The Boys of Summer (34 page)

“Well,” the manager said, “you certainly earn enough, but if you travel, I can’t encourage you to buy. We don’t let anyone use the recreation room until they’re eighteen, and some of these seventeen-year-olds, pretty husky fellers by the way, are kicking up a fuss. Rebelling. Throwing stones. Acting up. Now,
Mr. Black, it certainly would be a terrible thing if these white seventeen-year-olds threw rocks through the window of your thirty-two-thousand-dollar house, possibly injuring your wife while you were traveling and not here to protect her.”

Later Black’s friends in Lombard offered to buy one of the development houses. “Then, instead of us, you and Mae Nell move in.”

“Like hell,” Black said. “Something like that happens to you every day in your life if you’re black.”

He has adjusted to bigotry, without accepting it. His talks argue against nihilism and riot.

“Dropout,” he tells black youths, “is another word for quitter. Quitting is a cinch. You walk away. For the time being you’re the boss. Free as a bird. And because you’re young, people excuse a lot of things. But when you get older, people stop feeling sorry, and that gets you sore, but what are you good for? A quitter is trained for nothing but being angry.

“This reawakening of racial pride,” he tells black adults, “is a fine thing. African styles in clothing, jewelry and hairdos are important. But what’s more important is what we do to solve community problems. The future is the young; it’s in the schools. A new hairdo solves no problems, but wearing the new hairdo to PTA meetings is something else. That’s feeling racial identity
and
trying to make the ghetto school a better place. But if you had to pick one to skip, skip the hairdo. Make the PTA.”

During a recent Honors Day Program at Virginia Union, a black university in Richmond, Black spoke about the responsibilities as well as the rewards of black power: “Our efforts have to be more positive than shouting, ‘Sock it to him, Soul Brother,’ or, ‘We are victims of a racist society,’ or, ‘Honkey!’ I ‘m in favor of black history because it makes whites realize that American blacks have done more than make cotton king. But I ‘m opposed to all-black dorms, and to violence. If the black
student
wants
to use a loaded gun to make a point, what can we expect of
uneducated
blacks? By now some of you may be saying I’m a Tom, a window-dressing Negro. But I learned two things early. A minority cannot defeat a majority in physical combat and you’ve got to let some things roll off your back. Because my name is Joe Black, whites called me ‘Old Black Joe.’ After a few years of scuffling, I still hadn’t silenced all of them and throwing all those punches had made me a weary young man. Call me ‘Old Black Joe’ today and you agitate nobody except yourself.”

He makes one point to everyone. It is bigotry to exalt the so-called special language of the blacks. “What is our language?” he asked. “ ‘Foteen’ for ‘fourteen.’ ‘Pohleeze’ for ‘police.’ ‘Raht back’ for ‘right back.’ ‘We is going.’ To me any man, white or black, who says whites must learn our language is insulting. What he’s saying is that every other ethnic group can migrate to America and master English, but we, who were born here and whose families have all lived here for more than a century, don’t have the ability to speak proper English. Wear a dashiki or an African hairdo, but in the name of common sense, learn the English language. It is your own.”

At lunch, he handed me a sheet of paper. “This is a part of my philosophy,” he said. “And by the way, notice the use of English vocabulary.”

I read:

“If that’s what you make it, Joe,” I said.

“Well,” he said. “You got the point.”

During the summer of 1955, Elwin Charles Roe, a guileful man from the Ozark hills, where cottonwood and yellow pine grow thick, cut across the American grain. For a fee of $2,000, Roe confessed in
Sports Illustrated
magazine that he had put more than his left hand on what he threw. The title read: “The Outlawed Spitball Was My Money Pitch.”

Although the article won a prize for Dick Young, who wrote it, certain baseball people and laymen expressed distaste and disbelief. It was not, I suspect, that Preacher’s spitters shocked anyone. A man does what he has to in order to make a living. Rather, the act of public confession bruised a tender area in the national ethos. It was if a Frenchman had sold
Réalités
an essay on his coy mistress, and used not only her name but his own.

“Spitter, bah,” Larry Goetz, a large, gruff umpire, was quoted
as telling a reporter from the
Sporting News.
“I worked a lot of games behind the plate when Roe was pitching. I never once saw him throw a spitter and I’ve seen some thrown by real experts like Burleigh Grimes.”

“I doubt that he got away with as much as he says,” announced Ford Frick, the Commissioner of Baseball. “I believe he has done a little bragging. We have a rule in baseball, 8.02, which says that if a pitcher throws a spitter, he shall be removed from the game and suspended for ten days. If Roe were still in baseball, we would do something, but he has retired now and is beyond our reach.”

Away from official stuffiness, one could scent traces of amusement. “He never threw one against me in batting practice,” said Pee Wee Reese, “so I take it he never threw one in the game.” Writing in the New York
World Telegram & Sun
, Bill Roeder concluded that Roe would have to wait until he was sixty-seven before returning. Multiplying the ten-day suspension by a thousand spitballs, Roeder wrote,“he owes 10,000 days or more than 27 years.”

That season the Dodgers defeated the Yankees in the World Series for the first time and John Podres became a Brooklyn hero. Talk about the spitter faded while trees still wore green, darkening after Roe’s confessional summer. The Preacher himself disappeared into the Ozarks. A gifted raconteur, he shunned requests to speak at Rotary luncheons in St. Louis and at supermarket openings in Pittsburgh. Later his teammates gathered for old-timers’ games at Walter O’Malley’s handsome new ball park in Los Angeles and at Shea Stadium, a cylinder set on the old marshlands of Flushing, New York. Reticent Billy Cox showed up for one. Jackie Robinson flew to Los Angeles to play second base at fifty. There were no reunions for the Preacher. His sins confessed, Elwin Roe remained in a corner of Missouri, twenty-five miles from his old Arkansas home, selling groceries and leaving the world alone.

To reach the village of West Plains, you sweep down Illinois flatlands into Missouri and move southwest beyond St. Louis on Route 44, until you reach Rolla, a town supposedly named by a homesick settler from North Carolina, who spelled “Raleigh” as he pronounced it. At Rolla you leave the mainline and bend south through villages called Yancy Mills and Willow Springs and Cabool. Amid a subtle beauty of fields, rounded hills and scattered copses, the soil is touched with red. Ozark land is just promising enough to make a man want to farm it and just poor enough to starve him when he tries.

At the end of the 1953 World Series, after Mickey Mantle beat him, 4 to 2, with an eighth-inning home run, Preacher asked if I would give him the lapel button that newspapermen wear as an admission token to the food, drink and gossip of press headquarters. “What I like to do,” he said in a drawl, preserved with as much care as his pitching arm, “is to get trinkets from all my World Series and put ‘em on this bracelet of my wife’s. It sure does mean a lot to Mozee.” He was thirty-eight years old, and there was not much baseball left in his skinny body. If he were asking for Mozee Roe, his wife, he was also asking for himself.

“Sure, Preach,” I said, “but we oughta trade. I’ll give you the button. Then, in a couple of months, you give me a story.”

“What kinda story? I’m no writer.”

“Just a letter from the Ozarks,” I said, and handed him the button.

With December, Roe made good the bargain. Several cobra being shipped to the zoo at Springfield, Missouri, had squirmed loose from crates in a heated railroad car and, presumably, frozen to death. Roe used the snakes as a departure point:

I like to hunt deer and rabbit [the letter began], but Old Preach ain’t in no hurry to find no cobra. I have kept my eyes open but I have had
no luck; or maybe I should say I had good luck. I did not see one.

We had Sniders for 3 days and we done a little horseback riding. Snider is no fisherman, so we did no fishing. However we were boating one day and we looked at my trot line and lo and behold if we didn’t get a 20-pound catfish. That was quite a bit of luck as that is considered a large one of its kind and on top of that I had the Duke with me.

He couldn’t pitch much the next season. He was an elegant competitor; twice at Brooklyn he led the league in winning percentage. But in 1954 he lost four and won three. He understood, and when the Dodgers sold his contract to Baltimore, Roe retired.

Now two letters went unanswered. Finally, I telephoned—there is only one Elwin Charles Roe in the West Plains book—and simply said I’d arrive in a day or two.

“Well, we’re busy at the store,” Roe said. “I get up at six every morning for inventory. Jes’ what do you wanna see me about?”

“For some visiting. Look around where you grew up. I’ve never been to Arkansas.”

“We live in Missouri now. Moved ‘crost the line because the schools were better and we had two growin’ boys. But, sure, you could come down here. Things are changing. Maybe the people should know about it. We got a Holiday Inn. How’s Pee Wee and Erskine and Jack? You seen them? How they look?”

Physically he had changed more than any other Dodger. Roe, the pitcher, was all bones and angles, even to a pointed nose and a sharp chin. Greeting me in the lobby of the Holiday Inn stood a portly man of fifty-five, who wore eyeglasses and had grown jowls. “Welp,” Preacher said, brusquely. “Ready? I’ll show you what there is to be showed.”

We drove a mile south on Highway 63. On the side of a tidy, one-story brick rectangle, a sign read
“PREACHER ROE’S SUPERMARKET.”
“Not what you’d call a supermarket back east,” Roe said. “More like a grocery store, ain’t it? We deliver. We give
personal service. Now the big shopping centers are comin’ in, with the giant supermarkets. I don’t mind tellin’ ya, it’s got me worried.”

“What kind of car we driving, Preacher?”

He laughed. “I do believe,” he said, “they call this a Cadillac.” He turned off Route 68 and up a gentle rise toward a big two-story white frame house. “My home,” he said. “Seventeen acres. Good huntin’ dogs. I got it cheap. But with the land and all it’s worth somethin’ now. Come out and take a look around.”

Beyond a back lawn, land rose and fell to the west. Overhead clouds rushed across a wide, bright sky. “Windy,” I said.

“That wind’s all right, long as it’s blowing straight. It’s when it starts a-circling that you have to watch it.” He winked. “This here’s tornader alley. Look, this isn’t where I growed and that’s what I’m gonna show you. Heck, we can talk about any of it, then, now, the spitter, but I’ll bet you one thing. After you see how it was where I started out, you won’t believe the feller riding you went from there to being a major league pitcher. Come on, I’ll run you down to Viola, Arkansas. The population is a hundred eighty.”

His father, Dr. Charles Edward Roe, had wanted above all things to be a ball player. He was bigger than Preacher and stronger, but he never got far. A look at Memphis in 1917. A season with Pine Bluff of the Cotton States League in 1918, when Preacher was three years old. And that was all. Afterward Dr. Roe concentrated on medicine and studied his six sons in search of the major leaguer he had wanted to be. Preacher was the fifth-born boy, and Vince Scully remembers a day in St. Louis when Preacher shut out the Cardinals and a tall, bony country man walked up to strangers near the ball park and said to one after another, “Did you see what my boy did? That was my boy who pitched that game today.” The old doctor’s eyes were wet.

“My dad,” Preacher said, pointing the Cadillac south, “was a
fast righthander, the rubber-arm type. In the Cotton States League he pitched both games of a double-header three times. He couldn’t understand why I wasn’t rubber-armed, but I wasn’t, so that’s the way it was.

“There was a lot of land. Hell, all there was was land, and a few dirt roads. My dad used to make his calls on horseback. He wasn’t no doctor in a Cadillac. People paid him with chickens and sacks o’ grain.

“Up till I was in high school we had outdoor plumbing. A little shack with one hole in the door and another hole inside. There was the six boys and a girl and we all threw and they tell me, the funniest thing, when I was little, my dad always said, I was the one. I’d be the major league pitcher.”

“You ever think of medicine?”

“Not so’s I can remember. None of us went into medicine. Fact is, my brother Roy and I—he’s a school superintendent—are about the only ones who went into something more than labor. I guess it was we seen how hard a country doctor works and fer how little. I hung around Dad’s office and made calls with him. I saw him sew people after knife fights, and I heard him getting up at all hours when people banged on the door.

“That was work. Baseball was the other way. Fun. Every Saturday afternoon and every Sunday afternoon there was a ball game and we Roes was always in it. We played for the Viola team.

“We’d go to a ball field and all the people from two towns would be there and we’d have two baseballs which cost a dollar each, lot of money in Arkansas then. Course it was wide-open spaces and all the people who came to the game knew that if those baseballs got lost, the game was over. So when a ball got hit, no matter how far out into the bushes, play stopped until you found it. If both was in the bushes, you’d have the whole population of two towns, Viola and Calico Rock, a-trampin’ around looking. Afterwards you passed the hat and if you was
lucky you took in two dollars, for new baseballs.

“The umpire was some interested person in the community who worked for nothing, and he’d stand behind the pitcher’s mound, call it all. Balls and strikes. The bases. Only thing he couldn’t call was the foul balls. So there the catcher was on his honor. He’d always do real good till the last inning. Then he was liable to get hooked.

“Biggest games come around July 4. We’d have a three-day picnic and there was three kinds of events. The ball game. A bunch of fights. I ain’t gonna mention the third. That’s no different here than anywhere else.

“The picnics had some side shows and we got speeches and we was supposed to be dry. Notice I say, ‘supposed to be.’ A sheriff would catch some old guy making bootleg and get him in the pen a year. Soon’s he’d come out, he’d start making it again. Wasn’t the world’s biggest secret what was in them Fourth of July jugs.

“One time I said to a farmer, ‘Hey, Ben, how’s your corn crop comin’ in?’

“ ‘Fine, Preach,’ he hollered back. ‘Looks like thirty gallons to the acre.’”

Roe pulled off the blacktop road and stopped. “That was Moody, Missouri, you just went through, only you didn’t look real quick, so you missed it. This here’s Moody Park, where I got a great deal of training. There’s the same boards in that backstop that was there forty years ago. It’s eight miles from here to where I was raised. A lot of guys had horses or a bicycle. Us Roes had two horses and the older ones grabbed them. So on many a Saturday I’d walk eight miles to play the ball game and then walk eight miles home, and couldn’t wait for Sunday so’s I could do the same thing again.”

We had stopped on a rolling hilltop. Moody Park rolled eastward, on upland meadow, reaching toward ridges. A small white-stone building rose behind the backstop. “Ozark hillbilly
land is what you’re seein’,” Preacher said. “Good for sage and hardwood and, Lordie, how the grass grows. People are doing good grazing livestock.” A cattle fence bounded right field. “I never will forget the day another boy hit one over that farmer’s fence there. I thought it was a mile. You want to pace it off. Maybe 250 feet. A mile here was a pop fly in the major leagues.”

“Where are the grandstands?” I said.

“The dirt is the grandstands,” Preacher said. “That’s where people sat. You’re a ways outa New York City. Even St. Louis is near two hundred miles.”

He started the Cadillac south again. “My dad had very strong ideas about pitching. He worked on my curve-ball form, but he wouldn’t let me pitch in the games until I was sixteen. He wanted the arm to develop slow, natural and strong.

“Up until sixteen I played the outfield. The year I was sixteen, there was a kid could throw so hard nobody could handle his stuff, so I started catchin’. When I went into pro ball, the kid that was pitching to me, Charles Carroll, had become a catcher and I’d become a pitcher, which, of course, was always intended anyways. Charles Carroll had good ability but he jes’ quit. My younger brother Roy, the school superintendent, had good ability, but he was too hardheaded. He had to roll separate. A lot of things come together in making a ball player.

“Now you’re gonna ask about hitting. I was a
good
hitter in town games. Even in the minor leagues I hit fairly well. But, boy, I’ll tell you that major league curve ball isn’t as good to hit as them other things. What did I hit as a Bum—.032?”

“The book says your lifetime average is .110.”

“Ya looked the dang thing up, did ya? Well, you remember, then, about 1953. Big game in Pittsburgh and some young feller out there for the Pirates ain’t jes’ throwin’. He’s shootin’. He got a gun fer an arm. Here comes that ball, a-smoking and about ta burst into flame, and Old Preach swings, you remember?” In July 1953, Roe hit a 336-foot fly to left that fell a few inches
beyond the fence. Led by Billy Cox, the Dodgers spread sweat towels from the dugout toward home plate so that Roe, the home run hitter, could tread a carpet. “That young feller found out right then, you didn’t just blow one by Old Preach.”