Here’s an excerpt from James Wolcott’s new memoir about New York back in the ’70s:

How lucky I was, arriving in New York just as everything was about to go to hell. I had no idea how fortunate I was at the time, eaten up as I was by my own present-tense concerns and taking for granted the lively decay, the intense dissonance, that seemed like normality. Only F. Scott Fitzgerald characters (those charmed particles) feel the warm gold of nostalgia even while something’s unfolding before their enraptured doll eyes. For the rest of us, it’s only later, when the haze burns off, that you can look back and see what you were handed, the opportunities hidden like Easter eggs that are no longer there for anybody, completely trampled. To start out as a writer then was to set out under a higher, wider, filthier, more window-lit sky. A writer could still dream of climbing to the top, or at least getting close enough to the top to see who was up there enjoying themselves.

[Photograph's via Only NY Lives]

Bronx Banter Book Excerpt

Last week, I got a copy of Neil Lanctot’s new book, “Campy,” a biography of Roy Campanella. I was duly impressed by Lanctot’s previous effort, a meticulously researched book about the Negro Leagues and so I opened his new book book with considerable anticipation. The prologue was so striking, and so fitting for this space, that I immediately contacted Simon and Schuster for an excerpt. They generously agreed, so here is the prologue to “Campy.”

Please enjoy and then go to Amazon to buy the book. Looks like a keeper.

From “Campy,”

By Neil Lanctot

FOR SOME CITIES, a World Series game is an all too rare event to be savored and debated for years afterward. But for a New Yorker in 1958, the Fall Classic was a predictable part of the October calendar, as humdrum as a Columbus Day sale at Macy’s or candy apples at a neighborhood Halloween party.

The great catcher Roy Campanella was a veteran of the October baseball wars. Between 1949 and 1956, his Brooklyn Dodgers had taken on the New York Yankees five times, coming up empty all but once. On Saturday, October 4, Campy was returning to Yankee Stadium for yet another Series game, but everything had changed since the last time he’d set foot in the House That Ruth Built. The Dodgers no longer played in their cozy ballpark in Flatbush but in a monstrosity known as the Coliseum a continent away. And Campy no longer played baseball at all because a January automobile accident had left him a quadriplegic. For the past five months, he had doggedly worked with the staff and physicians at the Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation on Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan to learn how to function in a wheelchair. He had now sufficiently progressed to leave the hospital on weekends.

His doctors had encouraged him to accept Yankee co-owner Del Webb’s invitation to attend Saturday’s game at the Stadium, although Campy was initially not so sure. He had not appeared in public since his accident, nor had he sat on anything except a wheelchair. Nevertheless, he set aside any lingering anxiety to make the early-afternoon car ride to the Bronx, where box seats behind the Yankee dugout had already been set aside for Roy, his wife, two of his children, and a male attendant.

When the family station wagon arrived at Yankee Stadium, Campy could not help but think of the times he had suited up in the locker room in the past. He had never liked hitting at the Stadium, but he had enjoyed his fair share of glory there, whacking a key single in the deciding game of the Negro National League championship game as a teenager in 1939 and a more crucial double in game seven of the World Series in 1955, the year the Dodgers finally bested the Yanks. Today, he would just be another fan.

Campy soon discovered his wheelchair was too wide for the Stadium’s narrow aisles. He had no choice but to be bodily carried by his attendant, two firemen, and a policeman. “I felt like some sad freak,” he later recalled. “It was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me. I felt ashamed.”

But the fans whose glances he so desperately wanted to avoid soon began to shout out encouragement. “Hi, Slugger!” one greeted him. “Attaboy, Campy!” yelled another. “Stay in there, Campy, you got it licked.” Before long, virtually every one of the 71,566 present realized that the fellow with the neck brace and “tan Bebop cap” being carried to his seat was three-time MVP Roy Campanella. “By some sort of mental telepathy thousands in the great three-tiered horse-shoe were on their feet and when the applause moved, like wind through wheat from row to row, I doubt if there were many there who didn’t know what had happened,” wrote Bill Corum of the Journal-American. “It was a sad thing. Yet it was a great thing too, in the meaning of humanity. No word was spoke that anybody will know. Yet it had the same effect as that moment when a dying Lou Gehrig stood on this same Yankee diamond and said … ‘I’m the luckiest man in the world.’”

Down on the field, the top half of the second inning took a backseat to the heartfelt hoopla in the stands. With the count 1-1 on Milwaukee’s Frank Torre, Yankee pitcher Don Larsen stepped off the mound as the players in both dugouts craned their necks to see what was causing the commotion and then began to join in the ovation themselves. Upon spotting Campy only a few yards away, Yankee catcher Yogi Berra flipped his mask and waved, while home plate umpire Tom Gorman offered “a clenched fist in a ‘keep-fighting’ gesture.”

Campanella, who had vowed beforehand that he “wasn’t going to cry,” struggled to keep his emotions in check. He smiled back at Yogi (who “kept looking back and hardly could resist the temptation to run over and shake Campy’s hand,” said one reporter) and winked at the mob of photographers who gathered at his seat. For the rest of that warm October afternoon, he tried to focus on the game, even trying to eat a hot dog without success, but he could not stop thinking about the outpouring of love he had just experienced. “It’s hard to explain the feeling that came over me. I don’t believe any home run I ever hit was greeted by so much cheering,” Campanella said later.

It was the first time he had received such applause in a wheelchair, but it would not be the last. For the rest of his life, his presence, whether in a major league ballpark or in front of a Manhattan deli, would evoke similar responses. He was no longer just a ballplayer but a symbol of something much more.

© 2011 Neil Lanctot

We’re proud to present the following excerpt from Pete Dexter’s new book–his seventh novel–Spooner. This section picks up the story when Spooner is in high school. We just got through Spooner’s adventures on the football team where a sadistic coach named Tinker terrorized a fat kid, Lemonkatz. Spooner’s mother, Lily, is furious with the coach, as she is with many things in life, especially those things that are Republican. Then, young Spooner turns to baseball.

From Spooner:

By Pete Dexter.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Later that year Spooner began his career in organized baseball. The coach of the baseball team was Evelyn Tinker, who in addition to being held almost blameless in the Lemonkatz boy’s injury was now rumored to be collecting sixty bucks a week for the newspaper column, this in spite of Lily’s public campaign to have him fired, and being as Spooner was not old enough yet to have voted for Richard Nixon, this joining of Tinker’s team constituted the single most disloyal thing a child of Lily Whitlowe Ottosson’s had ever done.

How could he?

The question hung in the air at 308 Shabbona Drive, unspoken, like another dead father.

The answer—not that the answer mattered—was that Spooner had stopped at the baseball diamond on the way to the shopping center after school, and watched through the fence as Russell Hodge pitched four innings of a practice game against Crete-Monee, striking out twelve of the thirteen batters he faced. It was a tiny school, Crete-Monee, six hundred students, kindergarten through twelfth grade, and two of the players were only thirteen years old. The smallest one—who wore number thirteen, and was the only batter Russell Hodge did not strike out—was plunked between the shoulder blades as he turned away from an inside fastball, and cried.

Half a dozen times Spooner started to leave but couldn’t, waitingaround to see one more pitch, and in the end hung on the wire fence more than an hour, leaving diamond-shaped imprints on the underside of his forearms, wrists to elbows, taking the measure of Russell Hodge’s throws.

It came to him as he watched that Russell Hodge pitched in much the way he played linebacker, which is to say blind with rage. But it was more difficult in baseball, a game that had very little maiming, to sustain a murderous rage than it was in football, even for Russell Hodge, and after an inning or two Spooner thought he saw him working to conjure it up, sucking from the air every bit of resentment he could find. Giving Russell Hodge his due, even in a practice game against little Crete-Monee, he brought himself again and again to a state just short of foaming at the mouth—furious at the batter, at his own catcher, the umpire, who, behind the mask and protective vest was only Mr. Kopex the math teacher, furious even at the ball itself—and by the end appeared to have lost all his stuff.

* * * *

Monday afternoon, Spooner showed up at the practice field in tennis shoes and shorts. He didn’t have a glove—he’d taken the one he had out of his closet, but it was a toy and he could barely get his hand inside, and if he’d brought that along, he might as well have worn his old cowboy
hat too.

The players were already scattered in the outfield when he arrived, loosening up their arms or throwing each other grounders or fly balls.The student manager was chalking the batters’ boxes. Spooner stood behind the fence, unsure how to announce himself.

Presently, Tinker materialized and blew his whistle, and players jogged in and players jogged out, and pretty soon Mr. Kopex took the mound and threw a few tepid fast balls in the direction of the plate, and the star players took turns and took their cuts, and the players who were not stars chased the balls they hit.

Russell Hodge put one over the fence marking school property boundaries, fouled the next one off, and then lined a screamer back up the middle, catching Mr. Kopex, who’d given him a D in slow-track Introduction to Algebra, in the foot. Mr. Kopex was a large, fleshy fellow and he made one complete turn on the way down, 360 degrees, then lay on his back a long moment, getting his bearings. Here and there were scattered his glasses, his glove, and his cap. Presently he sat up and took off his shoe and sock, revealing a tiny, bone-white, misshapen foot, and lifted it up like a contortionist, cradling it, pulling it up almost to his mouth, and rocked slightly back and forth, staring at Russell Hodge, hoping, Spooner imagined, to get one more shot at him in slow-track algebra.

Coach Tinker went to the mound in a concerned jog but did not tell Mr. Kopex to run it off. Thanks perhaps to young Lemonkatz, Tinker had tamed his wild impulse to make the injured run.

Meanwhile, Russell Hodge was still at the plate, stamping his feet, stoking the fire.

Coach Tinker studied the problem, which in essence was that Mr. Kopex was holding up practice, and pushed back his cap to scratch his head. There was a scar there the shape of a smile from butting Lemonkatz. He nodded to Mr. Kopex and then turned and yelled, “We need a pitcher.”

The other assistant coach, Mr. Speers, the typing teacher, was also a large, fleshy man and, like Mr. Kopex, pigeon-shaped and had seen the line drive hit Mr. Kopex and was coming in from the field, walking at what appeared to be emergency walking speed. Mr. Speers and Mr. Kopex were bachelors and best friends and had volunteered together to coach baseball, thinking they could use the extra $250 the school district paid toward a European trip they hoped to take next summer. They were much alike physically, although Mr. Kopex belted his pants beneath his stomach and Mr. Speers hitched his together just below the nipples. They enjoyed exercise, that is, what they had considered exercise, the outdoors and fresh air and all that, hiking together in the forest preserve, but coaching baseball for Tinker had turned out to be nothing like exercise as they had known it before. On top of that the season was less than two weeks old and Mr. Speers had discovered he was allergic to dust and was runny-eyed and sneezing all the time. For his part, Mr. Kopex had developed hammer toes over the years and worried constantly about someone in spikes stepping on his feet. Unlike Mr. Speers, who wore black high-topped Converse sneakers, Mr. Kopex had played Little League ball in his youth and, as a matter of dignity, spent the money for a new glove and spikes of his own, and had, a few days earlier, admitted to Mr. Speers to a certain stirring at the sound they made as he walked over gravel.

Mr. Speers stood hesitantly over Mr. Kopex now, unsure if it was against the rules to help him up. “Get us off the field, Frank,” Mr. Kopex said, and Mr. Speers nodded at his friend and then bent down and rooted his head through his armpit, and tried to lift him up. Mr. Kopex was a loose handful though, slippery with sweat and pretty soon Mr. Speers gave up his hold on the armpit and fastened on to whatever parts he could fasten on to, and before they had cleared the practice field the two men had more or less reversed positions, with Mr. Kopex in a kind of headlock and making strangling noises as Mr. Speers dragged him off.

Spooner had stopped cold at the sight of Mr. Kopex’s misshapen foot—had the man been tortured in Korea?—and now he also saw Mr. Kopex’s glove, which lay brand-new and halfway open behind the pitching mound, where the imprint of the accident itself could still be seen in the dirt. Spooner thought he could smell the leather.

Tinker called again for a new pitcher, and Spooner walked onto the field, just like he belonged there, straight to Mr. Kopex’s glove. He picked up the glove as if it were his own and retrieved the same ball that had bounced off Mr. Kopex’s ankle. There were another fifty or sixty balls in a basket behind the mound, all of them scuffed and brown with dirt. The glove was still damp from Mr. Kopex’s hand, and Spooner remembered being introduced to him a long time ago at a faculty Christmas party. Spooner might have been eleven or twelve, and Mr. Kopex’s hand was no bigger than his own. He conjured up the feel of that hand exactly, it was like someone had passed him one of Phillip’s wet diapers.

Russell Hodge pounded the plate.

On the sidelines, Mr. Speers eased Mr. Kopex to the ground—not that he had been so far off the ground—and Tinker bent down in front of him with his hands on his knees and proceeded to scruff his hair playfully and compliment him on giving 120 percent, which was all that anybody could ask. Tinker was not easy with those sorts of compliments—for instance, Spooner couldn’t imagine poor stubby-legged Mrs. Tinker getting even an 85 or 90, even if she fucked him on a trapeze.

A certain look came over Mr. Kopex’s face. This was the third day of the second week of practice, meaning Mr. Kopex had been hearing Tinker’s percentages tossed around for nine days, and now, removed from the business of assistant coaching and back on his home turf, he returned fire.

“A hundred and twenty percent of what?” he said.

“A hundred and twenty percent,” Tinker said, as if percentages were self-evident, like your won-lost record.

Mr. Kopex, who was still sitting on the ground and in pain, nevertheless picked up a small stick and drew a circle. “Show me,” he said, and handed him the stick.

Spooner felt a stillness in his heart, waiting to hear Mr. Kopex discuss percentages with Coach Tinker, and likewise could barely breathe in anticipation of pitching to Russell Hodge.

“Let’s say this is the whole,” Mr. Kopex was saying.

Spooner decided to let Russell Hodge wait.

Coach Tinker set his cap back a little on his forehead again—this was his thinking mode—and said, “The whole what?”

“The whole whatever. The whole pie. And what you’re trying to say is that you want it all. You want a hundred percent.”

“It’s not for me,” Tinker said. “It’s for the youth. I want them to learn to give more than a hundred percent.”

Back in the other direction, Russell Hodge was pounding the plate again with his bat.

“Ah, but that’s just the point,” Mr. Kopex said. “One hundred percent is all there is. That is the whole. That is the definition of the whole.”

“The whole what?”

“The pie. The world. Everything. Where is the extra twenty percent?”

Mr. Speers was nodding along as Mr. Kopex spoke, and Coach Tinker was staring at the circle Mr. Kopex had drawn in the dirt, also nodding, as if he saw what Mr. Kopex was getting at too.

Coach Tinker said, “What I’m trying to instill in these individuals is to want a bigger pie,” and he leaned in even closer and looked at Mr. Kopex’s foot, which had blossomed like an orchid. “You might want to tape that,” he said. “Keep moving it around so it doesn’t stiffen up on you.”

Presently Mr. Speers and the student trainer eased themselves under Mr. Kopex’s arms and began to walk him very slowly back in the direction of school.

Tinker had another quick look at the circle Mr. Kopex had drawn in the dirt, then scrubbed it out with his shoe and turned away from the world of geometry and all its inhabitants. He clapped his hands and blew his whistle. “Let’s go, let’s go, move it . . .”

Tinker could not stand to waste practice time.

And all around Spooner the throwing and catching resumed, and Russell Hodge pounded the plate again and cocked the bat and waited for Spooner to feed him the ball.

He had never pitched from a mound before—even the roof of Major Shaker’s chicken house was flat—and as he threw he experienced a sensation like stepping into an unseen swale in the road.

The baseball headed east, just missing the wire backstop, passed a foot over Tinker’s head, curving slightly to the north, and vectored on out in the direction of Mr. Kopex, who was holding his injured foot behind him and a few inches off the ground and using Mr. Speers and the student manager as crutches. It hit him, of course, as Spooner already knew it would, struck him exactly on the knob of the heel of the hammer-toed, orchid-blossomed bare foot that Russell Hodge had just mangled with his line drive.

Mr. Kopex dropped to the ground again, bringing the student manager down with him. He cried out, “Oh, for the love of Christ,” and it sounded like he was begging for mercy, but of course if what you are looking for is mercy, high school isn’t the place for you anyway.

Tinker stared at Spooner, trying to remember who he was, then turned to the outfield and called for a new pitcher. And then headed out to tend to Mr. Kopex again.

One of the second stringers fielding balls in the outfield jogged in to throw batting practice. Spooner watched the kid coming, realizing he’d just gone through all the chances he was ever going to get.

He picked a ball out of the basket and motioned Russell Hodge back to the plate. When he looked again, trying to judge how much time he had left until Tinker returned, Mr. Kopex was writhing in the dirt, in a circular motion around his foot, which seemed strangely fixed to one point, as if somebody had pinned it to the ground with a compass from geometry class.

Russell Hodge pounded the plate and stepped in, pointed his bat at Spooner, aiming at him down the barrel. Spooner laid his fingers carefully across the stitches before he threw, putting a little extra pressure on the middle finger so that the ball would tail to the right, and as a result, the pitch hit Russell Hodge in his deaf ear instead of the mouth.

The sound was like breaking the seal on a pickle jar. Russell Hodge curled on the ground, holding both ears, as if the volume of the world was suddenly turned way too high. The thought passed at a strange, leisurely pace through Spooner’s brain that he’d killed Russell Hodge.

His first whiff of celebrity.

He stayed where he was, looking for signs of life, not really sure if he wanted to see any or not, not even sure if he’d hit him on purpose—if the thought had been there before he let the ball go or if his arm had just taken over. It hadn’t been an accident the way hitting Mr. Kopex was an accident, though. Spooner had known when the ball left his hand where it was headed.

What had Margaret said? “I think they just put you in the ground and you rot”?

* * * *

Tinker knelt beside Russell Hodge and gently rolled him onto his back. “Everybody get back,” he yelled. “Give him air.”

But there wasn’t anybody close enough to suck up Russell Hodge’s air. Most of the players took one look and were inching as far away as they could get. Russell Hodge lay cockeyed in the dust with his eyelids half open, staring off into the blue.

Tinker looked around, frightened. He lifted one of Hodge’s eyelids, stared for a moment and then let it go. He took Hodge’s mouth in his hand, puckering the boy’s lips, and moved his head slowly back and forth. “All right, Hodge,” he said, “let’s shake it off.” But even Tinker—who privately was still of the opinion that running a few laps on a broken femur wasn’t as bad as it looked on paper—even he knew better than that.

He rocked back on his heels, looking at Russell Hodge, and then went forward again and gently fitted his hands under the body—two hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce—and took him up in his arms and stood, and then walked slowly east, back in the direction of school, casting a surprisingly long shadow for a fellow of his height.

Tuesday morning Dr. Baber came on the loudspeaker to announce that Russell Hodge was still in the hospital with a brain injury, but doing well and expected to make a full recovery. A cluster of troublemakers booed from the back of Señor Rosenstein’s second-year Spanish class, where Spooner was at the time, and were sent to Dr. Baber’s office for detention slips. The two cheerleaders in the class both wept in gratitude, and one later claimed to have prayed for his recovery.

Tinker had spent all night and most of the day at Russell’s bedside, and, in the way these things sometimes turn out, news of this simple act of concern went a long way toward repairing his reputation among those who had criticized him after the Lemonkatz affair, and also served as a cooling-off period in another matter, as only last Friday Tinker had caught a student named Richard D. Peck lying under the bleachers reading Othello when he was supposed to be taking the sit-ups portion of his national youth fitness test, and threatened to kill him.

Peck’s family had already notified the school board of its intention to sue.

* * * *

That afternoon found Spooner standing alone as warm-ups began, Mr. Kopex’s glove curled under his chin like a baby’s head. He felt no guilt about stealing the glove, which he viewed as no worse than grave robbing—grave robbing being one of the terms Spooner still misunderstood at this stage of his matriculation, thinking it meant taking something old or unwanted. Kopex had been in the hallway on crutches when Spooner saw him earlier that day between classes, overwhelmed by the movement and jostling and noise, fighting for breath, sweat soaked and old overnight. No, Kopex wouldn’t want the glove anymore, wouldn’t even want it around the house where it could fall out of the closet and remind him of what had happened.

Spooner was thinking of Mr. Kopex and the glove—grave robbing wasn’t stealing, but it must have been something because he kept thinking about it—when Coach Tinker appeared at his side. “Spoonerman,” he said, and Spooner jumped at the sound of his voice, “I know you’re worried about Hodge.”

Spooner nodded, although the only specific worrying he’d done about Russell Hodge was that he would get out of the hospital and kill him. “The best thing you can do,” Tinker said, “is go out there and give it a hundred and twenty percent. That’s what he’d want.”

Two questions at once: Did this mean Hodge was dead, and was Tinker, after everything that had happened, still going to let him pitch? Spooner hadn’t expected another chance. He was now two pitches into his career in organized baseball, after all, and one had taken out the heart of the school’s math department—Mr. Kopex’s heel was cracked, while the roof of the foot, where Hodge’s line drive had drilled him, was only bruised—and the other had possibly killed the greatest all-around athlete in the history of the Prairie Glen High Golden Streaks.

“How is he?” Spooner said. The truth was Hodge dying still didn’t strike him as the worst way this could end.

“Who?”

“Hodge. Is he dead?”

Tinker gave Spooner a little elbow in the ribs, as if he had just told him a joke or wanted to point out a set of tits. It left Spooner’s ribs tender all week. “Don’t worry about old Hodgie,” he said, “he’ll shake it off. You just throw the baseball. Keep us in it until he gets back.”

* * * *

Tinker divided his players into two teams that afternoon and put Spooner on the mound to pitch to both sides.

They played three innings before it rained, Spooner getting used to the mound, to the movement of a new unscuffed baseball, to the sense of the players behind him in the field, depending on what he did. The center of attention. He walked two batters and struck out the other eighteen he faced. No hits, no runs, nobody hurt except the catcher, Ken Jonny, a perfect toad of a kid who, although apparently designed without a neck, was in fact hit twice in the neck when balls skipped over his mitt and under his face mask.

Copyright © 2009 Pete Dexter

You can order Spooner here.

“Clemente,” the new book by pulitizer prize-winning author, David Maraniss, hits the shelves today. It is a fine appreciation of Roberto Clemente, who is undoubtedly one of the most charasmatic players of the post-War era. Although Clemente was a key member of two World Championship teams, he played in relative obscurity in Pittsburgh during the 1950s and ’60s, and was overlooked for his much of his career. Until, of course, his monumental performance in the 1971 Serious, and his untimely death in December of 1972. His legend and reputation have grown ever since.

As my pal Steve Treder put it to me in an e-mail recently:

Clemente was actually slightly underrated until the late ’60s, and especially during the 1971 World Series when he suddenly got noticed by the national media. At that point they all suddenly seemed to think he was better than he actually was, after years of being overlooked. His early tragic death soon afterward froze his image in time. Had he lived, and had a few years of decline phase at the end of his career, his reputation probably would have balanced out about right. As it is, many casual fans seem to think he was the equal of Mays/Aaron/Robinson/Mantle, when in fact he wasn’t nearly as good as any of them.

It is no insult to say that Clemente wasn’t as great as Mays, Aaron, Robinson or Mantle. They are all legends. Fortunately for Maraniss, off-the-field, Clemente was more interesting than most. And between the lines, Maraniss points out, Clemente had a terrific, inimitable style.

There was something about Clemente that surpassed statistics, then and always. Some baseball mavens love the sport precisely because of its numbers. They can take the mathematics of a box score and of a year’s worth of statistics and calculate the case for players they consider underrated or overrated and declare who has the most real value to a team. To some skilled practitioners of this science, Clemente comes out very good but not the greatest; he walks too seldom, has too few home runs, steals too few bases. Their perspective is legitimate, but to people who appreciate Clemente this is like chemists trying to explain Van Gogh by analyzing the ingredients of his paint. Clemente was art, not science. Every time he strolled slowly to the batter’s box or trotted out to right field, he seized the scene like a great actor. It was hard to take one’s eyes off him, because he could do anything on a baseball field and carried himself with such nobility. “The rest of us were just players,” Steve Blass would say. “Clemente was a prince.”

Thanks to Mr. Maraniss and the good people at Simon and Schuster, here is an excerpt from “Clemente.” This section is less about Clemente specifically and more about the conditions that Black and latin players encountered in the early 1960s. But it establishes the backdrop that is essential to understanding Clemente’s story. Enjoy!

BOOK EXCERPT: From “Clemente”

By David Maraniss

“Pride and Prejudice”

[Clemente] arrived at Pirates camp to train for the 1961 season on March 2, a day late. He and Tite Arroyo had been delayed entry from Puerto Rico to Florida until tests came back proving they did not have the bubonic plague, a few cases of which had broken out in Venezuela during the tournament.

On the day he reached Fort Myers, free from the plague, a story ran on the front page of the New York Times under the headline: NEGROES SAY CONDITIONS IN U.S. EXPLAIN NATIONALIST’S MILITANCY. One of the key figures quoted in the story was Malcolm X, the Black Muslim leader, who in the Times account was referred to as Minister Malcolm. Interviewed at a Muslim-run restaurant on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, Malcolm X said the only answer to America’s racial dilemma was for blacks to segregate themselves, by their own choice, with their own land and financial reparations due them from centuries of slavery. He dismissed the tactics of the civil rights movement as humiliating, especially the lunch-counter sit-ins that were taking place throughout the South. “To beg a white man to let you into his restaurant feeds his ego,” Minister Malcolm told the newspaper.

This was fourteen years after Jackie Robinson broke the major league color line, seven years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the separate-but-equal doctrine of segregated schools, five years after Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. led the bus boycott in Montgomery, four years after the Little Rock Nine desegregated Central High School in the capital of Arkansas, one year after the first lunch-counter sit-in in Greensboro. Year by year, the issue of race was becoming more urgent. The momentum was on the side of change, but the questions were how and how fast. In baseball, where once there had been no black ballplayers, now there were a hundred competing for major league jobs, and along with numbers came enormous talent, with ten past and future most valuable players among them. Yet every black player who reported to training camp in Florida that spring of 1961 still had to confront Jim Crow segregation. Even if their private emotions were sympathetic to Malcolm X’s rage at having to beg a white man to let you into his restaurant, the issue in baseball was necessarily shaped by its own history. Having moved away from the professional Negro Leagues and busted through the twentieth century’s racial barrier, black players did not view voluntary resegregation as an option, and separate and unequal off the field was no longer tolerable.

Wendell Smith, the influential black sportswriter who still had a column in the weekly Pittsburgh Courier but wrote daily now for the white-owned newspaper Chicago’s American, began a concerted campaign against training camp segregation that year. On January 23, a month before the spring camps opened, Smith wrote a seminal article that appeared on the top of the front page of Chicago’s American headlined negro ball players want rights in south. “Beneath the apparently tranquil surface of baseball there is a growing feeling of resentment among Negro major leaguers who still experience embarrassment, humiliation, and even indignities during spring training in the south,” Smith wrote. “The Negro player who is accepted as a first class citizen in the regular season is tired of being a second class citizen in spring training.” Smith added that leading black players were “moving cautiously and were anxious to avert becoming engulfed in fiery debate over civil rights,” but nonetheless were preparing to meet with club owners and league executives to talk about the problem and make it a front-burner issue for the players association.

In a drumbeat of stories for Chicago’s American and columns for the Courier, Smith documented the life of black players in Florida. While his scope was national and his campaign was for all of baseball, he often focused on the travails of black players on Chicago’s American League team, the White Sox, who trained in Sarasota. Those players included Minnie Minoso, Al Smith, and Juan Pizarro, Clemente’s friend and sometimes teammate in Puerto Rico, who had been traded from the Braves. “If you are Minoso, Smith or Pizarro . . . you are a man of great pride and perseverance . . . Otherwise you would not be where you are today, training with a major league team in Sarasota, Fla.,” Smith wrote in a Courier column. “Yet despite all your achievements and fame, the vicious system of racial segregation in Florida’s hick towns condemns you to a life of humiliation and ostracism.” Among the indignities, he wrote:

You cannot live with your teammates.

You cannot eat the type of food that your athletic body requires.

You cannot get a cab in the mornings to take you to the ball park, unless it happens to be Negro-driven.

You cannot enter the hotel in which your manager lives without first receiving special permission.

You cannot go to a movie or night club in the heart of town, nor enjoy any of the other normal recreational facilities your white teammates enjoy so matter of factly.

You cannot bring your wife and children to the town where you are training because accommodations are not available where you are imprisoned.

You cannot, even if there are facilities, take them to the town’s sprawling beaches or parks, unless, of course, they are designated as “Negro.”

You cannot do anything that you would normally do in any of the major league cities where you make your living during the summer.

You are quartered in a neighborhood that ordinarily you would be ashamed to be seen in.

You are horribly embarrassed each day when the bus returning the players from the ball park stops on “this side of the railroad tracks” and deposits you in “Colored Town,” and then proceeds on to the plush hotel where your white teammates live in splendor and luxury.

You suffered a bruised leg sliding into second base, but you cannot receive immediate treatment from the club trainer because he is living in the “white” hotel. If he can get away during the night and come to your segregated quarters, he will, of course; but for obvious reasons, he prefers to wait until daylight.

Your wife cannot call you in case of emergency from your home because the place where you are incarcerated does not have phone facilities available at all times.

That is what it is like to be a Negro big leaguer in Florida during spring training . . . And the story has been only half told.

The spring training headquarters for the White Sox was the Sarasota Terrace Hotel, which banned journalist Smith and the black players. When Smith pressed the owner, a building contractor named James Ewell, to explain his policy, Ewell said he was following the social practices of the Sarasota community. Also, he claimed that if he opened his establishment to blacks he would lose contracting work: “My clients throughout Florida and other sections of the south would reject my business, I believe.” The White Sox situation was made more interesting by the fact that the team’s president, Bill Veeck, had been in the forefront of integrating baseball and was not oblivious to the plight of his black players. Veeck had found another place for them, the DeSoto Motel, which was run by Edward Wachtel and his wife, Lillian, a white Jewish couple from New York, who had retired to Florida and wanted in their own “quiet” way to break the segregation policies of their new home. For this gesture, the Wachtels received anonymous bomb threats, hate mail, and late-night telephone calls warning that crosses would be burned on their lawn. Their modest green-and-white one-story motel was located in a white neighborhood on Route 301 a mile or so from the rest of the team. The DeSoto was clean but modest, with far fewer services than the Sarasota Terrace. The neon sign out front boasted Heated * Air Conditioned * Overnites * Efficiences.

Veeck had tried to balance the conditions by hiring a cook, maid service, and transportation to and from the ball park. On the road, he had made the bold stand of pulling the White Sox from a hotel in Miami because it rejected his black players. Still, it wasn’t until Wendell Smith began his incessant campaign that the White Sox took the final step of leasing their own hotel in Sarasota so the entire team could stay together.
Down at the Pirates training camp in Fort Myers, where conditions were worse, Courier sports editor Bill Nunn Jr., a journalistic disciple of Smith, was determined to lend his voice to the integration campaign. From his first day in town, Nunn began interviewing players and club executives for a full-page story. There had been few advances since 1955, the first Pirates camp in Fort Myers, when young Clemente was sent off to a rooming house in the Dunbar Heights section of town where he had to eat and sleep apart from his teammates. Including top minor leaguers, there were now fifteen black players in the Pirates camp, led by Clemente and Gene Baker, a veteran infielder. In interviews with Nunn, both expressed their disgust. “We live in a world apart down here,” Baker told Nunn. “We don’t like it and we’ve voiced our objections. We only hope we get action.” At the ball park during the day, Baker said, he enjoyed talking to teammates Don Hoak and Gino Cimoli about their shared passion, greyhound racing. But when they went to the dog track at night, Baker had to go through the entrance marked “Colored” and sit apart from them.

Clemente was described as “bitter” about the situation. Here he was, a star player on the world champions of baseball, a reservist in the U.S. Marine Corps, still treated like a second-class citizen. “There is nothing for us to do down here,” he told Nunn. “We go to the ball park, play cards, and watch television. In a way it’s like being in prison. Everybody else on the team has fun during spring training. They swim, play golf, and go to the beaches. The only thing we can do is put in time until we head North. It’s no fun.”

Later, when asked to list his heroes, Clemente would place Martin Luther King Jr. at the top of the list. He supported integration, the norm in Puerto Rico, and believed in King’s philosophy of nonviolence. Yet in some ways his sensibility brought him closer to Malcolm X. He detested any response to Jim Crow segregation that made him seem to beg. In his early years with the Pirates, whenever the team stopped at a roadside restaurant on the way to or from a spring training away game, the black players would remain on the bus, waiting for white teammates to bring out food for them. Clemente put a stop to it by telling his black teammates that anyone who begged for food would have to fight him to get it. As he recalled the scene later, he went to Joe L. Brown, the Pirates general manager, and said the situation was demeaning. “So I say to Joe Brown, ‘We won’t travel anymore with the bus. If we can’t eat where the white players eat I don’t want to go with the bus.’ So Joe Brown said, ‘Well, we’re going to get a station wagon for you fellows to travel in.’ And [now] we’re traveling in a station wagon.” That still left a long way to go to reach equality.

During the first week of exhibition games, Nunn interviewed Brown and asked him why he allowed the team to be divided by segregation. The general manager said that he had met with the Fort Myers town fathers, who told him local law prohibited the mingling of races in hotels or motels, but that he felt he was making progress in getting them to change their practices. “I talked to all of the city officials about this situation of separate quarters for our players this year. I didn’t go to these men to make demands,” Brown said. “I explained our problem to them and told them we wanted integration at all levels for our players. I was pleased with the reception I received. The city officials listened to my complaints and appeared receptive. They didn’t make any promises but I believe they are just as eager to have this problem solved as we are.” Integration would take time, Brown told Nunn. He considered it a step forward that city officials even agreed to talk about it. Brown was a Californian who had no use for segregation, but he also was a businessman who did not want to alienate the Fort Myers establishment. “Frankly, we have no real complaints against the city of Fort Myers,” he concluded. “We have been treated wonderfully since coming here. The facilities are good and I’ve heard no objections from the Negro members of our club on the segregation issue.”

That last comment reflected a common attitude among baseball executives, and many sportswriters, who were so lulled by their own comfortable situations and the lazy ease of their sport in springtime that it was difficult for them to see the reality. When the Fort Myers Boosters Club held a Pirates Welcome Luncheon at the Hideaway, the guest list included Brown and manager Danny Murtaugh, Pennsylvania Governor David Lawrence, Ford Frick, the baseball commissioner, Warren Giles, the president of the National League, and several heroes of the World Series, but not Clemente, who could not get into the building unless he worked as a waiter or dishwasher. That same day, at ten in the morning, a forty-three-minute highlight film of the World Series was shown at the Edison Theater downtown, and notices announced there was no charge and “the public is invited—men, women and children.” As long as they were white. When the Fort Myers Country Club sponsored its annual Pirates Golf Tourney, the News-Press listed the foursomes, comprised of players, coaches, businessmen, and sportswriters. Brown and Murtaugh played, along with Groat and Friend and Schofield and Stuart and twenty more members of the Pirates organization. The Pirates were described as acting “like boys let out of school.” When the golfing was done, they were all served “a bountiful buffet dinner.” Clemente and his black teammates were back in Dunbar Heights.

In the bonhomie of the occasion, no one noticed who wasn’t there. Ducky Schofield, the utility infielder, was perhaps typical of white Pirates who were not racist but also did not seem to take into account how social conditions might have deeper effects on black teammates. When asked later whether Clemente was disliked by some of the Pirates of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Schofield said: “I’m sure there were some who didn’t like him. . . . Maybe it was because he didn’t put forth a whole lot of energy as far as being one of the guys. I think he pretty much stuck to himself quite a bit. In those days, guys ran in groups. Guys would eat together, have a couple of beers. Not that he had to do it, but I never saw him do it.”

Exclusive events like the Fort Myers welcome luncheon and golf outing were held in spring-training towns throughout Florida. But unlike previous springs, this time they were loudly criticized. The most attention was drawn to St. Petersburg, which called itself the capital of the Grapefruit League as home to the Yankees and Cardinals. Both teams had been staying at segregated hotels, the Cardinals at the Vinoy Park and the Yankees at the Soreno, but under pressure from the local NAACP and black players, the system was finally being cracked. When Soreno’s management refused to change its policy, the Yankees picked up and moved across the state to Fort Lauderdale, and in the aftermath, St. Pete officials were so worried about losing baseball entirely that the Cardinals were finally allowed to house their entire team in the same hotel. Small victories of that sort were being won here and there, rivulets in the mighty stream of civil rights. On March 13, in Miami Beach, Floyd Patterson defended his heavyweight boxing crown in a title match with Ingemar Johansson, and along with Patterson’s victory the most newsworthy aspect of the fight was that, at the champ’s insistence, the color bar was lifted in the Convention Hall. “Negroes were spotted freely among the predominantly white crowd in all sections,” the New York Times reported, and “so far as could be noted, no incidents arose from the integrated set-up.” It was an off-day for the Pirates, and third-baseman Don Hoak, who had been a decent amateur boxer, covered the event for a Pittsburgh newspaper. Yet in Sarasota and other spring-training cities, black ballplayers wanting to watch Patterson were not allowed into the whites-only theaters.

Change was slow, and did not occur unprovoked. One of the pivotal events that spring came when the chamber of commerce held a Salute to Baseball at the St. Petersburg Yacht Club. Bill White, the Cardinals first baseman, blasted the lily-white event as a symbol of baseball’s capitulation to Southern racism. His words echoed across the state and nation. “I think about this every minute of the day,” White told Joe Reichler of United Press International. “This thing keeps gnawing at my heart. When will we be made to feel human?”

“Clemente” can be ordered here and here. Mr. Maraniss has just kicked-off a promotional tour. He’ll be at the Barnes and Noble near Lincoln Center tomorrow, Wednesday, April 26th at 7:00 p.m.