[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 21 (Thursday, February 2, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E263]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


     A SALUTE TO THE AMERICAN NEGRO LEAGUE: JAMES ``COOL PAPA'' BELL

                                 ______


                        HON. WILLIAM (BILL) CLAY

                              of missouri

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, February 2, 1995
  Mr. CLAY. Mr. Speaker, this is Black History Month. Many black 
Americans who lived in the First Congressional District of Missouri, 
which I now represent, contributed significantly to the development of 
this great Nation. To name a few, Scott Joplin, Josephine Baker, W.C. 
Handy, and one in particular, James ``Cool Papa'' Bell.
  Cool Papa, as he was affectionately called, will long be remembered 
in baseball as one who set early records by which future players were 
measured. He was such a fast runner that his friends often described 
his speed with comments like ``He stole two bases at one time.'' 
However, his talent was not limited to running. Cool Papa was an all-
around player.
  Sports Illustrated recognized the outstanding talents and 
contributions of James ``Cool Papa'' Bell in a June 20, 1994, article 
entitled ``No Place in the Shade.'' I would like to share that 
informative and entertaining tribute with my colleagues during our 
observance of great black Americans.
                [From Sports Illustrated, June 20, 1994]

                         No Place in the Shade

                             (By Mark Kram)

       In the language of jazz, the word gig is an evening of 
     work; sometimes sweet, sometimes sour, take the gig as it 
     comes, for who knows when the next will be. It means bread 
     and butter first, but a whole lot of things have always 
     seemed to ride with the word: drifting blue light, the 
     bouquet from leftover drinks, spells of odd dialogue and most 
     of all a sense of pain and limbo. For more than anything the 
     word means black, down-and-out black, leavin'-home black, 
     gonna-find-me-a-place-in-the-shade black.
       Big shade fell coolly only on a few. It never got to James 
     Thomas Bell, or Cool Papa Bell as he was known in Negro 
     baseball, that lost caravan that followed the sun. Other 
     blacks, some of them musicians who worked jazz up from the 
     South, would feel the touch of fame, or once in a while have 
     the thought that their names meant something to people 
     outside their own. But if you were black and played baseball, 
     well, look for your name only in the lineup before each game, 
     or else you might not even see it there if you kept on 
     dreamin'.
       Black baseball was a stone-hard gig. It was three games a 
     day, sometimes in three different towns miles apart. It was 
     the heat and fumes and bounces from buses that moved your 
     stomach up to your throat and it was greasy meals at fly-
     papered diners at three a.m. and uniforms that were seldom 
     off your back. ``We slept with 'em on sometimes,'' says Papa, 
     ``but there never was enough sleep. We got so we could sleep 
     standin' up.''
       Only a half-mad seer--not any of the blacks who worked the 
     open prairies and hidden ball yards in each big city--could 
     have envisioned what would happen one day. The players knew a 
     black man would cross the color line that was first drawn by 
     the sudden hate of Cap Anson back in 1883, yet no one was 
     fool enough to think that some bright, scented day way off 
     among the gods of Cooperstown they would hear their past 
     blared out across the field and would know that who they were 
     and what they did would never be invisible again.
       When that time comes for Papa Bell--quite possibly the next 
     Hall of Fame vote [he was, in fact, inducted into the Hall in 
     1974]--few will comprehend what he did during all those gone 
     summers. The mass audience will not be able to relate to him, 
     to assemble an image of him, to measure him against his peers 
     as they do the white player. The old ones like Papa have no 
     past. They were minstrels, separated from record books, left 
     as the flower in Thomas Gray's Elegy to ``waste its sweetness 
     on the desert air.'' Comparisons will have to do: Josh 
     Gibson, the Babe Ruth of the blacks; Buck Leonard, the Lou 
     Gehrig of his game; and Cool Papa Bell--who was he?
       A comparison will be hard to find for Papa. His friend 
     Tweed, whom Papa calls the Black Historian, a title most 
     agreeable to Tweed, says that you have to go all the way back 
     to Willie Keeler for Papa's likeness. Papa's way was 
     cerebral, improvisational; he was a master of the little 
     things, the nuances that are 
     [[Page E262]] the ambrosia of baseball for those who care to 
     understand the game. Power is stark, power shocks, it is the 
     stuff of immortality, but Papa's jewellike skills were the 
     object of shop talk for 28 winters.
       Arthritic and weary, Papa quit the circuit 23 years ago, at 
     age 47, ending a career that began in 1922. During that time 
     he had been the essence of black baseball, which had a 
     panache all its own. It was an intimate game: the extra base, 
     the drag bunt; a game of daring instinct, rather than one 
     from the hidebound book. Some might say that it lacked 
     discipline, but if so, it can also be said that never has 
     baseball been played more artfully, or more joyously. 
     ``Before a game,'' says Papa, ``one of our big old pitchers, 
     he'd say, `Just get me a coupla runs, that's all.' You see we 
     played tricky ball, thinkin' all the time: We get a run, they 
     got to get two to beat ya. Right?''
       The yellow pages of Tweed's scrapbooks don't tell much 
     about the way it was, and they don't reveal much about Papa, 
     either; box scores never explain. They can't chart the speed 
     of Papa Bell. ``Papa Bell,'' says Satchel Paige, ``why he was 
     so fast he could turn out the light and jump in bed before 
     the room got dark!'' Others also embellish: He could hit a 
     hard ground ball through the box and get hit with the ball as 
     he slid into second; he was so fast that he once stole two 
     bases on the same pitch. ``People can sure talk it, can't 
     they?'' says Papa.
       Papa says he did steal two bases on one pitch, which was a 
     pitchout. ``The catcher was so surprised the way I was 
     runnin' that he just held the ball,'' says Papa. ``I asked 
     him later what he doin' holdin' that ball, and he said he 
     didn't know, 'cept he never seen a man run like that before 
     in his life.'' It is also a reliable fact that once in 
     Chicago, on a mushy field, he circled the bases in 13.1 
     seconds, two fifths faster than Evar Swanson's major league 
     record. ``On a dry field,'' he says, ``I once done it in 12 
     flat.''
       Papa could run all right, and he could hit and field as 
     well. He played a shallow centerfield, even more so than 
     Willie Mays did when he broke in. ``It doesn't matter where 
     he plays,'' Pie Traynor once said. ``He can go a country mile 
     for a ball.'' As a hitter Bell had distance, but mainly he 
     strove to hit the ball into holes; he could hit a ball 
     through the hole in a fence, or drag a bunt as if it were on 
     a string in his band. Bell never hit below .308, and one time 
     when he was hitting .390 on the last day of the season he 
     purposely gave up his batting title; he was 43 at the time.
       ``Jackie Robinson had just signed with the Dodgers, and 
     Monte Irvin was our best young player,'' says Papa. ``I gave 
     up my title so Monte would have a better chance at the 
     majors. That was the way we thought then. We'd do anythin' to 
     get a player up there. In the final two games of the season, 
     a doubleheader, I still needed a few times at bat to qualify 
     for the title. I got two hits in the first game and sat out 
     the second. The fans were mad, but they didn't know what we 
     were trying to do. After the season I was supposed to get the 
     $200 for the title anyway, but my owner, he say, `Well look, 
     Cool, Irvin won it, didn't he?' They wouldn't give me the 
     $200. Baseball was never much for me making' money.''
       Papa Bell earned $90 a month his first year, back in 1922. 
     He would never make more than $450 a month, although his 
     ability was such that later he would be ranked on Jackie 
     Robinson's all-time team in the same outfield with Henry 
     Aaron and Mays. Bill Veeck, who also saw Bell play, puts him 
     right up there with Tris
      Speaker, Joe DiMaggio and Mays. ``Cool Papa was one of the 
     most magical players I've ever seen,'' says Veeck.
       The money never bothered Papa; it was a game, a summer away 
     from the packinghous. ``Cept one time,'' adds Papa, ``when 
     one team told me to pay my expenses from St. Louis to 
     Memphis. They'd give it to me back, they said. I get there, 
     and they say no. Owner of the club was a dentist. I say to 
     `em I didn't come down here `cause I got a toothache. So I 
     went back home. Owners are owners, whether they are blue or 
     green.''
       Papa spent the winters in the packinghouse until he learned 
     of places like Havana and Vera Cruz and Ciudad Trujillo that 
     competitively sought players from the Negro leagues. He will 
     never forget that winter in Ciudad Trujillo. It was in 1937, 
     he thinks, when Dominican strongman Rafael Trujillo was in 
     political trouble. He had to distract the people, and there 
     was no better way than to give them a pennant. First, 
     Trujillo had his agents all but kidnap Satchel Paige from a 
     New Orelans hotel. Then he used Paige to recruit the edge in 
     talent from the States; namely Papa Bell and Gibson, who 
     along with Orlando Cepeda, the storied father of the Current 
     Cepeda, gave the didcator a pat hand.
       The look of that lineup still did not ease Trujillo's 
     anxiety. ``He wanted us to stay in pajamas,'' says Papa, 
     ``and all our meals were served to us in our rooms, and 
     guards circled our living qualters.'' Thousands would show up 
     at the park just to watch Trujillo's club work out, and with 
     each game tension grew. ``We all knew the situation was 
     serious, but it wasn't until later that we heard how bad it 
     was,'' says Papa. ``We found out that, as far as Trujillo was 
     concerned, we either won or we were going to lose big. That 
     means he was going to kill us.'' They never did neet 
     Trujillo. They saw him only in his convertible in the 
     streets, all cold and white in that suit of his that seemed 
     to shimmer in the hot sun, ``A very frightenin' man,'' says 
     Papa.
       Truijillo got his pennant and his election. A picture of 
     Papa's, taken near a large stream, shows the team 
     celebrating; the dictator had sent them out of the city--
     along with their fares home and many cases of beer. It had 
     been a hard buck, but then again it had never been easy, 
     whether it was down in Santo Domingo or back up with the St. 
     Louis Stars or the Pittsburgh Crawford or the Homestead Grays 
     or the Chicago American Giants. East or west, north or south 
     it was always the same: no shade anywhere as the bus rattled 
     along, way down in Egypt land.
       Papa took the bumps better than most. Some, like Gibson, 
     died too young; some got lost to the nights. Coolpapa, as his 
     name is pronounced by those who came from the South, well 
     Coolpapa, he just ``went on moving on.'' That was the way his 
     mother taught him back in Starkville, Miss., where he was 
     born in 1903; look, listen and never pounce, those were her 
     words, and all of them spelled survival. Work, too, was 
     another word, and Papa says, ``If I didn't know anythin', I 
     Knew How to work.''
       Long days in the sun and well after the night slipped 
     across the cotton fields, all that Papa and his friends could 
     talk about was ``goin' off.'' Papa says, ``One day some boy 
     would be there along with us, and then he'd be gone. `Where'd 
     he go? I'd ask. `Why that boy, he done gone-off! someone'd 
     say. Next you'd see that
      fella, why he'd be back home with a hat on and a big, bright 
     suit and shiny shoes and a jingle in his pocket.'' They 
     would talk of the great cities and what they would have 
     when they, too, went off, and only sometimes would they 
     hear about baseball. An old, well-traveled trainman used 
     to sit under a tree with them on Sundays and tell them of 
     the stars he had seen.
       ``Why, there's this here Walter Johnson,'' the trainman 
     would say. ``He can strike out anybody who picked up a bat!''
       ``Is that right?'' Papa would ask.
       ``Sure enough, boy. You think I'd lie? Then there is two 
     old boys named Ty Cobb and Honus Wagner. Well, they don't 
     miss a ball, and they never strike out!''
       ``Never miss a ball?'' gasped Papa. ``Never strike out? Is 
     that right?''
       ``I'm tellin' ya, boy. I've been to the cities and I 
     know!''
       ``Well, mmm,mmm,'' Papa would shake his head. Only one 
     thing botherin' me. What happen when this here Walter Johnson 
     is pitchin', and these other two boys are battin?''
       ``Y'all go on!'' the old man would yell, jumping up. 
     ``Y'all leave me alone. I'm not talkin' anymore. Don't non of 
     ya believe. I should know. I've been to the cities!''
       By the time he was 16, Papa was up north in St. Louis with 
     several of this brothers and sisters, who were already in the 
     packing-house. ``Didn't want to know 'bout ball then,'' says 
     Papa. ``Just wanted to work like a man.'' His brother 
     suggested that he play ball on Sundays. ``'James,' he said, 
     'you a natural. You throw that knuckleball, and their ain't 
     nobody going to hit it.''' Soon he was facing the lethal St. 
     Louis Stars of the Negro National League. ``They were a tough 
     club,'' says Papa. ``And mean! They had a fella named Steel 
     Arm Dicky. Used to make moonshine as mean as he was on the 
     side. His boss killed him when he began to believe Steel Arm 
     weren't turnin' in all the profits.''
       Bell impressed the Stars, and they asked him to join them. 
     ``All our players were major leaguers,'' says Papa. ``Didn't 
     have the bench to be as good as them for a whole season--we 
     only carried 14, 15 players. But over a short series we could 
     have taken the big leaguers. That October we played the 
     Detroit Tigers three games and won two of them. But old Cobb 
     wasn't with then, 'cause 12 years before a black team whipped 
     him pretty good, and he wouldn't play against blacks anymore. 
     Baseball was all you thought of then. Always thinkin' how to 
     do things another way. Curve a ball on a 3-2, bunt and run in 
     the first innin.' That how we beat big league teams. Not that 
     we had the best men, but we outguessed them in short series. 
     It's a guessin' game There's a lot of unwritten baseball, ya 
     know.''
       The Stars folded under the Depression. Papa hit the road. 
     An outfielder now, he was even more in demand. He finally 
     began the last phase of this career, with the Washington 
     Homestead Grays; with Gibson and Leonard and Bell, it was one 
     of the most powerful clubs in the black leagues' history, or 
     anybody's history for that matter. ``I was 'bout 45 then,'' 
     says Papa. ``Had arthritis and was so stiff I couldn't run at 
     times. They used to have to put me in a hot tub. I had to get 
     good and warm before I could move.'' Yet, he had enough left 
     to convince Jackie Robinson that he should never try to make 
     it as a shortstop.
       ``It was all over the place that Jackie was going to sign 
     with the Dodgers,'' says Papa. ``All us old fellas didn't 
     think he could make it at short. He couldn't go to his right 
     too good. He'd give it a backhand and them plant his right 
     leg and throw. He always had to take two extra steps. We was 
     worried He miss the change, and who knows when we'd get 
     another chance? You know they
      turned him down in Boston. So I made up my mind to show him 
     he should try for another spot in the infield. One night I 
     must've knocked couple hundred ground balls to his right, 
     and I beat the throw to first every time. He got the 
     message. He played a lot of games in the majors, only one 
     of 'em at short.''
        [[Page E263]] Papa was named to manage the Kansas City 
     Monarchs' B team in 1948, the agreement being that he would 
     get one third of the sale price for any player who was 
     developed by him and sold to the majors. He had two prospects 
     in mind for the Browns. ``But the Browns didn't want them,'' 
     says Papa, shaking his head. I then went to the Cardinals, 
     and they say they don't care, either, and I think to myself, 
     My, if they don't want these boys, they don't want nobody.'' 
     The Monarchs eventually sold the pair: Ernie Banks and Elston 
     Howard. ``I didn't get anythin','' says Papa. ``They said I 
     didn't have a contract. They gave me a basket of fruit. A 
     basket of fruit! Baseball was never much for me makin' 
     money.''
       Life began all over for Papa. He took a job at the city 
     hall in St. Louis as a custodian and then a night watchman. 
     For the next 22 years the routine was the same, and only now 
     and then could he go to a Cardinal game. He would pay his way 
     in and sit there in the sun with his lunch long before the 
     game began; to those around him who wondered about him, he 
     was just a Mr. Bell, a watchman. He would watch those games 
     intently, looking for tiny flaws like a diamond cutter. He 
     never said much to anyone, but then one day he was asked by 
     some Dodgers to help Maury Wills. ``He could run,'' he says. 
     ``I wanted to help.'' He waited for Wills at the players' 
     gate and introduced himself quietly.
       ``Maybe you heard of me,'' Papa said, ``maybe not. It don't 
     matter. But I'd like to help you.''
       Wills just looked at him, as Papa became uneasy.
       ``When you're on base,'' said Papa, ``get those hitters of 
     yours to stand deep in the box. That way the catcher, he got 
     to back up. That way you goin' to get an extra step all the 
     time.''
       ``I hadn't thought of that,'' said Wills, who went on to 
     steal 104 bases.
       ``Well, Papa smiled, ``that's the kind of ball we played in 
     our league. Be seein' you, Mr. Wills. Didn't mean to bother 
     you.''
       After that year Papa seldom went to the ballpark anymore. 
     He had become a sick man, and when he walked, his arthritic 
     left side seemed to be frozen. There was just his job now. In 
     the afternoons he would walk up to the corner and see what 
     the people were up to, or sit silently in his living room 
     turning the pages of his books of pictures: all the old faces 
     with the blank eyes; all of those many different, baggy 
     uniforms.
       Nights were spent at city hall, making his rounds, 
     listening to the sound of radio baseball by the big window, 
     or just the sound
      of the hours when winter mornings moved across the window. 
     When it was icy, he would wait for the old people to come, 
     and he would help them up the steps. Often, say about 
     three a.m., he would be looking out the window, out across 
     to the park where the bums would be sleeping, their wine 
     bottles as sentries, and he would wait for their march on 
     the hall. They would come up those steps and place their 
     faces up against the window, next to his face and beg to 
     be let in where it was warm.
       ``We're citizens, old Bell, let us in,'' they would yell.
       ``I know,'' Papa would say.
       ``It's cold out here,'' they would say.
       ``I know,'' he would answer.
       ``No, you don't, you. . . .'' And Papa would just look 
     away, thinking how cold it was outside, trying to think of 
     all the things that would leave him indifferent to those 
     wretched figures. Then it would be that he sometimes would 
     think of baseball, the small things he missed about it, 
     things that would pop into his mind for no reason: a certain 
     glove, the feel of a ball and bat, a buttoning of a shirt, 
     the sunlight. ``You try to get that game out of your mind,'' 
     he says, ``but it never leaves ya. Somethin' about it never 
     leaves ya.''
       Papa Bell is 70 now [he died in 1991, at 87]. He lives on 
     Dickson Street in North St. Louis, a neighborhood under 
     seige: vacant, crumbling houses, bars where you could get 
     your throat cut if you even walked in the wrong way, packs of 
     sky-high dudes looking for a score. They have picked on 
     Papa's house a couple of times, so now when he feels 
     something in the air, hears a rustle outside of his door, he 
     will go to the front window and sit there for long hours with 
     a shotgun and a pistol in his lap. ``They don't mess with 
     Papa anymore,'' says his friend Tweed, looking over at Papa 
     sitting in his city hall retirement chair. ``It's a reclinin' 
     one,'' says Tweed. ``Show'im how it reclines, Papa.''
       Now the two of them, Tweed and Papa, who sits in his chair 
     like a busted old jazz musician, torn around the edges but 
     straight with dignity, spend much time together in Papa's 
     living room. They mull over old boy scores, over all the 
     clippings in Tweed's portable archives. They try to bring 
     continuity of performance to a man's record that began when 
     nobody cared. They assemble pictures to be signed for people 
     who write and say that they hear he will be going into the 
     Hall of Fame; the days are sweet.
       ``Can't believe it,'' says Tweed. ``Can you, Papa? Papa 
     Bell in the Hall of Fame. The fastest man who ever played the 
     game.''
       ``Ain't happened yet,'' cautions Papa, adjusting his tall 
     and lean figure in his chair.
       ``Tell me, Papa,'' says Tweed. ``How's it goin' to feel? 
     The Hall of fame . . . mmm, mmm.''
       ``Knew a fella blowed the horn once.'' says Papa. ``He told 
     me. He say, `Ya got to take the gigs as they come.'''
Vol. 141


WASHINGTON, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1995

No. 21


House of Representatives