Terror in the City of Champions
Read Terror in the City of Champions Online
Authors: Tom Stanton
T
ERROR IN THE
C
ITY OF
C
HAMPIONS
A
LSO BY
T
OM
S
TANTON
The Final Season
The Road to Cooperstown
Hank Aaron and the Home Run That Changed America
Ty and The Babe
T
ERROR IN THE
C
ITY OF
C
HAMPIONS
Murder, Baseball, and the Secret Society That Shocked Depression-Era Detroit
T
OM
S
TANTON
An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield
Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK
Copyright © 2016 Tom Stanton
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stanton, Tom, 1960– author.
Title: Terror in the city of champions : murder, baseball, and the secret society that shocked Depression-era Detroit / Tom Stanton.
Description: Guilford, Connecticut : Lyons Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015043482 (print) | LCCN 2016005240 (ebook) | ISBN 9781493015702 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781493018185 (ebook) | ISBN 9781493018185 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Murder—Michigan—Detroit—History—20th century. | Black Legion. | Professional sports—Michigan—Detroit—History—20th century. | Baseball—Michigan—Detroit—History—20th century. | Detroit (Mich.)—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC HV6534.D6 S73 2016 (print) | LCC HV6534.D6 (ebook) | DDC 364.152/30977434—dc23
LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043482
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
For my sister Janis Stanton-Peterson, who gave me my first typewriter and so much more
C
ONTENTS
The Superstitious Schoolboy and His Gal
Dayton Dean and the Negro Reporter
This is the Detroit of the Detroiters: first, of course, the automobile capital of the world . . . then, the city of champions—Joe Louis, the Tigers, the Redwings . . . the parish of the priest with the largest congregation ever . . . the financial center that produced the most prodigious banking crash of the Depression . . . the city that calls itself Detroit the Dynamic.
—
A
UTHOR
J
AMES
S
TEVENS IN
T
HE
A
MERICAN
M
ERCURY
,
N
OVEMBER 1935
The Black Legion probably is the craziest and most dangerous mob ever formed in the United States. Police are not fighting gangsters. We are fighting a low type of mentality, men easily incited by mob psychology, who have taken a silly pledge and gone through a crazy ritual apparently created by a fanatic who seeks power.
—
D
ETROIT
P
OLICE
I
NSPECTOR
J
OHN
A
.
H
OFFMAN,
M
AY 1936
P
ROLOGUE
When I was a boy in the early 1970s, my aunts and uncles came to our house every December for the annual family holiday celebration. Amid clouds of cigarette smoke, the basement aglow with Christmas lights, they reminisced about their early years in Detroit. I heard of a magical time when even personal tragedies—the deaths of two infant sisters, the funeral of a grandfather, the slow demise of pal Beezie—were rendered soft and sweet. Most of their stories related to family: Aunt Bernice singing with a Big Band, Uncle Herbie leading a pack of neighborhood toughs, Uncle Teddy taking a church parishioner’s car for a joy ride.
My father and his brothers had been athletes, playing on sandlots, outdoor rinks, and cemetery football fields. They captivated me with their tales of the triumphant teams and heroes of their younger days. In the 1970s only one team I followed came close to winning anything. But my dad and uncles evoked an enchanted era of nonstop triumphs. Mickey Cochrane, Charlie Gehringer, Hank Greenberg, Schoolboy Rowe, Joe Louis, Dutch Clark, Normie Smith—the names danced from their youthful hearts. Within a six-month period in 1935 and 1936, the Tigers, Red Wings, and Lions all captured titles as Detroit’s own Joe Louis reigned as boxing’s uncrowned champion. Detroit remains the only city to score the trifecta of a World Series, a Stanley Cup, and an NFL championship in one season. The fact that it happened during the Depression—when my grandfather was unemployed, the family risked losing its home, and the children subsisted on watery soups and bacon-grease sandwiches—only added to its mystical significance. That it took place in a Detroit that was no longer recognizable made it all the more enticing. Through the eyes of a boy, it seemed a glorious time to be alive, a
Little Rascals
episode of endless escapades.