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THREE Up with Detroit and Philadelphia
- University of Nebraska Press
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three Up with Detroit and Philadelphia After the Beaumont season in 1942, Helen and I and our baby daughter, Elena, went back to Mayfield to let the grandparents see their new granddaughter . I had a job down in Beaumont for a month, but we wanted to go back up to Kentucky. About twelve miles away from Mayfield, in Viola, they were building a munitions plant and hiring a lot of people. I got a job as an inspector at the National Fireworks Plant. They made twentymillimeter ammunition for anti-aircraft guns. I was the chief inspector. Nobody else seemed to know anything about it, but I had had experience working with explosives in the coal mines. I had about thirty people, a couple of crews, working under me, who were unloading components for the shells for the ammunition, which we could fill with powder and petrol and other explosives. I was also a quality-control inspector on the assembly line. I was working a lot of extra hours and making $150 to $200, sometimes even $300, a week. Many of the guys on my crews were African-Americans. They still remembered me from the year I played at Mayfield. I was one of their favorites. When they found out that I was their boss, I was their hero. They called me “Mr. Charlie.” The plant we worked at was on eight square miles of bottom land that was farmed. The government bought it and built the plant with the assembly lines and everything. They put a chain-link fence around the whole works. You couldn’t have a fire or a garden in the plant. The rabbit population exploded inside this fence, without any hunting to control them. You couldn’t shoot a gun on the plant grounds. This was farmland with a lot of corn, turnips, beans, and everything planted, and the animal population just zoomed. The black guys hunted them. They would get a hickory stick about twenty-five inches long, with a big railroad bolt on the end of it, and go down there rabbit hunting. They’d chase the rabbits out of the brush and take the stick and wham! throw it and bring 64 up with detroit and philadelphia them down.The stick would hit the rabbits on the legs, and the guys would run over there and catch them.They’d do this often at noon. One time they were about twenty minutes late getting back to work. I said, “What the heck were you guys doing?” I was the foreman. But a friend of mine there said, “Oh, Charlie, don’t be too harsh on them. They’ll bring fried rabbit the next day for you.” I said, “You’re kidding? They will?” I’d never had fried rabbit. So the next day I joined them. They ate their lunch real quick, and out they went into the cornfields and the briar brushes and down in the creek bottoms. They’d run around there, and those rabbits would come out of that brush and off they’d go. I said, “Hey, I want to do this.” So they gave me a stick and off we went. They told me to wait until the rabbit zigs. You can’t hit them when they’re running away. So I waited and boom! I got one. I didn’t want to take it home, so I gave it to one of the black guys. We would get fifty or a hundred rabbits at noon. The next day the black guys would bring fried rabbit that their wives had cooked up, and they all insisted I try it. That fried rabbit was great. I stayed in shape that spring by chasing rabbits. People didn’t quite believe me when I told them that. But I still had bigger plans than working in a munitions factory and chasing down rabbits. I was determined to play major league baseball. Steve O’Neill had told me at Beaumont that I would go to the Detroit Tigers’ spring training camp. He liked my hustle and versatility. He’d give me a shot at going up to Detroit. Steve got the manager’s job at Detroit in 1943, so I figured my chances were improving. I received my contract in January, but it was for only $1,800 a year. A lot of the ballplayers were leaving for the service, but I had a deferment because I was in that gas blast...