Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues

by John Holway

  The Crawfords. Some people call that the greatest team ever seen in Negro baseball. They’d almost have to be. They had some awful good ballplayers. When you look at the material they had on the team, it had to be a great one. During the 1934 team we had Satchel and Gibson. We had Chester Williams shortstop, John Henry Russell—Pistol Johnny Russell—was the second baseman, Jud Wilson third baseman, and Charleston the first baseman. In the outfield that year we had four outfielders. We had Vic Harris —one year, the only time he ever left the Grays. Vic was playing left field, Cool Papa Bell was playing center field, I played right field and Jimmy Crutchfield played all the way across—left field, center field or right field. Crutchfield was a real fine little man. All ballplayer, give you 100 percent. He might have weighed 130 or 135 pounds. He had a lot of guts.

  On the Grays I hit number one most of the time. On the Crawfords I hit from number one down to about number six. This was my spot. In many cases I would hit in third place, and Cool Papa Bell was the man I hit behind a lot. With Cool on base, I’d lean back in the catcher’s box. Crowd him. Now he’s got to throw around me. And I hit in front of Bell a lot. Bell was very fast. You couldn’t put a slow man in front of Bell; you had to have a man who could run. If you had a man on first base, you had to have a good fast man on, because if he didn’t go to third base on a hit, Bell might pass him, run over him. Bell has done this on other occasions. When we were playing some little team that didn’t matter much, in some little town, this is another thing we did for show. Bell hit the ball to the outfield. Whoever was on first base would let Bell pass him, and we’ve gotten away with it. Nobody would notice it. This wouldn’t be done in a game that meant anything, but this is one of the things that would be amusing. I’d like to see Cool. I haven’t seen him for years and years and years.

  Living conditions? Forget it. Conditions were terrible then. We dressed in the YMCA or what-have-you. I recall playing baseball in Zanesville, Ohio, the Middle Atlantic League team. It was probably an AA or A team. We played in their ball park, and there wasn’t a man on their team that could have won a spot on the Pittsburgh Crawfords. I don’t remember the score, it wasn’t important, but I do remember that we couldn’t change clothes or take a shower in their clubhouse. Why? We were black.

  We had to go to a rooming house, a place on Route 40 where they had a shotgun hall, a room here, a room over there. The most rooms were a dozen rooms. We asked the lady if she’d heat up some water before we had to drive to Columbus in our uniforms. We had to get the grime off. So she poured the water in the bath tub, half full, and all the players who had played that day took a bath in that one tub of water.

  Where would we eat? We ate in Columbus, 135 miles away. Why not? There wasn’t any place we could get anything to eat in Zanesville.

  If we got through playing a ball game and wanted something to eat, we had to find a place that would serve us. One time going from Jackson, Mississippi, down south to New Orleans or Alexandria, Louisiana, we played a twilight game at five o‘clock. It must have been nine or ten o’clock when we finished. We had to drive all the way to Alexandria, getting in there at four or five in the morning. We still hadn’t anything to eat. We came across a place in the mountains, a guy selling fruit at one o’clock in the morning. Don’t ask me why he was out there at that time. We stopped and got cantaloupes, melons, apples; this was our food all the way to Alexandria.

  It’s hard to believe, but it just wasn’t human. This was the kind of life we had to live. We didn’t know there was supposed to be anything different; this was the way it always was. We didn’t go off and get clubs and light a fire to the restaurant. I remember when you couldn’t buy a hamburger on the highway between Akron and Youngstown. And Gus Greenlee had his pockets bulging with money! Today they’re giving the kids too much. I can remember when you couldn’t buy it.

  But we still played baseball, and I might say we played very good baseball. And we were happy, we sang, we had fun. I guess I enjoyed that life, because I stuck with it until I got a job at thirty-three years old and went to work.

  We didn’t clown like you may think. Baseball was a living to us. Well, how on earth could you make a living at $200 a month, or $150 a month? Josh Gibson was earning $200 a month, and I was earning the same thing. Gibson hadn’t reached his height at that time. I remember when he came up to the Grays in 1930 and they picked him off a playground.

  The other day I saw Manny Sanguillen in the Pirates’ clubhouse after they lost a game. He had two bats, drumming with them. They just got beat, man! They should be talking about how did we lose the ball game and how we going to do tomorrow. They weren’t even concerned about losing the game. When we lost a game, we’d sit up practically all night discussing it.

  Why did we do that? I think I’m expressing the feelings of most ballplayers of my day. This is the way I had to keep from washing the windows in a downtown store or sweeping the floor, and these were the kinds of jobs that were out there for us. So it was better than washing the windows for $15 a week or $12 a week. That was the average salary in those days. Well, now, if I’m going to play on these teams, you got to win. And if you want to win, you got to play good. You can’t play good going into the game with everything else on your mind. The ball game is the thing that’s important now: how to win the ball game.

  In 1934 I slid into first base in Jackson, Mississippi, and tore my knee up. This put me in a position where now I can’t bunt the ball and use speed. Anybody who got me up until that year got me more or less for speed and base running. So now I had to hit. I decided that if I’m going to get on base, I’ve got to hit the ball and I’ve got to hit it safely. So this is what I did, and I learned to hit the ball then for a pretty good average. I don’t know what I hit that year, but I know I hit pretty good. I had to hit the ball. I was just spraying the ball all over the place.

  I was pitiful—according to our standards—as a base runner, except I could hit the ball. But if I hit the ball against the left-center field fence, which I could do, I was lucky if I wound up at second base. Before that time I’d have been in third base and sometimes I’d have them throwing at me at home plate.

  But in 1935 I was released to Newark, to Abe Manley. They had an idea: “He’s all washed up, he can’t run, so he’s through.” They sent me to Newark and I went to spring training with them. But I didn’t have it, and I was released about, oh, the middle of May. I was sort of disgusted: That was the end of it. I went to New York, and my thought was, I’ll just go look around and see if I can get a job. What kind of job I could get I had no idea, because I wasn’t trained.

  Webster McDonald was managing the Philadelphia Stars, and he came over to New York in a car and looked me up where we loafed around 135th Street and Lennox Avenue. He wanted me to come to Philadelphia to play with the Stars. I said, “Mac, I can’t run.”

  Old Mac, in his soft-spoken way, spent a couple or three hours just sitting around the barbershop there. He said, “I’ll tell you, Ted, I have already committed myself. I knew that you didn’t have a job, and I had a feeling that I could get you to come play with the Philadelphia Stars. I have made arrangements to release two men. We know you were getting $200 to $250 a month. I don’t think Chief [the Stars owner, Ed Bolden] is going to go that much for you, because you’re physically not in shape. But I guarantee you right this minute $150 a month. I have made arrangements to release two men in order that we can pay you that much money.” So how much were the other two getting? That’s right, about $75 a month each. So I got in the car, got my bag and a few clothes, my suit-roll and all this, and hopped in the car with the baggage.

  Before 1935 had ended, my knee was getting better. Jess Hubbard showed me how to tape my knee so I could run and it didn’t give me pain, yet I didn’t run as fast as before the accident. Jess left my kneecap open. I’d run with a stiff leg, but I could run better, without pain.

  I remember one game in Bushwick Park. Mac beat the Bushwicks 1–0 in eighteen inning
s. You know who took him off the spot in those eighteen innings? Me. It was the eighteenth inning, there was either one man on or two men on, and Mac was struggling trying to hold this tie game. The ball was hit between the center fielder and me. My thought was, “Okay, if he don’t catch it, I’m going to back him up.” But somehow the ball kept staying, and when I looked, he wasn’t getting to it, and I just leaped. When I quit falling and sliding, I had the ball in my hand. Yeah, my meat hand. This was one of the big thrills I had. You don’t plan thrills like that, they just happen.

  We played against Dizzy Dean that fall. They had Larry French, Mike Ryba, Joe Hauser, Hack Wilson. We played nine games, and I’m sure I’m correct when I say they won two games.

  I got my base hits—in fact, I got a base hit off of Dean in Philadelphia in Shibe Park, and I was real proud of it. I can remember it very well, because he had a great fast ball. I knew if he threw me the fast ball inside, I didn’t know if I would be able to get around and meet it out front or not. So I was just laying and waiting for him to get it on the outside, and I just laid it down. I hit a rope, as they call it, to left field—left center, I mean. I was proud of that.

  I know Josh hit the ball out of the park in York, because I hit one myself that night off Jim Winford of the Cards. Gibson got a solo home run, mine was with the bases loaded. Gibson hit his to right-center field. I hit mine to left-center, a line drive, one of those high types of line drive.

  In 1936 near the end of the season, a man came up from down in the tropics. He was trying to get ballplayers to go to Santo Domingo to play. I remember we played in Wilmington this particular day. This man had so much money, he’d throw the money out on the bed, and Red Parnell, our center fielder, counted out about four or five hundred dollars. The man’d say, “Here, take it, what do you want?” Parnell up and went. Satchel went down, Josh went down.

  But I just couldn’t pick up that money. It was tempting, but remember, the season wasn’t over yet. About in August, it was, and I remembered that Mac had really done me a favor. He picked me up when nobody had any need for me, I didn’t have anything to offer anybody, there was no way for me to survive, and he picked me up and said, “Here, here’s a job for you.” I was grateful for that. I just couldn’t see that I was going to jump up and go, and the Stars still had a month or six weeks to go in the season. I just couldn’t have lived with myself.

  I left baseball in 1937. I could have said, “Well, I’ll retire on Social Security.” Ballplayers didn’t have any Social Security that they could retire on, so when you get as old as me now, what do you do? Where are you going to get a job from?

  I went into the bowling game. The first Negro bowling establishment in Pennsylvania was set up here. Jack Marshall set it up. I played on the team with Jack my last two seasons in Philadelphia. So when he came here, who would he look up, naturally? He hired me as one of the workers in the place in 1941. In 1943 I bought out a quarter interest in the place, and by 1946 I had bought the entire place. Since then I’ve been in bowling right along.

  I belong to the Greater Pittsburgh Bowling Proprietors. I’m the only Negro on the board of directors, and I write a bowling column for this paper that’s printed in Philadelphia. And boy, I have made quite a contribution to the Negro in bowling, because for the last thirty years, I guess in any town you might go to, in the bowling circle they know about me.

  I have had a lot to do with the development of one of the outstanding bowlers among Negroes in the country. You would probably know of her: Louise Fulton. I developed her as a bowler. I think I did a pretty good job publicizing her ability and getting her into spots where she could create interest. She was the first Negro to go into the Women’s Professional Bowlers, and she had been, until we closed, a partner in my bowling establishment for about ten years.

  And we have gotten integration in this town in bowling back through the years without any protest. No marching and all of this business. It has just been done, and we were accepted into all bowling circles. And we have Negroes in high offices in bowling here in this town. I feel happy that I had a part in that.

  I am fortunate. I’m not really an old guy. I work for a social agency whose job is to take care of people who are down on their luck. We have quite a big operation, six offices in and around this area and in New York. We take care of unwed mothers, babies for adoption and all of this.

  So I don’t have any regrets. I would like to have earned some of this money—it would have been nice in my old age. But I can look back and say that at least I played with and against some of these boys. And to have been on either one of these two teams, the Crawfords and the Grays, is an honor in itself. And not just a sub, but to be a regular on these two teams was a real honor.

  You look back at those days, the things that we did and how we had to live, and you have to wonder how we made it to this age. I was there when we had problems, and today I’m here when things are being changed for the good of Negroes in all walks of life. I truthfully say that I’m one of the luckiest guys in the world.

  I’ll say this: I’m not bitter. I think I’m very lucky to be able to say that I played with all the great ballplayers, with and against them. This is something that is unusual. I have tried to tell myself that had I played on a team that had fewer stars, I might have got more recognition. But how am I going to stand out on a team with Gibson, Satchel, Charleston, Bell? But I say, “By golly, I’ve got to be lucky to be on a team with men like that.”

  Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe,

  Willie Stargell with Ted Page

  Ted Page

  Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe

  Tom “Pee Wee” Butts

  Radcliffe catching, Josh Gibson scoring, at the East-West game in Comiskey Park.

  Double Duty in his pitching mode.

  Chapter 9

  TED “DOUBLE DUTY” RADCLIFFE

  Of all the characters who came out of the old Negro leagues, one of the more colorful was Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe. “He could catch the first game, pitch the second—and was a terror at both of them” —that’s how ex-catcher Royal “Skink” Browning of the Indianapolis Clowns puts it.

  “He could go out and pitch that first ball game and shut you out, and go out and catch the second game and dare you to run—just defy you to run,” adds shortstop Jake Stephens. “He had to ‘cheat’ you. He didn’t have that good curve ball, but he could beat you 2–1, 1–0. Never got the recognition he should have received. In my book he was one of the greatest.”

  Everyone who knew him, however, conceded Double Duty the league lead in talking. “Radcliffe would tell some lies,” chuckles Dick Seay, ex-second baseman. “He’d have us all in stitches. He talks with a lisp, you know, and down in Mexico once he told the owner his mother died twice. He wanted to go back to Chicago and wanted a little advance, so he said his mother died. The owner said, ‘I thought you told me she died last month!’ ”

  “He loved baseball, he loved to talk it,” Stephens grins. “But I never heard Double Duty swear. He wanted to be where the women were, he might have been a lady’s man, but he was no drinker.”

  When I first met Double Duty in 1970, he was overweight, playing pinochle and smoking a big cigar in a darkened social club on Chicago’s South Side. We met again for a more leisurely chat on the sidewalk outside his apartment. He set up two folding picnic chairs under a tree, and as he talked, he let his eyes roam up and down the street at what the prayer book calls “all sorts and conditions of men” who passed before him. He frequently interrupted his monologue with an obiter dictum about this fellow who was a drug pusher or that chick who was sashaying down the sidewalk across the street. (“You got that thing shut off, don’t you?” he’d ask, nodding to the tape recorder. I obediently shut it off, thus missing some of his choicest stories.)

  My most recent meeting with Double Duty came at a baseball dinner in Baltimore in 1990, when, at the age of 88, he stole the show from the more famous white big leaguers there.
He had been recently mugged and pistol-whipped in his Chicago apartment building, but otherwise was his bubbly, cherubic self.

  Though Radcliffe has a reputation for tall tales, I have checked the stories he told me, both with other players and with newspaper files. The following story is essentially correct.

  Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe Speaks . . .

  Damon Runyon gave me that nickname. He was a great fellow. He said I was the most versatile man he’d ever seen. He saw me and Satchel Paige pitch a doubleheader in Yankee Stadium in 1932. I caught Satchel in the first game and we won it 5–0, then I pitched the second game and won it 4–0. The next day when the paper came out, Runyon wrote: “It was worth the admission price of two to see Double Duty out there in action.” So from that day on they called me “Double Duty.”

  That was 1932 with the Pittsburgh Crawfords. That was the year I won sixteen straight—and I was pitching and catching—before I lost a game.

  I remember one game against the Brooklyn Bushwicks in Ebbets Field. We played before 16,000 people, more than the Dodgers could draw. Everybody was betting a lot of money ’cause Satchel was pitching the first game, but they beat Satchel 9–5. I came back the second game and shut them out 4–0. A fellow came up named Stewart—I heard he’d bet a lot of money. He used to follow us everywhere and bet on us. He gave me $200. He told me to keep $100 and buy the boys some beer with the rest. But nobody would accept anything, so I kept the whole 200.