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The Catcher in the Storm
If you asked anyone on the Tiger baseball team in 1969 who was the most gifted all-around player on the team, the response, without hesitation, would be Garnett Davis. Handsome, hazel-eyed Eddie Rat may have been the marquee player, but Davis was the one whom the players wished to measure themselves against. “Garnett was just a pure baseball player,” says Coach Paul Pennell. “You just give him a ball and glove and he could practically play any position.”
Davis, a co-captain of the team, was the full-time catcher, a position that took a combination of nerve, strength, and baseball intellect. He prided himself on being disciplined and staying focused. “I was a quiet leader with a noisy bat,” he says. His batting average consistently stayed above .300. In some stretches of games, his average hovered near .400, a colossal batting average.
Garnett Davis never had to look around Harley Field to see if Gardenia, his mom, had come to see him play. “I don’t ever remember my mother coming to a game,” he says. She was off cleaning the home of some well-to-do white family. And he certainly didn’t have to worry about his dad, Johnny Davis, showing up. He was lumbering around in the South Carolina heat, on a chain gang, because he ’had been convicted of murder.
Johnny Davis was born in 1911 in Congaree, South Carolina. His wife, Gardenia, was born nearby, in the town of Eastover. They met at a neighborhood get-together over red beans, rice, and sweet tea. They married young, moved to Columbia, the capital, and started a family. Gardenia gave birth to six children, four boys and two girls. Both of the girls died in infancy, one a crib death, the other of undetermined causes. The young couple were devastated. Gardenia could not tell if Johnny started gambling and staying out late at night because of the tragedies, but she imagined that was part of the reason. Garnett was the middle boy, coming after Earl, whom everyone called “Spoon,” and before Wali, the youngest.
Johnny and Gardenia were not well educated, being products of the sharecropping era, when educational opportunities were limited for blacks. Blacks in South Carolina seemed to be treated worse than blacks in any of the other southern states after the Civil War; the mind-set there bordered on feudalism. South Carolina governor Cole Blease served from 1910 to 1915. He had a rather whimsical habit of issuing pardons, often with attendant commentary. Newspapers considered him colorful and quite quotable. When a black man named Sam Gaskins accidentally killed the woman he planned to marry, Blease pardoned him. “It seems to have been a very sad accident,” Blease told the press, “however, after a second thought, possibly it was for the good of humanity, for had they married, no doubt they would have brought forth more negroes to the future detriment of the State.”
It was in Clarendon County—sixty-five miles south of Columbia—that the roots of the epochal 1954 school desegregation federal lawsuit led by Thurgood Marshall had been set. The stirrings of the lawsuit began because James Gibson, a black farmer, approached R. W. Elliott, a white man who was a powerful member of the school board, and asked him to please get buses for the black kids. The children were getting rained on going to school. Even in South Carolina, chilly winds unleashed on some early mornings cut right through clothing. “We ain’t got no money to buy a bus for your nigger children,” Elliott told the farmer. Gibson’s only recourse was to report to other black parents what Elliott had said. They were outraged. So Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund came to town and set the wheels of the lawsuit in motion. In the end, the case morphed into five combined federal desegregation lawsuits. The Bolling v. Sharpe case came from Washington, D.C.; the Gebhart v. Belton case from Delaware; the Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County from Virginia; the Briggs v. Elliott case from South Carolina; and the Brown v. Board of Education from Kansas.
The NAACP court victory at the Supreme Court was important, and wonderful, but Gardenia Davis couldn’t see it changing her family’s fortunes quickly enough. She thought life could be better in the North, so in 1955 the family headed for Ohio. Coincidentally, that was the year of the Emmett Till murder in Mississippi. There was something else that drove Gardenia’s move. Her husband, Johnny, had already left the family to live up north. At the time, Garnett had no idea why his father had disappeared.
In Columbus, Johnny Davis finally reconnected with his wife and sons. She got work as a maid; she was employed by a job service that sent her around to various well-to-do families to clean their homes. Johnny Davis found work at the notorious Buckeye Steel plant on the city’s near South Side, where the work was grueling and dangerous.
When he was old enough to join the Peers Club baseball team, Garnett Davis might have been the happiest kid in the neighborhood. He was always early for practice. He stayed late to hit balls. He was continually asking his coaches questions about the game. His keen interest in sports helped to take his mind off the family’s dire economic straits. “We were on welfare,” Garnett says. “I hated that. We went to Charity Newsies. I used to hustle up money cutting grass.” The Davis boys were not only ashamed of the free clothing dispensed by Charity Newsies but also embarrassed about the commodity food they had to get from a government food center. There was peanut butter, cornmeal, oatmeal, rice, flour—just basic items. There never was meat.
When he entered Franklin Junior High, Garnett could hardly wait for baseball tryouts to begin. Coach Vernon Barkstall saw something special in the kid right away. A good many of those who had followed baseball in Columbus in the 1950s well knew the legend of Vernon Barkstall. He was the Jackie Robinson of baseball at Ohio State University.
A native of Cincinnati, Barkstall had a reputation for playing a number of sports in high school. After that, he went into the military, and when he got out, enrolled at Ohio State. In 1956 he became the Buckeyes’ first black baseball player and the second black on the university’s basketball team. There were taunts and epithets from opposing players. Barkstall credited his military service for imbuing him with the patience and grit it took to endure the racial slurs. “He would always say to me, ‘You have to be cool,’ ” recalls Joe Roberts, who played on the basketball team at Ohio State with Barkstall. “When I was getting angry about some of the racial things, he’d day, ‘Be cool, Joe. Be cool.’ ” Barkstall was so good—and cool—that his baseball playing teammates voted him team captain. “His age helped him get respect,” says Roberts.
What Peers Club coaches didn’t teach Garnett Davis, Vernon Barkstall did. Barkstall had applied for head coaching baseball openings at the high school level in and around Columbus, but despite his playing pedigree, not a single high school would hire him, including East High. He eventually left the state and settled in Illinois. There is now an elementary school in Champaign that is named after him.
When Garnett Davis arrived at East High, he was immediately tagged as an all-around athlete. He played varsity basketball, football, and baseball. But he let everyone know his favorite sport was baseball. Yet he wasn’t—at least not yet—the most paid-attention-to athlete in his family. That honor belonged to Earl “Spoon” Davis, Garnett’s older brother. Spoon was an enormously gifted basketball player. He’d go onto the local playground, pull a bottle of wine out of his back pocket, place it behind the basket, get chosen for a game of five-on-five, and proceed to dominate the game. Admirers would ooh and aah over his court moves. After the game, he’d retrieve his bottle of wine and bid everyone good-bye. Many believed that if Spoon went to class and quit all the drinking, he’d surely land a scholarship. “I used to drink that wine and didn’t like to go to school,” Spoon confesses all these years later. Spoon knew there was a budding rivalry between him and Garnett and that he wouldn’t be able to keep up with his little brother. “He always went the right way,” he says about Garnett. “I went the wrong way.”
At the beginning of Garnett’s junior year, in 1967, his father left the family again. Gardenia convinced Johnny to return to South Carolina and atone for what he had done before fleeing to Ohio. And this is what Johnny Davis had done: In a house in a black neighborhood of Columbia, he and others had been sitting around a table playing cards. Cigarette smoke was billowing and there was music on the radio. One of the players accused Johnny of cheating. The accuser walked around the table, in Davis’s direction. There was yelling and pleas for both men to calm down. But as soon as the man reached Davis, he belted Davis, knocking him off the chair, sending his eyeglasses flying off his face. Davis, on his back, quickly reached for his hidden gun and shot the man. The shot was fatal. Davis fled for home and told Gardenia what had happened. He told his wife and children that he had to leave, right away. “He gave my mother the gun,” Wali, another Davis son, remembers. There were a lot of tears with Johnny Davis on the run. Johnny Davis knew someone in Columbus, Ohio, who could help him start life anew there. He told the family he’d be in touch as soon as he got settled. He told them they would join him in due time, which they did.
So Johnny Davis was living in Columbus the entire time he was a fugitive. It was a black-on-black killing, and the South Carolina authorities made only a perfunctory effort to capture him. But as the years passed in Columbus, Johnny never stopped looking over his shoulder. He crept back into South Carolina a couple times, but never for long. Gardenia finally convinced her husband to return to Columbia and turn himself in. She said she could not stand it anymore, worrying whenever there was a knock at the door that it might be the police. He was sentenced to three years on a chain gang. “I remember him showing me the marks on his ankle,” says Wali Davis of his father.
The night at the poker game was not the first time that Johnny Davis had been in trouble with the law. A few years earlier, there had been a nasty confrontation with a white man. Davis struck the man with a heavy stick. For that melee, he also served a prison stint.
Johnny Davis had left Columbus just as Garnett was going into his junior year of the high school baseball season. It was a time to start thinking about the future, about college, or maybe even the wild and beautiful dream of professional baseball. “It affected Garnett’s psyche,” his brother Wali says about their father’s absence. “Every young boy wants to know his father is there for him. Garnett missed that father figure. He reached out to teachers.” Wali himself suffered: “I went out into the streets,” he says. Garnett adds, “When our dad left, the family started to unravel. I think that destroyed the family.”
Johnny Davis’s incarceration also created a financial burden for the family. They were now dependent on one income, and Gardenia’s maid work was sporadic. There was always a panic at the first of the month, when the rent was due. “We’d move around a lot. The lights would get turned off,” remembers Wali. “My mother would change her last name to get the lights turned on in another place.” For much of Garnett’s senior year, Gardenia was frantic. There were long stretches when she went without work. She wondered if she should move back to the South, a place she loathed but where living expenses were far less than in the North. There were also relatives who would help them out. But that thought always vanished as quickly as it had come. Her relatives in South Carolina were also living threadbare existences. And she knew how much baseball at East High meant to Garnett. But Johnny Davis was locked away, jangly chains rubbing his ankles raw in the South Carolina sun. Gardenia sent letters to her husband, telling him that the boys were doing all right. It wasn’t the total truth. Spoon was out in the streets, drinking, worrying her something terrible. Wali hadn’t gotten over his anger about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Garnett was the bright spot in the family. “My father was proud of Garnett,” says Wali. “I think he felt self-conscious because he wasn’t around as much as he wanted to be.”
At some point someone told school principal Jack Gibbs that the Davises were about to be evicted. Gibbs was not going to let that happen. He decided that East High School needed another all-around school aide to help out in the principal’s office. And the cafeteria. And in the nurse’s office. And the library. And, lo and behold, Jack Gibbs created just such a position, which is how Gardenia Davis got a full-time job at East High School that year.
All her life, Gardenia had cleaned up after people, washing and ironing clothes, scrubbing floors. Now she had a job working next to educators. She was nervous, no matter how much her sons told her not to be. The family didn’t have a car, so she walked the half mile to school every morning. After some weeks passed, and she became comfortable in her multiple assignments, helping out wherever she was needed, she realized she loved it. She walked the hallways with great pride. When the maid service phoned her about a job, she told them she wasn’t coming back, ever.
On the field, Garnett went out of his way to be courteous to opposing teams after the game, whether the Tigers had won or lost, exhibiting a maturity the coaches admired. (Eddie Rat could be pretty charming after games also.) And no one ever heard Garnett complain about the fact that team members had to wash their own uniforms. He took such great pride in being team captain. He had become the heart and soul of the East High baseball team. He was the first to get the chairs from the school to take out to the cars for the team’s makeshift dugout down at Harley Field. But as Paul Pennell’s Tigers began nearing the halfway point of the 1969 season, the coach couldn’t help but hope for more settled, steady play.
The team had that emotional victory against Mohawk High. But on April 24, they had to face Marion-Franklin High. The Blue Devils of Marion-Franklin were respected as a well-coached, power-hitting team. Pennell sent his lefty, Norris Smith, to the mound, dispatching Eddie Rat to left field. No matter what Smith threw at the Blue Devils, they pounded him. It was a close game, but the Tigers went down, 7–6. There was no time to wallow in the loss, because there was another game the next day at Walnut Ridge High. Eddie Rat was back on the mound. Pennell shifted Larry Mann—who usually came off the bench—to shortstop, hoping that he would be more productive in that position. It did not seem to matter how fast Eddie Rat was throwing his fastball at the Walnut Ridge hitters; they kept hitting him. And it was yet another defeat, 8–3. And the team could not relax in light of their next foe either.
If there was a school in the greater Columbus area that represented academic and athletic achievement—not to mention money and status—it was Upper Arlington High School. F. Scott Fitzgerald would have salivated over this school’s pedigree and image. For spring break the students’ families went to the Caribbean or the pricey resorts in Mexico. They had summer cottages up in Michigan. In 1957, Upper Arlington’s Jack Nicklaus led the school to the state golf championship. After he turned professional, he insisted he be known as the Golden Bear, because that was the name of his high school mascot. He just thought there was something powerful and gallant in the school team’s name—the Golden Bears. Those who lived in that zip code had plenty of money; they paid lavishly for their homes and didn’t mind paying high taxes; they had maids who came from the black side of Columbus. They expected their children to go to the best schools in the country—Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Cornell; Ohio State, right down the road, was a good choice for law school or medical school, but not for undergraduate study. The students were lavished with praise and much was expected of them. And although the school was rich and fancy, it was a mistake to think of the school’s athletes as mere dilettantes engaging in the rough-and-tumble of contact sports. They had won the state titles in golf and football in 1968 and 1969—the year of East High’s basketball glory. Trophies glistened in the school hallway. The school took pride in fielding championship-caliber teams across a variety of sports—track, football, tennis, golf, rowing, and baseball.
On May 2, 1969, the Tigers and the Golden Bears squared off. Norris Smith took the mound for the Tigers. Pennell sent Garnett Davis out to center field. Once again the bright spots for the Tigers were Davis, who got three hits, and Ratleff, who collected two. But it was hardly enough. The Golden Bears strutted away with a 10–5 victory. It was the defeat that hurt the most: The poor black kids had been pummeled by the rich white kids. Upper Arlington High’s baseball team had already been getting high praise by those who were looking forward to the district, regional, and state baseball tournament. After their convincing defeat of East High, the praise heaped upon them only increased.
At the halfway point in the season, East High was suddenly in a downward spiral after three straight losses. The students at the school had always paid minimal attention to the baseball scores when they were announced over the loudspeaker; now they paid even less attention.
Pennell and his assistant, Henderson, knew they had problems. “It was midseason and we weren’t clicking,” recalls Pennell.
Pennell was lamenting anew that his players had not been able to play more games before the start of the official season. He and Henderson believed this was the main reason for the losses. Some of the teams they had lost to played with such poise and smarts. Those teams were jelling because of their experience. They had played plenty of games. Of course, some had even traveled south during school spring breaks to get in playing time.
The Tigers next faced West High. Norris Smith was on the mound once again. Pennell made another outfield move, sending Leroy Crozier to cover center field, replacing sometime starter Larry Mann. The always anemic fan base for East High’s away games grew all but invisible following the string of defeats. “Many times I’d be the only fan at away games,” says Sharon Pennell, the coach’s wife.
West High sent East High to its fourth straight defeat, 2–1. West also went back to the top of City League standings.
Eddie Rat’s alcoholic stepfather dismissed the baseball team from his concerns, taking a contemptuous pleasure in the losses. But Eddie Rat took pride in remaining calm and cool, and he reminded teammates that they were still playing for the league title. Garnett Davis took the losses hard. He hated losing. He was ultracompetitive and blamed himself for the team’s losses. At such a time, a high school baseball player surely might benefit from the reassurance of a dad. Was there anything better than a father and son together in a baseball field, playing catch together?
Basketball coach Bob Hart got himself over to Harley Field to see the team play. Everyone knew they were in a tailspin. The next game was against South High, Hart’s alma mater. He knew how much the players needed a victory. Pennell needed a fresh pitcher and found him in sophomore Ernie Locke, a southpaw. The Tigers were competitive. Locke pitched a nice game for a while, with Davis behind the plate. Kenny Mizelle, the Tiger second baseman, broke out of an offensive slump and smacked two hits. Davis also collected two hits and scored two runs, Robert Kuthrell scored two, Richard Twitty scored two, and Eddie Rat dashed across home plate for a score. But seven runs wasn’t enough. Locke lost his effectiveness and South High took the game, 8–7.
Garnett Davis’s family depended on charity and handouts to survive.
Now, they were in the throes of five straight defeats. Players were angrily flinging their gloves into the dirt.
Paul Pennell began brooding. There had been a sense of pride about the year, about this baseball team—and school year—being a tentacle of the civil rights movement. The Tigers were meant to be more than just a baseball team. “Walnut Ridge, Whetstone, North, the other schools, they’re all white. We were really the only black kids playing baseball in the city,” says Pennell.
Then, finally, it hit him.
He would have to reimagine how to play Garnett Davis, his most versatile player. He would have to think of Garnett the way the Dodgers had thought of Jackie Robinson, as a player with the unique talent to play practically any position on the field. “I went to Garnett,” Pennell recalls, “and I said, ‘I’m going to ask you to do something big.’ I said, ‘If we’re going to turn this ball team around, you have to move away from being catcher.’ ” Garnett was taken aback. Ever since the Peers Club coaches had put him behind the plate, he had been a catcher. But it did not take him very long to come around to Pennell’s reasoning. He too felt the team was in a perilous place and had to turn things around. Something had to be done.
Eddie Rat was surprised at the move. He had gotten used to Davis catching his pitches. But he also agreed with the plan, letting Pennell know that the important thing to him was making sure he didn’t injure his arm before district tournament play rolled around. Just as with basketball, the baseball tournament was an open, round-robin affair. Every team, no matter their record, got into the tournament.
Don Laird, who was an American Legion coach in Columbus in the late 1960s, was following the Tigers’ 1969 baseball season in the newspapers because he had once coached Garnett Davis. “When they lost those five games in a row,” Laird recalls, “I said to myself that they weren’t going to go anywhere in the tournament.”