The First Pitch: Race, Redemption, and American Legion Baseball

Tony King, will not be wrestling with philosophical questions when he walks out to the mound around noon on Sunday. All week he has been brushing aside the idea that this ceremonial first pitch was significant.

"It doesn't make any difference," he insists. "It's just the idea of it, anyway. You let the ball go, and you go down. It's just something to get the game started."

For weeks, he has been tossing a baseball into his pillows in his half of Room 256 of the Soldier's Home in Holyoke, Mass. And really, he has been getting ready in the bullpen since 1934.

At 97, King—his mind still sharp—knows deep down that this first pitch is an attempt to right a wrong, to provide a measure of racial healing. And it is a tribute to his friend and teammate from Springfield, Mass., the great one: Ernest Carter Taliaferro—the kid everyone knew as "Bunny."

Taliaferro—the only black player on the team—was so beloved by his teammates that they dared not participate in the 1934 American Legion eastern regionals in Gastonia, N.C. when racist officials tried to ban Bunny from the tournament. And so Springfield went home without having had a chance to advance to the national title game in Chicago.

But officials from both Springfield and Gastonia are trying to heal an old wound. And once King—the last remaining living player from that 1934 team—makes his pitch, at long last the American Legion baseball team from Springfield Mass., Post 21 will play against Post 23 from Gastonia N.C.

The game will take place in the backdrop of modern racial anguish. The teenage boys from Gastonia flew north on Friday, one day after Dylann Roof, who on Wednesday killed nine African-Americans at a historic black church in Charleston S.C., was arrested just 20 miles away in Shelby, the site—you can't make this stuff up—of the American Legion World Series. A woman from Gastonia made the call that led to the arrest and Roof's return to Charleston.

And this, of course, comes after recent racially charged incidents in Baltimore and Staten Island and Ferguson, and on and on and on.

For these current players, the racial discussion seems especially relevant, and what happened to that 1934 Springfield team, appears especially poignant. King never had any kids of his own. But these young ballplayers are essentially his children, born out of the legacy of that 1934 incident.

So while King's ceremonial first pitch won't mean anything on the scoreboard, it certainly means something. Because after 81 years, it's finally time to play ball.

Tony King was born in West Springfield on January 29, 1918 while World War I was still raging. He was the youngest of six children, the only boy. His dad, like just about everybody else in the Springfield area, worked in a factory, Fisk Rubber, in nearby Chicopee Falls. Tony knew that this was his future, too: factory work. He never even dreamed about going to college. When the Depression hit his father was out of work for a couple of years while his mom desperately tried to make ends meet, often taking in other people's clothes to wash, or cleaning rich neighbor's houses.

The one release from the drudgery was baseball, a game that stood at the center of the American sporting world. "In them days, every kid played baseball because there was nothing else to do," says King, his voice still strong and resonant. "Nobody had any money. Now, you go by and see these beautiful diamonds—nobody is out there."

The players back then all had nicknames. Even now, King rattles them off with ease: Moonie Jevanelli, Bits Bazzoni, and, of course, Bunny Taliaferro.

King was known, less colorfully, as "Kingie." He was a scrappy second baseman at Cathedral High School, and in the summer he joined American Legion ball and played for Post 21. Players then were 15 and 16 years old, rather than 17 and 18 like today.

The American Legion had started organizing summer baseball just nine years earlier. By 1934 it had become a big thing. In that fateful summer of 1934, American Legion players born, like King, in 1918, included Bob Feller in Iowa, and a rangy left-handed hitter named Ted Williams in San Diego.

The Post 21 team was a powerhouse squad, so good, in fact, that Vic Raschi was cut. A future standout with the Yankees, Raschi—known as "The Springfield Rifle"—went 132-66 in the big leagues. But he couldn't earn a spot on the team, in part, because they had the most dominant teenage pitcher in the city already: Bunny Taliaferro.

"He was an outstanding athlete," King recalls. "He was a good football player, and he played basketball, too."

Like King, Taliaferro knew he was headed for a lifetime of factory work, even as he harbored quiet dreams of a college education that would never come true.

But in the summer of 1934, against a backdrop of poverty, Taliaferro had an opportunity on the diamond. With Kingie ripping the ball, and Bunny mowing down opposing lineups, Post 21 won both the Massachusetts state championship and the New England championship. They then boarded a train for North Carolina for the Eastern Regionals. The winner would head to Chicago to play for the national title. This was the biggest adventure of their young lives.

"It was just a bunch of kids," recalls Tony King, the team captain. "Most everybody, it was the first trip they ever made away from home."

**

High on a hill in nearby Holyoke, overlooking the lush Connecticut River Valley, the Soldier's Home is a familiar landmark to anyone traveling south on Interstate 91. The veterans' health care and residential facility seems to have been torn from Norman Rockwell's sketchbook.

In the canteen, a prominent red, white, and blue menu advertises today's specials: hot dogs for $1, grilled cheese and tomato for $1.50. A veteran with a thick gray beard pushes a wheelchair with an American flag and a pinwheel into a glass-enclosed smoking room that's decorated with two bumper stickers: "These Colors Don't Run" and "Freedom Is Not Free/Support Our Armed Forces & Veterans."

Tony King occupies half of room 256, a modest space with a single bed, a bulletin board, a small television, a half-dresser, and a wooden closet adorned with a prominent "Family Does Laundry" sign. He says that he loves it here, and that people treat him well. He's playing Bingo for the first time in his life. He watches a lot of baseball on television ("It's something to do"). His family visits regularly, the most frequent visitor being his niece, Ann Haskell, a middle school nurse. He entertains her with his humor: "They ask me what keeps me going: I tell them it's my Viagra pills."

In recent weeks, King has preoccupied himself by propping two pillows at the top of his bed, walking a few feet away, and then firing a pristine white Little League baseball toward his headboard. Usually it lands with a puff—hardly enough sound to bother his roommate.

Not that Joesph Szostkiewicz would care, mind you. If anyone around here understands a thing or two about baseball and breaking down racial barriers, the 90-year-old Szostkiewicz is the guy. Back in 1946, the catcher from Holyoke, with his name encoded as Joe Soskovic (kind of a baseball version of an Ellis Island error) debuted in the Dodgers organization with the Trois Rivieres Royals, a Class C team in the Can-Am League. That same season, of course, another Dodger made his professional debut with a team in Canada known as the Montreal Royals in the International League: Jackie Robinson.

"He played at Montreal," Szostkiewicz puffs out in the raspy whisper his body allows after a lifetime of smoking.

"When I was at Three Rivers, he played an exhibition game—against us—Yeah. Yeah."

Szostkiewicz is excited for his roommate and says they are perfectly matched. "I can't speak," he rasps. "He can't hear."

The boys from Springfield had packed their wooden bats, baseballs, wool uniforms, and gloves that were—in the of the day—scarcely bigger than their hands, and began rumbling and rollicking their way south, first heading into Connecticut, along the Long Island Sound, and then into New York, with its impossibly tall buildings. They rolled down the Atlantic coast, and eventually into Washington D.C., where at that time, Franklin Roosevelt was not even halfway through his first term. Then they headed south. Hours later they pulled into the small city of Gastonia.

It was a nightmare right away. Tony King and Post 21 quickly learned about Jim Crow. One image seared its way into King's mind forever. While he was walking on a sidewalk, two African-American adults leaped out into the road so as not to pass him. "They had to get out on the road," King says. "They couldn't pass me on the sidewalk because they were black, and I was white. I never forgot that."

They team never ended up playing an inning in the tournament. Post 21 apparently got one practice in, and it proved to be a harrowing experience.

Danny Keyes, a reserve infielder—who at age 28 became a judge—would later tell stories about the team being threatened and jeered, and racially abused. He told his daughter Nancy that the players had to walk back to the hotel carrying baseball bats for protection.

At the hotel, Springfield legion official Sid Harris and coach Babe Steere told the team they could play the tournament without Bunny, or return to Massachusetts. Keyes later claimed that King and all the white players spoke in favor of going home, while Taliaferro said the team should try to win without him.

King does not remember having an important role in the decision.

"They give us credit for it, the players," he said. "But you know yourself, grownups rule. They are not going to let a bunch of kids dictate what is going to happen. It's the grownups. But I don't think we would have played without him anyway. He was a hell of a good pitcher and he got us where we were."

Understandably, there was an element of fear and self-protection. There was an element, too, of taking a principled stand. This was, of course, 13 years before Jackie Robinson broke the color line, and 20 years ahead of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision.

Eventually, the team left the tournament without playing a game and headed up north.

"When we got back, it must have been around midnight or so, Christ, there must have been around 200 people at Union Station," King recalls. "That was one of the nicest things."

**

Before long, Bunny Taliaferro and Tony King ended up living the lives that had seemed predetermined for them.

Taliafaro made tires at Fisk Rubber for the rest of his life while King set up shop at American Bosch, where he ran a machine that made plungers to fit diesel pumps. Both men fought in World War II, but once back home, they returned to the grind of the factories. Bunny married his high school sweetheart, raised a family and sent five kids to college.

The family's second youngest child, Linda Taliaferro, an attorney in New Jersey, said education was the No. 1 value. "That's where my father put the emphasis," she says.

Family dinners included plenty of talk about literature and music, and the emerging civil rights movement of the 1960s. "I credit my parents," Linda says. "They lived principled lives. They made sure we knew right from wrong."

Bunny died in 1967 at age 50. According to Linda, he never really talked about his experiences with the American Legion baseball team in 1934.

King was married for almost 42 years until his wife Charlotte died in 1968. She went to the grave never hearing a word about the exploits of Post 21.

But King had never forgotten. He kept an incredibly neat scrapbook of his high school and American Legion playing days.

"In them days, if your name was in the paper, you cut it out," he said. "Christ, everybody had scrapbooks."

King's scrapbook now sits in room 256, remarkably well preserved like the man himself. The spine is taped. The inside pages, slightly grayed and pocked, are not brittle. Page after page is filled with perfectly cut and pasted stories from the 1930s. Sportswriters with names like "Sip Pompei" come back to life.

Under the headline "Taliaferro Wins Honor," we read that Bunny was the "leading high school pitcher in the city." Another story says, "Local boy Tony King has been winning a great deal of glorious recognition in these parts from the results of his stellar diamond play." There is a picture of Bunny and Kingie, side by side, having made the "Morning Union's All-City Scholastic Team."

The account of the team's return from North Carolina provides a colorful and chilling account:

"…The lone disappointment of the past year, and don't you forget it was a bitter one for Coach Steere and his fighting youngsters to swallow, was scored at Gastonia, N.C., scene of the eastern final games, where the Springfield team voluntarily withdrew from the tourney when a controversy arose over the appearance of 'Bunny' Taliaferro, Negro baseballer, with the City of Homes nine.

The Cumberland, Md., Tampa, Fla., and Charlotte, N.C. teams raised a big howl when they learned that a Negro player was a member of the Springfield outfit. This fact, combined with the unsportsmanlike tactics displayed by the Gastonia citizens toward the Springfield baseballers forced the Home City officials to voluntarily withdraw the team from the tournament and return home. The final decision to take the Springfield team from the eastern finals was made when the Gastonia Legion heads were unable to guarantee to the local players and officials absolute safety from bodily harm from the angry Gastonia mobs."

In 2003, the story finally came to light. Then Springfield Mayor, Billy Sullivan, and a local doctor, Tim Murray, teamed up to raise funds for a stone monument next to the baseball field in Forest Park. Titled "Brothers All Are We," the monument literally etched the story in stone, describing "an act of loyalty and love for their friend and brother which sent a message that bigotry has no place in the game of baseball or in the game of life."

Linda Taliaferro, who came up for that ceremony, says the message of support for her father was profound: "The action of the team spoke loud and clear—how they put the respect and love of their teammate first and sacrificed personal achievement. They gave up the chance to win, rather than have him be humiliated further."

Ann Haskell, Tony King's niece, was stupefied to learn about this part of her uncle's past. "To him, it was nothing," she says. "They just did it, like it was the right thing to do."

In 2013, the story's reach expanded when Springfield College Professor Richard Andersen published a children's book based on the story called "A Home Run For Bunny." As a result, Tony King found himself in 2014 donning a cap and gown and receiving a special recognition award at the Springfield College commencement. He told Mary-Beth Cooper, the college's president, "If I died tonight, heaven wouldn't be any better than this."

Andersen sent copies of the book down to Gastonia, where Mayor John Bridgeman, a lifelong resident of the city since his birth in 1944, had never heard the story. Bridgeman penned an eloquent letter of apology to Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno: "What happened in 1934 is certainly a sad chapter in our City's history. Scars from the past can last for generations."

Springfield, of course, has had its own sad chapters and scars from the past. Just hours after Barack Obama was elected president for the first time in November 2008, an African-American church in the city was burned to the ground.

On Friday afternoon at City Hall in Springfield, Tony King was the man of the hour. A contingent from Gastonia began to arrive: media, politicians, one of the first African-American players to play Legion ball in 1964. They all wanted to meet King. As the cameras rolled, Springfield Mayor Sarno referred again and again to King as the "slugging second baseman." Richard Andersen lauded King as a "hero" who had led the stand for racial justice. King began his own brief comments by saying, "My only claim to fame is that I outlived my teammates."

The most moving part of the day came before the ceremony. King stood out in the hallway and shook hands with the members of the current Post 21 team. Kids with names like Mikey Cruz and Carlos Penalbert—many of them wearing jewelry—looked King in the eye and thanked him. The old man's hazel eyes glistened. Mayor John Bridgeman then approached and wrapped King up in a huge hug. They shared some quiet words.

"It's not your fault, what happened," King told him.

The healing had begun. But it will still missing one thing: The first pitch.