Reynolds sat in front of his locker in the clubhouse of the Kansas City A’s training camp in Bradenton. He eyed Manager Ed Lopat walking slowly in his direction. Today was the day the team would be cutting five or six players and sending them to the minor-league camp at Daytona for reassignment.
The players called it a “visit from the Turk.” It was a bus ticket to Palookaville, a knife to the heart of a big-league dream. The words were usually the same: “We like your talent, kid, but we want you to get some more experience in the minors. Keep your head up… and remember, you’re only a phone call away.” In many cases, the phone call never came.
Reynolds felt like hiding. But of course the Turk always found his victim.
So far, Reynolds had played well, getting six hits in nineteen at-bats, including a home run. He’d struck out five times and misplayed one ball in the outfield, but he was happy overall with his performance. His chances of breaking camp with the big club, he knew, most likely depended on whether the team’s best hitter and outfielder, Rocky Colavito, ended his holdout. If he did, Reynolds had done the math—there were six outfielders left in camp, not counting Colavito, and the team would probably carry only five. He had the least experience.
“Tommie, I want to see you in my office,” said Lopat.
He could feel the Turk’s breath. But going to the minor-league camp at Daytona, he rationalized, had a couple of things going for it. In Bradenton, he’d been staying in a boardinghouse across a bridge in Palmetto on the edge of its “shotgun shack” section, a cluster of run-down, narrow, rectangular houses in a black neighborhood. In Daytona, he’d be housed in the barracks with all the other players, black and white.
But the even bigger upside was his girlfriend, Penny—she lived in Daytona. They’d talked on the phone about her coming over to Bradenton to visit again, but they were holding off to see if he survived the Turk.
One thing was for sure—he didn’t want to get assigned to Birmingham. He’d listened to other blacks on the team talk about playing in the South, and they didn’t have good things to say. Third baseman Ed Charles, who spent nine seasons in the minors before finally making it to the big leagues in 1961, recalled road trips in the SALLY League where blacks not only couldn’t go into restaurants, but also weren’t allowed to use the restrooms and would have to relieve themselves in the bushes. In cities like Knoxville and Macon they had to stay in flophouses with no air-conditioning, while the white players stayed in nice hotels and came to the park fresh and rested. Charles also talked about how management expected all black players to project their best image in public. If a player spoke out on issues, he’d be labeled a “troublemaker,” the word would get around to other teams, and pretty soon the “troublemaker” was out of baseball.
But Tommie Reynolds was no troublemaker. Following Lopat into his office, he hoped for the best.
“Tommie, I like the way you’ve swung the bat this spring,” said Lopat. “We’re going to take you north with us.”
Reynolds could barely believe his good fortune. After only one season in the minors, he was going to The Show. There was a caveat, however. For the first three weeks of the season, big-league teams could carry twenty-eight players, but then they had to cut down to twenty-five. The Turk would still be lurking.
In high school, Reynolds had dreamed of following in the footsteps of other San Diegans—Ted Williams, Don Larsen, and Bob Skinner—but in talent-rich Southern California, the scouts didn’t take much notice. He had decent size—six feet tall, 170 pounds—decent speed (4.2 seconds to first), and a good but not great throwing arm. He was a line-drive hitter. But the scouts weren’t impressed enough to offer him a contract, so he enrolled in San Diego Junior College. His heart, however, wasn’t in school, so after one semester he and two of his buddies drove down to the army recruiting station in downtown San Diego and signed up. At the time, young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three and not in school were required to serve in the military.
Joining the army offered him the chance to get out of San Diego. He’d spent all but the first year of his life in Southern California, and he was anxious to see other parts of the country and meet new people… and he didn’t have a girlfriend to cloud the issue.
In January 1960, the threat of the Cold War hung heavily, especially after the Russians launched Sputnik and beat America into outer space. But to Tommie, the odds of actually seeing combat seemed remote. In the army, he figured, he’d learn skills that could help him later in life. In addition to his college prep classes at Lincoln High, he’d taken all the shop classes—wood, metal, drafting, auto—but after the army, he’d be eligible for the GI Bill and could get his college paid for.
Despite logic indicating otherwise, he thought the army was his best path to a pro contract. He’d be more mature, physically and mentally, and he would get to play on an army base team against good competition and catch the eye of scouts. Never mind that he would be twenty-two when he got out—relatively old to start a pro career—and that scouts rarely traveled to army bases in search of prospects.
After basic training at Fort Ord in California, he was stationed at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, where he encountered a different kind of racism than what he’d grown up with in California. On and off the base, black soldiers were routinely assaulted and subjected to taunts and racial epithets. Reynolds went out of his way to avoid trouble. He followed the advice to walk only in pairs.
After a posting to Germany, he got the chance to play on a base team, and although there were no scouts, a teammate was impressed and contacted a relative back in California, who got in touch with Art Lilly, the A’s scout in Southern California. Lilly promised he’d be willing to talk with Tommie in a year, after he was out of the service.
It was not an easy year. Reynolds regularly confronted racism. On the marching grounds, fights between blacks and whites were common. And in a bar in Munich, a drunken brawl broke out between white and black troops. Several soldiers were arrested and faced court-martial. Although Reynolds was involved in the fight, he avoided arrest because his commanding officer learned he had rescued a white soldier who was being pummeled by a black.
Nearing the end of his tour in October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis pushed the world toward the brink of nuclear annihilation. When President Kennedy demanded that Khrushchev turn Soviet ships around, American troops were ordered on high alert, including Reynolds’s unit of the 24th Infantry Division. He packed his combat gear, signed his last will and testament, and watched atomic warheads being loaded onto trucks. Even though he had only three months left on his tour, if war erupted, he’d be on the front line. Like everyone else in the world, he was scared.
Fortunately, the United States and Russia stepped back from war, and he was soon discharged, returning to San Diego. During his two years, he had indeed matured mentally and physically, gaining twenty-five pounds and more upper-body strength. Like so many of the men he’d served with, however, he’d picked up a nicotine habit and now smoked Pall Malls.
He enrolled in junior college again, but before the semester began Art Lilly showed up as promised. Going solely on the report of the friend, he signed Reynolds to a contract in January 1963—a $500 bonus, a new glove, and a $400-a-month salary.
Now, just fifteen months later, he was going north with the A’s. He’d be making the major-league minimum of $7,500 for the year. Maybe he would use it to pay off his Malibu Super Sport, or at the very least get the front bumper fixed from the damage it had suffered when he had fallen asleep at the wheel on his way to spring training.
Or maybe he’d use it to buy Penny an engagement ring.
Tommie parked his Super Sport in front of the Bradenton Greyhound station and hustled inside. He didn’t want to be late to pick up Penny, who was coming in from Daytona.
Although they were in love, he could count the times they’d been together on his fingers. There’d been the letters and phone calls when he was playing in Burlington, and the few days they’d spent together when she took a bus to Bradenton last fall to see him during Instructional League. That visit came the week before Kennedy’s assassination—Tommie heard the news just before the start of a ball game in Tampa; Penny found out walking to campus at Bethune-Cookman. Sharing their grief helped.
Tommie had fallen in love almost from that very first meeting when she tried to sell him a ticket to a play. He learned later that it wasn’t even a school play. It was a community play that had been written by the wealthy woman Penny was working for—scrubbing her floors, getting her five-year-old daughter ready for school, fixing lunch for her elderly mother, selling tickets to her play. Strapped for money, Penny had dropped out of college for a semester to work full-time to earn money to pay for next year’s tuition. She’d learned this work ethic from her mother while she was growing up in Chattahoochee, Florida, right next to the Georgia state line. Her mother worked eighteen hours a day on three jobs—an aide in a mental hospital, a cook in a restaurant, and the cleaning lady for her church—so that she could pay for at least some of Penny’s college education. Penny’s father had suffered a stroke when she was ten and was disabled. Growing up, Penny had taken care of the house and her younger siblings.
There was plenty that Tommie liked about Penny besides her good looks and work ethic. Like him, she was quiet, serious, and independent. He was learning from her what it was like to have grown up in the South. From her perspective, racism permeated everything, and bigoted people were all cut from the same cloth, whether they lived in Birmingham or Daytona. She didn’t buy the proposition that Daytona was more “enlightened.”
“With racism, there’s no in between,” she maintained.
As a student at Bethune-Cookman, she had taken part in a boycott of a local cafeteria, but didn’t consider herself on the cutting edge of the movement—her focus was doing what she had to in order to get through school. She wanted to be a teacher, no matter how long it took, or how many floors she had to scrub. To Tommie, she had a no-nonsense determination that he hadn’t seen in the girls he knew in California.
He wanted to marry her.
She wasn’t quite as eager. He had all the right stuff—he was attractive, mature, and gentlemanly—but she worried that his career and its travel would get in the way. She wasn’t a baseball fan, and had no illusions that he was rich. When she’d approached him about buying a ticket to the play, he had admitted that he couldn’t afford it. She knew he was telling the truth—he was, after all, frequenting an all-you-can-eat cafeteria during its early-bird special, not exactly haute cuisine.
Right on time, the bus rolled into the station. Watching Penny walking toward him, looking beautiful in her new sundress, he was ready to propose right there on the spot.