After the final game of the series in Knoxville, Tommie Reynolds had a funny feeling about leaving the locker room to walk to the bus. The race-baiters in the crowd had been riding him hard all night. Just to be safe, he grabbed a Louisville Slugger model K55.
Sensing something wasn’t right, Sullivan stopped him near the door. “Wait,” he instructed. “We’ll all go out there together. It’ll be safer.”
As the team headed out the door, a small mob of white fans stood between the players and the bus. Reynolds clutched his K55 to his chest, exactly as he’d held his M1 rifle during an army inspection.
“Do all those nigger-loving teammates of yours let you sit up front?” one hollered.
Nobody on the team responded.
“Are they taking you back to the zoo, Monkey Boy?”
The platoon of Barons eased past the mob, and then climbed on board the bus, a melee averted. In a few minutes, they would leave Bill Meyer Stadium for the two-hour drive through the sultry Tennessee night to Chattanooga.
Settling into a seat next to Blue Moon, Reynolds glanced out the window. A guy in a T-shirt that looked as if it hadn’t been washed since the Great Depression was jumping around and scratching himself like a monkey. Blue Moon and Reynolds ignored him. Maybe it was the same guy who’d thrown olives at Reynolds in left field after he’d hit a home run. A couple of olives had bounced off his side, but he’d kept his eyes focused on home plate… just as he’d been instructed.
The Barons had won the last two games of the series, Reynolds hitting homers in both, giving him five for the year, all on the road. At this point in the season, all of the team’s players of color—Reynolds, Jones, Campaneris, Rosario, and Huyke—were making significant contributions. Reynolds had no doubt that as soon as Blue Moon settled into the life of pro baseball, he’d be a big help, too.
As the bus pulled out of the parking lot, the dirty-shirt guy was still jumping around like a monkey. “Idiot,” mumbled Reynolds.
As Iron Lung rolled south on Highway 11 toward Chattanooga, Reynolds shoved thoughts of the idiot from his mind, thinking instead of his girlfriend, Penny, in Daytona Beach. He hadn’t seen her since the end of spring training, and when they’d talked on the phone a couple of nights earlier, she’d told him that she still hadn’t gotten her period and was going to the doctor for a test.
He would call her tomorrow from Chattanooga.
If she was pregnant, he knew what they’d do—get married. They were in love. Plus, it was “the right thing to do.” But when would they get married? Where?
They both had raised the question of whether they were ready. There’d been all the letters and phone calls during his first season in pro ball at Burlington, as well as the two adventures she’d taken to Bradenton to see him, first when he was there for Instructional League, and then again during spring training. She hadn’t told her mother back in Georgia of either of those trips. Proper young women weren’t supposed to do that kind of thing.
Sometimes when he was lying in bed, trying to get to sleep after an 0 for 4, he thought about the fact that they barely knew each other. They hadn’t even met each other’s parents or spent a holiday together. Would it be an issue that she was on her way to earning a college diploma and he had only a high school education? Was she cut out to be a baseball wife? Could she handle all the nights alone? Could she handle moving from town to town as he pursued his career? Would she fit in with the other wives, most of whom were white and not as educated as she was?
When it came to women, Tommie wasn’t going to put Rhett Butler out of a job. He’d never had a steady girl, not in high school back in San Diego, and not during his three years in the army. It wasn’t that he wasn’t good-looking, or smart, or caring. It just hadn’t happened. And now that the possibility of jumping headfirst into marriage was as close as a pregnancy test, he wondered if marriage appealed to him because he didn’t like being alone every night, and just wanted a wife to take care of him, somebody like his mother, who always had dinner waiting for his dad when he got home from another tough day of picking up other people’s garbage. Or was it because he was now living in the Deep South and felt so disconnected from the world around him? He couldn’t even eat in the same restaurants as his teammates, and he’d just had to carry a bat simply to get on the bus. Was all this isolation making him think he needed to be married?
If he did get married, he wouldn’t be the only Baron who’d gotten his girlfriend pregnant and leaped into marriage. But he didn’t know that. Ballplayers didn’t talk about that kind of stuff, at least not Birmingham Baron ballplayers.
It was funny. Despite all the time players spent together—on the bus, in the hotels, in the locker room, in the dugout—their level of communication was superficial. They talked about hitting and pitching and movies and cars and the hot babe sitting behind third base. But in the same way that the dirty-shirt idiot jumping around like a monkey didn’t know the first thing about Tommie Reynolds—such as the fact that if those Russian ships hadn’t turned around before they got to Cuba, he would have been on the front line, laying his life on the line so idiots could have the right to jump around like monkeys—his teammates didn’t know much about him, either. Players didn’t talk about the arguments they’d just had with their wives, or the overdraft notice from the bank, or how much they hated their fathers.
Reynolds slept most of the ride, but approaching Chattanooga he stirred, awakened by the conversation in the seat in front of him. Lindblad and Hoss were complaining about their accommodations back in Knoxville—bad TV reception and a broken air conditioner.
Reynolds bit his tongue. He liked Lindblad and Hoss, but he was sure they had no clue about how lousy the accommodations were that their black teammates had to endure. In the Knoxville boardinghouse where they’d stay, there were no televisions or air-conditioning units… or bathrooms in their rooms. In Macon, they stayed in a flophouse with holes in the walls. In Charlotte, all five black players shared a single room in a boardinghouse.
But in Washington, DC, the U.S. Senate was getting very close to passing a civil rights bill.
Penny was pregnant. After discussing the options, they decided that she would take a bus to Birmingham as soon as the Barons got off the road. They would get married as soon as possible.
The next day, Reynolds woke up unable to keep anything down, feeling chills and fever. As much as he wanted to suit up that night—he was on a hitting rampage, smashing two towering homers in his last two games—he called Sullivan and told him he was sick and couldn’t play. Sullivan got him a doctor’s appointment. The diagnosis was pneumonia.
Told by the doctor that Reynolds shouldn’t play for at least a week, Sullivan placed him on the ten-day disabled list. Stress-related illnesses and diagnoses were not in vogue in 1964, but a pregnant girlfriend and racial taunting probably hadn’t helped him stay healthy. It would be eighteen days before he would play again, not good news for a team struggling to score runs and hold on to their lead.