“When you finish high school, they tell a boy to go out and see the world,” Tomboy later said. “What do they tell a girl? They tell her to go next door and marry the boy that their family’s picked out.” It wasn’t right, she thought. “A woman has her dreams, too,” she said.32 The army shipped Bunny to San Francisco, and before too long she sent letters home saying she could use some company. Willa gave Tomboy the money, and with little more than a plan to meet her sister “somewhere” in San Francisco—she didn’t even know exactly where Bunny was stationed—Tomboy boarded a bus for California. “I had to see what was over there,” she said, “on the other side of the fence.”33
*The Israelite House of David was a Christian commune in Benton Harbor, Michigan, known for its devotion to vegetarianism and celibacy. Founded in 1903 by Benjamin and Mary Purnell, the colony reached its peak in the 1920s when it had as many as nine hundred members. In 1914, men who played baseball in the colony began playing outside teams around the country, and by the 1930s there were multiple House of David teams consisting of hired players. House of David teams often traveled with accompanying black teams and made a condition of play that the hosts also take on the black team. Many baseball historians credit the House of David teams with helping move major league baseball toward integration.
Golden Gate
Suitcase packed, truck’s already gone
Goin’ to San Francisco, gonna make it my home
Yeah, San Francisco please make room for me
Well, I’m goin’ to San Francisco
If I could crawl on my knees.
—LOWELL FULSON1
Tomboy’s first sight of San Francisco took her breath away. About the same time she reached the city, author John Dos Passos arrived to write a profile of San Francisco in wartime for Harper’s magazine. Whoever designed the city’s streets didn’t have the “slightest regard for the laws of gravity,” he wrote. The city was a jumble of steep slopes and precipitous curves, and the result was thrilling. “Whenever you step out on the street there’s a hilltop in one direction or other. From the top of each hill you get a view and the sight of more hills to the right and left and ahead that offer the prospect of still broader views. The process goes on indefinitely. You can’t help making your way painfully to the top of each hill just to see what you can see.”2
As captivating as the view was, Tomboy was on a mission and wasted little time. She needed to find her sister. In May 1943, Bunny Stone married Steward Louis Bell. The couple shipped out to separate military assignments. The army sent Bunny to the Bay Area and the navy returned Bell to his Pearl Harbor fleet.3 The marriage was rocky. For many years Bunny and Louis quarreled and made up and began the cycle again. Bunny needed some comfort from home, and Tomboy was happy to supply it.4 As she disembarked at the San Francisco Transit Depot on Mission Street, Tomboy was immediately engulfed in a big city wartime crush of humanity. Soldiers with duffle bags dashed toward idling buses; women with a child on each hip kicked heavy suitcases through a maze of moving legs; young people like Tomboy stepped off buses from Arkansas and Texas and wondered where they’d find one of the good defense jobs everyone was talking about.
In 1941 President Franklin Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 8802, which required federal industries to end discriminatory hiring practices based on race, color, or national origin. Hopeful workers read leaflets tacked on post office bulletin boards around the country exhorting the wonders of California: good jobs, beautiful weather, palm trees! The Kaiser and Moore Dry Dock shipyards in Richmond and Oakland were hiring tens of thousands of workers to build nearly fifteen hundred vessels to support the war effort.* “A ship a day” was being produced by men and women, blacks and whites, Mexicans, Portuguese, and Italian workers laboring side by side in integrated divisions. Within the span of three years, the population of Richmond, California, swelled from 23,000 to nearly 125,000. The docks needed painters, welders, riveters, forklift drivers, and crane operators for their six-days-a-week, round-the-clock schedule.5 If you stood still in the bus terminal for just a moment as Tomboy did, it seemed that everyone in the country was rushing to San Francisco to find a future.
Tomboy’s first few days in the Bay Area were so bizarre and improbable that her odyssey later became the stuff of Stone family legend. From the money her mother gave her, Tomboy ended up in California with fifty-three cents—no, sixty-seven cents—no, seven dollars—she said at other times. Surely it wasn’t much. She did not have an exact address for Bunny, didn’t know the area, and had no prospects for employment. She didn’t even have much luggage, just some dungarees, pressed slacks, and clean shirts. She also carried her old baseball glove from the Goodwill and the baseball shoes Gabby Street had given her. Tomboy had eaten all the food her mother had packed for the trip and was hungry and tired, but she knew she had to fend for herself. Although she noticed prostitutes walking around the area, making what seemed like easy money, Tomboy never for a moment considered such a desperate idea. “It was easy to go into street walking,” she said. But she believed no woman needed to prostitute herself if she was willing to work. “That was out. I couldn’t see that. That was like … doing dirty dishes.”6 Within a matter of days, the ever-resourceful Tomboy found a place to live and a job. Even more incredible, Tomboy was walking down a street when Bunny just happened to look out a nearby window. The two Stone sisters found each other. Whether it was luck, coincidence, divine providence, or foolishness—everything Tomboy needed, she said, fell right into her lap.7
In truth, Tomboy’s beginnings in San Francisco were more intentional. When she arrived at the terminal, Toni approached an attendant in the Travelers’ Aid station for help. The station supervisor told her to return later for an official appointment regarding job possibilities and lodging. Tomboy spent the first few nights alone in the bus station, but by the time came for Tomboy’s appointment with the Travelers’ Aid, she already had found a job and a room. The day she first arrived at the terminal, she spotted a black man in the station and asked for help. “Where would you find our kind of folks?” she asked. The stranger laughed and directed her to the Fillmore. As she passed Foster’s Cafeteria on the corner of Sutter, she noticed a help wanted sign in the window. Foster’s was a bustling warren of mirror-top tables where drifters and neighborhood residents converged over lumps of warm meatloaf and bowls of chili.* The cafeteria was looking for all kinds of help—waitresses, salad makers, dishwashers. “I knew something about salads,” Tomboy said. She got the job: fourteen dollars a week and one eat-in meal a day. “That boosted me,” she said.8
The next order of business was finding a place to stay. Tomboy knew that she would have trouble finding a room as a single woman. “A single girl? People don’t want you in their house,” she said. Some landlords might think she was a sporting girl or a hustler. As she usually did when she was in a pinch, Tomboy sought help from the church. She went over to St. Benedict’s in nearby Oakland and asked the priest for assistance. The priest initially thought she was a runaway. Tomboy sensed his unease, and before he could jump to more conclusions, she produced some papers. She had a letter from her father addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” asking Catholics, Masons, and other organizations to which he belonged to assist his daughter. The priest softened—“the redness went out of his face,” Toni said—and he called women in the parish’s Altar Society for suggestions. With the women’s help, Tomboy located a room in a Polish woman’s home; Mrs. Kardeski’s two sons were off to war and her house felt vacant.9
The job at Foster’s did not provide Tomboy with as much work as she wanted, and soon she was looking for a way to earn more money. She secured a job as a welder in the South San Francisco docks, working alongside longshoremen for the Matson shipping lines. She failed, however, to pass along one piece of information to her boss: she didn’t know anything about welding. “I was burning up that steel,” she said. When her boss realized she had no experience, he had already been won over by Tomboy’s eager
ness and sincerity. He offered her another chance and teasingly asked, “What the hell can you do?” At that moment, Tomboy looked around the docks and saw an army truck pulling up. “I can drive that,” she said. Toni hopped into the driver’s seat. When she heard the gears start to grind, she knew she could do the job. “I’m home!” she said to herself.10 The physical work at the docks suited her, and, dressed as she usually was in men’s work shirts and pants, she fit right in with the Rosie-the-Riveter coverall set on the dock.
Tomboy was one of nearly twelve million women across the country who worked alongside men in the defense industries, from shipyards to steel mills to foundries. As higher paying local shipyard jobs opened up, many black women found recently vacated positions in canneries, railroads, or military supply facilities. Women were able to forge a path out of traditional domestic work. Drivers pulling up for gas at the Richfield station on the corner of Lombard and Broderick in San Francisco temporarily gasped when female service station attendants asked, “Check your oil, sir? National emergency shortage on men, y’know.” In the Bay Area, women took over as streetcar conductors, street sweepers, hospital orderlies, and playground directors. Up in Santa Rosa, the DeTurk Winery started employing women to harvest grapes and drive delivery trucks. Also invaded was “man’s last sacred domain,” what one soldier called his barbershop. At Camp Roberts in San Miguel, women were allowed to apply for jobs cutting men’s hair. “Hitler was the one that got us out of the kitchen,” one woman said.11
Not everyone was happy with the invasion of what had been exclusively white men’s territory. “It’s too bad every skirt in Moore Dry Dock can’t be given her quit slip right now,” one angry foreman stated. When women in the shipyards, like Toni, began to be hired as shipwrights, painters, and welders—jobs that usually were off-limits to them—some men protested or looked for faults in the women’s work. “You ask any man, and he’ll tell you that a woman in the shipyards is in the way. They don’t none of them belong here.” Some women would not back down and fought for their right to jobs. They organized, met with local priests and ministers, and secured the support of male allies. While the close quarters of the shipyards and the inevitable daily interactions between men and women moved the workforce toward more equality, proximity only brought the transition part way, an observer said.* Women’s inclusion continued to be “conditional,” and their status never became equal to men’s. Many men believed women took away work that was rightly theirs and scrambled to keep the shipyards white and male. Some critics said men who complained were really afraid of competition. They said aggrieved men revealed an “obvious, persistent and perhaps more basic fear” than many males were willing to admit.12
Concern about blacks “invading” San Francisco reflected the same fear, many believed. When Mayor Roger Lapham addressed a 1944 press conference, for example, his question betrayed his anxiety. “How long do you think these colored people are going to be here?” he asked the only black reporter in the group, Thomas Fleming. “Mr. Mayor, do you know the Golden Gate?” Fleming responded. “It’s permanent. They are here to stay and the city better find jobs and housing for them, because they are not going back down South.” Fleming might have thought the mayor’s comment only slightly less disquieting than the note he had found a decade earlier pasted to the typewriter in his newspaper office: “You niggers go back to Africa,” it read. 13 Vandals had stolen into the offices of the San Francisco Spokesman and smashed plate glass windows and the Linotype after Fleming wrote an editorial saying blacks deserved to be hired for waterfront jobs.†
In Saint Paul, Tomboy had used her baseball skills to break down prejudice she faced as a girl on the local diamonds. In San Francisco, Tomboy used the same technique in confronting discrimination—joining pickup games on Sundays after mass with black boys and even some whites. But not all blacks arriving in San Francisco were welcomed by white residents as Tomboy was on the Post Street playground; Jim Crow attitudes were alive in the city, though communicated less directly than in the South. One area where blacks were warmly accepted was the Fillmore in the city’s integrated Western Addition—the area to which the black man in the bus station had directed Tomboy. She loved the diversity of the area and found it “filled with world-wide views.”14
As early as the 1890s, Japanese immigrants joined Jewish residents in the Fillmore and built a thriving community. After Pearl Harbor and the sudden removal of Japanese and Japanese Americans to relocation camps, the area became a center for the burgeoning black population. Willie Brown, a young Bay Area immigrant from Texas, said the Fillmore “had to be the closest thing to Harlem outside of New York.”15 He loved the Victorian gingerbread houses, the black barbershops, barbecue joints, pool halls, restaurants, and vibrant shopping district. Brown found work at Kaufman’s Shoe Store on Fillmore Avenue, and the neighborhood became his playground.* Like everyone else, though, Willie Brown came to the Fillmore mainly for the music. Marguerite Johnson, who moved there from rural Arkansas, worked at the busy Melrose Record Shop in the heart of the district. She said that “[b]lasts from [the store’s] loudspeakers poured out into the street with all the insistence of a false mourner at a graveside.”16 Jazz, the blues, bebop—the Fillmore was hot.
Nightclubs stretched for twenty blocks. There was the Club Alabam on Post, Town Club on Sutter, the Long Bar and Minne’s Can Do on Fillmore, Jimbo’s Bop City, the New Orleans Swing Club, Elsie’s Breakfast Nook, the Texas Playhouse, Leola King’s Blue Mirror. The most well known was Jack’s Tavern, which opened in 1933 and was the first club to be managed by black people. Alroyd Love and Lena Murrell* ran the “hottest colored nite spot in town,” which exploded in popularity during the war years when immigrants like Brown, Johnson, and Tomboy came looking for work and a good time.17 Among the Fillmore nightclub set, Jack’s was considered an elite establishment. Men wore satin ties with diamond stickpins; women wore fur coats, fancy hats, and lots of jewelry. “You saw great peacocks,” Brown said. “People would get dressed to kill…. Stacy Adams shoes with the white [stitches on the soles] showing they had been cleaned up with Clorox.”18 In the evenings, patrons formed lines outside Jack’s door, eager to hear the music, dance, and taste the dinner specials the tavern’s famous cook dished up. Dinner began at seven and was served until two in the morning. The dining room in the back had a small dance floor and a bandstand where Saunders King’s rhythm and blues alternated weeks with Johnny Ingram’s five-piece band. King said a person went into Jack’s “at one o’clock [in the morning] and the music was just beginning to feel good.”19 Bandleader Frank Jackson observed that although the dance floor was small, it enticed a few dancers eager to show their moves. Jack’s was a feast for the eyes, the ears, and the stomach.
Jazz musicians like Frank Jackson knew that other clubs often were rough—places where women were apt to be harassed, where drugs could be found, and where gangsters hung out. Jack’s Tavern was nothing like that, Jackson said. If a woman came to the club alone and a man tried to make a move on her, a gentleman would “take that up right away. ‘Are you being bothered?’” someone would ask and the offender would apologize and walk away.20 Men would sometimes buy a woman drinks, but they would rarely give her a problem. Some said the first place a black person would go in San Francisco was Jack’s Tavern. Tomboy was no exception.
The music drew her in, but the people inside kept her returning. Conversation at Jack’s Tavern was urbane and sophisticated, and Tomboy felt pleasantly “taken in,” as she put it.21 She had found in San Francisco a place to transform herself. As one migrant to the city put it, “there was a reshuffling of everybody … a whole new set of criteria set down for who was insiders and who was outsiders.”22 You could make a fresh start, reinvent yourself, even change your name. Marguerite Johnson, a record clerk, became a singer and a dancer and changed her name to Maya Angelou. Tomboy Stone decided her name no longer fit. It sounded too much like the special child from Saint Paul. “Tomboy” became “Toni”—a
sassy, confident metamorphosis more in line with the kind of people she met at Jack’s, people like Aurelious Pescia Alberga—a man whose dress and demeanor matched the lyricism of his name. Toni loved listening to the trim, dapper gentleman everyone seemed to know. The son of a Jamaican seafarer, Alberga was active in political circles, ran a bootblack stand at the Ferry Building, operated a bail bond business, and assisted a blind millionaire in managing real estate throughout the city. As Toni got to know him better, she realized Alberga’s current entrepreneurial occupations were sedate compared to the high adventures of his youth. In his sixty years, he had worked aboard a ship in the Arctic, survived the 1906 earthquake, won prominence as a boxer, and served as one of the first black army officers in World War I.23
Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone The First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League Page 7