Oscar Charleston by Jeremy Beer

Author:Jeremy Beer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO016000 Biography & Autobiography / Sports, SPO003030 Sports & Recreation / Baseball / History, SOC001000 Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska

7

Champion, 1932–1938

On January 28, 1932, Oscar Charleston was named the new manager of the Pittsburgh Crawfords. Thus did he begin an association, and finally a close friendship, with Gus Greenlee—a man he would hail in his scrapbook as “the daddy of them all”—that would last until Greenlee died on July 7, 1952.1 The next seven years would not be without their trials. Oscar would watch Greenlee’s empire rise and fall, his marriage to Janie falter, his skills slowly erode, and his place as the black game’s most popular player be usurped. But he would also emerge from these Pittsburgh Crawfords years with his first managerial championships and a hard-earned reputation as the unquestioned leader of the Negro Leagues’ most famous club.

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Oscar’s new boss had been born and raised in North Carolina, the son of a locally prominent contractor who instilled in his sons a strong drive for achievement.2 Two of those sons became doctors. Another became an attorney. Gus became the wealthiest and most famous of the brood by taking a somewhat different path. After dropping out of college, he became a bootlegger and racketeer. His father quite reasonably never approved of his wayward son’s career choice, but to nearly all of black Pittsburgh Gus Greenlee was a hero.

Greenlee arrived in Pittsburgh on a freight train in 1916. After he was mustered out of the army following the end of World War I, he returned to the city and began to fatten his wallet by running liquor as a taxi driver. Soon, he found himself the owner of a speakeasy, and a decade or so later, in 1933, he opened the Crawford Grill on Wylie Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. The restaurant was ideally located. Since the latter half of the nineteenth century the Hill had been a principal residence area for the city’s African Americans, and by the 1930s half of Pittsburgh’s 50,000–60,000 blacks lived in the neighborhood. Many, of course, were unemployed; in 1934 the combined rate of black unemployment and underemployment in Allegheny County reached 69 percent. Yet the Wylie Avenue commercial district stayed busy, offering a lively street life and plenty of night clubs in which Prohibition was not scrupulously observed.

Greenlee’s Crawford Grill was the most popular spot on the avenue. Three stories high and open all night, among its customers the grill counted black and white, rich and poor, entertainer and working man, policeman and pimp, athlete and politician. The food was excellent; the jazz stylings of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Lena Horne even better. Art Rooney, owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers and a friend of Greenlee’s, was a frequent visitor, and virtually every Negro Leaguer who came through the city hung out there. Greenlee often held court at the bar, gossiping with visitors and dispensing advice. He also dispensed financial help, for by 1932 he was the undisputed numbers king of Pittsburgh.

The numbers lottery was exceedingly popular in Pittsburgh, as indeed it was in many other cities. It was fun, easy, and cheap.

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