Curveball (12 page)
Authors: Martha Ackmann
As a woman player in a man’s game, Toni had experienced some of the prejudice Paige and Robinson described. She heard classmates call her “crazy” for playing baseball; she heard the jokes about her being far from ladylike. She even received occasional rebuffs from teammates when her play outmatched theirs. Like Robinson, she felt what it was like to be the odd one out: to sit alone in the dugout, to be excluded from the game’s camaraderie, to be regarded as a barely tolerable experiment.
52
When Brooklyn Dodger general manager Branch Rickey told Robinson that he wanted “a ball player with guts enough not to fight back,” Toni knew what he meant.
53
Jackie took the taunts and the strained hostility from some of his teammates, because he believed fans and other players would have “a change of mind when they realized I was a good ball player who could be helpful in their earning a few thousand more dollars.”
54
Toni took the jeers because she wanted to play.
Maybe it was the rhyme going around at the time about Jackie’s drawing power that convinced Yellowhorse to hire Toni. “Jackie’s nimble / Jackie’s quick / Jackie’s making / The turnstile click.”
55
Just as she had done with the St. Peter Claver team, the Twin City Colored Giants, Wall Post 435, and the Peninsula Baseball League, Toni became the first woman on a men’s team. She started earning a couple hundred dollars every month and was able to send a little money home to her mother in Saint Paul. “Things turned out for me at the Lions,” she said.
56
By the spring of 1949, Toni was headed to Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas as the female second baseman for the San Francisco Sea Lions. Life again had the improvisational rhythms she enjoyed—traveling around on a bus, seeing different towns every day, grabbing meals on the fly. She batted lead off and took advantage of any chance to get on base, including getting hit by a pitch. “Pitches come in now at ninety miles an hour,” she later said. “It’ll tear your brains out. You’ve got to know what you want and you’ve got to know where you’re going.”
57
One reporter covering a game in Maryville, Missouri, was so impressed with Stone’s tenacity that he remembered her for years. “Let me tell you,” he wrote, “she’ll make your eyes pop out with the way she handles herself.”
58
Gentry Jackson, the Sea Lions shortstop, argued that Toni was more than a curiosity. “A lot of people were looking at her as a woman ball player, but when she was on the field, the ball was hit to her as sharp as it was hit to me and she would pick it up and throw it. She wasn’t just a lady in uniform.”
59
The Sea Lions shortstop was also impressed by the way she could take rough dugout language. “There were occasions,” Jackson said, “where someone would say things a lady wouldn’t want to hear. But she was able in most cases to join in the dialogue without getting embarrassed.”
60
Like all barnstorming teams, the Sea Lions expected players to pull their weight in every aspect of the game, from pushing meandering cows off a field to serving as groundskeepers. On the swing through Texas, days of rain made the local field too wet for play. The Sea Lions poured kerosene over wet grass and set fire to it, in hopes the blaze would burn the diamond dry. It worked well enough to get the game started, but Toni slid on a wet patch during the game and injured her ankle. She was out of commission for weeks, but returned to the lineup when the team rolled toward the Deep South.
Back in California, Yellowhorse’s old friend from the short-lived West Coast Negro Baseball Association was feeling hopeful. As impossible as it seemed just three years earlier, Eddie Harris, the former business manager of the association, was now working for the formerly all-white Pacific Coast League, scouting black talent for teams like the newly integrated Seals and the San Diego Padres. “I believe this is the greatest chance for Negro talent here on the Coast,” he wrote. “If they make good here there is a great chance of making the big League.” Harris asked his friends to let him know of “any good players that you think could make the grade.” All their expenses would be paid in California. “They’ll get the best of everything while in spring training … act quickly,” he said.
61
The letter’s eager tone was like the post office flyers that lured defense workers to Oakland with the promise of good jobs, beautiful weather, and palm trees. Toni also thought the future looked encouraging. Her play with the barnstorming Sea Lions was making her into something of a Bay Area celebrity. One local reporter hunted her down to ask if she thought a woman would ever play professional baseball on the West Coast. Toni let her optimism spill over. Everything was changing, she said, and predicted a woman would sign with the Pacific Coast League by the 1950s.
62
As the Sea Lions bus rumbled toward New Orleans, Toni, Little Sammy Workman, and the rest of the team tried to catch some sleep before another round of back-to-back games. The sun felt good and Yellowhorse’s steel money box glinted in the light. It was bright as a penny.
*
While African Americans were hired for many jobs in the World War II shipyards, some unions created separate “auxiliary units” for blacks. Auxiliary units had no union votes or representation. The Boilermakers Union and Teamsters Steamfitters’ Union were completely off-limits to blacks (Katherine Archibald,
Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity
, with a new introduction by Eric Arnesen and Alex Lichtenstein, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006, 81).
*
Foster’s Cafeteria had several locations in San Francisco. The Montgomery Street cafeteria later became famous as the site where many Beat poets, including Allen Ginsberg, gathered to talk and write.
*
Beginning in 1942, a graduate student at the University of California—Berkeley, Katherine Archibald, spent two years working at Moore Dry Dock. Her examination of the integration of women and minorities in the workplace formed the basis of her remarkable 1947 study,
Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity.
Many of Archibald’s conclusions about the difficulties women and minorities faced in the shipyard workplace mirrored Toni Stone’s experience as the lone woman on men’s baseball teams.
†
Fleming had witnessed California’s racism as a young man growing up in Chico around 1926. The Ku Klux Klan gathered near his home where Fleming and his grandfather, Moses Moseley, sat on the front steps. Moseley “was so mad that he sat out on the porch with a loaded .30-caliber rifle and I sat beside him with a loaded .25-.20, plus we had loaded shotguns,” Fleming said. “I don’t know until today whether either of us would have fired if the Klansmen had decided to march on the street where our house was located” (Thomas Fleming, “Reflections on Black History: The Klan Marches in California,”
Sun-Reporter,
December 31, 1997).
*
Willie Brown served as mayor of San Francisco from 1996 to 2003.
*
Lena Murrell’s last name has been variously spelled as Murell and Morrell. I have taken the spelling of her last name from a business card for Jack’s Tavern circa the 1940s.
*
A. H. Wall Post No. 435 was chartered in 1933 and deactivated in 1955 (Bill Silar interview with the author, December 8, 2008).
The Oakland Tribune
of August 12, 1934, described the post as “San Francisco’s colored veterans’ unit.”
*
American Legion records indicate that a San Francisco team won the 1943 and 1947 California state championships. At that time, there were fifty-five American Legion posts in the Bay Area. While some accounts of Stone’s activity indicate her American Legion team was a “championship” one, newspaper records confirm that the Rincon Hill team was the Northern California representative to the state championships.
The Peninsula Baseball League operated from the World War II years until 1975. High school, college, and semi-pro players participated. Several players moved from the PBL to the majors including Dick Stuart (Pirates), Don Giles (Red Sox), and Charlie Silvera (Yankees). (
www.smdailyjournal.com/article_preview.php?id=57282
)
*
Wilson became the first African American mayor of Oakland in 1977. He served three terms during a particularly turbulent time in Oakland’s history.
*
Herald Gordon pitched for the Sea Lions in 1949. He also played for the Detroit Stars and Chicago American Giants from 1950 to 1954. Gordon earned his nickname, “BeeBop,” for the large round glasses he wore that resembled those of Dizzy Gillespie. Gordon didn’t need the glasses; he “just liked the style” (Gordon interview with the author, July 18, 2008).
*
The
Denver Post
tournament was introduced in the 1920s and proved to be a highly successful semi-pro invitational. The integrated tournament ran for ten days in the summer with ten teams selected by the
Post
’s sports department (Harold Seymour, Dorothy Z. Seymour, and Jane Mills,
Baseball: The People’s Game
, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, 271).
Finding the Heart
of the GameWe all do “do, re mi,” but you have to find
the other notes yourself.—L
OUIS
A
RMSTRONG
1
W
hen Toni stepped off the Sea Lions bus in New Orleans, she was grateful for the breeze. Summer was still a few weeks away from wrapping the Mississippi River delta in heat and humidity, but the gusty wind made the warm air a degree or two cooler.
2
The Sea Lions were scheduled to play a tripleheader with the local New Orleans Creoles and the visiting Fort Worth Tigers. Like nearly everyone else in New Orleans on a hot May day, Toni would have enjoyed a shady walk or maybe a swim. But here, deep in the Jim Crow South, walking and swimming were restricted for blacks—whether by law or by custom. Toni would have been either brave or foolish to walk through New Orleans’ beautiful Audubon Park, where she was not welcome. There was no specific ordinance that banned her, but, as the city park superintendent explained in bureaucratic contortions, “There is the possibility of racial conflict where the two races gather together in large numbers on public property wherein it has not been the practice before.”
3
The only public pool for New Orleans’ two hundred thousand black residents was so small and crowded a swimmer could barely get wet. Even the five-mile shoreline of Lake Pontchartrain was off-limits to her. Years before, when the lakefront was still undeveloped, a small stretch of shoreline called Seabrook became an unofficial black beach. However, when whites began building suburban homes along the shore and complained about black people using one-sixtieth of the beach, the Parish Levee Board banned blacks from Seabrook and redirected them to an alternative spot. Lincoln Beach was a miserable spit of land. Fifteen miles out of town, inaccessible by public bus or streetcar, Lincoln had facilities controlled by a white racketeer and was polluted with raw sewage.
4
Everybody in New Orleans knew where blacks were welcome and where they were not. Toni was quick to note the boundaries, even if others did not explicitly warn her about where she could walk without harassment. To many in New Orleans, Jim Crow was so unexamined and buried so deeply that racial separations seemed natural, or at least unremarkable. Accommodating whites was not only customary, it was also an act of survival for many Crescent City blacks. As one man put it, “As long as blacks accepted their place in the racial order, whites could be remarkably friendly.”
5
Toni remembered what her Saint Paul friend Evelyn Edwards had told her about “conditions” below the Mason-Dixon line. She also knew how segregation had become a way of life in New Orleans. Thanks to her parents, Toni learned of Homer Plessy’s long-ago defiance of New Orleans’s streetcar laws. In 1892, Plessy challenged a law that separated black passengers from whites traveling on streetcars and trains in Louisiana. His action led to the landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision of
Plessy v. Ferguson
, which upheld the “separate but equal” statute. The federal decision was used to legalize segregation in education, public accommodations, and transportation. Toni saw the legacy of
Plessy v. Ferguson
everywhere in Louisiana: buses, taxicabs, hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, museums, even religious institutions.