Curveball (10 page)

The next order of business was finding a place to stay. Tomboy knew that she would have trouble finding a room as a single woman. “A single girl? People don’t want you in their house,” she said. Some landlords might think she was a sporting girl or a hustler. As she usually did when she was in a pinch, Tomboy sought help from the church. She went over to St. Benedict’s in nearby Oakland and asked the priest for assistance. The priest initially thought she was a runaway. Tomboy sensed his unease, and before he could jump to more conclusions, she produced some papers. She had a letter from her father addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” asking Catholics, Masons, and other organizations to which he belonged to assist his daughter. The priest softened—“the redness went out of his face,” Toni said—and he called women in the parish’s Altar Society for suggestions. With the women’s help, Tomboy located a room in a Polish woman’s home; Mrs. Kardeski’s two sons were off to war and her house felt vacant.
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The job at Foster’s did not provide Tomboy with as much work as she wanted, and soon she was looking for a way to earn more money. She secured a job as a welder in the South San Francisco docks, working alongside longshoremen for the Matson shipping lines. She failed, however, to pass along one piece of information to her boss: she didn’t know anything about welding. “I was burning up that steel,” she said. When her boss realized she had no experience, he had already been won over by Tomboy’s eagerness and sincerity. He offered her another chance and teasingly asked, “What the hell can you do?” At that moment, Tomboy looked around the docks and saw an army truck pulling up. “I can drive that,” she said. Toni hopped into the driver’s seat. When she heard the gears start to grind, she knew she could do the job. “I’m home!” she said to herself.
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The physical work at the docks suited her, and, dressed as she usually was in men’s work shirts and pants, she fit right in with the Rosie-the-Riveter coverall set on the dock.

Tomboy was one of nearly twelve million women across the country who worked alongside men in the defense industries, from shipyards to steel mills to foundries. As higher paying local shipyard jobs opened up, many black women found recently vacated positions in canneries, railroads, or military supply facilities. Women were able to forge a path out of traditional domestic work. Drivers pulling up for gas at the Richfield station on the corner of Lombard and Broderick in San Francisco temporarily gasped when female service station attendants asked, “Check your oil, sir? National emergency shortage on men, y’know.” In the Bay Area, women took over as streetcar conductors, street sweepers, hospital orderlies, and playground directors. Up in Santa Rosa, the DeTurk Winery started employing women to harvest grapes and drive delivery trucks. Also invaded was “man’s last sacred domain,” what one soldier called his barbershop. At Camp Roberts in San Miguel, women were allowed to apply for jobs cutting men’s hair. “Hitler was the one that got us out of the kitchen,” one woman said.
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Not everyone was happy with the invasion of what had been exclusively white men’s territory. “It’s too bad every skirt in Moore Dry Dock can’t be given her quit slip right now,” one angry foreman stated. When women in the shipyards, like Toni, began to be hired as shipwrights, painters, and welders—jobs that usually were off-limits to them—some men protested or looked for faults in the women’s work. “You ask any man, and he’ll tell you that a woman in the shipyards is in the way. They don’t none of them belong here.” Some women would not back down and fought for their right to jobs. They organized, met with local priests and ministers, and secured the support of male allies. While the close quarters of the shipyards and the inevitable daily interactions between men and women moved the workforce toward more equality, proximity only brought the transition part way, an observer said.
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Women’s inclusion continued to be “conditional,” and their status never became equal to men’s. Many men believed women took away work that was rightly theirs and scrambled to keep the shipyards white and male. Some critics said men who complained were really afraid of competition. They said aggrieved men revealed an “obvious, persistent and perhaps more basic fear” than many males were willing to admit.
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Concern about blacks “invading” San Francisco reflected the same fear, many believed. When Mayor Roger Lapham addressed a 1944 press conference, for example, his question betrayed his anxiety. “How long do you think these colored people are going to be here?” he asked the only black reporter in the group, Thomas Fleming. “Mr. Mayor, do you know the Golden Gate?” Fleming responded. “It’s permanent. They are here to stay and the city better find jobs and housing for them, because they are not going back down South.” Fleming might have thought the mayor’s comment only slightly less disquieting than the note he had found a decade earlier pasted to the typewriter in his newspaper office: “You niggers go back to Africa,” it read.
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Vandals had stolen into the offices of the
San Francisco Spokesman
and smashed plate glass windows and the Linotype after Fleming wrote an editorial saying blacks deserved to be hired for waterfront jobs.
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In Saint Paul, Tomboy had used her baseball skills to break down prejudice she faced as a girl on the local diamonds. In San Francisco, Tomboy used the same technique in confronting discrimination—joining pickup games on Sundays after mass with black boys and even some whites. But not all blacks arriving in San Francisco were welcomed by white residents as Tomboy was on the Post Street playground; Jim Crow attitudes were alive in the city, though communicated less directly than in the South. One area where blacks were warmly accepted was the Fillmore in the city’s integrated Western Addition—the area to which the black man in the bus station had directed Tomboy. She loved the diversity of the area and found it “filled with world-wide views.”
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As early as the 1890s, Japanese immigrants joined Jewish residents in the Fillmore and built a thriving community. After Pearl Harbor and the sudden removal of Japanese and Japanese Americans to relocation camps, the area became a center for the burgeoning black population. Willie Brown, a young Bay Area immigrant from Texas, said the Fillmore “had to be the closest thing to Harlem outside of New York.”
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He loved the Victorian gingerbread houses, the black barbershops, barbecue joints, pool halls, restaurants, and vibrant shopping district. Brown found work at Kaufman’s Shoe Store on Fillmore Avenue, and the neighborhood became his playground.
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Like everyone else, though, Willie Brown came to the Fillmore mainly for the music. Marguerite Johnson, who moved there from rural Arkansas, worked at the busy Melrose Record Shop in the heart of the district. She said that “[b]lasts from [the store’s] loudspeakers poured out into the street with all the insistence of a false mourner at a graveside.”
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Jazz, the blues, bebop—the Fillmore was hot.

Nightclubs stretched for twenty blocks. There was the Club Alabam on Post, Town Club on Sutter, the Long Bar and Minne’s Can Do on Fillmore, Jimbo’s Bop City, the New Orleans Swing Club, Elsie’s Breakfast Nook, the Texas Playhouse, Leola King’s Blue Mirror. The most well known was Jack’s Tavern, which opened in 1933 and was the first club to be managed by black people. Alroyd Love and Lena Murrell
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ran the “hottest colored nite spot in town,” which exploded in popularity during the war years when immigrants like Brown, Johnson, and Tomboy came looking for work and a good time.
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Among the Fillmore nightclub set, Jack’s was considered an elite establishment. Men wore satin ties with diamond stickpins; women wore fur coats, fancy hats, and lots of jewelry. “You saw great peacocks,” Brown said. “People would get dressed to kill…. Stacy Adams shoes with the white [stitches on the soles] showing they had been cleaned up with Clorox.”
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In the evenings, patrons formed lines outside Jack’s door, eager to hear the music, dance, and taste the dinner specials the tavern’s famous cook dished up. Dinner began at seven and was served until two in the morning. The dining room in the back had a small dance floor and a bandstand where Saunders King’s rhythm and blues alternated weeks with Johnny Ingram’s five-piece band. King said a person went into Jack’s “at one o’clock [in the morning] and the music was just beginning to feel good.”
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Bandleader Frank Jackson observed that although the dance floor was small, it enticed a few dancers eager to show their moves. Jack’s was a feast for the eyes, the ears, and the stomach.

Jazz musicians like Frank Jackson knew that other clubs often were rough—places where women were apt to be harassed, where drugs could be found, and where gangsters hung out. Jack’s Tavern was nothing like that, Jackson said. If a woman came to the club alone and a man tried to make a move on her, a gentleman would “take that up right away. ‘Are you being bothered?’” someone would ask and the offender would apologize and walk away.
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Men would sometimes buy a woman drinks, but they would rarely give her a problem. Some said the first place a black person would go in San Francisco was Jack’s Tavern. Tomboy was no exception.

The music drew her in, but the people inside kept her returning. Conversation at Jack’s Tavern was urbane and sophisticated, and Tomboy felt pleasantly “taken in,” as she put it.
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She had found in San Francisco a place to transform herself. As one migrant to the city put it, “there was a reshuffling of everybody … a whole new set of criteria set down for who was insiders and who was outsiders.”
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You could make a fresh start, reinvent yourself, even change your name. Marguerite Johnson, a record clerk, became a singer and a dancer and changed her name to Maya Angelou. Tomboy Stone decided her name no longer fit. It sounded too much like the special child from Saint Paul. “Tomboy” became “Toni”—a sassy, confident metamorphosis more in line with the kind of people she met at Jack’s, people like Aurelious Pescia Alberga—a man whose dress and demeanor matched the lyricism of his name. Toni loved listening to the trim, dapper gentleman everyone seemed to know. The son of a Jamaican seafarer, Alberga was active in political circles, ran a bootblack stand at the Ferry Building, operated a bail bond business, and assisted a blind millionaire in managing real estate throughout the city. As Toni got to know him better, she realized Alberga’s current entrepreneurial occupations were sedate compared to the high adventures of his youth. In his sixty years, he had worked aboard a ship in the Arctic, survived the 1906 earthquake, won prominence as a boxer, and served as one of the first black army officers in World War I.
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Alberga could talk for hours, and he loved the limelight. Like Toni, he enjoyed celebrity and took pride in knowing local politicians, business owners, musicians, and sportsmen. And, like Toni, he was good at telling stories. One of his favorites was about skullduggery at the Need More, a saloon his uncle owned on the Barbary Coast, just below Montgomery Street in San Francisco. The Need More sat on pilings right on the estuary and was a favorite of weary crews just back from long voyages to China. Sea captains often found they needed two or three more men to make up a crew for the return trip to the Far East. So the captain hired hoodlums or “footpads” at the saloon. Sailors would get drunk, Alberga said, and footpads would drop them out the back door into a waiting boat where they’d be transported back to the ship bound for China.
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Alberga liked stories of people who broke rules, were unconventional, and charted their own course.

Once Tomboy told her stories about barnstorming through Canada with the Twin City Colored Giants, Alberga was hooked. He and Jack’s owner, Al Love, began thinking about how they could help Toni become part of a local team.
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Love was known for his generosity. When Saunders King’s electric guitar did not have adequate amplification, Love “saw what I was drivin’ at,” King said, and bought the musician a better instrument.
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He also was not the type of man to let barriers stop him. During the war, Jack’s Tavern was famous for keeping the music playing even during blackouts. Heavy drapes bordered the front door, and when the air raid sirens went off, the curtains were closed. “No one could see the lights,” musicians said, and the partying continued.
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Love and Alberga called upon their connections with the local American Legion to ask if Toni could join one of their sponsored teams. Toni had played a little American Legion ball back in Saint Paul, but team officials had denied her a uniform and she, naturally, felt left out in her own shirt and dungarees.
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But she was open to trying a new Legion team in order to get the chance to play ball. The A. H. Wall Post 435 met at the War Memorial Building on Van Ness, just around the corner from Jack’s. The post included many in the Fillmore music world and in fact was named in honor of Archie H. Wall, principal musician for the 24th Infantry in the Spanish-American War. Alberga knew the black veterans of Post 435 well. During World War I, he’d served as a first lieutenant and acting captain in Company A of the 365th Infantry. Some people around Jack’s Tavern still called him “Captain.” In the army, Alberga was responsible for recreation—organizing his regiment’s boxing matches, cross country runs, and baseball games. His commander praised his skill, observing that Alberga demonstrated “exceptional aptness for this line of work.”
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Apparently the Captain’s talent for sports promotion paid off. Toni became a member of the American Legion A. H. Wall Post 435 baseball team.
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“I was the only woman,” she said. “We played twilight games and I met many, many friends.”
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Like other Junior Legion teams, players were required to be seventeen years old or under.
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As long as Toni was in the act of reinvention, the time seemed right for another modification. “I put my age back,” Toni said, lopping off a decade.
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