Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone The First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League

by Martha Ackmann

  Back in California, Yellowhorse’s old friend from the short-lived West Coast Negro Baseball Association was feeling hopeful. As impossible as it seemed just three years earlier, Eddie Harris, the former business manager of the association, was now working for the formerly all-white Pacific Coast League, scouting black talent for teams like the newly integrated Seals and the San Diego Padres. “I believe this is the greatest chance for Negro talent here on the Coast,” he wrote. “If they make good here there is a great chance of making the big League.” Harris asked his friends to let him know of “any good players that you think could make the grade.” All their expenses would be paid in California. “They’ll get the best of everything while in spring training … act quickly,” he said.61 The letter’s eager tone was like the post office flyers that lured defense workers to Oakland with the promise of good jobs, beautiful weather, and palm trees. Toni also thought the future looked encouraging. Her play with the barnstorming Sea Lions was making her into something of a Bay Area celebrity. One local reporter hunted her down to ask if she thought a woman would ever play professional baseball on the West Coast. Toni let her optimism spill over. Everything was changing, she said, and predicted a woman would sign with the Pacific Coast League by the 1950s.62 As the Sea Lions bus rumbled toward New Orleans, Toni, Little Sammy Workman, and the rest of the team tried to catch some sleep before another round of back-to-back games. The sun felt good and Yellowhorse’s steel money box glinted in the light. It was bright as a penny.

  *While African Americans were hired for many jobs in the World War II shipyards, some unions created separate “auxiliary units” for blacks. Auxiliary units had no union votes or representation. The Boilermakers Union and Teamsters Steamfitters’ Union were completely off-limits to blacks (Katherine Archibald, Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity, with a new introduction by Eric Arnesen and Alex Lichtenstein, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006, 81).

  *Foster’s Cafeteria had several locations in San Francisco. The Montgomery Street cafeteria later became famous as the site where many Beat poets, including Allen Ginsberg, gathered to talk and write.

  *Beginning in 1942, a graduate student at the University of California—Berkeley, Katherine Archibald, spent two years working at Moore Dry Dock. Her examination of the integration of women and minorities in the workplace formed the basis of her remarkable 1947 study, Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity. Many of Archibald’s conclusions about the difficulties women and minorities faced in the shipyard workplace mirrored Toni Stone’s experience as the lone woman on men’s baseball teams.

  †Fleming had witnessed California’s racism as a young man growing up in Chico around 1926. The Ku Klux Klan gathered near his home where Fleming and his grandfather, Moses Moseley, sat on the front steps. Moseley “was so mad that he sat out on the porch with a loaded .30-caliber rifle and I sat beside him with a loaded .25-.20, plus we had loaded shotguns,” Fleming said. “I don’t know until today whether either of us would have fired if the Klansmen had decided to march on the street where our house was located” (Thomas Fleming, “Reflections on Black History: The Klan Marches in California,” Sun-Reporter, December 31, 1997).

  *Willie Brown served as mayor of San Francisco from 1996 to 2003.

  *Lena Murrell’s last name has been variously spelled as Murell and Morrell. I have taken the spelling of her last name from a business card for Jack’s Tavern circa the 1940s.

  *A. H. Wall Post No. 435 was chartered in 1933 and deactivated in 1955 (Bill Silar interview with the author, December 8, 2008). The Oakland Tribune of August 12, 1934, described the post as “San Francisco’s colored veterans’ unit.”

  *American Legion records indicate that a San Francisco team won the 1943 and 1947 California state championships. At that time, there were fifty-five American Legion posts in the Bay Area. While some accounts of Stone’s activity indicate her American Legion team was a “championship” one, newspaper records confirm that the Rincon Hill team was the Northern California representative to the state championships.

  The Peninsula Baseball League operated from the World War II years until 1975. High school, college, and semi-pro players participated. Several players moved from the PBL to the majors including Dick Stuart (Pirates), Don Giles (Red Sox), and Charlie Silvera (Yankees). (www.smdailyjournal.com/article_preview.php?id=57282)

  *Wilson became the first African American mayor of Oakland in 1977. He served three terms during a particularly turbulent time in Oakland’s history.

  *Herald Gordon pitched for the Sea Lions in 1949. He also played for the Detroit Stars and Chicago American Giants from 1950 to 1954. Gordon earned his nickname, “BeeBop,” for the large round glasses he wore that resembled those of Dizzy Gillespie. Gordon didn’t need the glasses; he “just liked the style” (Gordon interview with the author, July 18, 2008).

  *The Denver Post tournament was introduced in the 1920s and proved to be a highly successful semi-pro invitational. The integrated tournament ran for ten days in the summer with ten teams selected by the Post’s sports department (Harold Seymour, Dorothy Z. Seymour, and Jane Mills, Baseball: The People’s Game, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, 271).

  Finding the Heart

  of the Game

  We all do “do, re mi,” but you have to find

  the other notes yourself.

  —LOUIS ARMSTRONG1

  When Toni stepped off the Sea Lions bus in New Orleans, she was grateful for the breeze. Summer was still a few weeks away from wrapping the Mississippi River delta in heat and humidity, but the gusty wind made the warm air a degree or two cooler.2 The Sea Lions were scheduled to play a tripleheader with the local New Orleans Creoles and the visiting Fort Worth Tigers. Like nearly everyone else in New Orleans on a hot May day, Toni would have enjoyed a shady walk or maybe a swim. But here, deep in the Jim Crow South, walking and swimming were restricted for blacks—whether by law or by custom. Toni would have been either brave or foolish to walk through New Orleans’ beautiful Audubon Park, where she was not welcome. There was no specific ordinance that banned her, but, as the city park superintendent explained in bureaucratic contortions, “There is the possibility of racial conflict where the two races gather together in large numbers on public property wherein it has not been the practice before.”3 The only public pool for New Orleans’ two hundred thousand black residents was so small and crowded a swimmer could barely get wet. Even the five-mile shoreline of Lake Pontchartrain was off-limits to her. Years before, when the lakefront was still undeveloped, a small stretch of shoreline called Seabrook became an unofficial black beach. However, when whites began building suburban homes along the shore and complained about black people using one-sixtieth of the beach, the Parish Levee Board banned blacks from Seabrook and redirected them to an alternative spot. Lincoln Beach was a miserable spit of land. Fifteen miles out of town, inaccessible by public bus or streetcar, Lincoln had facilities controlled by a white racketeer and was polluted with raw sewage.4

  Everybody in New Orleans knew where blacks were welcome and where they were not. Toni was quick to note the boundaries, even if others did not explicitly warn her about where she could walk without harassment. To many in New Orleans, Jim Crow was so unexamined and buried so deeply that racial separations seemed natural, or at least unremarkable. Accommodating whites was not only customary, it was also an act of survival for many Crescent City blacks. As one man put it, “As long as blacks accepted their place in the racial order, whites could be remarkably friendly.”5

  Toni remembered what her Saint Paul friend Evelyn Edwards had told her about “conditions” below the Mason-Dixon line. She also knew how segregation had become a way of life in New Orleans. Thanks to her parents, Toni learned of Homer Plessy’s long-ago defiance of New Orleans’s streetcar laws. In 1892, Plessy challenged a law that separated black passengers from whites traveling on streetcars and trains in Louisiana. His action led to the landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision o
f Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the “separate but equal” statute. The federal decision was used to legalize segregation in education, public accommodations, and transportation. Toni saw the legacy of Plessy v. Ferguson everywhere in Louisiana: buses, taxicabs, hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, museums, even religious institutions.

  When Toni first arrived in New Orleans, she might have considered for a moment a visit to stately St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square. She always made a point of learning as much as she could about a new town. If nothing else, the cavernous stone sanctuary offered relief from the sun, and the sweet, thick smell of incense would remind her of Father Keefe and St. Peter Claver back home. But the Cathedral, like Seabrook beach or the front seats of the streetcars rumbling down Canal Street, was like the rest of New Orleans: separate and unequal.

  Toni dropped her belongings at the Page Hotel on Dryades Street in the city’s black section of town. “Everybody liked to come to New Orleans,” the Kansas City Monarchs’ Buck O’Neil said. “You could have a good time after the game.”6 There were other appeals to playing in New Orleans besides the nightlife. For most visiting players, rooms in black boarding houses were a treat compared to restless nights on the bus.7 But in New Orleans, Toni and the Creoles had the uncommon luxury of the Page Hotel. If their two-dollars-per-day meal money didn’t stretch far enough in the hotel dining room, they could always buy a good meal at the bus station. “They had black cooks and black waitresses and they got to know us and gave us special treatment when we hit town,” a Birmingham Black Barons player said.

  People came and went at the Page Hotel all morning, as it also served as black baseball’s ticket office. Alan Page, who owned three hotels in the city, seemed to be at the center of everything in New Orleans: business, sporting events, even soft drinks. He also owned the Creoles baseball team, and watched the price of Coca-Cola like other business owners watched the stock market. When Cokes went from five cents to ten cents all over the country, Page raised the price of Creoles baseball tickets. Men were charged one dollar, women seventy-five cents, soldiers sixty cents, and children thirty-five cents.8

  Toni knew the upcoming day would be a long one. She wouldn’t play all three games for the Sea Lions, but she would take all the innings that Yellowhorse offered her the chance to play. Toni’s goal was always to get more playing time. More time in the game meant a better chance to study pitchers, perfect her curveball hitting, and practice the quick pivot of double plays. She would be lucky if Yellowhorse gave her four innings, though.

  But Alan Page predicted that Toni would bring in a good crowd at Pelican Stadium. Sunday, May 1, was Opening Day for the New Orleans team, and Page and his crew had been busy propping up baseball advertisements in store windows and taping handbills to street lamps. When a gust of wind blew, loose posters turned cartwheels down streets until fans stooped down and picked one up. More than one person did a double take of the player whose photograph was prominently featured on the broadside. Smiling confidently for the camera—hands on hips, legs wide apart, Toni Stone looked like any other ballplayer except for the bold headline beneath her name: “Sensational Girl Player.”9

  Since the tripleheader was the official start of the Creoles’ Negro Southern League season, Toni joined other players in a motorcade parade from Shakespeare Park, a city recreation area for black players where the New Orleans team held spring training.* Neighborhood kids made a practice of gathering at Shakespeare to watch the ballplayers. “What we felt for those players was almost worship,” one fan said.10 The previous year’s parade had been memorable for featuring “300 future Jackie Robinsons”—young boys who whooped and hollered, many sporting new Brooklyn Dodgers baseball caps. Advertisements for Jackie Robinson caps were everywhere: “Kids, Men, Women! Get in on this Great Three for One Offer. Plus 8 × 10 of your hero suitable for framing and his life story—all for only $1.69 from Sports Novelty Company of Joliet Illinois.”11 Toni knew that fans couldn’t get enough of Jackie Robinson; back in California she even heard talk of a motion picture about Jackie’s life. But players in the parade hoped that fans would remember other black baseball players too. Everyone’s pay for the day depended on good gate receipts, and a parade down Dryades Street was the best way to generate excitement and money. Over two hundred businesses stretched from one end of the street to the other, reminding Toni of the Fillmore in San Francisco with its music and swarm of activity. There were Dizzy Gillespie, Lollypop Jones, Dinah Washington, Ethel Waters, and Chubby “Hip Shakin’ Mama” Newson all appearing in New Orleans clubs within a span of a few weeks. Dr. Daddy O, the city’s first black DJ, played all the new LPs on his “Jivin’ with Jax” radio show and then promoted them the next week in his newspaper column.* If you liked what you heard on the radio, Jiles Records on Rampart Street was only too happy to send a boy with records for purchase to your home.12 It was as though the whole city agreed that music was as essential to life as a quart of milk or a loaf of bread, and that sustenance could be delivered right to your doorstep.

  Toni enjoyed the parade. While she earned less than two hundred dollars a month playing for the Sea Lions, the money was secondary to doing what she loved. “Salaries [in Negro baseball] don’t compare to Williams or DiMaggio,” Buck O’Neil acknowledged. “But it beats the hell out of loafing on Central Ave or Beale Street or Eighteen and Vine.”13 Fans along the parade route cheering and shaking Toni’s hand more than made up for modest wages. Barnstormers rarely enjoyed such notoriety, and Toni relished the attention. After winding their way through the black sections of the city and stopping at a few sponsoring taverns, Toni and the other players ended at Pelican Stadium. “Pel,” as the locals called it, was home to the New Orleans Pelicans, a white minor league affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The stadium stood on the corner of Tulane and South Carrollton, next to the rail line, and was available to the Creoles when the Pelicans were out of town, just like Seals Stadium in San Francisco. Back in 1914 when the stadium was built, mule teams brought over wooden bleachers from the old Sportsmen’s Park, in hopes of maintaining a tie to New Orleans sports past—its white past.14 Toni entered the park, as all black players did, from the “colored” entrance in center field, not the “whites only” gate in front. Once inside the dugout, she parted company with the rest of the Sea Lions. While her teammates headed to the visitors’ locker room, Toni looked around for the umpires. She had no issue to discuss with the officials; she was looking for their good will. Toni knew better than to dress in the players’ locker room: it was too small to offer any privacy from thirty men who were throwing off shirts or rubbing each others’ arms with medicinal-smelling liniment. She knocked on the umpires’ door and asked if they would mind vacating for a moment while she changed into her uniform. Toni wasn’t sure why, but umpires were sensitive to her situation and rarely denied her request. Perhaps they felt a kinship with Toni—they were outnumbered in the game, too. She changed quickly and made sure to fold her street clothes meticulously for the return to the hotel. Then she walked down the dark hall and onto the bright field for infield practice. “You don’t look like no ball player,” her teammates teased her. Toni was used to their ribbing and welcomed it. Joking made her feel part of the squad. Other players always thought her uniforms looked too clean, and they would playfully toss a handful of dirt at her as she took her position at second. “Most of the players didn’t know what a clean uniform was,” Toni said. They equated grime with good luck and had an irrational fear of freshly laundered clothing. To Toni, ballplayers “were the most superstitious people in the world.”15