agate type

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?

  

black ballplayers in 1900

Check out these charts prepared by the sociology students of W. E. B. Du Bois at Atlanta University for the “American Negro” exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition:

I’m not sure under what category professional ballplayer would be listed (not the “professions,” which I think would mean mostly medicine, law, education, and the pulpit).  Most likely there weren’t any black professional ballplayers in Georgia at the turn of the century.  There weren’t that many in the county at large, at best a few dozen, probably—though there would have been many, many semi-professional or amateur players, of course.

In the 1900 U.S. Census, I’ve located a total of nine.  I wouldn’t claim that this is anything like a comprehensive accounting, since my research mostly focuses on later eras, and it’s not actually that easy to search my notes for exactly this information.  But here are the black men I’ve found in the 1900 census whose occupation is listed as ballplayer:

Sherman Barton (listed as a “Base Ballist,” a phrase that would have sounded antique even in 1900)
John Bingey (sic; could be the same as William Binga)
Harry Buckner
Peter Burns, a key figure in the Tokohama affair
Charles Grant, “Tokohama” himself
William Holland
Grant Johnson
John Patterson
Solomon White

For whatever reason, all lived in Chicago as of June, 1900, when the census was enumerated, except for Barton, who lived in Normal, Illinois, and Johnson, who appeared in his hometown, Findlay, Ohio.  All played for the Columbia Giants or Chicago Unions around this time.

Occupations of Charles Grant and Solomon White as listed in the 1900 U.S. Census.

Walter Ball can be found living in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where he was playing professional ball, but in the census he is listed as a “R. R. Porter.”  A couple of guys who might be Bill Monroe can be found in Chicago, but aren’t listed as ballplayers.  The 17-year-old Pete Hill, who by some accounts started playing professionally in 1899, is listed as a “day laborer” in Pittsburgh.  Many others who were definitely professionals at the time, especially in the East, can’t be found for certain in the census, including nearly the whole roster of the Cuban X Giants (Frank Grant, Clarence Williams, etc.).  It seems likely that the Cubans were on the road and were missed by the census takers.

Going beyond the census, I’ve found one official document that lists a black man’s occupation as ballplayer in 1900: the death certificate of Andrew Jackson, who had been for several years the third baseman and captain of the Cuban X Giants.  Jackson, who had led his team on a Cuban tour a few months earlier, died of heart failure at the age of 34 in New York City on May 15, 1900.  (Apologies for the poor quality of the image.)

In the sideways portion of the form at the bottom we are given Jackson’s profession:

I have to say I know virtually nothing about Andrew Jackson, or for that matter about the Cuban X Giants, which seem to be one of the least written about great teams in African-American baseball history.

the murder of walter dickey

Mark Aubrey has got a series of posts up about Walter Claude “Steel Arm” Dickey (mentioned briefly in this post), a lefthanded pitcher who toiled mostly for southern teams, but appeared briefly with the St. Louis Stars of the Negro National League in 1922, before he was murdered in Etowah, Tennessee, in 1923.

As Mark notes, there are numerous inconsistencies and contradictions in the various accounts of Dickey’s death.  Unsuprisingly the two white sources (the Chattanooga and Knoxville newspapers) see Dickey and his “crowd” as the aggressors, with the white killer, Waldo Keyes, acting in self-defense and escaping in an automobile that just happened to be passing by.  The two black sources (the Chicago Defender and Cool Papa Bell) say Keyes was the aggressor; the Defender says he arrived with companions in what would be his getaway car.  Anyway, you can read Mark’s posts and the articles and come to your own conclusions.

A tangential note: the Chicago Defender article, unlike the Knoxville and Chattanooga papers, is keenly aware of the racial geography of the area.  It makes sure to point out first that Dickey was murdered in the “Jim Crow section” of Etowah—that is, the very small black neighborhood—and, crucially, that after the killing Keyes fled to Copperhill, a small town right on the Georgia state line.  The Defender article chooses its phrasing carefully, calling Copperhill “a city that is dangerous for any person of color to even pass through in the day time.”  “Sundown towns” were southern communities where blacks might work, but could not live, and were expected to clear out by sundown.  In other words, the Defender was linking Keyes to a place it considered even worse than a sundown town. 

“baby riggins” and his dad

Orville Riggins, Jr., died on November 30, 2010.  (See comments from his family on this post.)  Here he is, “Baby Riggins,” a little short of eleven months old, cheering on his father in a Detroit Stars/Columbus Buckeyes game at Mack Park, Detroit, on Sunday, June 12, 1921:

Although Baby Riggins was Orville Jr., his father the ballplayer actually went by the name Arvell Riggins. There’s a fair amount of evidence for this, most importantly his own signature on his World War I draft card:

There are also census records and a number of newspaper references with varying spellings (Arvil, Arvel, etc.), as well as his death certificate, for which his wife was the informant:

 

Although he was sometimes called Orville in the papers, too, (as well as Bill and Bo), it seems pretty unlikely to me that a relatively common name like Orville would be consistently misspelled more or less the same way, unless he was going around telling people that’s how it should be spelled.

negro league deaths in the first world war

Check out Gary Cieradkowski’s Infinite Baseball Card story about Eddie Grant, New York Giants third baseman and World War I hero.  This made me think of Negro leaguers in World War I, specifically whether any were known to have died while in serving in the military during the war.  There are two such men, one of them already known to historians, the other a new discovery, I think.

•Until now, the only African-American ballplayer known to have died in World War I was Pearl Franklyn “Specks” Webster, a well-regarded, speedy catcher and outfielder for a number of teams in the 1910s.  The Brooklyn Eagle called him “a fine fielder, a clever batsman and a great base stealer;” he  once stole second, third, and home in the same inning. He was drafted into the 807th Pioneer Infantry and served as a corporal in France.  He survived the fighting, only to succumb to the Spanish influenza pandemic on November 16, 1918—only five days after Armistice Day.  The direct cause of Webster’s death was pneumonia—like most victims of the pandemic, he actually died of an opportunistic secondary infection of bacterial pneumonia after the influenza virus had weakened the linings of his lungs and bronchial passages.

(Pearl Webster should not be confused with William Webster, another catcher who played for some of the same teams around the same time and was also sometimes called “Specks.”)

•But there was another black baseball player who died while in the service during the war.  Norman Triplett was one of three brothers born in La Mott, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, all of whom played amateur and semipro baseball for the local La Mott Stars in the 1910s.  Norman Triplett was best known as a pitcher, but when Ed Bolden’s newly ambitious Hilldale Club picked him up in late June, he seems to have served mostly as a center fielder.  He appeared in two games against top black teams, once against the Cuban Stars and once against the Pennsylvania Red Caps, batting 2 for 7.  By the end of July he was back pitching with the La Mott Stars.

And by August, 1918, he was a private, first class, in the 803rd Pioneer Infantry in France.  It was there that he died about three weeks before the Armistice, on October 20, 1918.  He was actually buried there, but his body was brought back to the United States in 1921 and re-interred in the Fairview Colored Cemetery near Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, in a special La Mott section.  Frustratingly, I have been unable to find out exactly how he died, whether he was killed in action or died from some other cause (such as influenza).  Maybe somebody out there can help.

One of Norman’s brothers, Wallace, later became a close business associate of Ed Bolden.  The other, Mahlon Triplett, like Bolden a longtime postal clerk, had a son named Wally Triplett, who became the first African American football player to start for Penn State, and then in 1949 was drafted by the Detroit Lions, the first draft in which black players were taken. (Several African Americans, beginning with Kenny Washington and Woody Strode, had been signed as undrafted free agents since the NFL began to reintegrate in 1946.).

 A couple of other guys should be mentioned here: 

1) Ted Kimbro, who like his frequent teammate Pearl Webster died of influenza in 1918.  According to James Riley, he contracted the flu while in the service, but died shortly after being discharged.  Riley calls him “Arthur (Jess, Ted) Kimbro,” but he was definitely Ted Kimbro, as attested by census entries and his World War I card:


Ted’s older brother, as it happens, was named Arthur James Kimbro.  Both were born in St. Louis in the 1890s, though the family soon moved to Oklahoma, where they grew up.  I don’t know whether he was also a ballplayer, but it’s pretty certain that only one Kimbro appeared for “major league” black teams in the 1910s, and it was Ted. 

I’ve only seen the name “Jess Kimbro” connected to the ballplayer once, in the Chicago Defender (August 9, 1919).  It could be that he was nicknamed “Jess”—but it’s also true that one Jesse L. Kimbrough, a lieutenant in the black 365th Infantry Regiment at Camp Grant, Rockford, Illinois, had been mentioned several times in the Defender’s columns during the war, and it’s possible the ballplayer was mistakenly confused with him.  Kimbrough was from Los Angeles, where he was one of the earliest black officers in the Los Angeles Police Department, and he was a ballplayer—in fact, he organized the LAPD’s first black baseball team and played catcher for it.  In his retirement he penned a semiautobiographical novel about his experiences as a cop, called Defender of Angels, and a World War I novel, Brown Doughboy.

2) The lefthanded curveballer Anthony Mahoney.  He wasn’t killed in the war, but he was victim of a poison gas attack while in the trenches, and apparently never fully recovered.  He returned from the war and pitched for the Indianapolis A.B.C.’s and Baltimore Black Sox in the early 1920s before falling into a lengthy illness in 1924, and died at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., on September 25, 1924.

triple figures

Though I haven’t done any sort of rigorous demographic study or anything like that, it has always been my impression that an awful lot of Negro league players died at surprisingly young ages, an impression I share with Dave Wyatt, for one.

But it occurred to me that the 1920s Negro leagues, with Emilio Navarro, Silas Simmons, and Double-Duty Radcliffe, featured no less than three future centenarians.  And Simmons, having lived to be 111, was a “supercentenarian”—that is, part of the very small slice of the population that attains the age of 110, a milestone reached by only one in a thousand centenarians. 

How many men played for black baseball teams at the highest levels (NNL, ECL, and ANL, plus a few independents like the Homestead Grays) in the 1920s?  I don’t know…a thousand?  Fifteen hundred?  Currently in the United States 1 in 3,300 people are aged 100 or over.  So it seems, for whatever it’s worth, that the rate for the 1920s Negro leagues is rather high, compared to the general population.