Barnstorming to Heaven: Syd Pollack and His Great Black Teams (review)

Part baseball club, part circus act, the team that would become the Indianapolis-Cincinnati Clowns barnstormed around America for the better part of four decades. Alan J. Pollock's memoir—Barnstorming to Heaven: Syd Pollock and His Great Black Teams, based primarily on childhood recollections—is, above all, a love letter to his father's African American outfit. Syd Pollock, who also owned a vaudeville house in suburban Tarrytown, New York, and eventually presided over basketball's Harlem Globetrotters, began his career as a baseball promoter in the mid-1920s as the "exclusive agent for the Maggie Riley Devil Dogs, a 'Semi-Pro Male Club—One of the Fastest Out of Metropolitan District—with Baseball's $10,000 Female 'Wonder Girl,'" according to the trade cards Pollock distributed. But it was as the promoter and owner of the Miami Ethiopian Giants, later to become the Clowns, that Pollock rose to prominence. As the author's father, Syd Pollock looms large in this generally engaging memoir, but center stage is reserved for the men and, occasionally, women who played and performed for the Clowns.

Barnstorming to Heaven begins with an appreciation of the performer and sometimes-ballplayer whom the author calls the team's heart and soul, Richard King—better known as King Tut, the "Clown Prince of Negro Baseball." The book is most successful in the descriptions of King Tut (who performed both set and improvised routines aided by the Clowns' other novelty acts, most notably his longtime partner, an African American dwarf who appeared under the name Spec Bebop) and Goose Tatum (who later rose to fame with the Globetrotters). Anecdotes about the performers and their acts lend the memoir most of its charm. Providing a window into the Clowns' broad humor, for example, is the author's description of "The Dentist," a sketch performed by Bebop and King Tut and featuring a mouth full of blanched, dried corn kernels (substituting for teeth), pliers, a lit firecracker, and much hilarity. Pollock's father attempted to boost attendance after organized baseball's desegregation began to sap the Negro Leagues' fan base by signing infielder Marcenia Lyle Alberga (nee Stone), whom he renamed Toni based on the popularity of Toni Home Permanent kits. The son's account of this effort also gives some insight into the elder Pollock's creative business practices.

Barnstorming to Heaven has the tendency to look back at the world of the Clowns through rose-colored glasses. The Clowns were not only good ballplayers, they were the best that black baseball had to offer. Not only were they funny, they were beloved by everyone in the United States and Southern Canada. Nevertheless, Pollock does not give short shrift to the hardships of life on the road for an African American barnstorming team in segregated America. Nor does he gloss over the financial and logistical difficulties of owning and booking such an outfit through times both fat and lean. Most interesting, and certainly most poignant, are the final chapters that detail Pollock and his business partner Ed Hamman's attempts to keep the team afloat after exclusively black baseball became obsolete. They were able to do so through the fifties—when the Clowns featured a skinny, young infielder named Henry Aaron and three women at various times. That they then continued into the early sixties—when the team became truly integrated, fielding Caucasian players and performers as well as African Americans—is testament to their ability to promote a product audiences wanted to see.

If one theme runs through this narrative above all others, it is the popularity of the Clowns in all their various incarnations. By giving spectators a unique mix of great baseball and comedy, the younger Pollock suggests that his father catered to the tastes of his predominately, but not exclusively, African American audiences. Representing his father as a champion of civil rights and the team as traveling ambassadors...