In 1953, the major leagues were no farther South than St. Louis and Cincinnati. Baltimore was still a year away from the American League, and there wouldn't be a team below the Mason-Dixon line until the Colt 45's set up in Houston in 1962. Big-league baseball didn't actually get to Dixieland—the real South—until the Braves moved to Atlanta in 1966. The fact is, Jackie Robinson did not desegregate professional baseball in all of the United States—just the northern ones.
It wasn't that Robinson didn't try to break down the South. Before he went north with the Dodgers in 1947—the year the color line was busted—Robinson and black pitcher John Wright were to accompany the team for an exhibition game in Jacksonville, Florida, a city where nearly half the population was black. Jacksonville, however, abided by a city ordinance which prohibited blacks and whites from competing together on city-owned property. Consequently, Jacksonville's Parks Commission voted unanimously to cancel the game. The Dodgers objected, of course, and after a few days of squabbling and circumvention, they showed up at Myrtle Avenue Park to go on with the game—only to find that the park had been padlocked, with policemen standing guard outside for good measure. After that incident, Robinson and the Dodgers persevered in other Florida towns. In De Land, the scheduled game was called off because the lights were not working—the curiosity being that it was a day game. In Sanford, Robinson actually made it onto the field and began to play until the police chief appeared and escorted him from the premises.
The South was stronghold of minor-league baseball, and its Jim Crow practices were a retardant to the major leagues' desegregation process. Visionary executives like Branch Rickey and Bill Veeck were impaired by the refusal of their Southern farm clubs to receive black prospects. Placing a black player in the South was dangerous, at worst, and, at best, scandalous. In 1952, Rock Hill, South Carolina, of the Tri-State League employed a black outfielder named David Mobley, but after appearing in the lineup once, he was banned by the league. The Cotton States League went one step further when it tried to banish the entire Hot Springs franchise from its ranks during the Tugerson incident in 1953. The same year, Jacksonville Beach attempted to put black players on its Florida State League roster, but the local chamber of commerce wouldn't permit it. “No race prejudice is involved,” explained a spokesman. “It's just that the patrons of the team felt they would rather have an all-white team.”
There were a handful of players on the fringe of the Deep South as early as 1952. After Aaron's teammate with the Clowns, Ray Neil, was rejected in Dallas, the same team signed a black pitcher-outfielder named Dave Hoskins, who dominated the Texas League that year. The Florida International League fielded three black players in 1952—Dave Barnhill of Miami Beach, Claro Duany of Tampa, and Willie Felden of Fort Lauderdale. But even so, the prospect of playing in even a suburb of the South was terrifying to most black players—especially those from the North, to whom the South was a land of horror stories. An item from the New York Giants' training camp in 1953 subtly demonstrates this, as reported by the Pittsburgh Courier: “Doesn't Want To Go South! Perhaps the hardest-working player in uniform is Bill White, rookie first baseman. Reason? White wants to go to a Class C league in the North rather than face discrimination if he goes into the Carolina League.” As it turned out, the future president of the National League was dispatched to Danville, Virginia, of the Carolina League, where he had to be removed from the field on several occasions for engaging in animated disputes with objecting white customers.
While the breakthroughs in the Carolinas and Florida were significant, the two minor leagues that carried the banner of the Deep South were the Southern and South Atlantic. Their members were located in the Jim Crow playing fields of Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Northern Florida, where the notion of interracial athletic competition was unthinkable to many. In towns like Birmingham and Montgomery, it was against the law for blacks and whites to even play checkers or dominoes together.
To its very end, the Southern League held out staunchly against integration. The only black player who ever appeared in a Southern League game was Nat Peeples, who went to bat one time for the Atlanta Crackers in 1954. He failed to get a hit, and when the league closed down in 1961—in large part, because of its racial intransigence—it could say that a black man never made it to first base in the Southern League.
The South Atlantic League—the Sally League, as they called it, Mother of the Minors and Cradle of the Great—was made up of smaller towns than was the Southern. Its members were Montgomery, Alabama; Columbus, Augusta, and Savannah, Georgia; Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina; and the infamous Jacksonville. In 1953, the Sally League was observing its fiftieth birthday, ceremonially formalizing its place in Southern tradition. In many cultural respects, Aunt Sally represented the South at its deepest.
It was into this uncharted and forbidding territory that the Milwaukee Braves sent Henry Aaron, Horace Garner, and Felix Mantilla. The three unwitting pioneers were assigned to the Braves' Class A farm club in Jacksonville, the very city where Jackie Robinson had been welcomed with policemen and padlocks. At the same time, Savannah signed on a pair of black players named Fleming Reedy and Al Israel. And so, despite the efforts of Robinson and the others, it was up to Henry Aaron, Horace Garner, Felix Mantilla, Fleming Reedy and Al Israel to break the color line in the most vividly racial corner of the country. Baseball wouldn't be truly integrated in America until these five young men had made it through a season in the Sally League.
The Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee one day during spring training in 1953. John Quinn, the general manager, walked onto the field in Bradenton, Florida, and handed everybody a cap with an “M” on the front, and that was it. Or so I heard. I wasn't there. I was in Kissimmee, Florida, with the Milwaukee Brewers, which had been the Braves' top farm team before the move. When Milwaukee became a major-league city, the AAA club was moved to Toledo, and I would have played there in 1953 if I had made the team. But there wasn't much danger of that. I was only in Kissimmee as a courtesy for the season I'd had in Eau Claire.
It was the only time in my life that I failed to make a baseball team—although I can't honestly believe that the failure was mine. I hit the ball whenever I got up to bat. That was about three times, as I recall. My best opportunity was supposed to come one day when another black player and I went with the team to play the Red Sox in Winter Haven, but when we got there, the local authorities wouldn't let us off the bus. On the rare occasions when I did bat in Kissimmee, I had a double or two and a home run. The home run was my big mistake. It went over the right-field fence, which was the wrong way to impress the manager, Tommy Holmes. Holmes knew a lot about hitting, and one of the things he knew was that I would never be any good at it unless I learned to pull the ball. I'm sure he thought that the American Association was not the place for me to learn this. Before he actually had a chance to cut me, though, I went to John Mullen and asked that he reassign me to a lower team that would give me half a chance. Nice man that he was, he sent me to the Okefenokee Swamp, where the Braves had a minor-league camp outside Waycross, Georgia.
I rode to Waycross with Hugh Wise, who was the assistant minor-league director, and another player. We may have passed a living person or two along the way, but all I can remember is slash pines and saw grass. You couldn't see the mosquitoes, but you knew they were out there waiting for you. The only reason they didn't get me was that I had to stay in the car. The other guys brought sandwiches out to me, and I ate in the backseat. Finally, we came to a clearing in the woods—an old World War II air base that was our camp.
In those days, organizations had more farm teams than they do now, and the Braves sent all their players from the Class A level or below to Waycross. We slept in barracks, blacks and whites in the same long room. The camp was far enough from town that none of the local people paid much attention to us, but living together like that was a pretty bold thing for that day and age. The Reds had a similar place nearby in Douglas, Georgia, and they kept the black players' quarters separate from the whites'.
The camp had almost everything we needed, which wasn't much. Food and Ping-Pong were about it. On weekends, a bus would take us into town so we could do laundry or get a haircut or shoot pool. The first weekend I was there, I went in for a haircut, but somehow I managed to miss the bus back to camp. It was a long walk, and it was getting dark by the time I got to the camp. You had to climb a fence to get onto the grounds and there was a long road to the barracks, but it was much shorter to go through the woods. I found my way through, and when I came out, the guard spotted me. All he saw was a black kid sneaking up on the barracks, so, without further ado, he opened fire. Bullets were flying past my ears. I could see my career ending right there in the red clay of Waycross, Georgia—to say nothing of my life. Somehow, I managed to crawl into the barracks without being hit. The next day, John Mullen gave me a Bulova watch and told me not to miss the bus anymore.
Other than being eaten alive and shot at, Waycross was great. We had four fields, with batting practice and intrasquad games going on all the time. I got to bat almost as much as I wanted, and nobody seemed to care if I hit the ball 400 feet to right field.
There weren't any fences on most of the fields in Waycross, but they had dirt piles out there that served as fences. They were way out there, deep. I was getting ready to hit one day, and I noticed this little black kid hitting the ball over those dirt piles. The first time, I didn't pay too much attention, because he wasn't a very big kid. But then he hit one over the center-field dirt pile, and I thought, hey, nobody else here has been doing that: who is this guy? Somebody told me it was a kid who played shortstop for Eau Claire the year before.
—Jim Frey
As it turned out, it was a good thing I left Kissimmee when I did, because it gave me time to learn a new position in Waycross. Felix Mantilla, a Puerto Rican who had played at Evansville the year before, was easily the best shortstop in the organization, so right off they moved me across the bag to second base. That way, Felix and I could play on the same team, which is exactly what happened—except that we didn't know it would be that way until they announced it. In those days, with so many minor-league teams, they made assignments the way they gave out tour-of-duty orders in the army. You had hundreds of guys in camp—guys with numbers on their backs like 195F—and nobody knew where they were headed. Finally, they'd put up a list with everybody's assignment and call it out. It would be like: Henry Aaron, Bus 5, you're going to Jacksonville. Felix Mantilla, Bus 5. Horace Garner, Bus 5. They told us to pack our things and be on the bus the next morning, because we had to get to Jacksonville to play the Red Sox. They also mentioned that Horace, Felix, and I would be breaking the color line in the Sally League.
The game against the Red Sox was called a “historic event” in the Jacksonville newspaper, the Florida Times-Union. Since Jackie Robinson had been locked out six years before, black players had participated in games there on four occasions, but never on Jacksonville's side. As we expected, there were some boos, and we heard “nigger” and “burrhead” and “eight-ball” and other friendly greetings, but the biggest problem that day was the Red Sox. They beat us, 14-1. I could take some satisfaction in the fact that our one was a home run I hit in the eighth inning—to right field, naturally—against Ike Delock.
Two days later, we played Tommy Holmes' Toledo team, and it pleased me to hit a 400-foot home run to center field. The fact was, we probably had more talent than Toledo, even though we were two classifications lower. With Horace in right field, Felix at shortstop, Joe Andrews at first base, Rance Pless at third base, Jim Frey in center, and Ray Crone and Larry Lassalle pitching, we had the best roster that Jacksonville had ever seen. Jacksonville hadn't been blessed with many good teams, and neither had our manager, Ben Geraghty. Ben was a baseball man through and through, and it meant a lot to him to get to manage a team like ours. He knew it was his big chance.
Before we started playing games, Ben sat down with Horace and Felix and me and said that he would love to have us on his team, but we ought to be aware of what we would be up against if we stayed there. It was nothing we didn't already know, but it was reassuring to hear that the manager was on our side. Ben wasn't much to look at—he was a small guy, with a long chin and hound-dog eyes—and he didn't speak the King's English. He was also nervous, he drank too much beer, and he didn't change his clothes as often as he should have. But in all the years I played baseball, I never had a manager who cared more for his players or knew more about the game.
There were a few open days before the season started, and we used the time to get acclimated to Jacksonville. Meanwhile, Jacksonville used the time to get acclimated to us. We went to stores and just milled around for a little while, maybe stood in the doorway for a few minutes so that people could see us and get used to us. We also found a place to live, a house near the ballpark owned by a black man named Manuel Rivera, who ran a tavern called Manuel's that was the local hangout.
A day or two after we moved in, I was lingering around the ballpark when I noticed a girl about my age going into the post office. Our clubhouse man, T. C. Marlin, knew everybody in that part of town—a black section known as Durkeeville—so I fetched him real fast and asked him who the girl was. He told me her name was Barbara Lucas, and she had just returned home from Florida A&M to attend classes at a local business college. I had him introduce me as one of the next great stars of baseball. I don't think she was impressed, but I asked her for a date anyway. She said I'd have to come home and meet her parents before she could think about going out with me. She lived in the projects across from the park, and whenever we were in town the rest of the summer you could usually find me on Barbara's front porch eating her mother's coconut cake. And if I was there, more than likely Felix was sitting right across from me, having a piece of Mrs. Lucas' lemon pie.
I don't know whether it was coincidence or not, but our first game was in Savannah, against the team that had the other two black players in the Sally League. It seemed to Felix and Horace and me that the whole South had its sights trained on us, and as we were getting on the bus to leave for Savannah, the mayor of Jacksonville came by to tell us that whatever we heard on that field, or whatever the fans tried to do to us, we had to suffer it quietly. It sounded a lot like the speech Branch Rickey gave Jackie Robinson the first time they met.
There were more than 5,500 people at the ballpark in Savannah—the biggest Opening Day crowd they'd ever had and the biggest in the Sally League that year. It would be that way all summer. Wherever we went, the fans poured out to the park. We set all kinds of attendance records that year, and opened up the Sally League to a whole new group of customers. There were so many black fans that they had to add room to the colored section in a lot of the ballparks. Columbia had a rickety old park, and one night the colored section got so full, and the people got to rocking it so hard, that it collapsed. It was like a party every night in the colored section. All we had to do was catch a fly ball, and everybody on the black side of the ballpark would whoop and holler like we'd won the World Series. Then the people in the white section would start yelling at the people in the colored section, and it would go back and forth—sometimes in a friendly way, but more often not. There was probably nowhere else in the South where so many white and black people could be found in the same place. Horace and Felix and I knew that we had to shut out everything else and play ball, but when we looked up at all those black and white faces screaming at us, we couldn't help but feel the weight of what we were doing.
Every park I went in, I was on pins and needles. I just felt it was my duty as league president to see what happened to those guys. Even though Savannah had black players, too, I traveled with Jacksonville because most of the focus was on Aaron. Aaron probably didn't know it, but all year long I followed Jacksonville and sat in the stands to sort of keep a lookout. You were never sure what was going to happen. Those people had awfully strong feelings about what was going on. I knew, because they would call me all hours of the night to tell me. Before I took over as president of the league, I'd worked in Happy Chandler's commissioner's office in Cincinnati, and to the folks in the South that made me a Yankee. And since Chandler was the one who opened the door for Rickey and Jackie Robinson, I guess I was a damn Yankee. They'd call and tell me to get back up north and take my niggers with me. I was living in Columbia, and after word got out that we had blacks in the league, one of my friends quit speaking to me. A lot of the whites stopped coming to the ballpark. But Henry played so well that by the end of the year, they were coming back. My friend in Columbia even started talking to me again. Henry made Christians out of those people.
—Dick Butler, former president of the Sally League
We won the opener when Felix drove in a run in the ninth inning, and we kept winning—seven in a row before we lost one. We beat Augusta one night, 28-6. The Jacksonville paper wrote that we might be one of the greatest Class A teams ever assembled. And nobody could doubt that Horace and Felix and I had a lot to do with it. I hit well right from the start, although one of my teammates, Joe Andrews, led the league for the first month or so. Horace had a lot of power and one of the best throwing arms from right field that I ever saw. Felix was a flashy shortstop—much better than I was at second base—and a .300 hitter. The Braves had counted on the fact that all three of us would fare well in the Sally League, or they wouldn't have put us in Jacksonville. We had to clear the way for other black players to play down there, just as Billy Bruton and Garner made it easier for me and Covington at Eau Claire. The Braves knew, and we knew, that we not only had to play well, but if we ever lost our cool or caused an incident, it might set the whole program back five or ten years. When the pitchers threw at us, we had to get up and swing at the next pitch. When somebody called us a nigger, we had to pretend as if we didn't hear it.
All of that was harder for Felix than it was for Horace and me. We were both accustomed to it, being from the South, but Felix never heard that sort of thing growing up in Puerto Rico. It wasn't as easy for him to turn the other cheek. What made it worse was that it seemed like he got beaned almost every night. When it happened, Felix would shout back at the pitcher, mostly in Spanish, and Horace and I would tell him to shut up. The papers wrote that he was a crazy Puerto Rican, carrying on like that. Finally, when he was hit one night in Macon, Felix put down his bat and went after the pitcher. Horace was in the on-deck circle, and he sprinted out there and grabbed Felix before he could get to the mound, put a bear hug on him, got right up to his ear, and said: “You dumb son of a bitch! I know you don't speak much English, but hear what I'm telling you. You're gonna get us all killed!” Meanwhile, the people from the white section along first base were coming over the railing and people from the colored section were headed over to the white section. It was real close to being a race riot. They called the police, and after order was restored, the policemen ringed the field and stood there with their hands on their guns.
The next night we were in Augusta, and after a couple of innings the fans in the right-field stands started throwing rocks at Horace. Horace always said he didn't mind the rednecks throwing rocks at him, but when they started hitting him, that was different. He called time and told the umpire, and the umpire made the mistake of grabbing the public address microphone and asking people to stop throwing things at the right fielder. That was all the fans wanted to hear. When he came up to bat, they were all over him, shouting things like, “Nigger, we're gonna kill you next time. Ain't no nigger gonna squawk on no white folks down here.” Ben had to move Horace from right field to left, where the fans couldn't get to him. But we got our revenge that night. I was five-for-five, and between us, Horace, Felix, and I were on base thirteen times in fourteen times at bat.
That was the only kind of recourse we had. And laughing. After the games, we'd get back to our rooms and say, “Horace, what did you hear tonight?” We'd exchange our stories and just laugh all night at how stupid people could be. We'd laugh ourselves to sleep thinking about those people. They'd sit in the stands with mops on their heads. They'd throw black cats onto the field. You'd hear things like, “The big nigger [that was Horace], he's got to mow the owner's lawn on Saturday. Aaron's got to feed his hogs. And that other one, I don't know who he is, but he's a nigger to me.” Of course, whenever somebody said something like that, it bounced off the walls and echoed through the whole ballpark. It was strange how it worked. Everything would be normal, then it would get real quiet for a second, and out of the hush you'd hear something like, “Hey, nigger, why you running? There's no watermelon out there.” Horace hurt himself running into a fence one night in Macon, and as they were carrying him off the field, somebody shouted, “Put that nigger down. He can walk!” Joe Andrews, a white first baseman, was our buddy, and they even yelled at him. They'd say, “Hey, Andrews, every time you come to town you get blacker. You sleeping with Aaron's sister?”
My favorite incident was the time Horace caught a foul pop fly running into the crowd. We drew so well that they often filled the stands and put the overflow around the edge of the playing field. Well, one time there was a fly ball right down the line in right field and Horace and I went after it. Horace caught it on the run, and when he did, it carried him right into the crowd. He was about to run over this little kid, so to keep from knocking him down, he just picked the kid up and kept going for a few steps. And before he could put the kid down, this lady started shrieking: “My God! That nigger's running away with my baby!”
Not all of the incidents were quite so funny, though. We had death threats in Montgomery. People would send us letters saying things like they were going to sit in the right-field stands with a rifle and shoot us during the game on a certain night. Felix got one in Jacksonville that said, “Nigger, if you play tonight, they're going to carry you away in a casket.” He showed it to the lady who owned our house, and she got hysterical. She called the police, and the police called the FBI, and within about ten minutes there were two FBI guys at the door trying to talk to Felix, who could barely speak English. They told Felix he should go ahead and play, and they would be sitting in the stands. Nothing happened.
I don't recall ever feeling that our lives were in imminent danger, but we took nothing for granted. When we were leaving the ballpark after a game, Joe Andrews would carry a bat with him and tell us to stick close. Ben Geraghty fathered us and kept us calm, but Joe was our protector. We couldn't talk back to the fans calling us names, but Joe could, and he damn sure did.
I believe I was arrested three times that year for arguing with people on Henry's behalf. We'd walk on the field and they would start up the chants: “Nigger! Nigger!” Places like Macon, they'd come into the ballpark with coolers of beer and they'd be half drunk by batting practice. I'd say, “These sick rebel suckers,” and every now and then I'd just wander over to the screen to see what I could do for 'em. It was amazing the way Henry and Horace and Felix could take it. I'd be standing next to Henry in the infield and some yahoo would call him a nigger or something and I'd turn to Henry and say, “Did you hear that?” He'd look back at me and say, “What do you think, I'm deaf?”
It wasn't just the fans, either. We had a few Southern boys on our ball club, and they'd say things. Henry came up with a couple of men on base once when we were down by a run, and he popped up to end the game. Afterwards, somebody on our team said, “Well, when pull comes to tug, a nigger's gonna croak every time.” I just started screaming. We didn't need to be worrying about our guys, because we had enough problems with the rednecks on the other side.
And believe me, there were some mean pitchers in that league. In Macon they had an old ballpark so big you could land a 727, and there was a tin fence that circled the park, but it was too deep for a home run fence, so they had a snow fence inside it. The first time up, Henry hits one over that snow fence for a home run. The next time around, I doubled and then Henry came up. Their pitcher was some old-timer from the Pacific Coast League or somewhere like that, and when Henry was up there the second time, the pitcher said, “I got four for your head, nigger.” He threw the first one behind him. Henry just moved his head a little. Then the pitcher said, “I got three more here.” I was standing on second base, so I just yelled out, “Hey, why don't you throw one at me?” I would have loved to take that guy on. But Henry didn't need me. The next pitch was right at his head, and Henry just stepped back a little and tomahawked that thing right over my head. About two seconds later you could hear the ball banging against that old tin fence way out there. When we got to the dugout, Henry said, “Why was that boy mad at me?” I pointed out to the pitcher, who was stomping around the mound, and I said, “If you think he was mad before, take a look at him now.”
Henry was just so innocent, and such a nice kid. One time the pitcher was throwing at him and the other team was getting on him pretty bad and the fans were giving it to him, too, and I could tell it was bothering him. I said, “What's wrong, Henry?” He just shook his head and said, “I don't want to hurt nobody. I just want to play baseball.”
The poor kid was only nineteen years old. He was so naive he didn't even know how to put on his uniform. Hell, he'd never had anything like sanitary hose before. And he didn't care anything about signs, or that kind of stuff. One time in Columbia he came up late in the game with us losing 1-0 and no outs and a couple of men on base. Ben gives him the bunt sign, and I see Aaron back out of the box and shake his head. Ben flashes bunt again, and Aaron backs out and walks halfway down to third base to meet him. They talk about something, and then Aaron gets back in the box and hits a rocket to right center to score both runs and we win the game. Well, the next day I get to the park and Ben calls me over and says, “You know what that son of a bitch told me? He said, ‘I know this pitcher and I know what he's gonna throw me. Anybody else, I'd bunt, but I know this pitcher and I know I can hit him.’ Well, okay. But then last night I'm sitting in the lobby of the hotel and he's down there standing on the street corner waiting for some girl to show up. But the girl he's waiting for is from Columbus! We're in Columbia, and he's waiting for some girl from Columbus to show up! Hell, how could he have known that pitcher? He didn't even know what town we were in!”
—Joe Andrews
Horace and Felix and I never stayed with the rest of our teammates when we were on the road—never even ate with them. The team would stop at a restaurant, and the three of us would sit on the bus while Ben or Joe or some guy who rode the bench brought hamburgers out to us. We used to joke that the cows turned and ran when they saw us coming, we ate so many hamburgers. Once, we stopped at a little store and the white players got out to buy cold drinks. We stayed in the bus, but Felix wanted to get a drink out of the water fountain. There were two fountains, white and colored, and Felix took a drink out of the colored fountain. But it was hot water, and he spit it out. Then he moved over and took a drink from the white fountain. The problem was that the store owner saw him do it, and, being a good law-abiding Southerner, he called the sheriff. The sheriff was there before the team was back on the bus, and he said he was going to put Felix in jail. Ben talked to the sheriff for a long time before he finally convinced him to let Felix come with us.
Whenever we got to the town where we were going, the bus driver would take the white players to their hotel and Horace and Felix and I would just sit in the bus as the rest of our teammates filed out. It got real quiet when the white players had to leave us sitting there. I'm sure that if it had been up to them, we'd have stayed in the same hotel that they did. But Jim Crow made the rules, and we had to abide by them. Bear in mind, this was a year before the civil rights movement got rolling with the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. So after the white players got off the bus, we'd ride on to some private home on the other side of the tracks. Black people were happy to put us up, because we were big news down there. We were the closest they would ever get to Jackie Robinson.
The only place where we stayed in a hotel was Montgomery. Otherwise, Montgomery was the worst town in the league for black players. I could tolerate it only because my parents drove up from Mobile to see me play. When we weren't playing there, my father would go up about once a week anyway to read about the Sally League in the Montgomery newspaper. But even with Mama and Daddy nearby, I couldn't enjoy Montgomery. They had segregation down to an art in that town—the art of keeping the niggers down. It would be 100 degrees and black people would be standing on the sidewalks watching half-filled buses go by because there wasn't any more room in the colored section. When I heard two years later that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man, I understood perfectly.
The black hotel was called the Ben Moore, and as you might imagine, it was not in the high-rent district. It was located over a juke joint, and the noise kept us up most of the night. There was no air conditioning, the place smelled from the fish they were always frying downstairs, and if you opened a window the bugs would invite themselves in for a little picnic. The interior decorating consisted of a potted plant in the lobby. But after sleeping on the bus in the Negro League, the Ben Moore was like the Waldorf-Astoria to me. It was also a clubhouse to the black players, because the Jim Crow laws prevented us from putting on our uniform at the ballpark with the white players. Finally, near the end of the season, we said to heck with it and dressed at the park. As far as I know, the white players all went on to have normal, healthy lives after that.
Wherever we stayed, Ben Geraghty would always make it a point to come over and see us. He had nothing special to say—he'd just drink a few beers and talk baseball—but it meant a lot to us that the manager would go out of his way to make us feel like part of the team. One day in Columbus, the team was invited out to Fort Benning. When it came time to eat, suddenly Horace, Felix, and I were shuttled off to the kitchen. As soon as we sat down, here came Ben to join us. I've known white players and managers who will try to put on a good face around black players despite their real feelings, but there wasn't a phony bone in Ben's body. He was just a baseball man, and to him, we were just baseball players. Besides that, he liked us. He liked me and Felix because he knew we were headed for the big leagues, and he liked Horace because, in addition to being the best right fielder in the league, Horace was a good man who knew where to buy beer on Sunday. Horace always managed to find Ben a case of Schlitz for the long Sunday bus rides.
I guess it's not surprising that Ben drank a lot of beer, considering what he had been through. A few years before, he had been manager at Spokane when the team bus rolled down a hill and some players were killed. Ben climbed up the hill to get help. The crash wasn't his fault, but he took it very hard. People who knew him then said that he wasn't the same after the crash—he was nervous and drank more—but as far as I'm concerned, he still would have made a great big-league manager. Ben was in the Braves' system for a long time, and he was interviewed at least once for the manager's job, but with his wrinkled clothes and plain way of talking, he didn't make much of an impression. I always thought that, in his way, Ben was discriminated against every bit as much as Felix and I ever were. He died in 1963. It's one of my biggest regrets that he never got a chance to manage in the big leagues.
As kind as he was with his players, Ben never forgot that he was the manager, and he knew how to chew a guy out if he made a mental mistake. He jumped all over Felix and me one night when we let a pop fly fall between us. And he was always on me for missing signs. Once, he wanted to try a squeeze play, but to disguise it he clapped his hands and told me to hit the ball out of the park. So I believed him and hit the ball out of the park. But the worst was the time I got picked off second base three times in one game. The first time up, I singled and stole second, and the second baseman tagged me out with the hidden-ball trick. The next time, I stole second again, and he used some other hidden-ball trick and tagged me out again. Ben let it go the first time, but the second time he was pretty hot. When it happened the third time, he let me have it. Of course, I deserved it. But Ben did something I appreciated—something I've always admired in a manager. Instead of screaming at me in front of the whole team—Lord knows, I was embarrassed enough already—he waited until he could get me alone after the game. Then he told me how stupid I had been, and I couldn't disagree with him. I was a better baserunner from that day on.
The only person Ben couldn't handle was Joe Andrews. Joe was a big guy who might do anything, and Ben was probably scared of him. One night, when Joe had been drinking, we stopped the bus at a gas station and Joe put a coin into the vending machine to try to get a drink. The bottle wouldn't come out, and Joe started hitting and rocking that machine like he was going to knock it over. Ben didn't want to go out there, so he sent Horace out. Horace was the one guy who could hold his own with Joe—they were great friends. Horace just put his own money into the machine, and when the bottle came out, he handed it to Joe.
Joe would stay out drinking all night on Saturdays, and it got to the point where Ben wouldn't play him on Sundays. So whenever Joe would get in on Sunday morning, he would go right to Ben's room and pound on the door and yell, “You son of a bitch! You'd better play me today!” If any of the rest of us missed curfew, we would be fined, but Ben knew it was useless to try to fine Joe. He said once that if he fined Joe every time he missed curfew, they'd have to hold back his salary and Joe would still owe the team money at the end of the year. Ben arranged for Jim Frey to room with Joe to try to keep him out of jail. He stayed out of jail all year, but he didn't stay out of trouble. One night about fifteen of the white players were eating at a café in Columbus, and when they were finished, they went back to the motel and sat around the pool. All except Joe. After a while a car pulled up and a guy got out and said, “Where's that guy with that big letter jacket with the Indian head on it? He walked out on a seven-dollar check.” Everybody knew who he was talking about—Joe had been a great athlete in high school in Massachusetts, and he always wore that letter jacket.
Joe's drinking probably kept him out of the big leagues, because he was a natural hitter. I was only with him in 1953, but I understand that his drinking got worse before it got better. He used to arm-wrestle in bars, and that would lead to bets, and the bets would lead to fights. Joe was liable to do anything when he was drunk. He went to a black club with Barbara and Horace and me one night in Jacksonville, and after a while he started making passes at Barbara. I said something to him, and then Horace grabbed him and said, “Look, I got you in here and I'll get you out of here. But after that, you're on your own.” When Horace and Joe were together in the Sally League the next year, Joe had some problems at a bar in Columbia. He thought the owner had taken some of his money, so he went back to the hotel, got his switchblade, and said he was going to return with his money or the guy's heart in his hand. There was another squabble over money when Joe and Horace were playing together in South America, only that time a guy came looking for Joe with a hunting knife. Joe's drinking and fighting got so bad that he ended up in jail years later.
I finally hit bottom, and when I did, I'll tell you what brought me out of it. It was thinking about Henry. By this time, Henry was a superstar, going after Babe Ruth's record and everything, and it made me think of all that he went through in Jacksonville. I thought, if he can make it through all of that and do what he has done with his life, I sure as hell can do something with my life. That's when I joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and I haven't had a drink since.
I've only seen Henry a few times since we played together, but he always amazes me. A couple years after he broke the record, he was in Boston, and I went to see him with a Mafia guy who wanted to have a ball signed. We weren't there two minutes when Henry pulls me aside and says, “Who is that guy?” I said, “You mean you could tell?” He said, “The guy reeks. You're not involved with him, are you?” I still don't know how the hell he could tell so fast. He just knew. He has that instinct about people.
He had me figured out that first year. At the beginning of the season I was batting over .400 and leading the league, and Henry was hanging back in the low or mid-.300s. Then I started to drop and he closed the gap, and for a while we had a batting race going. I thought I had a real chance to win it, but Henry came up to me one day and kind of shook his head and said, “You'll never last. You drink too much beer. Your hands are getting slow.” And he was so right. That's what I mean about Henry's instincts. I've never met anybody like him.
—Joe Andrews
By the All-Star break, I was leading the league in various things. Five players from each team were selected to play in the All-Star Game, and I was one of them. But neither Felix nor Horace made the team, which I thought was strange. In fact, there were a lot of curious things about the All-Star Game. The game was in Savannah, and there were rumors that the governor of Georgia, Herman Talmadge, was going to ban me from playing in it. On one hand, it didn't make sense that he would keep me out of the All-Star Game when blacks had been playing in Savannah all year. On the other hand, he was Herman Talmadge, the man who conducted a nationwide campaign to prohibit blacks and whites from being on the same television show. Also, since the All-Star Game was the big fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Sally League, it could have been that they wished to uphold a league tradition that had been in place for the first forty-nine years. Another possible reason for keeping me out of the game was that all the players were invited to a reception at a private club where blacks were not permitted. Despite all of that, though, I was still intending to play in the game until the day before, when I got in a rundown between third and home in a game against Savannah and was spiked on the toe by a 240-pound catcher. I don't believe it was intentional, but I was never quite certain.
When I got hurt, another player from Jacksonville had to be named to take my place. Felix was the obvious guy, since he and I were both infielders and he was having a great season, but, instead, they picked another infielder named Billy Porter, who wasn't near the player that Felix was. So there were no black players in the All-Star Game. I didn't attend, but I've always regretted that I didn't. I should have at least gone to be introduced—just to force the issue and see what would happen. As it turned out, Talmadge didn't know that I wasn't going to play, and after he had lunch and took his seat, he got up and excused himself about fifteen minutes before the start of the game, saying he had a previous engagement. He had been getting a lot of flak from voters about the black players—it was technically against the law in Georgia for us to be on the same field as whites—and this way, he could say that he had never seen a black man play in a ballgame in his state.
By the All-Star break, we had just about eliminated every other team from the pennant race, except Columbia. Columbia was a Cincinnati franchise and a veteran team with the best pitching in the league. There was a veteran named Barney Martin, who was up briefly with the Reds that year, another named Maury Fisher, who made it up in 1955 for a few days, and Corky Valentine. I'll never forget Corky Valentine. There were some ornery pitchers in that league, but nobody as nasty as Harold Lewis Valentine. He was even nasty when he wasn't pitching. The day before he was scheduled to pitch, he'd sit on the dugout steps and say, “Have fun tonight, boys, because tomorrow I'm gonna stick it in your ear.” He meant it, too. I'm not saying he was a racist; I think Corky Valentine just hated everybody. He put Joe Andrews in the hospital when he hit him in the shin. Joe couldn't walk, but he was crawling out to the mound to try to get at Valentine. I was lucky, I guess—or quick—because he never hit me, although I'm sure he tried. But I hit him. I hit him good. Valentine made it up to the big leagues the next year, when I did, and I hit the tenth home run of my career off him. I didn't spare the rod on Corky Valentine. The scary thing, though, is that he eventually became a policeman somewhere in Georgia. That's enough to make you drive fifty-five.
Even though I hit him pretty well, Valentine was always tough on us. Columbia was tough on us. But we never minded playing there—at least, Horace and Felix and I didn't. Horace had a lady friend there who was a mortician, and she always managed to find a couple of nice young girls for me and Felix. My favorite town to visit, though—at least, for a while—was Columbus. I met a girl there who lived across the Alabama border in Phenix City, and we had a pretty good thing going until it occurred to me that it would be prudent to call it off. Phenix City was wide open, with drinking and gambling in the streets, and I walked through all of that to get to this girl's house. It wasn't so bad until I was walking home one night and a bunch of white guys started calling me names and chasing me. They chased me all the way across the Chattahoochee River into Georgia. That was the last time I saw that girl. Later on, she came looking for me in Jacksonville, but by then I'd made up my mind to marry Barbara.
None of that affected my performance on the field, though, because I never let anything take my mind off my job as a ballplayer. I led the Sally League in hitting for most of the second half of the season. I only had one short slump the whole year, but came out of it fine. When Joe Andrews asked me what I did to break my slump, I told him I called Stan Musial. I was liable to tell Joe anything, but I guess he believed me, because it started going around that I was friends with Musial. I'd never spoken to a major leaguer in my life, much less Stan Musial. But if somebody had told me that four years later I would beat out Musial for Most Valuable Player in the National League, I wouldn't have thought they were crazy. Even then, I figured I ought to lead any league I played in. I might have been a shy and quiet kid, but I was a confident shy and quiet kid.
I was sitting behind Henry and Horace on the bus one night, and they were talking about hitting. At that time, Henry could turn around any fastball in the world, but he had trouble with slow stuff. Garner was trying to talk to him about off-speed pitches, and he was telling him what Jackie Robinson had said to him about hitting slow stuff. Jackie Robinson was the idol of most of the black players back then, and what he said was gospel. But that didn't matter to Henry. He cut Horace off before he could finish and said, “I don't care what Jackie Robinson says. I'm Henry Aaron, and I'll do it my way.”
—Jim Frey
If I ever doubted myself that year, all I had to do to get my confidence back was count my watches or the bonus money in my billfold. Our owner, Sam Wolfson, gave out prizes to players who had big games. You'd check your locker after a road trip, and there was liable to be an envelope stuffed with five-and ten- and maybe twenty-dollar bills. I used that money to buy my parents the first television on our side of Toulminville. People came knocking on our door from all over the neighborhood to watch that TV. There was also a jeweler in Jacksonville who gave out watches if you hit the first home run of a game or a series, and I was giving away watches to all my friends. Other stores gave us slacks and sport jackets. I came up in the world that summer—although I wouldn't have carried it quite as far as the Columbia newspaper, The State, which wrote: “You will have a difficult time convincing Henry Aaron, a solid medium-size hunk of merchandise, that America is anything other than the land of opportunity. The communists will be unhappy to hear that this 19-year-old colored boy from Mobile, Alabama, is getting along nicely—and with a bright future ahead.”
I didn't know anything about communists and I was still a foreigner in the land of opportunity, but by the end of the summer I was pretty sure I had a future in baseball. I was also pretty sure it wouldn't be as a second baseman. If I was a bad shortstop in Eau Claire, I was a worse second baseman in Jacksonville. Somehow, I managed to make thirty-six errors, which nearly gave me a clean sweep of all the individual titles in the Sally League. The only one I missed was home runs. I hit twenty-two, but Savannah had a guy named Tommy Giordano who hit twenty-four, a lot of them over the 270-foot left-field fence on the football field where they played. I think Giordano's eyes went bad later, and that kept him out of the big leagues, although he is an executive now with the Cleveland Indians.
My batting average at the end of the year was .362, which was about twenty points ahead of Everett Joyner of Columbus. I had 125 RBIs, and nobody else in the league had more than 100. But I was a butcher at second base. Especially on double plays. I threw the ball as hard as I could, underhanded, and the shortstop couldn't see it until it was about to hit him in the nose. Felix used to say a guy could get killed trying to turn double plays with me. We all knew that my best position was some other position.
One guy who didn't seem to be worried about my problems at second base, though, was Ben Geraghty. I guess Ben could sense that I was the type of kid who needed to be encouraged, because he was always telling me that I was going to make it big. He told some writers that I'd make people forget Jackie Robinson. I knew that was nonsense, but Ben's faith meant a lot to me. He wasn't saying anything that he didn't believe, either, because he bragged on me to the Braves, too.
One day Lou Perini [the Braves' owner] called me into his office and said, “We keep hearing about this Aaron kid down in Jacksonville. When is he going to be ready for Milwaukee?” I said that as a hitter, he might be ready next year. But as a second baseman, it might take a couple more. So we sent Billy Southworth down there to grade his arm and see if maybe he could play the outfield. Aaron was still at second base, but it so happened that in the next game, there was a little bloop into short right field, and Henry had to chase it down and turn and gun the ball to home plate. He threw a strike—overhand—and got his man easily. Southworth came back and reported that Aaron had one of the best arms he'd ever seen.”
—John Mullen
I did have a strong arm, but it was a long way from being the best on our ball club. I've never seen anybody throw like Horace Garner—unless it was Roberto Clemente. Horace would put on throwing exhibitions around the Sally League. The fans would come early to watch him stand at home plate and heave balls over the center-field fence. Horace might have been a little uncertain in the outfield, but he could run and throw and hit with anybody. His problem was that he was a little old. He was twenty-seven the year we were together in Jacksonville, and I guess the Braves figured he was past the stage of being a prospect. But Horace had a lot of good baseball left. He stayed in the Braves' minor-league system for eight years, and in those years the teams he was on won seven pennants. He won batting titles, home run titles, everything. But he never got a shot at the big leagues. One year, the Braves told him they might call him up at the end of the year, but just before he was supposed to go up, he hurt his knee. He still played after that, but his chance was gone. When I think about it now, it doesn't seem right that I have all these awards and records and I'm in the Hall of Fame, and Horace is driving a school bus in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where ony a few people even know that he was a ballplayer.
When I played with Horace in the Three-I League, they had a contest one day for throwing and running. We kept telling Horace to get into it, but he'd just had a tooth pulled and he had a sore arm. He wouldn't do it. Rocky Colavito was in the league, and he threw one that short-hopped the center-field fence in Cedar Rapids, about 405 feet. We knew Horace could beat that, but he still wouldn't do it. Then we told him they were giving away a barbeque grill for first prize, and all of a sudden Horace was real interested. He grabbed the ball and threw it out of the ballpark. Then they had the sprints, and there was some guy in the league who had been a track man at Duke. When they ran the 100-yard dash, this guy got up to the line and dug in like he was in the Olympics or something, and Horace walked up there with his hat on backwards and his sweatshirt in his back pocket and beat the guy by ten yards.
—Joe Andrews
Horace and Felix and I and several others on our team put up big numbers that year, but somehow Columbia stayed right on our heels all season. The rest of the league was at least twenty-five games behind, but we couldn't seem to shake Corky Valentine and company. Finally, we clinched the pennant in Savannah. The night we did, Horace and Felix and I drove in a bunch of runs, and when we came out of the clubhouse, there was a white man standing there waiting for us. We could tell he wanted to talk to us, but he didn't quite know what to say. He was kind of shuffling around, trying to find the right words. Finally, he blurted it out. He said, “I just wanted to let you niggers know you played a helluva game.”
The team arranged a celebration party that night at a restaurant in Savannah. The only problem was that Felix and Horace and I weren't allowed in the restaurant. We had to stay in the kitchen while the rest of the team partied out in front. After a while, Spec Richardson, our general manager, gave us fifty dollars and told us to have our own party. We took fifteen dollars apiece for ourselves and bought some beer with the other five. When we got back to Jacksonville, there was another party for the team at a country club. Somehow, Mr. Wolfson arranged to get us in, even though black people were never included at affairs like that in the South. It was such a significant occasion that a writer from a black magazine came out to cover it, but he was stopped at the door.
The Braves also honored the players with a special night during the last homestand of the season. Since I led the league in most things, they asked me to stand on the field for a little ceremony. It was a pretty good feeling when Mr. Wolfson said, “Henry Aaron is like a son to me.” That wasn't the sort of thing a wealthy white man usually said about a black kid in the South. Then they took up a collection and brought it to me in a grocery sack full of dollar bills. I had my hat in one hand and a trophy in the other, and when I tried to grab the sack, it spilled. It was a windy night, and money was blowing all over the field. So I put down my hat and trophy and got on my knees to start picking it up. Mr. Wolfson got down on his knees right next to me. I don't know who the other dignitaries were—maybe the mayor and some of the merchants who sponsored us—but they were all scurrying around the field with me trying to chase down dollar bills, which must have been a sight that those people in Jacksonville never thought they'd see. Anyway, when we got the money all gathered up, I split it among my teammates.
We were riding pretty high going into the Sally League playoffs. Mr. Wolfson was so proud of us that he bought the players sport jackets with “Braves” lettered on them. We felt like big leaguers. I don't know if guys in Class A ball can be too cocky, but in our first series, against Savannah, we didn't play like we had been playing all season. We struggled through and finally won the series when Felix and I hit home runs that enabled us to pull out the last two games. That set us up against Columbia in the finals, best of seven.
The first game was at Columbia, and we won easily. Then we went to Jacksonville for three games. The Braves beamed some old World War II searchlights into the sky to attract people to the ballpark, and we drew over five thousand each night. When we left Jacksonville, we were ahead three games to one. It seemed to us that the series should have ended in Jacksonville, since we had won the regular season pennant, but for some odd reason, the last three games were scheduled for Columbia. For some other odd reason, Columbia won all three of them. I crashed into Felix trying to field a ball in the fourth inning of the seventh game, and they scored four times that inning to beat us, 4-2. The only consolation was that Barney Martin was the one who beat us—Corky Valentine had nothing to do with it.
We were disappointed to lose the playoffs, but Horace and Felix and I didn't lose sight of what we accomplished that summer. We had played a season of great baseball in the Deep South, under circumstances that nobody had experienced before and—because of us—never would again. We had shown the people of Georgia and Alabama and South Carolina and Florida that we were good ballplayers and decent human beings, and that all it took to get along together was to get a little more used to each other. We had shown them that the South wouldn't fall off the map if we played in their ballparks. At the end of the season, we still heard a few choice names being shouted at us from the stands, but not as often or as loudly as in the beginning. Little by little—one by one—the fans accepted us. Not all of them, but enough to make a difference. That was the most gratifying part of the summer. It showed us that things were changing a little, and we were part of the reason why. And we weren't the only ones who noticed it. Dick Butler, the league president, said that we had successfully broken the color barrier in Southern baseball. A columnist for the Jacksonville Journal wrote that “I sincerely believe Aaron may have started Jacksonville down the road to racial understanding.” I'm not sure I've ever done anything more important.
I wouldn't live that summer over again for a million dollars. But I wouldn't trade the experience for a million dollars, either.
—Horace Garner
After the playoffs, the only thing remaining was a banquet in Jacksonville, where I received the award for Most Valuable Player in the league. But I had something else on my mind that night. During the ceremony, I walked over to the telephone, called Barbara, and asked her to marry me. She said I had to ask her father, and I said to put him on the phone. Mr. Lucas had been something of a ballplayer himself, and he had doubts whether a black kid had much of a chance to make a decent living in baseball. Little did he know that one of his own sons, Bill, would also sign with the Braves a couple of years later. Bill never quite made it to the major leagues as a player, but he did even better. He got a job in the Braves' front office and ultimately became the highest-ranking black executive in baseball. In 1953, that seemed about as likely as me breaking Babe Ruth's home run record.
Mr. Lucas was a pullman porter, and he was porter on the train that carried his daughter to meet her new family in Mobile. This time, Mama and everybody else was at the train station, and when we got off, I noticed they were all staring at Barbara. Finally, Barbara said, “Why are you all looking at me that way? Is there something wrong with me?”One of my sisters said, “It's your eyes, girl! We've never seen a colored person with green eyes!” After we got home, neighbors kept coming by the house to look at the girl with green eyes. Because of her eyes, I called her Half-Breed.
We lived with my parents after we got married, but we didn't stay there. Felix—who also married a girl from Jacksonville—was going to Puerto Rico to play winter ball for the Caguas team, and he wanted Barbara and me to come along. Horace stayed behind in Jacksonville to tend bar at Manuel's Tavern, but I needed what Felix needed—a little money and all the ballplaying I could get. The Puerto Rican League was loaded with major-league pitchers, and it would be a good chance for me and the Braves to find out how ready I really was as a hitter. It was also a good chance to find a position I could play.
I started out at second base in Puerto Rico. Not only was I fielding poorly, as usual, but I was hitting about .125 after a couple of weeks. They were ready to send me home, but Felix went to the owner and talked him into letting me stay. That turned out to be one of the best things anybody ever did for me. If I had gone back to Mobile, I almost surely would have been drafted into the army. Although the Korean War had ended that summer, there was some pressure for the draft board to call me home and induct me anyway, because both of the Bolling boys were in the service and it didn't seem fair for me to still be playing ball. But when the Caguas team said I could stay with them, the Braves stepped in and got the draft board off my back. There were reports that I might be playing baseball with the Atlanta Crackers of the Southern League the next summer, and the integration of the Southern League was a serious enough matter that it persuaded the draft board to leave me alone for the time being.
The other benefit of staying in Puerto Rico was that I finally got out of the infield. I was playing so badly at second base that something had to be done. Out of desperation—and because the Braves thought it was a good idea—our manager, Mickey Owen, decided to see if I could handle fly balls.
I said, “Henry, how about trying the outfield?” He said, “Okay. I'm gonna be going into the army anyway. I'll do whatever you want until the draft board calls.” I sent him out there and hit him some fly balls. He just turned and ran and caught them. I thought, well, he can catch the ball, but can he throw it? I'd never seen him throw any way but underhanded. So I hit him some ground balls and told him to charge and throw them to second base. He threw the ball overhand, right to second base. Then I told him to cut loose and throw one to third. So he cut loose and that ball came across the infield as good as you ever saw. That was it. He was an outfielder.
—Mickey Owen
When I moved to the outfield, Owen was able to put Charlie Neal at second base. Felix and Neal, who later played with the Dodgers, were a much better double-play combination that Felix and me. In fact, with me out of there, we practically had a major-league infield. Rance Pless, who was my teammate at Jacksonville and would later spend a few months in the big leagues, was the third baseman, and the first baseman was Vic Power, who was in the Yankee organization and should have been their first black player. Power was a terror in the minor leagues and about as good around first base as anybody ever was, but he was colorful, and the Yankees wanted a solemn, dignified player to be their first black. So they brought up Elston Howard and traded Power to the Athletics, which enabled him to break into the American League and stay there for twelve good years.
Our center fielder was Jungle Jim Rivera of the White Sox, who was a good hitter and the meanest ballplayer I'd seen this side of Corky Valentine. One of the first days I was there, we were being beaten about 8-0 when Rivera got on base in the ninth inning. In Puerto Rico, it's considered a disgrace if you get shut out, so Rivera stole third and then stole home to break up the shutout. When we got in the clubhouse after the game, Owen screamed at him for bush-league baseball, and Rivera went wild. He jumped on Owen and was choking him until Felix and Power and Brooks Lawrence pulled him off.
The other outfielder was a local legend named Tetelo Vargas. He was almost fifty years old by that time, but he was known as the fastest player Puerto Rico had ever seen, and he was still fast enough to play a pretty fair left field. There's a stadium named for him down there.
The only problem on our team was catching. We had a local fellow who started out as the catcher, but the American pitchers objected because he wouldn't call for anything but fastballs. He couldn't speak any English, either. The pitchers would motion him out to the mound and explain that they wanted to throw a curveball, and he would nod his head and smile and go back and give the fastball sign again. So Owen had to take over himself. It had been a couple of years since Owen had caught in the big leagues, but with him behind the plate, at least Brooks Lawrence could throw his slider.
In addition to Lawrence, who won nineteen games for the Reds one year, we had a pitcher from the Braves' organization named Bob Buhl. Buhl was a paratrooper from Michigan, and if he wasn't as mean as Rivera, he was every bit as tough. One night Buhl and I were at a club together, and as we were walking home a gang of kids started following us. They were talking tough, and Buhl was talking back to them. When we came to a public park, they stepped up and surrounded Buhl. There must have been eight or nine guys against Buhl, and it was the damndest fight I ever saw. I started to jump in and help, but as soon as I made a move I felt the tip of a knife in my side. I was told to stay out of it, because they didn't want to hurt me. It turned out that Buhl didn't need me anyway. He wiped out every one of those guys. All I had to do was put his arm over my shoulder and walk him back home.
Another time, some kids followed Charlie Neal and me when we were walking home and threw a bottle at us. Usually, though, when Charlie and I were together, we'd fight each other. We were good friends, but we were always scrapping over something. If we weren't fighting, we were ready to fight.
Between fights, we played some good ball in Puerto Rico. Our team was in first place most of the winter against competition that was virtually at the major-league level. The Santurce team, which I was ready to join before Felix got me on with Caguas, had a bunch of guys who were or would be in the big leagues—Bob Thurman, Valmy Thomas, Ruben Gomez, Jack Harshman, and an outfielder named Willard Brown, who was such a hero in Puerto Rico that they called him That Man. The most famous player in the league, though, was a former Negro League outfielder for Ponce named Francisco Coimbre.
It was great experience to play with all of those guys, but what mattered most to me was the pitching. I saw major-league pitching almost every day, and after a while—after I moved to the outfield—I began to hit it. When it came time for the All-Star Game, I was hitting well enough to be selected. It was my third All-Star Game at three different positions in three different leagues in two years. And unlike most All-Star Games, I did all right in this one. They had a track meet before the game, and I won the sixty-yard dash. After the game, I was named MVP.
The All-Star Game was held in Caguas. In the Caguas ballpark, it was 400 feet to the bleachers, and then there was a big stone wall behind the bleachers. There were only three balls hit over those bleachers all year long. Stan Lopata, the big catcher for the Phillies, hit one. Aaron hit the other two in the All-Star Game.
He could hit a ball out of any park, but what I liked was the way he hit to all fields. One of the first days he was there, I saw him rifle a ball past the first baseman, like a bullet, and I said to myself, My God, he looks like Rogers Hornsby. I asked him if he had tried to hit the ball to right field, and he said he didn't know if he did or not. I said, well, whatever you did, keep at it. I can remember exactly what I said to him. I said, “Don't let anybody change you, because you're going to be a good hitter and probably a great hitter if you take care of yourself.” I could just see Hornsby in him, the way he would take that whip swing and drive the ball all over the park. Both of them would get that big end of the bat around so fast. And they were both hitchers. They'd get their hands started before the swing, like a sprinter getting a running start. Aaron was even the same size as Hornsby. I believe if he hadn't started thinking about home runs later on, he would have had some years when he batted .400, just like Hornsby.
—Mickey Owen
After my bad start, I was leading the Puerto Rican League in hitting until the last two weeks of the season. I dropped off a little and finished third at .322, but I did win the home run title—actually, I tied with Jungle Jim Rivera—with nine. Every time you hit a home run down there, they gave you a carton of Chesterfield cigarettes. Those were the strongest cigarettes in the world. I smoked back then—I'm not proud of the fact that I smoked for a long time—but a pack of those Chesterfields would last me three or four days. For leading the league, I was supposed to get more cigarettes, along with money and other prizes, but Rivera took all the loot for himself before I could claim any of it. I didn't make a fuss over it because I didn't want a problem with Rivera, and, besides, I had to get back to the States. I left before the postseason tournaments, but our Caguas team went on to win the Caribbean World Series that year over teams from Cuba, Panama, and Venezuela.
One of the reasons I wanted to get home was to show my parents—and Barbara's—their new grand-daughter. Our first child, Gaile, was born in Puerto Rico and spent her first couple of months in the little house we rented there. Caguas was kind of a country town, and one of my lasting memories of Puerto Rico is hearing a bell ringing in our backyard and looking out to find a cow eating Gaile's diapers off the clothesline.
When we got back to Mobile to spend a few weeks before spring training, I kept reading that I was headed for the Braves' Triple-A team at Toledo. But I told Barbara I wasn't going to Toledo. I felt that I could make the big club in Milwaukee, and if that didn't happen—despite my confidence, I didn't really think it would—I had reason to believe the Braves would keep Felix and Horace and me together and have us do it all over again in Atlanta. At least, that's what they told the draft board.
It makes me shudder now to think about integrating another league in the South. But I did plenty of things back then that I can't imagine doing now—that I wouldn't do now. I was ready for Atlanta. Why not? I'd made it through the Sally League without even getting hit by a pitch. I was a good ducker. The Southern League couldn't hurt me too bad, I figured. Besides, Mobile was in it. I would get to go home a few times during the season and play at Hartwell Field in front of my family and white people. That didn't sound bad.
In fact, I was more willing to go to Atlanta in 1954 than I was when the Braves moved there twelve years later, after I had been around the block a few more times.