Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone The First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League

by Martha Ackmann

  Later that month, Toni heard from her strongest advocate on the Clowns, Bunny Downs. Toni had written to Downs after receiving Pollock’s offer and asked for his advice. “It was a real pleasure to hear from you,” Bunny said, “as I am beginning to feel as though I was the forgotten man as far as some people I do claim as my personal friends.” Bunny had taken the liberty of talking with Syd about Toni’s contract. “I think a person deserves every cent he or she can get for services rendered. So make up your mind what you estimate your services are worth and explain to Syd and see what terms are satisfactory to all concerned.” Bunny seemed to be as surprised with the change in Buster Haywood’s position with the team as Toni must have been. “Every thing changes in this world,” he wrote philosophically, “so we have to try and be ready for anything that may arise.” He then zeroed in with his most candid advice. “Before you arrive at your salary terms do a lot of thinking for YOUR future,” he wrote, “and then talk it over with Mr. Alberga, then explain your side to Syd.”48

  Bunny Downs was right. Toni understood that the decision was about her future and that she needed to figure out what she wanted and how to negotiate for it. In 1954, she would be thirty-three years old, not the twenty-three-year-old that the new coach, Oscar Charleston, would think she was. She would no longer be the only woman in the Negro League and would have to share the spotlight with two nineteen-year-olds. In addition, the Clowns made it clear that she would not play every day. Toni knew baseball skills only improved with practice, and it gave her a fit, she said, to be “bench jockeyed.”49

  So many possibilities she dreamed of had come true. She was playing professional baseball in the Negro League. She heard cheering crowds at Griffith Stadium and Forbes Field. And she had held her own against future major leaguers and seasoned pros. But, like Mamie Johnson said, the more she played, the more she wanted to play. Toni wanted to go as far as she could in baseball. If wild propositions like being traded to a Japanese team for twenty-five thousand dollars a year had not come true, maybe others that she could not even imagine would. Toni had to decide if she would take Syd’s offer, the Kansas City Monarchs’ proposed $325, or some other option that she could not recognize yet. The choice was hers to make. “You have always treated me right and looked out for my interest,” Toni wrote to Bunny in a return letter.50 The question Toni faced that January was: what exactly did she want?

  *Scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. said that whites steering blacks to brothels was “another way of relegating blacks to second-class citizenship and ascribing to them questionable morality” (e-mail to author, October 17, 2007). Journalist Robin Roberts, in her book From the Heart: Seven Rules to Live By, wrote that a brothel was once an accommodation of last resort for her parents. “In the Air Force, my dad’s division, the all-black Tuskegee Airmen, was segregated from the white divisions in the early days. And my dad wasn’t always treated with the respect he was due. Once, after serving in Japan, he was transferred to an Air Force base outside of Dallas. My parents arrived about nine p.m., assuming there would be accommodations for them. They were stopped at the gate to the base, and the guard said, ‘You’ll have to go into Dallas. There is no housing available to you.’ And he was very pointed when he said ‘for you.’ My parents drove into Dallas and had no luck finding lodging. Finally, a black proprietor took pity on them and said, ‘I do have one place …’ It was a room in a brothel. The doorbell rang all night” (From the Heart: Seven Rules to Live By, New York: Hyperion Books, 2007, 65–66).

  *Mamie Johnson’s birth date has been listed as 1932 in Indianapolis Clowns publicity material and 1935 by the U.S. Public Records office. In my interview with Mamie Johnson [Goodman], she said she was born in 1935, and I have used that year as her birth date.

  A Baseball Has

  108 Stitches

  It’s a long old road, but I know I’m gonna find the end.

  —BESSIE SMITH1

  Toni decided to keep playing baseball. She signed with the Kansas City Monarchs for the 1954 season. The decision came down to two issues: Syd Pollock’s resolution that the Clowns would have only “ONE” [girl] in the starting lineup” and Bunny Downs’s advice to think about “YOUR future.”2 Those two capitalized words stuck in Toni’s mind and convinced her that joining the Monarchs was the right choice. As much as she felt the previous season had not ended well, she left the Clowns on good terms and expressed her thanks in painstakingly deliberate words. “I trust you will believe me when I say that I fully appreciate all that [y]ou have done for me and the interest shown in me likewise,” she wrote Syd.3 But Toni couldn’t stay with the Clowns and compete for attention with Connie Morgan and Mamie “Peanut” Johnson. She felt she stood a better chance of being noticed with Kansas City. The decision to jump also turned—as it always did—on money. Syd’s offer was lower than what he had paid her a year before. After negotiation with Tom Baird, Toni persuaded the Monarchs owner to increase her salary to four hundred dollars a month with the prospect of a two-hundred-dollar bonus at the end of the year. Toni accepted Baird’s terms and told him she would do her best to cooperate, noting she had heard only “good things” about Monarchs manager Buck O’Neil.4 Toni’s most candid comments were reserved as usual for her old friend Bunny Downs. “A change would do me good,” she wrote, adding, “I shall always remember how nice and considerate you was to me and I [want] you to know that I shall always remember you for the same.”5 As Bunny readied the Clowns bus for the annual spring training trip to Norfolk, Toni went to the TWA office in San Francisco to pick up the airline ticket Baird had reserved for her. Dress warmly for Kansas City, he advised. “Weather is very cold here now.”6

  Baird’s concern for Toni’s comfort was the only hint of cordiality in his stiff correspondence. Thomas Y. Baird was not a warm man, certainly not beloved in the way that former Monarchs owner J. L. Wilkinson was.* “Wilkie,” as he was affectionately known to his players, made the team into a legend, owning the Monarchs for twenty-eight years until age, ill health, and the slow demise of black baseball forced him to sell the franchise. The origins of the Monarchs reached back to 1912, when Wilkinson and a partner organized the All Nations team, a squad featuring players of many racial and ethnic backgrounds. “Direct from their native countries, Hawaiians, Japanese, Cubans, Filipinos, Indians, and Chinese,” promotional material read.7 The team also included one woman player, May Arbaugh, who was billed as “Carrie Nation.” When arriving in a new town to play baseball, the All Nations team would also host a dance, organize a wrestling squad, and provide music performed by the athletes. The team was not all sideshow, however, and they played some of the best black teams in the country, including Rube Foster’s Chicago American Giants. After World War I, Wilkinson reorganized All Nations as an independent semi-pro team and located in Des Moines before finally settling in Kansas City. Pitcher John Donaldson suggested the name “Monarchs” as a way to project the athletic supremacy the team hoped to achieve. In 1920, the Monarchs became a member of the newly constituted Negro National League. As the only white owner at that time in black baseball, Wilkinson used his race to make profitable financial bookings—bookings that racism would have made difficult to negotiate for black baseball executives. Newt Allen, a former Monarchs infielder and later team manager, said Wilkinson was “one of the finest men I’ve ever known…. You could go to him in the winter and get half of next summer’s salary.”8

  Besides being respected by the black community for his fairness and decency, Wilkinson was also admired as an innovator. He urged teams to move away from train travel to buses so that they could play in the small towns the railroads did not reach. Wilkinson’s most memorable innovation was a portable lighting system that made night games possible. In 1930, Wilkinson—with financing help from Baird—bought a “Sterling Marine 100 kilowatt generator with a 250 horsepower, six cylinder, triple carburetor, gasoline-drive engine” from the Giant Light Company of Omaha, Nebraska. Twelve men used the mobile generator to install forty
-four portable floodlights on tall poles in the beds of Ford trucks to flood the diamond with light. The innovation, overwrought contraption that it was, ushered in a new era and new revenue to baseball. Five years later, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt flipped a switch in the Oval Office to illuminate stadium lights at Crosley Field in Cincinnati, he was following a vision that Wilkinson and the Negro Leagues had already made a reality.9

  In July 1947, Wilkinson and several of the Monarchs players were involved in a car accident in Chicago. Wilkie ruptured the retina in his left eye and later became virtually blind. The following year, he sold his 50 percent ownership of the team to co-owner Tom Baird, retaining the right to organize a second, separate squad called the “Kansas City Monarchs Traveling Team” as well as the right to negotiate with his friend and former Monarchs player Satchel Paige. When Wilkinson handed over the reins to Tom Baird, the Monarchs had won eleven pennants and two Negro World Series and had sent more players to the major leagues than any other franchise. Next began the Baird era for the Monarchs.10

  Tom Baird had been involved with baseball long before he became the owner of the team.* As a teenager, he played for local championship teams near White City, Kansas. A fracture to his right knee, suffered during the off-season when he worked as a railroad brake-man, ended his playing career. Baird turned to managing and promoting area semi-pro teams. He ran the Peet Brothers company team and booked visiting squads in the Peet Brothers Billion Bubble Park.† Later he owned the T. Y. Bairds, a longstanding team in Kansas City’s white municipal league, who were occasional opponents of the African American Topeka (Kansas) Giants.11 In the 1930s Baird promoted both the House of David team and the Monarchs and arranged for the two teams to barnstorm against each other, with Babe Didrikson playing for the House of David team. After Babe Ruth retired from the Yankees, Baird tried unsuccessfully to woo him to one of the teams he represented.

  In 1946, when Jackie Robinson left the Monarchs to play with the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm team, Baird threatened to sue Branch Rickey for failure to compensate the Monarchs for Robinson’s services. The black press descended on Baird, interpreting his action as a white man trying to protect his investments and standing in the way of integration. Baird later publicly supported Robinson’s move, but complained, like Effa Manley of the Newark Eagles, that the majors outright stole players from Negro League teams. But above all, Baird was a businessman, and most blacks viewed him as an undependable ally. That attitude certainly was underscored by his membership in the Kansas branch of the Ku Klux Klan.

  Like Gabby Street back in Toni’s Saint Paul days, Baird was a white, middle-class Protestant Southerner who aligned himself with the Klan during its resurgence in the Midwest. Their local headquarters were in the same building as his office, and observers later suspected that Baird joined the Klan for business reasons. He believed Klan members could help advance his professional ambitions. He worried that if he did not join, his billiard business would suffer. But Baird also believed that whites were superior to blacks and did not question racism’s assumptions. For example, when Toni left the San Francisco Sea Lions, club owner Harold “Yellowhorse” Morris found himself on a Canadian prairie without a team, looking for help. Morris asked Baird to recommend him for a potential Chicago Cubs scouting job since the two men knew each other from Yellowhorse’s years as a Monarchs player. Baird wrote to the Cubs’ farm director with what he thought was a compliment. Yellowhorse Morris, he wrote, was “above average in intelligent [sic] for a Negro.” When major league clubs came looking for players who didn’t look “too black,” Baird did not question their racist assumptions and offered “an intelligent looking Negro, in fact he might even pass for an Indian,” and another who looked “like a white man from the stands.” Baird accepted Jim Crow stereotypes while simultaneously profiting from the labor of his black players.12

  The sterile tone of Baird’s letters to Toni indicated that her relationship with her new boss would be nothing like Syd Pollock’s gregarious intimacy. There would be no easy “Dear Toni” and “Cordially, Syd” exchanges, no “Kindest regards to your hubby” or concerned inquiries about the family’s health. Bob Motley, an umpire who worked for many Negro League teams, had occasion to compare owners and recognized the sharp contrast between Baird and Pollock. Baird was unfriendly, he said, was all about money, and only looked at blacks in terms of how he could profit from them. Syd “wasn’t looking at what I could do for him,” Motley said. “Pollock looked at the person I was and what I wanted to do in life.”13 There was no doubt that Pollock was a businessman, but he cared about the Clowns players and—at the very least—treated Toni and the other players with courtesy and respect.

  Before the Clowns and the Monarchs began spring training, Syd wrote to Toni and asked if all details with the Monarchs had been resolved to her satisfaction. He also had been in touch with Baird to check on Toni’s contract and make sure she would be playing in the 1954 season. In his letter, Pollock closed by asking for advice on an even more personal matter than her contract; he asked about her bra. “I’m having difficulty locating a place to make me up some sort of protective bra for Connie and Mamie,” he confessed. “Am sure you use one, and maybe you can give me some information.” He asked for specifics on who to contact and how much such special underwear might cost.14 Obviously Syd was not aware that the prostitutes who so often had provided her with a place to stay had also helped Toni adapt her uniform for rugged play. If he had known, the enterprising and open-minded Pollock might have contacted the sporting girls himself.

  In the middle of April, before boarding the Monarchs bus for spring training in Virginia, Toni stayed for a few days at Kansas City’s Streets Hotel in order to—at the team’s suggestion—practice with boys in the local Jackie Robinson baseball camp. She spent afternoons in warm-up drills with the teenagers, then returned to Streets for some rest and evening entertainment. Toni was familiar with Streets, having stayed there when the Clowns played the Monarchs. Like most players, she enjoyed the lively jazz scene in the hotel’s Blue Room and reacquainted herself with some of the musicians with whom she had become friendly. The 18th and Vine district was the home of jazz saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker, and the alleys behind the clubs were Bird’s early practice rooms. Connie Morgan’s younger brother, Sonny—who was starting out as a jazz musician with his own group in Philadelphia—was typical of many musicians who looked upon KC as a musical mecca.* In Kansas City, jazz and baseball were two parts of a cultural whole. “You couldn’t toss a baseball without hitting a musician,” one player said. “And you couldn’t whistle a tune without having a baseball player join in.”15 Toni loved the beat of the Blue Room and the flair of Kingfish, the locally famous bartender.

  One member of the Monarchs Toni was sure to spot at the Blue Room was her new manager, John Jordan “Buck” O’Neil. O’Neil lived permanently in Kansas City, not far from the Streets Hotel, and he loved jazz almost as much as he loved baseball. To him, the two delights “were the best inventions known to man.” O’Neil first embraced baseball as a way of escaping life in the Florida celery fields—farm work that the Sarasota native detested. There has got to be something better than this, Buck thought as he hauled boxes of celery from hot fields of muck. With the support of his parents and local teachers, Buck became a first baseman in 1934 and—as a teenager—began playing weekends with semi-pro teams around Florida. Semi-pro led to barnstorming, including time on Syd Pollock’s Ethiopian Clowns. But when Buck made it to the Monarchs in 1938, he found his home. He won the Negro American League batting title in 1946 and, after serving in the Navy during World War II, moved to managing the team in 1948. Managing a baseball team fit Buck O’Neil perfectly. He took great pleasure in studying the game, and was skilled in teaching techniques to younger players. When he once observed old Rube Foster conducting team strategy with a Meerschaum pipe, he was inspired. Foster “signaled his players and coaches with smoke rings,” O’Neil remembered. “Sm
oke rings!” Buck said he “spent a lot of time trying to figure out Rube’s system,” but he never could. O’Neil also spent enough time around players in the white leagues to admire the unique quality of black ball. There were differences, he said. White players depended on powerful home runs while black players “were fast and aggressive with lots of stealing, bunting, hit-and-run play.” They “brought speed, intelligence, unbridled aggressiveness on the basepa-ths,” he said. To those who said the Negro Leagues could not compete and that the best players were in the majors, O’Neil had a good-natured but pointed response: “Bring ’em on.” 16

  Anyone who spent time with Toni and Buck would tell you they had much in common. First there were their backgrounds and similar routes to the Negro League: caring parents, supportive teachers, and weekend, semi-pro, and barnstorming teams. They both were gifted storytellers with a deep respect for Negro League history and a hunger for remembering the past. They also were among the oldest members of the Monarchs—over thirty—the age by which most Negro Leaguers already had found their way into the majors or found their way home. But the most significant quality that made them similar was comportment. Both Buck and Toni had a way of surviving in baseball without losing their self-respect. In a profession that broke many—the months away from home, the temptations of the road, the frustrations of an unforgiving sport—they could commit to the game while maintaining their dignity. If a person at a Blue Room table looked closely at Buck, for example, he could see O’Neil having as much fun as the other men laughing and drinking around him. But if he really studied the skipper, he also would notice that the highballs Buck kept drinking never seemed to take effect and that O’Neil left Streets as sober as when he walked in. “I never did drink,” Buck confessed later. He and Kingfish had a pact: the bartender would serve Buck a tall glass filled with cracked ice and a slice of lemon, and then pour water into it. “I’d sip at that and act the fool like the other people,” Buck said. “We had a ball.”17