Having succeeded in assembling the best team in the Negro game, Posey set his sights on becoming its new czar. There hadn’t been one single unified black league since the original one founded a decade earlier by Rube Foster, the Chicago legend who had gone into an early decline and passed away in a mental hospital. In the Courier, Posey called for the formation of a new “East-West League” and cast himself as champion for all the other black owners. The Grays were enough of a draw that they could make money remaining independent, Posey claimed; but teams from smaller cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Newark couldn’t survive without a league that could guarantee quality opponents and weekend games. Posey also argued that the new league would free black teams from their heavy reliance on white booking agents who arranged games with white semipro and exhibition teams—but also took a 10 percent cut of revenues that made it almost impossible for most of the teams to see any profit.
What Posey failed to mention was the new challenge he faced in Pittsburgh. For while the Grays were reaching the pinnacle of the Negro game in 1931, Gus Greenlee was turning the upstart Crawfords into a team that could compete for top dollar in the world of semipro and exhibition games—and increasingly posed a threat to the top-tier black teams as well. Greenlee had replaced the sandlot manager, Hooks Tinker, with a wily, no-nonsense veteran of the Negro leagues, Bobby Williams. He had hired seasoned players such as second baseman “Pistol Johnny” Russell from the St. Louis Stars, shortstop Chester Williams from the Memphis Red Sox, and spitballer Sam “Lefty” Streeter from the Cleveland Buckeyes. By June 1931, the Crawfords had won ten games in a row, and Streeter had pitched an impressive no-hit shutout against the Book Shoe, one of the best teams in the independent Pittsburgh City League.
Then, in the middle of the season, Greenlee seized an opportunity created by the deepening Depression. After Smokey Joe Williams, the most feared black pitcher of the day was Leroy “Satchel” Paige, the lanky six-foot-four right-hander famous for his leggy windup and blazing fastball. Paige was also notorious for living up to his nickname—which he had acquired carrying suitcases as a seven-year-old railway porter in his hometown of Mobile, Alabama—by always being ready to pack his bags and jump from team to team depending on who was willing to pay him the most. Satchel had begun the season playing for the Nashville Elite Giants and its owner Tom Wilson, another racketeer who had signed Paige despite Satchel’s open flirtation with Wilson’s live-in girlfriend. But in midseason, Wilson had moved the team to Cleveland, where it promptly went bankrupt because it couldn’t fill enough seats. As soon as Greenlee heard the news, he wired Paige an offer of $250 a month to finish the season in Pittsburgh.
The day Paige arrived on the Hill, he headed straight to the Crawford Grill. As he entered the door, Greenlee rushed over to greet him. “ ‘We’re going to open against the Homestead Grays,” Gus said. “They’re the best there is, Satch. You beat them and you’re number one right from the start.” In early August, the Crawfords were scheduled to play their rivals for the third time, and Greenlee saw an opportunity to show off his new acquisition and embarrass Cum Posey at the same time.
When the day came, the Crawfords jumped out to an early lead before the Grays evened the score at seven-all in the fourth inning. Then Bobby Williams called in Satchel Paige, who made his signature lazy walk from the bullpen to the mound as the crowd in Forbes Field went wild. Over the next five innings, Paige struck out six batters and kept the Grays from scoring another run while the Crawfords pulled ahead for a 10–7 victory. Hooks Tinker, the former manager who was playing his last game in a Grays uniform, marveled at Paige’s mixture of speed and control. “He was mowing those guys down like mad,” Tinker recalled. “He was throwing nothing but aspirin tablets.”
After the game, Greenlee invited the team to the Crawford Grill and locked the door for a private celebration. The men all wanted to shake Paige’s hand, and the waitresses buzzed around to flirt with him. “They mobbed me like money’d rub off on me,” Paige recalled. But one girl kept her distance, a light-skinned beauty with a wide mouth and such large eyes that her friends teasingly called her “Toad,” or “Toadalo.” Naturally, she was the one who caught Paige’s eye. “Lo, I’m Satch,” he said, extending his long dark hand. “I know you all right, Mr. Paige,” she replied. “Everyone knows who you are. I’m Janet Howard.”
Until then, Paige would write in his autobiography, he had always thought of marriage as “like walking in front of a firing squad without anyone making you do it.” But in Janet Howard, he would discover that he had met his match. “Right then and there, she was starting to write the end of my bachelor days,” he wrote. “I didn’t even know it.”
Smitten, Paige offered to walk Howard home and asked if he could take her out again. When he got back to the Crawford Grill, he told Greenlee he needed extra cash for the date. “I’ll do better than that,” Gus responded. “Tomorrow you go down and buy yourself a couple of suits and hats on me.” Greenlee was so thrilled with Paige’s first win that he even offered to pay him $700 that month, a bonus over his $250 salary. “That ought to keep you happy enough to stay with me,” Gus joked. The next day, Paige charged two suits to Gus and bought three more with his own money, as well as an assortment of bright red, blue, green, and yellow ties. “You look like a walking barber pole,” Howard said when he showed up for their date. Then she grabbed Paige’s arm tight, as though he already belonged to her. “You look fine!” she said.
With Paige and Streeter on the mound, the Crawfords had a strong finish to the 1931 season and would have seemed like a natural addition to Cum Posey’s new East-West League. But Posey made no effort to include them, instead huddling secretively with the owners of clubs from Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Newark. When Gus Greenlee approached him about joining the new league, Posey presented him with a list of high-handed conditions. The Crawfords would only be considered “associate members.” The league would have veto power over any games they played in the same territory as the Grays. It would impose a salary cap on the Crawfords’ spending and have the right to transfer its players to other teams. The Grays owner even told Greenlee that he should install his brother See Posey as manager of the Crawfords.
Greenlee scoffed at the conditions, and for good reason. By then, he had launched his ambitious plan to build a professional-quality stadium “closer to where Negroes live,” as he put it. He had identified a property on the Hill occupied by a bankrupt brick factory and secured the blessing of the cemetery and the hospital on either side. He had formed a corporation called the Bedford Land Company and taken 20 percent of the stock, doling out the rest to the brick factory owner and his old bootleg suppliers, the Tito brothers, who were given the concession business and the job of keeping away Pittsburgh’s Italian mobsters. With an investment of cash, land, and construction of more than $100,000, the last thing Gus Greenlee planned to do was let Cum Posey dictate who could and could not play in Greenlee Field.
So instead of playing ball, Greenlee went to war. Dangling the lure of a brand-new stadium and hard cash from his numbers business, he began to raid Posey’s best players. By January 1932, he had convinced Oscar Charleston, the hot-tempered first baseman, to leave the Grays and join the Crawfords as a player-manager. He wooed away shortstop Jake Stephens and Ted Radcliffe, the pitcher known as “Double Duty” because he had once hurled the first game of a doubleheader and caught the second. Then Greenlee went after his biggest prey: Josh Gibson.
On a Wednesday in February, Gibson had signed a new contract with Posey for $150 a month. But the very next day, Greenlee summoned Gibson to the Crawford Grill and offered him $250 a month to join the Crawfords. Without saying anything about the Grays deal, Gibson signed the second contract. When Posey found out what had happened, he was furious and tried to shame Gibson into honoring the first deal with several stern columns in the Courier. But Greenlee had the more binding contract, witnessed by a notary public, and soon Gibson was back in a Cra
wfords uniform.
Later that month, as Posey traveled to icy Philadelphia for another tense league meeting, Greenlee took his team on a tour of the sunny South. He bought a bus with six cylinders and a shiny grille, painted “Pittsburgh Crawfords Baseball Team from Greenlee Field” on the side, and amused his players by getting behind the wheel. First Greenlee treated the team to ten days of spring training in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Then he accompanied them on a six-week barnstorming tour of exhibition games against local sandlot and semipro teams. In Louisiana and Texas, he arranged for wealthy black families to invite the team to their homes and serve them fresh-cooked meals. And to build anticipation in Pittsburgh—and no doubt to annoy Cum Posey—Gus made sure that the trip got ample coverage in the Courier. He invited John L. Clark, his part-time publicist, to cover the trip and sent back a photo of his team in Hot Springs. “CRAWFORDS BASKING IN SPA’S SUNLIGHT,” read the headline.
When the Craws returned to Pittsburgh in early April, more hoopla greeted them as they prepared to open their season at Greenlee Field. Greenlee hosted a black-tie welcome-home dance. Stepping up his courtship of the Courier, he invited Robert L. Vann to throw out the first pitch. By May, Posey finally realized that the Crawfords had gotten too big to ignore. Word leaked that he was in talks with Greenlee to bring the Craws into the East-West League, and the feuding owners agreed to an exhibition series. It took place over the long weekend of Memorial Day, and in a whirlwind of five games played in three different stadiums in two days, the Crawfords won the series, 3–2.
Finally, Cum Posey threw in the towel in his fight with Gus Greenlee. In June 1932, it was announced that the Crawfords would join the East-West League for the second half of the season. The Grays agreed to merge with the Detroit Wolves, to lessen the competition for crowds in Pittsburgh. But by then, it was too late to save Posey’s brash venture. He had chosen the worst year of the Great Depression to launch a new league, and several of its teams were sinking fast. In July, the Philadelphia franchise known as Hilldale, the winner of the first Negro World Series in the 1920s, folded after selling only 295 tickets over two weekends. Suddenly, even the survival of the Grays was in question. Several players became so worried about getting paid that they demanded cash in advance, and they walked out in the middle of a Saturday doubleheader when Posey rebuffed them. By the end of the summer, the new East-West League had folded, and Cum Posey’s dream of becoming the next Rube Foster was dead.
• • •
THAT FALL, GUS GREENLEE opened his weekly copy of the Courier to discover that Cum Posey was still finding ways to snub him. When the paper asked Posey to name the best black baseball players of 1932, he included only one Crawford in his “All-America Ball Club”—Chester Williams, as a benchwarming “utility” man. Missing from his starting lineup was not only Satchel Paige at pitcher but three former Grays players who would have been on virtually anyone else’s list: Josh Gibson at catcher, Oscar Charleston at first base, and Judy Johnson at third. Meanwhile, in describing his picks, Posey praised one in particular: “Cool Papa” Bell, the longtime outfielder for the St. Louis Stars. Bell “could play centerfield and bat on anyone’s club,” Posey wrote.
So in typical fashion, Greenlee targeted Cool Papa Bell as his next conquest. Bell was playing in the Mexican winter league in early 1933 when he got a call from Greenlee inviting him to Pittsburgh. Although the clean-living teetotaler was wary of his host’s gangster reputation, he was won over by Gus’s generosity. Greenlee treated Bell to dinner at the Crawford Grill and showed him around Greenlee Field, wowing the Mississippi native who had grown up playing on dirt sandlots in the South. Laying on the flattery, Greenlee “told me that I had a chance to be part of the best team in the history of black baseball and that I was the key,” Bell recalled. The Crawfords already had the best pitcher and the best hitter in black baseball, and when Greenlee signed Bell they gained the fastest base runner, too. (Among the many stories of Cool Papa’s speed: Satchel Paige swore he once saw Bell turn off a hotel room light switch and get in bed before it went dark.)
Over the winter of 1933, Greenlee also moved to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of Posey’s league. He called a meeting of owners from around the country in Indianapolis and proposed a resurrection of Rube Foster’s Negro National League. To serve as chairman, Greenlee nominated himself. Unlike Posey, he offered no grandiose mission statements or racially charged talk about curbing the power of white booking agents. Instead, he appealed to the financial interest of the most strapped clubs, by stressing how much money they could make when Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson came to town or they got a cut of the gate at Greenlee Field.
At first, Posey appeared to go along with the new effort and joined the other club meeting in Indianapolis. But it was only a matter of months before he pulled the Homestead Grays out of the new league. In a sign of how rancorous relations had become between the two owners, Posey also waded into a bitter tit-for-tat over the circumstances of the withdrawal with Greenlee’s publicist, John L. Clark, in the Courier.
In an open letter to the sports department, Posey insisted that he had quit the Negro National League because he owed it to his players. He complained that Greenlee was forcing teams to kick back revenues to the league and that the Grays could earn more by remaining independent. Clark fired back that Posey had been booted from the league for poaching rival players. He went on to mock the Grays owner for being afraid to compete with the Crawfords and for not having any “business enterprise other than baseball” to support his players. The war of words continued more than a month, titillating Courier readers with details of the nasty, closed-door league disputes.
Yet if Gus Greenlee was able to succeed as a baseball czar where Cum Posey had failed, it wasn’t just because of his ownership of marquee players and his own ballpark. It was also due to another stroke of competitive one-upmanship and clever marketing. Just as Greenlee’s new Negro National League was getting off the ground, white pro baseball announced its first All-Star Game. It was held at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in early July 1933 and saw Babe Ruth swat a two-run homer to lead the American League to a 4–2 victory against the National League.
As it happened, Roy Sparrow, a black stringer for the evening Pittsburgh Star-Telegraph, had been floating the idea of a black all-star game for some time. Once the white contest was announced, Sparrow arranged to meet with Cum Posey and Bill Nunn of the Courier at the Loendi Club to brainstorm how to make a black version happen. The three men mused about holding the game at Yankee Stadium, and Posey agreed to reach out to “Bojangles” Robinson, the well-connected movie star, to see if he could make introductions.
But later that night, Nunn and Sparrow went to the Crawford Grill and mentioned the all-star game proposal to Gus Greenlee. Once Greenlee heard that Posey was involved, he countered with the idea of holding the game in Chicago and said he would enlist the help of “King” Cole, the owner of the Chicago American Giants of the Negro League. Together, the two owners booked Comiskey Park for later that summer, decided to call the game the “East-West Classic”—and cut out Cum Posey. To gin up fan interest, Nunn suggested that the Courier and the Chicago Defender poll readers to select the players—an innovation that it would take the white major leagues decades to copy. Greenlee also brought in Abe Saperstein, the owner of the Harlem Globetrotters, to handle publicity, offering him 5 percent of the gate.
Played on a raw, rainy September day in the Windy City, the first East-West Classic didn’t exactly live up to that description. Twenty thousand fans showed up, but many were disappointed to find that the Crawfords’ main attraction, Satchel Paige, wasn’t there, having opted for a bigger payday elsewhere. Though Greenlee’s other top players—Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Oscar Charleston, and Judy Johnson—were all in the Eastern lineup, they turned in a lackluster performance, managing only seven hits compared with fifteen for the Western squad, which won, 11–7. Still, the maiden “Classic” of 1933 made headlines in Negro papers a
cross the country and marked the beginning of what would quickly turn into the biggest and most anticipated annual sporting event in black America. Over the next few years, it would grow to draw fifty thousand or more spectators every year and, under a profit-sharing agreement, throw off enough cash to keep dozens of black teams that lost money the rest of the time in business.
Looking back, virtually everyone who witnessed the Pittsburgh Crawfords of the mid-1930s agreed that Gus Greenlee had made good on his vow to Cool Papa Bell to assemble “the best team in the history of black baseball.” The Crawfords boasted five of the Negro League players later to be named to the Hall of Fame—Paige, Gibson, Bell, Charleston, and Judy Johnson. Those future legends were surrounded by more than a half dozen other standouts, including pitchers Nate Hunter and Leroy Matlock and outfielders Jimmie Crutchfield and Ted Page, the former Black Yankee whom Greenlee lured to the Crawfords with a side job as a lookout man for his numbers operation.
At their best, Greenlee’s Crawfords were unforgettably electric. At one point or another, they trounced every other Negro League team. They routinely made short work of white exhibition teams as well, dominating not only with pitching and power but with a blur of bunts, fakes, and steals. In one game against a white squad with pitcher Dizzy Dean on the mound, the Crawfords pounded the St. Louis Cardinals ace for eight runs on the way to an 11–1 victory. In another exhibition against a U.S. Marine Corps team, they ran up a 12–0 lead before taking pity on the Leathernecks. “This is really unpatriotic,” Gibson said to Paige during a trip at the mound. “I agree,” Paige nodded. “The Marines have to score at least one run.” On the next play, Paige threw a lob over the plate and the batter hit a dribbler down the first base line. Gibson scooped up the ball and fired it past the first baseman into right field, where Ted Page made a wild throw to home, allowing the player to score. When the game was over, Gibson sidled up to the lucky Marine. “I had a feeling you were going to be a hero,” he said.
Smoketown Page 13