Agate Type

eugene bremer

Eugene Bremer was a pretty successful pitcher in the Negro American League of the 1940s.  He played mostly for Cincinnati and Cleveland teams, and his name was usually spelled “Bremmer” in the black press.  He suffered a fractured skull in the 1942 car accident that devastated the Cincinnati Buckeyes and killed Ulysses Brown and Raymond Owens.  There was a wartime rumor that Bremer, along with Cleveland Buckeyes teammates Parnell Woods and Sam Jethroe, would be getting a tryout with the Indians, but of course this never materialized.

It has long been thought that at the end of his career Bremer briefly entered organized baseball with the Cedar Rapids Rockets of the Class C Central Association in 1949, where, as James Riley writes, he compiled “an uncharacteristically poor 2-7 record with a 6.38 ERA” (Biographical Encyclopedia, p. 105).

Rod Nelson, however, noticed some discrepancies between the “Gene Bremer” listed in SABR’s minor league database and the “Eugene Bremmer” of the Negro leagues.  It looked to me like they were two different players, as the Negro leaguer was supposed to have started his career with the New Orleans Crescents in 1932, while the minor league DB has its Gene Bremer born in 1928.  

A quick check at Newspaperarchive.com revealed that the 1949 Cedar Rapids Rockets employed 20-year-old twins from Moville, Iowa, named Jack and Gene Bremer.  Here they are at their debut, with their parents:



A closer look at SABR’s minor league DB shows that the 2-7, 6.38 record in 1949 actually belonged to Jack Bremer; Gene’s pitching record isn’t given, presumably because he didn’t appear in enough games.

The Social Security Death Index has a record for Gene Bremer, born September 21, 1928, died July 9, 1994, with his last residence being Moville, Iowa.  It’s possible his twin Jack is still alive, as there is no record for him.

As for the Negro league pitcher, I found the following records that corresponded to the death date found in Riley (June 19, 1971), though the birth date is different:

SSDI: Eugene Bremer, born 18 July 1916; SSN 434-05-6693 issued in Louisiana before 1951; died June 1971; last residence Cleveland, Ohio.

Ohio Deaths: Eugene J. Bremer, 54, married; “Non-white”; residence Cleveland, Ohio; died 19 June 1971, Cleveland, Ohio; certificate #049166.

I also found a record in the 1920 census for “Eugene Bremer,” black, 3 years old, living in New Orleans with his parents Joseph and Amanda Bremer, three sisters, a grandmother and a cousin.

So the Negro leaguer Eugene J. Bremer probably spelled his name with one “m,” and definitely did NOT pitch for Cedar Rapids in 1949.

UPDATE 2:34 p.m.  Here is Eugene Bremer (left) with teammate George Jefferson, from a website about the Cleveland Buckeyes.

 

UPDATE 5-29-2020 I wanted to post the photograph (with caption) of Bremer’s teammate Raymond “Smoky” Owens mentioned by Bob Poet in the comments. Owens was killed, along with Ulysses “Joe” Brown, in a car wreck involving several Cleveland Buckeyes players in 1942.

(Chicago Defender, May 25, 1940, p. 24)

Here is the same photo, published in the Cleveland Call & Post:

(Cleveland Call & Post, May 25, 1940, p. 6)

 

selling the negro leagues

Here is a passage from one of Ira Lewis’s “Passing Review” columns in the Pittsburgh Courier (September 11, 1926).  It’s a fascinating discussion of publicity strategies in black baseball.  The promoters and owners of clubs were often reluctant to hype their stars for fear of the individual players gaining too much bargaining power.  Lewis argues, however, that “smart management” recognizes the importance of making ballplayers into “box office attractions.”  The Homestead Grays, he says, finally broke through only when Cumberland Posey “got hep to the benefits of publicity and the wisdom of playing up his stars.”

Another takeaway from this piece: Lewis says of Joe Williams that “the Courier re-christened him from ‘Cyclone Joe’ Williams to ‘Smokey Joe’ Williams.”  So the change in nickname is confirmed as a conscious publicity strategy, apparently cooked up by the Courier in cahoots with Posey (who was himself a columnist for the Courier).

success?

From Leslie Penn: it seems that Ron Hill (Leslie’s cousin and Pete Hill’s great nephew) has heard positive noises from the Hall of Fame about the possibility of changing Hill’s plaque and even having a “re-induction” ceremony.  We’ll see how it develops…

stay thirsty

Check this out from Lawrence Wright’s profile of the Mexican telecom billionaire  Carlos Slim Helú in The New Yorker a couple of months ago (you need to be a subscriber to read the whole article online):

Slim is a man of few pastimes, apart from baseball, which attracts him because of his passion for statistics.  His favorite team is the New York Yankees.  He can recall obscure statistics, such as Sandy Koufax’s minimum number of strikeouts per inning or the batting averages of the stars of the Negro leagues.  Occasionally, he publishes rhapsodic articles about the sport.  “The numbers speak on a limitless diamond: of memory, imagination, the making of legends,” he wrote in 1999.  “The love of the game has a new beginning; the mind is once again at play.” [emphasis mine, obviously]

He may just be…The Most Interesting Man in the World.

pete hill cards

Something I ran across today: the two Pete Hill baseball cards issued in his lifetime, both in Cuba, one in 1910 for Punch Cigars, the other in 1909 as part of the Cabañas set.  The sets were issued to commemorate the American Series appearances of the Detroit Tigers (1909 and 1910) and Philadelphia A’s (1910).

 

pete hill’s burial site

From this list it looks like Pete Hill is the only member of the Hall of Fame whose burial site (or ultimate disposition of his body) is not known.  I didn’t realize that.

Anyway, we’re working on it...

redo?

Since it has turned out that John Preston Hill’s Hall of Fame plaque is mistaken, it seems like it would be a nice gesture for the Hall of Fame to commission a new one.  And, since his family did not get a chance to be present at his actual induction in 2006, perhaps a new plaque would provide an occasion for some kind of public recognition that they could take part in.

 

photos: pete hill, kenneth & bettye hill

Leslie Penn, who is Pete Hill’s great-niece and the granddaughter of Pete’s older brother Walter, has been kind enough to send along the following photos that have been preserved by the family.  The first is John Preston Hill himself.  The second is Pete’s son Kenneth and his wife Bettye, evidently sometime in the 1940s.

 

While the Hill family always knew that Uncle John had been a ballplayer in the Negro leagues, it seems as though the younger generations at least didn’t realize he was the same person as Pete Hill—for the very good reason that his real first name was not preserved in Negro league circles.  For our part, we didn’t know he was John Hill until Patrick Rock figured it out a couple of years ago.  And I wasn’t able to link Pete definitively to his family (and to his family’s origins in Culpeper County, Virginia) until Fred Worth obtained his death certificate, which gave his Security Security number, which in turn made it possible for me to get his Social Security application a couple of weeks ago.