Opening his eyes, Tommie struggled to get his bearings.
Slowly, he put it together—he’d fallen asleep at the wheel and run off the road, his prized Super Sport landing in a ditch, just short of a marsh. He imagined alligators and snakes lurking nearby, assessing his nutritional potential.
He glanced to his left, startled to see something ominous on his driver’s-side window—somebody had drawn a target, with the bull’s-eye right where his head had been resting.
Cautiously, holding tight to his .45, he opened the door to survey the damage to his car… and whether he would be able to back it out of the mess. If he couldn’t, the chances of getting a tow truck to come out in the middle of the night were slim, even if he could find a phone booth… or even if he was white. This was a highway in the Deep South, not the Pacific Coast Highway running through La Jolla. A black guy standing on the side of the road in the dead of night, trying to flag down a car, had no chance.
But luck was with Tommie Reynolds. He was able to jockey the car out of the gunk with only minor damage and to continue on the road to Florida and spring training.
When he was still in high school in San Diego at Lincoln High—a school with a 10 percent minority population—Tommie was the only black player on the baseball team. He paid for his equipment with money from his part-time job busing tables at Del Mar Racetrack… but he never saved enough to buy a letterman’s jacket, and with seven kids in the family, it wasn’t in his parents’ budget. On the football team, where he played tight end and defensive back, he was one of a dozen blacks, including his best friend, Kenny Tucker, a straight-A student who gave Reynolds rides to school every morning in his customized ’38 Chevy. Tommie was notorious for his helmet-rattling hits on defense.
He didn’t have a steady girl. In the classroom, he was a B student, taking all college prep classes. His favorite class was social studies with Mr. Nelson, partly because Mr. Nelson’s no-nonsense approach echoed his own family’s style. Tommie appreciated a clear sense of rules, whether it was on the ball field or in the classroom. In Mr. Nelson’s class, he read about civil rights events in the South—the beating death of Emmett Till; President Eisenhower calling out the federal troops to integrate Central High in Little Rock; the lunch-counter sit-ins in North Carolina; the bitter resistance to Brown vs. Board of Education. But being seventeen and far removed from the Deep South, Reynolds regarded those struggles as distant and detached from his life at Lincoln High. Although students segregated themselves into separate groups in the cafeteria, the jocks at least were trying to do their part for integration, black and white athletes eating lunch and hanging out together every day on an outside patio.
Traditionally, the football team chose the homecoming queen, and in 1958 they selected Evelyn Elston, who was smart, beautiful… and black. This didn’t sit well with a group of white parents, who complained to the principal, who persuaded the football coach to ask the team to reconsider its choice. Tommie and his buddy Kenny were having nothing of it, and lobbied their teammates not to back down. In the end, the team voted unanimously for Evelyn to keep her crown. Reluctantly, the administration accepted the vote, but decreed that future votes for queen would be by the whole student body, not just the football team. It would be two decades before Lincoln selected its second black queen.
After twenty-five hundred miles, Tommie finally arrived in Bradenton. It had been a rough trip—no shower, fitful sleep, gas station junk food, a torn-up front fender, a broken passenger-side window, and a target drawn on the driver’s side. He was relieved he’d made it.
Realistically, his chances of making the big club (or as the players called it, “going north”) were a long shot. From the ’63 Burlington club, he and pitcher Ron Tompkins, also of San Diego, were the only two players promoted to the forty-man big-league roster. In his brief stint with the A’s at the end of the year, he hadn’t exactly torn it up, getting only two hits in nineteen at-bats. Defensively, he still needed a lot of work, and although he could hit the ball a mile, he still didn’t know the strike zone, striking out almost one in every four at-bats his first year in A ball.
The chances were more likely that he would end up either in Dallas, the A’s Triple A farm team, or with Birmingham in Double A. He didn’t want to go to either place, but he definitely didn’t want to go to Birmingham. He’d read about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church that killed those four innocent girls, and knew enough about the racial violence that he didn’t want to play there.
Tommie was looking forward to the $15-per-diem paid to players on the big-league roster during spring training. That would be $450 a month, which was $50 more than he made his first year in Burlington. (Players’ salaries didn’t begin until the beginning of the regular season.) And it wasn’t as if he had wads of cash stashed away from a big bonus. He’d gotten a measly $500 bonus to sign, plus a new Wilson A2000 glove. He’d been able to scrape by during his first off-season, spending three months playing in the Florida Instructional League for $500 a month, and then surviving December and January by living at home with his parents back in San Diego.
But as much as anything else in spring training, he was looking forward to seeing Penny Preston again. They had met the previous spring in Daytona Beach while he was at minor-league training camp. She was a sophomore English major at Bethune-Cookman, a prestigious black college in Daytona. He’d come to a cafeteria to eat, and she was there selling tickets to a play. He didn’t buy a ticket—“I can’t afford it,” he said—but he did get her phone number. She made him work for it, however. With his close-cropped hair and youthful appearance, she pegged him to be only seventeen or eighteen. She was twenty, and there was no way she’d date a guy younger than her. When he told her he was twenty-one, she demanded to see his ID. (“I carded him,” she later said.) Not only was he old enough, but his California driver’s license made him seem almost worldly. They went out several times before he had to leave to go play ball in Iowa. She thought he was quiet, mature, and very much the gentleman. He thought she was beautiful and smart.
While he was in Burlington, they wrote letters, talked on the phone, and professed their love. Tommie had no doubt she was the one for him, even though they’d spent less than thirty hours together. When he returned to Florida in the fall for Instructional League in Bradenton, she did something very bold and daring for a nice college girl in 1963—she rode a Greyhound bus across the state and visited him in Bradenton for a few days. This was borderline scandalous, although her mother back in Georgia didn’t know about it. And now, if all went according to Tommie’s spring training plan, she’d travel across the state again, only this time she’d get to see him in a big-league uniform.
Pulling his Super Sport into the hotel parking lot, he saw its neon sign proclaiming that it was THE SPRING TRAINING HEADQUARTERS OF THE KANSAS CITY A’S. (The players called the hotel the “Big Pink” because of the way it glowed in the late afternoon sunshine.) Tommie smiled, grabbed his one suitcase, and headed for the lobby. The woman at the front desk furrowed her brow.
“I’m Tommie Reynolds with the A’s,” he said.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she replied. “We don’t accept Negroes here.”