Travel

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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Episode Transcript

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 that daunting and challenging tasks 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 barnstoning. So travel is a fascinating thing
to think about, and so travel for Negro League teams,
when you're talking about the Crawfords, the gravest things like that,
they had a sort of a twofold travel schedule. So
you might have we'll use I'll just say the Chicago

(00:48):
American Giants. Right, Oh, they're going to play on Monday
and Tuesday in Chicago, and their end goal is that
on Friday and Saturday they're going to be playing in
New York City. So what 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.

(01:10):
So it might be Cleveland and so you play in
the Cleveland Buckeyes, or it might 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 the early teams, and
this is something sometimes people they might play literally maybe
seventy or so games, seventy five games something that that

(01:31):
are actual league games. And those aren't always played in
the big cities because sometimes 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

(01:52):
of the reason you needed to do that was because
you needed to make enough money to keep the journey going.
They played 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.
Pitcher Dennis Biddle describes the importance of the barnstorming games
economically to the players. We would play bumpstoning games on

(02:15):
a said we go into Canada City to play the
monies Chicago. They would played two or three games in
between that game. We call them bumpstonning game. We call
them money game because if you won, you got sixty
percent of the game. If you lost, you got forty
percent of the game. And we couldn't afford to lose.

(02:38):
We needed the money to travel out to the next thing.
And this is a high well. Playing at a negro
Ba depended on who was playing independent 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

(02:58):
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
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,

(03:19):
for example, the Kansas City Monarchs certainly historically had a
much stronger financial backing than the Cuban Giants did. Hence
the reason the Cuban Giants don't really have a home,
right They move almost here 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

(03:40):
had in field that Gerald Caston remembers the many places
that Negro League took him because though when I was saying,
in the League we face some prigect gift out and
the gift guys a bird to Canada and Taos, Montana,

(04:01):
christ and I know it was it was a saying
I really enjoyed it. I went to places that I'm
thinking that would ever win if admitted amazing a small
town like that, it tweeded you will and you to
get the city town of the United States. I enjoyed myself.

(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, William Mays
is seventeen years old when he um, 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. But they had they would not have gotten
to experience otherwise. And that meant everything from these issues

(05:05):
about travel, how 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 was also
going to mean they may hear things and and see
things that they had not expected to see. I'm seventeen
years old. A lot of things I did not understand.

(05:26):
I did not understand why people would pay money, come
in game, call us all kind of name. I didn't
understand why after game we go to the hotel and
said bakas and they tell us no, we couldn't eat
in the restaurant. We had to eat and sleep on

(05:47):
the buck. The buff was like home. This is the
life and the Negro base money says if you were
from you know, like Buck Leonard when he came out
of Rocky Mountain in North Carolina black community. It was
insulated and so then you find yourself in a city

(06:08):
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 results of segregation
than they would have otherwise. In addition to just the
other side of it, the more positive side, which is

(06:29):
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 between a
lot of these teams and the bars and places that

(06:49):
where jazz musicians were playing, right, and getting to go here.
These are incredible, incredibly exciting experiences for our seventeen eighteen
year old that they would never have gotten otherwise. So
there's the both the positive and the negative signs of
these travel experiences for them. Picture Eugene Scruggs use the
travel to appreciate home and as a learning experience that's

(07:14):
riding all over the country and you know at that time,
you know, student after student, you know um um that
you know we will make up a game game, you know,
with the peoples in the community where a la and
so you know, it was the experience of being on

(07:35):
the bus everything. You know, it makes me think back
at home, you know, in someplace that where you travel,
like in Mississippidia, you know head Cutting Field, just like
the head Cutton Field in Alabama and ear Thing and
and I can recall one time we was at the
we was studying in our a g operative about the

(07:58):
h 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 I can think of the
name is in Virginia wherever you know where the slaves

(08:20):
you know were brought in right and on the ground
turn and all this stuff. You know, I've got to
inter seed. And it was, you know, it was a
great blessing, you know that. Um, sometimes I thought I
learned more about traveling around than that did. Professor Leslie
Hefy discusses the evolution of team travel from cars and

(08:43):
the importance of the team bus. 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. Um.
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,

(09:06):
and so they might have five 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 dedicated breast driver.

(09:30):
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 is where
you get you know, Charlie Pride talking about singing on

(09:52):
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. Out feel that Sam Allen remembers his
time riding the bush. When you played in that Ligro League,
you traveled. I mean you you were just like a family. Yeah,

(10:16):
you're on that bus. You slap on the bus and
h we we fight, you know, together, we did everything.
The bus was the team's safe hayn and oftentimes a
last resort if the team could not find logic. Jim
Crow laws and racially segregation created many challenges as to
where they could stay and where to eat and where

(10:39):
did you get gas? For the teams who traveled across
the country, you know, prior to nineteen fifty four, brown
versus board of head, that whole notion of separate but
equal ending right, even though I say ending a piece
of paper doesn't end it all right, For a lot
of the teams when they traveled, two biggest, three biggest
difficulties that didn't vary too much depending on where you

(11:00):
were going was where do you stay? Where do you eat?
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

(11:21):
was the job of the manager, the owner who sometimes
they had a traveling secretary who's responsibility was to try
to figure out what towns are there places where we
can stay and what they were typically looking for, are
are there 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?

(11:44):
And this is where the church sometimes came into play,
where they could provide the address and in the names
of folks who were willing to put up all 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

(12:04):
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 a teams 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. And then
the other one, of course, would be where do you
get food? And so again finding black owned restaurants, which

(12:29):
are a little easier to find both north and South,
or having to 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

(12:49):
if you couldn't find families that were going to serve you,
the church 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
um Louisiana and you were in New Orleans, you knew

(13:10):
that there were a number of black hotels. If you
were in Pittsburgh, there 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

(13:32):
not every place is going to serve um or are
you going to be able to get gas? And 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. He Outfield

(13:54):
to say and Allen from his interview withoud rown Bar,
I know you remember stopping at restaurants and being denid
access through the front door, and then you'd be directed
to enter through the back door 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

(14:16):
it been going on for such a long time that
you did get used to it? Well, no, you didn't
get used to it, but sometimes you didn't have any
choice if you got hungry, especially if you played the
night before and you struck out a couple of times,
you needed to get a good meal. Seeing some of
the rest of are ants they had in the kitchen,

(14:37):
they had like a piece of plywood and some kitch
box in the kitchen. But what we would do in
the kitchen. The cook looked like us, so we talked
to her and we get three plates in one. I
knew the man knew that she was doing it. It It
would kill all of us. But we sit back then

(14:59):
the kitchen and we'd up having the food. Even when
you could get a hotel, the places where the players
were allowed to stay still created challenges for the players.
Here again, as I'll feel the sand our well, I
tell you we are come at the plenty of moments. Act.
I said, when you went to a hotel, it was

(15:20):
a good thing that guess about every ballpark we went
to had a shower, so you got a chance of shower.
But when you went in the shower you had a rubble.
You had a rubble where you put your money in
and carry it in the shower, which because if you

(15:41):
left your money on the locker and somebody was gonna
clip you, and uh, that was one of these things
and didn't when you went we went to a hotel.
But most of the hotels we went to the had
maybe ten rooms on the floor and two bathrooms, and
you would have to stand in line, sometimes two three

(16:02):
hours to get in the bathroom. Oftentimes, young players had
no idea or the struggles that players would face. Willie
Mays recounts how his father had the foresight to me
sure Willie was well looked after and had appropriate accommodations
due to his age during his time in New York. Well,

(16:23):
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 Barons.
So coming back to New York being a player and
being a star in the hour feeling in New York,

(16:44):
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 Barons at the age around fifteen, he had already
called the guys and told him to take care of
mean U, not let me go out by myself anyway,
not to be around fast people. So he already had

(17:08):
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 Barbara 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. Author Jim Risler recounts some

(17:29):
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'd broke the color barrier. 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

(17:50):
person stories about traveling conditions, and they would describe the
crummy hotels people had to stay in. In a lot
of cases they were homes. They would describe the opportunities
that weren't available to them, and most critically, it's interesting
when Jackie Robinson went to spring training with the Dodgers

(18:11):
in forty six forty seven down in Florida, Jim Crow Florida.
Everything Jackie Robinson did was news. I mean he'd brush
his teeth and it was news. And these black writers
had a couple of them. Sam Lacy of the Baltimore
Afro American and Wendell Smith off the Pittsburgh Courier really

(18:32):
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
fascinating to go back and look at these articles and
see sort of day by day what a guy like

(18:55):
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
pulled over by the traffic cop. I mean that kind
of They again, they were advocates, but they really really
were very tough in describing what he went through. We

(19:19):
end our episode with the story from picture Gilbert Black,
who discusses his memory of the bus and the two
rules of playing for the Indianapolis Clowns. Well, we had
a bus, hey had. We had a bus, and the
bus was somewhat segregated in a sense, not by color,

(19:40):
but the higher edge amount of players sat on the
right side, and the sort of loss their players, like
the vier players that sat on the on the less
side usually were two occupants of the seat, and I
was lucky. I was on the right side with the
one occupant, me and King tut te Bab and so

(20:05):
on and so forth. What was the pain like for
for the players that played with the Indianapolis Clowns. I
made two hundred and fifty dollars a month. And our
last game we played in Washington, DC in nineteen fifty six,
and the players were supposed to share the gate and
we would we would share the gate and get a

(20:26):
percentage of the gate. I left with forty seven dollars.
I think with forty two dollars. By the time I
got home to Stanford, Connecticut, I was dead broth, the
king paying paying to get home. So we didn't make
that much money. But we loved baseball and we, you know,

(20:48):
kept playing. There was two rules on the Clowns, and
that was hustled on the field and don't miss the
bus behind the barrier voices from the Negro Leagues. Is
narrated by Bill Overton, produced by Taylor Haber. Executive producers

(21:09):
are Jason Wyhelt, Darren Peck, and Ron Barr. Please check
out our next episode, as well as the episodes in
this series. This series is distributed by Sports Byline USA
and the Eight Side Network.