Lefty, page 34
The Gomez house had an immense yard. If Lefty was outside, the trolleys that ran along Metropolitan Avenue often made an unscheduled stop. “The bells clanged, the trolley doors swung open, and down the stairs came the conductor to talk to Lefty, leaving the passengers looking out the windows at the two of them laughing away.”
One of the neighbors, an elderly gent named Mr. Mountain, lived in an apartment across the street. “Every time he and Lefty talked,” Ann Angrason related, “Monty said he wished he had a vegetable garden. He loved to hoe and weed, and watch vegetables grow. One day, Lefty said, ‘Put your garden in my front yard. Just give me some vegetables once in a while.’ Monty was out there the next morning. As the summer went by, his garden took up a third of the land. With wartime rationing, Monty’s vegetables were a welcome addition to dinner plates of the neighborhood. In the cabbage patch, there was one cabbage that Lefty’s Sealyham, Colonel, claimed for his own. Every morning he peed on it. It grew and it grew. Gigantic. The day Lefty picked it, we had a party.”
For the kids, it was all a party. “Everyone piling into Mom and Dad’s bed on Sunday morning for a pillow fight, then Dad reading us the newspaper comics … Mom ending the day with a favorite fairy tale … a three-story house furnished in art deco … chrome tables and chairs, white walls, white carpeting, and a white upright piano … draperies and slip-covered sofas in a vivid green, leafy design. Wartime in the forties … before turning on the lights, running through all the rooms and pulling down the green window shades so no light beams can be detected by enemy aircraft flying overhead … Mom’s homemade soups on the coal stove, and her handmade clothes for the children … measles, mumps, and itchy chicken-pox scabs covered with calamine lotion … ice- cream cones from Dad to ease the pain … pigtails and crew cuts … Holy Child Jesus elementary school, spelling bees … multiplication tables by rote … after the homework, outside on the sidewalk, and strapping metal roller skates onto our shoes and whizzing up and down the uneven pavements till we fall, scraping our knees … hopscotch and Simon Says … tricycles, then graduating to two-wheelers with Dad holding the handlebars until we can pedal and balance by ourselves … Pinocchio, the family’s first Disney movie, and returning home to find that we’re locked out because Dad forget the house key, and he has to climb the oak tree to the second-story bedroom and break a window to get us inside … and the winter holidays and the subway ride to Macy’s windows at Broadway and 34th Street, hand in hand with Mom and Dad, jostled along by the crowds as we pass by the magical displays of Christmas elves making toys for good little boys and girls … that was us.”
With the family settled, Lefty took a job as recreational director for the Carl E. Norden Company, which manufactured precision bombsights. The factory was in lower Manhattan and boasted a four-acre recreation field near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. Lefty was responsible for the industrial league baseball team, but also, among other tasks, supervising the bowling league, and sports as diverse as archery and ice skating.
Lefty still wanted to pitch somewhere, to stay in the game, so he signed on with the Brooklyn Bushwicks at $200 per week. The Bushwicks, a storied semipro team that operated from 1917 to 1951, played their games at 15,500-seat Dexter Park, which was not in Brooklyn but Queens, less than a mile from Kew Gardens. The field had once been a racecourse, and rumor had it that it was named for a horse named Dexter who had dropped dead and was buried in right field.
The Bushwicks were almost the perfect polyglot. The players were mostly white, the owner was a Jew, and the opponents were often teams from the Negro Leagues. They had hit against Satchel Paige and pitched to Josh Gibson. Jackie Robinson had played against the Brooklyn Bushwicks before he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers. When the major league season ended, the Bushwicks often scheduled exhibitions against ad hoc teams whose members had included Babe Ruth, Dizzy Dean, Lou Gehrig, Hank Greenberg, Phil Rizzuto, and Joe DiMaggio.
Max Rosner, the Bushwicks’ owner, signed major leaguers whenever he could. Sometimes active players moonlighted after the season, often using aliases, to pick up a few extra bucks a week, and sometimes retired players signed on just to keep playing. Lefty didn’t join the Bushwicks as a way to get back to the majors; he knew his career was over. But here was an opportunity to spend a bit more time doing what he loved.
“I walked over to Dexter Park in some old clothes and slippers that had been retrieved from the refuse heap,” he related with the usual hyperbole. “The clubhouse attendant was a veteran and, because I showed up early, he must have figured I was just a has-been looking for a workout. ‘There’s a nail over there, bub,’ he said. ‘Hang up your jacket.’ I looked at the nail and spiders were playing leapfrog in the cobwebs. The dressing-room man roused me from my stupor by shouting, ‘Come on! You haven’t much time. The regulars will be here soon. Here’s a uniform to put on.’
“ ‘I’ll bet Lincoln wore that,’ I told him.”
In his first game, Lefty not only pitched four innings of one-hit ball against the Black Yankees but socked a 400-foot triple, which raised the question: If the Bushwicks played against such high-class competition, how could Gomez achieve three bases, a feat never before seen in his almost twenty years of organized baseball?
The answer was simple. Lefty had boasted to Max Rosner that he would hit a home run. Rosner scoffed and money was put on the table. Lefty then persuaded the Black Yankee pitcher to put one right down the middle and the outfielders to pursue any ball hit to them without enthusiasm. All went according to plan until Lefty more or less collapsed rounding third. Three hundred sixty feet was simply too far to run on one hit.
Even with the Bushwicks to keep him in the game, Lefty remained determined to go overseas. If the army wouldn’t let him fight, he would entertain. In early fall, he signed on for a three-month USO tour of Africa and Italy, part of a three-man sports contingent that included Fred Corcoran, head of the Professional Golfers Association tour, and former heavyweight champ Jack Sharkey. In Italy, the trio would join a larger tour that included comedian Joe E. Brown and Humphrey Bogart. Their assignment was to visit hospitals near the front lines and do what they could to cheer up wounded soldiers.
Since he would be overseas at Christmas, Lefty decided to have a festive pre-holiday celebration. A special Christmas tree seemed just the ticket. Ann Angrason’s daughter Julie, twelve at the time, later recalled just how special it was. “Lefty wanted the children’s mouths to drop open when they saw the tree, so he drove upstate and chopped down a monster evergreen. He tied it to the top of his car and drove back to Kew Gardens in the snow. He loosened the ropes and tried to drag it up the stone steps into the front hallway, but the tree was so tall and so wide that, once he pulled it in, he couldn’t make a right bend into the living room without cutting the tree in half. He tossed the top half down the steps, and now he had the tree in the room but the evergreen was so wide, everything was lost to sight except the tree. June brought in boxes of tiny ornaments and they began decorating a tree that stopped in the middle. The ornaments looked lost because they were decorating a forest. I will never, ever forget it. When the kids came in to experience the wonder of it all, they get smacked in the face with an evergreen branch.”
Lefty had taken a leave of absence from both Norden and the Bushwicks, and on November 20 he boarded a ship in New York harbor to head for Africa. Journalist James Kearns of the Chicago Sun described the tour. “A 2,000 mile trek through the Mediterranean, Sicilian, and Italian areas, where American boys fight and rest and recuperate, under the auspices of the USO. Gomez, Corcoran, and Sharkey did a 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. daily show on stage, when there was a stage. Then the little shows; kidding, talking, visiting, bed to bed in Casablanca, North Africa, Port Lyautey, Algiers, Bizerte, Constantine, Tunis, and then two months in Italy and France, nearly all of it in hospitals close to the front lines.
“They had about 50 minutes of sports movies with them … golf shorts, the recent 1943 World Series, past Series, and knockout rounds of heavyweight championship fights since Dempsey-Firpo. After the movies, Corcoran would interview Gomez and Sharkey, and Gomez would kibitz on Sharkey’s replies.… He would quiz Sharkey on every fight he ever lost, and there were quite a few. Then the boys in the wheelchairs or the beds, or wherever the show was on, would ask question after question.”
Corcoran remembered the commitment of his mates. “Gomez and Sharkey worked long and diligently at their job on the tour.… Lefty was standing next to the bed of a wounded kid in from the battlefield who looked up at him and said, ‘I know you could pitch, but you have to admit you had a couple of weaknesses with a bat in your hand.’ Gomez grinned and nodded his head. ‘Only one weakness, really. A pitched ball.’ ”
The story the GIs always wanted Lefty to recount had occurred during an at-bat in Cleveland. “I was pitching against Bob Feller,” Lefty recounted. “Bobby was a young kid who could bring it in blazing fast. He was also on the wild side, which added to the intimidation the sluggers felt at the plate. Late in the afternoon, black clouds rolled in from Lake Erie. It got darker and darker and every inning McCarthy asked Bill Summers, the umpire, to call the game so the hitters in those pre-helmet days wouldn’t get skulled. Summers refused. He said thousands of fans were in the stands to see the game. By the time I stepped into the batter’s box it was drizzling rain. Feller’s ball was a misty blur. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a book of matches, lit one, and held it up in front of my face. ‘Feller can see the plate,’ Summers growled. ‘I’m not worried about the plate. I want to make damn sure Feller can see me.’ Summers fined me $50 for that caper.”
The trip also had its odd and scary moments. “In Italy one day,” Francis J. Powers reported, “after a rumor that the Allied forces had to retreat, the trio was moving towards the front, and Lefty was strangely silent as he watched truck after truck filled with soldiers going the other way. Finally, he tapped the driver on the shoulder and said, ‘Will you find out if those guys are coming or going. I don’t believe in getting anywhere before the army.’ ”
Lefty was also skittish of booby traps. “We moved into Italy behind the Fifth Army,” Fred Corcoran said. “The closer we got to the front, the more leery Lefty became. He wouldn’t touch anything that looked like it might have a wire or a package of TNT hooked on at the other end. And he always gave a wide berth to anything he saw lying on the ground unless he thought it had been lying there for at least a couple of centuries. On one occasion, up near the front, I stopped to pick up a ring I had seen half buried in the mud. He nearly knocked me down with the lunge he made to head me off.”1
After he returned home in February 1944, Lefty described the experience for himself. “I’m delighted to be back in the States. Anyone who says he isn’t frightened at the front lines or during an air raid is crazy. I was so scared running for a shelter that I thought I was standing in the same place until I noticed I wasn’t losing any ground on those in front of me.”
He summed up the trip typically: “It’s a good thing I wasn’t pitching overseas. With all those planes flying overhead, the opposition would have won a hundred to nothing.”
But there were also incidents for which levity was inappropriate. “Visiting with our boys in the hospital wards … even though wounded, they loved to play pranks on us, and I shared many a laugh with them. But we also saw men brought in on stretchers who were badly maimed, their uniforms bullet-riddled, many without legs and arms, others with their feet and hands frozen, their eyes bandaged, their lips clenched in pain but still holding on to that fighting spirit … the one thing that can pull them through the horror of their wounds. God, it’s an awful sight and one I will never forget.
“There were also many touching moments. Sharkey, Bogart, Joe E. Brown, and I had entertained in a ward, and, after the show, one of the boys called me over. One arm had been blown off and the other was in a cast. He said, ‘Lefty, I loved the show. I didn’t applaud, but it wasn’t because I didn’t want to.’ I was so touched by his generous spirit. He made me so happy that I was there to bring a laugh to boys like him, but it also made me very, very sad that war exists.”
1 During the tour, Lefty had another odd encounter with Moe Berg. “We were on our way from Italy to France and I saw Moe standing on a bombed-out street. I called out, ‘Hey, Moe, how are you?’ Moe put his index finger over his lips and kept looking around, acting mysterious. I just kept on going towards the front where we were to entertain the troops. Humphrey Bogart and Joe E. Brown were ahead of us and waiting. The entire incident lasted just seconds.”
33.
FIELD GENERAL
For the remainder of the war Lefty remained in New York, first working for Norden, then switching to a similar position with Westside Iron Works. In the early fall of 1945, an odd opportunity surfaced. A wealthy Venezuelan industrialist named Martin Tovar Lange asked Lefty to come to Caracas to set up pitching clinics for Latin players and black Americans who had come to South America to avoid the segregation of American professional baseball. Lefty was always pleased for the opportunity to teach baseball; he was especially pleased to be asked to teach these particular players. He had never agreed with the major league ban on African Americans and knew full well his visit to South America would draw attention in the press. Nellie was thrilled with the chance to play grandmother to Vernona and Gery in Kew Gardens, so Lefty and June flew to Miami and then on to South America.
Lefty arrived in a sprawling metropolis very much unlike New York. “In the mid-forties,” he said, “Caracas was a cosmopolitan city in an oil-rich country, where most of the people were poor. There was a country-club set of wealthy coffee and sugar plantation owners, an almost nonexistent middle class, and the barefoot poor who lived in homes of tin-roofed cinder blocks without water or electricity. It was common to see university students sitting on the curbs studying their books under the street lamps because they couldn’t afford lightbulbs.
“The politics were as hot as the coffee. They changed presidents quicker than we changed pitchers on a bad day. Shortly before our plane landed in Caracas, there had been a coup, bringing about a change in political leadership and turmoil on the streets. A riot could erupt at any time and anywhere. Protesters waved placards and pistols, shouting that unfair government policies were directed against the poor. Adding to the unrest were rumors that local Communists backed by Moscow wanted to nationalize foreign oil companies. Robbers were everywhere and they carried guns. If your pocket was empty, he’d shoot you for ‘wasting his time.’ June and I carried a $100 bill at all times. We didn’t want to upset the robbers. One morning, I was having my shoes polished at a corner street stand when the shoeshine boy was shot dead by a stray bullet. For the rest of my stay, I decided scuffed‑up shoes were in fashion.”
Through it all, life went on, even moved forward. Two days after Christmas 1945, Tovar and three other Venezuelans founded the Liga de Béisbol Profesional de Venezuela, South America’s first professional baseball league. The four teams would begin play the following month. Managing Tovar’s team, Cerveceria Caracas, the “Brewers,” was none other than that famed pitcher “of Castilian descent,” Vernon Gomez. As the Associated Press pointed out, however, lineage was deceiving. “1. The team is comprised of Venezuelans. 2. The players speak no English. 3. Gomez speaks no Spanish. 4. And Lefty has never managed before.”
Lefty, of course, found humor in the appointment—he said he might be forced to communicate in sign language, as in baseball signs—but his acceptance of the manager’s position made an even larger statement than simply running clinics. A cadre of highly talented black and Latino ballplayers played winter ball in Latin America. Roy Campanella, for example, who would go on to win three National League Most Valuable Player awards and be inducted into the Hall of Fame, was the catcher for Vargas, the eventual league champions. Sam Jethroe, who would win the National League Rookie of the Year award in 1950 at age thirty-three, was on the same club. And so Lefty became the first important American major leaguer to manage a mixed-race team; he was, as he described himself, “a pioneer.”
Pressure against segregated baseball had begun to increase with the close of World War II, and in August 1945 Branch Rickey infuriated much of white America by signing Jackie Robinson to a minor league contract. In November, Robinson joined a group of black all-stars in Venezuela that played against clubs from Caribbean nations. For the 1946 season, Robinson was to report to the Dodgers’ top farm team in Montreal. Canada had no segregation laws, but Montreal’s road games would be in American cities.
With this most inflammatory issue at hand, the fact that an acknowledged star such as Lefty Gomez would publicly proclaim he found race irrelevant helped undermine the racial intransigence of big league baseball. In fact, Pee Wee Reese, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Kentucky-born shortstop who was later credited with gaining acceptance for Robinson, said, “Lefty helped break the color line in baseball. Lefty never saw color. He only saw ability. That’s why, in 1945, when black players were still banned in major league baseball, he went to Caracas. It was his way of telling the brass back home that ‘Hey, there’s talent here and it has nothing to do with skin color.’ ”
“On the roster,” Lefty noted, “were Regino Otero, Oscar Rodriguez, and Rafael Noble from Cuba, now in the Cuban Baseball Hall of Fame, and Chico Carrasquel from Caracas. Noble went to the majors as a catcher for the New York Giants. Chico Carrasquel broke into the big leagues in 1950 with the Chicago White Sox, and Regino Otero played first base for the Chicago Cubs and later, as a scout for Branch Rickey, signed Mike Scioscia.”
Talented though the players might have been, Venezuelan baseball had its oddities. “The fans and the officials at the game took every play on the field very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that if the fans didn’t like what a hitter did at the plate, they hurled curses and bottles of beer at him. One day, after my pitcher walked four men in a row, the referee blew his whistle and a police wagon drove onto the diamond and my player was put into the wagon and driven to jail. The police booked him on the charge that he wasn’t trying to strike the guys out. In another game, a fistfight broke out in the sixth inning, and soldiers ran out onto the field and took the feuding ballplayers off to the pokey.”
