At my “mature” age, it’s tough to remember what happened last week, much less decades and decades (and decades) ago.
But when I turned on the TV to ESPN a couple of weeks ago, the team name and the powder blue uniforms took me back.
Wayyyy back. Little League back.
“Eastbank,” the jerseys of the Louisiana team read.
For the first time ever, the team from the East Bank (of the Mississippi River) of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans had defeated a Texas squad to advance to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa.
Fifty-eight years ago – yep, when dinosaurs roamed the infields – our Eastbank team failed to make it out of our Louisiana sectional. We couldn’t defeat the juggernaut from, I think, Jeanerette, or maybe it was Patterson (population 6,112).
Oh, well.
It had been a long, Cubs-like dry spell to reach Williamsport ever since.
Twice we’ve had teams from the DFW area advance to the Little League World Series. The 2002 Westside Little League in Fort Worth stole hearts and made it all the way to the U.S. semifinals. The 1960 North East Optimist (NEO) team, based in Haltom City, went even further, losing in the World Series championship game.
Indulge me, therefore, if my attention and my heart were on the kids from River Ridge, La., Saturday, as they played for the U.S. title. They have been wearing bright orange in Williamsport, as champs of the Southwest region. Even in those unfamiliar colors, they have been a special – and personal — joy to watch.
Sadly, my old Little League chapter doesn’t exist anymore. The 7th Ward Little League, based in the New Orleans suburb of Jefferson, had its field of dreams on diamonds that were less than three miles from where the River Ridge kids of today play.
The Williamsport tournament is for youngsters between the ages of 10 and 12. When we were 12, our home field was a makeshift diamond at the local junior high.
We were pawns of politics and Deep South racism, and we didn’t realize it.
Have you ever purchased a mail-order King Cake for Mardi Gras from the great Haydel’s Bakery? You should.
Haydel’s, originally just a window donut shop, was directly across the street from our ballpark.
Save for the prevailing scent of hot glazed donuts, the baseball field was unremarkable – except for what sat beyond the center field fence. There, in a clearing in the wooded area at the edge of the junior high property, lay an immaculate, brand-new, duplicate baseball diamond for boys of our same age.
Huh?
We thought it was odd. But at 12 years old, living in the Deep South, we weren’t curious enough to ask questions like that.
Our league’s parents had retro-fitted our 60-foot base paths inside the junior high’s 90-foot diamond. The outfield wall was one of those old-time wooden storm fences that were rolled and unrolled for games. Yes, it sagged in some spots.
By vivid contrast, the new neighboring field had a real pitchers mound, a red-dirt infield and a permanent wooden wall spanning the outfield. A PA system announced each batter.
This was Dixie Boys Baseball, we were told. The league was formed and administered by the parish’s local playground, which no longer wanted to be affiliated with Little League Baseball.
Little League Baseball was founded in 1939. Its first Little League World Series was played in 1947.
In 1960, there was no internet, no cable TV, to inform us of the unsavory history that had led to the beautiful new ballpark in the clearing beyond our makeshift outfield fence. Our history books made no mention of the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars.
In 1955, the same year that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus, and one year following the Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education that ruled racial segregation in public schools as unconstitutional, the Cannon Street YMCA in Charleston, S.C., organized a Little League chapter with four teams.
Four teams of 10- to 12-year-old African-American kids.
When the regular season was over, the Cannon Street league selected its all-stars and announced its intention to compete in the city tournament. But as writer Gene Sapakoff recalls eloquently in a 1995 Sports Illustrated article, they were destined to be “12-year-olds drafted into a baseball civil war.”
The state director of Little League, Danny Jones, announced that there would be no city tournament in Charleston because “blacks and whites simply aren’t supposed to mix.”
Upon hearing Jones’ decision, all 61 other leagues in South Carolina withdrew from the state tournament, causing the Cannon Street team to be declared state champion by default.
A week later, organizers of the Little League regional tournament in Rome, Ga. – which was to match eight Deep South state champions for the right to go to Williamsport – announced that they were refusing to let the Cannon Street YMCA compete because the team had advanced by forfeit.
Little League national directors in Williamsport, backed into a corner by their own rule book, capitulated and chose not to fight the Georgia group’s decision.
Instead, they invited the Cannon Street all-stars to be their guests and sit in the stands in Williamsport.
As Sapakoff wrote, “Before one of the games Cannon Street’s all-stars were introduced by the public address announcer, and as the boys stood to acknowledge the cheers, they heard a chant: ‘Let them play! Let them play!’”
The chant became a roar. But that was as close as the South Carolina kids got to the field.
Back home, Danny Jones, the bigot who first banned Cannon Street, wasn’t finished. Within a year, he had signed up 537 teams in 122 leagues to play all-white baseball for that next season.
Dixie Youth Baseball, as it became known, would grow to 390 leagues in eight southern states. Its official rule book made Jones’ intentions quite clear:
“The organizers hereof are of the opinion it is for the best interest of all concerned that this program be on a racially segregated basis; they believe that mixed teams and competition between the races would create regrettable conditions and destroy the harmony and tranquility which now exists.”
The beautiful, new little ballpark in the clearing beyond the center field fence, therefore, was all-white Dixie Youth Baseball. They were our friends and classmates and, in some cases, our teammates from the season before.
But naively, sheltered from our parents’ politics, we had no idea that, in effect, our Little League had been kicked out of our parish’s public recreation system – and off its playground — for fear that we might sign up a black player.
Our 7th Ward Little League soldiered on, in large part thanks to land donated by the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad in the shadow of the rusting Huey P. Long Bridge, which allowed our parents to build a new diamond.
But it’s long gone now. For me, just a memory, until I saw the powder blue uniforms – the same color that our league’s all-stars wore – and the word “Eastbank” on TV. My old neighborhood now sits within the boundaries of the River Ridge league.
Our team in 1961 was not pioneers. We broke no color barriers, though we did have a terrific pitcher named Huey Tewis, who was a Seventh-Day Adventist, which meant he couldn’t pitch from Friday night to sunset on Saturday. At the time, that seemed progressive enough.
It was years later when we finally realized why there were two leagues, identical in every respect, except for a bigoted rule book.
Like a lot of kids, my Little League memories tend to dwell, instead, on the sweeter ones. My first coach, the uncannily patient Frank Clew. The kindness of our team’s sponsor, Harry J. Spiro Realty, who bought us all nifty blue and red jackets. And if I may humbly add, there was a no-hitter I threw as a 12-year-old, after which my Uncle Buck took me across the street and treated me to a Haydel’s glazed donut.
Huey Tewis, the internet tells me, is now Dr. Tewis, an anesthesiologist in Cape Girardeau, Mo.
I hadn’t thought of him in years, until I saw the “Eastbank” jerseys with the powder blue trim.
Thank you, River Ridge boys, for stealing my heart these few weeks and for rekindling the memories. I know you would have crushed those bullies from Jeanerette.
