April 4, 2023 • 21 mins
For many players the opportunity to play in the Negro Leagues opened up a whole new life experience in traveling the country. However, travel was not often easy, and simple things like food, lodging, and gas were hurdles to consider in the Jim Crow era.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hi, This is Bill Overton. Outside of playing the game
of baseball, the Negro League players and their teams had
to manage the daunting and challenging task of traveling from
city to city across the country. From an economic standpoint,
this often meant playing many times a week in both
large and small venues. Baseball historian Professor Leslie Heffey describes
(00:28):
the concept of barnstorming.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
So travel is a fascinating thing to think about, and
so travel for Negro League teams. When you're talking about
the Crawfords, the Grays, things like that, they had a
sort of a twofold travel schedule. So you might have
let we'll use I'll just say the Chicago American Giants. Right, Oh,
they're going to play on Monday and Tuesday in Chicago,
(00:53):
and their end goal is that on Friday and Saturday,
they're going to be playing in New York City. You
do between traveling from Chicago to New York City, you
play whatever games you can set up in whatever communities
are available to you. So it might be Cleveland, so
you play in the Cleveland buck Eyes, or it might
(01:14):
be you're taking a little more of a circuitous route,
and so you get down to go to Dayton, or
you go to Zanesville, and so for a lot of
Negro League teams, and this is something sometimes people they
might play literally maybe seventy or so games, seventy five
games something like that that are actual league games. And
those aren't always played in the big cities because sometimes
(01:36):
the two teams would come together, but more typically and
then the rest of the you know, one hundred or
so one hundred and twenty games that they played could
be anywhere, right, and so lots of small communities, but
that was the idea. You needed to fill your schedule
and you needed to be and part of the reason
you needed to do that was because you needed to
make enough money to keep the journey going. They played
(01:58):
in lots of major league stadiums, but they also played
in the high school stadium where they played in the
local park, depending on what was available to them.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Pitcher Dennis Biddle describes the importance of the Barnstoning games
economically to the players.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
We would play Bompstoning games on a said we going
to Kansas City to play the Monarchs Chicago. They were
played two or three games in between that tames we
call them bompdoning game. We call them money games because
if you want, you got sixty percent of the gate.
(02:32):
If you lost, you got forty percent of the game.
And we couldn't afford to lose. We needed the money
to travel on to the next day. And this is
a high will. Playing in the Negro Bague.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Depended on who was playing, It depended on what day
of the week, and so trying to figure out how
to optimize the money that you're making, right as the
as the owner was trying to figure out what days
do you want to make sure that your team is
in a big city and you're playing against a bigger opponent,
because you might play a Friday, Saturday, Sunday set of
games and make enough money that that's going to take
(03:08):
you through the next couple of weeks, and so then
the additional games are simply to supplement that, right and
so then, and it also depended on the team, because,
for example, the Kansas City Monarchs certainly historically had a
much stronger financial backing than the Cuban Giants did. Hence
(03:29):
the reason the Cuban Giants don't really have a home,
right They moved almost year to year to find a
different city to call home because they don't have that.
So it also depended on the financial backing that they.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Had in fielding that Gerald cast and remembers the many
places the Negro League took him so that when.
Speaker 4 (03:46):
I was playing in the league, we face some predictive
is in the Guyser of Canada and Montandres and it
was it was exciting. I really enjoyed it. I went
(04:08):
to places that I don't think I will ever win
if it had been an amazing or small town like that,
it mean if you will, and you're going to get
the city out of the United States that are there
to win the set. So I enjoyed myself.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
So for many of them, this is going to be
the first time they've ever left the confines of where
they have grown up, right, what they are used to,
what they're comfortable with, and so you know you're going
to get a wide range of experiences that they're going
to have depending on how far they're going to travel
so and where they're coming from. So if you think
it's not about something like Hank Aaron who's coming out
of the South and is going to find his way
(04:44):
traveling with these teams and in the Negro League part
of his He is seventeen years old, right, Willie Mays
is seventeen years old when he and they're going to
suddenly leave the South to go up to Chicago and
to go to Kansas City and something and experience the
world that they would not have gotten to experience otherwise.
And that meant everything from these issues about travel, how
(05:06):
is this going to happen? Who are you going to
meet to encountering often maybe more white fans than they
have ever seen before, which is also going to mean
they may hear things and see things that they had
not expected to see.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
I'm seventeen years old. A lot of things I did
not understand. I did understand why people will pay money,
come in game, call us all kind of names. I
didn't understand why after game we go to the hotel
and said becaus and they tell us no, we couldn't
(05:44):
eat in the restaurant. We had to eat and sleep
on the buck. The bus was like home. This is
the life and the Negro banks boyer, if.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
You were from you know, like Buck Leonard when he
came out of Rocky Mount in North Carolina black community,
it was insulated and so then you find yourself in
a city like Chicago, and suddenly you're going to see
these colored and white sign that you wouldn't have seen
at home. Right, And so in some ways they're going
to more readily experience the Jim Crow laws and the
(06:21):
results of segregation than they would have otherwise. In addition
to just the other side of it, the more positive side,
which is getting to go to a big city and
experience the jazz music and when they're not playing, to
experience the fans, maybe the explosion of opportunities for new foods,
all of those kind of things. I mean, the connection
(06:43):
between a lot of these teams and the bars and
places that where jazz musicians were playing, right, and getting
to go here. These are incredibly, incredibly exciting experiences for
a seventeen eighteen year old that they would never have
gotten otherwise. So there's the most the positive and the
negative science of these travel experiences for them.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Picture Eugene Scruggs use the travel to appreciate home and
as a learning experience.
Speaker 5 (07:12):
Uh, just riding all over the country and you know,
uh at that time, you know stood uh after school,
you know that you know we would make up a
game game, you know, with the people in the community
where I live, and so you know, it was the
(07:33):
experience of being on the bus and everything. You know, Uh,
it may make me think back at home, you know,
in some place that way travel like in Missipi. You know,
had cotton field just like the headcotton field in Alabama
and everything. And and I can recall one time we
was at the we was studying and our uh a
(07:56):
geoperative about the uh there's the seven, seven and eight
Great Lakes and everything, and you know that made me
think about them when I was around the lakes and stuff,
and it made me think about uh the uh I
can't think of the name in Virginia where uh you
(08:19):
know where the slaves you know were brought in right
and on the ground turn and all this stuff. You know,
I've got you into see and it was a you know,
it was a great blessing. You know that sometimes I
thought I learned more by traveling around than I did.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Professor Leslie Heffey discusses the evolution of team travel from
cars and the importance of the team bus.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
By the forties and fifties. You're going to see a
little bit more of the bus than you than you
did previously, but that was still not always the primary
way that teams traveled. Buses were expensive, buses were hard
to come by for some of the teams, so what
they tended to do more commonly was actually simply to
pile in their cars, and so they might have five
(09:07):
or six cars to which they're all and so that meant,
of course that the players are doing the driving. So imagine,
you know, playing a doubleheader and then having to jump
in the car drive all night to get to the
next place where you're playing. When they had buses, typically
you know, you might have the trainer or somebody like
that who's driving the bus. He wouldn't necessarily have a
(09:28):
dedicated bus driver. The bus gave the advantage often of
giving you a place to sleep, a little more room
to because often that's what they were doing. Buses also
gave you the opportunity to air your uniforms out they've
literally hang them out in the windows as they were going,
and a lot more room to do that. Buses gave
a little more camaraderie, a little more chance to This
(09:50):
is where you get you know, Charlie Pride talking about
singing on the bus and things like that. When he
was playing for Memphis. They could travel, you know, from
New York all the way out to Kansas City to
and play everywhere in between.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
I would feel that Sam Alan remembers his time riding
the bus.
Speaker 6 (10:09):
When you played in that Negro League, you traveled. I
mean you were just like a family.
Speaker 7 (10:15):
Yeah, you on that bus.
Speaker 6 (10:17):
You slept on the bus, and uh we fight, you
know together, we did everything.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
The bus was the team's safe, hated and oftentimes a
last resort if the team could not find logic. Jim
Crow laws and racialist segregation created many challenges as to
where they could stay and where to eat and where
to get gas for the teams who traveled across the.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Country, you know, prior to nineteen fifty four, brown versus
border d and that whole notion of separate but equal
ending right, even though I say ending a piece of
paper doesn't end at all right. For a lot of
the teams when they traveled, two biggest, three biggest difficulties
that didn't vary too much much depending on where you
were going was where do you stay, where do you eat?
(11:05):
And where do you get gas? And that last one
maybe a little easier to navigate than the other two.
So what you have on the travel side, for example,
with the question of where do you stay? Oftentimes that
was the job of the manager, the owner. Sometimes they
had a traveling secretary who responsibility was to try to
(11:29):
figure out what towns are there places where we can stay.
And what they were typically looking for are their black
owned hotels, which you would find more in the south
than you tended to find than in some of the
northern cities. Or are their homes where And this is
where the church sometimes came into play, where they could
provide the address in the names of folks who were
(11:51):
willing to put up ball players for a night, you know,
because white hotels you're just not going to be able
to stay in. And the alternative to finding was you
have to sleep in the cars when you're traveling, or
in the bus, and that's where a bus certainly was
an advantage over the other. And so that played a
lot into you sometimes wonder when you try to track
(12:12):
a team's travel and you're like, why did they go
that far out of their way? Well, that's probably why
they were looking for somewhere to sleep, somewhere where they
would be welcomed as far as and then The other one,
of course, would be where do you get food, and
so again finding black owned restaurants, which are a little
easier to find both north and South, or having to
(12:33):
go to white owned restaurants and you send either the
lightest skinned player that you have to try to bring
out the meals if you had somebody, or you had
to go to the back and get served out of
the back of the restaurant. And that was often the
case where people had to do that if you couldn't
find families that were going to serve you, the church
(12:54):
putting up a meal, that kind of thing, And so
that those restrictions really had an impact on where teams went.
You know, if you went down to Louisiana and you
were in New Orleans, you knew that there were a
number of black hotels. If you were in Pittsburgh, there
(13:14):
were black hotels. So you wanted to try to minimize
the number of times you had to sleep in your
in your in your vehicles, because that invariably led to
some of the accidents. Sometimes things like that, you know,
and then getting gas, I mean, something as simple as
that is also sometimes difficult because not every place is
going to serve or are you going to be able
(13:36):
to get gased. Is that a stop where you can
use the restrooms? Typically? Not right, because again think about
the colored signs and the white signs over the drinking fountains,
things like that. So they're going to encounter all of
those kinds of things which were which made travel an adventure.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
His outfield with Sam Alan from this interview with Ron Bar.
Speaker 8 (13:57):
I know you remember stopping at restaurants and being I
had access through the front door, and then you'd be
directed to enter through the back door of the kitchen
to get something to eat. And it was not uncommon
to be refused rest room usage at service stations along
the road. Did you all ever get used to that
or had it been going on for such a long
(14:18):
time that you did get used to it?
Speaker 6 (14:21):
Well, no, you didn't get used to it, But sometime
you didn't have any choice if you got hungry, and
especially if you played the night before and you struck
out a couple of times you needed to get a
good meal. See some of the restaurants they had in
the kitchen, they had like a piece of plywood in
some fish box in the kitchen. But what we would
(14:43):
do in the kitchen that mad. The cook looked like us,
so we talked to her and we'd get three plates
in one. I knew the man knew that she was
doing that, he would kill all of us. But we
sit back there in the kitchen and we ended up
halving the food.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Even when you could get a hotel, the places where
the players were allowed to stay still created challenges with
the players. Here again is outfield of sant out Well.
Speaker 6 (15:12):
I tell you we uh got under funny moments, acting
said we when you went to a hotel, it was
a good thing that guessed about. Every ballpark we went
to had a shower, so you uh got a chance
to shower. But when you went in the shower, you
(15:33):
had a rubber. You had a rubber where you put
your money in and carry it in a shower with
you because if you left your money on the locker
and somebody was gonna clip you. And that was one
of these things. Then when you went we went to
a hotel, like most of the hotels we went to,
they had maybe ten rooms on the floor and two bathrooms,
(15:58):
and you'd have to stand and in line, sometimes two
three hours to get in the bathroom.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Oftentimes, young players had no idea of the struggles that
players would face. Willie Mays recounts how his father had
the foresight to make sure Willie was well looked after
and had appropriate accommodations due to his age during his
time in New York.
Speaker 9 (16:22):
Well, my first year was kind of scary because I
came to New York when I was about nineteen, just
turned twenty, and coming from Birmingham, Alabama was very scary
because New York I had read about it and I
had played there for a couple of years with the
Birmingham Black Bearons. So coming back to New York being
a player and being a star in the outfield in
(16:43):
New York, it was kind of scary. Well, my dad
was a very smart guy. He was a guy that
will stay ahead of me this way. When I went
to Birmingham Black Bearons at the age around fifteen, he
had already called the guys and told him to take
care of I mean, not let me go out by
myself anyway, not to be around fast people. So he
(17:07):
already had told them what to do. So when I
even when I got to New York, he had called
a guy named Joe Walker, which was a barber there
to make sure that I got a good room, make
sure that I you know, I ate right. I didn't,
you know, go out too much. So he was the
type of guy that was very low key.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Author Jim Reisler recounts some of the writers who tried
to tell the stories of the player struggles and how
even Jackie Robinson continued the struggle would travel after he
broke the color barrier.
Speaker 10 (17:39):
They basically told it like it was when they rode
the buses, and they didn't travel a lot with the teams,
but when they did, they would write sort of first
person stories about traveling conditions, and they would describe the
crummy hotels people had to stay, and in a lot
of cases they were homes. They would describe the opportunities
(18:02):
that weren't available to them, and most critically, it's interesting
when Jackie Robinson went to spring training with the Dodgers
in forty six forty seven down in Florida, Jim Crow Florida,
everything Jackie Robinson did was news. I mean he'd brush
(18:22):
his teeth and it was news. And these black writers
had a couple of Sam Lacey of the Baltimore f
ro American and Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier really
had special access to Robinson. They were as much sort
of his mentors and his traveling companions as they were writers.
But they would describe what he went through. And it's
(18:47):
fascinating to go back and look at these articles and
see sort of day by day what a guy like
Robinson was going through. It wasn't just Jackie Robinson went
two for four yesterday with a double in the fifth inning.
It was what he went through when he sat down
for lunch, and what he went through when he was
(19:07):
pulled over by the traffic cop. I mean that kind
of day. Again, they were advocates, but they really really
were very tough in describing what he went through.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
We end our episode with the story from pitcher Gilbert Black,
who discusses his memory of the bus and the two
rules of playing for the Indianapolis Clowns.
Speaker 7 (19:30):
Well, we had a busy had we had a bus,
and the bus was somewhat segregated in a sense, not
not by color, but the higher astauraunt of players sat
on the right side and the sort of lusser players,
like the beer players that sat on the left side,
(19:53):
usually with two occupants in the seat. And I was lucky.
I was on the right side with the one occupant,
mean King me and King tut t bop and so
on and so forth.
Speaker 8 (20:07):
What was the pay like for the players that played
with the Indianapolis Clowns.
Speaker 7 (20:12):
I made two hundred and fifty dollars a month. And
our last game we played in Washington, d C. In
nineteen fifty six, and the players were supposed to share
the gate and we would share the gate and get
a percentage of the gate. I left with forty some dollars.
I think it was forty two dollars. By the time
(20:33):
I got home to Stanford, Connecticut, I was dead broke
paying to get home. So we didn't make that much money.
But we loved baseball and we you know, kept playing.
There was two rules on the Clowns, and that was
hustle on the field and don't miss the.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Bus behind the barrier. Voices from the Negro Leagues is
narrated by Bill Overton, produced by Taylor Haber. Executive producers
are Jason Wykelt, Darren Peck, and Ron Barr. Please check
out our next episode as well as the episodes in
(21:16):
this series. This series is distributed by Sports Byline USA
and the eight Side Network
Hi, This is Bill Overton. Outside of playing the game
of baseball, the Negro League players and their teams had
to manage the daunting and challenging task of traveling from
city to city across the country. From an economic standpoint,
this often meant playing many times a week in both
large and small venues. Baseball historian Professor Leslie Heffey describes
(00:28):
the concept of barnstorming.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
So travel is a fascinating thing to think about, and
so travel for Negro League teams. When you're talking about
the Crawfords, the Grays, things like that, they had a
sort of a twofold travel schedule. So you might have
let we'll use I'll just say the Chicago American Giants. Right, Oh,
they're going to play on Monday and Tuesday in Chicago,
(00:53):
and their end goal is that on Friday and Saturday,
they're going to be playing in New York City. You
do between traveling from Chicago to New York City, you
play whatever games you can set up in whatever communities
are available to you. So it might be Cleveland, so
you play in the Cleveland buck Eyes, or it might
(01:14):
be you're taking a little more of a circuitous route,
and so you get down to go to Dayton, or
you go to Zanesville, and so for a lot of
Negro League teams, and this is something sometimes people they
might play literally maybe seventy or so games, seventy five
games something like that that are actual league games. And
those aren't always played in the big cities because sometimes
(01:36):
the two teams would come together, but more typically and
then the rest of the you know, one hundred or
so one hundred and twenty games that they played could
be anywhere, right, and so lots of small communities, but
that was the idea. You needed to fill your schedule
and you needed to be and part of the reason
you needed to do that was because you needed to
make enough money to keep the journey going. They played
(01:58):
in lots of major league stadiums, but they also played
in the high school stadium where they played in the
local park, depending on what was available to them.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Pitcher Dennis Biddle describes the importance of the Barnstoning games
economically to the players.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
We would play Bompstoning games on a said we going
to Kansas City to play the Monarchs Chicago. They were
played two or three games in between that tames we
call them bompdoning game. We call them money games because
if you want, you got sixty percent of the gate.
(02:32):
If you lost, you got forty percent of the game.
And we couldn't afford to lose. We needed the money
to travel on to the next day. And this is
a high will. Playing in the Negro Bague.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Depended on who was playing, It depended on what day
of the week, and so trying to figure out how
to optimize the money that you're making, right as the
as the owner was trying to figure out what days
do you want to make sure that your team is
in a big city and you're playing against a bigger opponent,
because you might play a Friday, Saturday, Sunday set of
games and make enough money that that's going to take
(03:08):
you through the next couple of weeks, and so then
the additional games are simply to supplement that, right and
so then, and it also depended on the team, because,
for example, the Kansas City Monarchs certainly historically had a
much stronger financial backing than the Cuban Giants did. Hence
(03:29):
the reason the Cuban Giants don't really have a home,
right They moved almost year to year to find a
different city to call home because they don't have that.
So it also depended on the financial backing that they.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Had in fielding that Gerald cast and remembers the many
places the Negro League took him so that when.
Speaker 4 (03:46):
I was playing in the league, we face some predictive
is in the Guyser of Canada and Montandres and it
was it was exciting. I really enjoyed it. I went
(04:08):
to places that I don't think I will ever win
if it had been an amazing or small town like that,
it mean if you will, and you're going to get
the city out of the United States that are there
to win the set. So I enjoyed myself.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
So for many of them, this is going to be
the first time they've ever left the confines of where
they have grown up, right, what they are used to,
what they're comfortable with, and so you know you're going
to get a wide range of experiences that they're going
to have depending on how far they're going to travel
so and where they're coming from. So if you think
it's not about something like Hank Aaron who's coming out
of the South and is going to find his way
(04:44):
traveling with these teams and in the Negro League part
of his He is seventeen years old, right, Willie Mays
is seventeen years old when he and they're going to
suddenly leave the South to go up to Chicago and
to go to Kansas City and something and experience the
world that they would not have gotten to experience otherwise.
And that meant everything from these issues about travel, how
(05:06):
is this going to happen? Who are you going to
meet to encountering often maybe more white fans than they
have ever seen before, which is also going to mean
they may hear things and see things that they had
not expected to see.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
I'm seventeen years old. A lot of things I did
not understand. I did understand why people will pay money,
come in game, call us all kind of names. I
didn't understand why after game we go to the hotel
and said becaus and they tell us no, we couldn't
(05:44):
eat in the restaurant. We had to eat and sleep
on the buck. The bus was like home. This is
the life and the Negro banks boyer, if.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
You were from you know, like Buck Leonard when he
came out of Rocky Mount in North Carolina black community,
it was insulated and so then you find yourself in
a city like Chicago, and suddenly you're going to see
these colored and white sign that you wouldn't have seen
at home. Right, And so in some ways they're going
to more readily experience the Jim Crow laws and the
(06:21):
results of segregation than they would have otherwise. In addition
to just the other side of it, the more positive side,
which is getting to go to a big city and
experience the jazz music and when they're not playing, to
experience the fans, maybe the explosion of opportunities for new foods,
all of those kind of things. I mean, the connection
(06:43):
between a lot of these teams and the bars and
places that where jazz musicians were playing, right, and getting
to go here. These are incredibly, incredibly exciting experiences for
a seventeen eighteen year old that they would never have
gotten otherwise. So there's the most the positive and the
negative science of these travel experiences for them.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Picture Eugene Scruggs use the travel to appreciate home and
as a learning experience.
Speaker 5 (07:12):
Uh, just riding all over the country and you know,
uh at that time, you know stood uh after school,
you know that you know we would make up a
game game, you know, with the people in the community
where I live, and so you know, it was the
(07:33):
experience of being on the bus and everything. You know, Uh,
it may make me think back at home, you know,
in some place that way travel like in Missipi. You know,
had cotton field just like the headcotton field in Alabama
and everything. And and I can recall one time we
was at the we was studying and our uh a
(07:56):
geoperative about the uh there's the seven, seven and eight
Great Lakes and everything, and you know that made me
think about them when I was around the lakes and stuff,
and it made me think about uh the uh I
can't think of the name in Virginia where uh you
(08:19):
know where the slaves you know were brought in right
and on the ground turn and all this stuff. You know,
I've got you into see and it was a you know,
it was a great blessing. You know that sometimes I
thought I learned more by traveling around than I did.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Professor Leslie Heffey discusses the evolution of team travel from
cars and the importance of the team bus.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
By the forties and fifties. You're going to see a
little bit more of the bus than you than you
did previously, but that was still not always the primary
way that teams traveled. Buses were expensive, buses were hard
to come by for some of the teams, so what
they tended to do more commonly was actually simply to
pile in their cars, and so they might have five
(09:07):
or six cars to which they're all and so that meant,
of course that the players are doing the driving. So imagine,
you know, playing a doubleheader and then having to jump
in the car drive all night to get to the
next place where you're playing. When they had buses, typically
you know, you might have the trainer or somebody like
that who's driving the bus. He wouldn't necessarily have a
(09:28):
dedicated bus driver. The bus gave the advantage often of
giving you a place to sleep, a little more room
to because often that's what they were doing. Buses also
gave you the opportunity to air your uniforms out they've
literally hang them out in the windows as they were going,
and a lot more room to do that. Buses gave
a little more camaraderie, a little more chance to This
(09:50):
is where you get you know, Charlie Pride talking about
singing on the bus and things like that. When he
was playing for Memphis. They could travel, you know, from
New York all the way out to Kansas City to
and play everywhere in between.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
I would feel that Sam Alan remembers his time riding
the bus.
Speaker 6 (10:09):
When you played in that Negro League, you traveled. I
mean you were just like a family.
Speaker 7 (10:15):
Yeah, you on that bus.
Speaker 6 (10:17):
You slept on the bus, and uh we fight, you
know together, we did everything.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
The bus was the team's safe, hated and oftentimes a
last resort if the team could not find logic. Jim
Crow laws and racialist segregation created many challenges as to
where they could stay and where to eat and where
to get gas for the teams who traveled across the.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Country, you know, prior to nineteen fifty four, brown versus
border d and that whole notion of separate but equal
ending right, even though I say ending a piece of
paper doesn't end at all right. For a lot of
the teams when they traveled, two biggest, three biggest difficulties
that didn't vary too much much depending on where you
were going was where do you stay, where do you eat?
(11:05):
And where do you get gas? And that last one
maybe a little easier to navigate than the other two.
So what you have on the travel side, for example,
with the question of where do you stay? Oftentimes that
was the job of the manager, the owner. Sometimes they
had a traveling secretary who responsibility was to try to
(11:29):
figure out what towns are there places where we can stay.
And what they were typically looking for are their black
owned hotels, which you would find more in the south
than you tended to find than in some of the
northern cities. Or are their homes where And this is
where the church sometimes came into play, where they could
provide the address in the names of folks who were
(11:51):
willing to put up ball players for a night, you know,
because white hotels you're just not going to be able
to stay in. And the alternative to finding was you
have to sleep in the cars when you're traveling, or
in the bus, and that's where a bus certainly was
an advantage over the other. And so that played a
lot into you sometimes wonder when you try to track
(12:12):
a team's travel and you're like, why did they go
that far out of their way? Well, that's probably why
they were looking for somewhere to sleep, somewhere where they
would be welcomed as far as and then The other one,
of course, would be where do you get food, and
so again finding black owned restaurants, which are a little
easier to find both north and South, or having to
(12:33):
go to white owned restaurants and you send either the
lightest skinned player that you have to try to bring
out the meals if you had somebody, or you had
to go to the back and get served out of
the back of the restaurant. And that was often the
case where people had to do that if you couldn't
find families that were going to serve you, the church
(12:54):
putting up a meal, that kind of thing, And so
that those restrictions really had an impact on where teams went.
You know, if you went down to Louisiana and you
were in New Orleans, you knew that there were a
number of black hotels. If you were in Pittsburgh, there
(13:14):
were black hotels. So you wanted to try to minimize
the number of times you had to sleep in your
in your in your vehicles, because that invariably led to
some of the accidents. Sometimes things like that, you know,
and then getting gas, I mean, something as simple as
that is also sometimes difficult because not every place is
going to serve or are you going to be able
(13:36):
to get gased. Is that a stop where you can
use the restrooms? Typically? Not right, because again think about
the colored signs and the white signs over the drinking fountains,
things like that. So they're going to encounter all of
those kinds of things which were which made travel an adventure.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
His outfield with Sam Alan from this interview with Ron Bar.
Speaker 8 (13:57):
I know you remember stopping at restaurants and being I
had access through the front door, and then you'd be
directed to enter through the back door of the kitchen
to get something to eat. And it was not uncommon
to be refused rest room usage at service stations along
the road. Did you all ever get used to that
or had it been going on for such a long
(14:18):
time that you did get used to it?
Speaker 6 (14:21):
Well, no, you didn't get used to it, But sometime
you didn't have any choice if you got hungry, and
especially if you played the night before and you struck
out a couple of times you needed to get a
good meal. See some of the restaurants they had in
the kitchen, they had like a piece of plywood in
some fish box in the kitchen. But what we would
(14:43):
do in the kitchen that mad. The cook looked like us,
so we talked to her and we'd get three plates
in one. I knew the man knew that she was
doing that, he would kill all of us. But we
sit back there in the kitchen and we ended up
halving the food.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Even when you could get a hotel, the places where
the players were allowed to stay still created challenges with
the players. Here again is outfield of sant out Well.
Speaker 6 (15:12):
I tell you we uh got under funny moments, acting
said we when you went to a hotel, it was
a good thing that guessed about. Every ballpark we went
to had a shower, so you uh got a chance
to shower. But when you went in the shower, you
(15:33):
had a rubber. You had a rubber where you put
your money in and carry it in a shower with
you because if you left your money on the locker
and somebody was gonna clip you. And that was one
of these things. Then when you went we went to
a hotel, like most of the hotels we went to,
they had maybe ten rooms on the floor and two bathrooms,
(15:58):
and you'd have to stand and in line, sometimes two
three hours to get in the bathroom.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Oftentimes, young players had no idea of the struggles that
players would face. Willie Mays recounts how his father had
the foresight to make sure Willie was well looked after
and had appropriate accommodations due to his age during his
time in New York.
Speaker 9 (16:22):
Well, my first year was kind of scary because I
came to New York when I was about nineteen, just
turned twenty, and coming from Birmingham, Alabama was very scary
because New York I had read about it and I
had played there for a couple of years with the
Birmingham Black Bearons. So coming back to New York being
a player and being a star in the outfield in
(16:43):
New York, it was kind of scary. Well, my dad
was a very smart guy. He was a guy that
will stay ahead of me this way. When I went
to Birmingham Black Bearons at the age around fifteen, he
had already called the guys and told him to take
care of I mean, not let me go out by
myself anyway, not to be around fast people. So he
(17:07):
already had told them what to do. So when I
even when I got to New York, he had called
a guy named Joe Walker, which was a barber there
to make sure that I got a good room, make
sure that I you know, I ate right. I didn't,
you know, go out too much. So he was the
type of guy that was very low key.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Author Jim Reisler recounts some of the writers who tried
to tell the stories of the player struggles and how
even Jackie Robinson continued the struggle would travel after he
broke the color barrier.
Speaker 10 (17:39):
They basically told it like it was when they rode
the buses, and they didn't travel a lot with the teams,
but when they did, they would write sort of first
person stories about traveling conditions, and they would describe the
crummy hotels people had to stay, and in a lot
of cases they were homes. They would describe the opportunities
(18:02):
that weren't available to them, and most critically, it's interesting
when Jackie Robinson went to spring training with the Dodgers
in forty six forty seven down in Florida, Jim Crow Florida,
everything Jackie Robinson did was news. I mean he'd brush
(18:22):
his teeth and it was news. And these black writers
had a couple of Sam Lacey of the Baltimore f
ro American and Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier really
had special access to Robinson. They were as much sort
of his mentors and his traveling companions as they were writers.
But they would describe what he went through. And it's
(18:47):
fascinating to go back and look at these articles and
see sort of day by day what a guy like
Robinson was going through. It wasn't just Jackie Robinson went
two for four yesterday with a double in the fifth inning.
It was what he went through when he sat down
for lunch, and what he went through when he was
(19:07):
pulled over by the traffic cop. I mean that kind
of day. Again, they were advocates, but they really really
were very tough in describing what he went through.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
We end our episode with the story from pitcher Gilbert Black,
who discusses his memory of the bus and the two
rules of playing for the Indianapolis Clowns.
Speaker 7 (19:30):
Well, we had a busy had we had a bus,
and the bus was somewhat segregated in a sense, not
not by color, but the higher astauraunt of players sat
on the right side and the sort of lusser players,
like the beer players that sat on the left side,
(19:53):
usually with two occupants in the seat. And I was lucky.
I was on the right side with the one occupant,
mean King me and King tut t bop and so
on and so forth.
Speaker 8 (20:07):
What was the pay like for the players that played
with the Indianapolis Clowns.
Speaker 7 (20:12):
I made two hundred and fifty dollars a month. And
our last game we played in Washington, d C. In
nineteen fifty six, and the players were supposed to share
the gate and we would share the gate and get
a percentage of the gate. I left with forty some dollars.
I think it was forty two dollars. By the time
(20:33):
I got home to Stanford, Connecticut, I was dead broke
paying to get home. So we didn't make that much money.
But we loved baseball and we you know, kept playing.
There was two rules on the Clowns, and that was
hustle on the field and don't miss the.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Bus behind the barrier. Voices from the Negro Leagues is
narrated by Bill Overton, produced by Taylor Haber. Executive producers
are Jason Wykelt, Darren Peck, and Ron Barr. Please check
out our next episode as well as the episodes in
(21:16):
this series. This series is distributed by Sports Byline USA
and the eight Side Network
Host
Bill Overton
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