agate type

dobie moore update

Here’s a copy of the actual death certificate for Walter Moore, whose death record was found by Peter Morris, and who might be the Kansas City Monarchs shortstop Dobie Moore:

The informant, “Mildred Toles,” seems likely to be Walter’s sister, Mildred, who married James Tate.  In the 1940 census, the Tates, Walter Moore, and another sister, Anna King, lived at 1022 Alfred, the same address Walter gave on his WW2 draft card and that’s on his death certificate.

Most intriguing, though, is the information that Walter Moore had been “in this community” for 21 years.  That puts his arrival in Detroit in 1926—the very year in which Dobie Moore was shot and his Negro league career ended.

In addition, Mark Aubrey has pointed out that Walter’s younger brother Allen is listed as a “Baseball Player” in the 1930 census:

Dobie Moore’s younger brother, Pete Moore, was a Detroit ballplayer, as late as 1941:

(Chicago Defender, May 31, 1941, p. 22)

There was also a Pete Moore playing for a team called the Black Mohawks of Bradford, Pa., in the late 1920s.  Was this also Pete’s brother, and were Allen Moore and Pete Moore the same person?

If the Walter Moore we’re looking at was not Dobie Moore, it seems like quite a string of coincidences: 1) same name; 2) both were from Atlanta, and were the same age; 3) both were in Detroit in the 1930s and 1940s; 4) both had a younger brother who was also a ballplayer (I haven’t compiled the date, but there were not that many black men who listed their occupation as ballplayer in the 1930 census); 5) our Walter Moore arrived in Detroit in 1926, the same year in which Dobie Moore was forced to quit the Monarchs.

And if this Walter Moore isn’t Dobie, where’s Dobie?  I haven’t found a trace of anyone else who could be him.

However: this Walter Moore died in Detroit on August 20, 1947.  As I have noted, Dobie Moore was supposed to have been one of the pallbearers at George Carr’s funeral in Los Angeles in January, 1948.  Not only that, but I found another sighting of Dobie Moore later that year, in Chicago:

(Chicago Defender, June 19, 1948, p. 10)

These 1948 sightings of Dobie Moore could be mistakes.  And the circumstantial evidence linking this Walter Moore to the Monarch shortstop is pretty convincing.  But it would be great to get one solid link between this Walter and the ballplayer—something like a reference to Dobie’s younger brother Allen (rather than Pete), or anything giving the name of any of Dobie’s relatives, or a record or document that establishes Walter Moore of Detroit as a ballplayer himself.

the death of dobie moore?

Peter Morris, author of Game of Inches and discoverer of William Edward White’s status as the first African American ballplayer in the major leagues, has a new blog—and in his very first entry floats a possible death date for the elusive Dobie Moore.  Peter found a death record for Walter Moore, born February 8, 1895, in Atlanta, Georgia, which matches the February 8, 1896, birth date on the World War II draft card originally found by John Bowman.  Given his parents’ names (Waddie Moore and Julia Drummond), Peter was able to trace this Walter Moore’s family back to Atlanta in the 1900 census, and forward to Detroit in 1930 and 1940—and, of course, Detroit was where Dobie settled after his Negro league career ended.

As he notes, there are a number of oddities here, including the evident fact that “Walter” Moore seems to be called “Lewis” in earlier census records.  Dobie Moore had a brother, Pete, who played (presumably semipro) ball in Detroit in the 1930s, but there’s no Pete in the Moore family (could he be Allen, the brother who moved to Detroit?).

Probably the biggest issue is that this Walter Moore died on August 20, 1947.   In January, 1948, Dobie Moore, according to the Los Angeles Sentinel, served as a pallbearer at his old teammate George Carr’s funeral in Los Angeles:

(Los Angeles Sentinel, January 29, 1948, p. 11)

It’s quite possible that the Sentinel was simply wrong.  It’s also possible that the Walter Moore we’ve identified is the wrong person, too.  At this point there’s not enough information to say for sure.  If I had to bet, though, I would wager that Peter has finally found Dobie’s death date.

Anyway, I’ve ordered a copy of the actual death certificate, so we’ll see if that adds anything to what we know.

(By the way, here’s why all the other birth and death dates that have been given for Moore are almost certainly wrong.)

joe hewitt

Joe Hewitt was a scrappy infielder and base-stealing leadoff hitter who played for a number of teams in the 1910s and 1920s, notably the St. Louis Giants/Stars and the Detroit Stars.  Here’s the Indianapolis Freeman writing about him on April 3, 1920:

“Joe Hewitt, the St. Louisian, who cavorts around the short-stop territory for the Wolverine aggregation, is considered by the well informed, to be one of the most valuable assets that any club in the new circuit can lay claim to.  Hewitt is a slashing left hand hitter, a nifty fielder and with a wealth of baseball brains, acquired through his familiarity of the methods employed by the half dozen big teams of the country, he takes high rank in the class of those infielders unanimously recognized as great.”

Hewitt was one player whose death nobody (to my knowledge) had tracked down.  Well, Dwayne Isgrig has found his death certificate, which shows that he died of tubercular pneumonia on April 2, 1948, in St. Louis.  It also tells us he was born in New Market, Alabama—his family had moved to Nashville sometime prior to 1900, and it was well-known that he had come from Nashville, so it was assumed he was born there.

The death certificate also tells us he was buried in Oakdale Cemetery in St. Louis, and Dwayne has confirmed that his grave is unmarked.

the rabbit’s foot company’s baseball team, 1905

Here’s a photograph from the Indianapolis Freeman (July 15, 1905), showing the baseball team affiliated with the “Rabbit’s Foot Company,” a minstrel comedy troupe and band that marked their arrival in each town they played with an extravagant street parade.  The company seems to have mostly played the South, at least in 1905. 

The ball club featured only a couple of players I’ve heard of:

Robert Gilkerson, an infielder who would later run the Lost Island Giants and, more famously, Gilkerson’s Union Giants (I think he’s the third from left in the back row);

George Washington, who pitched pretty well for the Cuban X Giants in 1906 (3-1, 3.09 against top black teams) and appeared again for the Philadelphia Giants in 1908.  I’m not positive this is the same guy; the Cubans/Philly Giants player was born in Savannah, Georgia, while the caption has this Washington hailing from Goldsboro, North Carolina.  In either case I don’t know which player in the photo is Washington.

Preparing to pitch for the Philadelphia Giants in Connecticut on July 1, 1908, George Washington suffered a heart attack in the club house and died.  A death certificate was filed for him in Philadelphia, on which his profession was listed as “Ball Player”; he had been married, and he was buried in Brunswick, Georgia.

(Washington Post, July 2, 1908, p. 8)

player of the week: john garcía

In Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball (1907) there appears the photo to the left below, of “A. Garcia (deceased), Genuine Cuban Giants.”  In Jerry Malloy’s edition, García appears in the index as “Antonio García,” and a few other sources seem to suggest that this García is Antonio María García, the greatest Cuban player of the nineteenth century.  However, A. M. García, who was nicknamed “El Inglés” for his tall stature and pale complexion, is pictured in the photo on the right (from Jorge Figueredo’s Who’s Who in Cuban Baseball):



They are, I think, clearly different people.  This photo, showing the slender García on the cover of El Score, makes the difference more obvious.  A. M. García did travel to the United States with Abel Linares’s All-Cubans in 1903, 1904, and 1905, but to my knowledge neither he nor any other Cuban player ever appeared with the Cuban Giants, which was a thoroughly African-American team.  Moreover, El Inglés passed away in Cuba on July 24, 1923. 

The García pictured in Sol White’s book appears in team photos of the Cuban Giants from 1902 (courtesy of Brian Campf) and 1903 (courtesy of John Thorn):



So who was he?  The Elmira, N.Y., Daily Gazette and Free Press (October 15, 1904) gives us an idea:

“In the last two or three years that the Cuban Giants have played baseball in this city,the position of catcher has been filled by a little, round chap who did not look much like a baseball crack.  He resembled more an apple dumpling than anything else, but when play commenced it was soon seen that he filled the bill.  He was agile as a cat and gathered in wild pitches and foul flies with a regularity and deftness that won the admiration of even those whom he put out.  He was John Garcia and had many friends here.”

The Daily Gazette was speaking in the past tense for a reason.  For the full story let’s turn to this front page article in the New York Times of October 2, 1904:



I was able to obtain John García’s death certificate, which confirms the details here, and adds a little more.  He was a “Base ball player” by trade who died on October 1, 1904, at King’s Park, Jamaica, from causes that aren’t completely legible in the (awful) copy I was given, but include an “aortic aneurysm and haemorrhage.”  Moreover, while the Times was skeptical about his national identity, the death certificate asserts that he was born in Cuba, giving him the singular honor of being the only genuine Cuban on the “Genuine Cuban Giants.”




News of his death spread quickly through upstate New York, where the Cuban Giants had barnstormed and where Garcia had gained “many friends,” in Elmira and elsewhere.  It soon emerged that he had taken his gregariousness further than anyone had imagined.  The dumpling-shaped but dextrous catcher, it turned out, had two wives.

One was black and one was white, and both tried to claim his body. The dispute caused “considerable excitement” at Everitt’s, the black undertaking establishment where García had been taken.  Evidently García had constructed two separate worlds and, possibly, two separate racial identities for himself.  The newspapers didn’t name either woman, but the black Mrs. García was known to his teammates and to the black undertaker.  Her address (874 Atlantic Ave.) was entered on his death certificate, which also classified García as “black.” 

The other Mrs. García was a “buxom white woman,” according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (October 7, 1904), who lived at 149 Underhill Avenue in Brooklyn and maintained that García’s father had been an “Indian” (apparently in order to establish that he was not black.)  In the words of the Daily Eagle, “she admitted that García occasionally stayed at 874 Atlantic avenue,” but produced a marriage certificate “dated last April in Brooklyn.”  The response of the black Mrs. García, if any, was not recorded in the press. 

Ultimately the white Mrs. García carried the day, securing her husband’s removal to the Underhill address under the care of a different undertaker, and arranging for his burial in Evergreen Cemetery.  Presumably the “little round chap” who gave his life for the Genuine Cuban Giants still resides there today.

This piece was originally published in the Outsider Baseball Bulletin (Vol. I, Issue 16; September 29, 2010).

jack hannibal, arthur coleman, mckinley brewer

This might be among the least-noticed of my work at the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database, but I’m personally very happy about being able to identify some minor Indianapolis players from the 1910s.

1) Jack Hannibal was a middleweight boxer who moonlighted as a professional baseball and football player in the 1910s and 1920s.  As I tried to track him down in official records, it soon became clear that “Jack Hannibal” was a boxing pseudonym.  Eventually it turned out that his real name was Porter Lee Floyd.  He was born in Campbellsville, Kentucky, in 1891, and moved to Indianapolis with his parents when he was five.  A high school track star, Floyd first entered the ring professionally in 1912, and he boxed, mostly locally, until 1928.  Supposedly out of 100 fights in his career he lost only five.  As a professional ballplayer he appeared intermittently in the outfield for local Indianapolis teams in the 1910s, appearing under four names: Porter, Lee, Floyd, and Hannibal.  Against the best black professional competition from 1913 to 1916, he batted 28 for 65 in 17 games, .431/.456/.600.  He continued to be active and popular on the local sports scene until his death in 1949 at the early age of 58.  According to the Indianapolis player and journalist Tiny Baldwin, Jack Hannibal was

“a quiet man, who always managed to talk at the right time, and only the right time.  Jack put each player on a high pedestal and made him feel he was on top of the world, and that way gave the players that little extra something which made each give his everything every time he strode onto the diamond.  His famous words were: ‘Every time I get out of Indianapolis, I like Indianapolis that much more’.” (Indianapolis Recorder, August 20, 1955, p. 11)

2)  It was previously thought that Clarence Coleman, a longtime catcher for the Union Giants and other barnstorming teams, also pitched for several Midwestern teams from about 1916 to 1921.  As I compiled stats for the late 1910s and early 1920s, it soon emerged that there must have been two Colemans active at the time: the catcher Clarence, who was a fairly well-known figure, and another Coleman who was a left-handed pitcher.  In 1920, for example, the southpaw Coleman pitched for the Dayton Marcos while Clarence Coleman was catching for the Union Giants.  Julius Culpepper observed the “big south paw” doing mound duty for the Marcos:

“A bird by the name of Coleman was put in to do the hurling…The chap had a strange kind of delivery, the like of which has never been before.  It fooled both the batter and the umpire as well for a while but at least it faded and did not last long” (Chicago Whip, July 24, 1920).

Coleman was only a marginal pitcher, and for a long time I assumed I would never found out anything else about him.  But I recently ran across this letter, printed in Tiny Baldwin’s “Passing Sportinalities” column in the Indianapolis Recorder:

“Mr. Tiney –
    I can’t place you but read your column every week.  Indianapolis is my native home – born on the Southside, raised on the Eastside.  Played with the Marion Ramblers from their start until they disbanded.  Played with Bowser’s or Jewell’s ABC’s after they split from C. I. Taylor, with such players as Todd Allen, Cat Francis, Puggie Hutchinson, George Board, Jack Hannibal, Blackwell, Rogers, Jack Watts and Joe ‘45’ Scotland.
     George Abram and Warner Jewell were managers.  I was a left-handed pitcher.  About Elvis Holland – he used to ask me about holding the ball.  It has been 40 years since I saw him.  He and Paige are about the same age.  I am 60 years old and Holland is younger than I.
     Yours truly –
     Arthur Coleman”
(Indianapolis Recorder, April 12, 1958, p. 14)

“Elvis Holland” is of course the great pitcher, and Indianapolis native, Bill Holland (full name Elvis William Holland), who was Arthur Coleman’s teammate on the 1919 Jewell’s A.B.C.s.

3) A player of a similar vintage, a pitcher/outfielder named Brewer, had been identified in some reference works as “Luther Brewer.”  I concluded that this was a mistake resulting from the omission of a comma in the summary section of a box score in a 1919 issue of the Indianapolis Freeman; Luther Farrell, who went by the name of Al Farrell early in his career, had pitched for the 1919 Jewell’s A.B.C.s alongside Brewer (and Arthur Coleman).  “Luther” and “Brewer” were listed side by side in the box score without a comma between them, and I think it’s possibility that a researcher thought this meant there was someone named “Luther Brewer,” rather than two different players.

Anyway, I was able to confirm this, again via a Tiny Baldwin article, this one from 1955 (see the bottom of the first column):

(Indianapolis Recorder, August 6, 1955, p. 11)

Brewer passed away on September 23, 1955, just six weeks after his words were published in the Recorder.

 

found: jim jeffries and tom johnson

Jim Jeffries and Tom Johnson

A couple of notes on work related to the Negro Leagues Database.  We’ve put up two recent updates, the first with statistics for the American Series in Cuba from 1904 to 1915, all the exhibition series played in Havana by major league and Negro league teams.  The second update, just last week, included a large amount of new biographical research, much of it having to do with birth and death information, handedness, and player heights and weights.  Here are notes on a couple of the more significant pieces of research included.

1) There’s been a lot of talk (in the comments here and elsewhere) about Jim Jeffries, the A.B.C.s southpaw who won 21 games against Negro league opposition in 1921.  I’ve already talked about his birthplace (Louisville, Kentucky) over at Seamheads.  As part of the new update to the DB, I’ve also been able to establish his time and place of death.  He passed away in Pulaski, Tennessee, on November 28, 1938, his death record still listing his profession as “Baseball Player.”

2) For several years I’ve been looking for Tom Johnson, the American Giants’ righthander who went 14-4 in 1916, 13-2 in 1920, and 46-20 overall in the years we’ve covered so far.  He was the only important American Giants player in these years who had gone completely undetected in any of the official records I’d been able to examine (draft cards, census records, etc.).  I had found a couple of mentions of him as a District of Columbia native, and this letter, from his brother Wilber “Steamboat” Johnson, also a ballplayer, who was serving overseas in the A.E.F. in 1918:

(Chicago Defender, June 15, 1918, p. 12)

(Tom also served in Europe during World War I, drafted into the 365th Pioneer Infantry.)  Wilber’s playing for the Washington, Baltimore, and Belmont Giants seemed to further associate the family with the Baltimore-D.C. area, but that lead went nowhere.  I had Tom’s name and his playing record, but nothing else—no idea how old he was, where he was from, when or where he died.

That’s how it stood for several years, until I recently unearthed his death certificate.  Turns out his full name was Thomas Jefferson Johnson and he was born in Bryan, Texas on April 22, 1889.  He died of tuberculosis in Chicago on September 22, 1926, just 37 years old.  Though he seems to have retired from baseball after the 1921 season, he continued to be involved in the game as an umpire, and his death certificate still listed him as a “Base Ball Player” with the American Giants.

not all ball players are broke: zack foreman of the kansas city monarchs

Note: The following essay was originally published in the Outsider Baseball Bulletin, October 6, 2010.

“News reaches this office that Zack Foreman is dead.  The letter does not state the cause.  Zack, the fans will remember, was with the Monarchs this summer.  He and his brother own a whole town down in Oklahoma.  Both have money.  Zack purchased a Locomobile recently.  One day when he was playing in Kansas City he handed Rube Foster a small package and asked him to hold it for a minute.  Some one brushed against Rube and the package fell to the ground and broke open.  Rube noticed some money and wondered what was coming off.   Zack was gone so long Rube opened the package to fix it up right and here is what the big fellow found in what he was holding: Twenty-one hundred dollars in $1 bills and seven $50 bills.  When Zack returned Foster told him to let him know the next time because he (Foster) did not want to be responsible for any such sum as that.  Zack waved his hand and said, ‘Oh, that’s a small amount.’  And some fans think all ball players are broke.”
                --Frank Young, Chicago Defender, October 8, 1921

Funny how packages of money are so liable to burst open randomly like that.  Anyway, Zack Foreman, Kansas City Monarchs pitcher during their first two seasons (1920 and 1921), was probably a wealthy young man.  A Locomobile was a very high-end luxury car; the Model 48, introduced in 1919, cost an astonishing $10,000 (the equivalent of $130,000 in 2011).

 


So where did the money come from?  Did Zack and his brother really “own a whole town down in Oklahoma”?  And why did he die so young—only 27, rich, a professional athlete?
   
Zachariah Foreman, Jr., was born in July, 1893, near Redland in the Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory, just west of Fort Smith, Arkansas.  His father, Zack Sr., was born in the same area in the 1840s, not much more than a decade after the infamous Trail of Tears forced the majority of the Cherokee people west to the Indian Territory for good.  What’s often forgotten today is that wealthy Cherokees, like other affluent Southerners of the time, kept slaves—and those slaves accompanied them to the new territory.  Zack Sr. was thus born into slavery.  After the Civil War this black population attached to the Cherokee Nation became known as Cherokee freedmen.  A bitter controversy about the tribal status of their descendents continues to this day.
   
Whether or not the elder Zack thought of himself as a Cherokee (I’d guess he did), he was probably the sharpest businessman in the Cherokee Nation in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.  One of the main sources for his early career is the oral testimony of a white man from Sequoyah County named J. J. Cape, collected in the 1930s by the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).  Cape tells the Zack Foreman story like he was Jack and the Beanstalk.  No magic beans, but it all starts with a young boy and a cow, in this case a lame cow left behind by some men taking a herd to market. From a very young age Zack, presumably still a slave, had to work to support his widowed mother.  Sensing opportunity, he took charge of the abandoned cow and nursed her back to health.  The cow turned out to be pregnant, and when she gave birth to a calf, Zack Foreman had the beginnings of his own herd. 
   
Cape claimed that Zack Foreman, Sr., never learned to read or write, but still managed to make himself a successful cattleman and pillar of the community, eventually becoming “the wealthiest man, white or black, in the Cherokee Nation,” according to the Indianapolis Freeman (November 28, 1891).  He married a young schoolteacher named Mattie, started a family, built a store and a cotton gin.  When the Kansas City Southern railroad bypassed the small black community where the Foremans lived, Zack convinced them to build an extra track, a “spur,” linking his property to the main line.  He gave everybody in town work scraping and grading the road and laying the ties, allowing those who owed him money to pay off their debts this way, while the company put down the rails.  That way he could ship cattle or cotton directly from his land.  Thus Zack Foreman Sr. became “the only Negro in the United States at that time who privately owned a railroad.”
   
Their small town became known as Foreman, or sometimes Foreman’s Spur, and acquired a U.S. post office on October 31, 1898.  Mattie Foreman became the postmistress.  Every year on August 4 the small town held an Emancipation Proclamation Picnic, featuring barbecue, games, dancing, red lemonade.  “Zack and his wife were always crowned king and queen of the festival,” Cape recalled.  “They rode a pair of black horses and passed in review before the crowd after the crowning.  Everyone loved Zack and Mrs. Foreman.”
   
Zack Foreman Sr. died on August 5, 1916, the day after the Emancipation celebration.  According to the Fort Gibson New Era, “His funeral was very largely attended, blacks, whites, and Indians being present.”  He left behind four sons (Sheridan, Roscoe, Zack Jr., and Dewey) and two daughters (Rhoda and Urah), and a fortune worth at least $12,500, according to the newspapers.  That is more than a quarter of a million dollars in today’s money.
   
Zack Foreman Jr. grew up under very different circumstances than his father.  According to Phil Dixon, he attended Langston University, the first (and only) black college in Oklahoma.  How he became a professional ballplayer is unknown, though one possibility is that he came into contact with ballplayers in the Army.  There’s no direct evidence he was a veteran, but there were several on the Monarchs, of course (Bullet Rogan, Dobie Moore, Robert Fagan, Lemuel Hawkins). There is a piece of circumstantial, negative evidence in the fact that no draft card for Zack Foreman has surfaced.  One of the main reasons someone would not have filled out a draft card is if he were already in the military before the draft, having enlisted in the regular Army; and the 25th Infantry, the source for much of the Monarchs team, was regular Army.  None of the other Monarchs who had served in the 25th registered for the draft, either.
   
Whether or not he had been in the Army, by January 1920 Zack Foreman was back in Foreman, and he was married to a schoolteacher, like his father had been.  That June he appeared in several Negro National League games for the Kansas City Monarchs, though he didn’t see out the season with them.  In 1921 he became a semi-regular in the rotation, and won more often than he lost, finishing 7-4, 4.23.  As a pitcher he was evidently a soft tosser, with good control but very few strikeouts.  In July 1921 his cousin Sylvester Foreman joined the team as a catcher; unlike Zack, he would go on to a decade-long career in the Negro leagues.

  
Zack Foreman (L) and his cousin Sylvester, both members of the 1921 Kansas City Monarchs.
   
Zack’s last appearance with the Monarchs was on August 6 in Kansas City.  He was trounced 9 to 4 by the sad-sack Chicago Giants, exiting the game after eight innings, having given up 11 hits and eight runs and striking out no one.  It’s unclear whether he was injured or had simply been released by the Monarchs. Either way, he was in Foreman on Saturday, September 17, visiting family, while Sylvester continued with the Monarchs.

After midnight he engaged in a poker game at the gin house his father had built.  Between 4 and 5 in the morning a dispute arose.  Foreman jumped up from the table and put his hand in his pocket.  One of the other players, a man in his mid-thirties named John Foye, rushed at Foreman with a knife, and said, “Zack, don’t come out with nothing—if you do, I’ll cut your goddamn head off.”

“You might as well cut, because I’m coming out,” Foreman replied, and he drew a pistol.  After a tense moment, Foye and his brother-in-law ran out of the room.  Then Foreman put the gun in the scabbard in his overalls and went out after them.  Foye was waiting for him around the corner of the house, and shot him as he walked by.  The bullet entered the back of his head and lodged just behind his right eye.  He was taken to the porch of a nearby house, where he died within two hours, just yards from his father’s cotton gin.

It took a sheriff’s posse several hours and “a hard chase” to track down Foye, finally capturing him in nearby Cottonwood.  After several trials and appeals over the next several years, he was finally found guilty of manslaughter in the first degree, and sentenced to four years in the penitentiary.
   
By 1930, Zack’s older brother Roscoe had become the postmaster at Foreman, their mother’s old position; but the post office was shut down on August 31, 1936, swallowed up by the Depression and the Dust Bowl that decimated the local economy and led to mass migration out of Oklahoma.  When you look up “Foreman, Oklahoma,” on Google Maps, you find a few buildings or houses in the area, so there is still at least a hint of the long-ago African-American community.  What became of the Foremans I don’t know; but the remains of Zacks Sr. and Jr. must still be down there somewhere, perhaps in a family cemetery no one remembers.

P.S.  Since this originally ran in the OBB, I have found out that Zack left descendants; Phil Dixon went to college with his granddaughter, and promises to tell the real story about Zack’s life and death in a future book.

vital statistics: cyclone joe williams

I was surprised to realize that Cyclone Joe Williams’s death date is still widely and wrongly reported as March 12, 1946, including by the Hall of Fame.  In fact he didn’t pass away until February 25, 1951, as reported by Laurence Alpert (via John Holway in this Baseball Guru piece), who found his death certificate.

Several newspapers took note of Williams’s passing in 1951, including the Pittsburgh Courier on its March 10, 1951, front page, in an item authored by W. Rollo Wilson (“WRW”; apologies for the poor image):   



Joe Williams’s exact birth date, unsurprisingly, is a little less certain.  His marriage certificate, according to Holway, listed April 6, 1885.   His World War I and World War II draft cards, which he of course signed, say April 6, 1886.  And his death certificate, according to Alpert, gives April 6, 1887.

Here is his World War I card:

And here is his World War II card:

UPDATE 4:41 pm  Thought I would add the 1900 census record of the Williams family in Seguin, Texas, which gives Joe a birth date of May 1886:

UPDATE: 5:16 pm Also see the updated 2002 edition of James Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues, which says on its very last page (952) that Williams was born April 6, 1886, and died February 25, 1951.

the death (and life) of charles “chino” smith

Charles Smith, now usually known as “Chino” (his nickname in Cuba), but called simply “Charlie Smith” in the newspapers of the late 1920s, died in New York City in the early hours of the morning on January 15, 1932.  Aged only 31 at his death, “Smitty” was eulogized by the Homestead Grays’ Cumberland Posey as “one of the best hitters of all time” (Pittsburgh Courier, January 23, 1932).  The New York Amsterdam News called him one of baseball’s “most outstanding characters and an all-time hitter whose ability drew many fans to the games in which he appeared” (January 27, 1932).  He was a pugnacious, crowd-baiting hitter of ferocious line drives who terrified pitchers. Satchel Paige deemed him one of the two toughest outs he ever faced (the other being Jud Wilson).

Smith’s statistics in the 1929 American Negro League were unworldly:

Smith led the ANL with a .464 average, 214 total bases, and a .903 slugging percentage (Rap Dixon was a distant second in the last two categories with 189 and .784).  Of course, this was in a league that batted .317 with a .448 slugging percentage, and it was in the Bronx’s Catholic Protectory Oval, a park that was only 180 feet down the lines on both sides.  Still, Smith comfortably outhit his Lincoln Giants’ teammate John Beckwith (.443, .776), and nobody else on the Lincolns, a team that challenged for the pennant (and by some accounts actually had the best overall record in the league), was even remotely close to Smith’s numbers.  It was not a bad year for Mr. Charles Smith.

According to John Holway in Blackball Stars, Bill Holland thought that Smith might have died of yellow fever.  Holway also notes that Smith’s death could have been linked to an on-field collision with Walter Cannady during a Lincolns-Homestead Grays game at Yankee Stadium on September 28, 1930, when Cannady accidentally kneed Smith in the stomach, and Smith had to be carried off, as shown in this photo from the New York Amsterdam News (October 1, 1930).   Incidentally, the day before (Saturday, September 27) Josh Gibson reputedly hit the only home run ever to leave Yankee Stadium (though the story has probably been greatly exaggerated).


Even in this poor reproduction, Oscar Charleston of the Grays is recognizable behind Smith.  Various accounts have it that Smith was knocked unconscious, which of course sounds more like a blow to the head than to the stomach.

Although he never played for the Lincoln Giants again, Smith had recovered sufficiently by November to appear in the special “Unico” championship in Cuba.  The following spring he joined the Brooklyn Royal Giants and spent the whole season with them, though he did miss quite a few games.

His death came on January 15, 1932.  Here’s his death certificate (which I originally published in the Outsider Baseball Bulletin, July 21, 2010):

Chino Smith died, not of yellow fever, but of stomach and pancreatic cancer, made worse by exhaustion.  John Holway’s report about Cannady kneeing Smith in the stomach might be the product of vague memories about Smith having stomach trouble in the months before his death, conflated with the dramatic incident at Yankee Stadium in 1930 that marked the end of his Lincoln Giants career.

Charlie Smith’s body was shipped to Darlington, South Carolina, where his family had lived at least since the 1910 census was taken.

Which raises the question of his birth place and date.  The death certificate (January, 1932) has him aged 31; in the 1930 census “Charles Smith,” “Ball Player,” born in South Carolina and living in Harlem with his wife Bessie, is listed as aged 29.  In the 1910 census young Charles E. Smith, living with his parents Thomas and Leila and several siblings in Society Hill, Darlington County, South Carolina, is listed as aged 9.  (Incidentally, Smith’s mother, according to his death certificate, was “Lelia Anthrum”; the Smith family in Society Hill in 1910 lived next door to a family named Antrum.)

In the winter of 1925/26 a number of Negro league players from New York City traveled to Puerto Rico, presumably to play ball.  I have not yet found any kind of public record of a Negro league tour of the island or of North American players being hired by teams that winter, but various players can be found on passenger lists returning from San Juan to New York from January through April, 1926.  These included Chino Smith’s Brooklyn Royal Giants’ teammates Dick Redding, Connie Rector, Charles Spearman, and Bob Scott, along with George Scales, Merven Ryan, Tom Finley, Richard Gee, Judy Gans, and Bardell (or Budell) Young of the Lincoln Giants. 

When George Scales returned to the U.S. from Puerto Rico aboard the S.S. Caracas on March 8, 1926, he was accompanied by one Charles Smith, on a passenger list that otherwise consisted entirely of Hispanic names:



This Charles Smith had a Harlem address (4 W. 129th St.), and was listed as born in “Hamet,” North Carolina, on September 24, 1901.  There is no “Hamet” in either of the Carolinas, but there is a Hamlet, North Carolina, which is located in Richmond County, right on the border with South Carolina—about 30 miles away from Society Hill, South Carolina.

Coincidentally, Hamlet was also the hometown of John Coltrane, who was born there on September 23, 1926.  Coltrane’s playing, like Smith’s, has been described as aggressive, even angry; did they also share a hometown and (nearly) a birthday?