Agate Type

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.

lost island giants

Both as a follow-up to my recent Field of Dreams post and as another example of the uses of digitized databases, I wanted to say a little bit about the Lost Island Giants, the team with the evocative name operated by Robert Gilkerson in northern Iowa in 1917. 

Gilkerson’s co-owner on this venture was William “Bingo” Bingham, a longtime outfielder for Chicago teams in the 1910s and early 1920s:

(Chicago Defender, May 12, 1917)

I’ve only been able to find  a few mentions of the Lost Island Giants in small Iowa papers, and a solitary box score in the Chicago Defender (June 30, 1917):

As it happens, the first draft registration for World War I occurred almost midway between these two articles, on June 5.  But for a long time I never found anything associated with this team; in fact, I really hadn’t noted its existence at all. 

Then, a few months back, I was trying fruitlessly to track down a pitcher named Ruby Tyree who had appeared with the American Giants early in 1917.  Thinking that “Ruby” was a nickname, and thinking that he would have registered for the draft in Chicago since he was playing there right around that time, I checked out the five men named “Tyree” who registered in Cook County (four of them black).  But none of them were listed as ballplayers, and besides, the pitcher was supposed to have been quite young, and the youngest of these men was 31 at the time. 

Finally, for some reason I don’t remember, it occurred to me to simply search for “Ruby Tyree,” in no particular state, with the “Soundex” function enabled for the last name.  This uses an algorithm to find names that are in some way similar to the one you’re looking for, in case of misspellings or transcription errors.  And I came up with one “Ruby Tyress,” residing in Ruthven, Palo Alto County, Iowa, a professional ballplayer working for Robert P. Gilkerson:

 

                  (click to enlarge any of the images in this post)

As you can see, his name is really “Tyrees”; “Tyress” is an Ancestry.com mistranscription. Given this information I was then able to pin down the ballplayer Ruby P. Tyrees, born 22 July 1891, died 23 November 1965, and buried in Leavenworth National Cemetery.

If one Lost Island Giants player could be found in Palo Alto County, it seemed possible that others could be there as well.  A search for black men registered in the county yielded a list of nine names (out of 3,455 total draft registrations).  Here’s a screenshot of the Ancestry.com search results:

As it turned out, fully seven of them (including Tyrees) listed themselves as professional ballplayers.  This is the single biggest find I’ve made so far in the World War I cards; that is, the biggest haul from one search, one click.  I’ve never seen one screen with so many players on it before.

Hugh Blackburn

 

Blackburn appeared briefly for the Kansas City Monarchs in 1920.

Edgar Daniel Burch

 

I believe this is “Burch,” no first name, who appeared in 1914 with the Indianapolis ABCs (Riley, Biographical Encyclopedia, p. 133).

Will Jones

 

This, I think, is William Fox Jones, an American Giants’ catcher in the 1910s (Riley, p. 452).

Allen McNair

 

THIS is the major find here, at least for me.  I had been looking for Hurley McNair’s WW1 draft card for some time.  He’s mistakenly digitized as “Alden McNair,” but the card in fact reads “Allen.”  I think he is probably the “Mack” listed in center field in the Defender box score above.

Jess Turner

 

Riley lists B. “Aggie” Turner (p. 794) with the Chicago Union, Chicago Giants, and All Nations in 1916 and 1917.

Clifford White

 

Now we have a first name for “White” of the Chicago Union Giants (Riley, p. 832).

Robert Gilkerson, incidentally, registered for the draft where he lived, Spring Valley, Illinois, which was also the headquarters for his other team, the Union Giants.  Bingham may have registered in Chicago, where one “William Horace Bingham,” born in 1885 and working in the stockyards, can be found in September 1918.

Like a number of other major black teams in the early twentieth century (the Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City, the West Baden Sprudels and French Lick Plutos of Indiana, the Breakers and Royal Poincianas of Palm Beach, Florida, and the Havana Red Sox of Watertown, New York) the Lost Island Giants were a resort team, intended to entertain well-to-do vacationers.  The mysterious-sounding, Field of Dreams-esque name seems to come from Lost Island Lake, located about four miles north of Ruthven, where these ballplayers all resided.  Arnold’s Park, which the Defender named as the location of Gilkerson’s team in mid-May, is a historic resort and amusement park on Lake Okoboji in nearby Dickinson County.  Whether or not the team moved around to various locations during the summer, I don’t know.

charley lightner

A while back I wrote about two exceedingly minor pitchers for the Kansas City Monarchs, Lightner (1920) and Linder (1922), who had been combined into one person in reference books.  The 1922 pitcher, it turned out, was an Army veteran named William Linder who joined the team along with Heavy Johnson and Branch Russell, while I built up a somewhat circumstantial case that the 1920 pitcher was a Kansas City man named Charley Lightner.

Now there’s verification, in the form of an article from the Kansas City Sun (May 1, 1920), that the Monarchs’ pitcher was in fact Charley Lightner.  By the way, “Bare” would be the Cuban outfielder Bernardo Baró, who was listed with the Monarchs on several preseason rosters, but ended up with the Cuban Stars.

bartenders

I recently ran across the following note in a column called “Tavern Topics” in the New York Amsterdam News (October 17, 1942):

For several of these players (Williams and Thomas in particular) their careers as bartenders/raconteurs are well-known; some of the others I (at least) hadn’t heard of before.  As it happens, men over 45 had just registered for the draft a few months earlier (April 1942), so you can see their places of employment.  Here are Joe Williams and Clint Thomas:

Oscar Levis was not old enough to be part of this particular draft registration phase (the only one from World War II that has been made public so far).  I don’t know who John Crain is.  Brooks, of course, could be Irvin Brooks, though there was also the catcher Ameal Brooks (John Beckwith’s half-brother), who lived in New York at the time.  Here is Irvin’s draft card again:

I was able to find this ad in the Amsterdam News (August 9, 1941), announcing the Harlem Moon Bar and Grill’s grand opening, and giving the name of Irvin Brooks’s employer, Eugene Prince, as one of the bar’s proprietors:

But the most interesting find here (to me, anyway) is “Knux” James, a well-known infielder from the 1900s and 1910s whom I hadn’t pinned down in any records.  In Riley he is listed as “W. “Nux” or “Gus” James; the nickname is also sometimes rendered as “Knucks” (it pretty obviously comes from “Knuckles,” though I haven’t yet found an origin story for it).  Here’s another Tavern Topics item about the Orange Blossom Bar and Grill, again from the Amsterdam News (March 14, 1942):

And here is the draft card for one William James, employed by Edward Crolley at 570 Lenox Ave:

Here’s his World War I card:

UPDATE 4/4/2009  Back when I first wrote this I should have linked to this post on Williams’s post-baseball career by Mark Gretchen at his Smokey Joe Williams blog.  It includes a photo showing the Cornell Bar at 547 Lenox Avenue in about 1940 (as well as one showing the building in 2007).

another filipino pitcher

It turns out that after Claudio Manela of the 1921 Cincinnati Cuban Stars, at least one more player from the Philippines performed for a Negro League team. Rube Foster tried out a Filipino pitcher named “Tombo” in a 1922 non-league contest against the House of David:

(Chicago Defender, 17 June 1922)

I’ve only found one other mention of “Tombo,” in the Palatine Enterprise (July 23 20, 1920 1923).  Evidently there was a team of “Fillipino and Hawaiian Stars” that played pretty extensively around the Chicago area (getting virtually no newspaper coverage), and he was their pitcher.

Note the echoes of William Taft’s patronizing “little brown brothers” language to describe the Filipino/Hawaiian players:

A number of people named “Tomboe” appear in official records around this time, particularly a family from the Philippines that lived in Hawaii.  I can’t link the Chicago pitcher specifically to anyone, though if I had to bet it would be on a guy named Pedro Tomboe, who was listed as 17 in the 1920 census.

chester brooks

I finally found an example of the name “Chester Brooks” (meaning the Royal Giants’ outfielder Irvin Woodberry Brooks) prior to Robert Peterson’s Only the Ball Was White:

(Pittsburgh Courier, December 18, 1937)

Cumberland Posey, it should be said, was perhaps the one person who did the most to preserve the memory of Brooks as a ballplayer during the 1930s and 40s, at least in print. 

(Thanks to Patrick Rock, who’s letting me use his library card until mine arrives.)

irvin brooks, west indian

I had been looking for sources that named Irvin Brooks as “West Indian.”  Courtesy of Paul Wendt, here is Cumberland Posey, writing about Brooks in the Pittsburgh Courier (April 3, 1943):

Brooks, you’ll remember, was not literally “West Indian”—he was born in the United States, and so were his parents, as far as we can tell; but he and his family lived among (and sometimes with) Caribbean immigrants in Key West, and he could well have had more substantial connections to the Bahamas of one sort or another.

If anybody has access to the digitized Pittsburgh Courier, maybe you could search for “Chester Brooks,” and see what comes up.

ajay deforest johnson, part ii

Here’s a little more information on Ajay Johnson of the Philadelphia Royal Giants, who is being researched by Bill Staples.  Ajay Deforest Johnson was born in Waco, Texas, on January 23, 1901, and died in Los Angeles on October 12, 1996.  An article in the Chicago Defender (November 15, 1947) about Johnson’s promotion to lieutenant in the LAPD (and the department’s hiring of its first three black policewomen) says this:

Ajay D. Johnson, a member of the force since July 20, 1929, was promoted from the rank of sergeant to that of lieutenant, the second to hold that rank here.  The other lieutenant is Roscoe Washington, uncle of football star Kenny Washington.

Roscoe’s brother (and Kenny’s father) was Edgar “Blue” Washington, actor and ballplayer for the Los Angeles White Sox and (briefly) the Kansas City Monarchs.  (The photo is from the Defender article.)

ajay deforest johnson

This is a note I received a couple of months ago from Bill Staples:

Gary,

I came across your entry dated Nov 3, 2006 , “Bubbles, Heavy, or the Big C?”

The 1920 box score between the Peoria Black Devils and St. Louis Giants caught my eye. I have been researching the career of pitcher/outfielder Ajay D. Johnson (b. 1/23/01) who played for the L.A. White Sox semi-pro team in California (April-September) from ‘25-‘28, he also pitched in the California Winter League with the Philadelphia Royal Giants, and with the same team during their famous tour of Asia (China, Japan, Korea & Hawaii) in 1927. Ajay was the #2 pitcher on the Royal Giants in wins, just behind Andy Cooper.

Ajay is a bit of a mystery, in that when he played with and against established Negro League players, he performed well—yet there is no evidence of him playing with a known team in the East. I suspect that he played with some Negro League team between 1920-23 (in 1923 he joined the LAPD, but continued to play semi-pro ball) ... but have not been able to locate any A. Johnson in the Negro Leagues ... until your posting of the Peoria Black Devils.

A few questions for you:
1) Have you seen any Black Devils box scores featuring A. Johnson as pitcher too (in addition to OF)?
2) Do you know if players from the Black Devils joined the Dayton Marcos? I see a few similar names on your page (Britt, Taylor, Johnson).
3) Have you cross referenced William McNeil's book [on the] California Winter League, to identify some of these players you discuss in this article? I see several names from the 1920-25 CWL seasons that suggests these are some of the same people, i.e. George Britton (aka Britt), Robert Scott, rf; John Hill, 2b. Might be worthwhile.

Thanks in advance for any information you can share on the A. Johnson with the 1920 Black Devils.

Bill Staples

P.S. Ajay Johnson is the player standing next to Biz Mackey in this photo.

Bill also sent a later message: 

A few comments on research conducted since my initial email:

- there is an Ajay Johnson in the WWI registration records. In 1918 this Ajay is in Illinois, not too far from Peoria.  This Ajay is also from Texas, but does not list his birthdate, and says his birth year is 1896. Unclear if this is the same person.

- The manager of the 1920 Black Devils is named “Graves.”  Might be a coincidence, but in 1917-18 the Defender refers to L.A. White Sox manager Lonnie Goodwin as “Lonnie Graves.” Goodwin worked for the railroad, as many pre-negro league players did, so it is quite possible he was involved in this story too.

If you search for Ajay Johnson in the Defender circa 1943 you will see articles on him when he was promoted to Lt. in the LAPD.

When Bill first wrote, I had only recently become aware of Ajay Johnson, due to his appearance on the passenger list for the SS Los Angeles on July 8, 1927, returning along with the other Philadelphia Royal Giants from their famous Japanese tour.  First of all, Johnson is fascinating as another black player who, like Bill Jackman, operated outside the organized Negro Leagues.  Secondly, he adds a new twist to some old problems about player identities in 1920.  Just possibly, we might finally be able sort out “Wise Johnson” and “A. Johnson” of Peoria, “Johnson” the Dayton right fielder, and “Johnson” the St. Louis Giant in early July.  We’ll see.  Expect more posts on this in coming days.

In the meantime, if anyone has access to Peoria newspapers in 1919 and 1920, you might check to see what you can find out about the Black Devils.

james hugh moss

Brian McKenna wrote me a couple of months ago regarding James Hugh Moss, a former Chicago ballplayer who was executed for murder in Georgia in 1928.  Here is the story from the Chicago Defender (August 11, 1928):

I didn’t know anything at all about Moss until Brian’s email.  You can check out the details of the case, gathered by Brian in this (rather morbid!) Baseball Fever thread about executed ballplayers.

Looking into Moss’s baseball career: as Brian pointed out, James Riley lists “Moss,” no first name, listed by Riley as “pitching briefly without a decision” for the American Giants in 1918.  I was able to find a single instance of Moss appearing with the club, pitching against a white semi-pro team called the West Ends on Sunday, May 19, 1918.  The West Ends won, 8-6; Frank Wickware relieved Moss in the fifth or sixth inning, probably with the score tied.

I couldn’t find any further hints of Moss’s baseball fortunes in 1918, but I did find a handful of references to a Moss pitching and playing center field for the Havana Stars, a traveling team based in Chicago 1917-19 that employed a number of second-tier black professionals (Sam Crawford ran the team for a while in 1917).  Moss was also the captain of the team in 1919.

Moss, by the way, was living in Etowah, Tennessee, which just a few years earlier had been the home of southpaw Claude “Steel Arm” Dickey, a star pitcher for the Montgomery Grey Sox of the Negro Southern League who had also appeared briefly with the 1922 St. Louis Stars.  Here is the story from the Defender (March 24, 1923); a headline (not reproduced here) runs across the top of the page reading, “Baseball Idol Slain by Ruffians”: