by Brad Snyder
Curt Flood’s inner strength came from his mother, Laura. She never feared anyone or anything—except for the Louisiana lynch mob that once tried to take her life.
Laura’s first husband, a Houston man named Ivory Ricks, worked as a supervisor at a lumber mill in De Ridder, a small southwestern Louisiana mill town north of Lake Charles. A black supervisor did not sit well with the white workers in De Ridder in 1915, or their wives.
One of the white wives, who ran the lumber mill’s company store, frequently took out her husband’s frustrations at reporting to a black man on Laura. But one afternoon in the store, the woman pushed Laura too far.
“Laura,” the woman said, “I have been observing you, and you look like a clean nigger. I am going to let you wash my clothes.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Laura replied. “I wash my own clothes, but I wouldn’t touch yours.”
The woman slapped Laura. Laura beat her to a pulp. A black man might supervise white men in Louisiana in 1915, but no black person could lay a hand on a white woman and live to tell about it. The word was out: Laura Ricks was going to be lynched.
With the mill workers loyal to Ivory Ricks holding off the mob by guarding his family’s home, Laura and Ivory packed up the family’s belongings, received an armed escort to the train station, and escaped unharmed to Houston. They soon moved to Oakland, California. By 1920, Laura had divorced Ricks. He won custody of their two children, but she took them anyway.
Laura and her children occasionally took the train from Oakland to De Quincy, Louisiana, a town 30 miles south of De Ridder where her parents lived. Laura would disembark in Houston, while her children continued to De Quincy to see their grandparents. Her children thought that she stayed in Houston because she liked the big-city nightlife. They were unaware of Laura’s lingering fear of returning home to Louisiana and being lynched.
During one of those nights in Houston, a young piano player spotted Laura at a blues club. With her caramel complexion, bobbed hair, and long pants, Laura stood out among other African-American women during the mid-1920s. She told the man eight years her junior that she was from Oakland, but she refused to give him her address or phone number.
Herman Flood left his native Texas and his job as a cook at a local drugstore and followed Laura to Oakland. He found a job there as a waiter on the ferry, figuring that one afternoon she would have to ride the ferry from Oakland to San Francisco (the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was not built until 1936). Though it took nearly a year, they finally met again on the ferry, and in 1928 they were married.
Herman and Laura Flood moved back to Houston in 1931 before their oldest son, Herman Jr., was born. Herman Sr. worked two jobs in Houston, as a hospital orderly and a janitor at a church, but he never saw a dime of his paychecks. He always handed them over to Laura, who had opened her own beauty salon. She ran the house. She also decided when they were going to move. They moved frequently. Anytime Laura disliked her home, her neighborhood, or one of her neighbors, she quickly packed up all her family’s belongings. Rickie, Laura’s daughter from her first marriage, would come home from school and find an address on the door with a three-word note: “We have moved.”
Herman and Laura had four children of their own. Herman Jr. was born in 1931, followed by Barbara two years later and Carl a year after her. Then came the baby.
Curtis Charles Flood was born in Houston on January 18, 1938, in the black section of Jefferson Davis Hospital. It did not take him long to take to baseball. One afternoon on Elgin Street, Laura told Herman Jr. to take the baby for a walk. After they had been gone for some time, Rickie went looking for her younger brothers. She was astonished at what she saw on the local playground: Curt was up at bat. Although only 18 or 19 months old, he insisted on swinging a small wooden bat that was almost as big as he was.
The South had no impact on Curt’s childhood. Just as Jackie Robinson’s family had moved from Cairo, Georgia, to Pasadena, California, when Robinson was a toddler, Curt was two years old when his family left Houston for good for Oakland.
The Floods, like so many other black families, settled in West Oakland. They lived in a two-story white wooden house at 2839 Helen Street. Rickie and her husband, Alvin Riley, lived on the first floor. Herman and Laura slept in one of the two upstairs rooms. In the children’s room, Herman Jr. and Curt shared one bunk bed, and Barbara and Carl shared the other.
Jobs were so plentiful in Oakland during World War II that the San Francisco Chronicle referred to it as a “Second Gold Rush.” Herman initially found a job as a dockworker and later at a military installation in Vallejo. After the war, he worked 60-hour shifts as a janitor at Fairmont Hospital. On weekends, he played Texas-style blues guitar in Oakland’s clubs.
At home, Laura worked as a seamstress and served as the family disciplinarian. She also opened a café in the back of a local tavern called the 1430 Club. She served Creole food from her native Louisiana and always left an open seat at the far end of the café’s lunch counter. People too poor to afford a meal knew that they could sit in that empty seat, satisfy their hunger, and still preserve their dignity.
Herman taught his children to love art and music. Herman Jr. played the trumpet. Young Curt learned to play the piano by ear. Both Curt and Carl loved to draw. The Floods may have been poor, but Herman and Laura always had enough money for bowls of fresh fruit to fill their children’s empty stomachs and for pencils and sketch pads to feed their dreams and imaginations. Curt credited his parents with teaching him “righteousness and fairness.”
West Oakland was a working-class black community that produced Congressman Ron Dellums, the Pointer Sisters, basketball players Bill Russell and Paul Silas, and scores of baseball players, including Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson, and Curt Flood. The Floods and many other West Oakland parents moved there from the South in search of jobs and to give their children better lives.
The line between trouble and triumph in West Oakland was a thin one. Curt and Carl initially stayed out of trouble by playing baseball at Poplar Park, only a few blocks from their home. Carl pitched, and Curt caught. Together they played on Police Athletic League teams and rode to the games in the back of a paddy wagon. Carl, however, began to get into real trouble, and Curt started to follow him.
Curt wanted so badly to join his older brother, who had been locked up in juvenile detention, that he stole a truck from the local sawdust mill. Even though his feet could not reach the pedals, he started the truck and drove it for two blocks before plowing it into a parked car. Curt had never seen his father so angry or his mother so disappointed as when they had to bail their two youngest children out of jail on the same day. While trouble would always find Carl, Curt vowed never to get into trouble again.
Curt’s ticket out was a man named George Powles (pronounced Poles). A failed outfielder with the Pacific Coast League’s San Francisco Seals, Powles took a temporary position in 1931 with the Oakland Recreation Department. He enrolled at San Francisco State and received his teaching certificate in 1936, but was unable to find a teaching job. He worked at a brewery, an oil refinery, and a creamery to support his family. In his spare time, he coached baseball.
Powles worked one summer as the playground director at Poplar Park and took an instant liking to nine-year-old Curt. Powles arranged for Curt and Carl to play on his Junior’s Sweet Shop midget league team. The two brothers were headed in different directions. Carl indulged in petty crime; Curt gravitated to art and athletics, mostly playing baseball for Powles. Competing against boys two to three years older than he was, Curt played catcher until he came home one afternoon with a badly bruised wrist. He had been hit by the bat while catching. Laura Flood had a fit. She liked Powles, knew that he kept her children off the streets, and did not mind Curt playing with older boys. But she insisted that Powles move her baby boy out from behind home plate. He agreed. They never had any problems after that day.
It was hard not to like Powles. He, his wif
e, Winifred, and their two children lived on 60th Street, two blocks from two baseball fields at North Oakland’s Bushrod Park. He provided the boys at Bushrod with bats and balls so they could play baseball from sunrise to sundown. A stocky, curly-haired man with an open face, large jowls, and prominent eyebrows, he often pitched for both teams during the course of their nine-inning sandlot games.
Powles turned his family’s home into a clubhouse. Winifred served cookies, cakes, pies, and ice cream. She talked with the boys about their girlfriends. George talked baseball, endlessly plotting strategy on a green chalkboard that folded up like a briefcase. He taught them card games such as bridge, and he taught them about life. Curt vividly recalled George chastising him on one occasion: “Don’t give somebody a dead fish to shake.” It was a lesson that Curt never forgot. For many black children from working-class families, it was their first time inside a white person’s home. Powles made them feel at ease.
Powles worked with black children for much of his life. In 1943, he finally landed a teaching job, at predominantly black Herbert Hoover Junior High School. After serving in the Battle of the Bulge, he returned to Hoover before transferring in 1947 to predominantly black McClymonds High School. Most whites hated teaching at McClymonds. Powles, however, was not like most teachers. As the basketball coach, he rescued a tall, gangly, and uncoordinated sophomore whose mother had died when he was 12 and who spent his evenings cooking dinner for his father. Powles made him the 16th man on the junior varsity basketball team (where he shared a uniform with the 15th man). “By that one gesture,” Bill Russell wrote, “I believe that man saved me from becoming a juvenile delinquent.”
In 1947, the same year Powles transferred to McClymonds, Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier. For aspiring young ballplayers like Flood, Robinson symbolized hope. For southern black families in West Oakland, Robinson symbolized success. The Georgia-born Robinson had grown up in California, starred in football, basketball, baseball, and track at UCLA, and served as an army lieutenant. He had been acquitted during a 1944 court-martial for refusing to move to the back of a bus at Camp Hood, Texas. His signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers made Robinson a hero nationally and in the Flood household. “There was a feeling of enormous pride in someone of my color finally doing something that had the nation’s ear,” Curt said. “Everyone was talking about Jackie Robinson, the first black athlete to play Major League Baseball, and, daily, my father would get the newspapers to see what Jackie was doing. It was a great deal of pride.”
Powles helped the next generation of black athletes to take advantage of Robinson’s success. He sent 17 players, most of whom were black, from McClymonds and his Captain Bill Erwin Post 337 American Legion teams to the major leagues. The best was a fatherless, painfully shy eighth-grader on Powles’s 1950 Bill Erwin team also named Robinson. Frank Robinson was so terrified about being away from home for the first time during the 1950 American Legion playoffs in Arizona and Nebraska that doctors initially diagnosed his nervous stomach as acute appendicitis. He completely clammed up around adults, except for Powles, who brought Robinson out of his shell by talking baseball. “He was terrific on the fundamentals, but he always went a step beyond them,” Robinson said. “Powles taught us how to think base-ball.” Robinson played on the second of Powles’s back-to-back American Legion national championship teams. During Robinson’s senior year at McClymonds, the star third baseman lost the team batting title to Flood, a scrawny sophomore center fielder. Flood hit .429 to Robinson’s .424.
Neither Flood nor Robinson played at McClymonds with Powles’s other future star, Vada Pinson. Two years behind Flood, Pinson was more interested in music at that time than baseball. Powles told Pinson, a first baseman/pitcher in high school, to choose between “the trumpet or the bat.” Pinson picked baseball and went on to become a fleet major league outfielder for 18 seasons, finishing his career with 2,757 hits.
Curt did not need the same type of prodding from Powles. He brimmed with self-confidence and charmed adults with his artistic ability and extroverted personality. In 1949 and 1950, he served as the Bill Erwin American Legion team’s mascot, bat boy, and chief crowd pleaser. He traveled with the team throughout California, warming up pitchers, catching batting practice, and wowing players and spectators with his spectacular catches in the outfield. He was 11 years old in 1949 and weighed 105 pounds. “We’d put on a little show with him, because the customers couldn’t help noticing the little guy and how clever he was,” Powles told Sports Illustrated in 1968. By the time Flood reached McClymonds a few years later, the other players recognized that he and Powles shared a special bond. “George was the coach, and Curt was his pet,” recalled Jesse Gonder, a catcher for eight major league seasons. “Curt was more mature than any of us at his age.”
Curt made extra money on Saturdays and during school vacations lettering signs, moving furniture, and setting up window displays for a downtown Oakland furniture store called E. Bercovich and Sons. A woman walked into the store one afternoon and asked Sam Bercovich, “Where is your Negro salesman who helped me pick out a piece of furniture?”
“We don’t have a Negro salesman,” Bercovich replied.
Bercovich realized that the woman was referring to Curt, who knew nothing about furniture but everything about dealing with people. When Curt was 15 or 16 years old, he drew a pen-and-ink portrait of Bercovich. Beneath the portrait, Curt wrote: “To Sam, Your Friend Always, Curt.” It still hangs in Bercovich’s Bay Area home.
If Flood had two baseball benefactors, the first was Powles, and the second was Bercovich, whose family’s furniture store sponsored decades of Oakland’s youth baseball teams. The biggest problem Powles and Bercovich faced was how to keep Curt on their Bill Erwin team. The Oakland high schools were divided among nearly a dozen American Legion teams. Powles’s McClymonds students had to play for the Colonel Young Post, whereas his Bill Erwin team could draw players only from Oakland Tech and St. Elizabeth’s. Powles initially pulled the same trick with Curt that he had used with Frank Robinson: Curt joined the Bill Erwin team at age 14 before he entered the 10th grade at McClymonds. Even at 14, Curt led Bill Erwin in hitting.
Powles and Bercovich hatched a plan. They persuaded Curt to transfer schools by moving in with his older sister, Barbara. Bercovich bought Curt a new $8 bicycle so that he could get from Barbara’s house to his new school, baseball games, and the furniture store. The mother of twin boys, Barbara was separated from her husband, John Henry Johnson, a Hall of Fame running back with the San Francisco 49ers and Pittsburgh Steelers, among other teams. Barbara and Curt became extremely close after Curt and Carl had begun to go in different directions. Curt moved into her North Oakland home ostensibly to look after her young children while she worked at night, but mostly so that he could play for the Bill Erwin team by attending Oakland Technical High School.
The same year Curt enrolled at Oakland Tech, the Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education . In Oakland, southern-style segregation did not exist. Oakland was a multiethnic, multiracial city of blacks and whites, Italians and Portuguese, Mexicans and Japanese. “I recall little discussion and no excitement in 1954, when the Supreme Court supposedly outlawed the segregation of schools,” Curt said. McClymonds was almost all black. Oakland Tech was 75 percent white. Curt’s transition, however, was a seamless one. He thrived in Tech’s art classes, designed sets for school plays, and painted banners for school assemblies. He joined the Art Club. He “fooled around, like most kids” but described himself as “an above-average student.”
Flood’s dream of leading Powles’s Bill Erwin teams to glory came true. The 1955 team captured the American Legion state championship. As members of one of the state’s few integrated teams, the players were as close as brothers. They won the state championship despite enduring racial slights along the way, such as being excluded from the team cafeteria at the state playoffs in Fresno and hearing racist catcalls directed at Flo
od during the regional playoffs in Lodi. In 27 Legion games that season, Flood hit .620 with 12 doubles, 5 triples, and 9 home runs. Despite his small size, he possessed strong hands and wrists and surprised other boys with his power. He confirmed his major league potential each winter as a member of the Bercovich-sponsored, Powles-coached semipro team in the Alameda Winter League. Major and minor leaguers from the Bay Area would stay in shape during the offseason by playing in that league. At age 15, Flood led his winter league team in hitting.
Because of his small size, scouts did not consider Flood a first-rate prospect. He was only 5 feet 7 and 140 pounds in high school, and eventually topped out at 5 feet 9 and 165. He had been prepared for the disappointment. A few years earlier, Powles had sat him down for a talk. He explained to Curt that a professional baseball career was possible, but that most scouts would write him off as too small.
One scout willing to overlook Flood’s size was the Cincinnati Reds’ West Coast scout, Bobby Mattick. Mattick liked Flood’s instincts at the plate and in center field. He found Flood easier to talk to than Robinson and Pinson. For Mattick, one thing stood out about Flood: “He had immense pride as a kid.”
An infielder with the Cubs and Reds from 1938 to 1942 and the son of a former major leaguer and minor league team owner, Mattick spent much of his eight-decade career in the game as a scout in Oakland. Hot after Robinson and the city’s other young black players, Mattick became a fixture at Powles’s home with his dry wit and big, smelly cigars. Recognizing that Powles could make or break him in the Bay Area, Mattick persuaded Reds general manager Gabe Paul to put Powles on the team payroll as a bird-dog scout. Powles was Mattick’s liaison to the city’s top baseball prospects. Beginning with Robinson, the best black players from West Oakland signed away their baseball lives to Mattick and the Reds for a few thousand dollars apiece. Big bonuses went almost exclusively to white prospects. There was no other way into the system. “Everybody signed with him,” outfielder Joe Gaines recalled. “If there were 30 guys in the area that signed, 25 of them signed with Cincinnati.”
