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9. The Ice Bucket
- Syracuse University Press
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87 9 The Ice Bucket I spent most of my NBA years in Syracuse. I didn’t have many problems there, but a couple of things happened that stay with me today. Syracuse wasn’t the worst place, and it wasn’t the best place: it was the way most northern cities were at the time. That meant they didn’t put up signs that said “Colored only,” but you still found out real fast where you could and couldn’t go. During my years in Syracuse I stayed with the Sylvahns, on East Fayette Street. They were a special couple. They ran a newspaper for the black community, because the big papers there pretty much ignored us, the same way it had been in West Virginia. If you got arrested, you might be in the paper, but that was about it. Along with the paper, the Sylvhans also ran a boardinghouse. It didn’t take me long to realize I needed to find a place to live in the Fifteenth Ward, because I wasn’t leaving that neighborhood. The Sylvahns were a nice couple; they took me in like one of their own. She was white and he was black, which was very unusual at that time. It was also sad because of the usual craziness. Her sisters would come to see her, but they wouldn’t come into the house; she would have to go outside and sit in the car with them. Mrs. Sylvahn treated me like the son she never had, and sometimes I would get out and around the neighborhood with a couple of good friends: Eugene Williams and Don Caldwell, although I called them “Moon” and “Peewee.” That’s how it was in those days. The players today can stay wherever they want. But I had to live in this little area where all the blacks stayed in Syracuse, and that did a lot to keep you humble. You were reminded all the time that what you did just didn’t make all that much difference, not with the things that really mattered. 88 | Moonfixer For me, it was time for more handprints: Moon and Peewee made that city feel like home. Moon is gone now, but Peewee, a retired post office clerk, is still there. The last time I was in Syracuse they had an event for the old Nats, and someone said to me, “Didn’t you just love our city?” And I said, “You see those two men? That’s what I loved about Syracuse.” Because we would sit on the porch and try to solve the troubles of the world, and my world was what they called the Fifteenth Ward. Every black person I knew in Syracuse lived there, and they took care of me: nothing bad was ever going to happen to me in the Fifteenth Ward. At first, maybe those folk expected I’d be different or have some airs because of basketball, but I think they eventually came to see me as just a decent human being. I lived on Fayette Street, and my social life outside the team pretty much consisted of walking to the Embassy (jazz club), which I’ll really get into later in the book. They had a real jazzy jukebox and they had some great live performers, and they always kept orange soda in the cooler for me, because I never drank alcohol. I’d go to the Embassy and play three or four tunes on the box to get ready to play, and then I’d go to the game. I remember once someone told Danny Biasone, our owner, they’d seen me in there drunk. Danny knew the truth. Sure. Earl was drunk on that orange soda. In those days, there was no real escape from the realities of race. There was no refuge, like there’d been at West Virginia State. It was everywhere, with some towns worse than others. Bobby Hopkins was with me in Syracuse, this guy who came up to play with us from Grambling , where he’d led the nation in scoring. I submit to you that he had all the tools. Once he learned the nuances of the game on the NBA level, it would have been “Watch out.” But he hurt his knee one summer, and that was it for his career. If he had stayed healthy, what a player he would have been. While he was there, he was like a younger...