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

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ackmann, Martha.

  Curveball : the remarkable story of Toni Stone the first woman to play professional baseball in the negro league / Martha Ackmann.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-55652-796-8 (hardcover)

  1. Stone, Toni, 1921-1996. 2. Baseball players—United States—Biography. 3. African American baseball players—Biography. 4. Women baseball players—United States. I. Title.

  GV865.S86A35 2010

  796.357092—dc22

  [B] 2010007019

  “They Went Home” from JUST GIVE ME A COOL DRINK OF WATER ’FORE I DIE by Maya Angelou, copyright © 1971 by Maya Angelou. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

  “A Song in the Front Yard” reprinted by consent of Brooks Permission.

  Interior design: Scott Rattray

  © 2010 by Martha Ackmann

  All rights reserved

  Published by Lawrence Hill Books

  An imprint of Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN 978-1-55652-796-8

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  In memory of N. Jean Fields

  (1932–1998)

  “It’s noble to be good, and it’s nobler to teach

  others to be good, and less trouble.”

  —Mark Twain

  Contents

  Prologue

  1 A Question of Sin

  2 Miracle in Saint Paul

  3 Barnstorming with the Colored Giants

  4 Golden Gate

  5 Finding the Heart of the Game

  6 On Deck

  7 Number

  8 Keep on at It

  9 A Baseball Has 108 Stitches

  10 Happiest Day of My Life

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  Prologue

  You’re supposed to step into a curveball, not away from it.

  —THOMAS BURT, INDIANAPOLIS CLOWNS,

  NEGRO AMERICAN LEAGUE 1

  Toni Stone got suspicious when the occasional stranger called to ask about her remarkable baseball career. She had seen a lot of fools, and the seventy-two-year-old woman’s guard went up immediately if she thought someone seemed interested in using her. Toni had learned the hard way that people could take advantage of her: someone once took some of her precious team photographs guaranteeing to “get Toni Stone the recognition she deserved” and then vanished with promises unmet and photos pocketed. Then there were the reporters who played fast and loose with the truth, trying to “improve” her story so that she would appear more sophisticated, better educated, or more feminine. She hated the inaccuracies, which she called “ad libs.” It was like a jazz riff, she said, the ad lib. “I don’t want no ad libbing. I want my real thing.”2

  In 1993, when baseball historian Kyle McNary called her on the phone, Toni wasn’t sure she wanted to talk to him. The two had never met, and she warily suspected that McNary might be just another person wanting to “capitalize of me.” She hated it when sportswriters claimed to rediscover her, then portrayed her as a sideshow oddity—a strange woman who long ago wanted to play baseball with the boys. It angered and hurt her when they turned her commitment to the game into a freak show. “I’m getting ready to go away,” Toni told McNary, leaving herself an opening to end the conversation if he turned out to be just another someone who wanted to make a buck. “I won’t be back until the middle of the month.” But when the earnest young man spoke to Toni about how much he loved baseball and only wanted to know more about her days in the Negro League, she warmed to him. Playing professional baseball had been the highlight of Toni’s life, and, as painful as some of the memories were, she freely admitted she had more good recollections than bad. With each question McNary asked, a rush of images flooded her mind: a cast-off baseball glove bought at the Goodwill, junker automobiles in the 1930s full of hungry players touring the Dakotas, jazz clubs hot with music, crowds of reporters straining to get a look at the girl playing Negro League ball, a newspaper story proclaiming Toni Stone “the greatest attraction to hit the loop since Leroy ‘Satchel’ Paige.”3

  No other woman ever matched Toni Stone’s accomplishments in baseball—during her nearly two decades of play or since. She was the first woman to play professional baseball on men’s teams in the Negro League of the 1950s. When a young Henry Aaron moved from the Indianapolis Clowns to the majors, Stone replaced him on the team. “She was a very good baseball player,” Aaron said.4 Known as a tenacious athlete with quick hands, a competitive bat, and a ferocious spirit, Toni was a pro and “smooth,” according to Ernie Banks.5 Yet her story is about much more than baseball. It is also about confronting the ugly realities of Jim Crow America, in the days before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus. Some of those stories Toni would share, and others were too difficult for her to admit—sometimes even to herself. There were memories of hurled epithets from the grandstands, “Whites Only” signs on railroad cars, and waitresses who would spit in glasses of Coke before serving them to black customers. During segregation, if you were a young African American woman and you wanted to play second base more than anything else in the world, you were in for a rough ride.

  When Toni began to relax and talk less cautiously with him, McNary admitted to her that he was surprised by how young shesounded when she answered the phone. Everyone who met Toni for the first time was momentarily startled by her odd, breathless, high-pitched voice. It made her sound small and insistent, like a child struggling to be heard. Toni explained that once when she was young she mistakenly drank some Sloan’s Liniment, an over-the-counter rub for stiff muscles. “It did me in, changed my voice,” she said.6 She joked about the way her voice sounded with a well-rehearsed line. “When I wanted to demand something, I had to use a whistle and a baseball bat,” she said. “A whistle and a baseball bat.” There was a tinge of weariness in her response, as if she had long ago grown tired of explaining herself.7

  Stone eased herself into a chair by the phone to continue talking. Her knees ached, but she rarely complained, and she would not let the pain stop her. Toni was too full of pride. She could still climb a ladder and paint a ceiling if she needed to, and she was legendary in her family for doing her own repair work. Aunt Toni “could really put on a set of steps,” her niece would say.8 Stone’s house—a small Victorian gem on Isabella Street in Oakland, California, had been her home for nearly fifty years after she left Saint Paul, Minnesota. “She needed to get away,” relatives said. Saint Paul had grown too small for Toni, and she always had her eye on the next horizon.

  When she was barely a teenager, people had already noticed that Toni Stone was far from ordinary. She was an astonishing athlete who seemed to excel at everything she attempted: swimming, golf, track, basketball, hockey, tennis, ice skating. She was even the most feared kid in the neighborhood when it came to playing red rover. She made a point of always breaking through the strongest link in the chain, just to prove she was tough.9 But baseball won her heart. “Tomboy” Stone, as neighborhood kids called her, eventually became so well known in Saint Paul that when her younger sister announced her engagement the newspaper mistakenly ran a photograph of Toni instead of her sibling.10 Editors, us
ed to putting Toni in the paper, had hastily inserted the wrong photograph. But they got it right when the newspaper imagined a future for Tomboy that would extend well beyond Minnesota. “We do not hesitate,” the Minneapolis Spokesman declared in 1937, “to predict that she some day will acquire the fame of one Babe” Didrikson.11 Years later Toni would state matter-of-factly, “I could outscore her and out hit her.” Many agreed. Ball players who later faced both Didrikson and Stone on the baseball diamond confirmed, “Babe was a pretty good player, but Toni Stone was a real good player.”12

  After she left Saint Paul, Stone went to San Francisco, then New Orleans, and traveled with semi-pro teams throughout the South. “I love my San Francisco. I had my hardships there. But they treated me right. Old San Francisco folks taken me over,” she said, her voice becoming softer. “I played ball. And I got a little job. I slept in the [bus] station. I have beautiful memories and very little bad ones. I guess it’s a way of carrying myself.”

  Working hard was a virtue Stone learned from her parents. Boykin and Willa Stone moved to Saint Paul in the 1930s and started a business. Every day, Toni came home from school—or from skipping school—and knew her parents would not be home until late at night. Their drive to make something of themselves left an impression. “I watched my folks come home and scuffle. It was during the Depression and I watched them work hard. And I said, ‘If I can’t be among the best, then I’ll just leave it alone.’”

  “Scuffle” was an important word to Stone. She used it to underscore the grit needed to work against the odds: resolve, persistence, sacrifice. It was the price people were willing to pay to do what they loved. If anyone suggested that playing black baseball was an easy road, she bristled and her thin voice became pinched and direct. “They never was in it!” she argued. “Those old timers, they really had to scuffle and darn near get killed going down the highway, run onto some snakes that tore the bus up.” During a time when a black person could be lynched for smiling the “wrong way,” a busload of African American ballplayers looking for a place to stay overnight threatened bigots on either side of the Mason-Dixon line. She hinted briefly at an incident triggered by the double prejudice she faced as an African American woman, but she stopped short before fully describing what happened. “You see, I fought a lot,” she admitted, “but they broke me of it. The fellas said they’d liable kill me.” Keeping the degradation she experienced from imploding inside her was perhaps what Stone meant by finding “a way of carrying herself.” A person had to listen carefully to Toni Stone.

  Toni’s hands ached with arthritis. Holding a phone had grown difficult for her. Even though he sensed she was tired and knew it was time to hang up, McNary had so many questions he wished he could ask: questions about playing with Willie Mays, cheering crowds at Yankee Stadium, Japanese trade rumors, the awful bus accident, Buck O’Neil, Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth, Louis Armstrong, Cooperstown. Did she play in the majors? Is that why people called her the female Jackie Robinson? “I’m just lucky to be alive,” Stone told him, without a note of humor. She gazed across the dusky living room to an ornate family mirror that reflected her face. Years of scuffling had not diminished her determination. Her gray eyes shot the same stare her father had, the look that said, “Do not stand in my way.” Fate had handed Toni Stone one imperfect chance to live her dream and she stepped into it.

  A Question of Sin

  From where she stood the air she craved

  Smote with the smell of pine;

  It was too much to bear; she braved

  Her gods and crossed the line.

  —COUNTEE CULLEN1

  Tomboy Stone had a confession to make. The young girl knelt in the St. Peter Claver confession box and began to unburden her mind. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” she began, and admitted that she wanted to run away from home. Tomboy was having trouble with her parents, and their disapproval was more than the twelve-year-old could bear. She looked down at her hands, worn and dirty from all the hours she spent outdoors, and thought about how she had come to make such a difficult decision. For some time Tomboy had felt pulled between the love she felt for her family and her love for something else: baseball. “It was like a drug,” she said. “Whenever summer would come around [and] the bats would start popping, I’d go crazy.”2 Boykin and Willa Stone did not understand their daughter’s obsession. They thought it was wrong, that it was unnatural for a girl to be so consumed by a boy’s game. Tomboy was well acquainted with their opinion. “My parents thought the idea of a little girl playing baseball was sinful,” she said.3 Her mother even sent a letter to teachers at school, informing them that her daughter’s health might suffer if she played sports. She “told them I had a heart murmur, anything to discourage me.”4 Tomboy also knew her parents had appealed to Father Keefe, the family’s parish priest, to dissuade her from playing baseball with neighborhood boys. But she could not give up the sport, and, after trying unsuccessfully to win her parents’ approval to keep playing, Tomboy decided to run away. Her decision made her heartsick, but, torn between baseball and her family, her choice was clear.5

  Father Charles Keefe listened as the young black girl recited the litany of her transgressions. Even out of sight in the confessional, children like Tomboy could not hide from Father Keefe. He recognized the children’s voices, and sometimes he didn’t bother to pretend that their disclosures were anonymous. He was like their mother or an alert teacher or the radio’s fictional crime fighter the Green Hornet in his omniscient acuity. Once, after one of the neighborhood children confessed his sins, the boy was startled when Father’s disembodied voice rang out from the opposite side. “By the way, Mel,” he said, “could you get me a carton of cigarettes from the store?”6

  Kids and adult parishioners alike trusted Father Keefe. As a white priest in a historically black congregation, he had gained the community’s respect for his commitment to race relations.* Tomboy thought highly of him, too, and was drawn to his honesty. To her, he was clear and direct—straight across the plate. She also loved his passion for life. She called him a “big old Irishman” who had a “Joy to the World” enthusiasm about him.7 He was a kind and creative man: the type to find a solution to a problem rather than issue a decree, she thought. A few years before, when the Stone family first started attending St. Peter Claver, Father Keefe had taken an interest in young Tomboy. He knew Mr. and Mrs. Stone were concerned about their daughter. The youngster was an outcast: she did not do well in school and was made fun of by some of her peers because she didn’t look, act, or talk like other girls. Keefe even knew that Boykin and Willa Stone disliked their daughter’s nickname, “Tomboy.” They called their daughter by her given name, Marcenia Lyle Stone. But to children and everyone else around St. Peter Claver, she was Tomboy Stone—the best athlete in the Rondo neighborhood of Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the girl who got into fights for being different.

  Tomboy completed her confession and agreed to recite several Hail Marys and Our Fathers. It was a light penance—what St. Peter Claver kids called “a slap on the wrist.” 8 But Father Keefe knew he had to do more than require Tomboy to pray. He had to come up with a long-term plan for handling the girl’s unconventional dreams while respecting her parents’ concerns. Willa and Boykin Stone were strict parents, but Keefe believed their worry for Tomboy stemmed more from anxiety about her future than from a conviction that playing baseball was morally wrong. The Stones thought baseball was unladylike, that there was no future in it, and they were anxious that their daughter might get hurt, physically or emotionally. Boykin and Willa wanted all four of their children to amount to something. Willa especially was concerned about their three daughters’ economic independence. She knew that for a young woman to truly have choices in life, she had to have money. Playing baseball would never give Marcenia that freedom, Willa thought. Boykin had additional concerns. He frequently lectured his children that even now—in 1933—black people in the United States faced unfair obstacles. Tomboy said her fath
er explained “how rotten the whites were to us … and how he wanted us to get our education.”9 What could baseball possibly offer a twelve-year-old girl from a black neighborhood in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Willa and Boykin Stone asked their daughter? Everything, Tomboy thought.

  After he finished hearing confessions from the line of youngsters standing in a neat row along the church wall, Father Keefe went to his office and considered how he could help Tomboy Stone. He did not believe Tomboy could be talked out of playing baseball: he had seen her play and knew she was a gifted athlete. He also wondered if sports might actually help the combative Tomboy more than hurt her. If she was proud of what she did on the diamond and gained some respect in the community, perhaps Tomboy wouldn’t fight as much. Maybe she would forget about running away. Keefe thought about suggesting that the youngster become more involved with the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center—a lifesaver for kids with time on their hands and an inclination to temptation.* But Boykin and Willa Stone might feel more assured, Keefe wagered, if their daughter participated in something directly connected to the church. The diocese had a baseball league for boys, and he knew that Tomboy was acquainted with many of the players. “After Mass, I’d put my dungarees on and I’m out to find the fellas,” she said. Keefe might be able to convince parish boys to let Tomboy play in the Catholic boys’ baseball league if they realized how fast she could run and how far she could hit a ball. If he could channel her athletic ability into a Catholic activity, perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Stone would stop criticizing their daughter’s interests. Father Keefe mentioned his idea to Tomboy. He “told me that since I wasn’t going to stop playing,” she said, “I might as well play for the church.”10