28 ELSTON HOWARD

Ellie Howard made the opening-day roster in 1955, a historic marker in Yankee history, but a move that felt surprisingly natural. No player embraced his arrival more than Phil Rizzuto, but Berra, Mantle, Martin, Ford—they all accepted him as their teammate from the start. Dickey, from Little Rock, Arkansas, enjoyed working with him on catching. Turner, from Nashville, Tennessee, found him to be a perfect gentleman. (Fourteen years later, Howard would join Turner as a coach on the Yankees.)

Some writers, asked about why the Yankees were so slow to bring a black player onto the team, merely said, “They won every year; no reason to change. Why 1955? Well, they didn’t win in 1954.”

Casey said only positive things about Howard’s abilities, but one day, he joked, “I finally get a nigger, and he can’t run.” For the rest of his life, this one line would be cited as an example of his racism. (Usually the “n” word was cleaned up in the telling, and it became simply “I finally get one….”)

But even for the young, liberal-thinking New York press emerging on the scene, his use of the “n” word was not taken harshly.

“He was a product of his times,” they would say, almost to a man, and echoing Arlene Howard’s comments (or perhaps she borrowed theirs). “He was born in Missouri in 1890, went to segregated schools, and middle America grew up with certain prejudices, or certain ways of speaking. Even Harry Truman used the ‘N’ word.”

“When repeating that sentence, people lose sight of the first half of it,” notes Toni Mollett Harsh, a grandniece of Edna’s and former Reno city councilwoman, who today oversees Casey’s legacy. (Her mother, Margaret Mollett, served as his bank secretary.) “ ‘I finally get one’ is an important statement and says a lot. Remember, he played against Negro League teams and saw what Robinson, Mays, Irvin, Campanella, Newcombe, Black, Doby, Paige, Aaron and Banks meant to their clubs. People overlook that part of the statement and they shouldn’t.”

—

Arlene Howard wrote, in her 2001 memoir: “There really was nothing malicious about what Casey had said. If anything, Elston was upset because Casey had referred to him as a slow runner. Hey, he ran track on the relay team when he was at Vashon High School, and he led the International League with twelve triples in 1954. Even though Casey would use the ‘n’ word and occasionally referred to Elston as ‘Eight Ball,’ Elston never really thought that Stengel was racist. Casey was just being Casey. He was sixty-five years old. That was how people of his era talked, Elston thought, and so he accepted it. Casey was always blurting out words that were unusual and embarrassing.”

“Casey really liked Ellie and Arlene,” said the sportswriter Steve Jacobson. “And he liked dancing with Arlene at team parties, because, like Edna, she was taller than he was and he thought they cut a good figure together.”

—

With the benefit of hindsight, promoting Howard onto the Yankees’ roster was a much more significant milestone in the team’s history than was presented at the time. Baseball has long been proud of ending discrimination in its ranks through the signing of Jackie Robinson by the Dodgers, seven years before the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision ending school segregation. For the Yankees, the change was long in coming, and happened after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Whereas Yankee fans cared mostly about winning, the growing voices from social activists (and there were plenty in New York City) were putting pressure on the team to finally integrate. They were, after all, the game’s most visible team. The Yankees were not the last team to integrate (that was the Red Sox, four years later), but they were the ones now drawing the greatest attention on this issue.

Casey’s role was not insignificant, because he created an environment in which the event could “just happen,” in which Howard’s teammates could easily welcome him onto the roster. There was no clubhouse meeting in which Casey warned his players to “accept Howard.” The theme was winning; if Howard helped to accomplish that, he was a Yankee all the way.^*1

Whatever Casey’s upbringing may have taught him, at age sixty-four he accepted the change rather comfortably and, by easing Howard onto the roster, helped baseball into what may have been its greatest era—the mid-to-late 1950s, when the rosters were now at “maximum talent,” featuring both black and white players squeezed into just sixteen teams.

Having traded Vic Power before he ever played for the Yankees, Casey had only a few dark-skinned players in his Yankee years—Harry Simpson (whom he had picked for the 1956 All-Star team while Simpson was still with Kansas City; he came to the Yankees in 1957), Hector Lopez (1959), and Jesse Gonder (1960) followed Howard—but, given that they were joining his swath of white players, ranging from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl native Mantle to South Carolina’s Bobby Richardson—the transition was done with ease.^*2

—

Because Elston had to live apart from most of his teammates who were housed at the Soreno Hotel, not all of Casey’s spring-training rules applied to him. For those who lived there, rules were simple—and the no-dog-track rule was long gone.

1. Players are to report at Miller Huggins Field in uniform every morning before 10:30.

2. There will be an 8 o’clock call at the hotel for all player[s.]

3. Dress in the hotel in the morning: sports shirt permissible, which must be buttoned at neck, plus a jacket. Dress in the hotel for dinner; must have shirt and tie, and coat on at all times.

4. Tipping: Meals, 25 cents for breakfast, 50 cents for dinner, $1 per week for room maid.

Dan Daniel wrote a column about this in the World-Telegram, noting that it marked the end of the dime tip, and the first time he had ever seen written rules regarding tipping.

Alas, spring training was not smooth sailing for Casey. On March 26, as the Yankees were preparing for a celebration to mark their thirtieth anniversary of moving to St. Petersburg, Casey got into a scuffle with a local photographer and was served with papers at Al Lang Field, charging him with assault and use of obscene language. The photographer charged Casey with kicking him in the leg. The story ran all over the country. “I’m in jail,” Casey said to Bob Fishel, the Yankees’ PR man. “Y’gotta come down and bail me out. It’s fifty dollars, but bring more because they might change their mind.” The mayor of St. Petersburg, knowing the importance of having the mighty Yankees connected to St. Pete, quickly jumped to Casey’s defense, and even presented him with a key to the city, before the matter went to court.

“I’m sure sorry that the rhubarb developed at Al Lang Field the other day,” said Casey to his writers. “I certainly didn’t have anything against that photographer or any photographer. I don’t even know him. They tell me he’s a nice fellow. He got in our way at the Brooklyn game, and I ordered him off the field and out of the dugout. Maybe I was a little mad and I yelled at him. But I sure didn’t know I was starting any great feud. The Yankees have been coming to St. Petersburg now for 30 years. We like it here. The city and people are great to us. I certainly wouldn’t want to spoil that relationship in an argument with a photographer, or anybody else. Maybe I didn’t say ‘please’ to him when I told him to get off the field, but it was a tense ball game and I didn’t want anyone in our way. I sure hope this thing can be cleared up.”

It was cleared up. The complaint was dropped, and Casey never had to go to court.

—

By the spring of 1955, radio reporters were beginning to show up at training camps with tape recorders. They were big and bulky, reel-to-reel, and not easy to travel with or plug in. One such radio reporter was named Howard Cosell.

For whatever reason, perhaps a little too much self-confidence, Cosell did not click with the Yankee players or their manager, and he found it difficult to do his job until Bob Fishel intervened and coaxed people to talk with him. This saved Cosell from the embarrassment of a failed assignment, and helped launch his career on ABC Radio with a program called Pennant Preview.

Of course, what he got from Casey was a dose of Stengelese. Casey could really offer it up for these hapless radio guys, but the advent of recorders also allowed some verbatim coverage of the dialect. When Time magazine sent a print reporter, armed with a tape recorder, Time decided to run with the Stengelese. Its readers were probably as dumbfounded as the poor reporter.

Casey proceeded to praise Berra, and included Mantle (“my big fella”) in the run-on sentence, acknowledging him almost in passing. Casey then tossed a big compliment at Moose Skowron, with a “Skowron, maybe” in his ranking of his best players.

Then came mention of Bob Cerv with “he can’t field now,” noting that perhaps someone else could use him. It was like putting a FOR SALE notice on his back.

“The other fella” (Martin) and the “Little Old Man” (Rizzuto) get mentioned when he covers the infield, where as usual, he was putting doubts in people’s minds about Rizzuto’s future.

When he got to Elston Howard, he said, “Good kid too. If they leave him alone and stop fighting the Civil War all over and they almost ruined him.” Casey was showing sensitivity here to making an issue of Howard’s race and perhaps interfering with his focus on the games.

He concluded with special attention to Eddie Robinson and his “16 home runs in his first 32 hits,” noting that Joe Collins is a good player for first base but that Robinson “does me a good job.” The Eddie Robinson performance to which Casey alluded was not uncommon at that time in Yankeeland, when a player might be a fill-in, perform well, and then sit back down when the regulars returned.

“I broke into the lineup in May after Collins and Skowron were hurt,” said Robinson in 1957. “I stayed in there for just about a month. All I did was hit 13 home runs in that time and help the Yankees boost their lead to five and a half games. But when Collins and Skowron got better, Stengel put me on the bench and I never did get back in there. I couldn’t figure it out then. I still can’t.” Between May 18 and June 15, 1955, he had thirteen homers, and twenty-nine RBIs in twenty-nine games. And then it was back to the bench.

Allie Reynolds retired after the 1954 season, and on July 27, 1955, “the Junkman,” Ed Lopat, started against the White Sox in Yankee Stadium. His days of baffling hitters with off-speed breaking balls were coming to a close. After four consecutive singles by Chicago in the top of the second, Casey walked to the mound and signaled for Tom Sturdivant to replace him.

That marked the end of the Reynolds-Raschi-Lopat era. Lopat was traded to Baltimore three days later (Don Larsen was called up to replace him), where he finished his career with ten appearances for the Orioles.

The year when Howard arrived, 1955, was also the final year of Joe Carrieri’s four-year tenure as batboy. Casey liked him a lot, and was often playful with him. “Joe! Joe! Get up and hit for DiMaggio!” he yelled when Carrieri had nodded off on the bench one evening during batting practice.

“I used to line up the bats in the bat rack based on the batting order,” recalled Carrieri in 2015. “One game, I noticed Woodling taking a bat from the slot when it was supposed to be McDougald. I ran and told Casey, ‘He’s batting out of order, he’s batting out of order!’ And I was right, and I saved the day. McDougald went up to hit. After the game, Casey told the team, ‘Even Joe the batboy makes us great!’ and he gave me twenty-five dollars.”

—

This year also marked the beginning of the widespread use of batting helmets, and Casey had an observation on that, as he had had on the gloves-off-the-field rule the year before: “If we’d had them when I was playing, John McGraw would have insisted that we go up to the plate and get hit on the head.”

The first Yankee player saved by the helmet was Jerry Coleman, who was beaned in July. “The ball struck his helmet with a crack that was heard across the ball park and except for the fact that he was wearing the safety cap, he probably would have been seriously injured,” reported The Sporting News.

—

April 28–29, 1955, was the Yankees’ first visit to Kansas City, the place from which Casey’s own nickname was derived. This gave him a chance to visit with his brother and sister, though he stayed with the team at the Muehlebach Hotel. Fans greeted him warmly when he went to home plate with the lineup cards, as he had received them graciously in the hotel lobby, signing every piece of paper, answering questions, posing his own. He loved all this. He loved people, hotel lobbies, celebrity, train travel, old stories, and good times.

If a fan, perhaps a bit inebriated, started heckling Casey, the Ol’ Perfessor was skilled at handling it. “I want to compliment you for being so fine a fan,” he might say, “and we need more like you. Each city should have its red hots like you!”

“You can’t hold yourself aloof from the customers,” he would explain later. “You can’t snub them and you mustn’t snub them. If they feel hurt, they can jolly well tell you where to go….The fans make baseball possible. Don’t ever forget that.”

The Yankees split the two games in Kansas City, and in losing the second one, they fell out of first place; they didn’t get back to first place till over three weeks later, during a seven-game winning streak; then they stayed on top until July 31. After that, they didn’t regain first until September 16—in the midst of an eight-game winning streak. During that whole time, however, they were never more than two games out.

The Yankees’ annual Old-Timers’ Day fell on Casey’s sixty-fifth birthday, and there he was, surrounded by Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Connie Mack, and Bill Terry, with a cake that represented Ned of the Third Reader, that character in his elementary school textbook whom he always liked to “quote” when he felt it was appropriate for a silly question or an obvious answer.

He was doing fine financially at sixty-five. Soon he received his first Social Security check (for seventy-five dollars) to complement his baseball salary, his oil income, his investments, his Lawson Bank income, and his endorsements. But his health was problematic, and soon after Old-Timers’ Day, he turned the team over to Jim Turner for a few days while he stayed at the Essex House with the flu and a bladder condition. He watched the games on television.

By now, the Essex House was truly a mid-Manhattan haven for him. He would leave by cab around 2:00 p.m. for an 8:00 p.m. night game, after an hour of pacing in his twenty-eighth-floor suite. Edna would follow later, get her ticket at the will-call window (Window 21), and sit next to the dugout, passing up the invitation to sit in the mezzanine box with other wives of team officials. Casey would pace the dugout throughout the game, and was always high-energy and quite animated with his arms. After the game, while Casey held court with his writers, Edna would wait up to two and a half hours at her seat and then by the switchboard operators for him to claim her, but she enjoyed talking to anyone who was passing by, even the cleanup crew. The Stengels would then take a cab back to the hotel from Yankee Stadium (talking about the game to the cabbie), and go to their suite. Casey would freshen up and, still wound up from the game, go back, alone, to the street. He needed to unwind, for he could recall every pitch to every batter, every nuance of a game. Should he have waved Bauer over three steps in right in the fourth inning? Did he fail to exploit a weakness somewhere in his opponent?

Unwinding for him meant exiting on Central Park South, across the street from the horse-drawn carriages, walking east, downhill toward Sixth Avenue, making a right turn at the corner and then another, one block south, on West Fifty-eighth Street, and finally uphill toward the back entrance of the Essex House. He would always be recognized, and always enjoyed bantering with the fans or the tourists. The experience seemed to relax him for the rest of the evening.

Toots Shor’s notable restaurant was a short walk away, but he was not a regular. The New York Athletic Club was literally next door. No interest. As gregarious as he was, room service with Edna in the twenty-eighth-floor suite overlooking the park was often just the ticket when the team wasn’t on the road.

—

Casey could be both thoughtful and thoughtless when it came to his players. When George Weiss told him he was thinking of trading the injured Irv Noren, Casey jumped to the outfielder’s defense. “He got hurt playing for you, didn’t he?” said Casey. “You owe him something.”

Noren stayed, and got to collect another World Series check.

But on September 9, Casey made out the lineup card for the game showing Don Larsen pitching and batting eighth, and Rizzuto batting ninth. This was a cruel and embarrassing thing to do to the aging Rizzuto; Casey had also done it with Willy Miranda, and would do it again with Bobby Richardson. Larsen hit well for a pitcher, but Rizzuto seemed to deserve more respect than this. Though Rizzuto held his tongue, his friends among the writing corps knew how hurtful this was to him. Some recalled the day at that long-ago Brooklyn tryout when Casey told him to go get a shoeshine box (though it was not actually Casey, but a coach, as reported earlier).

—

Billy Martin had been off with the army, playing and managing a team at Fort Carson, near Colorado Springs, but he used a month and some days of accumulated leave to join the Yankees on September 1. (He was in fact declared eligible for the World Series, despite missing the August 31 cutoff for the active roster.) He was a good addition in a close pennant race, batting .300 in twenty games, which no one expected from him. He then hit a stellar .320 in the World Series, again proving himself to be a terrific October hitter.

The Yankees reclaimed glory when they clinched the American League pennant—Casey’s sixth in seven years—on September 23, with victory in the nightcap of a day-night doubleheader at Fenway Park, and with Ford, an 18-game winner, saving the 3–2 win for Larsen. Casey called on Whitey with one out in the seventh, and got Ted Williams to hit into a double play to hold the lead.

It was a season in which the Indians became the first team in Casey’s seven years to win a season series against the Yankees, capturing thirteen of the twenty-two games between them. The Yankees still finished three games ahead of the Tribe and five ahead of the White Sox, thanks in part to their demolishing of the Orioles, winning nineteen times in twenty-two games.

It was also a season in which Berra won his third MVP award, tying DiMaggio, as he drove in 108 runs, while Mantle belted thirty-seven home runs, and Howard hit an impressive .290 in his rookie season, playing left field, right field, and catching.

—

Brooklyn. Again. Another Subway Series. Casey seldom called them the Dodgers; he said “the Brooklyns.” And here they came, trying to beat his Yankees after failing five times in five attempts, starting in 1941. For Dodger fans, it had become “Wait till next year!” after each setback.

And yet, arguably, they had the better team. The Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s were loaded with stars, and even had the “mystique” that Yankee fans liked to talk about. Maybe 1955 would put an end to the suffering.

Counting the managers, Walt Alston and Stengel, and coaches Dickey and Billy Herman of the Dodgers, the World Series featured thirteen future Hall of Famers, including Campanella, Reese, Robinson, and Snider of Brooklyn (Sandy Koufax didn’t make an appearance), and Berra, Mantle, Rizzuto, and Ford of the Yankees, along with other stars, including Hodges, Furillo, Newcombe, Gilliam, Bauer, Howard, Martin, and Skowron. Formidable talent was abundant.

Not surprisingly, the teams split the first six games, setting up a dramatic Game Seven at Yankee Stadium before 62,465 fans.

Stengel named Tommy Byrne, who had pitched a complete-game win in Game Two, and Alston selected Johnny Podres, who had a complete-game win in Game Three. Only twenty-two years old, Podres had twenty-nine career victories in his three seasons with Brooklyn.

—

In the last of the sixth, with the Yankees trailing 2–0, Martin walked and McDougald dropped down a bunt single. The tying runs were on with nobody out and Berra batting. Yogi hit a fly ball down the left field line—a very difficult catch for the left fielder, who had been shading to his left for the left-hand-hitting Berra. Amoros, in his first inning in left, ran at breakneck speed and speared the ball right by the foul pole. The unexpected catch caught both runners too far from their bases—and Amoros fired to Reese, who threw on to Hodges for a double play. Bauer grounded out to short, and the threat was over.

Now, it wasn’t as if Casey had done anything wrong, but if he hadn’t taken Byrne out, Alston would have kept Gilliam in left. Gilliam wore his glove on his left hand, Amoros on his right. The play was just so: Amoros was able to snare it, whereas Gilliam might not have been.

“I played the game wrong,” Casey later reflected to his writers. “I had my hitters taking on Podres and I shoulda had ’em hitting. I knew the kid hadn’t pitched a complete game since mid-July. I figured he couldn’t last. But he did last and I was wrong—they shoulda been up there swinging from the first inning on.”

Casey was wrong about this postmortem, too: Podres had gone the distance four days earlier.

The Yankees had been playing without Mantle, who was hampered by a leg injury. The best they could get from him was a pop to shortstop in the seventh as a pinch hitter. He was 2-for-10 in the series with one home run, but, obviously, missing a 100 percent Mantle from their daily lineup was a huge setback. (He had hardly played at all after September 14.)

In the ninth, an inning every Brooklyn fan came to know from verse, Skowron grounded out to Podres, and Cerv flew out to Amoros. That brought up Howard, who grounded out, Reese to Hodges.

And the Brooklyn Dodgers were at last world champions—for the first time in the history of the franchise. Oh, what a celebratory day and night that was in the borough of Brooklyn. This was a seismic event in the annals of Brooklyn, not just Brooklyn baseball. Brooklyn was only a borough, not a city, and the Dodgers (and the Brooklyn Bridge) provided their major identity in the nation; their fans among the most loyal, long-suffering, and boisterous. The effects were thunderous.

Billy Martin was near tears. “It’s a shame for a great manager like that to have to lose,” he said.

The experience of losing a World Series was a first for Casey.

—

The series ended on October 4, and four days later, the Yankees gathered at Idlewild Airport (now JFK) for a trip to the Far East, with a stopover in Honolulu.

Casey was going back (along with a traveling party of sixty-four) to revisit Japan and the Philippines, which he had last visited in 1922 with McGraw’s Giants.

This time, the Yankees would play twenty-five games (winning them all save for one tie), on a tour organized by a Japanese newspaper. It was a goodwill tour, and for three of the players—Eddie Robinson, Johnny Kucks, and Andy Carey—it was also a honeymoon trip. Carey led the team with thirteen homers in the twenty-five games; his bride was Lucy Marlow, a beautiful Columbia Pictures starlet who had appeared in 1954’s A Star Is Born. They married October 6. Ellie Howard brought his home-movie camera to record the trip, and also hit .468, to lead the team.

Rizzuto was among a handful of players who did not go, but Phil insisted this was not because of a feud with Casey. Some thought they did have a feud, going back to a year earlier, when Phil suggested that half the pay cut he was being offered be borne by Casey for not playing him every day. Now he insisted he’d said this in jest. Meanwhile, on this tour, Casey took advantage of the opportunity to play McDougald at short almost every day, in preparation for the time when Rizzuto would indeed walk away.

The Stengels, the Weisses, the Dickeys, the Turners, the trainer Gus Mauch and his wife—the “grown-ups” on the tour—had a great time with the first-class treatment they received; it began with a parade before a hundred thousand fans in Tokyo. (Casey had to fight a cold for most of the trip, but it didn’t dampen his spirits.)

“The games didn’t mean anything and we could have just gone through the motions,” said Jim Konstanty, who had started Game One of the World Series in 1950 for the Phillies but was now a Yankee. “Not with Stengel though. ‘The name Yankees stands for something all over the world’ he told us. ‘You’ll play every game as if your job depends on it. And maybe it might.’ ”

“I hope some day to have a Japanese player on the Yanks so your fans over here can follow him,” said Casey. “It would be good for baseball, for Japan and the New York Yankees.”

The Yankees even appointed a Japanese scout, Bozo Wakabayashi, as a gesture to back Casey’s words.

“Casey made a terrific hit with the Japanese,” said Weiss. “But that hardly was surprising. He gave it to them straight from the shoulder. He said that the Japanese should make their baseball patterns conform to getting the most out of their physical abilities. The Japanese do not run as big and heavy as our players do.”

In her memoir, Edna recounted the trip, surely the trip of a lifetime:

This trip was our first voyage since that memorable Giant–White Sox exhibition to Europe 31 years earlier, and we had more excitement than at the World Series. The Yankees were big news in Tokyo. Crowds up to 75,000 saw our games; there were parades, dinners, and so many flowers in our hotel room that we nearly hung out a florist sign. Casey received bouquets every time he stepped up to home plate. He also received gorgeous gifts of bone china, kimonos, and valuable Satsuma vases.

At one dinner, he was given a large box, and when he untied the ribbon, out popped a Geisha girl.

“Say Edna,” he winked, when he sat down. “Don’t you think I ought to bring this back to Yankee Stadium? Ball boys are getting a little outdated.”

That trip, incidentally, evolved into a round-the-world tour for Casey and me. From Japan, we left the team and went on to Manila, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Cairo, Jerusalem, Beirut, Rome, Munich, Vienna, Frankfurt, Paris, London, and Iceland. We brought back so many souvenirs we laid them end to end on our dining room floor and had to pick our way across like stumbling infielders. We had tea sets from Hong Kong, Meersham [sic] pipes from Turkey, and a Japanese doll as big as Phil Rizzuto.

Casey was photographed in a Geisha girl’s wig, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and it’s probably the most celebrated gag photo of his ever taken.

—

After the Asian journey, the Stengels stopped in New York to visit with Weiss, but they made it home to Glendale for New Year’s. They had been in their Glendale home all of twenty-eight days in 1955.