were lost in that shuffle, their names forgotten to history, until finally the Baseball Hall of Fame started to perform long overdue acts of redress, entering players from those old Negro Leagues into the pantheon where they belonged. All of those guys with famous names and stats – Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, “Pop” Lloyd (Babe Ruth said that “Pop” Lloyd was not the best black ballplayer he had ever seen, Lloyd was the best ballplayer he had ever seen PERIOD), Ray Dandridge, and “Cool Papa” Bell (whose memories make up the excerpt today) to name just a few, would have crushed in the Major Leagues. Only the color barrier kept them out.

“Cool Papa” Bell, (Hall of Famer), was born in 1903 in Mississippi and his life spanned almost the entire century. He witnessed it all. He played in the Negro Leagues from 1922 to 1950, an incredible run, and is often said to be the fastest man to ever play the game. (There’s a famous story, mentioned in every piece about him, first related by Satchel Paige: Bell was so fast that at bedtime he would flip the light-switch in his room and be in bed before the light actually went off.) In 1974, he finally made it into the Hall of Fame. (At least he was alive to experience that.) His lifetime batting average in the Negro Leagues was .377.

Perhaps the saddest part of his story is that after he retired from baseball, he tried for many years to get a coaching gig in Major League baseball but no one would hire him. Shameful. He did get work as a scout. When they were kids, his brothers played baseball, too, and Bell had no interest in anything other than getting himself in the game. He signed with one semi-pro black ball club (the pay was so dismal he kept a day job at a packing company), and then another, and then another. He started out as a pitcher before moving to the outfield. He was a switch-hitter. He was so fast that when he batted left-handed, the players in the outfield experienced the dread of anxiety because he was a step or two closer to first base. That’s how fast he was. Nobody wanted to walk him, because if he was on first, he would usually steal second. Then he would steal third. Then he would steal home. So a Cool Papa Bell base hit was as treacherous as three separate men on each base and a power-hitter up at bat. If Bell was on first base, he had “I’m headed for home plate” written all over him. He shows up in Ken Burns Baseball where the story is related that he was on first-base and he ended up making it to home plate on a sacrifice bunt, for God’s sake.

He and Satchel Paige and a couple of others played for a while in the Dominican Republic and then Mexico. (Baseball was integrated in Mexico.) This was in the late 1930s. Cool Papa Bell won the Triple Crown in the Mexican League. He was well-liked by everyone. A good man, who didn’t go for the hard-living hard-drinking hard-womanizing lifestyle of many ballplayers.

Cool Papa Bell was #66 on The Sporting News’ list of greatest ballplayers of all time.

Donald Honig tracked Cool Papa Bell down in St. Louis, where he lived. The stories he tells are great (entire games remain clear in his memory, who’s on first, etc., from some game in 1921), and also tremendously sad. But he finishes up his interview saying he does not like to hold onto anger, he does not like to dwell on the bad things: “I’m not mad at Mississippi or any place else. That’s the way it was in those days. I pray that we all can live in peace together.” Bell died in 1991 and there’s a street in St. Louis named in his honor.

The book from which this interview comes, again, is Baseball When the Grass Was Real.

Here’s an excerpt.

Excerpt from Baseball: A Literary Anthology, edited by Nicholas Davidoff. Excerpt from Baseball When the Grass Was Real, “James ‘Cool Papa’ Bell”, by Donald Honig

It was rough barnstorming. We traveled by bus, you see. You’d be surprised at the conditions we played under. We would frequently play two and three games a day. We’d play a twilight game, ride 40 miles, and play another game, under the lights. This was in the 1940’s. On Sundays you’d play three games – a doubleheader in one town and a single night game in another. Or three single games in three different towns. One game would start about one o’clock, a second about four, and a third at about eight. Three different towns, mind you. Same uniform all day, too. We’d change socks and sweat shirts, but that’s about all. When you got to the town, they’d be waiting for you, and all you’d have time to do would be to warm your pitcher up. Many a time I put on my uniform at eight o’clock in the morning and wouldn’t take it off till three or four the next morning.

Every night they’d have to find us places to stay if we weren’t in a big city up North. Some of the towns had hotels where they’d take us. Colored hotels. Never a mixed hotel. In New York we’d stay at the Theresa, in Harlem, or the Woodside. In the large cities in the South we’d stay at colored hotels. In smaller towns we’d stay at rooming houses or with private families, some of us in each house.

You could stay better in small towns in the South than you could in the North, because in a small town in the North you most of the time don’t find many colored people living there. And those that are there have no extra rooms. But in a small town in the South there are enough colored people living there so you an find room in their homes.

Once we were going from Monroe, Louisiana, to New Orleans. We had to cross the bridge over the river at Vicksburg, Mississippi. We were planning to eat lunch at a little town called Picayune. We stopped at a colored restaurant and asked if they had any food.

“Oh, not for all those men,” they said. “It’ll take us too long to fix food for all those men.” It was spring training, and we had about twenty-five men.

When the restaurant people went outside and looked at our bus standing there, they said, “Say, whose bus is this? Any white boys in it?”

“No,” we said.

“Who owns it?”

“We have an owner.”

“Is he white or colored?”

“Colored.”

“And all these boys on the bus are colored?”

“Yeah,” we said.

“Well,” they said, “you all better get out of the state of Mississippi quick as you can.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause if you don’t, they gonna take this bus and all you guys in it and put you all working on that farm out there. They need farm workers real bad. There’s a lot of people now out there on the farm they caught passing through. They jail ’em for speeding and put ’em to serving their sentence out on that farm.”

So we got back on the bus and drove straight through till we were out of the state of Mississippi.

When I was manager of the Kansas City Monarchs’ farm team, we played a lot against the House of David. That was in 1948, ’49, ’50. They had a lot of ex-minor- and -major-league players on their teams. They had to wear a beard. We barnstormed with them through California, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, North and South Dakota, and Canada.

We met a lot of good people, but also a lot that weren’t so good. Some of them wanted to be good. All the people that you see that say, “I don’t want you to do this or that” – they aren’t bad people, they’re worried people a lot of time, worried about the public. When we traveled with the House of David, they had no trouble finding accommodations, so they had all their reservations made out before the season started. But we had to go to places where we never did know whether we could sleep. Most of the time we’d stay in these cabins on the edge of town. They call them motels today, but in those days they called them cabins.

We went into a lot of small towns where they’d never seen a colored person. In some of those places we couldn’t find anyplace to sleep, so we slept on the bus. If we had to, we could convert the seats into beds. We’d just pull over to the side of the road, in a cornfield or someplace, and sleep until the break of day, and then we’d go on into the next town, hoping we’d find a restaurant that would be willing to serve colored people.

All those things we experienced, today people wouldn’t believe it. The conditions and the salaries, and what we had to go through. Lots of time for months and months I played on percentage – all of us did – and we’d be lucky to make $5 a game.

But I had a lot of fun in baseball. Saw a lot of great ballplayers. Guys you probably never heard of. Pitcher named Theodore Trent. He’d beat Paige an awful lot of the time. And he never lost a game to a big-league team barnstorming. When we played Max Carey’s all-stars, Trent struck those guys out again and again, with that great curveball he had. One game he struck Bill Terry out four times.

Trent was a great pitcher, but he got TB and died young.

Satchel was the fastest, though. I never saw a pitcher throw harder; you could hardly time him. I’ve seen Walter Johnson, I’ve seen Dizzy Dean, Bob Feller, Lefty Grove, all of them. Also Dick Redding and Smokey Joe Williams among our boys. None of them threw as hard as Paige at the time I saw them. All he threw for years was that fastball; it’d be by you so fast you could hardly turn. And he had control. He could throw that ball right by your knees all day.