Terror in the City of Champions (24 page)

Detroit had hosted Negro league teams over the years and Louis would soon be asked to financially back another one. (His manager would deter him.) The major leagues remained all white. The color barrier wouldn’t come down for another dozen years. But that didn’t keep Louis from rooting for the Tigers. He listened to games on the radio, saw them in person when time allowed, and read about his team every morning at breakfast. He even defied his managers by playing scrimmage games between boxing matches. In the summer he would launch a barnstorming softball team, the Brown Bombers, as a way of helping his unemployed friends. Louis was the gate attraction and played first when his schedule permitted.

On Tuesday, before flying to Chicago to announce his next opponent, King Levinsky, Louis relented to demands for a quick meet-and-greet with politicians. As he walked through city hall, black admirers fell in line with him. They paraded with Louis through the corridors toward the mayor’s office, the entourage growing into a crowd as he went. “All I can say is I’m glad to be home,” Louis offered. The visit was brief, but he shook hands with Mayor Couzens and the wide-bottomed police commissioner, Col. Pickert.

A few weeks later Pickert showed up in the Tigers dugout.

“Hi there, fellows,” he said. The players did not recognize him and assumed Pickert to be a cop assigned to guard them. They should have known by his glistening buttons and shoes and his polished gun belt that he was no ordinary flatfoot. As it would turn out, he didn’t recognize them either.

Greenberg came into the dugout.

“Hello, Schoolboy,” Pickert said. “How are you feeling today?”

As the tallest Tigers, Greenberg and Rowe often got mistaken by casual fans. Frequently, they didn’t bother to correct the error.

“Sign this, will you, Rowe?” asked the commissioner. He held out an autograph book. Greenberg obliged and mimicked Rowe’s signature. If precise, he would have put “Schoolboy” between quote marks, as Lynwood always did.

With the third-ever All-Star Game approaching, speculation turned to which players would make the team. In the first two years fans had voted for their favorites, with managers disregarding many of their selections. This year fans had no say. In the American League the eight managers cast ballots. They favored several veterans—Lou Gehrig, Al Simmons, Joe Cronin—whose performances so far were lacking. The managers omitted Hank Greenberg, the league leader in home runs and runs batted in. Greenberg did not receive any first-place votes, not even one from his boss, Cochrane, who said he didn’t want to be accused of favoring too many of his own players. (Cochrane, Rowe, Gehringer, and Tommy Bridges had all been selected from Detroit.)

Responding to the snub, Greenberg chose his words delicately at first: “I guess they take experience into consideration when picking the team, and Gehrig has more than I.” Typical of his personality, Greenberg was soon engaging in a lawyerly conversation with reporters and teammates. He liked to debate and to argue and, of course, to be right. (Who didn’t?) He asked questions until the person answering arrived at the same conclusion.

“How many runs batted in have I got?”

“How many does Gehrig have?”

The All-Star choices were announced two weeks before the contest. In the thirteen games that followed, Greenberg drove in twenty-one runs and hit five homers, a performance that underlined his omission. Fans castigated the managers for excluding Greenberg. The condemnations were so loud that league president William Harridge had to respond. Harridge said he also would like to see Greenberg (and a few other players) on the team. “But there are limitations which must be considered,” he noted.

The dispute irritated writer Harry Salsinger, who sounded more like a frustrated parent than “The Umpire” of his column heading. “The only solution is to cancel the game and end the bickering and quarreling,” he wrote.

Greenberg and several pals, including his gentile blond love interest, Helen Young, drove with him to Cleveland to watch the game. A front-page headline soured the trip for Greenberg. H
ANK
M
ARRIED?
T
IGER AND
B
LOND
D
ON
S
AGE
G
RINS
, it read. The rumor was false. They hadn’t—and wouldn’t—wed. The report angered Greenberg. “You can light your cigar on the adjectives he used,” said one witness to Greenberg’s reading the article. The American League won the game without him, which in the eyes of the managers justified their selections.

In mid-August Will Rogers was flying in Alaska with friend and fellow Oklahoman Wiley Post, a one-eyed pilot and globe-trotting adventurer. They were heading to Siberia. Rogers filed news reports along the way, composing them on his typewriter aboard Post’s red monoplane.

“Was you ever driving around in a car and not knowing or caring where you went?” he wrote on August 12 in his homespun voice. “Well, that’s what Wiley and I are doing.” A day later he described Alaska as a wonderful country. “If they can just keep from being taken over by the U.S., they got a great future,” he offered. The next day he reported seeing Mount McKinley, “the most beautiful sight I ever saw.” In one dispatch he told of Eskimos who “were thicker than rich men at a ‘Save the Constitution’ convention.” In another he said Alaska’s governor was a fine chap—“a Democrat, but a gentleman.”

On August 15, battling low visibility and bad weather, Post spotted a small lagoon through a break in the clouds and landed his pontoon-equipped plane near a camp of Eskimos. He asked directions to the town of Barrow and learned it was just ten minutes away. After a short break Post and Rogers took off. The plane climbed and banked sharply toward Barrow when the engine suddenly sputtered and then exploded. The Eskimos watched as the flight crashed into the lagoon, killing both men instantly.

When news reached the states, radio airwaves filled with urgent bulletins of the tragedy. Presses thundered out special editions. On the streets newsboys parroted the front-page banner headlines of Will Rogers’s death. “He loved and was loved by the American people,” said President Franklin Roosevelt.

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, preparing for his appearance at the Detroit Police Field Day, learned of his friend’s death. They had known each other for thirty-five years, back to their early days in vaudeville when Rogers did rope tricks and Robinson danced with a partner. They had recently finished filming
In Old Kentucky
, which would be Rogers’s last movie release. Robinson said Rogers had told him of his adventure plans. “We all tried to get him not to go, but he loved to travel,” he said.

Robinson showed up at the office of the
Detroit Free Press
accompanied by Olympic gold medalist Eddie Tolan, one of several black athletes he mentored. Another was Joe Louis. “There isn’t a man in the world who can lick little Joe,” Robinson, fifty-seven, had noted days earlier. The press quizzed every black celebrity who came to town about Louis—and every famous baseball fan about the Tigers. Robinson qualified as both. He reaffirmed his support for the Yankees. “But if the Yankees can’t win,” he said, “I’d sure like to see Mr. Cochrane win again.”

Cochrane and the Tigers had gotten to know Will Rogers during the 1934 World Series. Like almost everyone else, they liked him. Cochrane considered Rogers a friend. “It seems that a member of our club has been killed,” he said. At home plate before the game, rather than discuss ground rules, the umpire and coaches all lamented the loss of Rogers. In the locker room it was no different. Rogers had pledged to return for the 1935 World Series. “I guess when your number comes up, there ain’t anything you can do about it,” said Flea Clifton.

Experience did not keep Mickey Cochrane from worrying. He stayed up late worrying. His usual diversions of books and music—he liked to check out bands at clubs and prided himself on being able to identify groups by their sound—no longer relaxed him. He awoke in the middle of the night worrying. He worried about actual problems and potential ones. By mid-August he had lots to worry him. Legitimate concerns.

The troubles started on a Sunday when Tony Piet of the White Sox slid into Charlie Gehringer and injured Gehringer’s right knee. The Tigers had Monday off. But Gehringer, who had not missed a game in three years, could not play on Tuesday or Wednesday. Cochrane used his hobbled star as a pinch hitter on Thursday and Friday. Meanwhile his substitute, Flea Clifton, plunged into a 0–13 hitless spell. Cochrane and Greenberg weren’t connecting either. Cochrane’s average fell twenty points. Around the same time Greenberg went nine days without a home run. And pitcher Tommy Bridges took a line drive to his leg.

In the locker room before his team would lose to Washington, Cochrane worried that the whole season might fall apart: “These things like injuries come in bunches, and I almost get the jitters when I get to wondering where they will strike next. For two years we’ve been going along great. Maybe it was luck or something, I don’t know. But it looks as though they’re catching up with us now.”

The Tigers remained in first. Cochrane simply feared it could all slip away. He also worried that his players were growing complacent. When they let an 8–4 lead turn into a loss, Cochrane had seen enough. Prior to the next day’s game he calmly cleared the clubhouse of everyone but the team. Behind closed doors he thundered and fumed and called out numerous men, telling them they were wasting games. The fire in his voice made the paint “curl up and crackle,” one scribe reported after talking covertly with his ball-playing sources. When he was done, most players looked beaten and refused to talk. Not General Crowder, the oldest Tiger at thirty-six. “I just love to hear Mike cuss,” he said. “Brother, we just heard something classical. It will do us a lot of good. See if it don’t.”

Unwanted Attention

A yellow, brown, and gray-blue haze—the colors of an old bruise—tinted the sky over Ecorse, Michigan, on some days, staining the air with a sulfuric, metallic, petroleum stench. It could be like that in River Rouge, Lincoln Park, and other downriver communities too. The dirty factories bordering the rivers and rail lines tinged the entire region. Their massive iron, steel, and concrete structures, discolored by residue from smokestacks, swallowed wide swaths of terrain, creating a grim, forbidding landscape.

With just 13,000 residents and less than three square miles of land, Ecorse looked trivial on a map, especially when compared to Detroit, the behemoth a few miles upriver. But Ecorse’s significance dwarfed its size. It was home to Great Lakes Steel, an employer of 8,000 men. Those who worked for years by the flames, corralling the red-hot rolls of steel with tongs, wore their work on their faces, especially the cheek nearest to the heat. “You’d see men walking down the street, one side of their face would be sweating, and the other side not,” said a resident. “All the pores had been baked closed on the one side of their face. That side would be red and the other side would be white. . . . You knew where he worked.”

Because of Great Lakes Steel, the village carried weight in the coarse, turbulent world of 1930s industrial politics. Crime and corruption had long been part of Ecorse’s composition. During Prohibition its proximity to Canada across the river made it a favorite outpost for rum-running gangs. The islands arrayed off its shore offered cover for bootleggers. Now with Prohibition over, gambling flourished more than ever. Federal agents had recently seized 20,000 counterfeit five-dollar bills at a garage being used for gaming. Prostitution remained wide open as well. But something else was going on. Newspaper editor William Mellus detected “an undercurrent” but couldn’t identify it. In Ecorse and the other downriver communities he covered he heard rumors of a secret organization and spotted gatherings of men that left him uneasy.