Jon Meacham
"When an old man dies, a
library is being burnt to the ground."
African Proverb
The nickname, alone, makes the
man’s life story worth sharing. Cool Papa Bell. As fellow Depression era Jim
Crow survivor BB King would sing, “The man has paid his dues.”
Slowly close your eyes. Cool Papa Bell. You can almost hear the rhythmic pulse of classic jazz music
in the deep-south Great Depression decade of the 1930’s. A Delta Saturday
night with soft blue lights illuminating the inside walls of a smoky Negro tumble
down Mississippi tar-papered dance hall shack. Feel their pain.
Grooving-swaying-ballsy; lives of cotton chopping, drifting field to field and
women to women, woe the bad times while I find me a spot in the shade, kind of
Jazz.
 |
| Cool Papa Bell |
But Cool Papa Bell was no
musician. What he was, some claim, was the fastest man to ever play the game of
baseball. So fast, legend said, Cool Papa could turn out the lights in his
segregated hotel room and be under the covers before the room got dark. Now,
that is fast. How fast? Rumor has survived that once Bell stole two bases on
one pitch. Yes, it happened, Bell told a reporter in 1973. "The catcher,
why he was so surprised the way I was runnin' that he just held the ball,"
says Papa. "I ask him later what he doin' holdin' that ball, and he say he
didn't know, 'cept he never seen a man run like that before in his life."
It is documented beyond doubt
that once in Chicago, on a wet and soft infield, Bell was timed circling the
bases in 13.1 seconds, four tenths of a second faster than Evar Swanson's
recognized white major league record of 13.5. "On a dry field," Bell
once recalled, "I done it in 12 flat."
Other examples of Cool Papa’s
speed were more of a stretch, pure hyperbole, but they add to the extent of the
legend. The most incredible story told is that Bell once hit a single up the
middle and was called out when hit by his own batted ball as he slid into
second base. There are, however, other of Papa’s feats of speed that are well
authenticated and backed up in multiple sources: going from first to third on a
bunt; scoring from second on a sacrifice fly and scoring from second on a
slowly hit ground ball. Once, playing on an off season barn storming tour
against the Bob Lemon All-Stars, which featured major league white players,
Bell scored from first base on a bunt. A
teammate said, “If he bunts and it bounces twice, put it in your pocket.”
In his 1967 autobiography,
Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever, the legendary and best known black player of the Jim
Crow era, Satchel Paige wrote, “If Cool Papa had known about colleges, or if
colleges had known about Cool Papa, [Olympic sprinter] Jesse Owens would have
looked like he was walking.”
Cool Papa Bell came to this
earth at the most inopportune time; born in 1903 in Starkville, MS, poor timing
for a Jim Crow era baseball player of skill galore, at a time in America when
skill did not trump skin color. Born James Thomas Bell, he played baseball when
blacks could not play in the white’s only major leagues, hadn’t since 1883, all
based on a “gentlemen’s agreement” between owners. Instead, Bell displayed his
skills in the segregated world of Negro baseball, a lost caravan that followed
the sun. Every school child today knows all changed when Jackie Robinson came
along in 1948. But 1948 was too late for Bell, 45 years old when Jackie brought
the walls of segregation tumbling down, his body all worn out by a quarter
century of the gypsy like lifestyle of the Negro Leagues.
 |
| Negro League Hall of Fame |
Always dreaming of a better
life, as a restive young cotton field hand, Papa lie awake after the sun had
set on another grueling day in the fields, consumed with visions of someday
“going off,” somewhere, anywhere, faraway. Like many of his time, Papa was well
learned in the stoicism needed to survive the mental beat down of the lot in
life of a Jim Crow era Mississippi Delta field hand. You just “went on moving
on.” Eyes down, tantamount to avoiding trouble.
Off-spring of sharecroppers' were inculcated early to be wary, always,
if you wanted to survive the rigid caste system of the early 20th Century
American South. “Look, listen and never pounce,” was the motherly advice Bell
and his siblings received.
For sharecropper families,
work was life and life was work, the cotton fields their world. "If I
didn't know anythin',” Bell once said, “I knew how to work."
It was six long and hot days a week of chopping Mississippi cotton and one Saturday night ride to town on the back of an open flatbed truck, the men dressed in their best night on the town Tom Walker suit. It was the one time a week, Bell recalled, that a man felt like a man – his soul momentarily lightened, drawn by the allure of the local dance clubs and their dark segregated pleasures.
It was six long and hot days a week of chopping Mississippi cotton and one Saturday night ride to town on the back of an open flatbed truck, the men dressed in their best night on the town Tom Walker suit. It was the one time a week, Bell recalled, that a man felt like a man – his soul momentarily lightened, drawn by the allure of the local dance clubs and their dark segregated pleasures.
Education, Bell remembers, was
a not a pragmatic need in the Mississippi cotton fields. However, the
opportunities outside the Delta were always tantalizingly dangled by their
mother in front of the wide eyes of Papa and his five siblings. “The thing of
it was my mother always said that she wanted us to go as far in school as we
could. She said that we didn’t need a whole lot of education right here at that
time; a lot of people didn’t need it at that time. But you might live in the
days that you need an education, for you to live. Well, I didn’t have a chance
to go to school or to have much schooling. (Still) She said, ‘I just hope that
you will go and live in a bigger city where you will have more opportunities to
go to school.’ So we got large enough so we could go away.”
By the age of 16 years, Papa
had departed northern Mississippi to join several older siblings who had
already relocated north to St. Louis. The year was 1919. The Great War in
Europe was over and the nation was rolling unencumbered, Jim Crow be damned,
into the flamboyant and roaring decade of the 1920’s. A strong and strapping
young man, Bell found ready work in the city’s slaughter houses and meat
packing plants. It was hard and dirty work, but acceptable for a young man of
no entitlement, having known nothing of a better life.
The nickname Cool Papa was
bestowed upon Bell as a 19-year-old rookie. He had come to the Negro Major
League as a left-handed pitcher. Bell
was informed in route to his first major league game that he would be the next
day’s unexpected starting pitcher in a contest crucial to the outcome of a hot pennant
chase. The news did not unhinge the cool, calm and collected young and budding
star. He took the assignment in stride, winning the game the next day by
throwing a shutout and hitting a home run to account for a 1-0 final score. To
top off his masterful day and to record the final out in the ninth inning, Cool
Pap struck out Oscar Charleston, the League’s best hitter. Years later, Bell
told baseball writer John Holway, “They said that ‘he’s so cool he don’t get
excited.’ (St. Louis Stars Manager) Bill Gatewood said, ‘We’ve got to add
something to it. We’ll call him Cool Papa.””
For Bell, and other black ball
players like him, some of the best of any era to every play the game, baseball
beat toiling from “can see til can’t see,” in the cotton fields of Mississippi.
However, the daily grind of a wayfaring Negro Leaguer was nothing a pampered
modern day player of any race could relate to. Playing sometimes as many as
three games in the same day, in three town’s miles apart, often the players
slept in their sweat and dirt cloaked uniforms, driving all night in a rattling
broken down old bus. Surviving on greasy meals eaten at small rural back road
“colored only” restaurants, or worse, outside the back door of establishments
that did not serve or allow blacks inside to dine with white customers; Bell
once called his life in the segregated leagues of the Great Depression, a
“tough gig.”
 |
| St. Louis Stars |
I stand in 2014 on the grounds of a little used, but well-built and well-kept baseball field in crime ravaged North St. Louis. A small plaque dedicates the field to Cool Papa Bell. Baseball is all but dead in the inner cities of America; this has been well known and true for at least 20 years. Despite several well intentioned and generous attempts by Major League baseball to reignite the flame for the game amongst the nation’s youngsters of color, this ball field is about as popular with the young men of this dangerous neighborhood as a well thrown police canister of tear gas.
Ironically, during the 1930’s and early 40’s, Negro League attendance often outdrew the white major league teams. Often the teams shared the same stadiums. African-American support and loyalty to the sport was intense.
If Yasiel Puig, the star
Dodger outfielder with a linebacker’s body and the grace of a power forward,
had been born in North St. Louis in 1990, instead of Havana, Cuba; he would
have never picked up a baseball glove or a bat, but would have matriculated
young to the area’s basketball courts and football fields.
Cool Papa Bell, a man
enshrined in Cooperstown, NY in the Baseball Hall of Fame, is unknown and
forgotten in his old home neighborhood. Gone from this earth for almost ¼
century, Cool Papa, when he was not roaming the nation playing ball, called
home for his entire adult life this now squalid patch of urban decay.
I am several miles from ground
zero of the past summer’s Ferguson riots, an urban clash that mesmerized the
world and drew critical eyes to an area that had long simmered with racial
unrest, in need of only a spark to blow the lid off a smoldering pot of
destitution and hopelessness. The spark was provided in August, 2014, when
white police officer Darren Wilson shot dead black teenager Michael Brown.
The entire region, as I stand
here in October, 2014, is on tense guard, police standing down – for the time,
but armed and ready for the violence many predict will once again overflow the
area with the eminent announcement of a grand jury decision on to either indict
or not charge the white officer. The "feel" in the late autumn air portents
trouble.
Even if I could find any area
youth using this abandon ball diamond, I would be stunned if they knew who Cool
Papa Bell was. I am certain; they would know the names of Darren Wilson and
Michael Brown, the two main characters in the deadly confrontation in the
streets of Ferguson, three months prior.
Sixty hour a week shifts in
the packing plants of the post-World War I years were hard, but for Cool Papa,
there was always Sunday afternoon's, and that meant baseball. At the age of 19,
after dominating for several years the local sand lot circuit as a hard
throwing pitcher, making as much as $20 a game, Bell hooked on with the city’s
Negro Major League team, the St. Louis Stars. It was the epitome for a black
baseball player in 1922.
The Stars were in need of a
pitcher. Their former ace, with the colorful nickname of Steel Arm Dickey, had
supplemented his Negro League baseball salary by distilling prohibition era
whiskey. His boss discovered Steel Arm was not turning all the profits agreed
to over to him. The Boss, showing little concern for the Stars chances in the
1922 Negro League pennant race, had Steel Arm murdered. Dickey’s unfortunate
demise opened the door for the need of a new and “live” arm. The Stars signed the
local and untried 19 year old Bell.
 |
| Cooperstown Plaque |
A career that spanned roughly the years between the two great wars, 1922-1950, saw Bell play with the best of the Negro Leagues. Over the years Cool Papa logged time on the rosters of the St. Louis Stars (1922-1931), the Detroit Wolves (1932), Kansas City Monarchs (1932 and 1934), Homestead Grays (1932 and 1943-1946), Pittsburgh Crawfords (1933-1936), Memphis Red Sox (1942), Chicago American Giants (1942), Detroit Senators (1947), and Kansas City Stars (1948-1950).
In 1937, Bell broke a contract
with the Crawfords and headed south in search of a league that would judge him
by his play on the field and not the color of his skin. He spent five years
laboring in the Cuban, Dominican, and Mexican leagues. Those years in Latin
American were some of Bell’s best, he always claimed, from the perspective of
both his performance level on the diamond and his treatment as a man off.
In 1937, Bell played for a
team owned by Rafael Trujillo, the brutal dictator of the Dominican Republic. The
team was anchored by a dark skinned All-Star quartet recruited from the Negro
Leagues: Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Orlando Cepeda (father of the future hall
of famer) and Cool Papa. The political tension - the season was being played
amongst the gun fire of a revolution - was at times unbearable. A winning team
in the baseball mad Dominican would strengthen the popularity of the dictator.
Losing, the players soon learned, was not an option.
 |
| St. Louis Stars |
Bell and his teammates never
did meet the irascible despot, only catching short glances of him from afar.
Still, Trujillo left an impression. "A very frightenin' man," Bell
said year's later.
Bell and his teammates won for
Trujillo that valuable Dominican League pennant and indirectly, the election.
The Dictator held a players only party, with a healthy allotment of armed
guards attending, immediately after the championship game. After the
celebration, Bell and his scared expatriate teammates departed the banana
republic as quickly as possible, back to the states with their pay checks, one
case of beer per player (a departing gift from Trujillo); and their lives.
During the 1930’s, Cool Papa
also supplemented his regular season pay by displaying his talents in the
integrated winter baseball leagues of California. He more than held his own
against the greatest white players of the era.
No one who saw him play
doubted that Cool Papa Bell was the best of the best segregated baseball had to
offer. How would he have fared if he had been allowed to compete against the
best white ball players of his time? Statistics of the era, especially in the
Negro Leagues, were, by today’s computerized standard, primitive and
unreliable. “I remember one game I got five hits and stole five bases,” Bell
recalled, “but none of it was written down because they forgot to bring the
scorebook to the game that day.”
The Baseball Almanac has
documented for history the following totals for Bell, complied over a 20 year
career in the Negro Major Leagues: 940 games, 1241 hits for a lifetime average
of .337; 194 doubles, 64 triples and 63
home runs; an impressive resume, no doubt, by any era’s standards. Amazingly,
Bell never in his 28 year career registered a season’s batting average below .300,
which alone, if accomplished by a white player of the era, would have made the
hitter automatic Cooperstown bound, a first ballot solid lock.
In 1933, Papa was credited
with 175 stolen bases in a 200-game season. A Denver Post Sports Editor once
wrote, “All these years I’ve been looking for a player who could steal first
base. I’ve found my man; his name is Cool Papa Bell.”
 |
| Bell sliding in for a triple |
Hall of Fame Baseball Executive
Bill Veeck, who had seen Bell play in his prime, classified him as equal to the
great white players of the era, Tris Speaker, Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio.
"Cool Papa was one of the most magical players I've ever seen," once
declared Veeck.
In the outfield, Bell played a
mean and devil may care center field. Hall of Famer Pie Traynor, a white star
of the era, remembered how shallow Bell played, showing master confidence in
his God given speed, almost as if daring hitters to try and knock a hit ball over
his head. Even more shallow, according to Traynor, than a young Willie Mays
when he broke in with the New York Giants. "It doesn't matter where he
plays," Traynor once said. "He can go a country mile for a fly ball."
When Jackie Robinson named his
all-time Negro League team, for his outfield he chose Bell to go along with
Henry Aaron and Willie Mays. Aaron and Mays, who both cut their teeth as youngsters
in the Negro Leagues but excelled in the integrated Major League baseball of
the 1950’s and 1960’s, becoming national
icons, wealthy beyond the dreams of the depression era Negro Leaguers, such as
Cool Papa. Mays and Aaron made millions, successfully ingraining themselves in
the culture of a post war nation struggling with racial desegregation.
By necessity, Bell and his
fellow Negro Leaguers knew of no off season. When the Negro League World Series
would wrap up in October, Bell would hit the barnstorming trail on a tour of
All-Star games. The most popular format for these arranged events consisted of
regulation and competitive games played between teams made up of stars of both
white baseball and black baseball, still separate, but at least now on the same
field of play. No reliable statistics were kept, or if they were, never
survived; thus much of the statistical resume on Bell is left forever
unfinished, especially when competing against white all-stars.
 |
| Lou Brock Breaks Bell's record of 115 SB |
Bell had the well-earned
complimentary reputation as a thinking man’s player. He could hit with power –
he was the first player to record a three home run game in the highly
competitive Cuban League - but like the white Ty Cobb of the dead ball era,
Cool Papa was a proponent of small ball, using on offense his legs and his
brains to manufacture runs. Hit ‘em where the a’int.
“Baseball was all you thought
of then,” Bell told Sports Illustrated in a 1973 interview that proceeded his
election to the baseball Hall of Fame, a sort of introduction primer for
baseball fans of a soon to be knighted legend most had never heard of. “Always
thinkin' how to do things another way,” Bell said then. “Curve ball on a 3-2,
bunt and run in the first innin'. That's how we beat big-league teams. Not that
we had the best men, but we outguessed them in short series. It's a guessing
game. There's a lot of unwritten baseball, ya know."
 |
| 1940 KC Monarchs |
For Negro Leaguers, the hours
were long, the conditions horrid. “Never did find that place in the shade,” he
once said. “Baseball was a hard gig, no doubt, after a while it really took its
toll on your body and your mind. All of the travel, living weekly pay check to
pay check, it just wore you down. No security in the Negro Leagues.” By
avoiding the decadence that sidelined too early so many of his fellow Negro
Leaguers; Papa held up better than most. “Even the big stars of the Negro
Leagues, Josh (Gibson), for example, look how most ended up; busted and broken,
dying way too young,” Bell stated.
From 1943 to 1945, Cool Papa
was teammates with two of the biggest names to come out of the Negro Leagues,
Buck Leonard and Josh Gibson, on a juggernaut of colored baseball talent known
as the Washington Homestead Grays. Many call the Grays the best Negro team ever
assembled. Others go farther, saying the club was one of the best of all-time,
period. Bell remembers those years as a melancholy time. "I was 'bout 43
then," says Papa. "Kinda sick. Had arthritis and was so stiff I
couldn't run at times. They used to have to put me in a hot tub. I had to git
good and warm before I could move."
By 1945, with the conclusion
of the Second World War, most knew it was a matter of mere time before the
walls of baseball's long standing racial segregation would come tumbling down.
The question was when, and most importantly, who. “We all knew how big this was,”
remembered Bell. “If the one chosen didn’t do well, it might be a long time
until the next chance came.”
Cool Papa, like most of his
generation of black star players, held no grudge against the young blacks now
getting the chance that skin color had denied their older team mates. "It
was all over the place that Jackie was going to sign with the Dodgers,"
says Papa. "All us old fellas didn't think he could make it at short. He
couldn't go to his right too good. He'd give it a backhand and then plant his
right leg and throw. He always had to take two extra steps. We was worried. He
miss this chance, and who knows when we'd git another chance? You know they
turned him down up in Boston. So I made up my mind to try and show him he
should try for another spot in the infield. One night I must've knocked couple
hundred ground balls to his right and I beat the throw to first every time.
Jackie smiled. He got the message. He played a lot of games in the majors, only
one of 'em at short."
Integration of baseball’s
major leagues came too late for Cool Papa Bell, although he did claim to have declined
an offer from the American League’s St. Louis Browns, forerunners to today’s
Baltimore Orioles. Always a true gentleman with a charming smile, Cool Papa
Bell, when finally discovered by Major League baseball in the mid 1970’s,
became an eloquent spokesman for the heritage and living history of the Negro
Leagues.
 |
| Field Dedication |
The two young Monarchs Bell
had failed to pedal to white baseball were future major league stars Ernie
Banks and Elston Howard. The two finally found a major league home and their
contracts were sold by the Negro League team, but once again, Bell was left out
of the shade. "I didn't get anything," Bell recalled in a 1973 Sports
Illustrated article. "They said I didn't have a contract. They gave me a
basket of fruit. A basket of fruit! Baseball was never much for me makin'
money."
When Cool Papa retired from
baseball for good, in 1950 at the age of 47, he limped back home to St. Louis
with no pension, no endorsements, no savings and no fame. He had only the
acknowledgement of the few who had witnessed his greatness in the now vanishing
land of the Negro Leagues, of how once long ago; this now quiet and broken old
man had spewed his magical gift over the sun soaked summer diamonds of
segregated American baseball.
Sadly, Bell spent his post
baseball declining years as a city night watchman, hiding during daylight hours
behind dead bolt locked doors - a loaded shot gun always cradled in his lap -
from the urban war zone that had taken over his north side St. Louis, MO
neighborhood. He died in 1991; forgotten by his neighbors, a prisoner in his
own home.
In 1974, Cool Papa Bell was
finally given the national recognition so long denied him when he became the
fifth player from the Negro Leagues inducted into the National Baseball Hall of
Fame. The New York Times noted that when told about his election, Bell said it
was his biggest honor but not his biggest thrill. That, he said, “was when they
opened the door in the majors to black players.”
In 2018, American songwriter and singer Paul Simon released a song titled Cool Papa Bell:
"We got the well, well, well
And Cool Papa Bell
The fastest man on Earth did dwell
As Cool Papa Bell "
The iconic Simon explained the unlikeness of his interest in a man who died a generation before and who, despite his accomplishments, was relatively unknown. "I mean, he was a very colorful character. He was supposed to be the fastest guy in the league. The legend was he once bunted a triple. Also that he could flip the light switch and be in bed before the light went out. Those were Cool Papa Bell stories. It’s too bad that they never brought him up to the majors. I guess he was probably too old by then."
Bell lacked the strut of some
of the more boisterous and headline grabbing stars of the Negro circuit. He
was, however, well respected for his behavior off the diamond. Meticulous to a
fault, in both his dress and behavior, Papa was widely admired for his class
and often held up as a role model for young players just breaking into
professional baseball. “My mother always told me that it didn’t make any
difference about the color of my skin, or how much money I had. The only thing
that counted was to be an honest, clean livin’ man who cared about other
people. I’ve always tried to live up to those words,” Bell said upon his
enshrinement in Cooperstown.
Recently, Negro League history has come into vogue, a lost nugget of Americana suddenly found. The nation is discovering its exotic history, better late than never.
"We got the well, well, well
And Cool Papa Bell
The fastest man on Earth did dwell
As Cool Papa Bell "
The iconic Simon explained the unlikeness of his interest in a man who died a generation before and who, despite his accomplishments, was relatively unknown. "I mean, he was a very colorful character. He was supposed to be the fastest guy in the league. The legend was he once bunted a triple. Also that he could flip the light switch and be in bed before the light went out. Those were Cool Papa Bell stories. It’s too bad that they never brought him up to the majors. I guess he was probably too old by then."
 |
| Headstone: 70 years of marriage |
Fellow Negro Leaguer Ted Page
remembered Bell as “an even better man off the field than he was on it. He was
honest. He was kind. He was a clean liver. In fact, in all of the years I’ve
known him, I’ve never seen him smoke, take a drink, or say even one cuss word.”
In 1920 a teenage Bell married
his wife Clarabelle. She remained for him, for the next 70 years, the perfect
mate. Never one seeking the limelight, friends said the low key Clarabelle had
the perfect unassuming personality to mesh with her likewise husband. The two
spent their golden years side by side. William Brashler, who interviewed Bell
in 1971, wrote, “At home, Bell remained married to his most ardent fan, his
wife Clarabelle. She was the same woman who had traveled with him through the
years, who had kept his voluminous scrapbooks, and who had gently endured his
itinerant life.”
Cool Papa Bell died March 7,
1991, at age 87 in St. Louis, just a few weeks after Clarabelle’s death.
The man with the smooth as
silk nickname but the poor luck of being born a generation too soon, never
found the retirement comfort of the celebrity riches bestowed upon the likes of
latter day Negro League alumni, the Willie Mays’ and the Hank Aarons’. He may
have escaped the cotton fields of Mississippi, but Cool Papa never found that
elusive spot in the shade. Few former Negro Leaguers ever did. Didn’t matter,
Bell would tell his few friends as he lived out his twilight years. Narrowly
born too early to play in the major leagues, he claimed to have never been
bitter. “Funny, but I don’t have any regrets about not playing in the majors,”
he once said. “They say that I was born too soon. I say the doors were opened
too late.”
Living with Clarabelle in their
small house on Dickson Street, the retired Papa occasionally would take in a
St. Louis Cardinals’ game, venturing on the city bus south down Grand Avenue to
the Old Sportsman’s Park. Cool Papa Bell, thanks to Jim Crow, his baseball
career moored on the edge of glory by a system of inequity, would pay his
dollar admission to sit anonymously on the hard green wooden plank left field
bleachers - the cheap seats with no shade.
How sad a sight it must have
been; the once magnificent Cool Papa Bell unrecognized by fans cheering blindly
the performance of players not worthy of carrying even the glove in the glory
days of the stooped and hobbled old man who set alone amongst them.
No comments:
Post a Comment