Negro League Player Still Hears the Cheers

Lonnie Summers, now 73, doesn’t step up to the plate anymore. Or squat behind it and flash signals to the pitcher. But when the former catcher and batting champion picked up a bat in the living room of his Inglewood home the other day, he instinctively held it up as if ready to take a cut.

“Wait a minute,” he said in the middle of a conversation about the good old days, disappearing into another room. He came back with a team photo, disappeared again and returned with a huge stack of tattered newspaper clippings from decades ago. The mementos, and the memories they evoked, had not been hauled out for a while.

Things were different during his years behind the plate, Summers recalled. Baseball was tougher, both on and off the field. The bus rides were long; the pay was low. And, oh yeah, blacks played on different ball diamonds from whites.

Summers, an Oklahoma native who hung up his glove in 1954, is one of an estimated 140 survivors of the Negro Leagues, the sole professional baseball forum for blacks in the United States before Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, began the integration of the major leagues by signing Jackie Robinson in 1945.

“Lonnie was one of those big, strong ballplayers who hit powerful line drives,” said Chico Renfroe, an Atlanta-based sportswriter. “He hit some of the most screaming line drives you’ve seen in your life.”

Renfroe, himself a former Negro League player, said it was only “Father Time that kept (Summers) from joining Jackie in the majors.”

Summers’ professional career began in the late 1930s, when he played for the Baltimore Elite Giants in the Negro Leagues for a few years. Then, for the next decade and a half, he played on teams in Puerto Rico, Mexico and various South American countries before returning to the Negro Leagues’ Chicago American Giants. He ended his career playing in a semi-professional integrated league based in San Diego.

Summers, whose wife died recently, said it had been a long time since he’d thought about his glory days--the game in Mexico in which he batted in 11 runs, or the Negro League All-Star game at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in which he played with Junior Gilliam, a star second baseman for the Baltimore Elites who later signed with the Dodgers and become rookie of the year in the majors in 1953.

Baseball was not on Summers’ mind, he said, when he received a phone call last month inviting him to receive a plaque from the Inglewood City Council. The recognition was part of a nationwide program organized by Renfroe and sponsored by the Southern Bell telephone company of Atlanta to ensure that young people do not forget the trailblazers of the Negro League.

“It’s a part of history, and they’re dying off so fast,” Renfroe said. “People still tell me they didn’t know there was a separate league for blacks.”

Baseball could be an especially grueling game back then, Summers said.

“I once played a double-header in Chicago, rode all night to Philadelphia (on the team bus) to play one game and then headed out that day to play in Chicago again. After you took a shower, you sometimes didn’t even have time to get something to eat before the bus left.”

Teams sometimes played three games a day and eight in a weekend. To pass the time on the rickety buses, team members played checkers, slept, gossiped or took turns driving. When the team finally reached its destination, there were segregated hotels, restaurants and water fountains to contend with.

Renfroe said gas-station water fountains marked “Colored” had lukewarm water, but the ones marked “White” offered cold water. The team members could not drink from the cold fountain, but they sometimes surreptitiously filled a container with the cold water and drank it on the bus.

Once, Summers recalled, he and his teammates entered a packed restaurant in Detroit after a game and were told by the manager that the eating establishment was closed.

But it’s full, they protested.

It’s closed, the manager insisted.

They ate down the street.

Summers said black team members knew to stay out of certain parts of town. Meanwhile, the routine of playing and quickly moving on to the next game kept racial incidents to a minimum, he said.

It was a love of baseball that kept players going, Summers said, not huge salaries. He earned $250 a month when he started, with a $2-a-day eating allowance for out-of-town games. The salary improved when he crossed the border to play in Mexico, but even then he earned less than his white teammates.

Summers would not criticize the high salaries being paid his contemporary counterparts, saying they deserve what they are getting. He added, however, that ballplayers today do not appear to enjoy the game as much as Negro League players did.

Summers said getting a chance to play in the majors did not prey on his mind during his career. Negro League baseball was highly competitive; its teams frequently beat major league teams in exhibition games. “I played against the best and with the best,” he said.

But looking back, Summers said he does sometimes feel that he was cheated out of the big time. Once Robinson broke the color line, younger Negro Leaguers such as Willie Mays, Roy Campanella, Ernie Banks and Hank Aaron went to the majors. “It just shows that we could have done it all along,” Summers said.

“I missed out on a lot,” he said. “I had an excellent arm in my prime, and as far as hitting and catching and running was concerned, I knew I could play. The thing was getting the break.

“I think the game of baseball owes us something. But I would never bring it up because I know the first thing they’re going to say: ‘Why should we give you something when you didn’t make it? You didn’t make it.’ ”

Summers moved to Los Angeles after he left baseball and became a janitor in Los Angeles schools. He retired in the mid-1980s after 29 1/2 years on the job.

Baseball, once his obsession, has lost some of its charm as the years have passed. Summers has been invited to Dodger Stadium as a dignitary but has turned down the offer. He still occasionally gets to the ballpark but prefers to sit by himself in the bleachers.

“If I go to the ballpark now, I don’t let anyone know I’m there,” he said. “I go to watch the game, not to celebrate anything.”

Summers had second thoughts about receiving the plaque from Inglewood but finally decided to accept it. Now, next to the team pictures and other baseball photos lining the walls of his home is a fancy proclamation. “Read it,” he says. “It’s all true.”

“These players,” it says, “endured countless miles on the road, accommodations which were less than accommodating (and) pay which was no reflection of their talents and efforts. The strides made, the trails blazed, the sacrifices endured . . . and the heights reached will forever maintain their place in history.”