9781400066513

Leroy "Satchel" Paige is a poster child for the tragedy of segregated baseball. He could have dominated major league pitching but got a chance with the Indians only at the end of his career. Paige could have been the star to break baseball's color line, but Jackie Robinson got first crack as a "safer choice." While there are stacks of biographies about Robinson, this is the first attempt at a full, major biography of Paige. Tye, a journalist, is more noted for his labor histories, such as Rising from the Rails, about black rail porters. However, he's a passionate baseball fan with a strong interest in the history of segregated America. Why has so little been written about Paige? One factor is the difficulty of getting reliable information. Paige was well known for embellishing stories. Tye masterfully weaves primary and oral sources together to create a credible biography of a talkative yet elusive subject. We can hope that his occasional sloppiness when it comes to sports facts (e.g., he refers to Joltin' Joe Dimaggio as "Jumpin'" Joe) will have been corrected for publication because this is an important book about a neglected figure in baseball history. Recommended for all readers in sports as well as 20th-century America.Randall Schroeder, Ferris State Univ., Big Rapids, MI Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

LARRY TYE was an award-winning journalist at The Boston Globe and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. An avid baseball fan, Tye now runs a Boston-based training program for medical journalists. He is the author of Shock, Rising from the Rails, Home Lands, and The Father of Spin (a New York Times Notable Book), and his books have been turned into documentaries and films.

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Chapter One

Coming Alive

“I was no different from any other kid,

only in Mobile I was a nigger kid.”

Satchel Paige entered the world as Leroy Robert Page. He was delivered at home into the hands of a midwife, which was more help than most poor families could afford in 1906 in Mobile, Alabama. His mother, Lula, was a washerwoman who already spent her nights worrying how to feed and sustain the four daughters and two sons who had come before. Five more would follow. Leroy’s father, John, alternated between the luxuriant lilies in the gardens he tended uptown and the corner stoops on which he liked to loiter, rarely making time to care for his expanding brood. With skin the shade of chestnut and a birthplace in the heartland of the former Confederacy, the newborn’s prospects looked woeful. They were about to get worse.

The hurricane that battered Mobile Bay just two months after Leroy’s birth started with two days of torrential rains carried in on the back of a driving northeast wind. By the next morning ten-foot-high surges had dispatched oyster and fishing vessels to the bottom of the sea. Tornado-like squalls ripped from their roots southern pines, blew tin roofs off Greek Revival homes, and made it look as if birds were flying backward. At historic Christ Church only the choir loft was left standing. The lucky escaped by fleeing to third-floor attics or climbing tall trees; 150 others were consigned to watery graves. One area hit especially hard was the Negro slum known as Down the Bay, where the Pages lived.

Their home was a four-room shack called a shotgun, because a shot fired through the front door would exit straight out the back. That is the path storm waters took when they burst through Down the Bay’s alleys on the way to more fashionable quarters. Rental units like the Pages’ were ramshackle and fragile, with no flood walls to protect them from the nearby sea and no electricity to ease their recovery. The Page cottage remained standing but the thin mattresses the children shared and their few furnishings needed airing out. That cleanup would have to wait: Lula’s white employers insisted she be at their homes early the next morning to mop up the storm damage. The kids would wait, too, the way they did every day when Mama headed to work, with the older ones watching over baby Leroy and the rest of the young ones.

Leroy’s world was being reshaped in another way that would mark him even more profoundly. Mobile historically was a center of the slave trade and the destination for the last slave ship to America, but Alabama’s oldest city also was home to more than a thousand blacks who bought or were granted their freedom in the antebellum era. That paradox was consistent with the coastal city’s push toward the conservative state of which it was part and its pull to a more tolerant world beyond its shores. For more than two hundred years Mobile had welcomed outsiders—Irish Catholics fleeing the famine, Jewish merchants, Yankees and English, along with legions of Creoles, the free offspring of French or Spanish fathers and chattel mothers—and they in turn challenged inbred thinking on everything from politics to race. The result, during the Reconstruction period, was a blurring of color lines in ways unthinkable in Montgomery, Selma, and most of the rest of Alabama. Jim Crow—the system of segregation named after a cowering slave in an 1820s minstrel show—was there in Mobile, but so was Booker T. Washington’s gospel of black self-help. The races were separated on trolleys and in other public settings, but the separation was done by tradition more than law. Blacks not only could vote for officeholders, a few even held political office. Paternalism more than meanness defined how whites treated Mobile’s 18,000 black citizens.

Unfortunately for Leroy, that live

Excerpted from Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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Satchel : The Life and Times of an American Legend

Satchel : The Life and Times of an American Legend

1400066514

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