Mobile Bay Monthly Magazine

The Life and Times of an American Legend

This much talked about new book is the stirring story of a man born to a Mobile washerwoman with 12 young mouths to feed. Earning his name Satchel from his work as a railroad porter at L&N Station, Paige took to baseball on the streets of Mobile, where he invented his trademark hesitation pitch. He grew into a superstar hurler, and at the age of 42, helped propel the Cleveland Indians to the World Series. Here, in this special excerpt, the history of his Mobile years.

Satchel Paige entered the world as Leroy Robert Page. (The family later changed the name to Paige.) He was delivered at home into the hands of a midwife, which was more help than most poor families could afford in 1906 in Mobile. His mother, Lula, was a washerwoman who already spent her nights worrying how to feed and sustain the four daughters and two sons who had come before. Five more would follow. Leroy's father, John, a landscaper, alternated between the luxuriant lilies in the gardens he tended uptown and Down the Bay corner stoops on which he liked to loiter, rarely making time to care for his expanding brood.

Being full-time mother to her 11 surviving children should have been more than a full-time job, but Lula could not afford the indulgence. John did not earn nearly enough to feed all those babies, so Lula took jobs she variously described as washerwoman, laundress, and domestic. All amounted to the same things: scrubbing spotless the homes of wealthy white families; using blue bleach along with red-hot water to clean their clothes, a smoothing iron to remove wrinkles from blouses and dresses, and starch to firm up shirt collars; and helping with the cooking. Later when her own children were older, she sometimes took home the washing and ironing, setting up a boiling pot and rubbing board in the front yard.

Lula's wages of fifty cents a day helped feed her family. Leroy never missed a meal, although it was more likely to be cereal, greens, and water than chicken, beef, or milk. "It was poverty-stricken living," Leroy would say later, "before I knew what that meant." What he and his siblings did know by the age of six was that they had to pitch in.

Leroy worked the alleyways like a pro, collecting and cashing in empty bottles he found there. A half-pint could catch a penny; four cents for a quart. Delivering ice, a valued commodity in steamy Mobile, also brought in small change. Leroy was springing up like a weed in a bog, and as he grew so did Lula's and John's expectations of his earning power. The obvious place to look for work was the nearby L&N Station, where five separate railroads provided passenger service. Black redcaps hoisted trunks onto and off the trains.

Black Pullman porters served as chambermaids and shoe shines, nursemaids and valets. Black chefs and waiters offered seat-side service of sugar-cured ham, Welsh rarebit, and 131 other culinary delights, while black firemen shoveled wood and coal to feed forever-hungry locomotives. And black youths like Leroy jumped when wealthy white travelers snapped their fingers in the air, polishing their boots or carrying bags to hotels like Mobile's luxurious Battle House for as little as a dime or as much as a quarter.

Leroy was the quickest among the pint-size porters, but he soon realized that he could not bring home a real day's pay if he made just ten cents at a time. So he got a pole and some rope and jury-rigged a contraption that let him sling together two, three, or four satchels and cart them all at once. His invention quadrupled his income to forty cents a load. It also drew chuckles from the other baggage boys. "You look like a walking satchel tree," one of them yelled. The description stuck. "Leroy Paige," he said, "became no more and Satchel Paige took over."

Thus was born the most celebrated sobriquet in sports. Or so Satchel wrote in his 1962 autobiography. Over the years he volunteered more versions, including telling a radio interviewer that he was first dubbed Satchel when he hung around the Mobile Bears' ballpark collecting beat-up balls and broken bats. He brought his defective equipment to the schoolyard in a bag and "they started to call me 'Satchel.'"

There is one last explanation of why Satchel was called that since he was a boy - not because he toted suitcases, but because he swiped them. A man whose case he stole chased him, retrieved the bag, and gave young Leroy a hard slap across the face. "That's when I named him Satchel, right on that day," said Wilbur Hines, a boyhood friend and neighbor.

Wherever the nickname came from, it caught on. Only Lula, who brought him into the world, and later Bill Veeck, who brought him into the major leagues, persisted in calling him Leroy. To everyone else, he was Satchel, or just Satch.

BASEBALL ROOTS
Lula and John enrolled Satchel in the blacks-only W.H. Council School at the required age of six, as they had their six older children. One lesson Satchel took away from his school years was the joy of baseball. There were no independent youth leagues then, black or white; America's first Little League game was a generation away, and it would be two generations before black adolescents got their shot. But Mobile was a baseball town whose subtropical climate made it possible to play the game year-round, while its passion for playing made it Alabama's only city to allow Sunday ball. Seven days a week kids like Satchel took to the streets looking for enough space to make a field and enough other kids to cobble together two teams.

Temperatures topping 100 and humidity nearly as high may have kept their parents rocking quietly on their porches, sipping sugared tea or hand-squeezed lemonade, but it was not enough to sideline these youthful baseball players. Many learned to hit and pitch playing "top ball," where a stick replaced the bat they could not afford and soda bottle caps substituted for baseballs. "I can still see him as a little boy," said his sister Palestine, who was five years younger. "He had a sun hat, a ball and bat." Lula had similar memories of baseball becoming Satchelï¿½s escape and obsession: "Why, he'd rather play baseball than eat. It was always baseball, baseball."

They played just off Davis Avenue, the main thoroughfare in black Mobile. Ted Radcliffe, a catcher and pitcher who grew up near the Paiges, remembers that even the disappearing daylight did not stop intrepid young baseballers like Satchel and him. "We'd make cotton balls and soak them in oil and play night ball," said Radcliffe. "We'd light them and run like hell."

Satchel got his first taste of how good a ballplayer he could be at the Council School. Most elementary schools had teams in that era, although the youngest kids generally spent more time watching than playing. Not so with Satchel. The coach put him in when he was a mere eight years old, pairing him against boys two or three years his senior. He would later claim that he had played each of the nine positions, sometimes all in the same game. "If I'd pitch the whole game I'd strike out seventeen and eighteen with nothin' but speed," he said. "I was under 10 years old strikin' out everybody." He soon became known around the South Side of Mobile as the best school-age pitcher anyone had ever seen. It was partly how hard he threw and partly how artfully. When kids came to the plate, his slow pitch surprised them. "They just wet their pants or cried. That's how scared they were of my speed."

FISHING AND HUNTING
While baseball would become his vocation, another childhood passion - fishing - also lasted a lifetime. His fascination with fishing was inspired partly by the joy of eating crabs, catfish and shrimp. He also loved the serenity of the water, a getaway from the frenetic city and squalid slum. Moisture made the shorefront air softer and swept away the smells of hemp and tar. Close in were rows of long, flat piers and beyond that steamships and schooners sailing to what Satchel imagined were exotic ports of call, places where skin color did not count for everything.

Hunting offered a different sort of escape. He had no guns then, and no need for them. He could nail a squirrel with a rock using his catching hand rather than his throwing one, or make a lasting impression on an adversary's backside with a brick, stone, or pebble. The precision and power made him special and kept him safe. One time he was ambling down the railroad tracks heading home from his job as a baggage porter. In his fist was a pile of rocks, in the air a pheasant. As it flew by he aimed and fired. Dead bird. Another pheasant, another whip-like release of a stone, a second direct hit. Quietly watching were four white men carrying shotguns. "You mean to tell me you killed those birds with rocks?" the first hunter asked, incredulous. "You ought to be a baseball player."

Rock throwing also gave birth to what would become one of the most controversial and deceptive deliveries in baseball: the hesitation pitch. When he aimed a brick at a rival gang member, his adversary would instinctively duck. Knowing that, Satchel stopped mid-delivery, catching his foe stooped over in a posture that made him easy prey. The misleading motion worked equally well when he was armed with a baseball. At the top of a painfully deliberate stretch he paused longer than normal, arms high above his head, then thrust his left foot forward. He paused again - slowing but not stopping - as he whipped his arm and sent the ball flying. The result: batters swung at shadows long before the baseball itself arrived.

At school he was absent so often that the Paige home become a regular stop on the truant officers' rounds. At the L&N Station he stopped pulling and started purloining suitcases. He stole bicycles, too, along with anything else that was easy to grab. One night in 1918, walking home after dark, he passed a five-and-dime store with an alluring display of gold-colored bands and red and green stones. In he went and, when he thought no one was looking, he stuffed a fistful of the trinkets into his pocket. "Unless you've gone around with nothing," he would explain afterward, "you don't know how powerful a lure some new, shiny stuff is."

Unluckily for Satchel, a burly security guard saw him pocket the loot, nabbed him, and dragged him to police headquarters. That night the authorities released him to Lula. It would be his last night home for more than five years and would mark the end of his boyhood. The next day there was a hearing before a truant officer he called Mrs. Meanie. She was armed with a list of long infractions Satchel thought had escaped notice, from fistfights to skipping school to stealing to not listening to her repeated warnings. He thought she would never finish. She thought he would never listen and would end up on the trash heap that consumed so many black boys from Mobile. Her last words pronounced his punishment: confinement until the age of 18 at the state reform school.

"No!" Lula screamed. Satchel was shaking so hard he could not say anything. Just two weeks before he had celebrated his 12th birthday. Now he was being told he would not see freedom again for six long years.

A NEW CHANCE IN REFORM SCHOOL
The sign out front said Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Law-Breakers. In truth, Mount Meigs was as much an orphanage as a prison. While many of its wards did, like Satchel, have run-ins with the law, others were just having tough times at home or had no home. Buildings were without bars. The 380-acre campus was without fences. "We was free to go, you could go out, run away, go anywhere you wanted," Satchel recalled.

Having grown up deep within Mobile's South Side slum, in a shack shared with ten brothers and sisters and two parents, Satchel appreciated any comfort. It did not seem a hardship that he had to share his bed with another boy. The reformatory gave him more food than he was used to, with more clothes, warmth, and space. The school also was his only vestige of home. While other parents or grandparents visited often, his seldom did if ever. It is understandable why Lula, who had a brood of children in Mobile and no automobile, would have had a difficult time making the two-hundred-mile trip to Mount Meigs. But try telling that to a 12-year-old who was feeling abandoned.

Satchel tried out for the choir and had a voice so vibrant and resonant that he rose to be its leader. He made the drum and bugle corps. He did work hard, coaxing milk from cows, picking cotton, and helping construct new buildings, yet for at least half the year his daily routine also included ciphering, reading, and other lessons he would have gotten in elementary school. He did not like the school at Mount Meigs any better than the one in Mobile, but there was no playing hooky this time. In spite of himself, some of the learning was sinking in.

FIRST COACH
Then there was baseball. More of it than he had seen or played at his school in Mobile or on sandlots. There was a coach, too, Edward Byrd, who for the first time taught Satchel the fundamentals, and for the first time Satchel paid attention. Byrd's young protege had an anatomy that was all up and down. Rising more than six feet and weighing barely 140 pounds, Satchel joked that if he stood sideways you could not see him. His wiry arms and stilt-like legs were aerodynamically perfect to propel a ball from mound to plate. They gave him motion.

Momentum. Strength. And he had the ideal launching pads: hands so huge they made a baseball look like a golf ball, with wrists that snapped with the fury and flash of a catapult. Byrd understood what God had given this manful boy with his outsize appetites, limbs, and talents, and the coach was determined that it not be squandered. He showed Satchel exactly how to exploit his storehouse of kinetic energy. The first thing was to kick his foot so high before unleashing the baseball that it blacked out the sky and befuddled the batter. Then the novice pitcher swung his arm far enough forward that it seemed like his hand was right in the batter's face when he let go of the ball. So was born the Paige pose, the look that over the decades made Satchel stand out from the pitchers before and after: left leg held skyward, right arm stretched as far as it would go behind him, the catapult cocked to give the ball maximum power as he whirled forward to release it.

Satchel had to outwit his opponent. Watch a batter's knees, Byrd advised, the way a bullfighter studies a bull. Detect any weakness in the setup of his feet, his stance, the positioning of his bat. Then put the ball where the slugger can't hit it.

Satchel was better at doing that than anyone who had ever come through the Mount. It was less his accuracy, more his velocity. He threw hard. No curveball or slider, no change of pace or special finesse. Not yet. Oftentimes he almost fell off the mound as he was letting go of the ball.

However unconventional his demeanor, he delivered. A baseball weighs just five ounces - it is a mass of cork wound with woolen yarn and bound in cowhide - but flying off of Satchel's fingers it resembled a cannonball. And he kept getting better, the way Coach Byrd said he could.

Satchel arrived at the Mount in 1918 with just six years of schooling, most of that sporadic and unfocused. He left in 1923 secure in his letters and numbers. Furthermore, "Those five and a half years there did something for me - they made a man out of me. If I'd been left on the streets of Mobile to wander with those kids I'd been running around with, I'd of ended up as a big bum, a crook," he said decades later. "You might say I traded five years of freedom to learn how to pitch."

MOBILE TIGERS
Lula let him relax and celebrate his release from the reformatory for nearly a month before she reminded him that money was as scarce as ever in the Paige household, and he had better find work. One afternoon he ended up at Eureka Gardens, where his older brother Wilson pitched for the semi-pro, all-black Mobile Tigers. Wilson was not there, but after watching other prospects try out, Satchel was sure he could measure up. A master of the first impression, he whistled in a few fast ones that "popped against the catcher's glove like they was firecrackers." Then he challenged the Tigers' skipper to pick up a bat, blowing ten pitches by him. "Do you throw that fast consistently?" the manager asked. "No sir," Satchel answered. "I do it all the time."

Satchel was signed on the spot, with a fresh dollar bill sealing the deal. He was 18 at the time, and this was his first job and first team. He quickly established himself as a standout for the Tigers, to the point where fellow players wanted to buy him drinks and "all the gals just wanted to be around, squealing and hanging on my arms." While he chalked up "a few" no hitters, playing for a scrub team earned him just a dollar a game when fans turned out and a keg of lemonade when attendance was sparse.

Lemonade did not even pay Satchelï¿½s bills, much less Lulaï¿½s, so he pitched not just for the Tigers but for any local team willing to pay. He also cut the grass and cleaned the grandstands where the all-white Mobile Bears played. One day several Bears challenged him to show what he could do, and, as always, he was delighted to oblige. The first batter swung and missed at three fastballs. All the second generated was a breeze. "We sure could use you," one of the players finally told him. "If only you were white."

The lament was familiar to Wilson "Paddlefoot" Paige. With a nickname whose origin was beyond dispute - he had size-12 feet - this older brother was even faster than Satchel and could catch as well as pitch. Everyone in and out of the family agreed that Wilson could have been better than Satchel. "But he liked the girls. He didnï¿½t want to play ball," said Palestine. "He wanted to follow them dern girls." The truth is that Wilson loved pitching, catching, and playing ball generally, says his son Wilson Jr., who still lives in Mobile. But he was the more responsible and employable of the brothers, so when the family was in especially dire straights, Wilson gave up baseball and "stayed around to help support his mother...he did regret not continuing playing."

In 1924, just a year out of Mount Meigs, Satchel won about thirty games and lost just once. The next year every team around wanted him. By midseason the following year, 1926, he strung together twenty-five wins in a row. Going for win number twenty-six, something snagged: with a 1-0 lead in the ninth, and two out, his infield made three straight errors. The bases were loaded and Satchel was fuming. The crowd began to hiss, which made him madder still. "Somebody was going to have to be showed up for that," he wrote afterward. "I waved in my outfielders. When they got in around me I said, 'Sit down there on the grass right behind me. I'm pitching this last guy without an outfield.'" He milked the situation the way he once did cows on the Mount, taking his time, pumping back and forth. Three pitches, three strikes, and a win preserved. It was his twenty-sixth straight victory and the crowd went wild.

One person, who did not watch Satchel play then, or ever, was Lula. She had neither the time nor interest. She "didn't like baseball, nohow. She never did see me pitch and I guess she never will," Satchel wrote in 1948. "She thought baseball was sinnin', always playin' and never workin'." Did that bother him? Absolutely, he maintained. "It's a terrible strain on you when your mama ain't behind you."

But Lula did offer up her support - with caveats - when Satchel was recruited to play in the Negro Southern League. The proposal came from the owner of the Chattanooga White Sox, Alex Herman, a former semi-pro player who eventually returned to Mobile and a successful career wheeling and dealing in politics and running a funeral home, insurance company, and family bakery. "My father was driving down Congress Street and saw this kid throwing oyster shells," recalls Kirk Herman. "He was a raggedy kid, he'd throw from a distance of twenty to thirty feet at the telegram poles. He'd throw fast, and curve it, and it hit the poles every time." Alex Herman was impressed enough that he watched Satchel pitch with the semi-pro Tigers, then tried to draft him for the White Sox, a team of full-time, paid ballplayers.

The timing was perfect. While Satchel had proven his pitching prowess, he still earned too little to move out of Lulaï¿½s shotgun shack. The only way out for him would be to sign with a professional team, and now the all-black team with the ironic title of White Sox was here asking him to join. But there was a catch: Lula. Satchel was underage and needed parental permission to leave Mobile. So he and Herman sat down to work it out with Mother Paige. "Your pa ain't been dead more'n a year and you're going off and leaving," she complained. "You're just a boy."

Herman told Lula that he would look out for the young ballplayer. He said Satchel would be paid $250 a month, of which the pitcher would collect just $50 with his mother getting the rest. He offered her $200 in advance. Lula knew that neither Satchel nor she would ever see money like that if he stayed in Mobile, so she relented. Her decision was made easier when Wilson, whom Herman also tried to sign, said he was staying home.

It was settled. Satchel would get his first shot at seeing the world beyond Alabama and playing in a real baseball league. Alex Herman would get a tale to recite for the rest of his life. Driving his children by a weed-infested sandlot on the South Side of Mobile, he would say, "That's where Satchel Paige used to pitch. That's where I discovered him." There was a fire in Satchel's belly even then, to hear Herman tell it, and the manager vowed to stoke it. So he swept the boyish ballplayer away from the city of his birth and brought him to Tennessee.

VISITS HOME
Satchel would return infrequently to Mobile during his playing days and a couple of times a year in later years, holding court on his sister Palestine's porch or in old friends' backyard beer halls. He loved Palestine's oyster loaf and her boiled crabs. He did not like getting stopped repeatedly by the police, who wondered why a black man was driving a late-model Cadillac and wearing all that jewelry.

Sometimes his wife joined him and occasionally one or more of the kids, but generally he went alone. He stayed with his brother John and more often with Lula, who still called him Leroy and still treated him like another of her brood rather than a star.

Satchel relished being celebrated as the hometown boy who came from nothing but made it big. He liked even better escaping his fans and any talk of baseball by stealing away at night to fish with his great-nephew Chris Grove. "He knew I could hide him in this city and he could have his private time, his Satchel time," says Grove, whose grandmother was Satchel's youngest sibling. Grove would get a call out of the blue saying, "Nephew, I'm on my way. You know what to do." That meant tracking how the fish were running and knowing just which pier to go to. Satchel did not like a crowd when he was fishing. "When he came here to Mobile," says Grove, "he wanted to fish, raise Cain, and have fun."

As fun as fishing was, visiting Mobile was not easy for Satchel. His nephew Leon Paige thinks the famous pitcher was embarrassed by his family's poverty and his native city's racially retrograde ways. He may have been, but it was more complicated. Being home reminded Satchel why he wanted to escape. He saw the ghosts of what he might have become every time he looked at his siblings, none of whom had it easy. One brother drowned at sea. A sister had a nervous breakdown after her son was killed in a fight. Wilson turned to the bottle much the way their father had.

Satchel knew that but for the intervention of men like Coach Byrd and Alex Herman, he could have ended up like Wilson - digging graves to earn a living, then ending up in his own early grave. It was not a comforting image for the returning baseball hero. Being a kid again, which is the way most people feel when they go home, was no more fun for Satchel the second time around than it had been the first. That was why he stayed away and, when he came home, it is why he spent so much time fishing with his grandnephew, carousing with new friends, and looking ahead rather than back.

Copyright c 2009 by Larry Tye. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. New York.