Mickey and Willie by Allen Barra - Excerpt

7/30/2019 Mickey and Willie by Allen Barra - Excerpt

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The Parallel Lives of

Baseballs Golden Age

724

m l m y


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1Fathers and ons

I a scientic research team were to conduct an exhaustive study

o the ideal places, times, and conditions or breeding the perect

baseball player, theyd surely come up with something very close

to Westeld, Alabama, in the heart o Birminghams steel industry, or

the mining district o Commerce, Oklahoma.

Thousands o southern blacks let their homes during the Depres-

sion and moved to industrial cities in the North, but in Westeld, Ala-bama, William Howard Cat Mays chose to stay home. Grueling as

the work in the local steel mills was, Cat understood that the promise

o a better lie in towns like Gary, Indiana, Flint, Michigan, and Pitts-

burgh, Pennsylvania, was remote. He stayed in Alabama. At the same

time, countless amilies rom Oklahoma and adjoining states made

the decision to abandon everything and make the hazardous trek to

Caliornia; their stories would be told in prose by John Steinbeck and

in song by Woody Guthrie. No one spoke or Elvin Charles MuttMantle, who chose to keep his amily in Oklahoma, taking jobs as


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[ 16 ] M i c k e y a n d w i l l i e

a road grader, tenant armer, and, nally, miner to put ood on the

table.

For both Cat Mays and Mutt Mantle, the main recreationpractically the only onewas baseball, specically the industrial

league baseball organized by their companies. They raised their boys

in a baseball culture. No athers ever guided their sons toward pro-

essional baseball with more single-mindedness than Cat and Mutt.

Both men saw baseball as a way to get their sons out o those small

towns, out o the mills and mines, although they guided them in very

dierent ways. And once Mickey and Willie let, neither ever lived in

his hometown again.

Willie Howard Mayswhy he was not named William like his

ather has never been explainedwas born in Westeld on

May 6, 1931. Theres no monument or plaque to mark the spot; little

o the Westeld that Willie knew remains standing today. A pamphlet

printed by the Birmingham Chamber o Commerce in the 1960s

called it a village, which is inaccurate

Westeld was never a vil-lage or a town, but a community o neighborhoods populated by black

working-class amilies whose lieline was the steel mills in nearby Fair-

eld. Virtually all the houses were o the type called shotgunit

was said that you could re a shotgun at the ront door and the pellets

would go out the back door.* They were built and owned by mills

such as the Tennessee Cast Iron and Railroad Company (TCI), the

great subcorporation o U.S. Steel, ocially to benet the workersbut in reality to maintain their dependence on their employers.

The larger town o Faireld provided necessary servicessuch as

schoolsto the small nearby communities like Westeld. Faireld

was born in 1910, the same year that nearby Rickwood Field opened,

* This was because the shotgun houses were usually three to ve rooms in a row withno hallways and sometimes no doors between them. Oh, the boss man high with TCI, ran the lyric rom a popular song o the 1930s.


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Fathers and Sons [ 17 ]

and it was a planned community rom the start, the result o U.S.

Steels purchase o TCI.*

Years later in his autobiography, Jackie Robinson, criticizing Willieor his lack o involvement in the civil rights movement, would remind

Mays o his roots: I hope Willie hasnt orgotten his shotgun house in

Birmingham slums, wind-whistling through its clapboards, as he sits in

his $85,000 mansion in San Franciscos ashionable Forest Hills, or the

concentration camp atmosphere o the Shacktown o his boyhood.1

The house Willie grew up in was airly standard or amilies o

black steelworkers, and not terribly unlike those o most white steel-

workers in the Birmingham area. In act, it was not a great deal dier-

ent rom the house o a zinc miner in Commerce, Oklahoma, where

Mickey Mantle grew up. Some might have rated the Mays home as

superior: an early Mays biography describes the house he grew up

in as middle class.2 Its doubtul anyone would have said that to

describe the Mantles house in Commerce; Cats amily had little

money, but his house had electricity, which the Mantle home did not.

Today some o the neighborhoods in and around Westeld arein ruin. All thats let o most o the original company houses is their

oundations. The population has been shrinking steadily or decades,

rom perhaps 5,000 when Willie was born to just over 1,100 in 1990

and under 1,000 today. The steel industry that sustained these com-

munities began deserting the Birmingham area in the late 1970s, and

the industrial baseball leagues that produced Willie Mays were gone

at least two decades beore that.

The black population o Alabama yielded many ne baseball play-

ers, among them perhaps the games greatest pitcher, Satchel

* The town was rst named Corey, ater the president o U.S. Steel, William E. Corey;the name was quickly dropped when Corey was caught in a New York hotel with ashowgirl rom the Copacabana, an incident that made headlines rom New York downto Birmingham. Asked to rename the town, the companys new president thought thathis hometown o Faireld, Connecticut, deserved a namesake.


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Paige; the leading home run hitter o the twentieth century, Henry

Aaron; and arguably the greatest all-around player in the games history,

Willie Mays. The greatest concentration o black baseball talent in thecountry was in the South, and in the South no state produced as many

Negro League players as Alabama; in Alabama the preponderance o

talent came rom the industrial leagues o the Birmingham area.

Mays grew up in a baseball tradition that was more than hal a

century old when he was born. Baseball had been introduced to the

Deep South ater 1865 by Conederate soldiers who had learned the

game either rom their Union captors in prison camps or during breaks

when men rom the two armies would get together or some R&R

beore they resumed slaughtering one another. How the game came

to be popular with southern blacks is a subject on which historians are

split. Some say that ree blacks learned it rom their ormer masters.

Others suggest that black soldiers in the Union Army, who numbered

perhaps 200,000, picked it up rom their white comrades. Yet a third

possibility is that blacks watched white men play, then went home and

played it themselves. Its likely that all three actors had a role.The ather o black ball in Alabama was a man named Charles

Isam Taylor, who went to Birmingham rom South Carolina in 1904.

A veteran o the U.S. Army and the Spanish-American War, Taylor

worked his way through Clark College in Atlanta, where he helped

organize the schools rst baseball team. For our years, Taylor made a

living by staging and promoting (and sometimes playing in) baseball

games or Birminghams black ans. In 1910, realizing that there wasmore money to be made above the Mason-Dixon Line (where black

teams could be matched against white teams), Taylor moved his team

to the industrial town o West Baden, Indiana. The ans were heart-

broken, and at least one black newspaper, the Birmingham Reporter,

continued to print items about their games, passing on inormation

about the local lads who were playing ball so ar rom home. From

there, Taylor ades into obscurity, but his brainchild o using the

industrial leagues as a talent arm or a proessional league lived onand fourished.


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Fathers and Sons [ 19 ]

I there was one progressive aspect to the steel and coal barons

who dominated Birmingham industry, it was that they saw the value

o sponsoring baseball teams among the black as well as the whiteworkorces. Baseball provided great exercise and improved morale

enormously, and shirts with company names and logos proved to be

cheap but eective advertising.

Lorenzo Piper Davis, the most important gure in Birmingham

black ball history, was Willie Mayss mentor and rst manager. He

told me in 1987, There is a lot to be said about the way the com-

panies treated us. It was the closest thing a black man could get to

a square deal. They paid or bats and gloves and uniorms, and they

even paid or our travel expenses to go play other company teams.3

Davis, o course, was speaking o a time in the late 1930s and early

1940s when the Birmingham steel industry, shaking o the Depres-

sion, was booming again, but rom the years beore World War I until

the early 1950s, when a combination o actors ranging rom the civil

rights struggle to televised major league baseball eroded support or

both the Negro Leagues and white minor leagues, Birmingham couldlay claim to being the baseball capital o the South.

Allen Harvey Woodward, known to his riends or reasons no one

can remember as Rick, was one o the big reasons. Rick was the son

o steel baron Joseph Hersey Woodward and, despite his athers indi-

erence, was an enthusiastic supporter o Woodward Irons company

team. In 1909 he made a daring movesupervising the construction

o the rst steel-and-concrete ballpark in the South. Rickwood Field,named in a radio contest and combining the owners nickname with

the rst part o his last name, became the home o a team called the

Birmingham Barons, named or the coal and steel magnates who ran

Birmingham. It would also be home, beginning in the early 1920s,

to the Black Barons, who played on alternate Sundays and other days

when the white team was traveling.

Rickwood Field opened on August 18, 1910. It was largely mod-

eled ater Shibe Park in Philadelphia, home o Connie Macks cham-pion AsMack himsel came to Birmingham to advise Woodward


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on construction detailswhile also incorporating elements o Pitts-

burghs Forbes Field and Cincinnatis Crosley Field (still known in

1910 as Palace o the Fans), ballparks that Willie Mays would stillbe perorming in more than hal a century later. Rickwood, which

stands today as the oldest ballpark in the country, was or decades

the crown jewel o southern baseball. It was as i history wanted to

provide Willie Mays with a worthy stage rom which to launch his

legend.*


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Mickey and Willie by Allen Barra - Excerpt

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