Sunday, Jul. 13, 2008

Kershaw County: Doby broke all barriers

Camden native’s play helped change people’s minds on race

The season was Larry Doby’s best.

The year included a seminal moment in the nation’s march toward racial equality.

The play took place on a Saturday afternoon in Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, and it is among the highlights of Doby’s Hall of Fame baseball career.

All three elements struck a chord with Ken Saulter, a teenager selling scorecards at the stadium that day.

Here was Doby, the Camden native who seven years earlier had become the first African-American to play in the American League. On his way to a 32-home run season that helped the Indians win the 1954 pennant, Doby played outstanding defense in center field as well.

On July 31, 1954, Doby climbed a fence in center, stretched out his left arm and snared a fly ball to prevent a Washington Senators home run. Shaken up when he tumbled to the ground after the catch, Doby’s concerned teammates surrounded him.

Saulter remembers it vividly.

Two months earlier, the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision abolished segregation in schools, giving the civil rights movement a key boost.

Against that backdrop, Saulter sat quietly in the stands and watched all those white faces around Doby.

“All of those Indians ran out of the dugout and surrounded him to see how he was,” Saulter said. “In 1948, you would have only seen a few players run out.”

The event shows how far Doby had come in his career and how quickly baseball and the country were evolving in the early days of the civil rights movement.

“When I knew him,” said Wally Westlake, a Cleveland outfielder from 1953-55, “a good portion (of) that hate had diminished.”

What has not diminished over the years is the respect Saulter and Westlake have for Doby, who was born and raised in Kershaw County before moving to New Jersey at age 13.

Saulter earned two college degrees and worked as a economist before retiring to Ann Arbor, Mich. Now 67, he’s written an essay describing why Doby was such a special player and detailing what he calls Doby’s greatest catch.

“I’ve lived in some interesting places, even abroad,” Saulter said. “I always would talk about Larry Doby. Most people didn’t know who he was, the stuff he had to take and the courage he had to show.”

The 87-year-old Westlake, who retired from baseball in 1956 and lives in Sacramento, Calif., remains fond of Doby, who died in 2003.

“He was a good person and a helluva ballplayer,” Westlake said.

He was the kind of player who stood out to the young Saulter for reasons beyond the color of his skin.

In a season in which Cleveland made the World Series, Saulter was at Cleveland Stadium for most games. Tall for his age, he hopped a bus from his humble home on the city’s west side to work at the stadium even though he was three years shy of the required age of 16.

After three innings, his scorecard peddling would end and he would find an empty seat to watch the game.

“I was very impressed with the players,” Saulter said. “Larry stood out. He was a quiet, shy kind of person and very approachable. I could get an autograph any time I wanted, I felt like. He was a great athlete.”

That season, Doby established career highs with 32 home runs and 126 RBIs to finish second in the American League Most Valuable Player race to Yogi Berra. He was nearly flawless in center field, committing two errors while recording 411 putouts in 153 games.

Westlake does not remember the catch that Saulter wrote about in his essay. “There were so many great catches,” he said.

Larry Doby Jr., born after his father’s baseball career ended, said his father wasn’t much for bragging about the play, or any other.

“He was very low-key,” Doby Jr. said. “He just said it was one of his best catches.”

Still, Doby Jr. has a photo of the play on a wall in his New Jersey home.

When Doby blasted a home run later in the game, the day was complete for Saulter.

“The thing that cemented it in my memory was I went back to my neighborhood and told anyone who would listen the complete story from beginning to end,” Saulter said. “Friends would ask me to tell the story.”

This came in an era when segregated schools were the norm. After the Brown decision, that began to change.

“When I graduated high school in 1959, there were 93 graduates, with three black students,” Saulter said. “In 1954, it might have been less.”

Westlake, who played for Pittsburgh in the National League in 1947 when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, points to the role baseball played in the progress.

“Jackie Robinson took on a helluva job,” Westlake said. “Not only did he take on color barrier in baseball, but he put a crack in society.”

Doby followed a few months later in Cleveland, armed with an attitude honed growing up in Kershaw County and New Jersey.

“His time in Camden shaped the kind of person he would grow up to be,” Doby Jr. said. “Growing up in the South when there was a lot of segregation, he played in integrated sandlot games. He tried to treat people as people treated him.

“The way that he spoke about South Carolina as I was growing up, you would have thought he would have lived there his whole life. That’s how proud of it he was.”

His play on that day in July 1954, when he prevented one home run and smacked another, was but one highlight of a prideful life.

It’s one that lives on in Saulter’s mind.

“An incredible experience,” he said. “A perfect defensive and offensive union.”

Reach Wiseman at (803) 771-8472

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