A Well-Paid Slave

by Brad Snyder

  Curt turned to his friends, Johnny and Marian Jorgensen, who immediately took up the fight. Marian turned her Oakland home into mission control and found the Floods a lawyer, a former congressman from Martinez, California, named Robert Condon. On October 26, Condon filed a lawsuit in Contra Costa Superior Court against Finn and the owner of the home, Constance Oliver. The lawsuit sought access to the house as well as $10,000 in punitive damages. Condon also filed a complaint with the California Fair Employment Practices Commission. Contra Costa Superior Court judge Richard E. Arnason issued Flood a temporary restraining order—after Flood put up a $1,000 bond— forbidding Finn and Oliver to rent or sell the property for the next year. The court order permitted Flood to move into the house the following day.

  Backed by the court order, 11 sheriff’s deputies, several highway patrolmen, and two representatives from the state Fair Employment Practices Commission, Curt and Beverly attempted to move into their new home at 1:30 p.m. on October 27. Approximately a dozen supportive local women and their children, along with 30 members of the media, watched. No one knew what to expect. Condon had brought along a locksmith after correctly assuming that the locks had been changed. The locksmith drilled a hole in the back door and fitted it with new locks. Not knowing who or what might be inside, the sheriff’s deputies searched every room and every kitchen cupboard before allowing the Floods to enter. As Curt and Beverly waited outside, Curt spoke with the neighbors and joshed with their children. Once it was declared safe, he gave the 30 newsmen a tour of the home. After the tour, he addressed the assembled media on his back porch with an eloquence, calm, and self-assuredness that belied the commotion of the day.

  “Yes, we thought of chucking the whole thing to avoid trouble,” he said. “But there’s a great deal of pride involved.

  “It doesn’t make any difference whether I’m a professional athlete or a Negro or whatever—I’m a human being.

  “If I have enough money to rent the house, I think I ought to have it.

  “There was a challenge to be met, and I think we met it well.”

  Flood was eventually forced to drop his lawsuit after Finn and Oliver could not be found to be served with papers and did not show up for court; the battle, however, had been won.

  “You don’t do these things if you scare easily,” Flood told the Baltimore Afro-American, “and this time I knew I was legally and morally right.”

  The housing ordeal made the front pages of the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner as well as several other Bay Area newspapers. The Washington Post wrote an editorial arguing that Flood’s housing dispute was the perfect example why Californians should vote against the referendum seeking to repeal the state’s fair housing law.

  Six women brought over a small tree for the Floods’ backyard and cooked dinners for their first two nights in the house, bringing tears to Beverly’s eyes. Several days later, two neighbors took her to the local grocery store. The men invited Flood to play golf and bridge.

  Breaking barriers, however, came with a cost. The Floods’ children endured racial taunts and got into fights. Debbie, their oldest daughter, was excluded from the local Brownie troop. Racists phoned the house and threatened the family. The police received a false report that someone had broken into the Floods’ home and stolen the furniture. Both Finn and the owner refused to cash Flood’s rent checks, much less sell him the house.

  “I have no regrets,” Flood told the Los Angeles Times in January 1965. “We’ve enjoyed living here and have met some wonderful people. The experience has been well worth all the difficulties we had at the start.”

  A few of Flood’s Oakland baseball buddies slept outside the house in a parked car that first night to make sure that nothing happened to him or his family. They were not the only ones watching. J. Edgar Hoover was watching, too. On October 30, the FBI director ordered the special agent in charge of the San Francisco office “immediately [to] obtain facts pertinent to this alleged occurrence through established police and/or other sources.” The San Francisco office had received its initial report on Flood’s housing dispute three days earlier. On November 4, Hoover received a three-page memorandum and numerous news clippings as well as several updates about Flood’s housing lawsuit. Hoover wanted the information in part because of Flood’s “recent notoriety as a player in this year’s World Series.”

  The FBI director was no friend of the civil rights movement. He appeared to be more concerned about Communist infiltration of the movement (which he was convinced of) than he was with protecting civil rights workers from white violence. In October 1963, Hoover persuaded Attorney General Robert Kennedy to approve wiretaps on Martin Luther King’s home and office because King continued to consult with advisers with alleged ties to the Communist Party. In April 1964, Hoover bugged King’s hotel rooms and later attempted to blackmail the civil rights leader about his extramarital affairs. Hoover’s interest in Flood was about as beneficial as a file with the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission.

  Flood’s interest in the civil rights movement continued during the assassinations and antiwar protests of the late 1960s. Not even the most self-absorbed major leaguer could ignore what was going on around him. Martin Luther King’s April 4, 1968, assassination delayed Opening Day. Two months later, Senator Robert Kennedy’s funeral caused the league to postpone games in New York and Washington. The New York Mets players forced the Giants to postpone that night’s game in San Francisco. Several players protested their teams’ decisions to play that Sunday on the national day of mourning for Senator Kennedy. Milt Pappas of the Reds; Dave Giusti, Rusty Staub, and Bob Aspromonte of the Astros; and Maury Wills of the Pirates refused to play. All the players were fined. A few days later, Pappas was traded; Giusti, Staub, and Aspromonte were traded after the season; Wills was left unprotected in the expansion draft.

  Flood conveyed his feelings about King’s assassination through his portrait of Dr. King. “When something happens like that your feeling is what can you do and generally you can’t do anything,” he said. “But I feel we owe this family a great deal, and I feel this is my small step in the right direction.” A St. Louis calendar company had asked him to paint the portrait. Flood hesitated because he did not want to tarnish the memory of a man he had met a few times and had admired so deeply. What started out as a small commercial project became a standard part of his biography. The company reproduced over a million copies of the portrait. That fall, Coretta Scott King received the original work during an Atlanta benefit concert honoring Dr. King. The audience received 8-by-10 color reproductions. Flood was not there for the presentation; he was playing in a postseason tour of Japan with his Cardinals teammates. But he took full credit for the portrait, which he described as “the best work I’ve ever done.”

  The person who most likely painted the portrait of Dr. King was a California artist named Lawrence Williams. Williams owned a Burbank studio called Portrait Arts, Inc. In early 1967, Williams had entered into a similar arrangement with NFL wide receiver Tommy McDonald. McDonald was winding down his football career with the Atlanta Falcons after 10 seasons with the Eagles, Cowboys, and Rams. Like Flood, McDonald also placed his name on the portraits, but McDonald later claimed that he had done it so potential clients could contact him. In a 1967 Los Angeles Times article, McDonald made it clear that he did not paint the portraits; he was only selling them. Flood made no such distinction. He took full credit for the Gussie Busch portrait and every portrait thereafter. After the Martin Luther King painting earned national acclaim, it became difficult for him to reveal the truth.

  Regardless of who painted the King portrait, Flood’s feelings for Dr. King and the impact of the civil rights movement on his decision to sue baseball were genuine. As Flood related in Ken Burns’s nine-part Baseball documentary in 1994:

  I guess you really have to understand who that person, who that Curt Flood was. I’m a child of the Sixties, a man of the Sixties. During that period of time, this country was comin
g apart at the seams. We were in Southeast Asia. Men, good men, were dying for America and for the Constitution. In the Southern part of the United States, we were marching for civil rights, and Dr. King had been assassinated, and we lost the Kennedys. And to think that merely because I was a professional baseball player I could ignore what was going on outside the walls of Busch Stadium is truly hypocrisy. And now I find that all of those rights that these great Americans were dying for, I didn’t have in my own profession.

  Flood sought to take what his hero, Jackie Robinson, had accomplished one step further. Unlike Robinson, Flood came of age during the civil rights movement and realized that a seat at a lunch counter, a house in a white neighborhood, or a spot on a major league roster was not enough. Flood recognized that racial equality could not be achieved without the freedom to sell one’s talent to the highest bidder.

  Five years after his housing dispute, Flood once again sought protection from the courts for what he believed was legally and morally right. This time he was not taking on a couple of gun-wielding racists; he was planning to sue Major League Baseball. To obtain the union’s financial backing, Flood knew that he needed not only Marvin Miller’s support but also the support of the players.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On December 12, 1969, Flood boarded a flight from St. Louis to Miami en route to San Juan, Puerto Rico. The next day at the Players Association’s executive board meeting, Flood’s job was to explain to 25 player representatives why he wanted to sue baseball over the reserve clause and why he needed the union to pay for his legal fees. Marvin Miller promised to support Flood at the meeting, but it was up to Flood to persuade the players of his sincerity.

  Flood tested his persuasive skills on both legs of the flight. As he boarded the first-class section of the plane in St. Louis, he saw the Cardinals’ player representative, Dal Maxvill. A Washington University engineering graduate, the 5-foot-11-inch, 157-pound Maxvill was a good-field, no-hit shortstop. In May 1964, he quit the game after being sent back to the minors in Jacksonville and accepted a $10,000 engineering job with the Bussmann Fuse Company. After a week, he changed his mind. That October he started all seven World Series games in place of injured second baseman Julian Javier and wound up catching the final out. Two years later, he took over as the Cardinals’ starting shortstop and became an integral member of the Cardinals teams of the mid- to late 1960s.

  Maxvill had no idea why Flood was on his flight. Flood took a seat next to his former teammate in first class, revealed his plan to speak to the player representatives in Puerto Rico, and explained his decision to challenge the reserve clause in court. Maxvill’s primary concern was Flood’s personal well-being. He had watched Flood work for years to get to the top of baseball’s salary scale. In those days, the only way to make close to $100,000 was through winning, consistent excellence, and longevity. A player’s salary could be reduced by a maximum of 20 percent each season. Having made $90,000 in 1969, Flood was due several big paydays. Maxvill hated to see him throw them away.

  “How can this work out for you?” Maxvill asked.

  “It’s just something I feel like I need to do,” Flood replied.

  “Everybody gets traded,” Maxvill said.

  “You haven’t,” Flood replied.

  “It’s early,” Maxvill said. “I’m a few years younger than you.” Maxvill was indeed traded to the A’s during the 1972 season. “Everybody got traded then,” Maxvill later remarked. “Even Willie Mays got traded.”

  “Why are you doing this to yourself?” Maxvill finally asked. “Do you know that you’re going to be out there like the Lone Ranger?” Nothing Flood said satisfied his friend and former teammate. Maxvill did not realize at the time the full impact of Flood’s lawsuit. They talked all the way to Miami.

  While waiting in the Miami airport to change planes, they encountered another cornerstone of those great Cardinals teams (and Maxvill’s former road roommate), catcher Tim McCarver. Of all the white players on the Cardinals, McCarver had been Gibson’s and Flood’s guinea pig. The son of a Memphis police detective, McCarver had signed with the Cardinals right out of high school as a $75,000 bonus-baby catcher. He was cocky and intelligent, but also filled with a lifetime of southern prejudices. It was Gibson’s and Flood’s job to disabuse him of them.

  McCarver once walked onto the team bus after a 1960 spring training game eating an ice-cream cone (McCarver says it was an orange drink). Gibson nudged Flood and then asked McCarver in a voice loud enough so that the rest of the team could hear: “Hey, Tim, can I have a bite of that ice-cream cone?” The young catcher did not know what to do or say. He had never shared an ice-cream cone (or an orange drink) with a black person. “I’ll save you some,” McCarver mumbled in response. Gibson and Flood burst out laughing. McCarver knew they had gotten him. Another time, McCarver informed Gibson that there was a “colored guy” waiting for him outside the locker room. “Which color is he?” Gibson asked his catcher.

  Sometimes the lessons were more serious. At spring training, McCarver saw a black kid stealing some baseballs from the outfield and yelled: “Hey, stop that, you little nigger!” Flood just stared at McCarver, who insisted that he had said “you little cannibal.” Gibson read McCarver the riot act. McCarver apologized. But what Gibson wanted McCarver to do was to think about why he had said it. Flood and Gibson saw McCarver’s racial attitudes change completely over time. “Tim McCarver was a rugged white kid from Tennessee and we were black, black cats,” Flood wrote. “The gulf was wide and deep. It did not belong there, yet there it was. We bridged it.”

  Gibson and Flood targeted McCarver not because they thought he was an irredeemable southern racist. They recognized him as a potential team leader and good friend. They were right on both counts. Although Gibson reigned as the team’s unquestioned leader, Flood and McCarver were named co-captains in 1966 in a move that a St. Louis toastmaster described as pleasing “everybody but the Ku Klux Klan.” Four years later, they were traded together to Philadelphia. Their reactions to the trade were starkly different. McCarver quickly signed; Flood wanted to sue.

  In the airport and on the short flight from Miami to Puerto Rico, Flood once again explained his plan to sue baseball. McCarver, who had flown in from Memphis, sat there in “complete shock.” He’d had no inkling that such a lawsuit was in the works. Nor did he have any idea why Flood would do such a thing.

  “Curt, do you really want to do this?” McCarver asked. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  Like Maxvill, McCarver soon realized that Flood was deadly serious. McCarver peppered Flood with many of the same questions that would be asked the next day. He asked about the more than $90,000 in salary that Flood would be leaving on the table. He asked whether Flood knew that he would be blacklisted from the game forever. He asked how Flood could survive financially. Even though he had known Flood for a long time and knew how determined Flood could be, McCarver still believed that the other players and Miller would talk him out of suing.

  Flood knew that Maxvill and McCarver would support him during the union meeting in Puerto Rico and throughout his lawsuit, not because they understood his decision but because they admired him as a teammate and a friend.

  Flood had another person in his corner in Puerto Rico: his on-again, off-again girlfriend, actress Judy Pace. Pace flew in from an appearance on The Dating Game in Copenhagen to give Flood moral support. The daughter of a Los Angeles airplane mechanic and a dress shop owner, she had broken racial barriers in 1968 as television’s first black villainess on the show Peyton Place. Among a small cadre of black actors appearing regularly in movies and on television at that time, Pace starred in the television show The Young Lawyers and played Gale Sayers’s wife in the ABC television movie Brian’s Song.

  Flood first noticed Pace when she appeared as a bachelorette on a 1965 edition of The Dating Game. On the show, Pace sat behind a partition and asked questions of her three celebrity suitors. She chose Willie Mays, not because
she had figured out who he was but because in her mind his high, squeaky voice meant that he must be someone important. “That’s awful. That’s a beautiful woman,” Flood told his friends while watching the show on television. “I deserve her more than Willie does.”

  For nearly a year, Flood clamored to meet Pace. He tracked her down through Sy Marsh, her agent at William Morris. “[Curt] thought I was the prettiest little chocolate thing he had ever seen in his life,” Pace said. She had no idea who he was. Flood called her everywhere he went. He sent her baseball cards, news clippings, and flowers. Her father was impressed and encouraged Pace to go out with Flood. She finally agreed to meet him but only in a crowded place and with a chaperone. Flood’s father, Herman Sr., having divorced his mother, Laura, and moved to Los Angeles, accompanied them on their first date. They went to Dodger Stadium for one of the first two games of the 1966 Dodgers-Orioles World Series. After the game, Flood ate with Pace’s parents at their home. He then flew back to St. Louis, but the phone calls continued. A week later, he called Pace after moving into the Shoreham Towers in West Hollywood. “Now you can see me all the time,” he said. The following year, she was his guest, sans chaperone, at the 1967 World Series between the Cardinals and the Red Sox. After one of the games in Boston, they dined with Bob Gibson and his wife. Over the years, Flood visited Pace on the sets of the movie Three in the Attic, the television show The Young Lawyers, and Ossie Davis’s film Cotton Comes to Harlem.

  Flood and Pace shared a bond as successful black entertainers. They both knew what it meant to have to be three times better than their white counterparts and shared the fatigue of striving for perfection all the time. They were both living the American dream but knew how hard living that dream could be. Pace admired Flood’s decision to sue baseball and flew to Puerto Rico to support him.