Curveball (7 page)

“It was just like a miracle,” Tomboy said.
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By July of the following year, Gabby Street was gone. He resigned his position with the Saints and joined the hapless St. Louis Browns in the major leagues, first as a coach and later as manager. But after a year and a half with the Browns, Street retired from baseball entirely. Reporters caught up with him at his home in Joplin, Missouri, where Gabby tried to convince them that his life in baseball was happily finished. “Ah,” he said, as he lit his pipe and patted his dog. “This, ladies and gentlemen, is the life. No ball club to worry about and no bad front office to be [scared] of. This, I repeat, is the well-known life.”
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When the summer of 1936 came to a close for Tomboy, she had behind her four years of Catholic boys’ league play, over a year of HighLex girls’ softball, a couple of years hanging around the Saint Paul Men’s Meat Packing League, and a hard-earned stint at baseball school with a former World Series manager. The cleats Gabby Street gave her were more than equipment. They were a gift of validation to her—a stranger’s belief that someday she might be able to go forward in baseball. With the shoes neatly placed in their original box and ready to be laced up, Tomboy Stone felt her life in professional baseball was just beginning.

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abby Street’s baseball camp ended with the close of summer, and fifteen-year-old Tomboy reluctantly returned to classes. “I wasn’t happy going to school,” she said. “I don’t know if I was slow to start or what, but it was rough.” Tomboy entered the Saint Paul public schools when she was ten, after her family moved from West Virginia. When she turned twelve and was ready for junior high, local teachers recommended Hammond, the district’s school for special education students. Teachers realized that Tomboy had difficulty keeping up with the other youngsters in class, did not appear interested in academic work, and often grew frustrated. She may have had an undetected learning disability, but schools during the Depression rarely had resources for evaluating students’ specific learning problems. Without knowing exactly what her learning difficulty was, Tomboy entered Hammond—a school that emphasized vocational subjects to prepare pupils for work in the trades. Members of the Stone family and others who knew her said Tomboy did have trouble discerning subtleties—academically and socially. As one relative later put it, Tomboy “couldn’t read between the lines.” Her literal mind often caused her to miss nuances. She saw simple explanations where others found complexity. A short attention span and an inability to keep still also contributed to her problems in the classroom. Being labeled a “special child” by educators and her family because she went to Hammond Junior High humiliated Tomboy. She realized the word “special” was a euphemism for intellectually slow, and the label felt patronizing and demeaning to her. “I was in a category of my own,” she said sarcastically. She often would dredge up the phrase “special child” when describing how others viewed her. Tomboy Stone, she said, was the “special child,” an odd, even aberrant girl. That perception eroded her confidence and stole her self-respect at times. Years later, describing herself as a teenager, Tomboy said that “a ‘special child’ [was the] kind of youngster who didn’t have too much love for themselves.”
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As much as Tomboy felt stigmatized for attending Hammond Junior High, the school did have teachers who found a way to build on the talents they saw in her. “A teacher told me I could use my hands,” Tomboy said, and “Mrs. Covern, Mrs. Van Heusen, Mrs. Egan knew that I loved sports.” Teachers realized, as Father Keefe initially suspected, that if Tomboy could excel in one area, her self-esteem might rise. Florence Egan, Hammond’s physical education teacher, invited her along to watch competitive skaters at the city’s Hippodrome rink. Another teacher spoke to Boykin and Willa Stone about their daughter’s extraordinary reflexes and hand-eye coordination and encouraged them to allow her to join the school’s girls’ sports teams. By Tomboy’s final year at Hammond, in the spring of 1937, she had so distinguished herself as the school’s top athlete that she was the honoredguest at Saint Paul’s Emblem Dinner for junior high school athletes. The
Minneapolis Spokesman
noted that Miss Stone “is always taking away honors.” Tomboy became the first girl in eighteen years to letter in three sports in a single year: track, high jump, and diamond ball (a Minnesota version of softball). When Tomboy accepted her award at the evening banquet, she acknowledged that Hammond had made a difference in her life, and she thanked Mrs. Egan as well as her principal and her music and social studies teachers for encouraging her athletic abilities.
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Tomboy’s parents were pleased with her Emblem Dinner recognition since they had long preached the importance of personal accomplishment. “I just want you to be somebody,” Tomboy’s mother told her.
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Willa and Boykin believed there were two ways to get ahead: know the right people and get an education. By the “right people” they meant doctors or lawyers, people who had money or notable achievements. Willa took pride in frequently entertaining the “right people” from Saint Paul’s black community. She would call the local bakery and order special bread for luncheon sandwiches. Tomboy would be put on cleaning detail in order to make the family’s large Victorian home proper and inviting. “Mrs. Boykin Stone,” the newspaper reported, “entertained her mother, Mrs. J. B. Smith of Bluefield, W. Va., with a birthday party … at her home. Several classical selections were given by Miss Johnnie Mae Smith, sister of Mrs. Stone.”
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Tomboy knew her mother could be demanding and called her “the sergeant” when she couldn’t hear. Willa was just as firm as her husband about the importance of personal distinction and independence, and she socialized as a way of “getting ahead” in business. She even went so far as to join different churches from time to time in order to participate in a variety of social activities. At one point, Willa attended the Methodist church, her daughters went to the Catholic church, and her sister Johnnie sang in the Lutheran church choir. Unlike Tomboy, who looked to the Catholic church for moral guidance, Willa viewed her religious involvement as a way of establishing herself in the community. But as much as Willa was concerned about propriety and what the “right people” thought, she eventually did give her daughter permission, of sorts, to follow her heart. She knew Marcenia would never feel at home in a world of ladies’ luncheons and music recitals. As unconventional as playing baseball was for a girl, Willa Stone knew the sport gave her daughter confidence. “If people are going to talk,” she told Tomboy, “then give them something to talk about.”
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When Tomboy approached her mother with an idea about an even more serious baseball possibility than Catholic league baseball and junior high sports, Willa Stone may have regretted her earlier words. After the interest Gabby Street had shown in her, Tomboy felt emboldened and her baseball aspirations grew. She asked her mother if she could start traveling on weekends with a barnstorming baseball team of black men. The idea developed after one of the teenager’s routine circles around Saint Paul playgrounds looking for pickup baseball games. Tomboy had noticed a group of men taking batting practice at a local park. She may have been hesitant in the classroom, but she rarely was shy on the baseball diamond. She asked the man who seemed to be in charge if she could shag balls for them, and George White said yes. White had once played center field for a semi-pro team and now spent his free time organizing games for area youngsters and managing the local Twin City Colored Giants. “I stayed around them,” Tomboy said, and earned a few bucks for shagging balls. White always had his eye on the lookout for talented young people who could add youth to the traveling Giants team. Most of the players White managed were former semi-pro athletes who had baseball smarts but who were not as fast on the base paths as they once had been. George White had found thirteen-year-old John Cotton playing against a local fast-pitch softball team at Rondo’s Welcome Hall fields. The young second baseman was surprised when Mr. White asked if he would be interested in a Colored Giants tryout over at Como Park. Cotton showed up, did well, and White opened a spot for him on the team. “My mother and uncle knew everyone” on the Giants, Cotton said, and they did not worry about him spending weekends playing in nearby towns. Mrs. Cotton may have thought twice, however, when the team started one-month summer road trips to Canada. John was too young to have any official identification and once was detained at the border when the squad tried to re-enter the United States. Only when the team scrambled to the back of the bus and found a game handbill featuring the young boy’s photograph were border guards convinced that the boy was a ballplayer barnstorming through Ontario and Manitoba.

When George White discovered that Tomboy could do more on the baseball field than shag balls, he asked if she’d like to join John Cotton and the other Colored Giants and barnstorm on the weekends. “Mother wanted me [close] to her,” Tomboy said, “but I told her it was a way to make a little extra money.” Mrs. Stone gave her daughter permission, and George White gave Tomboy her first professional uniform—a ragtag, used one but a uniform nonetheless. No one on the team made much money, Tomboy admitted. The team would “travel back and forth to Wisconsin,” she said, and “go out of town on the weekend, because [older players] had to hold jobs during the week.” On a typical Sunday, Tomboy would attend St. Peter Claver mass, then get in old cars with the team and drive someplace such as Kenosha, Wisconsin, for a game. She was sixteen and the only girl on the team. “She was a ballplayer,” John Cotton said, plain and simple, and “could throw just like a man.” Tomboy made two or three dollars a game: the team played percentage or “PC” ball, with the winners earning 60 percent of the gate and the losers 40 percent. Tomboy enjoyed playing with the men, even though some were former semi-pro baseball players and far more experienced athletes than she. Tomboy did not mind being occasionally overmatched on the diamond; it helped improve her game, she thought. Playing for the Colored Giants also gave her a taste for traveling, getting out of her Rondo neighborhood, and meeting new people. “That was good,” she said. “Traveling was the greatest education I could have.”
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