Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone The First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League
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Then there was the matter of Tomboy’s name. Everyone in Rondo had a nickname. There was “Rock Bottom” and “Flat Head” and “Turkey Breast” and “Puddin’.” The names stuck, and sometimes kids couldn’t even remember how they got the names or what they stood for. Tomboy’s neighbor Norman “Speed” Rollins could not recall if “Speed” came from the fact that he always ran home as fast as lightningor that he liked to dance fast. “Hey, Speed. You’re speeding. Slow down,” friends used to tell Rollins on the dance floor.48 Ask anyone at Dunning Field who “Marcenia Lyle Stone” was and you were apt to get a blank stare. Tomboy knew the nickname embarrassed her parents.49 The Stones were formal people. Willa was so proper that she would not go anywhere without her hair done up in rosettes and her fingernails polished, and Boykin was a member of the elite Sterling Club of serious, civic-minded black professionals. The Stones aspired to the likes of Thomas and Eva Neal, the elite black family of Rondo who entertained prominent educator Mary McLeod Bethune and later welcomed first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to the city. The Neals supported “worthy Negro causes” and took a special interest in neighborhood girls, showing them the correct way to make conversation, use a dessert fork, and avoid wearing the color red. “Red is the color for street women,” Mrs. Neal once told Evelyn.50 Tomboy knew her place was not with women like Mrs. Neal. “I wasn’t high on the elite side,” she said. “That’s why they called me Tomboy.”51
Feeling unrefined and not understood by family and friends—like an outcast, Tomboy said—made Father Keefe’s help with playing baseball all the more welcome.52 Not only did she finally receive neighborhood recognition for the victories she brought the St. Peter Claver team, but she also attracted citywide attention as the one of Saint Paul’s outstanding girl athletes. For the time being, Tomboy decided to stay put in Rondo. She shelved her plan to run away from home, like the forgotten ice skating trophy in her upstairs bedroom. Although her parents had yet to watch her play and still wished Tomboy would turn more attention to her schoolwork, Boykin and Willa were grateful to see their daughter’s confidence grow. They even were willing to admit that Father Keefe’s decision had been right. In playing baseball, Tomboy Stone had crossed a line. But it wasn’t sin that she was embracing. It was salvation.
*St. Peter Claver Catholic Church was named for the seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit “slave of the slaves” who ministered for nearly half a century to men and women in the Caribbean. He was elevated to sainthood in 1888. Saint Paul Archbishop John Ireland worked with a black “congregation of converts” to establish St. Peter Claver in Minneapolis/Saint Paul. In 1910 Father Stephen Theobold, a native of British Guiana, began his ministry at the church. Theobold was legendary for his speeches on race relations and, along with other members of the Church, helped found the Minnesota NAACP. St. Peter Claver church members also played leading roles in working with W. E. B. DuBois in establishing the Niagara Movement—a campaign that called for a “mighty current” to end racial discrimination and disenfranchisement across the country. Theobold died of peritonitis in 1932 and was succeeded by Father Charles J. Keefe in 1933 (St. Peter Claver Diamond Jubilee, 1892–1967, 5–9).
*Hallie Q. Brown and its Minneapolis counterpart, the Phyllis Wheatley Center, were linchpins in the Twin Cities. “Hallie Q.,” as it was affectionately called, opened after the black YWCA closed in 1928. It offered child care, athletics, senior activities, health care, and cultural, political, and social events. The center was named for Hallie Quinn Brown, an Ohio educator who spearheaded the black women’s club movement in the nineteenth century. In Saint Paul, “Hallie Q” was led by the formidable I. Myrtle Carden from 1929 to 1949. Carden improved the lives of countless African American residents in and around Rondo. Children in the Rondo neighborhood, including Tomboy, also played at the Welcome Hall Center and took part in its activities sponsored by the Zion Presbyterian Church.
*The Saint Paul Saints team was used as “development ground” by the New York Yankees from 1919 to the early 1930s. Bob Connery, a scout for the Yankees, bought the Saints in 1925. Among the players who moved from the Saints to the Yankees were Leo Durocher and Vernon “Lefty” Gomez (e-mail to author from Stew Thornley, November 13, 2008).
*I base the Stone family’s arrival date in Minnesota on the fact that Boykin Stone and his family are listed in the West Virginia census for 1930, and Saint Paul school records indicate that Marcenia Stone enrolled in 1931.
*Scholar Jennifer Delton in Making Minnesota Liberal noted “‘Oatmeal Hill’ reportedly referred to the lighter skin color of blacks in the solidly middle-class areas, as opposed to ‘Cornmeal Valley,’ the area west of Dale Street, where the southern migrants settled, the term referring to a southern food staple” (187).
*Scholar Douglas Bristol Jr., in a study of black barbers, wrote that “from the 1820s to the Great Migration almost a century later, [black barbers] dominated the upscale market serving affluent white men even as other African American business people lost their white clientele…. A perceptive understanding of their customers, in the sense of W. E. B. DuBois’s concept of double-consciousness, allowed black barbers to capitalize on racial stereotypes. Because they understood how whites saw them, they were able to create masks that white customers found appealing…. The willingness of black barbers to accept and exploit the racial stereotypes of their white customers represented an entrepreneurial innovation that secured their economic niche” (Douglas Bristol Jr., “From Outposts to Enclaves: A Social History of Black Barbers from 1750–1915,” Enterprise & Society vol. 5, no. 4, The Business History Conference 2004, 596–597).
*Whitney Young’s 1947 master’s thesis in the University of Minnesota School of Social Work addressed African American negotiation skills. Young (1921–1971) became executive director of the National Urban League in 1961, and he was one of the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington.
*Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie were the victims of the lynching. In 2003, citizens of Duluth, in an effort to atone for and learn from the tragedy, dedicated a monument in their memory.
*W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963) was one of the most prominent African American voices of the twentieth century. A prolific author, DuBois is most notable for his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. One of the founders of the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, DuBois was often at odds with other leaders such as Booker T. Washington concerning the best way for blacks to gain power and respect. While Washington believed blacks should assimilate into white culture, DuBois argued that white dominance should be challenged. DuBois was familiar with Minnesota politics: he worked at a resort on Lake Minnetonka near Minneapolis following his graduation from Fisk University in 1888.
Miracle in Saint Paul
I do feel, in my dreamings and yearnings, so
undiscovered by those who are able to help me.
—MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE1
Tomboy Stone loved her baseball glove. It was smooth and dark and worn in all the right places. Although she sometimes envied the new gloves that other kids had, this old beauty she had bought for twenty-five cents at the Saint Paul Goodwill would have to do. To earn the money for the glove, Tomboy had worked around the neighborhood for small change.2 Her parents would not offer money for equipment that might lend her encouragement to play even more baseball. “They wanted me to do anything but wear old tennis shoes and spend all day hitting baseballs,” Tomboy said. The baseball shoes that she admired in store windows were expensive, and she realized she shouldn’t pine about them to her mother and father. Even though she knew the shoes were out of reach, she couldn’t get them out of her head; they looked so professional with their rows of shiny, teethlike spikes. “Professional”—that’s the word Tomboy used to confer her highest praise on anyone or anything associated with baseball. When she let her aspirations run unchecked, she admitted that she hoped one day to be a professional baseball player. After playing in Saint Paul’s Catholic boys’ baseball league for almost four years, T
omboy said, “I knew I wanted to be an athlete,” adding, “I didn’t concern myself that there weren’t any women in the game.”3
Boykin and Willa Stone resigned themselves to Tomboy playing baseball during the summers with the Catholic boys’ league and, later, the Saint Paul’s HighLex girls’ softball team. Given her strong arm, Tomboy played the outfield and occasionally pitched. But she did not stay with the girls’ team for long; she quit a little after a year. “Not [for] me,” Tomboy said. “It wasn’t fast enough,” and the girls’ play failed to challenge her the way the Catholic boys’ did.4 When Tomboy decided to quit softball, her parents were relieved; at least it meant one less team she would be playing on.
What the Stones didn’t know was that Tomboy had another opportunity in mind. She started to hang out at the meatpacking plants in South Saint Paul. She’d ride her Silver King bike, the one her father bought for her for eleven dollars, or grab a streetcar and head down to the Armour or Swift plants, situated side by side next to the groaning stockyards and the Mississippi River.5 The workers, many of whom were black men, organized company baseball teams—some integrated—that played on the weekends. The Armour squad was so good they won the Minnesota Municipal League State Championship for several years in the 1920s.6 Tomboy hoped there might be a way for her to join the workingmen’s league or at least get the men used to the idea.7 She also liked hearing the men talk. They had an easy way about them, and—years before—a few had played in the Negro Leagues. She felt more comfortable listening to old men discussing balls and strikes than she did hearing girls her own age chattering about who had won the Jitterbug contest the previous weekend. “I wasn’t popular with the girls because I loved to play with the boys,” she said. When girls around Rondo called her “Tomboy” in their derogatory way, the sneer fueled her determination, and she vowed to keep playing baseball until she could earn a living at it. “One day this is going to be my game,” Tomboy said.8
Father Keefe’s gamble of encouraging Tomboy to play Catholic baseball did affect her in positive ways. She was consistently attending school, and she was reading more. But not her textbooks, necessarily. History classes disappointed her the most. It wasn’t that she wasn’t interested in history; it was that the books did not offer any record for understanding who she was. She didn’t have the words to describe how she felt about that absence, but she knew that a significant part of history was missing from the books her junior high teachers asked her to read. All the women and black people in her textbooks led subservient lives, it seemed to her. They were either assisting a white man in an invention or traipsing along after some clear-eyed blond who “discovered” a territory that Indians had been living in all along. Tomboy’s friend Evelyn Edwards agreed. School history books, she said, presented blacks only as slaves or victims, and there was little mention of any black achievements. Evelyn knew for certain that blacks had contributed greatly to music; she had learned that at her prayer meetings.9 For Tomboy, blacks in her textbooks “were all cotton pickers.”10 Her neighbor Speed Rollins knew what she meant. One of his most humiliating days at school occurred when his teacher insisted that—as a black child—he read the Little Black Sambo part during story hour. The experience felt degrading to him.11 Tomboy knew there were many distinguished black Americans. She’d heard her father talk about his time at Tuskegee and the indelible marks Booker T. Washington and Dr. George Washington Carver made on the country. W. E. B. DuBois’s trips to Saint Paul made clear that he too was an accomplished man. Textbook history always boiled down to “Captain-John-Smith-and- Pocahontas,” Tomboy said. Even fifty years later, that phrase remained her shorthand for describing the intellectual impoverishment she experienced at school.12
Hungry for inspiration, Tomboy turned to the local library for sports books. She searched for stories about athletes who made names for themselves. When she found books that inspired her, like biographies of Babe Ruth, she read them twice, sometimes three times.13 The Babe had recently made one of his visits to the Twin Cities, playing exhibition games after his retirement from baseball. “I wanted to be Babe Ruth,” she said. “He was everybody’s hero.”14 Tomboy especially looked for books about women athletes, but she found few trailblazers. The absence of women role models seemed to underscore the sentence she had heard many times. Tomboy could recite the line by heart: “a girl going to play ball was a disgrace to society.”15
Tomboy also read books to help improve her athletic skills and learn game strategy. While she was grateful for Father Keefe’s help in finding her a baseball team, she often felt frustrated when the Catholic team’s coaches ignored her. Coaches pulled the boys aside to teach them how to turn the double play or hit to the opposite field, but they always assumed Tomboy would not be interested in the finer points of play or couldn’t execute them. “The coach would tell the boys stuff but not me,” she said. Rather than stewing about being excluded, Tomboy immersed herself in the science of the game. “I got a rule book and studied it,” she said. “I knew it more than the boys.” 16
Tomboy also discovered newspapers. The local papers interested her, especially when they ran stories about athletes, local baseball teams, or neighborhood kids who broke into professional sports. Gordon Parks, a few years older than Tomboy, was already receiving coverage. “Gordon Parks Returns Home,” the Minneapolis Spokesman proudly declared. It described the “young Twin City photographer’s” three-month tour with a traveling semi-pro basketball team.* More than anything, however, Tomboy loved reading the Chicago Defender. She would ride her bike to the train depot and wait for stacks of the Defender to be dropped off by the Great Northern line out of Chicago.17 The newspaper opened up a world of possibilities and was “the best book,” she said. “I used to call it my Bible, when Mama wasn’t listening.”18 Defender readers scanned the newspaper for political, social, and sports news affecting the country’s black citizens—news that the white newspapers either did not care to cover or didn’t know existed. Founded in 1905 by Robert Sengstacke Abbott, the Defender reportedly began with a twenty-five-cent investment, a three-hundred-copy print run, and “offices” located on the kitchen table of Abbott’s landlord. Long a champion for racial equality, the Defender called for blacks to migrate to the North and was credited with helping to triple the black population of Chicago in the 1930s. It rallied against lynching, condemned racist voting barriers, and put pressure on the military to integrate. “That Chicago Defender Abbott, he told it like it was,” Tomboy said.19 “It was like my book, and I studied that. It told me what the Negro was doing, what we were contributing.”20 Pullman porters, cooks, and waiters took copies of the Defender to relatives and other readers down South. Barbers in black neighborhoods sold the newspaper in their shops. By the early 1920s, the newspaper was the largest and most influential black publication in America.21
Once as a birthday present Tomboy received a “deadheadin’” ticket—a free pass to ride the train. She went down to Chicago, stayed overnight, and happened to meet Defender editor Robert Abbot. “I was a young kid,” she said, “but I knew he was somebody.”22 The chance meeting stayed with her. Tomboy continued devouring the paper, especially the inspirational essays by Reverend Benjamin Mays of Morehouse College, columns by Mary McLeod Bethune and Langston Hughes, and, of course, sports coverage of black athletes. “You had so few role models,” she said. She read news of track star Jesse Owens, the Negro Leagues’ Oscar Charleston and Satchel Paige, and her greatest hero, the man she called “the champion’s champion,” boxer Joe Louis.23 As a good storyteller herself, Tomboy appreciated the Defender’s sportswriting style: a mix of staccato flash and unabashed enthusiasm that delighted her. A reader could almost hear the pop of a baseball bat in the paper’s sports stories. “More than 20,000 baseball enthusiasts came to the ‘House that Ruth built,’ here Sunday to witness four teams battle for top honors,” one story began. “The nightcap gave the fans a chance to do some old fashioned back-lot yelling for the Pittsburgh Crawfords went
on a wild rampage knocking down the poles, busting the bleachers seats with long—and equally hard—line drives and causing the utter embarrassment of one ‘Slim Jones,’ ace hurler for the Philly Stars, by sending him to the showers in the first inning.”24
But Tomboy did not need a newspaper to tell her when the Saint Paul Saints were in town. The Saints were a minor league affiliate of the Chicago White Sox and played at nearby Lexington Park, not far from her home. Tomboy was so used to spending summer days on the playing fields around the ballpark that she called the area her “second home.” When the Saints were in town and she heard the game day commotion begin, she made a point of stopping by the park on routine bike rides through the neighborhood.25 Although they were a white team and were never affiliated with the Negro Leagues teams she admired, the Saints were a team she could learn something from, Tomboy believed. Attending games, like reading books, had become as much a part of her sports education as playing ball. The Saints had their ups and downs in the standings, but under new manager Gabby Street the 1936 squad won more games than they lost and were in second place in the white minor leagues’ American Association. Early one morning before a Saints game, Tomboy rode her bike over to Lexington Park and watched Street coax young men through a strict regimen of drills. Street did more than coax: he also yelled and shouted when athletes didn’t try hard enough. The shouting didn’t bother Tomboy. Since she was always looking for a coach who would take the time to instruct her, she thought even a loud old man was better than someone who ignored her. After studying the practice from the perch of her bike, Tomboy pushed down the kickstand of her Silver King and walked through the open gates of the still-empty Lexington Park. She wanted to get a closer look at what was going on. Street barely looked up at the young interloper coming into the park. But when Tomboy kept walking closer and they finally did eye each other, neither the fifty-three-year-old white manager nor the fourteen-year-old black girl ever could have imagined how their separate worlds would collide during that 1936 summer.* Tomboy didn’t know a thing about Gabby Street. She certainly didn’t know what a gift he later would give her.