The Atlanta Crackers

We took a Sunday morning detour through Atlanta to find an obscure but intriguing nod to forgotten history.

The official City of Atlanta Parks sign can be found at 1401 Bridges Ave outside the Hartnett Community Garden, on the side facing away from the street. Access to the field can be found one driveway down between 1405 and 1409 Bridges Ave. You have to want to find it.

The Atlanta Black Crackers were a professional Negro league baseball team which played during the early to mid-20th century, when segregation was the law of the land.

In 1940 Negro league players were paid $2 a week in meal money and $60 a month in salary, benefits that often went unpaid. They were called the “N” word as often as they were called by name. Barnstorming the nation, the Crackers once traveled by bus from Greenwood, MS to Flint, MI for a one-night stand. Sometimes they played as many as three games in one day. They changed their clothes in open fields, and they shared bathwater with teammates.

It is a well-worn cliche that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it — a cliche, for sure, but an accurate one.

Respecting the past allows a certain perspective over the times in which we live. Maybe lacking in predictive certainty for the future, but even the ugly parts offer some insight into how we as a nation are progressing. Hiding it changes nothing.

On Reunions and Grandkids

Last weekend, I missed my 50-year high school class reunion. Shawna and I have 14 grandkids.

Never in high school did I ever reflect forward on becoming a grandparent. Conversely, as a grandparent, I seldom reflect backwards on my high school experiences. But this week the two juxtaposed into a confluence that defines the 2025 me.

I will always be a proud member of the Crystal City High School Class of 1975. Once a Hornet, always a Hornet. But let’s be honest, high school can really suck. Regretfully, 50 years ago, I kept my circle tight. The cliques, the ridiculous ways we divided ourselves up to sooth our insecurities, well, that’s so 1975. But, in 2025, we are deeper, with richer understanding of who we are, of our humanity and the bumpy road we have all followed. We as now senior citizens have all turned out pretty much the same.

But a long time ago, we all searched for our identities in the same small town that has always taken pride in its roots. We cruised the same Main Street, partied together at any house parentally deserted for the weekend. And even though we all went our separate adult ways, we all shared a CCHS that nourished our angst-ridden teenage souls. Fifty years ago, I was too busy trying to get out to appreciate that my hometown was a great place to grow up.

I enjoyed the reunion pictures recently posted on Facebook - filled with camaraderie and affection, like a cozy 1970s crocheted vest. It is a good chapter of life when the gauze of age has softened those long-ago sharp edges. We, the Class of ‘75 share a pivotal life stage.

It was disappointing to miss the reunion, but not a hard choice. Shawna and I have sat through too many Kindergarten Christmas programs and four-year-old dance recitals to count.

My maternal grandparents, Richard and Francis Dunker, raised ten children who all grew into successful adults, in a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house on Crystal Heights Road. Grandma was raised in the bootheel Arkansas boarder Missouri town of Willamette. She answered a classified ad in a local paper for a domestic in the home of a supervisor at the local Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company factory. A few years before, Grandpa had matriculated to Crystal City from Perryville, MO to work at PPG. He climbed his way up to become a crane operator, where in 1970, after 45 years of employment, he retired.

On the Dunker side, I had 26 first cousins. Four of us were in the same catholic school classroom first through fourth grade. Then, Rick's mother and her siter, my mother, decided it was time to break up the comedy team, he banished to the public school.

Saturday nights at Grandma and Grandpa’s were special. At 6 pm, we all gathered in front of the black and white TV for the Newlywed Game. My grandmother was no more than five feet tall, but when the host Bob Eubanks would ask a “whoopie” question, Grandma’s both feet would raise a foot straight up from her recliner, driven by a resounding belly laugh of hilarity. By age 12, I had figured it out.

Next was Roller Derby, then Wrestling at the Chase and finally, the network headliner, Gunsmoke. I was always sound asleep on the living room floor before Marshall Dillon had deposited the last bad guy in the tumble weed blown dirt of Boot Hill. There were five of us. No one got carried to the car.

Grandpa Dunker dropped out of school in the 8th grade. He was getting old enough, he said, the only path he saw to graduation was to marry the teacher, so he quit. Despite a limited formal education, Grandpa was a Grand Master of Life. Once, after Grandma had passed and I was home from college, I took Grandpa to lunch. As we were seated, he told me, “If the waitress has fat ankles, always order the chili.” It has proved over the years, fail proof sage advice I have passed on to my own kids.

Grandpa’s most treasured possession was his 1944 Harley Davidson motorcycle. Even at a young age, I just sensed my grandpa was cooler than yours.

I learned from Grandma and Grandpa Dunker to do the small things, and it'll lead to bigger things. They consistently modeled for 26 grandkids that belief.

My paternal grandfather, Robert Almany, died in 1934, when my dad was three

years old. My paternal grandmother, Mary, had demons. By 1935 she had abandoned my dad in a rooming house in the St. Louis suburb of University City. He told us that his older sister Olive and brother Robert were fiercely protective of him, but just mere teenagers themselves. In the heights of the Great Depression, few were lining up to adopt the four-year-old boy of an alcoholic widow. When the police found him alone for several days and scared, he was on a fast track to the City Orphanage

Somehow, he ended up in Union, MO with the Sherrif of Franklin County. Several years ago I stumbled across a big clue in a 1935 newspaper story on why and how, and I wrote a blog on it. It is head scratching and knee bucklering how a random act of kindness by a stranger changed my dad’s life and thus mine as well. The Sherriff found dad’s Aunt Annie Murphy on a farm south of Crystal City. She agreed to take him in. My four brothers and I grew up on that farm.

Dad hammered into us his story. He had a choice when his father died and his mother left him, he was going to let that motivate him and be the best or he was going to succumb to it and become a statistic of a kid whose parent did something she shouldn’t.

My fellow ’75 classmate Laura Morrow wrote a nice obituary on my dad. https://www.myleaderpaper.com/.../article_a88780f8-1c40...

My dad never acknowledged it, but I know he never forgave his mother for abandoning him as a child. Who could? This ressentiment of betrayal on the most basic human level was a complex and compounding burden that effected his life to the day he died.

Grandma and Grandpa Dunker’s “House on the Heights” is to this day a beacon of a reminder of some of my best childhood memories; comforting and welcoming. Their story isn’t just about a huge brood of grandkids. It’s about a couple who managed to raise a large thriving family through the depths of first the Great Depression, then the Second World War. They laid the foundation for a legacy that today I cherish and pass on. Their lives will influence generations to come.

Conversely, besides a copy of a wedding day photo, I have only one black and white polaroid of my grandmother on the Almany side. In 1963, I am standing with her, expressionless. Like her life, it is stark and blank. Until she passed away in 1976, she would periodically come to live with us. I assumed it was an “all-other options were exhausted” necessity. It never lasted long and it was never good. Dad said as far as he knew, his mother never slept one night of her life in a house she owned.

But life doesn’t always move in straight lines. We are a melting pot and all things are connected. Ninety-one years ago, a grandfather of whom I know nothing, died. Last week I missed my 50-year high school reunion. In a uniquely American way, it all fits nicely.

Shoeless Joe: say It ain't so

You can't find the treasure hidden on the road until you start digging. Probably not what you thought, but something will pop up.

While searching yesterday for a sports bar in Greenville, SC that would simultaneously telecast both the Mizzou and Illini football games, we stumbled across the Shoeless Joe Jackson historical museum.

If there's a more tragic character than Shoeless Joe Jackson in the long and intricate history of baseball, I know not of him.

Jackson’s career ended in utter disgrace when he was barred from organized baseball because of his role in the Black Sox gambling scandal of 1919. He and seven of his Chicago White Sox teammates were allegedly paid to throw that fall’s World Series.

Many call him the greatest hitter who ever lived. His .354 career batting average is the fourth highest of all time, his playing days short circuited in his prime. Who knows how great his numbers might have been. Due to his lifetime ban Jackson has not been eligible for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The museum is located in the small house where in 1954 Jackson died. Two miles away is the Brandon Textile Mill where Jackson began laboring at age six. At 13, he became a regular on the mill’s baseball team. The factory building and the adjacent ball field still today stand, a large smokestack looming behind the first base line.

With the exception of 14 years spent playing professional baseball, Shoeless Joe Jackson spent his entire life in Greenville.

Due to no child labor laws of the day, there was no time for school, so Jackson never learned to read or write. He probably would have spent the rest of his life working in the textile mills if it weren’t for baseball.

.As for his role in the Black Sox scandal, it seems to have been peripheral at worst. History has recorded Jackson as a victim of circumstances he could neither control nor fully comprehend.

The prosecution of Shoeless Joe and his teammates was a complicated, ambiguous affair replete with coercion and distortion of half-truths. Jackson had a .375 batting average and no errors in the 1919 Series. His 12 hits set a Series record that stood until 1964, 13 years after he died.

In the 1990’s two movies, Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams; sparked a renewed interest in Jackson’s plight.

Years after he was banished Jackson still received sympathetic fan mail. His story has been handed down through generations. It locks in the tradition and nostalgia that is America’s game. In Field of Dreams, Jackson's "ghost'' takes to the ball field by sort of "floating'' from the corn stalks in the outfield.

As I gaze over the very outfield ground that over a century ago was patrolled by a young illiterate mill hand who was destined to become the infamous Shoeless Joe Jackson, I think, “say it ain’t so, Joe.”