Truman shows pride in his ballplayer dad
Us
KEVIN KIRKLAND
Truman Posey Brown has an easy way to remember the face of his father, ballplayer Ray Brown: He looks in the mirror.
“When we were at a reunion, one of the players walked up and said, ‘Ray, I didn’t know you were still around!’” recalls Truman’s cousin, Nancy Boxill Thompson of Bradenton, Fla.
Truman didn’t set him straight because he is nonverbal. The 77-year-old man has mental disabilities and lives in a group home in Penn Hills. Functioning at a 3-year-old’s level, he has never lost a child’s joy at small surprises.
On Monday, it was a photo, baseball card and bobblehead of Ray Brown, the right-handed ace of the Negro Leagues’ Homestead Grays, the 2006 inductee in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the father who sometimes drove nearly two hours each way to visit Truman at Polk Center in Venango County.
“That Truman wasn’t capable of doing things that other boys do was a great sadness for Ray,” Nancy says.
Imagine Truman’s bewilderment when his father vanished for months at a time, playing baseball all over the country and in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Venezuela and Cuba, where a Black pitcher with a 21-4 record and a .311 batting average in 1936 was a hero, not a pariah.
“Ray was very attached and interested in how his son was growing,” Nancy says.
So how then to explain to a child that his father, his spitting-image hero, was never coming back?
Truman, who moved to Polk Center when he was 2 years old, was 22 when Ray died in 1965. That was 55 years ago, but his eyes still light up when he sees his father’s face. The walls of his bedroom are filled with photos, baseball memorabilia and posters of Truman’s other hero, John Wayne. Is it coincidence that Ray, a lightskinned Black man, looks a little like the square-jawed Duke? Truman also has dozens of baseball cards.
“He has more baseball cards than food in his lunch box,” says Shaunequa Carter of Turtle Creek, an aide at the group home that Truman shares with another man and two women.
Until recently, nobody made cards or bobbleheads of Negro Leaguers, who started their own league 100 years ago because Black people weren’t allowed to play in the majors. Ray, who grew up in Alger, Ohio, attended Wilberforce University but left to sign with the Grays. He continued his studies in the offseason, graduated in 1935 and married Ethel Posey, the oldest daughter of the team’s owner, Cumberland Posey.
Nancy, whose mother, Beatrice, was the youngest of the four “gorgeous Posey girls,” believes Ray and Ethel met when he and other ballplayers lived on the top floor of the Poseys’ house on 13th Avenue in Homestead. Several books and websites claim Truman’s parents were married at home plate on the Fourth of July, but Nancy is pretty sure she would have heard that story if it were true.
In June 1937, a photo of Ray and “his pretty bride” appeared on the front of the Pittsburgh Courier’s sports section.
That December, Courier sportswriter Chester Washington sent a telegram to Pittsburgh Pirates manager Pie Traynor suggesting he sign Ray, Grays teammates Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard, and Satchel Paige and Cool Papa Bell of the Pittsburgh Crawfords:
“KNOW YOUR CLUB NEEDS PLAYERS ... HAVE ANSWER TO YOUR PRAYERS RIGHT HERE IN PITTSBURGH ... ALL AVAILABLE AT REASONABLE FIGURES ... WOULD MAKE PIRATES FORMIDABLE PENNANT CONTENDERS ... WHAT IS YOUR ATTITUDE? ... WIRE ANSWER.”
Pie didn’t reply and watched forlornly as the 1938 Pirates led the National League by as much as seven games until they stumbled at the end of the season. In late September, Mace Brown’s “Homer in the Gloaming” gave the Chicago Cubs a stunning victory over the Pirates and the pennant.
Ray took Ethel with him when he played winter ball in Puerto Rico in 1939, according to fellow Negro Leaguer Gene Benson, who was given a furnished apartment in San Juan that he and his wife shared with the Browns. Ray played for the Grays for 14 seasons, from 1932 to 1945, and helped the team win nine pennants.
“He’s what they called their Sunday pitcher,” says Negro Leagues historian James Riley. “They’d pitch their best on Sunday to draw a crowd, and nobody was better.”
Truman was born in November 1942 toward the end of his father’s time with the Grays. In 1944, Ray had a 9-3 record and threw a one-hit shutout in the Negro World Series to help the Grays again beat the Birmingham Barons. After Ray left the Grays, he played in Mexico and Canada. He continued to visit his son at Polk Center after he and Ethel divorced.
“Though there was a divorce, it didn’t disrupt Ray’s relationship with Truman,” Nancy says.
Tired of the long drive to Venango County, Ethel had her son moved to a group home in the Pittsburgh area in the 1980s. Nancy says Truman has his mother’s personality, always cheerful and sociable. “She enjoyed people very much.”
At the group home, Truman loves to show people books and magazines, especially ones about baseball, says Marlana Bayerlein, program manager for Mainstay Life Services. He often rolls and tucks magazines into his back pockets, the way kids used to do with their baseball gloves.
Truman usually attends six or seven Pirates games each season, sitting in excellent seats provided by the Pirates behind home plate at PNC Park. Does he pretend that’s his father out on the mound, striking out Crawfords with his famous curveball?
Like the rest of us, Truman hasn’t been to any ballgames this year because of the pandemic. On opening day in July — how weird does that sound? — he didn’t get to see Major League Baseball honor his father and all the other Black players who never got a chance to play in the majors. But he understands Ray’s legacy, Marlana says.
“He points to his picture and to himself, like, ‘He’s mine, my dad.”
Earlier this year, I learned that Ray would be included in a special series of bobbleheads made to honor the centennial of the founding of the Negro National League in 1920. Phil Sklar, co-founder and CEO of the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum in Milwaukee, sent me a bobblehead to give to Truman. It was delivered to his group home on Monday along with a photo, a Ray Brown baseball card and a copy of “Lucky Bats,” the children’s book I wrote with Elijah “Lucky” Miller, a batboy for the Homestead Grays.
Since his friends at Mainstay had already bought Truman a bobblehead, it wasn’t as big a surprise as I’d hoped. But it did give him one to display and one to play with. I like to picture Truman falling asleep with his dad and dreaming of the day in 2006 when he watched proudly as Ray was inducted in Cooperstown, N.Y.
Dennis Thompson, Nancy’s husband, was with Truman that day at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. When Dennis grew up in Teaneck, N.J., his hero was his backyard neighbor, Elston Howard, a former Negro League catcher who became the first Black player on the New York Yankees. He remembers Truman’s reaction when he caught sight of a large picture of his father in the hall of fame.
“He just went off. He knew he was a star and he looks just like him. It was a very proud moment for him,” Dennis says. “It was one of those moments you never forget.”