Agate Type

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.

jim eschen, 1913 all-americans

Jack Morris writes about the Frank Wickware/Walter Johnson contest in 1913:

“I think the Eshen listed in the boxscore for the All-Americans is Jim Eschen, who would eventually play 10 games for the 1915 Cleveland Indians. He was an up-and-coming player in 1913. The Yankees had signed him and sent him to Jersey City in the International League where he mostly played left field. 1913 was his rookie year in Organized Baseball. According to the December 20, 1913 Sporting Life, he was going to go to camp with the Yankees in Houston for the spring of 1914.”

Also: see Phil Dixon’s book The Negro Baseball Leagues: A Photographic History, page 68, for another team photograph of the Schenectady Mohawk Giants, this time without the plaid jackets so you can see what their uniforms looked like.

salvador poree

Dwayne Isgrig recently sent me a question from Wayne Stivers, who was wondering if anyone had a first name for a pitcher named “Poree” who appeared in a single Negro National League game for the St. Louis Giants in 1921.  Dwayne dug up this interview I did with Scott Simkus a while back, in which I said I’d figured out Poree’s identity.

Well, it’s a circumstantial case, but a pretty good one, I think.  Both Dwayne and I have seen items in the St. Louis Argus mentioning Poree (no first name) pitching for the Sumner High School baseball team. (Sumner High’s alumni, by the way, include Tina Turner, Chuck Berry, and Arthur Ashe.)  He was picked up by the Giants in June, presumably after the end of the school year, and first appeared for them against the white semipro Quincy Moose Gems:

(St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 14, 1921)

Poree worked in at least one other game for the Giants in July against Jewell’s A.B.C.s, a minor team from Indianapolis, before making his one and only Negro league appearance on August 2 against Joe Green’s Chicago Giants:

(St. Louis Globe-Democrat, August 3, 1921)

After 1921 he vanishes from the Negro leagues.  But in 1924 “Salvador Poiree” (sic) pops up in Chicago, pitching for an all-black team in the postal league:



(Chicago Defender, City Edition, August 2, 1924, page 10; NB—this is the City Edition; you won’t find this article in the ProQuest digital version of the Defender, which is the National Edition.)

Poree was still pitching in Chicago semi-pro ball as late as 1929, by then for a team called Jimmy Hutton’s All-Stars, which consisted of black postal workers:

(Chicago Defender, National Edition, August 10, 1929, page 8)

Joining Poree on the All-Stars were Negro leaguers Reuben Curry, George Sweatt, John Hines, Buddy Hayes, and James Bray, as well as prominent local players Ira Ward and Carter Wilson.  The venerable spitballer George Harney, former American Giants ace, also played for the All-Stars in 1929.

In the 1930 census you can find Ward, Wilson, Hines, and Bray in Chicago, all listed as postal workers—along with “Salvadoree Poree” (again sic), postal clerk, 27, born in Louisiana, and living with his wife Maude, who was born in Missouri, and two daughters.

Working backward to the 1920 census, a 16-year-old named “Salvador Porre” can be found in New Orleans living with his parents Joseph and Rita Poree, and three younger brothers, Curtis, Marshall, and Norman.

Working forward to the Social Security Death Index, we find a single person named Salvador Poree, born February 21, 1903, died January 1979, with his last residence in Roselle, Du Page County, Illinois.

To sum up: the only thing really missing here is a direct reference to Salvador Poree having a connection to St. Louis—although according to the 1930 census his wife was born in Missouri.  He was still living in New Orleans as of January 1920, so his family would have had to move to St. Louis within the next year, with Salvador himself winding up in Chicago by 1924.  At least one of his brothers (Marshall) was also living in Chicago in 1930, so it could be that the whole family moved to Chicago. 

Since Poree had at least two daughters (as of 1930) as well as three younger brothers, it seems very likely that there are living relatives who might remember him.  In any case, he serves as an object lesson in how much you can find out about obscure Negro leaguers, even the briefest cup-of-coffee hopefuls.

red ant, big train

If you remember anything about Frank Wickware and his 1913 team the Schenectady Mohawk Giants it’s likely to be Wickware’s 1 to 0 defeat of Walter Johnson in an exhibition game on October 5 of that year.  This was Walter Johnson at the height of his powers, the year he went 36-7 for the Washington Senators with a 1.14 ERA.  Both Wickware and Johnson were born only a few months apart (Johnson on November 6. 1887, Wickware on March 18, 1888) in the southeast corner of Kansas; both were often linked to Coffeyville, though Johnson was born and grew up outside of Humboldt, while it appears that Wickware was from Girard, though he may later have moved to Coffeyville.

   
    
Walter Johnson and Frank Wickware.  Note that Wickware is called “Smoky Joe” Wickware by the Schenectady Gazette in 1913, several years before the nickname was attached to Cyclone Joe Williams (who, incidentally, started the year with the Mohawks).

The game only went five innings (45 minutes!), perhaps by prior agreement with Johnson, who had just thrown 346 innings in 48 games for the Nationals.  (The Schenectady Gazette said it was called due to darkness.)  His team had been advertised as consisting of American League players (thus, presumably, the moniker “All-Americans”), but I’ve had a hard time tracking them down.  The only ones I know for sure are Fred Jacklitsch, a 38-year-old former Phillies catcher, playing for Rochester of the International League that year, and Paul Dietz, shortstop for Harrisburg of the Tri-State League and later a fixture on the East Coast semipro scene.  It seems safe to say that Johnson was backed by a minor league team—and not a high-level minor league team, either.

Yet Johnson hardly needed them.  He struck out 11 in five innings.  Of his  62 pitches, only nine were called balls, and the All-Americans did not manage a single assist. The Mohawks made only two hits, both ground rule doubles that went over the crowds standing in the outfield, one to left, one to center.  (You have to wonder just how close the fans were standing.)

Wickware, by contrast, was pretty good, but not overpowering.  He fanned five but walked three, allowed five hits (including two to Johnson), and hit a batter.  Still, he succeed in working his way out of trouble, and scraped through with the five-inning win.

Here’s the Schenectady Gazette’s account of the game (October 6, 1913; click to enlarge).

2624 wylie avenue

Last week I had the great pleasure of speaking with Dr. McDonald Williams, professor of English and son of Alexander McDonald Williams, the founder of the Negro National League’s Pittsburgh Keystones and builder of Central Baseball Park.  Among many other fascinating things Dr. Williams told me was the fact that I had unwittingly posted a photo of his house in 1931!

His father owned a bloc of four houses to the right of the grocery pictured here.  Going toward the right, the first house after the grocery was rented out; the second was occupied by the family of Rob Bailey, Dr. Williams’s uncle (his mother’s brother, who in fact had worked at Central Park); and the third house, 2624 Wylie, which would be barely visible on the right side in this photo, was the home of Alexander and Margaret Williams, and thus was one of Dr. Williams’s childhood homes.  The fourth house, which isn’t pictured here, was where Alexander’s younger brother Charles lived with his wife.

schenectady mohawk giants, 1913

Ran across this photo today, in the Schenectady Gazette (May 2, 1913).  Love the plaid warmup jackets.

 From L to R: William Wernecke (owner), Jesse Bragg, Grant Johnson, Mike Brown, William T. Smith, Cyclone Joe Williams, Leroy Grant, Judy Gans, Phil Bradley (captain), and Johnny Pugh. 

This is just the roster at the beginning of the year; there would be plenty of changes through the season.  Williams, Johnson, and Gans would defect (back) to the Lincoln Giants within a few weeks of this photo; Frank Wickware, Chappie Johnson, Knucks James, and Walter Ball would later join the Mohawks.

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?

  

earliest known photo of pete hill?

In honor of the dedication of Pete Hill’s historical marker in Buena, Virginia, here’s a photo of the 1904 Philadelphia Giants I ran across recently.  It was printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer on September 2, 1904, on the occasion of Rube Foster’s great victory over the Cuban X-Giants in the three-game series they played for the “Colored Championship of the World.”  (Foster’s 18 strikeouts, by the way, could be considered the all-time “Negro league” record, beating Satchel Paige’s 17 strikeouts against the Cuban Stars on April 29, 1929, though I suppose it depends on how you define “Negro league record.”)

The evidence suggests that 1904 was Pete Hill’s first full season in big-time black baseball (he had played for the Cuban X-Giants in Havana the previous fall), so this could be the earliest photo of Pete that we have.  Pete is in the middle row, second from left.

(Apologies again for the poor quality of this microfilmed-then-scanned image; I’m sure, or at least I hope, that actual prints of this picture exist somewhere.  I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen one, though.)

There’s another photo of the Philadelphia Giants floating around that’s commonly dated to 1904.  It can’t be, though, as Grant Johnson (top row, far left—the only player not identified in the handwriting on the photo) did not join the Giants until 1905—he was with the Cuban X-Giants in 1904.  In fact, Johnson only played for the Philadelphia Giants in 1905 (and for a short time in Cuba in the fall of 1907), so this photo certainly dates from 1905 rather than 1904.

UPDATE 6/16/2011  Here is a much better image of the 1904 photo.

alexander mcdonald williams

I’ve been in touch with McDonald Williams, the son of Alexander McDonald Williams, Barbadian immigrant, founder of the Negro National League’s Pittsburgh Keystones, and builder and owner of their home, Central Baseball Park.  Mr. Williams has been trying for several years, since before I started writing about the Keystones and Central Park, to get a state marker placed on the location of his father’s ballpark, which preceded Greenlee Field as a purpose-built park for black professional baseball by more than a decade.

Mr. Williams sent me a photograph of the Negro National League annual meeting held in Chicago on January 28, 1922, a picture I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else.

Neither Mr. Williams nor I can identify everybody in the photo yet, but here are some IDs for sure:

Back row, far left: Ira Lewis, a Pittsburgh Courier editor and secretary of the Pittsburgh Keystones.

Back row, sixth from left: Alexander Williams, Mr. Williams’s father, builder of Central Park and founder and president of the Pittsburgh Keystones.

Middle row, far left: Joe Green, owner/manager of the Chicago Giants.

Front row, far left: J. L. Wilkinson, owner of the Kansas City Monarchs.

Front row, third and fourth from left: Rube Foster and C. I. Taylor.

Based on photos from the Chicago Defender and Cleveland Gazette, I’ll hazard a couple of further guesses:

Back row, fourth from left: Sam Shepard, part of the St. Louis Stars’ ownership group (who were there fighting with representatives of the old St. Louis Giants for the league’s St. Louis franchise).

Back row, seventh from left (second from right, next to Alexander Williams): George J. Tate, owner of the Cleveland Tate Stars, and proprietor of another black-owned, purpose-built Negro league park, Tate Field.

Any additions to this list are welcome.

UPDATE 4/4/2011 Sadly, C. I. Taylor would be dead less than a month after this photo was taken (he passed away in Indianapolis on February 23).  He had just turned 47 on January 20.