Traveling Man : ‘Stick’ Robinson Remembers the Best of the Negro Leagues

Meet Earl Robinson for the first time and you soon notice the twinkle in his eye, a ready laugh, a sense of spunk and energy that completely belies his age of 74.

A handshake reveals even more. The grip is firm and strong, suggesting the strength of a former athlete.

Robinson was a baseball player. A good one. A catcher and an outfielder who swung the bat so proficiently, he was given the nickname “Stick.”

“I was just gifted,” Robinson said from his home in Fullerton. “I could always hit, and to all fields. I batted left-handed, but I could hit it as well to left as I could to right.”

Robinson is one of the last remaining links to the Negro Leagues baseball era. The Negro Leagues were first established in 1920 because African-Americans were banned from the Major Leagues. Jackie Robinson (no relation) broke the modern-day color barrier in 1947, but the Negro Leagues stayed in existence until 1960, when the last two franchises folded.

Robinson did not play for one of the well-known teams, like the Kansas City Monarchs, Chicago American Giants, Pittsburgh Crawfords or Homestead Grays.

But starting with the Kansas City Royals in 1947, Robinson was a member of several barnstorming teams that played against Negro League teams across the United States and Mexico.

The Royals’ team he played for appeared in the movie “The Jackie Robinson Story,” released in 1948.

Some of the players Robinson played with or against included Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, brothers Mel and Andy Porter, Chet Brewer, Sammy Hughes and Biz Mackey, the man Robinson said taught him the finer points of catching.

Brewer gave Robinson the nickname “Stick,” after a game in Mexico during which Robinson hit three home runs.

Wealth of Memories

The experiences left him with a trunkful of memories and stories.

“I can remember a game in White Plains, N.Y.,” Robinson said. “We played the House of David, an all-Jewish team. They had the worst lighting; just a bunch of lights strung between telephone poles. In the outfield you had to crouch real low to see the flight of the ball.”

Or the time in Mexico, when some base-running chicanery by Cool Papa Bell--a player others said “was so fast he could turn off the light and be in bed before the room got dark”--caused a near riot.

“I’m up to bat and Cool Papa Bell is on first,” Robinson said. “I get a single, and as I turn toward second, I see the right fielder come up and throw to home. I turn around and see Cool Papa sliding home. I’d heard he was fast, but I couldn’t believe that.

“Well he wasn’t that fast; turned out that when he got to second, he cut past the pitchers mound and went home without ever going to third. Somehow, the umpires never saw him and ruled him safe. It almost caused a riot. Finally, Bell had to go back and tell the umps what he had done.”

Born near San Antonio in Monthalia, Texas--”a town that’s about two blocks long,” according to Robinson’s wife Charlotte--Robinson’s family moved to Watts in 1930, when he was 4.

He graduated from Jordan High, where he played baseball, football, basketball and ran track. In 1943, he enlisted in the Navy. He was a baker on the USS Pennsylvania “who did my share” of loading munitions during combat in the South Pacific.

Robinson said he saw his first Negro League game while in the Navy. “It was in Philadelphia. The Pittsburgh Crawfords against the Baltimore Elite Giants, in 1944. It was the first time I ever saw [legendary catcher] Josh Gibson. He hit a home run so hard, it broke a wooden seat in the stands.”

Robinson learned the position of catcher while still in the Navy. While stationed in San Diego, he tried out for the base’s team. “They said they needed a catcher and I told them I could do it,” Robinson said. “I’d never caught in my life.”

Starting From Scratch

After his discharge, Robinson returned to Los Angeles and took a job with the Kwik Set Lock Co., where he stayed for 43 years before retiring in 1990. But he kept playing baseball with municipal and semipro teams and was soon spotted by some former Negro Leaguers who were starting their own teams. His employer gave him time off to play baseball.

He played first in 1947 for the Kansas City Royals, a team Paige occasionally pitched for, Robinson said.

“He was still a big name,” Robinson said. “But he’d never pitch the whole game, just enough for people to see him. We’d often play two games a day back then. Once, he pitched three to four innings in Los Angeles in the afternoon, and pitched another three to four innings in San Diego that night. Both times Andy Porter would finish up.”

Robinson did sign a minor league contract in 1949 with the Cleveland Indians. The experience was brief and unpleasant.

“They sent me to Red Bluff, S.C.,” Robinson said. “When I got there, there was a sign on the right-field wall that read, “Support your local [Ku Klux] Klan.’ I thought, ‘Oh, man,’ and came right back home.

“I could not have gone through what Jackie [Robinson] did.”

So Earl Robinson was content to play on semipro teams like the Los Angeles Eagles and the Los Angeles Yankees that served as opponents whenever Negro League teams came to Los Angeles. He also joined Negro League all-star and barnstorming teams that traveled the country in hopes of making extra money.

“The games were always a big event,” Robinson said. “The men went in suits and ties. The women in their Sunday best dresses. Some major league teams would not play us [in exhibition games] in their stadiums. Not only could we beat some of those teams, we’d outdraw them. Some owners were envious.”

Lost History

Robinson is a part of the African-American baseball legacy that is not well known, according to Ray Doswell, curator of the Negro League Hall of Fame museum in Kansas City.

“There was no history written on these teams,” Doswell said. “Just because a team was black did not make it part of the Negro League, which had an official structure. There is a vast amount of uncharted information on community teams, exhibition teams, and even other organized leagues not part of the official Negro Leagues structure.”

For example, Doswell said, in 1947 there was the West Coast League with teams in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Fresno. “Technically, they were not part of the Negro Leagues. But some of those players would join Negro League teams.”

Robinson, who quit playing in 1960, said he still follows baseball. “I had stopped watching in 1994 when they had the strike. That was so dumb. But I eventually came back. Baseball just gets in your blood.”

He had four children with his first wife, Jackie. His oldest son, Lee, who now lives in Memphis, Tenn., was a catcher in the Dodger minor league system in the 1970s.

Charlotte, his wife of the last 26 years whom he met at work, is also retired. She had three children before she married Robinson. Together, they had a daughter, Monica.

These days, Robinson is content to take his daily four-mile walk, work in his garden, and play with his 13 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

And even if they don’t always know the names of the players he knew, Robinson’s stories and memories are still a hit.