Curveball (5 page)

Hungry for inspiration, Tomboy turned to the local library for sports books. She searched for stories about athletes who made names for themselves. When she found books that inspired her, like biographies of Babe Ruth, she read them twice, sometimes three times.
¹³
The Babe had recently made one of his visits to the Twin Cities, playing exhibition games after his retirement from baseball. “I wanted to be Babe Ruth,” she said. “He was everybody’s hero.”
¹⁴
Tomboy especially looked for books about women athletes, but she found few trailblazers. The absence of women role models seemed to underscore the sentence she had heard many times. Tomboy could recite the line by heart: “a girl going to play ball was a disgrace to society.”
¹⁵

Tomboy also read books to help improve her athletic skills and learn game strategy. While she was grateful for Father Keefe’s help in finding her a baseball team, she often felt frustrated when the Catholic team’s coaches ignored her. Coaches pulled the boys aside to teach them how to turn the double play or hit to the opposite field, but they always assumed Tomboy would not be interested in the finer points of play or couldn’t execute them. “The coach would tell the boys stuff but not me,” she said. Rather than stewing about being excluded, Tomboy immersed herself in the science of the game. “I got a rule book and studied it,” she said. “I knew it more than the boys.”
¹⁶

Tomboy also discovered newspapers. The local papers interested her, especially when they ran stories about athletes, local baseball teams, or neighborhood kids who broke into professional sports. Gordon Parks, a few years older than Tomboy, was already receiving coverage. “Gordon Parks Returns Home,” the
Minneapolis Spokesman
proudly declared. It described the “young Twin City photographer’s” three-month tour with a traveling semi-pro basketball team.
^*
More than anything, however, Tomboy loved reading the
Chicago Defender.
She would ride her bike to the train depot and wait for stacks of the
Defender
to be dropped off by the Great Northern line out of Chicago.
¹⁷
The newspaper opened up a world of possibilities and was “the best book,” she said. “I used to call it my Bible, when Mama wasn’t listening.”
¹⁸
Defender
readers scanned the newspaper for political, social, and sports news affecting the country’s black citizens—news that the white newspapers either did not care to cover or didn’t know existed. Founded in 1905 by Robert Sengstacke Abbott, the
Defender
reportedly began with a twenty-five-cent investment, a three-hundred-copy print run, and “offices” located on the kitchen table of Abbott’s landlord. Long a champion for racial equality, the
Defender
called for blacks to migrate to the North and was credited with helping to triple the black population of Chicago in the 1930s. It rallied against lynching, condemned racist voting barriers, and put pressure on the military to integrate. “That
Chicago Defender
Abbott, he told it like it was,” Tomboy said.
¹⁹
“It was like my book, and I studied that. It told me what the Negro was doing, what we were contributing.”
²⁰
Pullman porters, cooks, and waiters took copies of the
Defender
to relatives and other readers down South. Barbers in black neighborhoods sold the newspaper in their shops. By the early 1920s, the newspaper was the largest and most influential black publication in America.
²¹

Once as a birthday present Tomboy received a “deadheadin’” ticket—a free pass to ride the train. She went down to Chicago, stayed overnight, and happened to meet
Defender
editor Robert Abbot. “I was a young kid,” she said, “but I knew he was somebody.”
²²
The chance meeting stayed with her. Tomboy continued devouring the paper, especially the inspirational essays by Reverend Benjamin Mays of Morehouse College, columns by Mary McLeod Bethune and Langston Hughes, and, of course, sports coverage of black athletes. “You had so few role models,” she said. She read news of track star Jesse Owens, the Negro Leagues’ Oscar Charleston and Satchel Paige, and her greatest hero, the man she called “the champion’s champion,” boxer Joe Louis.
²³
As a good storyteller herself, Tomboy appreciated the
Defender
’
s
sportswriting style: a mix of staccato flash and unabashed enthusiasm that delighted her. A reader could almost hear the pop of a baseball bat in the paper’s sports stories. “More than 20,000 baseball enthusiasts came to the ‘House that Ruth built,’ here Sunday to witness four teams battle for top honors,” one story began. “The nightcap gave the fans a chance to do some old fashioned back-lot yelling for the Pittsburgh Crawfords went on a wild rampage knocking down the poles, busting the bleachers seats with long—and equally hard—line drives and causing the utter embarrassment of one ‘Slim Jones,’ ace hurler for the Philly Stars, by sending him to the showers in the first inning.”
²⁴

But Tomboy did not need a newspaper to tell her when the Saint Paul Saints were in town. The Saints were a minor league affiliate of the Chicago White Sox and played at nearby Lexington Park, not far from her home. Tomboy was so used to spending summer days on the playing fields around the ballpark that she called the area her “second home.” When the Saints were in town and she heard the game day commotion begin, she made a point of stopping by the park on routine bike rides through the neighborhood.
²⁵
Although they were a white team and were never affiliated with the Negro Leagues teams she admired, the Saints were a team she could learn something from, Tomboy believed. Attending games, like reading books, had become as much a part of her sports education as playing ball. The Saints had their ups and downs in the standings, but under new manager Gabby Street the 1936 squad won more games than they lost and were in second place in the white minor leagues’ American Association. Early one morning before a Saints game, Tomboy rode her bike over to Lexington Park and watched Street coax young men through a strict regimen of drills. Street did more than coax: he also yelled and shouted when athletes didn’t try hard enough. The shouting didn’t bother Tomboy. Since she was always looking for a coach who would take the time to instruct her, she thought even a loud old man was better than someone who ignored her. After studying the practice from the perch of her bike, Tomboy pushed down the kickstand of her Silver King and walked through the open gates of the still-empty Lexington Park. She wanted to get a closer look at what was going on. Street barely looked up at the young interloper coming into the park. But when Tomboy kept walking closer and they finally did eye each other, neither the fifty-three-year-old white manager nor the fourteen-year-old black girl ever could have imagined how their separate worlds would collide during that 1936 summer.
^*
Tomboy didn’t know a thing about Gabby Street. She certainly didn’t know what a gift he later would give her.

There were few major league ball players who had seen more good and bad luck than Charles Evard “Gabby” Street. He had managed a World Series winner, and he had witnessed the minor league team he played on vanish in an earthquake. Street was born in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1882 and began his baseball career as a twenty-year-old in a Kentucky semi-pro league playing for sixty dollars a month. Coaches thought of Street as a scrappy catcher with a good arm and a less-than-impressive bat. By the time he was twenty-four years old, he was playing with the San Francisco Seals baseball team and living at the Golden Gate Hotel in the Bay Area. During the early hours of April 18, 1906, a sudden and violent jolt threw Street out of bed. He picked himself up, rushed to the window, and saw people running out of buildings, yelling “Fire!” and “Earthquake!” Street later told reporters, “If I live to be a hundred, I shall always remember that scene” of the great San Francisco earthquake. The cast members of
Beauty and the Beast
and
Babes in Toyland
also lived in the hotel. “What the female members of those troupes wore as they hiked for the exits is nobody’s business,” he said. The rear of the hotel began to shudder as the groups scrabbled down swaying staircases to the pavement below. Just as they reached the ground, a second shock split a water tank atop the hotel in half, sending water cascading over those lucky enough to escape the building’s complete collapse. Street worked his way through the bricks and flames until he reached Golden Gate Park, where he spent the night with the weary and numb masses. After three days, he started for Oakland until a policeman stopped him. “You’re going to take off your coat and begin pitching bricks out of the street,” the guard ordered him. Everyone was needed to help out, and Street complied until two days later, when he happened upon one of his team’s pitchers. The teammate knew how they could get out. “Don’t hurry,” he said, “but start for the ferry at the end of Market Street and pitch brick all the way.” It took Street nine hours, but he made it to the wharf and crossed to Oakland, where the Elks Lodge gave him money to get as far as Denver. In Denver, the Red Cross bought him a ticket to Chicago. In Chicago, the Refugee Committee handed him fare to Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh, a local baseball pal lent him money to go as far as he could. The loan took him to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where Street finally stopped. Pennsylvania seemed far enough away from earthquakes and fires. Later that summer, he convinced the town’s Tri-State club, the Millionaires, to let him join the team. Being called a “Millionaire” was a name the indebted catcher would have been far too exhausted to find ironic.
²⁶

Street stumbled around a few more years before he made it to the big leagues in 1908 as the battery mate for Walter “Big Train” Johnson of the Washington Senators.
^*
Big Train was at the beginning of his celebrated twenty-year career, perfecting a fastball that some hitters said was so invisible, it was like hitting a watermelon seed. “The first time I faced him, I watched him take that easy windup,” Ty Cobb said. “And then something went past me that made me flinch. I hardly saw the pitch, but I heard it…. Every one of us knew we’d met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ballpark.”
²⁷
While Street proved to be a good catcher for Johnson, his weak bat and problems with drinking—he was reportedly “lost” for five days during the 1909 season—forced a trade to the New York Highlanders in 1912.
^†
After several more years roaming the minors, Street joined the army at the outbreak of World War I and served two years with the First Gas Regiment—Chemical Warfare division in Argonne, France. He distinguished himself during the war as a sergeant, won a Purple Heart, and returned home where he “toured the bushes” as both a player and a manager.

The “Old Sarge” had few illusions about where his baseball career had ended up. While managing a Class C club in Muskogee, Oklahoma, Street was dejected and direct. “You can’t go much lower than that in organized baseball,” he said. “Not much of a job; not getting anywhere.”
²⁸
But the low period did not last for long. In 1929, he became a coach for the St. Louis Cardinals. Team vice president Branch Rickey helped him beat his drinking habit, and a year later Street was named manager of the Red Birds. He led the rough-and-tumble Gas House Gang to two consecutive pennants and one World Championship. By 1932, though, the Cards had slipped to sixth place, and the next year, the Cardinals’ front office fired him. Some said a young upstart sensation, Dizzy Dean, had an argument with the older, easygoing Street. Cardinal executives thought they needed a firmer hand at the helm. Street’s firing was followed by another dismal round of minor league clubs. He thought he was finished with baseball forever and would return to his family’s home in Joplin, Missouri, but his love for the game would not let him go. “I’m going to put on a uniform just for the smell of the dust again,” he said. “I’ve got baseball in my blood, I guess. I can’t leave it alone.”
²⁹
In 1936 he moved his wife and two children to Saint Paul, where he became manager of the Saints.

When Tomboy stood observing Street that morning at Lexington Park, he was directing a baseball school for Twin City white boys.
^*
There was not a single black child among the boys inside the ballpark, and there were certainly no girls, white or black. But Tomboy was used to being the exception and she began plotting ways to get Street’s attention. She hoped he would let her into the school, even though it was obvious she would be bending a policy—formal or unspoken—about who could attend. Even as a young teenager, Tomboy already had learned how to get around the rules. She had been playing as the only girl in the Catholic boys’ league for nearly four years, and she was used to boys’ initial resistance, even hostility. Sometimes when she took a turn playing second base, boys would slide into her on double plays, hoping to rattle what they assumed was an inexperienced infielder. But Tomboy had been playing the game long enough to know how to take care of herself, as she said. Even more important, she also had learned that apprehension rather than anger fueled some of the resistance she met from boys. “It took a few years,” she said, “but I realized some [male teammates] felt threatened by my presence.”
³⁰
Some of the young men attending Gabby Street’s baseball school might have felt threatened by her presence at Lexington Park as well, but Tomboy continued to move closer to the clutch of players circled around Gabby. She strained to hear what the old coach was saying.

Street loved nothing better than a group of young players who were eager to learn more about baseball. He had just about had it with players in the major leagues who seemed to have only a passing interest in the game. “Today’s players don’t live and breathe baseball,” he complained. “After a game they’re more likely to head for a golf course or a country inn or a talking picture.”
³¹
In the old days, he said, “we lived out baseball over a glass of beer and a ham sandwich. We played baseball around the hotel at night. Boys nowadays have too many automobiles. They drive up to the park two hours before the game, get in their suits, have a meeting, dress quickly after the game, jump in their cars and are 50 miles from each other in two hours. You can’t learn baseball on a blackboard. You have to live the game, breathe it 24 hours with fellows who talk your language, know your problems. All the kids think of now is hit, hit, hit—no teamwork.”
³²
Street wanted to reach kids who loved the game the way he did. Perhaps that’s why he felt Tomboy staring at him from outside his circle of students.