A Well-Paid Slave (7 page)

Powles worked one summer as the playground director at Poplar Park and took an instant liking to nine-year-old Curt. Powles arranged for Curt and Carl to play on his Junior's Sweet Shop midget league team. The two brothers were headed in different directions. Carl indulged in petty crime; Curt gravitated to art and athletics, mostly playing baseball for Powles. Competing against boys two to three years older than he was, Curt played catcher until he came home one afternoon with a badly bruised wrist. He had been hit by the bat while catching. Laura Flood had a fit. She liked Powles, knew that he kept her children off the streets, and did not mind Curt playing with older boys. But she insisted that Powles move her baby boy out from behind home plate. He agreed. They never had any problems after that day.

It was hard not to like Powles. He, his wife, Winifred, and their two children lived on 60th Street, two blocks from two baseball fields at North Oakland's Bushrod Park. He provided the boys at Bushrod with bats and balls so they could play baseball from sunrise to sundown. A stocky, curly-haired man with an open face, large jowls, and prominent eyebrows, he often pitched for both teams during the course of their nine-inning sandlot games.

Powles turned his family's home into a clubhouse. Winifred served cookies, cakes, pies, and ice cream. She talked with the boys about their girlfriends. George talked baseball, endlessly plotting strategy on a green chalkboard that folded up like a briefcase. He taught them card games such as bridge, and he taught them about life. Curt vividly recalled George chastising him on one occasion: “Don't give somebody a dead fish to shake.” It was a lesson that Curt never forgot. For many black children from working-class families, it was their first time inside a white person's home. Powles made them feel at ease.

Powles worked with black children for much of his life. In 1943, he finally landed a teaching job, at predominantly black Herbert Hoover Junior High School. After serving in the Battle of the Bulge, he returned to Hoover before transferring in 1947 to predominantly black McClymonds High School. Most whites hated teaching at McClymonds. Powles, however, was not like most teachers. As the basketball coach, he rescued a tall, gangly, and uncoordinated sophomore whose mother had died when he was 12 and who spent his evenings cooking dinner for his father. Powles made him the 16th man on the junior varsity basketball team (where he shared a uniform with the 15th man). “By that one gesture,” Bill Russell wrote, “I believe that man saved me from becoming a juvenile delinquent.”

In 1947, the same year Powles transferred to McClymonds, Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier. For aspiring young ballplayers like Flood, Robinson symbolized hope. For southern black families in West Oakland, Robinson symbolized success. The Georgia-born Robinson had grown up in California, starred in football, basketball, baseball, and track at UCLA, and served as an army lieutenant. He had been acquitted during a 1944 court-martial for refusing to move to the back of a bus at Camp Hood, Texas. His signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers made Robinson a hero nationally and in the Flood household. “There was a feeling of enormous pride in someone of my color finally doing something that had the nation's ear,” Curt said. “Everyone was talking about Jackie Robinson, the first black athlete to play Major League Baseball, and, daily, my father would get the newspapers to see what Jackie was doing. It was a great deal of pride.”

Powles helped the next generation of black athletes to take advantage of Robinson's success. He sent 17 players, most of whom were black, from McClymonds and his Captain Bill Erwin Post 337 American Legion teams to the major leagues. The best was a fatherless, painfully shy eighth-grader on Powles's 1950 Bill Erwin team also named Robinson. Frank Robinson was so terrified about being away from home for the first time during the 1950 American Legion playoffs in Arizona and Nebraska that doctors initially diagnosed his nervous stomach as acute appendicitis. He completely clammed up around adults, except for Powles, who brought Robinson out of his shell by talking baseball. “He was terrific on the fundamentals, but he always went a step beyond them,” Robinson said. “Powles taught us how to
think
base-ball.” Robinson played on the second of Powles's back-to-back American Legion national championship teams. During Robinson's senior year at McClymonds, the star third baseman lost the team batting title to Flood, a scrawny sophomore center fielder. Flood hit .429 to Robinson's .424.

Neither Flood nor Robinson played at McClymonds with Powles's other future star, Vada Pinson. Two years behind Flood, Pinson was more interested in music at that time than baseball. Powles told Pinson, a first baseman/pitcher in high school, to choose between “the trumpet or the bat.” Pinson picked baseball and went on to become a fleet major league outfielder for 18 seasons, finishing his career with 2,757 hits.

Curt did not need the same type of prodding from Powles. He brimmed with self-confidence and charmed adults with his artistic ability and extroverted personality. In 1949 and 1950, he served as the Bill Erwin American Legion team's mascot, bat boy, and chief crowd pleaser. He traveled with the team throughout California, warming up pitchers, catching batting practice, and wowing players and spectators with his spectacular catches in the outfield. He was 11 years old in 1949 and weighed 105 pounds. “We'd put on a little show with him, because the customers couldn't help noticing the little guy and how clever he was,” Powles told
Sports Illustrated
in 1968. By the time Flood reached McClymonds a few years later, the other players recognized that he and Powles shared a special bond. “George was the coach, and Curt was his pet,” recalled Jesse Gonder, a catcher for eight major league seasons. “Curt was more mature than any of us at his age.”

Curt made extra money on Saturdays and during school vacations lettering signs, moving furniture, and setting up window displays for a downtown Oakland furniture store called E. Bercovich and Sons. A woman walked into the store one afternoon and asked Sam Bercovich, “Where is your Negro salesman who helped me pick out a piece of furniture?”

“We don't have a Negro salesman,” Bercovich replied.

Bercovich realized that the woman was referring to Curt, who knew nothing about furniture but everything about dealing with people. When Curt was 15 or 16 years old, he drew a pen-and-ink portrait of Bercovich. Beneath the portrait, Curt wrote: “To Sam, Your Friend Always, Curt.” It still hangs in Bercovich's Bay Area home.

If Flood had two baseball benefactors, the first was Powles, and the second was Bercovich, whose family's furniture store sponsored decades of Oakland's youth baseball teams. The biggest problem Powles and Bercovich faced was how to keep Curt on their Bill Erwin team. The Oakland high schools were divided among nearly a dozen American Legion teams. Powles's McClymonds students had to play for the Colonel Young Post, whereas his Bill Erwin team could draw players only from Oakland Tech and St. Elizabeth's. Powles initially pulled the same trick with Curt that he had used with Frank Robinson: Curt joined the Bill Erwin team at age 14 before he entered the 10th grade at McClymonds. Even at 14, Curt led Bill Erwin in hitting.

Powles and Bercovich hatched a plan. They persuaded Curt to transfer schools by moving in with his older sister, Barbara. Bercovich bought Curt a new $8 bicycle so that he could get from Barbara's house to his new school, baseball games, and the furniture store. The mother of twin boys, Barbara was separated from her husband, John Henry Johnson, a Hall of Fame running back with the San Francisco 49ers and Pittsburgh Steelers, among other teams. Barbara and Curt became extremely close after Curt and Carl had begun to go in different directions. Curt moved into her North Oakland home ostensibly to look after her young children while she worked at night, but mostly so that he could play for the Bill Erwin team by attending Oakland Technical High School.

The same year Curt enrolled at Oakland Tech, the Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional in
Brown v. Board of Education
. In Oakland, southern-style segregation did not exist. Oakland was a multiethnic, multiracial city of blacks and whites, Italians and Portuguese, Mexicans and Japanese. “I recall little discussion and no excitement in 1954, when the Supreme Court supposedly outlawed the segregation of schools,” Curt said. McClymonds was almost all black. Oakland Tech was 75 percent white. Curt's transition, however, was a seamless one. He thrived in Tech's art classes, designed sets for school plays, and painted banners for school assemblies. He joined the Art Club. He “fooled around, like most kids” but described himself as “an above-average student.”

Flood's dream of leading Powles's Bill Erwin teams to glory came true. The 1955 team captured the American Legion state championship. As members of one of the state's few integrated teams, the players were as close as brothers. They won the state championship despite enduring racial slights along the way, such as being excluded from the team cafeteria at the state playoffs in Fresno and hearing racist catcalls directed at Flood during the regional playoffs in Lodi. In 27 Legion games that season, Flood hit .620 with 12 doubles, 5 triples, and 9 home runs. Despite his small size, he possessed strong hands and wrists and surprised other boys with his power. He confirmed his major league potential each winter as a member of the Bercovich-sponsored, Powles-coached semipro team in the Alameda Winter League. Major and minor leaguers from the Bay Area would stay in shape during the offseason by playing in that league. At age 15, Flood led his winter league team in hitting.

Because of his small size, scouts did not consider Flood a first-rate prospect. He was only 5 feet 7 and 140 pounds in high school, and eventually topped out at 5 feet 9 and 165. He had been prepared for the disappointment. A few years earlier, Powles had sat him down for a talk. He explained to Curt that a professional baseball career was possible, but that most scouts would write him off as too small.

One scout willing to overlook Flood's size was the Cincinnati Reds' West Coast scout, Bobby Mattick. Mattick liked Flood's instincts at the plate and in center field. He found Flood easier to talk to than Robinson and Pinson. For Mattick, one thing stood out about Flood: “He had immense pride as a kid.”

An infielder with the Cubs and Reds from 1938 to 1942 and the son of a former major leaguer and minor league team owner, Mattick spent much of his eight-decade career in the game as a scout in Oakland. Hot after Robinson and the city's other young black players, Mattick became a fixture at Powles's home with his dry wit and big, smelly cigars. Recognizing that Powles could make or break him in the Bay Area, Mattick persuaded Reds general manager Gabe Paul to put Powles on the team payroll as a bird-dog scout. Powles was Mattick's liaison to the city's top baseball prospects. Beginning with Robinson, the best black players from West Oakland signed away their baseball lives to Mattick and the Reds for a few thousand dollars apiece. Big bonuses went almost exclusively to white prospects. There was no other way into the system. “Everybody signed with him,” outfielder Joe Gaines recalled. “If there were 30 guys in the area that signed, 25 of them signed with Cincinnati.”

After Curt graduated from Oakland Tech at the end of January 1956, he signed for no bonus, a $4,000 salary, and an invitation to the Reds' spring training. “We were prepared to pay Curtis a bonus,” Mattick claimed at the time, “but the boy decided against it.” Under the bonus rule, anything greater than $4,000 would have made Curt a “bonus baby” and forced the Reds to keep him on their major league roster for two seasons. The
Cincinnati Enquirer
erroneously reported “that all 16 major league clubs sought to sign Flood after his graduation from high school last week.” The
Oakland Tribune
claimed that “no less than 11 clubs” were willing to bid on Flood's services and that one team was prepared to offer him “around $25,000.” In truth, Mattick was the only scout who had made him an offer.

At 18, Curt could not have cared less about the reserve system. Or that he would be competing with all his friends from West Oakland for a spot on the Reds' roster. He wanted to be a major league baseball player like his hero, Jackie Robinson, and to play for the Reds with his former high school teammate, Frank Robinson. In part because his class graduated in January, Curt received a plum invitation to spring training to show the Reds what he could do.

On the standard team questionnaire, Flood informed the Reds that he liked Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movies and that San Francisco native Joe DiMaggio was the greatest player he had ever seen. Next to a question about women, Flood wrote “Eeeech.”

The only one not enjoying Curt's success was his older brother Carl. Carl was more than 6 feet tall and, despite a lengthy criminal record (the armed robbery conviction came five years later), still possessed loads of pitching talent. As a 19-year-old semipro pitcher, he threw three consecutive one-hitters. “The three hits wasn't really hits,” childhood friend Thomas Johnson recalled. “[It was] a couple of misplayed balls, and they gave them hits.” Those misplays drove Carl crazy. His talent was enough to warrant a $2,000 minor league contract. “He turned it down,” Herman Jr. recalled, “because little brother was making more than he was.” Not that it mattered. Herman Jr., the soft-spoken but wise oldest brother, knew that Carl lacked Curt's discipline. Carl's pride held him back; Curt's propelled him forward.

By signing Curt for $4,000 and sending him to Florida in March 1956 for spring training, the Reds thrust him into the South's cauldron of racial discord. Nearly two months before Curt's graduation from Oakland Tech, on December 1, 1955, a tailor's assistant at a Montgomery, Alabama, department store refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. Rosa Parks was the second woman arrested for this act of racial defiance on a Montgomery bus in nine months. Parks's arrest led to the creation of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and to a massive boycott of the city's bus system. The reluctant leader of the MIA and the boycott was a 26-year-old pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr.