by John Holway
I’ve never been out to the new park in St. Louis, I don’t have time. I used to get a pass to Sportsman’s Park, but since I got old, my balance is a little bad, I can’t protect myself in a crowd, I can’t walk up a flight of steps without something to hold on to, so I avoid crowds.
These young ballplayers, they got it easy. You know, we went to Kansas City to play in ’65. I used to dress in that same clubhouse. They’d enlarged it, and you know what those ballplayers had in there? They had free access to all the soda, milk, beer and everything. There are two rubbing tables in there, just everything. And the manager has his own office in the clubhouse. We never had anything like that. If a man can’t play ball now, I don’t know what’s wrong with him. Two or three trainers, and they still can’t stay in there and pitch nine innings. And they’re getting all the breaks in the world.
I was out there for a reunion, an old-timers’ game. A park full of people. They say Charlie Finley’s no good, but I admire him. I’ve never seen anybody else do that. Bell and I went up, we stopped at the best hotel in town and had a lot of fun. Finley paid all our expenses. I told them, “I got to have more expense money.” They said: “Oh, that Drake. He hasn’t changed a bit!”
Bill “Plunk” Drake
Brown’s Tennessee Rats, 1914. Bill Drake is fourth from the left in the back row.
Bill Drake is far right in photo from 1916 in Brinsmade, North Dakota
Dave Malarcher
Andrew “Rube” Foster
Crush Holloway
Crush Holloway
Chapter 3
DAVID MALARCHER
Scholarly, soft-spoken David Malarcher has been too long overlooked as one of the giants of black baseball. He was perhaps the finest third baseman of his day just before and after World War I—and he went on to write a record as manager that rivaled if not surpassed that of his illustrious mentor, Rube Foster. His players adored him, and even today, when old-timers gather to trade stories, Malarcher is deferred to as the dean of them all.
“He was a good man, a very good man,” says outfielder George Sweatt, who, like Malarcher, was college educated in an era when many ballplayers bordered on illiteracy. “He was more the quiet type. What I liked about him, he was a gentleman at all times. Dave didn’t carouse around like the rest of the ballplayers.”
“He was a very intelligent man,” agrees pitcher Webster McDonald. “Used to make us go to church Sunday mornings, wherever we were. A very fine man.”
Malarcher’s career resembled that of his white contemporary, Bucky Harris, the good-field, no-hit, boy wonder manager who won pennants for the old Washington Senators, 1925-26.
Malarcher was even more successful as a manager. In his nine years at the head of the American Giants, he led them to the play-offs six times; to the league championship four times; and to the black world championship twice, the only years the black World Series were held while he was manager—1926 and 1927.
“Best manager I ever saw? Malarcher!” declares Alex Radcliff, who played under him in Chicago. “Because he was an intelligent man. And understanding. If you made a great catch or a great hit, he would come up and shake your hand, congratulate you, make you feel good. He was in the ballplayers’ corner. He didn’t let the owners of the team abuse the ballplayers. If he thought you needed a raise, he’d ask for you. Incidentally, I think that’s why he quit managing. Because we wanted a raise—the ballplayers. He said to me, ‘I’m giving it up because I don’t like riding the buses all night.’ But I couldn’t see that. I think he did it because of us.
“He won so many one-run ball games with inside baseball. He said he got it from ‘Rube Foster’s School.’ I asked him one day, I said, ‘To what do you attribute your success as a manager?’ And he said: ‘I went to Rube Foster’s School.’ ”
When I met Malarcher in his neat brick home in Chicago in 1970, he was well over seventy-five, yet as trim as he had been in his playing days. He could still touch his toes without bending his knees. We talked in his study, surrounded by books ranging from Emerson and Shakespeare to Zen Buddhism. With sparkling eyes and a velvet voice, he recalled a unique American life and revealed why his players almost venerated him.
David Malarcher Speaks ...
I had the two greatest teachers, Rube Foster and C. I. Taylor, the two greatest men ever to manage. I learned from C.I. how to put a ball club in condition. And I learned from Rube how to put them in condition and then how to direct them, which makes me know that Rube was the greater of the two. Rube was a master, he was a master. After I became manager I used to win so many ball games the fans would say to me, “You’re a greater manager than Rube.” You know what I said? “I’m just doing what the master taught me.”
I never shall forget the first time I saw Rube Foster. His team, the American Giants, came down to New Orleans in 1915 to play against the Eagles, the semipro team I played with. I never saw such a well-equipped ball club in my life! I was astounded. Every day they came out in a different set of beautiful uniforms, all kinds of bats and balls, all the best kinds of equipment.
I was born in Whitehall, Louisiana, October 18, 1894. That’s a long time ago, a long, long time ago. I was born right under the Mississippi River levee, about fifty-seven miles from New Orleans and thirty to thirty-five miles from Baton Rouge, right on the river road, as we call it, Route 61.
This is my scrapbook. I got it in France in World War I. A kind French family gave it to me. I call it “A Treasury of the Beautiful.” This is my mother; these are my sisters. I had seven sisters and three brothers. I was the youngest. My mother educated all of her children to some degree. They all got some education.
My mother was born in slavery. She was just a girl in the Civil War, and after that she told us she worked in the homes of the rich plantation owners. She never worked in the fields. She told me she learned to read and write from the white children she nursed. It gave her a fine background. She became a midwife and delivered many white babies up and down the river. I believe there are grown-ups down there now that might have been delivered by my mother.
My father worked at this big plantation, Charboné. They were very kind white people. Most of them were French people, Catholics. My father was the leading worker there. He worked digging ditches, planting the sugarcane and harvesting it. As little boys, my brother and I took food to him on the weekends. And when he got paid he’d take us to the big white general store and set us up on the counter, and nothing was said about it.
My family attended a church that my grandmother was one of the founders of. One of my nephews is minister there now. And we were in church every Sunday, of course. My family came under the influence of these educated ministers, so my family has always striven for education.
When I was about five or six years old my mother and father bought another home at Union, Louisiana, up the road on the Mississippi, right on the levee, to be near the country school. My sister Cathy had gone down to New Orleans to a school and came back and opened a private school right in my own house. That was the first school I attended.
It was a pleasant life. Oh yes, it was very, very pleasant. I played baseball, tops, marbles, ran in the woods, looked for rattlesnakes, swam in the Mississippi—all of the kids just lived in the river. We had a ball. It was a wonderful life.
The first baseball team I played on was down in the country, called the Baby T’s. I’m sure we were very young, because that was prior to 1907. I was a catcher in those times. We played all around in the country there. And there were other boys’ teams, maybe down the road, up the road. We used to go across the Mississippi to play against the small boys’ team. Just a lot of baseball. My oldest brother played on the men’s team, and my brother just older than I played on the big boys’ team, and I was on the little boys’ team. So we played baseball all our lives.
They had some fine players. There was a team in New Orleans called the Eclipse, which was a men’s team, and there was another men’s team at Donald
sonville, Louisiana, called the Joneses. They played all up and down Louisiana, all up and down the river. And at my home there was a team called the Pelicans; my oldest brother played on the Pelicans. There was another team at a plantation just about ten miles up the road called the Black Rappers. And there was another team called the Blue Rappers.
Dave Malarcher
All these white boys had baseball teams too, and they knew us very well because my mother worked in their homes. Of course we didn’t socialize with the whites, but there was never any trouble that put fear into us like certain places in Mississippi where white people were mean to Negroes. That made a difference, it made a difference in your life. I remember once after I was grown I made a trip down to see my mother in the country. One of these white boys about my age knew about me up here in Chicago playing baseball, and when he saw me on the road he ran to me to shake my hand. All of a sudden it occurred to him, the difference between us, and he just stood there and smiled and laughed, he was so glad to see me.
When you come up among kind white people, where you didn’t have all these problems, you don’t feel any different. I never think of myself as colored. I mean, I’m in business here in Chicago, I’m a real estate broker, and when I go down to the Chicago Title and Trust Company, they accept you as a good broker. I have never had the feeling that Negroes have—that people think Negroes have. It never bothered me, not a bit, not in my life!
Now I have felt as free all of my life as I feel now. And I’ve never worried about it like people think most Negroes worry about the problem. I went to good schools, had white teachers from the North. That is where they say Negro schools were founded—by whites in the North, from the churches, you know. Methodist churches, Congregational churches, churches that came down there right after the Civil War. They founded these associations to work for the education of the Negro. And they founded New Orleans University and Strait College and Talladega and all of the other great Negro schools. They were white, and of course they had problems with the white people, because they were sort of ostracized. But because we associated with them, we had no feeling of being inferior. They treated us as equals.
I went to New Orleans University in 1907. I was in grade school then. For a number of summers I’d come home and work in the rice fields with the other boys. And I was so strong that when I went to New Orleans the city boys didn’t have a chance against me in athletics. It was because of that country upbringing.
In New Orleans I worked for a rich white family. I worked in the mornings and afternoons cleaning the yard, a yardman as we called it. I was living on the place, had all the food I could eat, and in the summer they’d give me clothes. Most boys who went to college in those days lived right out in the rich neighborhood, with the rich white people. I was making $2.50 a week, but with food and clothing and a place to stay, and doctors’ bills if necessary, that kept me in school.
Strait College and New Orleans University were founded about 1869, one by the Methodist Church and one by the Congregational Church. They operated all through those years, for seventy years, and then they merged to form Dillard University.
That’s where I met my wife. These are all pictures of my wife down through the years. Here’s her family. You can see they were proud, well-educated people. She had a beautiful voice, she could have been an opera singer. Gorgeous voice. Everybody that heard her would tell you this. She was a great church worker, taught Sunday school and taught in the public school. Here’s a picture of her quartet group. They traveled in the summer for Strait University all through the North.
Of course I played ball at school, from 1913 to 1916. Here’s a book with the history of New Orleans University. It says, “Between 1913 and 1916 the baseball team lost not a single game.” That’s right. “The success was due to two stars, David Malarcher and Robert Williams, who acted as coaches.” It says my nickname was Gentleman Dave: “Malarcher went directly from the campus into professional baseball in Indianapolis.”
C. I. Taylor’s Indianapolis ABC’s had been to Cuba during the winter of 1915 and ’16, and they barnstormed back through New Orleans and played against my city team, the Eagles. Their second baseman, Bingo DeMoss, had left, and the ABC’s needed a second baseman. They saw me play and offered me a job. When C.I. offered me $50 a month, that was a lot of money. I could give my mother half and still get along. So I went with him that summer, and went to school in the winter.
When I first came to Indianapolis, we played in the old (white) Federal League park. The Federal League had disbanded, as you know. It was a big park, a good playing field and a good big grandstand. Later on they tore that down and we played in the American Association team’s park, Wylie Field. We played a lot of games there.
I made three plays in my career when the fans came out and carried me around on their shoulders. One was in Detroit, one was in Chicago and one was in California. The game in Detroit was my first year, 1916. I was playing outfield. If you ever go to Detroit, if you look in the Detroit Free Press in 1916, you will probably find it in the record. We were barnstorming against the American Giants, and we played in Detroit in Navin Field, the Tigers’ park. Bruce Petway was the guy that hit the ball, one of those long drives, a hard, long, high fly. I guess I nearly ran a mile. I finally reached up and caught it with one hand, my left hand, over my right shoulder. We played sixteen innings 1–1 and it was called on account of darkness. We had white umpires, and they made quite a few mistakes, we thought. We didn’t argue with them, but after the game they came in and said, “Definitely, fellows, we made some mistakes, but we have never seen this kind of baseball before.” The next morning the newspaper came out and said that if the National and American leagues could play this kind of baseball that we saw today, they would have to enlarge their seating capacity. That is in the record.
Now I kept that clipping for a long time. Maybe about eight or ten years ago I gave it to a friend, a reporter. He was going to make use of it, because one time we played in an old-timers’ game at Cubs Park. The Old-Timers’ Association took us all in. When they took Negroes in the major leagues, they took us in the Old-Timers’ Association. So they invited us out as a group, and this particular year we played an old-timers’ game. They wanted to write us up, you know, publicize the game, and the reporter came out to ask me about my records. I told him about this day, and he said, “You know, that’s significant, what that paper said. You know what it meant? That reporter back there was telling the American and National leagues then that they should put Negroes in the major leagues.” “If the American and National leagues could play this kind of ball, they would have to enlarge their seating capacity.” But nothing, of course, was done. The white fans missed all that. They missed it.
Another of the three plays during my career when the fans came out and carried me around on their shoulders was in Chicago. We were playing the Kansas City Monarchs, and I think they had the bases loaded in the ninth inning with Big T. J. Young up, a good hitter, a catcher. He hit a line drive—wheee—over my head, breaking to my right. I had to jump and reach over and get it. That was the end of the ball game, and the people came out of the grandstands and got me and carried me around. It was a thrill. Many people say, in cases like that, “Well, it was an accident.” But it wasn’t an accident. You see, I had to be thinking, I had to be fast and I had to know what I was doing. I had to go up and I had not only to put my hand up, I had to reach over my head. I was thinking, it wasn’t an accident.
The third great catch I made, I was playing shortstop in California, one of those games against the major leaguers. We had been sent for to come out and boost the Los Angeles White Sox, a colored team, to play against those big leaguers. Well, the ball was hit over second base, and I had to go way back and around, circle the ball and toss it back this way, underhanded and backwards to second base, and it was a double play.
Well, in 1917 and 1918 they were calling me the best third baseman in the world. Another time I raised a lot of cain
was when we were playing the Cubans in 1918 in Kokomo. This was a twilight game at Kokomo, and you know there are very few colored people in Kokomo. Just masses of white people out there, and they loved the ABC’s. C.I. loved to win in Kokomo; that was his territory. We were playing the Cuban Stars, and it was getting late in the afternoon. They had us one run behind in the ninth, and it was getting dark. I came to bat in the ninth inning and tripled. Rodriguez was the Cubans’ catcher, kind of a proud fellow, a big tall fellow—a good catcher. Anyway, I was on third, the pitcher pitched, and I didn’t even give Rodriguez time to throw it back. When he lobbed the ball back, I went home. Safe. On the first throw back to the pitcher—he didn’t have any idea that I was going home. I took the chance, because the next guy might fly out, then we would lose the ball game. C.I. was so happy, he ran out and grabbed me and kissed me. He gave me five dollars right there on the field—five dollars was a lot of money in those days
I was drafted in 1918. I was in college then, playing baseball in the summer, but I didn’t try to get out of it: I went to war. Here’s an interesting picture; this is when we were drafted in Indianapolis. They took seven of us together. It broke up the team, really. We went in August to the war.
I was in the 309th Pioneers. Here is a picture taken Christmas Day in 1918 in St. Luce, France. See, my outfit didn’t get to the front lines. We landed in France around September or October in 1918, when the war was almost over. It just happened that we were out walking on Armistice Day and of course everybody, every Frenchman, welcomed us, and we went in and met this family. They were fine people, and here’s a picture that they made with me. This is one of the girls and this is the other daughter. And here’s a picture when they invited a couple of us soldiers up for luncheon. We had it right out in the back yard, a beautiful rose garden—lovely country, you know. This little drawing was done by one of the girls.