As it happened, Woogie Harris was on vacation in Europe, and he had left his little brother Teenie in charge of the numbers operation. Woogie had warned Teenie to watch out for overplayed numbers and to lay them off on other racketeers. But Teenie didn’t act quickly enough. When he reached his brother with the bad news, Woogie sent Teenie to a secret address downtown to collect $25,000 in cash to pay off the first wave of winners. In the following weeks, Woogie and Greenlee pawned many of their own possessions and took out new mortgages on their Penn Hills homes in order to pay off all of the “805” hits in full. Then, like Andrew Carnegie before them, they moved in and took over the territory of competitors who had gone under.
Having weathered the “805” crisis, Gus Greenlee had the means to make his most ambitious investment yet. He bought a block-long hotel called the Leader House on the corner of Wylie Avenue and Crawford Street and transformed it into a nightclub he called the Crawford Grill. On the first floor, be built a huge bar and a small, elevated stage with a mirrored piano. One floor up, there was a theater that stretched the length of the floor and had a revolving stage. On the third floor, Greenlee created a private “Crawford Club” where he entertained personal guests with his finest liquor and counted his gambling spoils. Overnight, the Grill became the hottest nightspot on the Hill, a place where black and white hipsters came to mingle over the club’s famous daiquiris, and where all the top Negro entertainers who performed at the dance halls of the Hill or the Stanley Theatre downtown headed after their concerts were over.
To keep the authorities at bay, Greenlee plied police with free bets and fat envelopes of cash. On most days, a visitor to the Hill could see dozens of runners milling around the corner of Wylie Avenue and Crawford Street as patrolmen walked the beat, paying them no mind. But once in a while a raid would be staged, usually during election years. In the spring of 1934, a vice squad barged into the Crawford Grill and demanded that a locked storage room in the basement be opened. Inside were a half dozen slot machines gathering dust, a discovery that allowed authorities to charge Greenlee with operating a “gaming house” and Gus to beat the rap by insisting that the machines hadn’t been used in years. Several months later, police used axes and crowbars to bust through a partition at the Belmont Hotel, pulled a false bottom out of the bar, and found hundreds of numbers slips and accounting books. They arrested Teddy Horne, a Greenlee associate who ran the hotel, along with Gus’s brother George, but both men were later released without serving any jail time.
If Greenlee and his lieutenants always seemed to beat the rap, it was no accident. Along with greasing palms, Greenlee courted the Republican politicians who ran Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County by delivering Negro votes. He became the treasurer and enforcer of the Third Ward Voters League, the most powerful black political organization on the Upper Hill. At Christmastime, he invited the distressed citizens of the ward to the league’s headquarters for hot meals and free turkeys. On Election Days, he used his network of numbers runners to remind them of his generosity and get them to the polls. Although the league had an official policy that a vote of the entire board of officers was required to ratify all decisions, Greenlee quietly passed the word to Pittsburgh’s major, Charles Kline, and its powerful state senator, Jimmy Coyne, that to get whatever they wanted, they need only come see Gus.
(The deal kept everyone happy—until the 1932 election approached and it became clear that voters on the Hill were listening to Robert Vann’s calls to turn Lincoln’s picture to the wall. For years, Greenlee had used his political connections to arrange for tax relief for Hill residents who voted Republican. But in the summer of 1932, he was informed that he was under investigation for defrauding the state of tax revenue. After months of embarrassing headlines, he was cleared, but it left a sour taste. When Courier gossip columnist Julia Bumry Jones quoted Greenlee as saying that “a change of pasture is good for the cow” just weeks before Election Day, it wasn’t an accident; between the lines was a signal that Gus wouldn’t hold it against the voters of the Third Ward if they voted for Roosevelt.)
Throughout black America, the Depression gave racketeers a chance to play community hero, and nowhere was that more true than in Pittsburgh. As white-run banks stopped doing anything for Negroes except take their money, Greenlee became the top lender on the Hill, doling out loans to cover rents, prevent foreclosures, and pay doctor and funeral bills. Breadwinners laid off from factory jobs could count on temporary work in his numbers operation. Families in distress found bags of groceries and buckets of coal at their doorsteps. At the same time, Gus made sure everyone could see just how much cash he had to spread around. On any given day, he could be seen driving around the Hill in one of six different automobiles—a Lincoln, a Cadillac, a Chevy, a Buick, a Ford, and his flashy red Packard convertible. Gus held court at the Crawford Grill in silk double-breasted suits and sported an expensive bowler hat in a picture that appeared regularly in the Courier. In his back pocket, he carried a money clip stuffed with hundred-dollar bills that he flashed at every opportunity.
To help burnish his reputation as a modern-day Robin Hood (who in this case took from the poor to give to the poor), Greenlee hired a part-time publicist. Conveniently, John L. Clark also happened to be the author of “Wylie Avenue,” the Courier’s widely read column on the business and politics of the Hill. Clark had begun work on an exposé of racketeering in Pittsburgh when one day Greenlee summoned him to the Crawford Grill. Gus offered the columnist a syndication deal with the “West Penn News Service,” an apparently fictitious front with offices in a building owned by Greenlee. The racketeering exposé never appeared, and from then on Clark’s “Wylie Avenue” column became a regular source of attacks on Greenlee’s enemies and tributes to his financial generosity and political clout.
Big Red became so well known for his largesse, in fact, that sometimes he had to go out of his way to demonstrate its limits. One of his closest white friends, and a regular at the Crawford Grill, was an Irish sandlot athlete who dabbled in ward politics on the North Side and was saving up to buy a semipro football team. Decades later, when that team became the Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers, Art Rooney would tell his biographer a story about a scene he witnessed at the Grill while huddling in a back booth with Gus Greenlee and Jimmy Coyne, the Republican Party boss.
A woman came over and whispered to Greenlee that she needed some money. He told her to get lost. “That’s not how you talked last night,” the woman purred. “That was last night,” Gus growled. “When I’m hard, I’m soft. When I’m soft, I’m hard. Now beat it!” The three men went back to their political plotting until, moments later, an ashtray came flying through the air and barely missed connecting with Coyne’s head. Greenlee laughed it off but Coyne was not amused, and from then on the state senator insisted that the three meet at a location that he controlled in the Oakland district.
Greenlee was kinder to a group of struggling sandlot baseball players who approached him for support around the same time. They called themselves the Pittsburgh Crawfords, and they had gotten their start thanks to Teenie Harris, the little brother of Greenlee’s partner Woogie Harris. A talented athlete, Teenie had been the captain of the baseball team at Watts High on the Hill. After playing a hard-fought championship game against McKelvey High one year, Teenie and the McKelvey captain had decided to join forces and form a semipro sandlot team with the best black players from the two squads. They named the team the Crawfords after a bathhouse on the Hill that sponsored them for a few hundred dollars, and Teenie dropped out of school to play for them while continuing to moonlight as a bag man for Woogie.
By the early 1930s, the Crawfords had assembled a raw but imposing roster, including a teenage slugger named Josh Gibson. (They had become so good, in fact, that Teenie had quit to devote himself to his other athletic love, semipro basketball.) Yet for all their success on the field, the “Craws,” as locals called them, were always on the brink of financial collapse, since
the city wouldn’t let them charge for attendance at the public park where they played. To stay afloat, the Crawfords passed a hat. Even then, they often saw little of the meager contributions they collected. During one Memorial Day weekend game in 1930, they raised $8 but had to pay out $6 to the umpire and the visiting team. Afterward, sportswriter Ches Washington wrote an impassioned column chastising the “cheap- sports” of the Hill who wouldn’t even pay a nickel to watch a “young team with all the earmarks of future greatness.” Washington called on local businessmen to save the Crawfords, and the white owner of a local sporting goods store responded by offering to buy the team for $1,000.
The players decided to approach Greenlee instead. At first Gus told them he wasn’t interested. He would donate money for uniforms and travel, he said, not no more. Then a week later, he summoned the youngsters to the Crawford Grill to announce that he had changed his mind. He was ready to buy the team and put all the players on salary.
Greenlee didn’t say what caused the reversal, but the question became a source of fascination on the Hill. Some said he was thinking about the upcoming election, when his ally Jimmy Coyne would be on the ballot. (Sure enough, the Crawfords were soon taking the field with “Coyne for Commissioner” stitched on their uniforms.) Others thought Greenlee was taking a page from his friend Alex Pompez, a New York numbers banker who owned a baseball team called the Cubans and used it to launder money. Still others assumed Gus was just doing a favor for the Crawfords because of their connection to Teenie Harris, his cut buddy’s brother.
Yet given what happened next, it’s likely that Gus Greenlee had a more competitive motive as well. He was already a big man in black Pittsburgh, but buying the Crawfords gave him a chance to go head-to-head with the heir to the biggest Negro dynasty in town: Cap Posey’s son, Cumberland Posey Jr.
• • •
IN THE SUMMER OF 1930, just as Gus Greenlee was about to purchase the Pittsburgh Crawfords, Cum Posey introduced night baseball to the East Coast. That spring, the Kansas City Monarchs had become the first Negro League team to illuminate their home stadium so games could be played past dark, five years before white major league teams embraced what at the time they still viewed as a gimmick. But it was Posey’s bright idea to approach J. L. Wilkinson, the white president of the Monarchs, and propose that he send his team and lighting gear on a monthlong barnstorming tour with the Homestead Grays. Once Wilkinson agreed, Posey cut deals to take the road show to a dozen cities across Ohio and Pennsylvania, including Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown, Greensburg, Altoona, and Beaver Falls as well as Pittsburgh.
Cum Posey may have been a late bloomer, but since becoming manager and owner of the Homestead Grays he had shown just how much drive he inherited from his father. Posey had benched most of the original players from the Homestead steel mills and set out to lure top talent from the sandlot ranks and the disorganized world of professional Negro ball. He offered salaries to players whose teams only paid by the game. He negotiated with the Pittsburgh Pirates to use Forbes Field while the white major leaguers were out of town. (The locker room, however, was kept off-limits.) Posey even rewarded his players by bringing their favorite sandwiches to games.
In 1925, the year Cap Posey died, his namesake made his most ambitious move yet. Cum hired Joe Williams, the six-foot-six, half-black, half-Comanche Texan who was considered the most fearsome black pitcher in the game. In New York, where he had played in his younger days, Williams was known as “Cyclone” because of the way his fastballs flew by hapless batters. Once he arrived in Pittsburgh, he acquired a new nickname: “Smokey Joe,” for all the smoke he threw in Smoketown.
Over the next five years, Posey added a half dozen other future legends to the Grays roster. They included slugger John Beckwith, triple-threat outfielder Oscar Charleston, and Martin Dihigo, the hard-hitting Cuban second baseman who was the first black Latin player to become a star in America. Judy Johnson, the clutch-hitting third baseman, joined the team as a player-coach. Watching the way Posey went after players he wanted—and after women on the road—Johnson marveled at the owner’s relentlessness. “Posey played the saint, but he was anything but a saint,” Johnson recalled. “He was a terrible womanizer and ruthless in raiding other teams. He just wasn’t a man you could trust with your wife or anything else.”
Under Posey, the Grays projected an image that combined professionalism with extreme toughness. He demanded that his men dress in suits and ties off the field and prohibited card playing during games. But he also courted players with hair-trigger tempers and did little to keep them in check. Oscar Charleston, the scowling first baseman, had once been charged with assault for attacking an umpire, and had been fired from his previous team for throwing a punch at the owner. During one team fight, third baseman Jud “Boojum” Wilson dangled shortstop Jake Stephens out of a hotel window by his heels. During another, Ted Page, the veteran outfielder who would later be traded to the Black Yankees, had a knife pulled on him by one of his teammates.
In the night game series against the Kansas City Monarchs, the teams stood even in their series as they arrived in Pittsburgh on a Friday in mid-July. The morning of the game, twelve trucks loaded with lighting gear pulled up to Forbes Field. Crewmen positioned towers around the inside of the park. A generator powered by a 250 horsepower engine was set up. At half past eight, just as the sun was setting, the Grays and the Monarchs took the field in front of seven thousand spectators, one of the largest crowds ever to attend a Negro League game in Pittsburgh.
But as soon as full darkness fell, a problem became apparent. The lighting system had been designed for the much smaller parks where the Monarchs usually played, not a stadium as large as Forbes Field, with its three tiers of steel bleachers and center field stretching to almost 450 feet. The towers were too small. The bulbs kept flickering on and off. For the fans, the action on the field was a dim blur. Even the players couldn’t even see one another clearly.
When Smokey Joe Williams took the mound for the Grays, he couldn’t make out the fingers that catcher Buck Ewing used to call pitches. They settled on two signals: glove up for a fastball; glove down for a curve. Ewing still had trouble tracking Smokey’s bullets, and midway through the game he caught one at the top of his mitt and broke a finger. Ewing had to leave the game, and his backup, who was playing center field, informed the coach that he had no intention of trying to catch Smokey Joe’s smoke in the dark. With no other options, coach Judy Johnson turned to the stands and spotted Josh Gibson, the young sandlot catcher for the Crawfords who had begun hanging around Grays practices. Johnson yelled out at Gibson to suit up, and the teenager caught the rest of a wild game that didn’t end until close to midnight, in near total darkness, when the Grays finally won, 5–4, in the twelfth inning.
Or at least that was Judy Johnson’s account of how Josh Gibson came to play for the Homestead Grays. According to another version, Cum Posey deliberately poached Gibson. The day before, he sent his brother See Posey to an out-of-town Crawfords game. See met Gibson behind the stands, gave him a contract to sign, and drove back to Pittsburgh. Yet however it happened, Gibson remained in a Grays uniform from them on. He helped the Grays win the series against the Monarchs, and by the end of the season he was the team’s full-time catcher and Buck Ewing had hung up his mitt.
Still only eighteen, Gibson had the face of a choirboy and the build of a lumberjack. Josh and his family had arrived in Pittsburgh from Georgia three years earlier, and his growing frame had been hardened by work in the iron mills alongside his father. His play behind the plate was still erratic, but there was no question that he could hit. Gibson’s power came not just from his thick muscles but also from his economical hitting technique. He held his 40 ounce bat cocked and tucked into his right side and stood in a wide stance, giving him until the last second to read pitches before he swung at them with a short step forward and a lighting flick of his mighty arms and wrists.
Several weeks later, in a game against the Ba
ltimore Black Sox, Gibson blasted a home run that everyone present proclaimed the longest drive they had ever seen at Forbes Field. By September, he had helped position the Grays for a showdown with the New York Lincoln Giants for the “Colored Championship of the East.” After taking a 4–3 game lead, the Grays arrived at Yankee Stadium for a doubleheader that included another Gibson homer in the first game, one that became the stuff of baseball legend.
Judy Johnson later claimed that he saw the ball clear the roof, fueling the myth that Josh Gibson had “hit one out of Yankee Stadium.” According to numerous other accounts, the ball actually sailed into the third-tier bleachers and dropped into the bullpen. In either event, Gibson’s hot bat helped the Grays win the series against the Lincoln Giants, 6–4, and the bragging rights to the Eastern championship. In the Courier, Chester Washington praised the 1930 Grays as “without a doubt the greatest aggregation of players in the history of the Homesteaders, and one of the most brilliant Negro teams ever to cavort around a diamond-shaped arena.”
The next year, the Grays got even better. They played 153 games against teams of all stripes and won all but 17 of them. They crushed semipro teams across the South in a spring training tour. In a doubleheader exhibition against Connie Mack’s All Stars, a white team that included Lefty Grove and several other Hall of Famers, the Grays swept both games, the second by 18–0. There were no established Negro leagues that year, but the Grays won every series they played against other top black teams. Although reliable statistics are hard to come by, Josh Gibson was said to have hit seventy-two home runs, and he and at least four other teammates batted over .300. When the Grays won a season-ending series with the Kansas City Monarchs, Posey proclaimed it as good as a world championship. “For the first time since Hillsdale defeated Kansas City in the Colored World Series of 1925,” he crowed in the Courier, “there is an undisputed National Championship Team of the United States. And there is occasion for a little vanity when I say the Homestead Grays were the champions of 1931.”
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