As a follow-up to this post, last week I received a phone message from Sara Kalvin, public relations official at Pilgrim State Hospital in Brentwood, Long Island, New York, who, after looking into my requests about the possible release of Cannonball Dick Redding’s records from when he was in the psychiatric facility in the 1940s (he died there in 1948 under reportedly “mysterious circumstances”), told me that yes indeed, the state’s privacy laws prevent the release of all such medical records of patients in such psychiatric hospitals and, therefore, Redding’s files cannot be forthcoming.

That leaves the the receipt of the official letter from Pilgrim denying the similar written request for the release of records I sent a couple months ago. That hopefully forthcoming communication should confirm Ms. Kalvin’s determination. Oh well.

In the meantime, I’m waiting for what could be my last hope for finding out why a legendary pitcher like Dick Redding was sent to a mental asylum and, more importantly, how and why he died there — a request for the release of his medical records from Veteran Affairs. Cannonball actively served in Europe during World war I, and I’m hoping the century of time between then and now, as well as the 66 years since his death, is enough time to allow for the issuance of his military health records. I’ll keep on this and keep you posted.

At this point, I want to mention a very insightful email of advice sent to me after I put up the aforementioned post. A close friend, confidant and great help to me work wisely recommended last week that even though I’m a trained journalist with pit bull instincts, when it comes to historical research like this, it’s often best to use the honey-instead-of-vinegar approach and take it easy when approaching official sources and institutions like Ms. Kalvin and Pilgrim hospital.

He suggested I ease off a bit for a while on the Dick Redding matter, and after reflection, I think it’s advice I will definitely heed. I’m still trying to find the right balance I’m trying to strike between journalist and historical researcher, and my friend’s suggestions were extremely timely and needed to kind of get me back on an even keel. many thanks to him.

Hi all, many apologies about the lapse in posts for a little while. I actually had a medical emergency and was in the hospital for a bit, but I’m getting back into the swing of things now …

And, to start of with the Return of the Ginger (that’s me), the picture above is from a gathering at Herb Simpson’s house last Wednesday with Herb, me, WWL TV reporter Bryan Salmond (he’s on the right in the picture), and Lorri Ericson and Pete Bellmar for the Seattle Mariners booster organization, the RBI Club, which will be hosting Herb and his nephew (and yours truly) for the team’s African-American Heritage Day July 28.

Bryan interview the ever-loquacious Herb as well as Lorri for a piece that’s going to be broadcast this coming Sunday on WWL. Bryan was a great guy, and Lorri and Pete were fantastic. It was great to finally meet them all.

In the photo, Herb is showing his actual jersey from his time with the 1946 Seattle Steelheads of the short-lived West Coast Negro Baseball League. To the left of him is a display case choked full of priceless and fascinating mementos from Herb’s storied career in the Negro Leagues and then in the minor leagues.

It was a pretty fantastic afternoon, and thanks to everyone for coming to honor Herb. If you get a chance, check out Bryan’s piece, which, as noted, is scheduled to air Sunday.

“I am a public relations officer, and I can say without a doubt right now that nothing like that ever happened here.”

Yes, I’m a researcher. I deal in databases and microfilm and files of old documents and pictures and stuff.

But in a previously life, I was an investigative journalist. A hard-as-nails-one. I asked people hard questions, backed them into a corner and got action because of it. In essence, I could be a bad ass, journalistically speaking.

But you see, that never really completely leaves you, that urge for doggedness and grit and pulling answers out of someone. And, quite especially and deliciously, proving someone wrong and rendering them, if only for a moment, speechless and dumbfounded. True, there’s a healthy dose of schadenfreude involved, but it comes with the territory of taking no, umm, poop.

I reverted to that former self yesterday because I decided that, to a large extent, I’m done fooling around when it comes to finding out what happened to Cannonball Dick Redding in Pilgrim State  Hospital on Long Island in 1948.

Since my last few posts about this (here, here and here), I’ve been waiting to hear back from modern-day Pilgrim Psychiatric Facility about my request for the release of records from there — I’m not optimistic, given New York State’s strict patient privacy laws, even though that patient has no living relatives and has been dead for more than 65 years — and I sent a formal request for records from military services since Redding served in the Army in WWI.

But we journalists at heart are not a patient bunch. Not in the slightest. So I guess yesterday I took off the gloves and threw down the gauntlet.

I  did so by calling up Pilgrim and asking form the public information officer at the center, Ms. Sara Kalvin. Let’s just say that during our roughly 20-minute conversation, I dropped the terms “murder,” “abuse” and “cover-up.”

Like the title of this post says, I’m done foolin’ around. And my, shall we say, aggressive questioning got Ms. Kalvin to pop out the quote with which I led off this post.

I had to explain who Dick Redding was, and I had to give some rudimentary background about what the Negro Leagues were pre-Jackie. She gave me the same basic line I’ve been hearing from various state officials regarding state privacy laws and the release of patient info. Yadda yadda yadda.

But when I said that events like murder, mysterious deaths and patient abuse were commonplace during the time of Dick Redding’s time as a patient/inmate (I used the term “inmate,” just to rattle the cage some more), that’s when she said that she could pretty much guarantee that such things never happened at Pilgrim.

“People like to think that this place is haunted, that there are specters all over the place,” she said. “But nothing could be further from the truth. We want to put an end to those  types of things, those rumors.”

At which point, of course, I pointed to documented, well reported cases of such occurrences happening at Pilgrim, as I detailed here and here.

That’s when she stammered a bit and searched for something to say. 

I then asked if, around the time of Cannonball’s death, if the autopsy and processing of the body would have taken place in-house, at the hospital,or if an investigation and autopsy would have been done by Suffolk County, N.Y., officials.

She said that “at one time in our history, we did have a morgue on site, but I’m not sure when that folded.”

She asked me why I was inquiring about this man, to which I responded that Redding was a Hall-of-Fame quality pitcher and that, indeed, many are building a case for him to be inducted into the shrine. That’s when I  said it. Impulsive? Perhaps? Tabloidy? Possible. Putting some accusational bait out there? Sure.

But this is journalism, folks. You want answers, you gotta stir the pot.

“I’m just concerned that if something bad did happen to Mr. Redding, there might have been a cover-up,” I said.

At that point, i also informed her that we, i.e. the research community, did have a copy of Redding’s death certificate, which does confirm that he was a patient at and died in Pilgrim on Halloween 1948 and that he was attended to by a doctor named “L. Kris” from May 24-Oct. 31. The cause of death, however, is whited out.

We talked for a bit more, and she ended by promising to look into it and see what she could do for me, and she also promised she’d call me back.

So that was that. In a prologue to that neat little conversation, I called the Suffolk County Police Department to find out if there would have been a PD investigation of any questionable incident at Pilgrim in 1948. The officer who answered the phone looked up Redding’s name in their database and told me they had no record of an investigation by that name.

He also said that because Pilgrim was a state facility, any outside investigation would have been conducted by the NY State Police. I thus called the public information officer at the NYSP Troop L barracks and left a message. I have yet to hear back, and I’ll keep you posted.

A query … Being first a New Orleans enthusiast and now a NOLA resident, I’ve always wondered: Did Satchel Paige, as is indicated in numerous biographies, really pitch for the New Orleans Pelicans at the end of the 1926 season, his first as a pro? I’m fixin’ to find out tomorrow …

The schedule for the annual SABR Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference is out. Here’s a PDF of the presentations and other events:

program schedule

It looks like I’ll be making my presentation on Bill Binga and his rich family heritage at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, Aug. 16, bright and early. Lots of Diet Pepsi consumption expected beforehand. 🙂

The other presentations look pretty intriguing, too. I’m looking forward to seeing Todd Peterson in action after corresponding with him via e-mail so much, and it’ll good to see Brother James Brunson again — missed him last year. Melissa Booker’s talk about Booker T. Washington and baseball looks especially alluring, as does, of course, hearing from Satchel Paige’s son, Robert, and the Stearnes family. But Vic Harris, greatest Negro League manager ever? I dunno … George Skornickel has a mighty task of convincing me …

I also hope I can make it on Thursday in time to go to Hamtramck!

For a moment, let’s set aside the fact — and yes, it is a fact — that it’s ridiculous and insulting that the Baseball Hall of Fame has decreed that no more segregation-era African-American figures will be inducted into those “hallowed halls.” In essence, the grand Cooperstown institution has once again shut its doors to the Negro Leagues, even though they still remain woefully underrepresented in the Hall.

So aside the fact that a slew of induction-worthy African-American players will, apparently forever, continued to be denied their just due. What about the Negro Leagues managers, who are even more poorly represented in Cooperstown? Just look at this year’s induction roster: Three of  the half-dozen guys going in are managers.

I’m not saying that Bobby Cox, Tony LaRussa  and Joe Torre don’t deserve to go in. They do, at least certainly Torre and LaRussa (For all of his great Braves teams, Cox’s squads still only won a single World Series win, instead choking in the playoffs year after year.)

But what about the Negro League managers? What about, for example, Dave Malarcher, who some  believe is second only to his mentor, the great Rube Foster, in terms of segregation-era black skippers? That’s not to mention that “Gentleman Dave” was a true Renaissance man who more than lived up to his famous nickname.

Then there’s the case of one Winfield Scott Welch, who, like Malarcher, was a native of Louisiana. (Malarcher was from Whitehall, La., a couple stones’ throws north of NOLA, and, as I detailed in this article,  he was a graduate of New Orleans University, one of the precursors to modern-day  Dillard University.)

Welch, who hailed from tiney tiny Napoleonville, La., was so good as an on-field general that in September 1944, just about as Welch was guiding the Birmingham Black Barons to their second straight NAL title after they thoroughly dominated the league all year, the New York Amsterdam News tabbed him “baseball’s best pilot.” Welch, the story asserted, was what today would be called the ultimate “player’s coach.” Said the article:

“Many go so far as to say Welch is the greatest manager Negro baseball has ever produced, and they may not be far wrong. One look at the brilliant ball club he has fashioned, the way it hustles and plays heads-up ball at all times backs up an assertion of that kind. Sure, it’s a powerful club with every man a star, but more than that it’s a team that plays its head off for Welch. Every man on his squad idolizes him; they’d sooner lose an arm or leg than let him down.”

By the time Welch finally retired from the gametwo decades later, he had garnered a resume not only as a stalwart coach, but a true hardball kingpin who helped keep blackball together after the integration of the majors. He became a confidante of sports magnates like Bill Veeck and Abe Saperstein — oh, for whom, by the way, Welch also coached a little basketball operation called the Harlem Globetrotters.

He had become an owner of arguably the most storied club in African-American baseball history, the Chicago American Giants. And he earned a rep as possessing one of the finest eyes for talent, and as one of the keenest developers of said talent, in the horsehide world.

And, to cap it off, he became, as many top former Negro League figures — such as, of course, Buck O’Neil — did, a major league scout, scouring the South for diamonds in the rough for the Phillies. It was in this capacity that Welch  arrived in Atlanta in the summer of 1961, at which time the Atlanta Daily World interviewed him and captured this quote from the man whose nicknames included “Lucky” and “Gus”:

“There is very little money in the minor leagues, and when I sign a ballplayer, I want to have every confidence that he can go all the way. You can ruin a kid’s life by signing him if his qualifications are doubtful. I do not sign just to show officials I am working. I may go all season without coming up with the right man, but meanwhile I am looking at every prospect with a critical eye.”

That reflective, judicious and compassionate attitude toward the game was developed over almost a half-century of immersing himself in America’s pastime, and it all began in sparsely populated Assumption Parish, Louisiana, just about at  the turn of the century. Welch earned his stripes, and his own shot at the big time, by playing for and managing some of the best local and regional teams in  New Orleans — and other Pelican State cities like Alexandria and Shreveport — for 20 years. He also organized and operated a state-wide “baseball academy” that tutored kids in the sport and nurtured their love of baseball.

The result  of that culturing — aside from an incredibly deep knowledge of and acumen for the game — was a fierce loyalty to his home state and to the Crescent City that remained throughout his fascinating baseball career. He helped cultivate, train and shepherd dozens of New Orleanians into the blackball big time, many  of whom remained with the skipper throughout their careers.

Consider this, then, the introduction of a series of posts about Winfield Scott Welch, a native Louisianian who is among the ranks of pre-integration African-American baseball figures who should be in the New Orleans Professional Baseball Hall of Fame but aren’t.

The next installment on “Gus” will come early next week, when I examine his roots in Louisiana and New Orleans and the time he spent in his home state accruing his well rounded baseball talent.

Just wanted to post something really quick about what’s in the works. It might be a day or two before I can get this stuff completed and up, but hopefully I’ll get everything out by early next week.

Basically, I’ll have a couple more posts about Cannonball Dick Redding, one concerning the ongoing efforts to find out what happened to him in Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island in 1948, the other about the history of the Redding side of his family and the search for a surviving descendant or relative.

I’ll also hopefully have a series of articles about Winfield S. Welch, a native of tiny Napoleonville, La., who developed into the most respected manager of his era in Negro League baseball.

In addition, there might be a post or two sprinkled in about the so-called New Orleans Professional Baseball Hall of Fame, as well as another post about Gretna, La., native and one-time Homestead Gray J.B. Spencer.

All that and more on “The Price Is Right.” Wait, no, I mean my blog. Yep. My blog.

Representatives and volunteers from the Negro League Baseball Grave Marker Project and SABR gathered in Minneapolis Saturday to dedicate the new grave stone for William “Bill” Binga, a turn-of-the-century blackball great about whom a bunch of people have written, including (he said, not-so-humbly) myself here and here.

I unfortunately couldn’t be at the ceremony, but from what I hear, it was fantastic. Here’s some coverage in the Twin Cities media about it in the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

A couple thoughts … One is that it seems like the St. Paul paper’s article cribbed a few things from the article on Binga I did for Hour Detroit magazine. That’s kind of cool, I guess. People are reading my stuff, which is kind of gratifying and that I’m making a difference, that I’m helping to shine a light on these tragically ignored men and women.

Two, it looks like the various Twin Cities TV stations didn’t see fit to cover the ceremony at all. Take that as you will.

Finally, and certainly most importantly, congrats and thanks to Pete Gorton, Todd Peterson, Jeremy Krock and all the other volunteers who worked so hard to make it all happen. And much gratitude and respect to Dave Winfield, his foundation and the Padres for funding the bulk of the project on this. Winfield proved again his commitment to and love for the Negro Leagues and other pre-integration African-American baseball figures.

Props, as they say, to all.

New Orleans has such an untapped, complex and compelling history of African-American baseball that virtually on a weekly basis, I uncover something, or someone, new. Unfortunately — because this shows how ignored the NOLA blackball scene has been — I’m pretty much the expert on Crescent City black hardball, almost by default.

While I’m constantly and passionately trying to uncover this rich tradition, I’m also sad that so many Big Easy baseball players have been ignored. (For  reasons that will hopefully develop this week, I’ll write more extensively about this in general terms later this week.)

One of them is the man above, utility infielder Joseph B. Spencer Jr., a native of the city of Gretna, La., just over the river from  NOLA proper. It’s where I currently live, and  where another local black baseball legend, Wesley Barrow, is apparently buried in an unmarked grave.

Gretna also bumps against the Algiers section of New Orleans. (It’s weird … A part of New Orleans, Algiers, is actually separated from the rest of it by the river on what’s called the West Bank, where separate towns like Gretna, Harvey, Marrero and Westwego also sit. Not confused  yet? Well, the West Bank is actually more to the south and east sides of the river and from New Orleans. Like I said, it’s goofy. It took me like a year to get used to it. All those towns I mentioned, btw, had their own black amateur and sandlot hardball teams at one point or another.)

The Algiers neighborhood is where Herb Simpson, former Negro Leaguer and possibly the last living link to that bygone era, has lived his entire life. He’s somewhat of a local hero, having become the first Negro Leaguer inducted into the New Orleans Professional Baseball Hall of Fame and an oft-interviewed personality by various local media outlets. (More about Herb later this week, for the same reasons to which I alluded in the second paragraph.)

Herb played baseball with J.B. Spencer. Lots of baseball, actually, from the West Bank sandlots to the Birmingham Black Barons to the Seattle Steelheads to the traveling Harlem Globetrotters baseball aggregation. And they were roommates for much of their careers. When Spencer died in 2003 at the age of 83, his obituary in the New Orleans Times-Picayune stated that Spencer was the “devoted friend of Herbert Simpson.”

“I miss him,” Herb told me this weekend. “He and I were good friends.”

“He was a real nice person,” Herb added.

Joseph B. Spencer  Jr.  was born Aug. 4, 1919, to Joseph Spencer Sr. and Alexcener Spencer. He was raised at 716 Fried St., near the corner of 7th Street. Today, Fried Street is one of the byways that bounds J.B. Spencer Park, which, sadly, I didn’t even know existed until, well, just this moment when I looked up the address on Google Maps.

Joseph Spencer Sr. was a  longshoreman on the river docks who was quite active in the longshoremen’s union in town. In fact, in the 1940s he led an offshoot labor group in an unsuccessful attempt to form its own, new union, an effort that was ultimately shot down by the National Labor Relations Board.

The neighborhood in which Joe Jr. was raised was a mixed African-American and Italian one;  several Italian families led by first-generation immigrants from the southern European country resided on nearby blocks.  One of then was the DeLuca family, headed by Frank DeLuca, who owned a grocery store.

Joe Jr., or J.B., attended Gilbert Academy and developed his passion and skill at the national pastime. While his stated position was second base, he was often used throughout his career as a utility infielder who reportedly could play any position on the field except pitcher.

Spencer began, much like Herb Simpson did, on the sandlots of the West Bank and greater NOLA area, including the Algiers Giants semipro team, where he was joined on the roster by Herb Simpson. The pair developed a friendship that lasted their entire lives.

“He was a real nice person,” Herb told me this weekend.

J.B.’s hardball career took off when he entered his 20s, and by 1941 he was a regular with the Birmingham Black Barons, who were managed by Winfield Welch, another New Orleans native who became a near-legendary Negro Leagues skipper by guiding the Barons to multiple Negro American League titles in the early to mid-1940s and, at the same time, becoming a skilled developer of young talent like J.B. Spencer.

(I’ll talk more about Welch soon,  hopefully. I’ll also look at how there was definitely a funnel of talent from the Crescent City to the Black Barons, who served as the first big-time team for many a NOLA lad. In addition, from Birmingham sprang a pipeline of talent that ended up in Seattle with the Steelheads and then the Globetrotters, a migration that included both J.B. Spencer and Herb Simpson.)

Spencer stayed with the Black Barons for several years before jaunting up to Pittsburgh to join the famous Homestead Grays, who were studded with legendary Hall of Famers. When Spencer arrived at the Grays’ camp in April 1943, he was joined by yet another New Orleanian, pitcher John Wright, who would eventually anchor the Homestead mound staff and, most famously, become the second black player signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers after Jackie Robinson. (For more on Wright, see this article I did for Baseball America.)

It was with the Grays that Spencer evolved into a well regarded infielder in the Negro National League, although it was at times it seemed to be a struggle to earn the same kind of reputation as other infielders. Take, for  example, a June 1943 wire service article previewing the Grays’ upcoming clash with the New York Cubans:

“Granting that Spencer is the second base sensation of the year, he is not on equal terms with Cox, who guards the hot corner for the Cubans — and swings a mean bat.”

But such slights shouldn’t have bothered Spencer,  who helped form one of the greatest infields in Negro Leagues history with the Grays. When you’re manning the dirt with greats like Buck Leonard, Sam Bankhead and Jud Wilson, Spencer could have told the press to buzz  off.

Ironically enough, the 1943 Grays went on to win the Negro National League pennant and defeat Spencer’s  former team, the Negro American League champion Black Barons, in the Negro World Series that year.

The 1943 Homestead Grays

But Spencer, much like many top-flight Negro Leaguers of the day, jumped around from team to team, and so he stayed with the Grays for just a pair of seasons before hopping to the New York Cubans — the team who a year before had allegedly been of higher quality than what Spencer could offer.

However, his stay with the Cubans was fleeting, and later in 1945 he was shipped back to Birmingham, of all places, where he reunited with Welch and led the media to state that the “second base position seems to be in good hands with J.B. Spencer.”

In all, Spencer spent roughly 15 years as a player in the various levels of Negro Leagues, a career that included a lot of barnstorming miles and a shared hotel room  with teammate Herb Simpson. Spencer then reportedly played for a few minor-league teams in the early 1950s after the integration of organized baseball before retiring, according to a May 22, 2003, obituary in the Times-Picayune.

J.B. then joined the Gretna Recreation Department, where  he was employed for many years, a length of service that certainly contributed to the city naming a park after him.

Joseph B. Spencer Jr. died May 16, 2003, and was buried in McDonoghville Cemetery in his hometown.

The more I explore the issue of if and when Rhode Island native Lizzie Murphy played for a black barnstorming team for one game, the more it seems like both history and current researchers are mixing her up to some degree with Isabelle Baxter. The source of the confusion is two-fold.

One, they both took the field (or reportedly did, in Lizzie’s case) for a team with monikers involving the words Cleveland and Giants. As an earlier post of mine discussed, there are three possible teams Murphy could have played for — the Cleveland Giants, a team based in that Ohio city that jumped from the semipro lots to the Negro National League in 1933 for a few months; the Cleveland Colored Giants, a squad also based in Ohio but run by Charlie Tilley, a New Hampshire athletic here in the first few decades of the 20th century; or another barnstorming team called the Cleveland Colored Giants, this one based in Rhode Island.

Two, popular belief seems to be that Lizzie Murphy played for a touring African-American team when it sauntered through her home state in 1933, the same year Isabelle Baxter reportedly played for the sandlot , soon-to-be-NNL Cleveland Giants.

But a few things help to bring clarity to this conundrum (I love that word, btw, not sure why). One is that fact that Isabelle Baxter was black, while Lizzie Murphy  was, umm, white. Plus Isabelle was from Cincinnati, Ohio, while Lizzie was from Warren, R.I. That much we do know (photos of the two women help clarify the situation, as you can imagine).

Something else confirms, apparently undeniably, that Isabelle Baxter was, in fact, the one who played a single game for the Cleveland Giants in 1933, before they went to the NNL (where, of course, they performed abysmally and folded after the season). The source? A June 17, 1933, article in the Cleveland Call and Post, under the headline, “Girl Ball Player Aids Cleveland 9.” To quote forthwith:

“Isabelle Baxter, clever little girl second baseman, playing this season with the famous Cleveland Giants, featured in the opening game of the season at Hooper field at Cleveland when the Giants easily trounced the Canton Clowns, 14 to 8. Miss Baxter took five fielding changes,  her only bobble coming when, after a spectacular stop back of first base, she pulled Tom Ponder off the bag with a wide throw. At the bat she hit safely once and drove two hard-hit balls to the outfield.”

So that’s that. (Gary Ashwill did a brief post about Baxter a little while ago. In fact, the article reproduced above came from his WEb site. I still haven’t figured out how to convert PDFs to JPEGs.) The article never mentions the NNL, so it’s probably safe to assume that this came before the G-men hopped up to the big-time. The piece also doesn’t indicate whether Baxter would keep playing for the team, but the line “playing this season” seems to indicate that she would be on the roster a while. Prevailing knowledge is that she competed with the Giants just once before being summarily dropped when the aggregation went NNL. That belief is augmented by the fact that there’s no more mention of her playing for the team after that point.

Isabelle was born in Cincy around 1915, per the 1930 Census, to William and (I think) Florenza (or Florenda, the record is a bit hard to make out) Baxter. The Baxters had a fairly large brood — the 1930 count has three daughters and two sons, with Isabelle being the second-oldest of the bunch. William made his living laboring in street construction.

That would have made her just a tender 18 years old when she suited up for the Giants. But that wasn’t the only time she competed with men, at least according to a photo and long caption in the Sept. 30, 1950, Call and Post. The package is called “Baseball Queen” and features a long, vertical picture of Baxter standing with her hands on her hips. Here’s the first paragraph of the subsequent caption:

“Miss Isabelle Baxter, manager of the Harlem Queens of Chicago and four of her teammates, Evelyn Clark, Laura Hill, Paulene Saunders and Bernice Graham, have returned to Cincinnati after a tour of the western states and Canada, with a record of 69 games won and 25 lost.”

(Baxter apparently took a page from Abe Saperstein’s book by tacking on the “Harlem” name to a team from Chicago, just like Saperstein did with the Globetrotters. Phonies. The Rens are the true African-American hoop pioneers from Harlem.)

The caption discusses Isabelle’s softball exploits. It then adds this: “She also played second base on a hard ball men’s team, the Superior Athletic Club of Springfield, Ohio.”

But there’s another fascinating aspect to Baxter’s athletic career: bowling.

It’s OK if you just read that word and want to bail now. Bowling doesn’t have a reputation as being all that enthralling for non-participants and lovers of the sport. Snarky pundits will claim that the words “sport,” “athlete” and “bowling” shouldn’t be used in the same sentence.

But like it or not, bowling is one of the biggest participatory sports in the world, and once you do get on the lanes, you find that it’s actually really fun, challenging and far from easy.

And, in the case of black history, it’s also significant and overlooked, partly because just like so many other American sports organizations, bowling was rigidly segregated into the mid-20th century. For decades, the American Bowling Congress and the Women’s International Bowling Congress official barred all people of color until 1950 in both cases.

That injustice gave rise to, in 1939 in Detroit, the National Bowling Association, a predominantly but certainly not exclusively African-American group that still exists and that has, for three-quarters of a century, fostered inclusion and participation of all races in bowling. The group today focuses much of its efforts on getting youth involved in the sport, according to TNBA’s Web site. The group asserts that bowling can help break down social, racial and economic barriers as well.

But before the ABC and WIBC dropped their segregation clauses, TNBA set up its own network of local, regional and national clubs and tournaments, parallel to those of the white organizations. In that way, TNBA served much of the same function at Negro Leagues baseball.

And, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, one of the most active and successful TNBA members was …  Isabelle Baxter. She apparently kicked butt, in fact. In 1947, for example, when TNBA held its sixth annual national tournament (in Cleveland, which appears to have been somewhat of a focal point for the organization), Isabelle cruised to polyurethane glory.  Said the April 26, 1947, Call and Post:

“However, the weekend sensation was Isabelle Baxter of Cincinnati. The Queen City lass, rolling nine games in the five-man team, doubles and singles, compiled an amazing 1,732 total [pin count] for first place in the women’s All-Events.”

That total easily outdistanced second-place Gladys Chestnutt of Indianapolis (who seems to have been Baxter’s foil and main rival). Isabelle also teamed with Maxine Webb to claim the women’s doubles crown. The triumph over Chestnutt was probably a sweet one for Baxter — less than three months earlier, the Indy native trumped Isabelle at the second annual National Bowling Classic for Women in Indiana.

Baxter was a kegler force to be reckoned with for a while, too; at the 1952 National YMCA Bowling Tournament, she  and  Webb, her doubles partner, were dubbed “star bowlers.”

Isabelle Baxter: Multi-sport star. But I want to know this: Could she pick up the deadly 7-10 split? It’s impossible, I tells ya!

Anyhoo, it seems like African-American bowling history is an untapped, largely unexplored topic. Someone should look into that.