Willie Wells: “El Diablo” of the Negro Leagues by Bob Luke (review)

World War II. As a member of Texas’s Lost Battalion, he became a POW along with thousands of American soldiers after the fall of Java in early 1942. The prisoners were forced to work on the Burma-Siam Railroad on reduced rations while suffering from malaria, dysentery, and tropical infections. At one point Eddie’s weight dropped to sixty pounds, even as he hauled hundred-pound loads. Eddie Fung describes his years as a POW without bitterness, but in vivid detail. He explains his particular experience as the only Chinese American prisoner, how he and his comrades survived on the meager rations, how they kept up morale, and how they reacted when faced with the demand to sign loyalty oaths to the Japanese Imperial Army or face execution. The Adventures of Eddie Fung is a remarkable book on many levels, not the least because its informant is, as editor Judy Yung describes, “a natural storyteller with a fantastic memory for detail, a precise way of expressing himself, a wonderful sense of humor, and a strong determination to tell the story right. . . . He also proved to be an unusual interviewee in that he was both introspective and analytical in his responses” (p. x). The portrait that emerges in Fung’s memoir is that of a restless young man who seeks adventure, but finds instead that joy comes through cooperating with others. Even as Fung debunks the romanticism of cowboy work, the life he describes possesses idyllic qualities. He recalls no meanness, but rather generous, community-minded people: “everyone just helped each other out, period. It felt so natural and so right that I thought this was the way it should be” (p. 52). University of California–Santa Cruz professor Judy Yung was fifty-six years old when she began conducting oral interviews in 2002 with the eighty-year-old veteran . Yung had previously interviewed some four hundred people, but she was wholly unprepared for the transformative effects of this experience. Dr. Yung, as it turned out, fell in love with Eddie and became his wife. Many readers will find this charming account of Eddie Fung’s life story similarly irresistible. Texas State University–San Marcos Steven L. Davis Willie Wells: “El Diablo” of the Negro Leagues. By Bob Luke, foreword by Monte Irvin. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. Pp. 208. Illustrations, table, notes, sources, index. ISBN 978-0-29271-751-0. $22.95, paper.) Willie Wells Field, a section of Austin’s new Butler Park (adjacent to the Palmer Events Center), occupies part of a tract where Disch Field, a twentiethcentury Minor League baseball park, once stood. Ironically, the original occupant of that park, the Austin Pioneers of the Class B Big State League, did not integrate until the mid-1950s. By that time, Wells, a shortstop banned from Major and Minor League Baseball because of the color of his skin, was completing his professional career. Despite his posthumous election to the Baseball Hall of Fame, Austinites’ and baseball fans’ recognition of his name is probably only slightly better, if that, than of the old hastily built bush-league diamond. Bob Luke enlightens readers about the career of this lesser-known sports star and “the segregated conditions under which he played” (p. 2) in his argument justify348 Southwestern Historical Quarterly January *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 348 ing Wells’s induction into baseball’s most hallowed hall. In so doing, he accomplishes his goal of writing a book for enthusiastic and casual fans alike. Indeed, those uninterested in the game itself will find value in this publication. Willie Wells begins slowly, unlike its subject. Luke uses his opening chapters to convince readers of the validity of Wells’s enshrinement and of the extent of his talent. These chapters rely heavily on the memories of teammates, opponents, and fans, since statistics from the Negro leagues are rare. Still, his abundance of anecdotal history mixed with available statistics is convincing, except possibly to extreme statistical junkies. Luke does an excellent job of interweaving facts and opinions from oral histories, newspaper accounts, and other books on the Negro leagues. For readers more interested in twentieth-century or Austin...