Terror in the City of Champions (8 page)

Mayor Markland and the Black Legion lost the election on April 5, 1934, to Joseph “Honest Joe” Hackett, whom Kingsley had endorsed. In the days after, Arlington Jones, a city employee, came to Kingsley with a bizarre story. He told him how he had been tricked into joining a secret society, enticed to a meeting by word that a black family was moving onto a nearby street. He said he had been forced to take an oath at gunpoint. He now feared he would be killed. After his initiation Jones had told an acquaintance that he didn’t like the group and wanted no part of it. Mayor Markland and others had heard and confronted him. They had warned that he would face serious trouble if he didn’t keep his mouth shut. Jones told Kingsley all of this and recalled parts of the Black Oath, the threats of floggings and murder, and the evil things happening within the group.

Kingsley found the story unbelievable but shared it with the new mayor. He thought it inconceivable that anyone in their city would resort to murder over politics. Still, he told Jones to report it to the office of county prosecutor Duncan McCrea. He did. But no one there was interested. Jones went to the Detroit bureau of the Federal Department of Justice. Agents viewed his story as a bag of mumbo jumbo. No one believed “Little Arly” Jones. They wondered if he had been hallucinating. Agents directed Jones to file a complaint with the Highland Park Police. Weeks earlier, Jones had spotted Highland Park cops at a Black Legion gathering in the basement of a church, two blocks behind Mickey Cochrane’s apartment. The cops belonged to the secret society. He knew better than to complain to them. So he let it go.

Not long after his defeat, former mayor Markland found work as an investigator—for Prosecutor Duncan McCrea.

It Hurt for Days

Early spring’s optimism wilted after the Tigers fell into fifth place. Mickey Cochrane juggled his lineup throughout April and May, trying to find a combination that could win consistently. Every few days he gave someone new a whirl in the leadoff spot: first Billy Rogell, then Jo-Jo White, then Pete Fox, then back to White, then Frank Doljack, then Fox again. When Cochrane made out a lineup, the only players assured to be hitting in the same positions were the last two, Marv Owen and whoever was pitching. For a long while Cochrane batted himself third, the spot frequently reserved for the team’s best hitter. But he struggled, hitting sixty, seventy, and eighty points below average. Midway through the fifteenth game, he pulled himself out of the lineup. He stayed out only for a day and a half. Cochrane’s frustrations mounted. Aside from Charlie Gehringer, none of the stars started strongly. Greenberg managed one home run in the first twenty-seven games. Goslin scuffed out a hit every four at bats or so. The pitchers faltered too. Even psychologically.

Schoolboy Rowe faced booing from Tigers fans in his third appearance. The greeting staggered him as he charged toward the mound in the ninth inning of a relief assignment. He said he felt like running straight to the train depot and jumping a car to Arkansas. “Boy, I’m just telling you, it was terrible,” he said. “I could feel those cold chills playing leapfrog up and down my spine. I like to died.” Fox, one of his friends, said Rowe had been longing for Edna, his sweetheart back home. They had been together for eight years. She was his first love and he hers. In school they used to write love notes behind their textbooks. Rowe hinted that they might marry. “I’m going to surprise all of you guys,” he said. Two weeks later, with Rowe still floundering, Cochrane debated whether to demote him to the minor leagues.

Mental mistakes plagued the team. Forgetting there were two outs, rookie pitcher Steve Larkin fielded a grounder and pivoted to throw to third base. When he realized he had no chance to get the runner, he turned in a rush and flung the ball wildly beyond Greenberg at first. A run scored. Base runner Heinie Schuble also lost count of the outs, thinking there were two when Fox hit an easy pop to second. Schuble, running full throttle toward home, got doubled off third base.

And then there was Gee Walker. No one could set off Cochrane like Walker. On May 21 he got picked off second base—the third time he had been caught in a month. Another ten dollar fine followed. The Tigers had decided that the penalty money would go to the clubhouse teen at the end of the season. “Unless the [Tigers] change their ways,” noted a reporter, “the lad will probably step right out and buy the ball park from Mr. Navin as soon as he receives his dough.”

Cochrane couldn’t catch a break. The streak of aggravation even touched his personal life in a minor way when his son’s bike was stolen. Hoping the thief would return it, police portrayed the disappearance as possibly a mistake, noting that nine-year-old Gordon might have lost his ride. But he hadn’t. The twenty-eight-inch, red-and-white, chrome-wheeled bike with electric lights on the front and rear had been pilfered as more of the Cochranes’ belongings were transferred from Philadelphia to their apartment near Palmer Park. It was the kind of bike that not every family could afford, especially during the Depression.

Cochrane was gloomy, tense, and often angry. Connie Mack, his beloved old boss, noticed it when his Philadelphia Athletics came to town on Wednesday, May 23. Mack was seventy-one, a year older than Henry Ford, whom he had met during spring training. Mack stood out on the ball field in part because of his age—nearly two decades older than anyone else in the dugout—but also because of his clothes. Mack wore a business suit on the field. His public persona was that of a wise old grandfather. After his team blistered the Tigers 11–5, Mack headed over to the Detroit Yacht Club, where he was being honored. Cochrane was sitting in the high-ceilinged, chandeliered lounge looking glum.

“What’s the matter, Mickey,” said Mack. “Don’t you feel well today?”

“I’d feel better if we’d won that game this afternoon,” Cochrane replied.

Mack had long ago learned to move on after a loss.

University of Michigan football coach Harry Kipke, Athletics slugger Jimmie Foxx, and Red Wings coach Jack Adams were sitting with Cochrane. All had come to hear Mack speak. Kipke told Cochrane he had a “hunted look” in his eyes.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Are the wolves out already?”

Cochrane didn’t laugh. He admitted that he had been getting nasty letters. “Some of them are tough, and it’s tough on the boys,” he said. “Hell knows they’re trying.”

Adams tried to cheer him. “Bet you five bucks that for every letter you get calling you a tramp, you get a dozen telling you you’re okay,” he said.

It didn’t work. Cochrane began listing his team’s failures. Before he got far, Kipke cut him off. “It’s a mystery to me why a manager like you with a team in third place in a tough league should worry. . . . Here’s what I’m worrying about: Where will I crawl next fall after Michigan takes a beating from Ohio State, Illinois, and Minnesota? Now, there’s something to worry about.” (He was right to be worried; the Wolverines would lose all of those games and more, scoring only twenty-one points all season.)

At the banquet in front of a thousand club members, Mack talked of Cochrane without mentioning the encounter in the lobby. Mack recalled how he had motivated his team during a slump years ago. Cochrane was the hardest-working player on the Athletics and all of his teammates knew it. Mack contrived to rally the others by scolding Cochrane publicly for the team’s flop. He figured the lecture would force Cochrane’s teammates to reflect on their own lackluster contributions. In that long-ago outburst, he placed the blame squarely on Cochrane.

“I want to apologize for saying that to Mickey,” he told the crowd on Belle Isle. Mack noted, however, that that the ploy had worked and the team had rebounded. More seriously, he added, “I let Mickey come to Detroit because I didn’t want to stand between him and a career as a manager. That was the real reason why I allowed him to leave. I believe he is going to be one of the really great managers of the game. Like all new managers, he is trying too hard at present. He is taking baseball too seriously. Fifty years as a manager of a baseball team has taught me a lesson that Mickey has yet to learn.”

Boxing teams from twenty states converged on St. Louis for the national Amateur Athletic Union championships. Of the hundreds competing one boxer was drawing the most attention by far. Word had been spreading about the promising fighter from Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood. In a short time he had risen from the city’s Golden Gloves competition to the top tier of American amateurs. No one wanted to miss this emerging phenom, this “baby-face Negro,” as some writers were calling him. As Joe Louis, a light-heavyweight, slipped into the ring for his title match, aficionados of the sport rushed to their seats.

Joe Louis Barrow came to Detroit at age thirteen in 1926 after his mother and stepfather, Lillie and Pat Brooks, had moved north from Alabama with their oldest sons. A close call with the Klan had prompted Brooks to head to Michigan to seek a better life for his family. “The Ku Klux Klan stopped them and was going to pull them from the car,” recalled Louis’s sister Vunies. “Someone in the crowd recognized my stepfather. He said, ‘That’s Pat Brooks. He’s a good nigger.’ . . . My stepfather . . . made up his mind that night he was leaving Alabama.” After Brooks had settled into a job, he and his wife sent for their children, who were staying with family. In Detroit Joe floundered in school but got work. He shoveled snow. He sold ice in the summer and coal in the winter from a horse cart. Later he operated a lathe. When he discovered boxing at the Brewster Center—famously redirecting the money his mother had given him for violin lessons—he began to see his future take shape. As Louis plowed through opponents, others took notice.

“When he hit you, it hurt for days,” said Eddie Futch, who had sparred with him.

In Missouri the AAU match did not last long. Louis dropped his opponent, Arlo Soldati of Princeton, Illinois, three times in two rounds. His final punch, a right to the head, put Soldati on the mat, unconscious, for five minutes. Nat Fleischer, covering the bout for
Ring
magazine, called Louis “the most promising heavyweight prospect” he had seen since Max Schmeling in 1926. James Zerilli, writing for Louis’s hometown fans, said Louis had honored himself as “the classiest and most finished boxer” at the tournament. The black press lavished attention on Louis as a posse of trainers, managers, and racketeers pushed to get a piece of his lucrative future. They wanted to take Louis into the professional ranks. He wasn’t yet twenty.

The Tigers exploded at the end of May. They swept the Boston Red Sox at Navin Field, split a four-game series in St. Louis against the Browns, and then won eight of ten games against Cleveland and Chicago, scoring more than ten runs in five of those contests. In a cycle of three games, they accumulated forty-three runs—twenty in one thrashing of the Indians. By the end of the second week of June, Detroit sat in first place, ahead of New York.

But the Yankees were also playing well. Thirty-nine-year-old Babe Ruth was winding down his tenure in pinstripes. He would last one more season in the majors. After the previous campaign New York had tried to unload Ruth, offering him as a playing manager and a gate draw. Frank Navin had considered him for a while, but the deal grew complicated with demands and delays, and ultimately Navin favored Cochrane. Ruth could still hit on occasion. In a two-game series against the Tigers, he popped three home runs. But he was becoming a liability overall. Sports editor Harry Salsinger, who had witnessed Ruth’s entire career, offered a blunt assessment. He described Ruth as a “distinct handicap” in the field and on the bases. “The Babe is fatter than before and slower, and Joseph McCarthy, the manager of the Yankees, dislikes to think of what will happen after the middle of June when the scorching sun dries the base paths and hardens them and steams the vim and vigor out of the ball players.”