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Return of the Lost Island Giants

More than a decade ago I wrote about the Lost Island Giants, a 1917 team based in Ruthven, Iowa, that featured Hurley McNair, Ruby Tyrees, and Bingo Bingham, among others. Recently I ran across a photo of the Giants in the Sioux City Journal (September 13, 1917, p. 10), and thought it was worth posting here. For a number of these players this is the only image I’ve seen of them (although the quality isn’t quite good to use any of these on Seamheads).

Owned and operated by Robert Gilkerson, the Lost Island Giants were a predecessor to Gilkerson’s Union Giants, a team that would be a staple of the Midwestern barnstorming circuit well into the 1930s.

Here’s the article that accompanied the photo:

perfect games: mcclellan 1903, curry 1919

Danny McClellan, Reuben Curry

On July 17, 1903, Danny McClellan of the Cuban X Giants faced the semipro Penn Park Base Ball Club of York, Pennsylvania, and set them down on no hits and no runs, with not a batter reaching first base.  It’s the first known case of an African American pitcher throwing a perfect game.

(Philadelphia Inquirer, July 18, 1903, p. 6)

Sixteen years later, a tall, gangling young pitcher named Reuben Curry, working for Gilkerson’s Union Giants, did the same thing against the Wellsburg, Iowa, team, hurling a perfect game as his teammates cruised, 10 to 0.

(Chicago Defender, September 20, 1919, p. 9) 

McClellan’s perfect game is pretty well-known—it appears in every bio of him, and there’s even somebody who wants to commemorate it with a historical marker. But Curry’s feat, unlike McClellan’s, remains almost completely unknown.  In part, this is probably because the Wellsburg team was completely anonymous, consisting mostly or entirely of amateurs.

The Penn Parks, by contrast, were a pretty solid semipro team—the day after McClellan’s gem they even brought in the St. Louis Browns’ Red Donahue to try to bring down the X-Giants, to no avail:

(Philadelphia Inquirer, July 19, 1903, p. 14)

This made three straight shutouts of the Penn Parks by the X-Giants (Rube Foster had whitewashed them on July 16).

Getting back to Gilkerson’s Union Giants—if their opponents were generally unimpressive, they still put together a pretty talented team in 1919.  Their pitching rotation consisted of Curry, Jack Marshall, George Harney, and Hurley McNair.  Curry, McNair, and Marshall would all go straight into the Negro National League the following year, and Harney would get there by 1923.