Jackie and Campy (3 page)

Brooklyn was known as the borough of well-attended churches, tree-lined neighborhoods, and trolleys, while Manhattan was “the city” of office buildings where professionals worked, women shopped, and anyone who had money spent their Saturday nights. Brooklyn had Coney Island, stickball in the streets, bargain racks, and doo-wop, but Manhattan had world-class museums, Sax Fifth Avenue, and Carnegie Hall.
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Predictably Brooklynites developed an inferiority complex. Dominated by blue-collar, ethnic neighborhoods with names like Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, and Flatbush, Brooklyn was home to a working-class people with a colorful, irreverent sense of humor and an eternal chip on their shoulder.
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Boisterous and combative, they reveled in even the smallest victory over their cross-town rival and somehow managed to make a virtue out of any setback.
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Baseball would prove to be the most popular ground for bragging rights.

In 1890 Brooklyn won the National League pennant, in spite of its roster being raided by the newly created Players League, established the year before. Flatbush businessman George Chauncey financed the renegade league’s Brooklyn team and built a home ballpark in sparsely populated Brownsville, where he had extensive real estate holdings. When the Players’ League folded, Chauncey arranged a merger of his team with the Bridegrooms, who left Washington Park for the more “modern” Eastern Park in Brownsville. It was a bad decision. Brownsville was not very accessible by public transportation and the town’s residents were mostly new immigrants who didn’t understand the sport.
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In addition, most of the seats were too expensive, a fact that did not escape the writers of the
Brooklyn Eagle
. “Twenty-five cents” should be the price to see a game, they argued. “Not only does baseball cost more, but the ball game is held on the out
skirts of town, the seats are hard, the grandstand is open to the wind, snow and rain, there are no reliefs of scenery or music—nothing but sandwiches and frankfurters—and no guarantee that a poor, spiritless show may not be given.”
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For eight forgettable years the team remained in Brownsville until it was rescued by Charles Ebbets, a ticket taker who had risen to president and stockholder of the club. Ebbets returned the team to Washington Park with the financial assistance of several transportation moguls who profited by having the ballpark reachable by their streetcar lines.
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When the Grooms’ majority stockholder Charles Byrne died in 1898, the owners of the Baltimore Orioles, Ned Hanlon and Harry Von der Horst, saw the opportunity to invest in Brooklyn’s more lucrative market. In 1899 they purchased a half interest in the Bridegrooms and changed the team’s name to Superbas, after a popular vaudeville act, Hanlon’s Superbas. While Hanlon retained the presidency of the Orioles, he took over as manager in Brooklyn. He also brought along with him the talented core of the Orioles, including Joe Kelley, a regular .300 hitter with a rifle arm; “Wee Willie” Keeler, a five-foot-four-inch outfielder and the game’s most prominent place hitter; and Hughie Jennings, a fiery shortstop who hailed from the Pennsylvania coal mines. These future Hall of Famers were notoriously profane and brought a fierce, combative style to Brooklyn as well as such controversial tactics as “tipping the bat” and the “hidden ball play.” The fans adored them and flocked to the ballpark to see them play. The Superbas’ combination of ferocity, skill, and trickery enabled them to win National League pennants in 1899 and 1900.
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But the good fortune didn’t last long.

In 1902 Charles Ebbets purchased a majority interest in the Superbas and changed the team’s name to Dodgers, a reference to the adept skill of Brooklynites to “dodge” the city’s many street trolleys.
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That same year the Dodgers’ roster was raided by the upstart American League, and the team was left with few star players. What’s worse, constant clashes between Ebbets and Hanlon, who continued to manage the team, hastened the club’s decline, and the Dodgers slipped into the second division, where they remained for more than a decade. Hanlon was fired in 1905 after the club finished in last place, fifty-six and a half games out.
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Perhaps the only thing that kept the Dodgers alive was their interborough rivalry with the New York Giants, who always attracted a sellout crowd.
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Perennial losers, the Dodgers attracted most fans to Washington Park by the sheer amusement of their incompetent play. Ebbets’s penny-pinching ways forced the team to remain in their rickety old bandbox. To spite him, many fans shunned the admission price to watch games from the Ginney Flats apartment building, just beyond the center-field wall. Neighborhood saloonkeepers encouraged their rowdyism by selling discounted beer, adding to the circus-like atmosphere. Outfielder Casey Stengel, who began his playing career with Brooklyn in 1912, quickly learned to trade insults with the best of them and developed a quick wit that would see him through many a losing season, both as a player and a manager.
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Ebbets eventually realized that the only way to secure a sizable return on his investment was to build a larger, more permanent ballpark that would attract fans on a routine basis. To that end, he purchased a site in the underdeveloped section of Flatbush, just east of Prospect Park, for $100,000. Ground was broken in March 1912, and the new stadium opened the following year.
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The opening of the new ballpark marked the beginnings of a new, more promising era in Dodgers baseball, a fact that was underscored by the hiring of Wilbert Robinson as the team’s new manager in 1914. Once an outstanding catcher for the Baltimore Orioles, Robinson would go on to become pitching coach and, in 1902, manager of the Orioles. Known for his jovial and easygoing disposition, the portly manager was nicknamed “Uncle Robbie” by the Brooklyn sportswriters. Together with ace pitcher Jack Pfeffer and aging stars Rube Marquard and Jake Daubert, Robinson led the team to National League pennants in 1916 and 1920 and was hailed as a genius by the fans, who called his teams the “Robins.” Of course, the Robins were called less complimentary names after they dropped the World Series to the Boston Red Sox in 1916 and to the Cleveland Indians in 1920. Still, as long as Charles Ebbets ran the club, the Dodgers were successful. But when he died in 1925, club officials named Robinson as the new president, and the club returned to the second division. Despite featuring several future Hall of Famers like Max Carey, Zach Wheat, and Dazzy Vance, the team could never quite reach the top. Robinson’s absentmindedness and casual approach to life became trademarks of his teams, which were appropriately named the “Daffiness Boys.”
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The comedic highlight of these miserable years occurred on August 15, 1926, when the Dodgers, in a game against the Boston Braves, loaded the bases with one out in the bottom of the seventh of a tie game. Up to the plate stepped Babe Herman, a superb hitter, who promptly smacked a line drive off the fence in right-center field. Two runs should have scored, but only one crossed the plate. When the dust cleared there were three Dodgers base runners standing on third base. The umpire called out two of the runners to retire the side.
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The wacky miscue became part of Dodgers folklore and gave rise to a popular joke about the cab driver who was cruising past Ebbets Field and asked a spectator how the game was going. When the fan replied, “The Dodgers have three men on base,” the cabbie asked, “Which base?”
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While the Dodgers were floundering in the second division, Brooklyn’s black teams were flourishing. Negro League Baseball had been popular in the borough since 1904, when John Connor, proprietor of the elite Royal Café in Bedford-Stuyvesant, established the Brooklyn Royal Giants. Conner believed that black baseball would be good for business and recruited such outstanding players as shortstop Grant “Home Run” Johnson and catcher Bruce Petway, a college student in Nashville. Initially the Royal Giants operated primarily as a traveling team because of the abundance of Negro League clubs within a hundred-mile radius, including the Philadelphia Giants, Cuban X-Giants, Genuine Cuban Giants, Quaker Giants of New York, Baltimore Giants, and Keystone Giants of Philadelphia.
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In 1912 the Royal Giants began playing regularly at Washington Park, and the team’s fortunes thrived under a new owner, Nat Strong, a white booking agent. Strong added future pitching ace “Cannonball” Dick Redding and catcher Louis Santop, the first great power hitter in Negro League history and a regular .400 hitter. As a result, the Royal Giants occasionally contended for the Eastern Colored League title during the 1920s.

Another great team was the Lincoln Giants, who regularly played in Brooklyn before establishing a regular home in Harlem. The club’s ace was Smokey Joe Williams, an imposing six-foot-five-inch right-hander with a blazing fastball and pinpoint control. With Williams on the mound, the Lincoln Giants were arguably the very best team in black baseball.
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A third Negro League team, the Brooklyn Eagles, played at Ebbets Field before relocating to Newark, New Jersey, in 1936. They would go on to
become a first division club in the Negro National League.
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With such teams as the Royal Giants, the Lincoln Giants, and the Eagles, as well as a dozen other Negro League teams that visited the borough, Brooklynites grew accustomed to watching exceptional black baseball. In the process the borough’s Negro League teams served to gain a modicum of respect among white fans as well as lessen the social tensions that existed between the two races during the early decades of the twentieth century.

Contrary to popular belief, Brooklyn was not always a melting pot where different ethnic and racial groups lived happily together. Historically neighborhoods were divided along ethnic and racial lines. While rich in social diversity, the different groups did not really associate with each other. Hostilities were especially pronounced between the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came to Brooklyn at the turn of the century from southern and eastern Europe and the German and Irish immigrants who had settled in the borough earlier.
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Italians settled in Williamsburg, Sunset Park, and the South Brooklyn–Red Hook area, where the men could find work as laborers along the docks or in the warehouses, plants, and piers of the shipyard.
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Jews, who fled from religious persecution in eastern Europe, settled in the old German neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Brownsville, located between Bedford-Stuyvesant and Canarsie. By 1930 Brownsville had become the largest Jewish community in the United States. But these were not the same kinds of Jews who had settled earlier in Williamsburg. Those were German, middle-class Jews, with a strong work ethic and an appreciation for education and Wagnerian opera. The new Jews, according to the
Hebrew Standard
, were “of a low class” and had “no religious, social or intellectual ties to their predecessors in Williamsburg.”
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The more established Jewish population distanced itself from these recent arrivals.

In 1924 the United States passed legislation restricting immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and for the next forty years the newcomers were mostly African Americans from the rural South. Lured by northern job recruiters and promises of a better life in the industrial North, thousands of southern blacks migrated to Brooklyn between World War I and the 1930s in what has become known as “the Great Migration.”
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Unlike the European immigrants who preceded them, however, blacks faced not only discrimination but de facto segregation in their efforts to seek employment and housing. Weeksville, the largest and best-known black neighborhood, was called “Blackville” by whites who lived on its periphery. Similarly whites dubbed a nearby elevation “Crow Hill” because of “all the darkies who lived there,” according to a retired white policeman who once patrolled the area.
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Brownville’s Jews begrudgingly tolerated rather than accepted blacks on an equal footing in a neighborhood that became known as the home of the Socialist Labor Movement and the Murder, Inc. mob. Racial tensions between blacks and whites also ex
isted in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where whites, encouraged by the Ku Klux Klan, established restrictive covenants to prevent blacks from purchasing property.
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As outlying residential areas developed, black migrants flocked to the downtown neighborhoods, where they rented rooms and apartments in converted one-family houses. Decline and deterioration in these neighborhoods followed.
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Despite the racial tensions, Brooklyn’s African American population enjoyed greater stability than blacks in other major American cities because of the existence of a prosperous middle class. Some came from the Fort Greene–Washington Park area, where they opened churches, clothing stores, restaurants, and nightclubs. Others were transplants from Manhattan drawn by Brooklyn’s better educational facilities for blacks.
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By 1930 Brooklyn had ninety-four black-owned businesses with combined net sales of $500,000.
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The existence of such a prosperous middle-class disproved notions of African American inferiority among Brooklyn’s whites, showing that the American Dream of social and economic mobility transcended racial boundaries.