The Dream Cats - A Baseball Story - Introduction

I am not sure what led to this story. I was lying in bed suffering a terrible allergy episode and trying to go sleep when it just started writing myself inside my head. A couple of days before I started writing it I heard an interview with Jackie Robinson's widow on NPR and I imagine that generated the process that led to this story. In part the story is based on my reflections on relationships in the 1950s between white Southerners like the ones I grew up with and African-Americans. I hope no one finds anything I say in the story offensive; I never use the n-word, but excluding that, I try to make it a pretty honest depection of what life was like for African-Americans and whites in the last days of the Jim Crow era. I will publish additional episodes of it as I complete them. I am sure the final version of the story will be somewhat different, and hopefully better, than the episodes I post here which will not be the final edited version.

I was a tow-headed twelve-year-old the summer the Dream Cats came to town to play our local baseball team. Actually my hair was more of a medium dull brown, but since a baseball story always has to have a tow-headed boy in it, and since I am about to tell the story of an event that changed my life, I think I can be excused if I begin my little tale with a lie. It was early July when the mayor and his secretary started putting up the posters advertising the "Game," "The Big Game," the "Biggest Event" in our little town's meager history. Bliss, Texas, wasn't much of a town then and still isn't. In the early 1950s, it couldn't have had more than 4,000-5,000 people. If we had been someplace up north people would have called it a hamlet, but since we were East Texas rednecks we referred to it as our town.

The mayor was an ambitious young man named Damon Bigsby. He got the idea of having an exhibition baseball game because the town needed to build a new wing on our tiny hospital, more of a rural clinic actually, and he thought he could gin up enough interest in a game between the up and coming Negro (that's what African-Americans wanted to be called in those Jim Crow days) team everyone in east and central Texas was talking about and some of the local boys who thought they knew how to play the game. In those days, in the era when Mantle, and Mays and Aaron were budding young superstars, when you mentioned the "game" everyone knew you were talking about baseball. In the small towns of the South in the early 1950s no one ever paid any attention to basketball and football, but everyone knew what you were talking about when you mentioned the "game," and everyone knew about the legends of the game such as the Babe, the Georgia Peach, the Iron Horse, and modern stars like Ted Williams and Stan Musial and Roy Campanella.

The Dream Cats were one of the touring baseball teams that travelled around the South playing exhibition games against any team the town they stopped in could put together. A few years later when we had a television set I used to occasionally watch a basketball game between the Harlem Globetrotters and their hapless rivals the Washington Generals. The Globetrotters always won, usually by lopsided scores such as 125-30. That's pretty much the way games between the Dream Cats and the thrown-together local teams they played all over east and central Texas and Louisiana and Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma turned out. As far as I know the Cats never lost one of these games, not even one. Their star player was a seventeen-year-old outfielder named Delbert Jackson, Jr. Today he would have been called "Del Jack," or "DJ," but nicknames in sports weren't as common then. Sure, there were some such as the Babe and the Splendid Splinter, but I think baseball names showed more imagination in those days. They weren't just dumb takeoffs on a person's name. Young Jackson was a tall skinny lad, about 6'2" or 6’ 3" with a throwing arm like a cannon. It was said he could throw a baseball so hard it reached home plate quicker than if it had been fired from a rifle. He also had surprising power in those rock-hard, lean arms and shoulders and often hit three or four home runs in a game. Our small baseball world was awash in rumors that any day now he would be signed by a major league team and sent to one of their farm teams for seasoning.

I was standing on our town’s only sidewalk mid-morning of a hotter-than-Hades day in early July when an ancient yellow school bus drove down Main Street and parallel parked on the curb across the street from the Mayor’s office. At least I think it had been painted yellow before it rolled off the assembly line several years before World War II began, but now it was mostly rust-colored with the rust broken up in various places by streaks of fading yellow paint. On both sides just below the windows they had painted “Dream Cats Baseball Team, Marshall, Texas.” The driver, a portly black man just past middle age, opened the door, got out, and walked into Mayor Bigsby’s office. Later I learned that the driver’s name was Willie Williams and that he was also the team manager, president, ticket taker, and whatever else needed doing except for playing the game of baseball. He didn’t need any extra help in that department, as our amateur team was about to find out. None of his players got off the bus to stretch their legs. They were all from East Texas and knew how to stay out of trouble. After getting directions to the ball park from the mayor the driver climbed back into his bus and drove up the street toward the baseball park which was in a former cow pasture on the north side of town.