Terror in the City of Champions (19 page)

Woodward Avenue divided the city’s east and west sides. It began downtown near the riverfront at Jefferson and cut diagonally through the city, past the 1871 former city hall, past the crisp towering J. L. Hudson Department Store building, and beside Grand Circus Park and the Fox Theatre. The legion’s stone chapel was a few blocks off Woodward, which continued past the Maccabees Building (home to WYXZ and the popular
Lone Ranger
radio show) through the cultural center, with the main branch of the library on one side and the arts institute on the other. Woodward skirted within a block of the General Motors headquarters in the New Center area. It edged alongside the ritzy Boston-Edison neighborhood where Henry Ford once lived and where many titans of industry and society remained, including Frank Navin and Walter O. Briggs. Woodward sliced through the incorporated city of Highland Park—carved right out of the center of Detroit—before reemerging near Palmer Park. Miles north beyond the city limit, still along Woodward, stood Father Coughlin’s Shrine of the Little Flower.

Northern High School sat at about the midpoint of the ten-mile stretch of Woodward from the waterfront to Eight Mile Road. It was three blocks from the city’s largest synagogue, Beth Temple El. The night after Dayton Dean received his assignment, attorney Maurice Sugar’s supporters gathered at Northern High for a rally. It was three days before the election. Detroit school officials had tried earlier to block the meeting. Citing Sugar’s leftist leanings, the school system had rejected his petition to use the building. Sugar sued, noting that other candidates had been provided access. A court agreed and ordered that Sugar be allowed to hold his gathering.

On Saturday night, as hundreds were arriving at the auditorium, Dayton Dean and Leslie Black headed to the site. They stopped to buy an ax and a ladder. Black despised Sugar, in part because of the Victory case. He had talked at legion meetings about wanting to lynch both Sugar and Victory. But tonight his mission with Dean was to cut power to the high school during Sugar’s rally, thus throwing the hall into darkness and allowing legion members inside to hurl stench bombs—lightbulbs filled with chemicals—and rain fake campaign literature upon the attendees. Dean tried to break into the basement of the school, thinking he could punch out the custodian and disrupt power from inside. Alas the basement door was locked. Black started to shimmy up an outside electric pole but didn’t get far before growing exhausted. Dean tried next and climbed high enough to chop at the wires with an ax. Sparks flashed as Dean scurried back down. Confident he had done the job, he approached the school on foot only to discover that the lights were still on. He had cut the wrong wires, dimming a nearby safety zone.

This failure was not lost on state commander Lupp. Upon returning from the successful camp-burning mission, he chided Dean for having failed him yet again. Without cover of darkness, legion members inside the auditorium did not throw their smoke bombs. They did, however, leave behind hundreds of flyers in support of “comrade Sugar.” The pamphlets, attributed falsely to the “Communist Party of America,” had been printed by the legion. They urged rebellion. “Throw out the bosses and kill the aggressors of the common people,” they stated. “Negroes, rise against your white oppressors. . . . Tear down this damnable form of government.” The literature drew coverage in the press, with school and police authorities contending erroneously that the flyers had been created by powers aligned with Sugar. Actually, legionnaire Leslie Black had ordered them.

Sugar’s allies reassembled the next day. An automobile parade, begun at four distant points in the city, converged into a massive procession toward Arena Gardens, a 3,000-seat place also along Woodward that often hosted wrestling matches. The crowd’s size convinced Sugar’s supporters that with a strong election-day turnout he might win one of nine seats on the judicial bench. The backing of several black ministerial associations would not hurt. In his limited newspaper advertising, Sugar highlighted only one of the many endorsements he had received. “Clarence Darrow urges election of Maurice Sugar,” the copy proclaimed. The ad featuring Darrow, renowned for the Scopes “Monkey” Trial, ran in the
Detroit News
, the only of three major dailies offering anything resembling fair coverage. The sharply pro-business
Free Press
mostly ignored Sugar, and William Randolph Hearst’s
Times
editorialized against him—twice in a week.

On election day Sugar drew 63,000 votes but fell short of capturing a court seat. The defeat did not extinguish his desire to be elected to public office. He decided to pursue a spot on the Detroit City Council. News quickly reached the Black Legion and Dayton Dean soon received a new assignment: Murder Maurice Sugar.

Harry’s Caravan

In the Tigers’ Lakeland, Florida, clubhouse at Henley Field, two veteran pitchers were talking, maybe Carl Fischer and Elon Hogsett or Vic Sorrell and Fred Marberry or some others altogether different.

“How many pitchers we going to carry this year?” asked one.

“I read in the paper where we was going to carry nine.”

“Yeah, nine. And they got fourteen working out down here. . . . That means about five of us is going to get the air. I suppose they’ll be keeping a couple of them young hams so they can get experience and letting a couple of real pitchers go.”

“Club does that sometimes.”

“Yeah, and what does it get them?”

“I’ll say it gets them a lot of grief. And then some.”

Harry Salsinger, “The Umpire,” didn’t identify the men, but he captured their conversation in his sports column. He wanted to give his readers a sense of what young players encounter when they come to camp dreaming of landing a job, which inevitably means displacing another player. “The men who have established themselves in the major leagues, consciously or unconsciously, unite against a newcomer,” said Salsinger. “They have a common bond this time of year.”

One look around the locker room revealed the Tigers to be a youthful team. By mid-March only four men—bespectacled Vic Sorrell, veteran starters Fred Marberry and General Crowder, and Goose Goslin—were thirty-two or older, though Cochrane and Gehringer were rapidly approaching the milestone. Almost all of the rest were in their twenties. Eleven rookies had been invited to camp, five of them pitchers. Of those Steve Larkin was the only one with major league experience. He had pitched six innings over two games in 1934. “Whistling” Jake Wade, Clyde Hatter, Joe Sullivan, and Mike Cesnovar had yet to rise above the minors, but all held hopes. So did outfielders Hugh Shelley and Chet Morgan, infielder Salty Parker, Rose Bowl football star Dixie Howell (who had no set position), and catchers Frankie Reiber, with a sixteen-game tenure over two seasons, and Birdie Tebbetts.

The Tigers had been high on Tebbetts since his high school days. He felt an allegiance to the team because Navin had occasionally sent money to Tebbetts’s widowed mother, who was bringing up three children. The team also supported his education at Providence College and saved his life by getting him medical treatment when he came down with a serious infection. If he failed at baseball, Tebbetts planned to become an attorney.

Every pitcher tells a story, and Elon Hogsett’s involved his bad teeth and his nickname. His choppers had pained him so severely last season that the club ordered him to get “a flock” of infected teeth removed over the winter. His mouth was feeling better now, though his nickname, Chief, always aggravated him. (It would for the remainder of his career.) A man of few words, Hogsett told anyone who asked that he had but drops of Indian blood coursing through his veins. He was one-thirty-second Cherokee, he protested, yet writers insisted on calling him Chief. A relief pitcher, he didn’t mind so much that fans responded with Indian war calls when he entered a game, but he preferred to be called Elon.

Not everyone liked one another. Pete Fox refused to talk to Goose Goslin after a smarting remark about his intelligence. They wouldn’t speak for the entire 1935 season. Fox, described by baseball writer Fred Lieb as “a grim little fellow, game as a pebble,” had his supporters, among them Hank Greenberg and roomie Schoolboy Rowe. Goslin preferred Gee Walker and Jo-Jo White, southern boys who called one another “nigger.”

The Lakeland locker room was lively and warm. It had been improved over the winter. A coal-burning stove now stood in the middle of trainer Denny Carroll’s room, with showers off to the side. Carroll kept it toasty to prevent chills. Massage tables, draped in white linen, set on each side of the stove. The room smelled of ointments and medications, a potpourri of alcohol and arnica, wintergreen and witch hazel.

Spittoons were scattered about the clubhouse, and each player had a cage to call his own with two sets of uniforms hanging inside. Players usually brought their own shoes, but this year Cochrane had purchased everyone a pair. While in one of his angry moods during a losing streak last season, he had told the screwball bastards that if they won the goddamn pennant, he’d buy them all a pair of fucking shoes. “That’s a bet, Mike,” Greenberg had said. Cochrane made good on the pledge. Doing so nourished team camaraderie.

Cochrane’s confidence no longer drew bewildering looks from his men. When he forecast a pennant and a world championship this time, his players bought into the likelihood of it. His self-assuredness was as infectious as Heinie Schuble’s smile. Schoolboy Rowe predicted he would win twenty-five games. (He was tempted to go with thirty but didn’t want anyone thinking he was popping off like Dizzy Dean.) Greenberg announced he was setting his sights on the home run title, even though he had hit twenty-three fewer than leader Lou Gehrig in 1934. His hopes were bolstered by word that Navin had removed the twenty-foot screen from atop the left field fence. It had been erected originally, opponents believed, to thwart visiting sluggers like Jimmie Foxx. The screen had more than doubled the height of the wall, turning home runs into two-base hits. Need proof? Greenberg pointed out that he had led the majors with sixty-three of those buggers. But now, with Navin Field home to one of the game’s most powerful hitters, the screen was coming down. And Greenberg was salivating.

He desperately wanted a taste of fame, like Rowe got with his win streak. “That’s the thing that makes stars,” he said. “Sixteen victories are pretty nice even if they are not won in a row. But because the Schoolboy won his in one-two-three order he became famous. . . . I am a first baseman. I can distinguish myself in three ways. I can become a superb fielder. I can lead the league in batting. Or I can lead it in hitting home runs.” The first two were unlikely, he said. “Why shouldn’t I go after the slugging championship? With that screen out of the way, the park is almost made to order for me.”

One longtime observer noted: “The big dream lures him.”

Gee Walker’s spring dream was more modest. He wanted to start. He wanted to be the main guy in right field. During the World Series he had gotten only three at-bats because Cochrane favored Jo-Jo White and Pete Fox. Rumors of trades swirled around Walker like Kansas twisters. Prognosticators pointed to the team’s underwhelming outfield—who was there beyond Goose Goslin?—as Detroit’s drawback. Walker, whose pay had been cut by almost half, yearned to prove them wrong. Almost everyone could see his potential: The boy could hit. But his weaknesses surfaced as persistently as a cork bobber. More important, they frustrated the hell out of Cochrane, who was touting Chet Morgan as his possible right fielder.

“Gerald Walker remains . . . one of the puzzles of baseball,” said Salsinger, the baseball sage. “Walker, a most likeable man and one of the most aggressive of players, has never learned to control himself on the field and to harness his ability. He should be one of the headliners of baseball, and he would be if he bridled his temper and concentrated on the game.”

On this point Charles Ward, Salsinger’s competitor at the
Free Press
, agreed. Ward had all sorts of splendid nicknames for players, but he fashioned nothing endearing for the popular Walker. He referred to him bluntly as “The Mississippi Hard Head.” Walker’s prime flaw was that he could be distracted easily. Opponents could pick him off by heckling him. So they did. During the World Series, after Walker had tied the score by driving in a run in the ninth inning, the entire Cardinals bench began yelling at him. Walker was twenty feet off first base when he engaged in the argument, screaming taunts back as the pitcher threw the ball to the first baseman, who tagged him out. The Cardinals howled with laughter. What Walker needed was to show the same attentiveness in baseball as he showed when playing the Ballyhoo and Wiffleboard games in hotel lobbies.

Throughout winter and into spring, Cochrane consistently forecast great things for his Tigers, provided they stayed healthy. “We didn’t win the World Series,” he told one gathering of fans. “But things will be different. . . . I think we will repeat [by capturing the league pennant] and win the series, as well.” Weeks later he told his team, “We’ll win again unless something serious happens.” He also informed Grantland Rice that the Tigers would be back in the World Series. Rice agreed, but many observers didn’t, thinking that the Tigers had gotten lucky in 1934. A pre-season poll of baseball writers showed Cleveland the favorite. New York, others said. Frank Navin, who wanted a World Series ring more than anyone, hid his thoughts behind a wall of jinx-driven caution. He admitted the Tigers had a good team. However, he noted, “Luck is a big thing in baseball. We had some last year.”

One man who had no qualms about speaking his mind was Dizzy Dean, still puffed and prideful over his and his brother Paul’s victories. In Bradenton, Florida, before taking on the Tigers in a spring scrimmage, Dean said the best Detroit could hope for was third place. He projected Cleveland in first and Boston or New York in second. The Indians, he explained, have “Hal Trosky, who is a much better hitter than Hank Greenberg.”