Curveball (6 page)

Dressed as she nearly always was, outside of school, in dungarees and a clean shirt, Tomboy stood waiting for the right moment to approach Gabby. Street had no idea who she was, what she wanted, or why she kept studying him so intently. She had a beat-up old baseball glove in one hand and held her other arm cautiously against her side. Two months earlier, Tomboy had fractured her arm while riding her bike around Arundel and Washington in Saint Paul. She hit something in the road, tumbled into traffic, and instinctively stretched out her arms to break the fall. As she landed, a car hit her. “Miss Marcenia Stone,” the newspaper reported, “was struck by a hit and run driver Tuesday night.”
³³
The injury had taken nearly six weeks to heal, but Tomboy prided herself on being tough and had rejoined her team. Not giving in to pain was another way Tomboy proved she was “one of the boys.” Once when she took a turn as catcher in the league, she was hit by a ball and knocked unconscious. She decided to give up catching—“I left that alone”—but the injury never once made her swear off baseball.
³⁴

Gabby Street looked at this girl with curiosity; he knew nothing about what her arms could do—injured or otherwise. As a white man who never read black newspapers and barely knew they existed, he would not have known that local reporters called the young woman observing him “one of the best young girl athletes in St. Paul.”
³⁵

A teammate once described Gabby Street as being built like a sergeant, “rather dour of countenance and with a real vocabulary in the two languages required in the army—English and profane.”
³⁶
Without thinking, Street gruffly shooed Tomboy away and turned his attention back to the boys in the baseball school. Undaunted by his rough demeanor, she returned to the school a while later, stood in the same place outside the group of white teenagers, and waited to ask Street if she could join them. Tomboy had no illusions and understood that a girl playing baseball was not only unwelcome but was also considered reprehensible to some. “[My parents] would have stopped me if they could, but there was nothing they could do about it,” she said. Neighborhood boys “told me to go home and be a girl and others asked why I insisted in playing baseball.” She was called a “bull dagger” and “was did everything but spit on,” Tomboy later said, but she continued to play.
³⁷
In the past her persistence had paid off, so she continued to wait until Gabby Street, annoyed that she had returned to his school once more, told her to get out and go home. Girls didn’t play baseball, he thought, and he wasn’t going to waste his time on some black girl who no doubt couldn’t keep up. Baseball required discipline and a dedication to strategy. Why include a girl when a boy might really get something out of the instruction? Baseball is “a good thing for boys,” he always told reporters, and that’s why his teams always invited white boys out to the park before games “to try their baseball wings,” as he put it. Baseball brought out the best qualities in a boy, he said, and helped young men become professional. “Professional,” the word Gabby Street used to motivate his young charges, was the same word that signaled excellence to Tomboy Stone.
³⁸

Of course, Street being Street, he couldn’t simply teach baseball strategy to the white boys; he also had to pepper his lessons with stories about the old days. He had a storehouse of anecdotes that he was happy to share with anyone who loved baseball. Before spring training that year, Street talked baseball to civic and professional groups in Saint Paul—sometimes appearing before as many as two luncheons and two dinners a day. He accompanied his talks with lantern slides depicting the lighter side of baseball and generated so much good will in the community that a newspaper said he was as good as a “March thaw.”
³⁹
Sitting now with his baseball school boys at the Lexington ballpark, Street would put aside a strategy session for a while and spin a tale. It was almost as if he were back with the St. Louis Cardinals after a game, sitting around the hotel with a clutch of young teammates gathered to hear the old man sit up late, smoke his pipe, and talk of playing with Ruth and Cobb and Big Train. While hearing Street’s tales of baseball’s great players was thrilling, everyone always wanted to hear the same story. It wasn’t about playing baseball but about the ball—the one Street caught in Washington, D.C. If he tired of telling the legendary story, he didn’t let on. Street would lean back, rewind his memory nearly thirty years, and begin.

It was like this, he said. It was 1908. He was twenty-six. It was the year Ty Cobb and Honus Wagner won the batting championship. One night a group of writers drinking at the National Press Club in Washington were talking baseball and arguing about who was the best catcher who ever lived. “Street,” Preston Gibson, the society editor of the
Washington Post
, said. Gibson claimed Street had such a deft touch, he could pick daisies with a catcher’s mitt. I bet he could catch anything, he wagered. How about catching a ball tossed from the top of the Washington Monument, one of the writers suggested. After pestering Street with the dare for weeks, Gibson finally cornered the catcher and asked if they could try to accomplish the feat the next day. Street agreed, and on the morning of August 21, 1908, he accompanied Gibson and few onlookers to the Washington Monument. Street looked up—555 feet up—into the blinding sun to the top of the obelisk. Gibson had called ahead and received permission from the superintendent of grounds to try the stunt. Street looked up again. He was bareheaded, in plain clothes, and had not brought his chest protector or any of the other regulation equipment he usually wore when catching for the Washington Senators. Gibson headed to the top of the Monument with a basket of baseballs and a twenty-foot wooden chute he had cobbled together to send the balls hurtling through the air. Gibson carefully set the first ball on the chute and sent it rolling. On the ground below, Street lost the ball in the sun, and it landed with a heavy thud on the grass. A second, third, and fourth ball fell out of the sky. Again, Street could not find them against the sun. Let’s move to the shady side, someone suggested, and Street walked around to where he hoped he could get a better look at the balls. He positioned himself to make a waist-high catch rather than one over his head. That way, I may only break a wrist or an arm, he thought. Gibson rolled a few more balls down the chute. Street missed them all. Toss them out a bit further away from the Monument, he called to Gibson. Street could see Gibson’s arm as it stretched out the window, but the ball was invisible. The strain of looking up into the sky for so long had grown too much for Street, so he asked his friend George McBride—the Senators shortstop and his old pal who lent him money after the San Francisco earthquake— to spot the balls for him as they came hurtling down. Street figured he would only look up when McBride told him to, when the ball was about two hundred feet over his head. A tenth, eleventh, twelfth ball rushed past Street. One ball remained: the thirteenth. Gibson let the ball fly. McBride yelled out. Street looked up and instinctively raised his glove above his head as though he were snagging a pop foul for the Senators.

He caught it.
^*

Gibson later told Street that when he caught the ball, the pop sounded like a .38 revolver going off. The next day, fans at the Senators game, who had read about the feat, gave Street a wild ovation. Newspaper headlines proclaimed “Fans Get the Willies Figuring on Street’s Feat.”
⁴⁰
The ballistics department of the army estimated the ball fell at 290 miles an hour, with an equivalent weight of nearly three hundred pounds. “Sure they were heavy,” Street later said, “but not too heavy. I just used my regular mitt—no sponge or anything.”
⁴¹

Tomboy loved old baseball stories as much as the Saint Paul boys at Street’s baseball school. It would have surprised Gabby Street to know the young black girl who kept pestering him knew baseball history better than most and had read nearly every baseball book published.
⁴²
She would have liked to hear about the old catcher’s mitt that he rigged to make balls sound extra loud when they slammed into the leather, or tales about how he had broken nine out of ten fingers in thirty years of catching, or about the time Pepper Martin put an alligator in the St. Louis Cardinals’ team car.
⁴³
Tomboy certainly was not what Street expected. And when Tomboy showed up one more time at his baseball school after being told to go away, the old white man began to smile at her determination. Of course, Tomboy did not realize that Gabby Street was not what she expected, either. Street was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Street once told New York sportswriter Fred Lieb that he was a member of the Klan. “Gabby Street, Rogers Hornsby, and Tris Speaker, fellow stars from the old Confederate states, told me they were members of the Ku Klux Klan. I don’t know whether Cobb was a Klansman, but I suspect he was,” Lieb wrote.
⁴⁴
Lieb’s hunch about Cobb was well founded. Lieb said Cobb “had a contempt for black people” and, in Cobb’s own language, “never would take their lip.” When Cobb was with the Detroit Tigers, he stayed out of Ohio for a year and a half to avoid arrest in Cleveland for knifing a black waiter. Lieb reported that the Tigers settled the case out of court by paying the victim.
⁴⁵

Street’s racism, while not as violent as Cobb’s hatred, nevertheless revealed itself in the way he reduced black people to stock characters, erasing their individuality and even their names. While most people assumed Charles Street’s nickname, “Gabby,” came from his constant chatter behind the plate, the name actually had roots in his racism. “We used to call the colored boys ‘Gabby’ down in Alabama, and when I wanted a new baseball thrown into the game I used to call, ‘Hey Gabby, where’s the baseball?’ … If you see a black boy and want him, and you don’t know his name, you yell, ‘Hey, Gabby.’ It works in St. Louis, too, and if you don’t believe it, try it. To me all black boys have been ‘Gabby,’ and I got my nickname from the use of that word and not, as is commonly believed, because I am a chatterbox.”
⁴⁶

Tomboy was not immune to the reach of the Klan, even in Saint Paul. In 1923, several universities in the Big Ten had student Klan groups, and units of the Ku Klux Klan existed in Saint Paul and Minneapolis. The 1923 University of Minnesota yearbook featured a photograph of a KKK homecoming float rolling down the streets of the Twin Cities.
⁴⁷
At one time in the 1920s the Minnesota KKK published three newspapers and bought twenty acres of land in Owatonna in hopes of creating a “Klan Park”—a development that never materialized, though the Klan owned the land for years.
⁴⁸
Minnesota Klan activities primarily focused on Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and socialists, although the Klan’s reach would have intimidated anyone who was not a white Protestant. Nationally, the Klan’s influence peaked in the early 1920s, when it claimed nearly three million members. By the 1930s, membership had fallen to several thousand men. The 1925 murder conviction of Indiana Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson virtually ended national Klan activities. When Street came to Saint Paul in the 1930s, the Klan’s public demonstrations were almost over: the last Minnesota meeting had been held in 1927. Public displays of racism, however, took other forms. The same year that Street ran his baseball school, Saint Paul’s celebrated International Festival of Nations admitted “confusion” over how blacks would be depicted in a parade. Black residents were represented by a “procession featuring Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, James Weldon Johnson, Marion Anderson, and a group of tap dancers—as indigenous Americans.”
⁴⁹

By the 1930s, some men like Gabby Street who had been members of the Klan in its early days expressed their beliefs less in violent action and more in personal philosophy. They would not let their racist principles stand in the way of practical or economic pursuits. At times, they even could treat an individual black person or a Catholic with kindness and respect while at the same time denouncing the racial and religious groups the person represented. When the Alabama native Street saw Tomboy Stone return to his baseball school time and time again, he may have seen her passion for the game more than her race, her gender, or her religion. He could make an exception for one black girl who seemed obsessed with baseball without re-evaluating his own racist attitudes toward all black citizens. After watching Tomboy return to his baseball camp so many times with her request to be included, Street finally relented. He temporarily put aside his racist assumptions and told the persistent girl to go out on the field and “show those boys up.”
⁵⁰

Street later recalled, “I just couldn’t get rid of her until I gave her a chance. Every time I chased her away, she would go around the corner and come back to plague me again.” When Tomboy took to the field at Gabby Street’s baseball school, her ability astonished the old manager. He was impressed with the way she fielded: her neat handling of hard-hit grounders, the way she snuck up on slow rollers and stretched to “spear line drives.” Her batting caught his eye as well. She had discerning judgment and knew when to be patient. Her hitting was a repertoire of long flies, line drives, and “grass cutters.” Street took a liking to Tomboy, and she enjoyed the old catcher as well. As they talked, Tomboy confessed that she wished she had more professional equipment, especially professional baseball shoes like some of the white boys had. My mother couldn’t afford to buy any, she said, neglecting to add that her parents wanted to keep her appetite for baseball under control. “I haven’t anything to do with the color line that keeps your people out of baseball,” Tomboy remembered Street telling her. “And I haven’t got anything with that other unwritten law that keeps women out of the game,” he said. “But if I did …”
⁵¹
Several days later, on July 17, Tomboy celebrated her fifteenth birthday. The Old Sarge gave her baseball shoes.