The Original Curse (24 page)

This was not unjustified alarmism. Bombs linked to labor—some to the IWW, some to other unions—were being found all over Chicago.
In January, a girl was arrested at Union Station, armed with 50 pounds of dynamite and a loaded automatic pistol. Known as “Dynamite Girl,” she had IWW connections and, according to the
Tribune
, “With the great I.W.W. trial coming up next month, the police saw a possible motive in the efforts to bring contraband explosive to Chicago.”
¹⁵
(Dynamite Girl was actually anarchist Ella Antolini, 18, who was sent to a Missouri prison, where her cellmate was famed anarchist Emma Goldman.) In March a bombing campaign that was part of the strike against the Lyon & Healy music company led to murder indictments for union officials. Also in March, a bomb had been found in the Federal Building office of attorneys Frank Nebeker and Claude Porter, who would be prosecuting the IWW trial. It was the second bomb found in the building in the previous two months. In April a man believed to be an anarchist or a Wobbly was arrested for making bombs in his South Side home. In July, as part of an internal dispute in the Cobblers Union, a bomb on the North Side exploded at 1:00
A.M
., driving hundreds of locals into the street. There was paranoia when it came to domestic terrorism, but it was rooted in daily headlines. The presence of the IWW made Chicagoans nervous.

The climax of the IWW trial came with the testimony of the union’s leader, massive, one-eyed organizer “Big Bill” Haywood. On the stand, Haywood lobbed his own sensational accusations, including the claim that lumber bosses were getting black workers hooked on cocaine and heroin so that they’d become addicted and agree to work for low wages. Haywood stridently denied the government’s assertion that the Wobblies supported the kaiser and made a pretty good point in response: if the IWW was antiwar, how could it be pro German? “I regard the German socialists as more responsible for the war than any other body,” Haywood said. “They refused to vote for the general strike against the war. If they had refused to fight in August 1914, this war would never have been.… I have learned to despise autocracies of all kinds and that includes governmental autocracies. Germany today is the worst autocracy in the world.”
¹⁶

Haywood’s testimony ended August 13. Four days later, as Hollocher hit in his 20th straight game, the trial jolted to a stop. The prosecution made its final argument, and the defense, in a move that sent a wave of surprise through the courtroom, declined to present a final argument. Just after 4:00
P.M
., with the trial having dragged over four and a half months, the jury retired for what was expected
to be a proportionately long deliberation. But they returned in just 65 minutes. All 100 defendants were found guilty. “It had been feared by court attaches that, were the 100 convicted, there would be a riot in court,” the
Tribune
reported. “Instead, there was a dead, almost breathless silence.”
¹⁷

Shock fell over the room. Haywood, in a move to calm his disciples, praised Landis and agreed that the IWW had gotten a fair trial. If there was outrage over the guilty verdict, it would apparently be expressed another time.

T
HE
O
RIGINAL
C
URSE
: C
HARLEY
H
OLLOCHER

Charley Hollocher batted .316 as a rookie, fourth in the NL, and by the end of the year he seemed destined to become one of the greatest shortstops the game had known. But Hollocher’s story would take a strange, tragic turn.

By 1923, Hollocher was in his prime. He was team captain, coming off a year in which he had hit .340 for the Cubs and, incredibly, struck out just five times in 592 at bats. At spring training in California, though, he suffered an attack of the flu. He went back to St. Louis and was examined by Dr. Robert Hyland, who sent Hollocher to a specialist. Hollocher never explained what was wrong with him but later said, “They advised me that I would ruin my health if I played baseball that season.”
¹⁸
Still, Bill Killefer, who was by then manager of the Cubs, persuaded Hollocher to rejoin the team. Hollocher hit .342 in 66 games but continued to have stomach pain. Finally he left a note saying, “Feeling pretty rotten, so made up my mind to go home and take a rest and forget baseball for the rest of the year. No hard feelings, just didn’t feel like playing anymore. Good luck.”
¹⁹
And that was it. Holly left.

He returned for 76 games in 1924, but his stomach still hurt, and he quit for good. He worked at a number of odd jobs around St. Louis and spent a year as a scout for the Cubs. But he did not play ball again. Hollocher might have been a hypochondriac, might have had a legitimate but undiagnosed stomach condition, or—as has been more recently speculated—might have been suffering from depression. The latter reasoning makes sense in light of what later became of Hollocher.

On August 14, 1940, at age 43, Hollocher, who had been complaining to his wife about abdominal pains, slid into the front seat of his car and parked in a driveway near Lindbergh Boulevard in St. Louis County. He took off his sunglasses and took out his membership card for the Association of Professional Baseball Players. He pulled out his new shotgun—so new that the tag was still attached—scrawled out a note, and placed it on the dashboard. The note read: “Call Walnut 4123, Mrs. Ruth Hollocher.” He then put the barrel of his shotgun to his neck and pulled the trigger.
²⁰

Carl leaned back on the bench in the corner of the home dugout, watching George Mogridge hurl for the Yankees. Another southpaw, and everyone in Beantown knew what that meant: the Red Sox would not score—they could not beat lefties at all—and they would lose. Carl’s arms were folded against his chest. The heat wave had passed, and now it was a chilly Saturday at Fenway, maybe 60 degrees. Fans wore overcoats. Carl’s teammates were not bothering him, which was customary. Carl was pitching the second game of that afternoon’s doubleheader against New York, and most players steered clear of the boxman on the day he was pitching, leaving him time to get his focus. But the truth was Carl’s teammates steered clear of him even when he was not pitching.

It was OK, though. Carl had other worries on his mind.

Babe Ruth was coming to bat, and Carl heaved a sigh when the crowd went into the usual convulsion of cheering. After the run-in with Barrow in the beginning of July, Ruth’s temper had cooled, and he was now pitching his turn in the rotation and playing the outfield when he was not on the slab. And even Carl had to credit him—Ruth had been performing quite well. Still, Carl had never liked the man, though they’d been acquainted for a long time. He hadn’t liked Ruth when they both joined the Providence club in 1914, hadn’t liked him when they came up to the Red Sox together later that year, hadn’t
liked him when they were battling for a spot in the pitching rotation as rookies in 1915, and did not like him now that they were big-league stars. Carl could not explain why. Ruth was big, loud, and brash; he did not seem to care a whit about anything except satisfying whatever desire happened to grab him at that moment. What baffled Carl was that people seemed to
love
the big ape for it. Ruth would do something childish—steal a car, eat two raw steaks, punch a man on the train, fight with Barrow—and he’d get that dumb grin on his moon face, and everyone would laugh and say, “Oh, Babe.”

Maybe this was the reason Carl disliked Ruth. Babe was popular. Carl was not. One thing Carl knew was this: there is such a thing as popularity. We all know people who are popular without being able to explain why they should be. We also know people who are not popular, and yet they may be even more deserving of respect. Popularity does not necessarily rest on merit. Nor is unpopularity necessarily deserved. It was long ago made very apparent to Carl that he was not one of those individuals who were fated to be popular. It used to bother him some, for he supposed there are none of us who wouldn’t prefer to be well thought of.
¹

Maybe it was the death of his father that was behind his persistent unpopularity. Carl was just 12 when William Henry Mays, a stern Methodist minister who had moved the family from Kentucky to Missouri, was returning from a day of preaching, got caught in a rainstorm, got sick, and died. After that, it seemed, Carl never learned how to get in good with other men. It’s a bad outlook for a boy of 12 to have a dead father. Everywhere he went in the years following his father’s death, he was immediately disliked. When he was with Boise, Idaho, he didn’t have a pal on the club until the season was half over. When he went to Portland, Oregon, he got the same cold shoulder until the fellows understood him better. But when he came East and joined the Providence club, he got a still bigger dose of the same unpleasant medicine, and that began to get on his nerves.
²

It was OK, though. Carl had other worries on his mind.

Maybe, it’s true, he should not belittle the other men when plays were bungled behind him. But Carl didn’t stand for failure. That could be attributed to his uncle Pierce—who actually wasn’t Carl’s uncle. In 1913, when Carl was 21, he signed with Portland. One afternoon Pierce Mays showed up at a game. He approached Carl, wondering if they were related. Maybe, they concluded, there was a distant
relation. But Carl and Pierce took to each other immediately, and (with his wife, “Auntie” Genevieve) it was as if he had a new set of parents. The way he clung to Pierce made Carl suspect that losing his father at a young age had been more difficult than he had originally supposed. Perhaps the bond with Uncle Pierce was forged on death itself—it probably was no coincidence that Pierce’s only son had died too. Why else could Carl make no friends among his teammates but immediately make friends with Pierce?

At one point, when Carl had been particularly frustrated with his unpopularity in Providence, he wrote to Uncle Pierce, telling him that baseball was a game where you had to swim continually against the current and that he had perhaps better get out, go back to Oregon, and see what he could do in some other profession where the waters weren’t quite so deep.
³
Carl got a letter back saying that he could surely return to Portland, only he would no longer be welcome at the home of Pierce and Genevieve Mays. They did not tolerate quitters. So Carl stayed, but now he got angry at himself when things did not go well. He was not going to let down Uncle Pierce. He got angry when his teammates showed ineptitude in the field. Why shouldn’t he? When they failed, weren’t they letting Uncle Pierce down too?

Ah, it was OK, though. Carl had other worries on his mind.

Like his right arm, which was not hurling as it usually did. Carl had been lammed in his past four starts. His arm was sore, and he was showing signs of wear and tear.

And he was worried about Freddie Madden, his longtime girlfriend who would become his wife in just a little more than a month. Carl wanted to support her with a nice honeymoon and, eventually, a new house.

And the Red Sox, whose grip on first and the attending slice of World Series coin was slipping.

And the World Series itself—that it would take place at all was looking more and more doubtful. When the Red Sox won in 1916, Carl had gotten more than $3,900. He needed that money.

And the men from the shipyard league, who had been pressuring him for two months now to join Dutch Leonard and get himself out of the way of the war.

And Carl was worried about his Class 1A status. He’d gotten word to report to his draft board in Mansfield, Missouri, for a physical. He was trying to arrange for the physical to be moved to Boston so that he could continue pitching.
⁴
Either way, after the physical, he’d probably be drafted, maybe before the season ended. Even if the Red Sox won the pennant, even if the World Series was put on, there was a good chance Carl would be the property of General Pershing and relocated to the front by the time it started. He could win a pennant, get married, and be dead, all in the same year.

Carl Mays married Freddie Madden after the 1918 season but left Boston in a controversial trade in 1919. Here, Mays and his young family are shown in New York shortly after the trade. (N
ATIONAL
B
ASEBALL
H
ALL OF
F
AME
L
IBRARY
, C
OOPERSTOWN
, N.Y.)

Carl squinted out at the field and furrowed his brow. He looked like a man with a toothache.
⁵

Manager Miller Huggins once summed up his feelings for Carl Mays, pointing out that if just about any player Huggins had ever coached was in need, he would offer help. But not Carl Mays. “If [Mays] was in the gutter,” Huggins said, “I’d kick him.”