The Baseball Dreams of Eberhard "Zip" Fuhr and the Reality of Internment Baseball, 1942-1947

He had more nicknames than he could remember. At home his mother called him "Abie," the German contraction for his given name Eberhard. Because he had coal black hair and a dark complexion, a few of his friends called him "Dago," as if he were a thin Italian swain instead of a husky German who couldn't even dance. He blamed it on his big feet, which his friends said were the size of suitcases and earned him the nickname "Satchel." But the tag he liked the best, "Zip," was hung on him by his baseball teammates at Woodward High School in Cincinnati, who couldn't believe how fleet and agile their talented but satchel-footed catcher was.¹

On the afternoon of March 23, 1943, seventeen-year-old Eberhard "Zip" Fuhr sat in his fifth period class, distributive education, on the third floor of Woodward High.² Distributive education was a fancy title for a dull course in simple salesmanship, and most of the students were on the edge of sleep or deep in spring daydreams. For Zip Fuhr that meant enjoying the dream he had harbored for years of one day being good enough to play professional baseball.

He had begun harboring the dream when he was still in elementary school and on Saturdays rode the streetcar to violin lessons that his mother insisted on. But each time the streetcar passed Deer Creek Common, with an endless dirt field of Knothole League games in progress, he had to resist the urge to jump off the streetcar and join the games. After he finally gave in to the urge, his violin teacher called his mother and wanted to know, "Whatever happened to Eberhard?"³

Crosley Field was just blocks away from the Fuhr household, which was located on the corner of York and Baymiller streets.⁴ Zip Fuhr's dedication to baseball, rather than the violin, entitled him and his teammates, as members of the Knothole League, to free admission to Redlegs games periodically. They sat in what they called the nosebleed section of Crosley Field and studied their favorite players. For Zip that was Ernie Lombardi, the Redlegs' strapping catcher who could hit line drives with such velocity they broke fielders' hands. Lombardi's secret, they said, was an overlapping grip that permitted his bat to whip like a golf club.⁵ Zip didn't fail to notice that his hero also had satchel feet and was so slow they could throw him out at first base after one of his rocket line-drive singles. Still, Lombardi's hitting and temperament were so fiery that he became Zip's idol, and when he graduated from Knothole League baseball to the greater glories of the Woodward High Bulldogs, Zip adopted Lombardi's overlapping bat grip in an effort to develop some of the same power that Lombardi had been able to incorporate into his compact swing.⁶

Practice for the 1942–43 Bulldog season had begun two weeks earlier when the Redlegs traded Lombardi to the Boston Braves. Despite this move, he remained Zip Fuhr's idol. Using Lombardi's peculiar grip, Zip was learning to hit with power to the opposite field. He still had good speed and a strong arm. It all meant that, as he sat daydreaming in his distributive education class, the life of a slick salesman was the last thing on his mind. Nor did he have thoughts of college. He'd be in the trades he was certain—a warehouseman, or perhaps a baker like his father—but only until he could realize his dream of some day playing professional baseball.⁷

Suddenly

At 1:30, halfway through Zip Fuhr's class on distributive education, the door to the hallway opened suddenly. It was L. D. Peasley, Woodward High's principal. The school had nearly four thousand students and a staff of hundreds. It was, in fact, a small city, and it was rare for students to even catch a glimpse of the man who ran the school like some distant god...