Earl the Pearl

by Earl Monroe

  I learned a lot of things playing on the playgrounds, but the only problem was that I was from South Philadelphia, and when I was growing up, players from there still weren’t getting a lot of runs on most playgrounds outside of our neighborhood. Most of the best-known players were from some other neighborhood, like West or North Philadelphia. My home playground court was at 30th and Oakford in South Philadelphia, which was the black playground court in that area. The court where the white players ran was on 30th and Tasker, and me and my guys used to travel down there sometimes to play. A guy named Jerry Rullo was the playground director at Tasker, and he organized those games. He played with the Philadelphia Warriors in 1946 and had a lot of guys playing for him at Tasker.

  Their games were great competition, and a lot of times, if we black guys won, we’d have to fight our way out of there going home. When race riots broke out in the area in those days, everybody would say, “It must be March,” because that was the month we’d play against each other, when it was getting warm outside. (I’ve never heard of a race riot anywhere when it was cold. If you fight when it’s cold, you hurt your knuckles.)

  When I understood all of this, my game improved by leaps and bounds, and very quickly. When I understood what the game of basketball was all about—that it was scientific—I passed a lot of players who had been ahead of me. In my senior year of high school I scored about 21 points a game. That was the first year I played the whole varsity season. I kept written notes about all the guys who dogged me as a player, and as I got better and beat them I would cross their names off my list in the little blue notebook my mother gave me. Eventually I made sure I beat all the guys whose names I wrote in that notebook. That gave me satisfaction, let me know just how good I was getting, after I beat certain top-notch players.

  Matt Jackson came back to Philly from college and heard my name dropping from everyone’s lips. I guess this pissed Matt off because he had been top dog in South Philadelphia basketball a year before. One day, after Matt and his people had been going around dissing me and my game to everyone who would listen, calling me a “hotdog” and a “showboat, playground player,” suddenly all of South Philly was abuzz about which of us was the best player, especially since I had also been the leading scorer in the city during my last year in high school. I think all of this got up under Matt’s skin, because he really didn’t think I was better than him, as some of my supporters were going around saying.

  So we met at the David Landreth Elementary School schoolyard to settle the whole matter. On the day of the one-on-one matchup, the whole place was jam-packed, people packed like sardines into and around the playground. The place was overrun with basketball fanatics, you know, men and women, old, young, and middle-aged, sitting on benches, plopped down on the ground, hanging on the chain-link fences by their fingers and toes, folks all up in the trees like bats hanging from branches, so many people’s faces looking through the wire mesh fences. I remember thinking I was seeing nothing but eyes as wide and round as the shining silver dollars my father once gave me, eyes staring at us in wonder, and all to watch Matt and me play for the title of best young basketball player in South Philadelphia. Before the game I told Matt, “Let’s bet five dollars on the game.” Now that was a lot of money to lose in those days, but I felt it would make me play better, and it did. That game was memorable, a match made in roundball heaven, the classic traditional player against the playground hotdog showboat, the flashy, imaginative, creative baller against the steady, do-it-by-the-book, old-fashioned player out on the blacktop.

  The whole scene was like a spectacle. You could cut the excitement and tension that were hanging in the air with a knife or a razor. It was something else. It was one of the most exciting things—if not the most exciting thing—to happen to me in my life up to that moment. Matt and me played to 21 points and the first one there won. But hey, I’m getting ahead of myself and my story, so let me go back to where it all began.

  Part One

  GROWING UP IN SOUTH PHILLY:

  1944 TO 1959

  Chapter 1

  EARLY LIFE IN SOUTH PHILLY

  I WAS BORN AT 2:15 IN THE MORNING on a wintry day, November 21, 1944, at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. My mother, Rose, named me Vernon Earl Monroe Jr., after my father. Being born on that day makes me a Scorpio, and the biggest significance about that is the fact that I’m pretty perceptive about a lot of things, at least I think so. One thing is certain: I don’t forget a lot of things and I’m very vindictive, which some say is a trait of Scorpios. Generally, though, I look at how people treat me and then I treat them the same way. See, I’m a big advocate of the old saying that you do unto others as they do unto you.

  Anyway, they tell me the day I was born was a very cold day and after my older sister Ann came to see me, she told people I was about 23 or 24 inches of nothing but skin and bones. She also said I was “the ugliest thing she’d ever seen.” At least that’s what she told me she said over the years. But, you know, she loved me so much when I was coming up that later on I kind of forgave her for that comment, though not altogether.

  My mother’s last name changed to Smith when she married again after my father left, but while my father was around she was Rose Monroe. Before that she was just Rose Hall, which was her family name. She was one of 18 kids, born somewhere in the middle of my grandmother’s children. By the time I was born, all of my mother’s brothers and sisters except three had passed away: There was just my mother and her two sisters, Aunt Nicey and Aunt Mary, and Uncle Jim. But Uncle Jim died on the 22nd of November, the day after I was born. Ma—that’s what I called my mother—told me later that Uncle Jim had died relatively young, at around 40, after he swallowed a red-hot potato that burned up his insides. I don’t know if that’s the real truth, but there’s no one around to refute it. So people in my family always said things like “when God takes something away, God brings you something back,” and that “something,” I guess, was me.

  Ma was born September 14, 1914, in New Bern, North Carolina, and my father, Vernon Earl Monroe, was born on Christmas Day, 1912, in Columbia, South Carolina. They were married in the early 1940s but didn’t stay together very long: I think he left when I was five or six years old. She was 30 years old when she had me, and my parents brought me home to a row house located at 2524 Alter Street in South Philadelphia (it’s no longer there), where I lived until I was 11 years old.

  Philadelphia is famous for its row houses, which line the streets of the inner city for block after block. I think row houses were first built in Philadelphia, or at least that’s what I remember some people telling me when I was growing up. Anyway, row houses are attached to each other at the sides and most are not too big in size. They have white stone steps that lead up to the entrance of the house from the sidewalks called stoops, and you find people sitting on them, especially during the hot summers. I lived in that row house on Alter Street with my mother, my sister Ann, and my father, until he left. John Smith, my stepfather, moved in a couple of years later. A year or so after my stepfather moved in, my baby sister, Theresa, was born. But we all, at one time or another, lived in that two-story house I was brought home to when I was born.

  That house had a basement with a furnace, and it also served as a place that we stored a lot of stuff in, including coal for the furnace. On the first floor there was a living room, dining room, and a kitchen. Behind it was a small yard that had an outhouse nobody used. Behind the yard was an alleyway piled high with a lot of trash (some stinking garbage, too), and it ran the length of one city block. We sometimes used to play hide and go seek back there in the daytime (but never at night), and when we ran through the alley it would be like running up and down small hills, with low-lying flat stretches between each hill of trash.

  At night—and sometimes even during the day—criminals used to run through this alley to try to escape from cops who were after them for whatever crimes they had committed—mostly small-time stuff. Many times they wo
uld get away, because the cops were afraid to really search for them back there. Plus, the crooks were guys from the neighborhood and they knew where all the hiding places were, which route to take to get away—you know, the tricks of the trade of being escape artists. But sometimes they would get caught by the cops and go to jail, though this didn’t happen often.

  In the front of the house, on the first floor, there was a small vestibule you had to go through to get to the front door, which led outside to Alter Street. Then you went down four whitewashed steps to cross the sidewalk and then you were on the street, which was dirt and cobblestone. On the second floor of the house were a small bedroom for my sister Ann and a larger master bedroom that my mother and father (and later, my stepfather) slept in, along with me. I slept in a baby crib until I outgrew it and bunked down on a cot. It was cozy up there, a little tight, but no one ever complained.

  Around the time I was four or five years old, I remember Ann—who was 15 years older than me—was going with a man named Andrew “Big Jimmy” James, who later became her husband. Anyway, when Big Jimmy would come over to the house in the daytime during the summer to see Ann, they would be trying to make out in the front room, because Ma and my father were away working. So they would be on the couch, trying to be romantic, you know, kissing and whatnot, and I’d come into the front room, put two chairs together and lay there looking at them. They never said anything, but I knew they were pissed off by the way they looked at me. Big Jimmy probably thought I was part of the CBA, you know, the Cock Blockers Association! Maybe he even thought I was the king of it, you know what I mean? (When I spoke at Ann’s funeral in 2007, I said, “I know Andrew must have been thinking back then when he and Ann first met that I was the king of the CBA.”)

  My maternal grandmother, who we all called “Mom,” ran a speakeasy next door to our house, at 2522 Alter Street, from the time I was born. And, at the same time, my mother ran card games in our house on weekends, when people got off work. They would come over to my mother’s house and play card games like bid whist, pitty pat, and tonk, and they played for money. As I grew older, I would stay up late just to watch what was going on. Sometimes someone—I can’t remember who they were, though it might have been a man named J.D.—would carry me on their shoulders over to Mom’s place and I’d watch the people gambling and playing the numbers, because my grandmother did this, too. Then someone would say, “Hey Earl, what number should I play?” And I would give them a number and they’d play it. Or, somebody would be shooting dice and my grandmother would say to me, “Earl, call the number.” And I would call it. And if they won she would say, “See, I told you. Earl’s a good luck numbers guy.”

  But my mother didn’t like me being there, around this kind of stuff. So she’d be monitoring what was going on and she’d tell me sometimes, “Go on home, Earl. Stay upstairs, boy, and go to bed.”

  During the day my grandmother had a store where she sold candy and food all year round and shaved-ice cones drenched with different-colored sweet syrups we called “water ices” (they called them “snowballs” or “snow cones” in other places) during the summer, when it was hot. At night Mom would sell liquor for 50 cents a shot—you know, bourbon, scotch, and gin—and glasses of wine, beer, and whatnot in her house.

  She also sold pork sandwiches, pickled pigs’ feet from a big old jar full of them, chitlins, anything fried. Just slap some bread on whatever it was to absorb some of the liquor and people could drink more because they had a base of grease in their bellies. So she’d be selling fried porgy sandwiches—with all the bones left in the fish—that people ate like there was no tomorrow. Sometimes, all of a sudden someone would start choking and coughing because they had a bone caught in their throat. Then somebody would have to run and get a loaf of bread so they could wash the bone down their throats with water. (I never liked greasy food like pigs’ feet or chitlins, myself. I just couldn’t get down with it, especially chitlins, because the smell just turned me off.)

  Everybody who came by gambled, shot craps, drank, played the numbers, things like that. All of this went on in my grandmother’s house. Later, as I grew older, I watched people dancing and listening to the music of Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, the Platters, and James Brown.

  The first real lasting image I can recall of my father was him pulling me aside one day and telling me he was going away. I remember this day vividly, because before he left he told me to hold out both my hands, and I did. Then he poured two handfuls of shiny silver dollars into my cupped hands. When my father gave me all those shiny silver dollars, I thought it had to be all the money in the world. That made me real happy, even though I never really cherished money too much—although I always knew I needed to make some—when I was growing up. But I thought after my father gave me those silver dollars that I could always make do in my life, because the actual fact that my father gave me all those shiny silver coins could really carry me through to accomplish whatever it was I wanted to do in my life. Now, whether that’s true or not, I have never forgotten that moment. After all, I was only five.

  Back then those silver dollars really meant something special to me. My mother kept them for me for safekeeping and she would give me one every now and then, whenever I really needed something. Maybe that’s why later on, after I hooked up with my father again, I always saw him as a source of money until I got to know him much better. I don’t know, I never thought about it. But when he gave me all those silver dollars that day, that was the last time I remember seeing him until we were reunited 14 or 15 years later, when I was 19 years old and in my first year of college. That was an important, eventful day for me and I will talk more about it later. But I didn’t know anything about my father when I was growing up. As a matter of fact, I told everybody he was dead, even though I knew he wasn’t. I guess I might have been ashamed of the fact that I didn’t have a real father around, so I lied. Plus, I really didn’t know where he was, so it was almost as if he was dead.

  In 1951, when I was six, I remember my mother started living with John Smith, who I called Mr. John. Suddenly, he was just there. My sister Ann, who was living with us at the time, left the house after she married Andrew James in March 1951. Big Jimmy was in the army, stationed out in Colorado Springs, Colorado, so Ann moved out there with him and I moved into her room and laid claim to her bed.

  My sister Theresa was born September 11, 1951. Her father was John Smith. I remember Ann bought Ma a TV set for her birthday, which corresponded with Theresa’s homecoming from the hospital. That was great timing! Because it was the first TV set on our block, that was when a lot of neighborhood people started coming by our house, especially young kids, to sit up and look with wonder at the black-and-white images coming out of what was then considered a magical little box with a screen.

  It was something else just watching people’s faces as they craned their necks, leaned forward to watch that rectangle with a flickering small screen and those rabbit ears sitting up on top. My grandmother used to talk to the set, saying, “don’t you go there, don’t you see people are waiting for you!” People would be staring in amazement—and disappointment, too—at all that weird-looking white and gray flickering and listening to the buzzing fuzz sounds coming from the TV, until somebody had the sense to get up and turn the set off. Then the people visiting our house would file out the front door looking bewildered and dazed and our family would go upstairs and go to bed.

  When “Mr. John” first came to live with us, I was very young and really didn’t have any thoughts about him one way or the other. I mean, he was just somebody else there, and I can’t recollect drawing any kind of conclusion about him beyond the fact that he had come to live with us. After Theresa was born we became a family, and that stood for something. But as time went on and I grew older, my stepfather started to get on my nerves and I began to dislike him, especially the way he treated my mother. Still, I must admit, he always had a good job—he was a butcher at A&P Market—and he made really good money
, which took care of us and all the bills very well.

  Mom—her name was Nicey—lived next door to us (her daughter, Aunt Nicey, was named after her) and her last name was Hall, or Allen—she was an Allen, too. Because back in those days a woman might have a husband, then she wouldn’t have a husband—you know what I mean? So she was all those names at once. Mom was something else, a different kind of woman, real strong. There were empty lots next to her house, and she grew fresh vegetables on some of them, you know, stuff like collard greens, tomatoes, string beans, and other vegetables.

  On the other side of Alter Street, a lady named Miss Mabel Wilson lived. Miss Wilson ran the Vacation Bible School I attended during summer months, and she kept a garden where she grew a lot of vegetables and had peach trees, too. A lot of kids in the neighborhood—including me—loved to pick those peaches off the tree branches and eat them during summer and fall. Man, those peaches were sweet and really good. Miss Mabel was a very industrious and caring person. She was also very religious and had four sons, Carroll (who I went to school with), Harvey, Stanley, and Jerry—who was the oldest—and a daughter named Lily.

  Anyway, Miss Mabel started to teach Bible studies there in the summer, but not when it rained because the school didn’t have a roof. It was a little lot across the street from Miss Mabel’s place, between two houses. It just had some tables and chairs with a wood-and-wire fence around it and a small gate that swung back and forth to let you in. People in the neighborhood respected that place because no one ever went in and vandalized it, you know, like took the wooden chairs or the tables. After her death, to honor her for the community work she did all of her life, the political bigwigs in the area renamed the block we all lived on Mabel Wilson Way.