There were few major league ball players who had seen more good and bad luck than Charles Evard “Gabby” Street. He had managed a World Series winner, and he had witnessed the minor league team he played on vanish in an earthquake. Street was born in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1882 and began his baseball career as a twenty-year-old in a Kentucky semi-pro league playing for sixty dollars a month. Coaches thought of Street as a scrappy catcher with a good arm and a less-than-impressive bat. By the time he was twenty-four years old, he was playing with the San Francisco Seals baseball team and living at the Golden Gate Hotel in the Bay Area. During the early hours of April 18, 1906, a sudden and violent jolt threw Street out of bed. He picked himself up, rushed to the window, and saw people running out of buildings, yelling “Fire!” and “Earthquake!” Street later told reporters, “If I live to be a hundred, I shall always remember that scene” of the great San Francisco earthquake. The cast members of Beauty and the Beast and Babes in Toyland also lived in the hotel. “What the female members of those troupes wore as they hiked for the exits is nobody’s business,” he said. The rear of the hotel began to shudder as the groups scrabbled down swaying staircases to the pavement below. Just as they reached the ground, a second shock split a water tank atop the hotel in half, sending water cascading over those lucky enough to escape the building’s complete collapse. Street worked his way through the bricks and flames until he reached Golden Gate Park, where he spent the night with the weary and numb masses. After three days, he started for Oakland until a policeman stopped him. “You’re going to take off your coat and begin pitching bricks out of the street,” the guard ordered him. Everyone was needed to help out, and Street complied until two days later, when he happened upon one of his team’s pitchers. The teammate knew how they could get out. “Don’t hurry,” he said, “but start for the ferry at the end of Market Street and pitch brick all the way.” It took Street nine hours, but he made it to the wharf and crossed to Oakland, where the Elks Lodge gave him money to get as far as Denver. In Denver, the Red Cross bought him a ticket to Chicago. In Chicago, the Refugee Committee handed him fare to Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh, a local baseball pal lent him money to go as far as he could. The loan took him to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where Street finally stopped. Pennsylvania seemed far enough away from earthquakes and fires. Later that summer, he convinced the town’s Tri-State club, the Millionaires, to let him join the team. Being called a “Millionaire” was a name the indebted catcher would have been far too exhausted to find ironic.26
Street stumbled around a few more years before he made it to the big leagues in 1908 as the battery mate for Walter “Big Train” Johnson of the Washington Senators.* Big Train was at the beginning of his celebrated twenty-year career, perfecting a fastball that some hitters said was so invisible, it was like hitting a watermelon seed. “The first time I faced him, I watched him take that easy windup,” Ty Cobb said. “And then something went past me that made me flinch. I hardly saw the pitch, but I heard it…. Every one of us knew we’d met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ballpark.”27 While Street proved to be a good catcher for Johnson, his weak bat and problems with drinking—he was reportedly “lost” for five days during the 1909 season—forced a trade to the New York Highlanders in 1912.† After several more years roaming the minors, Street joined the army at the outbreak of World War I and served two years with the First Gas Regiment—Chemical Warfare division in Argonne, France. He distinguished himself during the war as a sergeant, won a Purple Heart, and returned home where he “toured the bushes” as both a player and a manager.
The “Old Sarge” had few illusions about where his baseball career had ended up. While managing a Class C club in Muskogee, Oklahoma, Street was dejected and direct. “You can’t go much lower than that in organized baseball,” he said. “Not much of a job; not getting anywhere.”28 But the low period did not last for long. In 1929, he became a coach for the St. Louis Cardinals. Team vice president Branch Rickey helped him beat his drinking habit, and a year later Street was named manager of the Red Birds. He led the rough-and-tumble Gas House Gang to two consecutive pennants and one World Championship. By 1932, though, the Cards had slipped to sixth place, and the next year, the Cardinals’ front office fired him. Some said a young upstart sensation, Dizzy Dean, had an argument with the older, easygoing Street. Cardinal executives thought they needed a firmer hand at the helm. Street’s firing was followed by another dismal round of minor league clubs. He thought he was finished with baseball forever and would return to his family’s home in Joplin, Missouri, but his love for the game would not let him go. “I’m going to put on a uniform just for the smell of the dust again,” he said. “I’ve got baseball in my blood, I guess. I can’t leave it alone.”29 In 1936 he moved his wife and two children to Saint Paul, where he became manager of the Saints.
When Tomboy stood observing Street that morning at Lexington Park, he was directing a baseball school for Twin City white boys.* There was not a single black child among the boys inside the ballpark, and there were certainly no girls, white or black. But Tomboy was used to being the exception and she began plotting ways to get Street’s attention. She hoped he would let her into the school, even though it was obvious she would be bending a policy—formal or unspoken—about who could attend. Even as a young teenager, Tomboy already had learned how to get around the rules. She had been playing as the only girl in the Catholic boys’ league for nearly four years, and she was used to boys’ initial resistance, even hostility. Sometimes when she took a turn playing second base, boys would slide into her on double plays, hoping to rattle what they assumed was an inexperienced infielder. But Tomboy had been playing the game long enough to know how to take care of herself, as she said. Even more important, she also had learned that apprehension rather than anger fueled some of the resistance she met from boys. “It took a few years,” she said, “but I realized some [male teammates] felt threatened by my presence.”30 Some of the young men attending Gabby Street’s baseball school might have felt threatened by her presence at Lexington Park as well, but Tomboy continued to move closer to the clutch of players circled around Gabby. She strained to hear what the old coach was saying.
Street loved nothing better than a group of young players who were eager to learn more about baseball. He had just about had it with players in the major leagues who seemed to have only a passing interest in the game. “Today’s players don’t live and breathe baseball,” he complained. “After a game they’re more likely to head for a golf course or a country inn or a talking picture.”31 In the old days, he said, “we lived out baseball over a glass of beer and a ham sandwich. We played baseball around the hotel at night. Boys nowadays have too many automobiles. They drive up to the park two hours before the game, get in their suits, have a meeting, dress quickly after the game, jump in their cars and are 50 miles from each other in two hours. You can’t learn baseball on a blackboard. You have to live the game, breathe it 24 hours with fellows who talk your language, know your problems. All the kids think of now is hit, hit, hit—no teamwork.”32 Street wanted to reach kids who loved the game the way he did. Perhaps that’s why he felt Tomboy staring at him from outside his circle of students.
Dressed as she nearly always was, outside of school, in dungarees and a clean shirt, Tomboy stood waiting for the right moment to approach Gabby. Street had no idea who she was, what she wanted, or why she kept studying him so intently. She had a beat-up old baseball glove in one hand and held her other arm cautiously against her side. Two months earlier, Tomboy had fractured her arm while riding her bike around Arundel and Washington in Saint Paul. She hit something in the road, tumbled into traffic, and instinctively stretched out her arms to break the fall. As she landed, a car hit her. “Miss Marcenia Stone,” the newspaper reported, “was struck by a hit and run driver Tuesday night.”33 The injury had taken nearly six weeks to heal, but Tomboy prided herself on being tough and had rejoined her team. Not giving in to pain was anoth
er way Tomboy proved she was “one of the boys.” Once when she took a turn as catcher in the league, she was hit by a ball and knocked unconscious. She decided to give up catching—“I left that alone”—but the injury never once made her swear off baseball.34
Gabby Street looked at this girl with curiosity; he knew nothing about what her arms could do—injured or otherwise. As a white man who never read black newspapers and barely knew they existed, he would not have known that local reporters called the young woman observing him “one of the best young girl athletes in St. Paul.”35
A teammate once described Gabby Street as being built like a sergeant, “rather dour of countenance and with a real vocabulary in the two languages required in the army—English and profane.”36 Without thinking, Street gruffly shooed Tomboy away and turned his attention back to the boys in the baseball school. Undaunted by his rough demeanor, she returned to the school a while later, stood in the same place outside the group of white teenagers, and waited to ask Street if she could join them. Tomboy had no illusions and understood that a girl playing baseball was not only unwelcome but was also considered reprehensible to some. “[My parents] would have stopped me if they could, but there was nothing they could do about it,” she said. Neighborhood boys “told me to go home and be a girl and others asked why I insisted in playing baseball.” She was called a “bull dagger” and “was did everything but spit on,” Tomboy later said, but she continued to play.37 In the past her persistence had paid off, so she continued to wait until Gabby Street, annoyed that she had returned to his school once more, told her to get out and go home. Girls didn’t play baseball, he thought, and he wasn’t going to waste his time on some black girl who no doubt couldn’t keep up. Baseball required discipline and a dedication to strategy. Why include a girl when a boy might really get something out of the instruction? Baseball is “a good thing for boys,” he always told reporters, and that’s why his teams always invited white boys out to the park before games “to try their baseball wings,” as he put it. Baseball brought out the best qualities in a boy, he said, and helped young men become professional. “Professional,” the word Gabby Street used to motivate his young charges, was the same word that signaled excellence to Tomboy Stone.38
Of course, Street being Street, he couldn’t simply teach baseball strategy to the white boys; he also had to pepper his lessons with stories about the old days. He had a storehouse of anecdotes that he was happy to share with anyone who loved baseball. Before spring training that year, Street talked baseball to civic and professional groups in Saint Paul—sometimes appearing before as many as two luncheons and two dinners a day. He accompanied his talks with lantern slides depicting the lighter side of baseball and generated so much good will in the community that a newspaper said he was as good as a “March thaw.”39 Sitting now with his baseball school boys at the Lexington ballpark, Street would put aside a strategy session for a while and spin a tale. It was almost as if he were back with the St. Louis Cardinals after a game, sitting around the hotel with a clutch of young teammates gathered to hear the old man sit up late, smoke his pipe, and talk of playing with Ruth and Cobb and Big Train. While hearing Street’s tales of baseball’s great players was thrilling, everyone always wanted to hear the same story. It wasn’t about playing baseball but about the ball—the one Street caught in Washington, D.C. If he tired of telling the legendary story, he didn’t let on. Street would lean back, rewind his memory nearly thirty years, and begin.
It was like this, he said. It was 1908. He was twenty-six. It was the year Ty Cobb and Honus Wagner won the batting championship. One night a group of writers drinking at the National Press Club in Washington were talking baseball and arguing about who was the best catcher who ever lived. “Street,” Preston Gibson, the society editor of the Washington Post, said. Gibson claimed Street had such a deft touch, he could pick daisies with a catcher’s mitt. I bet he could catch anything, he wagered. How about catching a ball tossed from the top of the Washington Monument, one of the writers suggested. After pestering Street with the dare for weeks, Gibson finally cornered the catcher and asked if they could try to accomplish the feat the next day. Street agreed, and on the morning of August 21, 1908, he accompanied Gibson and few onlookers to the Washington Monument. Street looked up—555 feet up—into the blinding sun to the top of the obelisk. Gibson had called ahead and received permission from the superintendent of grounds to try the stunt. Street looked up again. He was bareheaded, in plain clothes, and had not brought his chest protector or any of the other regulation equipment he usually wore when catching for the Washington Senators. Gibson headed to the top of the Monument with a basket of baseballs and a twenty-foot wooden chute he had cobbled together to send the balls hurtling through the air. Gibson carefully set the first ball on the chute and sent it rolling. On the ground below, Street lost the ball in the sun, and it landed with a heavy thud on the grass. A second, third, and fourth ball fell out of the sky. Again, Street could not find them against the sun. Let’s move to the shady side, someone suggested, and Street walked around to where he hoped he could get a better look at the balls. He positioned himself to make a waist-high catch rather than one over his head. That way, I may only break a wrist or an arm, he thought. Gibson rolled a few more balls down the chute. Street missed them all. Toss them out a bit further away from the Monument, he called to Gibson. Street could see Gibson’s arm as it stretched out the window, but the ball was invisible. The strain of looking up into the sky for so long had grown too much for Street, so he asked his friend George McBride—the Senators shortstop and his old pal who lent him money after the San Francisco earthquake— to spot the balls for him as they came hurtling down. Street figured he would only look up when McBride told him to, when the ball was about two hundred feet over his head. A tenth, eleventh, twelfth ball rushed past Street. One ball remained: the thirteenth. Gibson let the ball fly. McBride yelled out. Street looked up and instinctively raised his glove above his head as though he were snagging a pop foul for the Senators.
He caught it.*
Gibson later told Street that when he caught the ball, the pop sounded like a .38 revolver going off. The next day, fans at the Senators game, who had read about the feat, gave Street a wild ovation. Newspaper headlines proclaimed “Fans Get the Willies Figuring on Street’s Feat.”40 The ballistics department of the army estimated the ball fell at 290 miles an hour, with an equivalent weight of nearly three hundred pounds. “Sure they were heavy,” Street later said, “but not too heavy. I just used my regular mitt—no sponge or anything.”41
Tomboy loved old baseball stories as much as the Saint Paul boys at Street’s baseball school. It would have surprised Gabby Street to know the young black girl who kept pestering him knew baseball history better than most and had read nearly every baseball book published.42 She would have liked to hear about the old catcher’s mitt that he rigged to make balls sound extra loud when they slammed into the leather, or tales about how he had broken nine out of ten fingers in thirty years of catching, or about the time Pepper Martin put an alligator in the St. Louis Cardinals’ team car.43 Tomboy certainly was not what Street expected. And when Tomboy showed up one more time at his baseball school after being told to go away, the old white man began to smile at her determination. Of course, Tomboy did not realize that Gabby Street was not what she expected, either. Street was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Street once told New York sportswriter Fred Lieb that he was a member of the Klan. “Gabby Street, Rogers Hornsby, and Tris Speaker, fellow stars from the old Confederate states, told me they were members of the Ku Klux Klan. I don’t know whether Cobb was a Klansman, but I suspect he was,” Lieb wrote.44 Lieb’s hunch about Cobb was well founded. Lieb said Cobb “had a contempt for black people” and, in Cobb’s own language, “never would take their lip.” When Cobb was with the Detroit Tigers, he stayed out of Ohio for a year and a half to avoid arrest in Cleveland for knifing a black waiter. Lieb reported that the Tigers set
tled the case out of court by paying the victim.45
Street’s racism, while not as violent as Cobb’s hatred, nevertheless revealed itself in the way he reduced black people to stock characters, erasing their individuality and even their names. While most people assumed Charles Street’s nickname, “Gabby,” came from his constant chatter behind the plate, the name actually had roots in his racism. “We used to call the colored boys ‘Gabby’ down in Alabama, and when I wanted a new baseball thrown into the game I used to call, ‘Hey Gabby, where’s the baseball?’ … If you see a black boy and want him, and you don’t know his name, you yell, ‘Hey, Gabby.’ It works in St. Louis, too, and if you don’t believe it, try it. To me all black boys have been ‘Gabby,’ and I got my nickname from the use of that word and not, as is commonly believed, because I am a chatterbox.”46
Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone The First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League Page 4