Spirit in Action
Segregated Blackball to Major Leagues - The Saga of Satchel Paige
Larry Tye's recent book is SATCHEL: The Life and Times of an American Legend. Satchel Paige was a trail-blazer in the times when African-Americans were segregated from whites in their neighborhoods, schools, drinking fountains and on the ball field and Larry Tye chronicles Satchel's long march to color-blind recognition with the feel of an gripping adventure.
- Broadcast on:
- 05 Feb 2012
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- other
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world alone ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world alone ♪ Today for Spirit in Action, we'll be speaking with a fine and passionate writer on a mission, Larry Tye. His recent book is Satchel, The Life and Times of an American Legend, and it's perfect for our consideration during Black History Month. Satchel Paige was a trailblazer in the times when African Americans were segregated from whites in their neighborhoods, schools, drinking fountains, and on the ball field. Larry Tye tells the story of Satchel Paige with the feeling of a gripping adventure, but with the careful documentation of a thorough biographer. Larry is an award-winning journalist at the Boston Globe, and he joins us today from Boston. Larry, I'm delighted to have you here today for Spirit in Action. I'm delighted to be with you. Your latest book is Satchel, although I understand there's another one that's coming off the presses very soon. Satchel, The Life and Times of an American Legend. I'm afraid for some of our younger listeners, they may not be totally keyed into who Satchel Paige was. Why don't you give us an overview of Satchel Paige's life and his place in baseball? Sure, there are two different parts of his life that I focus on, and I'll tell you about both of them. One is Satchel Paige, the baseball player, and he may have been the greatest pitcher ever to pick up the baseball. What he's sure is that he pitched for more fans in more ballparks over more years with more flair than any pitcher has ever done in the 150-year history of baseball, and he did that mainly in the shadow world of what was called them the Negro Leagues. For your younger listeners, particularly, they ought to know that starting a little bit after 1900s during the post-Civil War era, we call Reconstruction. America's baseball world, like its world generally, was separated into two universes, one black and one white. That meant that blacks and whites had separate water fountains, they attended separate public schools, they had segregated seating on public transportation like buses and trains, and they generally operated in a second and inferior, poorly funded and largely ignored universe, and that included baseball. So the reason listeners might not have heard of Satchel Paige is because instead of pitching in the major leagues, like the old-time great Cy Young and Christy Matheson and other more familiar pitchers were, Satchel played for 9/10 of his career in this underworld of the Negro Leagues. And you said that started in the early 1900s. I understand that there was a period before that where segregation in leagues was not deriguer across the entire U.S. That's true, that was during the era of Reconstruction, when integration applied across institutions in America, that for the first time blacks were elected from the south to local legislatures, to Congress, to all kinds of positions in their community, they had institutions generally that were beginning to integrate, and there was a golden period where baseball as well had blacks playing at the highest level. But starting just about the time that Satchel was born, segregation began to take hold by law in terms of things like public office and schools and by custom in baseball, to the point where in the early 1900s when Satchel was coming up, there was a firm tradition that said blacks will not be allowed. Is this true in both the south and the north? You talked about segregation, you talked about the whole Jim Crow approach to relationships between the races. We think of that perhaps with respect to the south, and I think that maybe people from the north looked down on people in the south as they did those bad things. They did apartheid in our country, they did segregation. Was it equally true in the north or to what degree was it true in the north? This very good question we should not as a northerner, I would be the first one to say coming from a place like Boston, that we had our own deeply rooted racism in our own segregation. The difference was that generally in the north it was segregation by practice, whereas in the south it was segregation by law. But one was no less insidious than the other, and while more blacks and there was more overt hostile segregation in the south, it was happening in the north as we saw in the busing crisis in Boston in the 1960s, and we saw in cities where racial violence erupted from Chicago and New York to cross California. Since we're in Black History Month, all of this is very important, and it might be the total motivation behind why you decided to write Satchel, Life and Times of American Legend. But in fact, I also understand that you're a baseball fan, so you might have competing allegiances. What was the real top motivation to get you to write this book, Larry? Both were equally important. I think of this as two biographies in one. One is the biography that I wrote as the Passionate Baseball fan, and the Passionate particularly Boston Red Sox fan. And that was the fascination with Satchel pages of picture. I wanted to understand how he could throw a baseball so accurately that he could set up a matchbook on home plate, walk 60 feet, six inches back to the picture's pond, and throw 9 out of 10 baseballs over that matchbook. And I wanted to see, was he really as great as a great picture in my era? The Pedro Martinez and Roger Clemens and Nolan Ryan and Sandy Copax. So that was half the motivation. The other half was that this is also a biography of Jim Crow. And Jim Crow was the nickname we used for the whole pattern of racial segregation, the 75-year pattern of racial segregation in America. And the Satchel page story, given that he was born just as Jim Crow was taking effect, and his whole career mirrored the career of Jim Crow and of segregation in America. It was a biography of Jim Crow buried within a biography of Satchel page, and it let my interest in racial history melt with my interest in baseball. And most importantly, I wrote this book for young kids, for kids like my teenagers who grew up hearing about Jim Crow but not really understanding what it was and never having experienced it. And I know the kids like that sitting down and reading a book on Jim Crow might be tough sell, but reading a book on a great baseball player that happened to have the other history buried within it was a likelier proposition. Well, Larry, let's get into some of the specifics of how that applied to Satchel page or Leroy page, I guess is his official name, and I understand there's multiple spellings of his last name. He seemed to be something of an enigma. He seemed to constantly be reinventing himself, modifying and keeping people guessing about who he really was. One of the things we know about him for sure though is he grew up in Mobile, Alabama, and you had kind of a hopeful start to describing Mobile at the early part in the book, that it was kind of a more positive place in the south for blacks, but that change that was not such a happy ending and it wasn't a happy place really for Satchel to be. Can you talk a little bit about the dynamics of Mobile itself? Yes, Mobile, Alabama is best described actually by envisioning standing in Mobile, and depending on what direction you're looking at, you're getting a sense of the two sides of Mobile. If you're looking out to the beautiful water and the Gulf Coast, you're seeing the Mobile that was looking out to the wider world and that defied a lot of the early racist instincts of the rest of Alabama and the deep south. It had a history of more tolerance, it had a history of treating blacks, free plays and others with more sympathy and understanding, and it seemed to pose a hopeful future for the city and maybe even for the state. But if you're turning and looking the other way, looking to the rest of Alabama, inland, you see the Mobile that ended up dominating. By 1906, the year that Satchel was born, Mobile was adopting the same racist laws, ensuring that blacks had to sit at the back of a bus and could only sit when there were seats in that for all the whites to be accommodated first, that they went to separate schools, the kids like Satchel had to go to the small and inadequate blacks only, library, that generally the city gave way to the state and to the region's worst instincts and became part of this pattern of racial segregation that ensnared too much of America and all of the deep south. I'm a little bit embarrassed to bring up Satchel's childhood home because in some ways, at least, it perhaps characterizes almost a stereotype in common of African-American families with a largely absentee father and an amazingly persistent and resourceful mother. Can you flesh out that picture? Yes, the picture is, unfortunately, too close to a stereotype, but it also happens to be the truth of what happened with Satchel. His dad was a very good guy, but he just wasn't around much, and he describes himself as a landscaper. I described him in my book more accurately, I think, as an occasionally employed gardener who too often was out of work and too often depended on Satchel's mother, who took him laundry from wealthy whites to pay for Satchel and his teaming family of brothers and sisters to make it. The fact is, it was very difficult to make it, and the fact is, Satchel went in through no fault of his own at the very young age of 12 when he was sentenced by a truant officer and by a court to the Alabama Reform School of Juvenile Negro Lawbreakers, whose very name suggested the system of segregation that was operating then in the state of Alabama. The bad news was that at a young age, because his parents couldn't handle him, he ended up in Reform School, but good news was that the Reform School was under the direction of a famous black scholar and philosopher named Booker T. Washington, who believed that the key to black advancement was taking young kids like Satchel Paige and teaching them what they could do better than anybody else. Teaching them that the way to get ahead was not to try to overthrow Jim Crow, because it would take another half century, it turned out to do that. It was to make it within the unfair world that he found himself and to figure out a way to excel. And what Satchel did was, over the next five years, he excelled by learning how to throw a baseball better than anybody else, and he said, "I gave up five years of my freedom to learn how to pitch, and it was a trade worth making," and he proved that for the rest of his life. That's kind of surprising. I think so many young folks who go into reformatories, it really just starts a cycle of crime, and it perpetuates itself. It puts them with other lawbreakers and so on. Booker T. Washington had an effect on this. I understand there's some women who, a group of women who were very influential in this place, was Mount Meigs, which is what I believe it was called, was Mount Meigs especially different in terms of all of these other places, reformatories, et cetera. Mount Meigs, which was the location of this institution, and what it became known as in shorthand, was different. It was different partly because of Booker T. Washington and the African American women of the era who made it their project to make sure this was more than a school for punishment, but it was a school for learning. It was not only different from what existed then, it was different from the institution that exists there today and has a dormitory named after Satchel Page. Today it's a place that has more hardened kids, and punishment is more central to the mission, that they try today to do more reforming, but the mission has changed a bit. And I think that the Satchel was very lucky to be at that particular institution at that moment in time to get the opportunity to learn and to develop rather than just become more hardy. Booker T. Washington wasn't the only one who was competing for the minds of blacks about how to move forward, how to oppose Jim Crow. Could you talk about the other major strain of thought? Sure, there was a major strain of thought by a younger, at the time, seemingly more militant guy named E.B. Dubois, and what he was doing was advocating essentially overturning the system of segregation. One thing is just not fair if we have to start out with the strike against us that having inferior institutions only designed for blacks with less resources and can operate in the shadow world. And so what he did was founded an organization called the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and their mission through brilliant lawyers like Thurgood Marshall was to overturn the system of segregation that's actually grown up in. That was clearly something that Booker T. Washington sympathized with, but he felt it was unrealistic. It turned out both were right. Dubois was right in the sense that the ultimate solution depended on overturning segregation. Washington was right that it would take a long time, and a lot of people would be stuck in the system, like Thatcher was, for another half century. And so having these two competing thoughts was actually a great thing, I think, for the community back then, focused on short and long-term solutions. You've also written a couple other books relevant to this discussion. One of them is called Rising from the Rails, Pullman Porters, and Making of the Black Middle Class. What motivated you to pursue this history of blacks? I believe you are white, and I think you're actually a Jewish background. What was driving you to delve so deeply into something that really is so crucial to our country? So what motivated me to write this book was partly the idea that whatever race one is, you have to understand, if you care about history, that race is the story of America, and that to really understand everything from the seemingly disparate worlds of baseball and train travel, that behind them is a story of what race was like in America. And so that was part of my motivation. The other is just looking for good stories and untold stories, and I think that's what a journalist and an author spends half of their life doing. You're looking for the big issue, but for the little untold gem of the story that is a lens into that bigger issue. And my lens was partly the story of these Pullman Porters, the elegant black men who worked on the railroad for nearly 100 years, and who I think of as a great all-American success story. They started out as just freed slaves at the end of the Civil War. They went to work on George Pullman's elegant sleeping cars that took people across America, and they produced their sons and daughters, nieces and nephews account for a disproportionate share of America's prominent African-American lawyers and doctors, Supreme Court justices like Thurgood Marshall's, and politicians like Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco. So there's a great success story of Black America. Justice Satchel Page, while he's the story of the tragedy of Jim Crow, is also the story of a triumph that a guy can rise from that to make his way into the baseball hall of fame and into the legends. Yeah, it is quite a story. So again, that book was rising from the rails, Pullman Porters, and making the black middle class. We're talking about your most recent book, Satchel Life and Times of an American legend. Could you map out a little bit for me the, I guess, decline into segregation of blacks, of the black leagues of black ball, I guess, as it was called, and the rise from it, that period. I think you said segregation was really taking effect in the early 1900s. People like to think of Jackie Robinson as the first black to play in the major leagues, but I guess that's not true. Back in the 1800s, there were some other folks. There were what I think is more accurate in terms of looking at what Jackie Robinson's role in history was. He was the first black to play baseball in the modern era in the 20th century. But then, in fact, as you say, there was this earlier lost history of blacks playing well and playing at the highest levels. And so what happened is we go from the Civil War where blacks are enslaved to a period of hope during reconstruction when blacks were given opportunities in baseball and other eras to the turn of the century from the early 1900s, the re-segregation of baseball. And then we go for nearly a full half-century. Before in 1947, Jackie Robinson is the first black to play in the major leagues. And 1948, Satchel Page follows him onto the major league field. And why is it that Jackie Robinson was the first one and not Leroy Satchel Page? I mean, some points of view, surely, Satchel was a more notable player. He had established history, he had great appeal to a wide number of fans, both black and white. Why was it that Jackie Robinson was first? The question that you just asked is the same one that Satchel asked, which was simply why was Jackie first when Satchel was the one who had proven just how good blacks could be, and he felt he deserved the chance. And I think that he was right. It was only because Jackie Robinson was the second string, second baseman on an all-black team called the Kansas City Monarchs on Satchel Page's Kansas City Monarchs. That was the only reason that Branch Ricky had ever heard of Jackie Robinson. He only played in the Negro leagues for one year before Ricky signed him to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers farm team. And Satchel basically for 30 years had been proving not just how good he was, but he had been bringing the spotlight of white reporters and white Americas and white owners like Branch Ricky to how good the Negro leagues were. But I think Ricky signed Jackie rather than Satchel because Jackie was younger, he was college educated, he seemed like he was at the beginning of a great career where Satchel looked like he might be at the end of his career. And most importantly to Ricky, Jackie Robinson would do and say what he told him to, and Satchel Page wasn't going to do or say what anybody told him to. And I think Ricky didn't want to bring on a character. He wanted to bring on somebody who was younger and more malleable. Branch Ricky signed Jackie Robinson and it took a year later and the manager who was willing to take a much greater risk, a guy named Bill Beck to have the courage to sign Satchel Page and Satchel never let him down. Another thing that perhaps played in the decision I suppose is that Satchel was not exactly what you call, he didn't follow the numbers, he didn't obey. And I guess sometimes his behavior was a bit scandalous. And Branch Ricky was not a person who was going to put up a scandalous. He was not a person who condoned what some people might think of as immoral behavior. That was a significant part of the issue, wasn't it? It was, and Branch Ricky was a key coddler. He wanted somebody who was much more of a straight arrow the way that Jackie Robinson was. At this stage partly wasn't beyond carrying on with women, he wasn't beyond drinking. He lived a more freewheeling and some could say scandalous life. But I think he was a much more interesting character as well. He was somebody who understood the history of blacks in baseball. He understood what it was like playing in front of white audiences. And I think if he had been signed, and this isn't based just on theory, it's based on what happened a year later when he was signed, he drew the biggest crowds that had ever filled most of the stadiums, whether it was in Chicago or in Cleveland or in New York. He filled up stadiums. He actually broke turn styles. And most importantly, whereas Jackie Robinson wasn't quite sure how to deal with the hostility and the racism that he encountered, sexual Paige had spent 30 years dealing with that. And he was much better at disusing a lot of attention. And I'm never going to take anything away from Jackie Robinson. And he deserves, and whatever I say, he's certainly always going to have his place in history. But I think sexual Paige deserves a place alongside him. An old Negro Leaguer who I interviewed was much more eloquent than I could ever be in capturing the roles of these two guys. And what he said was that it was Jackie Robinson, who opened the door in baseball to the new racial reality. Jackie Robinson opened the door, but with sexual Paige, who inserted the key. If you just tuned in, you're listening to Spirit in Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet. This is a Northern Spirit Radio production. Our website is northernspiritradio.org. On that site, you can hear six and a half years of archives. You can find links to our guests, like Larry Tye, who's with us today, speaking about Satchel, the life and times of an American legend. Also on that site, you'll find a place to comment. And we love hearing back from you. Everything you feed back to us goes through my eyes and through my brain and hopefully comes out my mouth as part of the improvement that we can make to Northern Spirit Radio. Again, we're speaking with Larry Tye. He's written a book, "Satchel Life and Times of American Legend." It deals both with segregation and the whole history of what was called blackball, I understand at the time. The Negro leagues of the era of desegregation of our emergence from Jim Crow and the role that Satchel Page played in that. Satchel Page is not, I think, Larry, some kind of a simple character. It's really kind of hard to pin him down. He certainly was a winning character for many people. He drew the men's crowds that you mentioned. But his character, was he a drinker, was he a smoker? In some ways, he held up high ideals of what the young people should be like. But in his own personal life, there are many things that clearly walked over that line of scandalous. For instance, at one point, I believe he was married at least to two women at once. And he wasn't clear whether he was being honest with either or both of them or the public. He's a complex person. How do you end up thinking about him? Was he a moral person? Was he making the best of the situation he had there? What do you think about all of that? I think that he was exactly as complex as you suggest. That on the one hand, he grew up in a system where he was given irrational rules that he had to behave according to. He had to go to this library, not go to that library. He could go to the inferior black school, but not go to the white school. He could only be a groundskeeper on the field that the white baseball team in Mobile was playing in, and he had to play on a second-rate black baseball diamond. So he was given the irrational rules to live according to. And I think he decided at a certain point that he was going to throw all the rules out. And those included rules, like being married to one woman, those included rules, like being faithful. And there are lots of things to criticize him for. And his own kids understand that side of satchel. He had seven kids, and the good news is, and the other side of satchel was he really tried hard. And his kids ended up being really outstanding citizens and being really good, concerned people. And I think that that was the other side of satchel. He had an exceedingly smart and very prim and proper wife who was a devout Christian. And she, I think, in many ways made up for the other side of satchel. And she understood them. And I think he is a complex person. He is an incredibly real person with foibles that he would freely have admitted. But I think if you were weighing his life and the good and the bad, you have to say he did a whole lot more good for a lot more people than he ever heard anyone. And even when he was hurting people, he had them laughing and he had them understanding that he was never anybody who pretended to be anything other than a flawed character. So I think of him in a way like I think of the uncle who you want to come to dinner and entertain you with great stories and really awe you with all the special things that he can do. I'm glad satchel wasn't my father. I wish I had him as an uncle or a grandfather. That's a good way thinking about it. You mentioned his wife, his third wife, actually, a lahoma. You said she was a devout Christian, I believe she was specifically Jehovah's Witness. I think in some ways I saw echoes in her character of his mother that in fact, I think he kind of attached to lahoma perhaps. I'm sure that there's deep love of all sorts and all kinds of connection. But one of the elements I assumed was that somehow she provided a tether or maybe a way to keep him rooted and connected and making his life and the outcome of his life better. There are plenty of other women evidently willing to throw themselves at him, but she tethered him to something better and I think it was echoes of what he got from this mother. Does that reflect what you think of that situation? Yeah, I think it's a really good analysis. I think that it was not accidental that she was not the first or second woman he ended up with, but he was selling his seeds in those early days. It was not accidental that it was only lahoma that he really wanted to settle down with and develop a stable family. And I think what he was looking for was partly some sense of the strong woman that he had grown up with. And he grew up with a great role model and a mother and a not so great role model and a father. And the good news was that he was much more devoted to and there as a breadwinner for his kids than his dad had been for him, but the other good news was that he had a mother for his kids every bit as much of a straight arrow and as much of a good influence on his kids as his mother had been on him. So I think that we're both playing a little bit of psychologist, but you can't help but thinking that. And I think that if he were there today with us, if he were here on this radio interview, satchel would agree with that analysis. And he adored lahoma even when he couldn't be as faithful as he wanted to be to her. Well, he might admit it if he were here. On the other hand, he might spin some kind of a yarn. He evidently had quite a penchant for that. He kept people guessing on what year he was born, what the birthday was, where he lived, where he went. I mean, he didn't want to get nailed down. It was kind of my impression of him. That's true. And if I said that he could be depended on to agree with us, then just for the point of being disagreeable, he would not agree with us. And I think what he was doing, and I think spinning all these legends about himself, it's extraordinary to me that when I went back and looked at all the claims that he made to have pitched 50 no hitters and 100 shutouts and just to have done things that were seemingly beyond belief, as I went and researched every baseball fact and other things that he claimed for himself, I found that 80 to 90% of them were true, which raises the question, why invent? Why embellish 10% if you're threatening people's willingness to believe and your believability for the other 90% he had really done? And I think that he just couldn't help himself, that he was such a good storyteller, and he realized that while Babe Ruth had a million reporters following his exploits in Major League Baseball and he couldn't lie about him and was all there and his accomplishments were there in the record books, Satchel Page had no record keepers because the Negro Leagues couldn't afford them for most of their games, and so he had to be out there fanning his own legend and creating his own mystery. And even over simple things that were easy to fact check, like what year and what day and what date he was born on, he would tell different stories because he felt that was creating a mystery about him, and it was getting reporters to pay attention, and he wanted more than anything in the world not to be forgotten. And I think that in doing that he fanned his legend to the point where when you tell people the name Satchel Page, in addition to thinking of a great ballplayer, old-timers think of fantasy, and they think of is he really telling the truth, and a guy who just spun the stories about himself, and that's fortunate because there were great stories, and it's unfortunate because, again, it takes away from the real factual accomplishment of all he did in his life. You may have mentioned this in the book, but I also thought that spinning those stories, the fantasy as you referred to it, that in part it helped him not be under the thumb of or accountable to segregation, to this control from above. If they didn't quite know who or where he's from or what he was, it was hard to, I guess, hold him as tightly within the rules of Jim Crow of segregation. Does that make sense to you? Is that something maybe you did say in the book? And I'm just repeating your words as if they were mine? No, I did say some of that. You've said it probably more eloquently, and I think it does make sense. I think that this is a guy who came up in a world where rules didn't make sense. He invented his own rules. He decided he could live by them, but he knew it's some deeper level, and maybe it's because of what his mother had instilled with him in terms of her positive teachings when he was a kid. He knew it's some deeper level what right and wrong were, and that's why he brought in his wife to clarify his moral choices, and that's why he was such a good dad to his kids, and I think that he, in the end, his legacy, like his baseball accomplishments, his moral legacy is a whole lot more positive than it is questionable, and he did as much, I think, to undermine the Jim Crow system as anybody. I think that it's not accidental that Jim Crow was integrating baseball fields in America a decade before our schools and our other major institutions were integrated. Baseball was truly as a cliché goes, the all-American sport, and once you integrated that and once people got used to seeing blacks and whites playing together without the sky falling, when they could do it on the baseball field, we thought it happened in basketball and in football, and in other sports, we thought it happened in our school rooms and on our buses, and I think that it just, they really did some extraordinary things in changing the thinking, and there's nobody, including Jackie Robinson, who deserves credit any more than Satchel Paige does, that if Jackie was the father of integration in baseball, Satchel was the grandfather. Part of his technique, I get the sense that Jackie Robinson kind of wanted to take it head-on. He was a serious person, I'm going ahead. Satchel played with the system, I guess you will. He dodged around things. One of the things that he did, I understand, was strolling out to the plate, kind of ambling, and he had a kind of sometimes maybe a little bit clownish caricature that he was playing with, and I think that maybe that was part of the techniques that had to be used by blacks in this country to deal with segregation. It's a way to get around. If you took him head-on, you were going to be shot hung all the horrible things that did happen, but if you played around him and you made someone laugh, they were maybe a little bit less likely to lynch you, and maybe you could get a little bit of insight growing in them. I think that you're right. I think there were two things that separated Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige. Partly, as you suggest, it was the era, and Satchel would come up in an era where black ball players, and it wasn't enough to just go out and pitch a great baseball game. You had to come early, and he would put nails up on a board behind home plate, and he'd go back to the pitcher's mound, and he would throw a baseball so hard and so accurately that he could help drive in a 10-penny nail into a board with just a baseball that he was pitching. And he had to do little stunts like that, because blacks who were coming to the games back then, and then eventually a small member of whites who came and watched Negro League games wanted to be entertained, and they were putting out their hard-earned money, and they wanted to come a little bit early and get a show, and he gave them the show that they wanted. It didn't take anything away from what he did when he went on the mound, but blacks of that era understood that they had to be entertainers as well as baseball players, and so for 30 years he did that. Jackie Robinson never grew up in any of the Negro League, and he thought that was good meaning, but it was just one generation not understanding what the other one had done to create opportunities for it. Jackie should have understood that he was on Satchel Paige's team, and that Satchel had to do things that may seem unseemly or unbignified to him, but were a reality of the world that Satchel had grown up in. The other thing is they were two incredibly different personalities. Satchel lacked harder and lived harder than Jackie did, and maybe that's why Satchel also lived longer. As he pointed out, that Jackie Robinson in later years had white hair and had ulcers and had issues that never troubled Satchel, and Satchel said, "I'm a lot older than Jackie, but Jackie looks like my father or grandfather." And I think what happened was, you talked about the image of Satchel strolling out, taking his time when he went from the bullpen to the pitcher's mound, and Satchel did that in part because he wanted to milk the audience for every last cheer and applause line that he could get, and as he said, it took me 30 years to get here to the Major League pitching mound, and I'm damn well going to take my time getting out there in my stroll from the bullpen. And he did it very well, and eventually he got into baseball hall of fame, but my sense was that he felt very conflicted about the whole thing. I mean, of course, he's exciting. He's pursued this for 30, 40, I guess by the time he's actually in baseball hall of fame, but I understand that they wanted to create a separate hall for those who had played blackball, those who were in the Negro leagues. They didn't want to have their trophies, their recognition, in the same place with the whites, but that got turned around. It did. It was a crazy and sort of tragic thing that what they did was the owners of all the baseball teams and the great lords of baseball who ran the Hall of Fame decided that they were trying to do a maya culpa for all the racial segregation for a half-century in baseball, and so they said we're going to take a certain number of blacks, starting with Satchel Page, who played all or most of their career in the segregated Negro leagues. We may not have great statistics on them, but we're going to trust to what records there are, and we're going to put them in the Hall of Fame without having played the kind of major league baseball that other players had to do to get to the Hall of Fame, and so they were doing this wonderful maya culpa, but then they sort of tripped over it, and they said, "Geez, we're going to put them in their own special section here, so we're going to make up for baseball segregation by segregating them in a special quarter of the Hall of Fame." The bad news was that they did that. The good news was that baseball writers and fans howled so loudly that they reversed themselves, and Satchel Page not only is right there in the center of the Hall of Fame, but if you go to Cooperstown today and visit the Hall of Fame, you will see Satchel Page's statue out in front in his classic pose. His right leg lifted so high in the air that it looks like it's blacking out the sky, and his arm getting to tilt back in the catapult-like way that he threw the ball, and his statue was right out there in front of the Hall of Fame because he was one of the greatest characters ever to play baseball and to make it into the Hall of Fame. That kind of says it, Larry. You've mentioned this before, and I just want to emphasize the point. What happened with Satchel and what happened with sports is part of what helped move us out of segregation, helped move us out of blacks as second-class or maybe even lower-class citizens in this country. How important do you think that that role is? I mean, if it hadn't happened, if, you know, we hadn't had so many great athletic stars that came up from the black leagues, the Negro Leagues, as they were called. Would it have slowed down desegregation? Would it have slowed us down in terms of the civil rights era coming about? I think it would have. It's impossible to predict in terms of taking one factor out of history and saying that, "What have affected other factors?" But I think you just look at it. It's logical that if people see integration happening in an aspect of their life that is really central to a good share of Americans, what goes on on the athletic field really matters in this country. Sports is big. And if you see something happening there, it just makes sense that it's easier to accept it happening in other realms of American life. So if it happens on the baseball field, we know that that led directly in ways that we can measure to what happening in other sports arenas like basketball and football. And I think that if you talk to Supreme Court justices and others who are involved in integrating the schools and the buses and every other institution, they all said, as did Martin Luther King, that the sports world really paved the way. And would it have been an extra year that it would have delayed things or an extra decade? Who knows? All we know is that the people who were most central to it said they took hope and inspiration. And they said they took hope and inspiration not just from that in a generic sense, but from ball players like Satchel Page and his counterpart in the black baseball world, as good as Satchel was at pitching a baseball, his arch nemesis, Josh Gibson, was as good a hitter. That they called him the black Babe Ruth, but I think there are some who say that he could hit the ball even further and that he did at Yankee Stadium. And Satchel is symbolic of a whole range of other great black ball players from the Negro League world. Unfortunately, Josh Gibson died before he could make it to the major leagues. And Cool Papa Bell, who was the fastest black ball player of his era and maybe any era, never got to do what Satchel did in terms of shining in the major leagues. Satchel was one of the few who spanned two eras. He played for 30 years in the Negro leagues and then he came up in the major leagues and lasted for long enough to cement his legend among major league baseball fans all across America. They had a bit of a stunt that they did in his later years in life. They would pull out some kind of an easy chair and set him up on the throne as if he's a geriatric old man and then he'd get out there and pitch incredibly. It was actually extraordinary and the best evidence of that was when a crazy, wonderful owner of the Kansas City Athletics named Charlie Finley had a really mediocre team. He was looking for one game at the very end of the major league season in 1965 when Charlie Finley had a tough time filling the stadium at all during that season. He wanted to one game late in September to fill up the stadium. He brought back the aging Satchel page to pitch three innings and he set him up before the game out in the bullpen in an easy chair and a rocking chair with a nurse in a white uniform rubbing his arm, his own personal water boy, and brought him in and he didn't really care what Satchel did for those three innings because he did, in fact, succeed in filling the stadium. Everybody wanted to come back and see the ancient Satchel page pitch. And what Satchel did was he pitched against the hard hitting Boston Red Sox three shutout innings. The only guy to get a hit off him was Carl Jostrensky, who two seasons later would go on to win the triple crown. The most home runs, the most RBIs, and the highest batting average in the season. And Carl Jostrensky got the only hit off of him and after the game went up and gave Satchel a bear hug. And that bear hug was because a full generation before, Jostrensky's dad had batted against Satchel in a semi-pro game on Long Island. And Satchel was the only guy in the history of baseball who lasted long enough that fathers and sons and grandsons could all bat against him. And that night in Kansas City against the Red Sox, he not only pitched three shutout innings, he set a record that will never ever be broken. He set a record for being the oldest player in the history of baseball, 59 years, two months and eight days old. And let me say that again, 59 years. We think of guys like Roger Clemens or Nolan Ryan being ancient when they pitch into their mid-40s. And Satchel Paige came back at 59 and could throw well enough that he could shut out the Red Sox. What had happened was he had had seven kids late in life. And to go out and earn money for his kids, the only way he really knew how to earn money was to go out and throw baseball, so he kept doing it at the age when most people were sitting in rocking chairs, not just in the bullpen, but forever. There's a few more things I want to ask you, Larry, before we hang up. Because this is spirit and action that folks are listening to. And Satchel Paige played his important role of leading us to the fact that we weren't going to judge people on the color of their skin. And I think we've made tremendous progress on that, although there's still ways to go. Part of what we've covered in this interview has been what Satchel Paige did. But you, as his biographer, also are doing a work of spirit, in my opinion. And I just want to get some feel for your roots. I mean, obviously you're a baseball lover. I understand you grew up Jewish, maybe are practicing now. What kind of role did those things play in what motivated you to do the book? Is this a spiritual or religious motivation behind this? What's the big picture for Larry Ty? For me, spirituality, I am still very much interested in my faith. And I'm interested even more so in the morality behind that, in the sense of ethical standards. And I think that if you can combine two passions, it's like what we were talking about at the beginning. I have a passion for baseball, but I could have gone out and picked any white ball player and told the story just about baseball. And it was looking for a story that was about something more than just the fantasy world of baseball. It was looking for a story that was a little bit about what mattered in America in terms of moral and spiritual issues. And I think the story of race combined with the story of baseball really takes those two elements and cements them together. So to me, this is an appropriate story to be talking about on a show that is all about spirit. And spirituality is all about depth of feeling and depth of moral commitment. And that's what Satchel Paige had, and that's what I think that the whole transformation we've had racially in our society. We're not what we ought to be, and even baseball isn't where it once was and where it ought to be. In Satchel Paige's sort of post-integration era, we got to the point where 30% of baseball was made up. Professional baseball was made up of black ball players, and today we're back below 10%. And I think we have to keep asking, even in an escape world and a fantasy world like baseball, these important spiritual and moral questions, which include what's happening today is all that we were talking about in racial progress continuing. But generally, Satchel Paige, to me, is a good news story. It's an uplifting story, and it's a success story that we spend an awful lot of time in America looking at depressing and downbeat stories. And I think there are out there great uplifting spiritually and morally stories like Satchel Paige's, and that's what I was having done celebrating with this book. It's a great celebration. I've got one last question, and this comes from my location. I live in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and that's where Norton Spirit Radio starts out from as it spreads across the country and the world. We have our own little piece of history. Hank Aaron, on his way up, he really started here in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and so we've got our own little piece. And this emergence of these stunning athletes that we have, the ones that were kept out of professional ball, kept away from larger audiences by segregation. Another northern city that played a role in this, and again, I'm trying to, I think I'm putting in kudos here for maybe the Midwest. Bismarck North Dakota, of all of the unlikely places where integration happened, Bismarck North Dakota was one of them. We can understand over in California, the California League, evidently, did this well before the rest of the country. But Bismarck isn't there something wonderful about this Midwest sentiment that led at least a few examples of where integration could happen? I think it's brilliant. I think the idea that Satchel Page played some of his best baseball and some of his most celebrated baseball. The idea of doing it in a place like Bismarck, which had a handful of blacks and wasn't quite sure what black America was all about. It embraced this integrated baseball long before the major leagues did, and it played celebrated baseball. They ended up in Denver at the Denver Post tournament. There were lots of places in the heartland of America where there were very few blacks that had really welcomed any kind of baseball, and particularly baseball that brought in great black ball players. And Satchel had a blast there in Bismarck North Dakota, and you mentioned Hank Aaron. Hank Aaron came from the same city, Mobile, Alabama that Satchel did. And Satchel grew up with Hank Aaron's dad and ended up in his later years when he was a short time pitching coach for the Atlanta Braves. Ended up coaching and pitching against Hank Aaron. And there's no part of America, but most notably the Midwest, that aren't part of this great success story because Satchel Page played baseball in the south. And in the northeast, he played in the winters in California, and he played a good part of his career in towns all across the Midwest, farming communities and other places. They embraced him and they gave him a chance to earn a living as well as make a name. It is a great success story. I understand that you have another book coming up. Actually, I have two books. One of them is done and is due out just before Father's Day and it's a biography of another great Midwestern American hero, and his name is Superman. And it's a book that looks at why we embrace the heroes we do by looking at the longest blasting of all our heroes, Superman. And then I'm working, just started working for the same publisher Random House on a book on a hero of mine when I was growing up, and his name is Robert F. Kennedy. Wow, some great books coming up. I'm sure we'll keep in touch with you, Larry. We've been speaking with Larry Thai, author of Satchel, The Life and Times from American Legend. He's also author of Rising From the Rails, Pullman Porters in the Making of the Black Middle Class. He's also another book, Father of Spin, Edward Bernays, and the Birth of Public Relations. All a number of great books, Larry, and you seem to be able to combine inspirational visions of people. Your writing is so very easy. I didn't have the sense of reading a textbook. I had the sense of reading an adventure, yet all the facts and the documentation are there. It was a great thrill for me to read Satchel, and it was great to have you here today for Spirit in Action. I really appreciate your giving me the time to talk about these, and I wish you and your listeners great luck. We'll take you out for today's Spirit in Action with a relevant song by one of my favorites, John McCutchen. It's from his CD, Sermon on the Mount, all baseball-related songs, and this one is about Jackie Robinson, and it mentions his teammate, Pee Wee Reese, who stood by him through the worst of the abuse Jackie received as the lightning rod for the integration of the big leagues. So we'll hear part of Cross That Line by John McCutchen. Let's meet here next week for Spirit in Action. He was a child of the south. Learn to stand your ground and shut your mouth. You bear your crosses every day. Your fingers caked in charge of clay. Another child's southern role. Learn to stand your ground, defend your own. You grow up learning wrong from light. You grow up learning black from white. World apart the season turns. Deep inside the fire burns. Who knows the place, who knows the time. When you are moved to Cross That Line. Both bound by a boyhood sport. Jack played at first, Pee Wee Short. That day they met on Brooklyn's Field. Their histories never seem so real. One saw the other take the throws. He saw the spikes, he saw the blows. He knew the promise that was made. He knew the price, the other pain. World apart the season turns. Deep inside that fire burns. Who knows the place, who knows the time. When you are moved to Cross That Line. No way to know he'd be the one. He heard the taunts he heard the cheers. He felt the burden of the years. And he called for time, and then he walked from short to first. Stood and faced the man who'd faced the worst. Then these two children on the south. Arm and arms to the ground and shut the mouths. World apart the season turns. Deep inside that fire burns. Who knows the place, who knows the time. When you are moved to Cross That Line. The world's apart the season turns. Deep inside that fire burns. Who knows the place, who knows the time. When you are moved to Cross That Line. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website. NorthernSpiritRadio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)