Friday, May 27, 1927: New York City

The Flood. The General. And Sam Rice’s Secret.

Myles Thomas

Published in

The Diary of Myles Thomas

20 min readNov 3, 2016

Rain. Rain. Rain. And more rain.

The flooding in the Mississippi Valley continues to bring devastation to a stunningly large part of the country. The papers say the flood line now stretches some 500 miles from New Orleans to Illinois — over 17 million acres. As hard as it is to believe, more than half a million people are now homeless.

New Orleans is practically gone.

Pops Armstrong, who’s from New Orleans, told Benny Morton that the city leaders there purposely diverted the flood waters to the colored parishes by breaking their levees. They washed them out — even drowned some — but they didn’t save the city.

Now that their homes are gone, I wonder how many will stay in the South. Benny told me the other night that he’s already seeing a wave of them — “Folks washed out of those cracker towns” — coming north to New York and Chicago.

President Coolidge has put Herbert Hoover in charge of the flood relief efforts, and he’s set up over a hundred relief camps. He went on the radio from Memphis to ask Americans to donate money to support the relief effort. He said that the families stuck in Memphis now resemble “the pitiable plight of a lost battle,” and that just a couple of blocks from where he was standing the flood waters were raging at a rate 10 times that of Niagara Falls! In parts of Mississippi, Hoover says, the water is over 50 feet deep.

Major League Baseball teams are all in the North, so none of them are threatened directly by the floods, but the weather’s been awful everywhere and rainouts are being called left and right — which means there will be plenty of double-headers piled up on top of each other later in the season.

This week’s downpours in New York postponed three of our games against the Athletics. And today our exhibition in West Point against the cadets was called off after less than two innings because of the rain.

I hitched a ride back from West Point with the Babe, who had driven up in his custom-made Nash sedan. On our return he drove much too fast, as usual. Jidge is a regular collector of speeding tickets, and also shameless about using his fame to get out of them, often by handing the cop who’s stopped him two autographs — one, Ruth’s own, and the other that of the Secretary of the Treasury, on a $50 bill.

If it wasn’t for Ruth’s catlike reflexes, he would no doubt have been involved in a dozen major accidents in his career. Instead, he’s only been involved in a half dozen — several of them quite serious. Hoyt says in Boston, Ruth once destroyed his Packard, took a few minutes to dust the cobwebs from his head and then hitched a ride to the local Packard dealership where within minutes he drove off in a new car.

The Babe clearly gets a thrill out of dangerous driving, and he also clearly gets a thrill out of terrifying his passengers. Today he turned our return trip to Manhattan into a Coney Island ride, repeatedly swerving to splash through deep pools of water that had welled up on the sides of the roads, like a kid jumping in puddles. It was terrifying.

When I got back to Steven’s townhouse from West Point — an outcome that was seriously in doubt a couple of times — I found an unexpected visitor sitting in my living room, playing my jazz records and drinking Steven’s Scotch whisky: General Crowder.

Crowder is a pitcher for the Washington Senators whose real name is Alvin, but no one’s called him that since the Great War. Instead, he has the dubious distinction of being nicknamed after Gen. Enoch Crowder, the man who oversaw the war’s draft lottery, and also issued the “Work or Fight” order that forced so many ballplayers to enlist.

Alvin Crowder and I first met back in ’24, when I was having a disappointing year for the Toronto Maple Leafs in the International League and he was a late-blooming 25-year-old pitcher on the Rochester Tribe. It was a game in Toronto at the end of the season, one that had no bearing on either of our team’s chances for the minor league pennant.

**Myles Thomas with the Toronto Maple Leafs**

After I lost my short-lived bid for a no-hitter by giving up a home run in the top of the third to Rochester’s number eight hitter, I was so hot-headed-pissed that I decided to brush back the next batter, paying no attention to the fact that I was brushing back the opposing pitcher. To make matters worse, I hit him.

When it was my turn to bat the next inning, the General returned the favor. Before the game was over, we’d hit each other three times. The game was secondary — actually, it was less than that — eventually turning into a crazy Mexican standoff to determine which of us cared less about our ERA, and more about beaning the other. I thought I had proven my point when I clocked Crowder in the eighth with men on first and third, not caring that I was loading the bases with only one out.

But the General did me one better. In the bottom of the ninth, Rochester was winning 4–2 and I was the sixth man due up. After Crowder retired the first two batters, and was one out from victory, he intentionally walked the next three Maple Leafs, just so he could hit me one more time. While he was walking his third batter, our pitching coach, Larry Hatheway came over to me and suggested, “We should fuck with that loon, and pinch-hit for you. That will drive him nuts.”

“Great idea, Larry,” I said, slapping him on the back. Then I turned to our bench. “Hey, which one of you dumb bastards wants to hit for for me and take a fastball to the head from that lunatic?”

Not surprisingly, there were no volunteers.

The General then showed me something special.

After I got in the batter’s box, he had his catcher stand up and catch three more intentional balls — just to prolong my misery. And then he drilled me, forcing in a run, before retiring the next batter to end the insanity, and put a 4–3 win in his back pocket.

After the game, as I got out of the showers, our ballboy handed me a note. It said, “I need a drink. Meet you at the Maple Bar.”

Of such encounters are true friendships born.

While we were getting rained out in Philly, Crowder was in Washington where it was pouring even harder — torrential downpours washed out the Senators’ home games Tuesday, Wednesday and today — so their team took an early train to New York for our three-game series at the Stadium starting tomorrow. I wasn’t expecting Crowder this afternoon, but I was happy to see him.

“Mon General!”

“Tommy, boy. Where are we drinking tonight?”

“Sorry, General, I’m turning in early. After pitching pretty well against you boys on Monday in D.C., I’ve got a shot of being handed the ball in relief tomorrow.”

“So, what about me? I gave up a night out with the boys for what? Milk and cookies?”

“Milk and Scotch, General. Milk and scotch. Bring it with you. But an early night. OK? Let’s walk over to McDonald’s for a bite and some shots.”

**McDonald’s Restaurant, Broadway and 72nd Street.**

Crowder and I leave the townhouse and walk west through the rain to Broadway and then down two blocks, to 72nd Street. Inside McDonald’s pub we grab a booth in the back, and I introduce the General to Kelly McDonald, the daughter of the owner, who knows almost as much about baseball as Miller Huggins and John McGraw. Kelly asks Crowder who the Senators are sending to the mound tomorrow. He tells her that for the first game of our double bill it will be Hod Lisenbee — their rookie sensation, who’s already beaten us twice this season — but that he isn’t sure who’s getting the ball for the second game.

We both order steaks, and I tell Kelly that we’ll start off with two glasses of milk, and two extra, empty glasses. “Be careful tonight,” she sings in her Irish accent. “Even though you’re in a back booth, do us both a favor and don’t go flashing that bottle you brung with ya’. You hear me, Myles?”

“Kelly, you’ve wounded me. When have I been anything but discreet?”

“Yer OK, but yer rascal pal, Steven, almost got us fined last week puttin’ his bottles of hooch up on the table.”

“Well, don’t worry, Miss McDonald, I’ll do all of my pouring the same way your old man deals with the police — under the table.”

“Thank you, Myles. Yer a darlin’. Yer all a girl could ask for.”

Between our under the table pours of Scotch, the General and I catch up. We talk a lot about baseball and our teammates. We swap stories, but no matter how much we drink, I’m careful not to give away any secrets that could give him or the Senators an edge. And I know the General is doing the same. It’s an unspoken code between competitive friends. We’re major league ballplayers. That means that we’re competitors first, friends second. I swear the only thing about retirement I look forward to is being able to swap inside stories with other players like the General.

“I’m pretty sure this is Johnson’s last year,” he tells me. “Walter’s almost recovered from his broken ankle — I doubt you boys will see him this trip, but he’ll probably be back on the mound in Boston next week. Hell, he’ll probably come back and pitch another shutout. Shirley Povich, this great Jew kid who covers us for The Post, told me that Johnson’s next shutout will be his 110th. Can you imagine?”

I can’t. The General and I both broke into the American League last season. We quickly calculate that between the two of us, in the equivalent of a little more than a season and a half, we now have 10 complete games — and no shutouts. Johnson must have 400 complete games, hell, maybe 500. He’s had years where he’s won 36, 33, 28 and 27 games — along with a bunch of other 20-win seasons. Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Pete Alexander and Cy Young are as far apart from the rest of us pitchers on earth as Ruth, Gehrig, Hornsby and that bastard Cobb are from the rest of the hitters.

**Walter Johnson shaking hands with President Coolidge.**

“I’ll never be Walter Johnson,” the General says as our steaks hit the table. “But I believe we can both be winning pitchers in the majors. You feel that way too, Tommy, right?”

“I do. I really do.”

“But a career like Johnson’s? Shit, I’ve never even dreamed about having a career like that.”

Kelly interrupts us, to make sure I’ve noticed the two policemen who just sat down for their nightly freeloading dinner at the front of the restaurant. I nod and roll my eyes to let her know that I’m way ahead of her, and that she should stop worrying, the Scotch will stay below the table. She heads back to the front.

“Hey, speaking of confidence, Tommy, what’s with your boy Gehrig? He’s got almost twice as many RBIs as Ruth. He’s on a helluva hot streak.”

“I don’t think it’s a hot streak. I think it’s going to be like this for a very long time.”

“The whole season?”

“No, General. When I say a very long time, I don’t mean this season, I mean many seasons. He’s up there with Hornsby and Cobb, and not very far from Ruth. He’s a very strange bird, though, very insecure and very serious. I’ve never met anyone like Lou. I mean, I’ve met shy people, and insecure people, but none of them were as great at what they did as this kid is at baseball. Big, strong, handsome — he’s got less reason to be insecure than any ballplayer I’ve ever met, except for Ruth. In fact, if I could take any one player to start a team with, it would be Gehrig.”

“Over Ruth?”

“The Babe is 32. His miracles can’t go on forever. Lou is 23.”

“Youth. I’m beginning to miss it,” the General says as he pulls out a pack of Lucky Strikes, lights a stick and slides the pack across the table to me.

“Hey, what’s going on with Sam Rice?” I ask.

The General takes a long time to think.

“Pour me another shot, would you.” He hands me his glass. I refill it under the table. He takes a stiff swallow and stares down at his hands.

Sam Rice is one of the most famous Senators and a crowd favorite. He’s a jackrabbit, one of the fastest players in the league — he plays right but catches more balls than most center fielders. In the ’25 World Series against the Pirates, he made what many call the greatest catch the game has ever seen, racing across the field and diving headfirst into the outfield stands.

Rice has been with Washington for a dozen years and his lifetime batting average must be close to .330 — last year he hit almost .340 — but now, thirty-some odd games into the season, he’s barely batting .200.

“Tommy, it’s strange. Sam and I have gotten real close. He’s much older, but we share the military thing. Sam joined the Navy well before the Great War, back in ’12. He says he joined because he wanted to see the world. I joined the Army much later, right after the war was over, in ’19. I wouldn’t exactly say I wanted to see the world, but I sure as shit wanted to get the hell out of Winston-Salem. I wanted no part of that town — not the tobacco factories, not the cotton mills — and those were about the only two places where an uneducated kid like me could find regular work. So, I figured that with everyone surrendering to us, I could join the Army, not get shot at, and finally get far away from Winston-Salem.”

The General cocks his head and smiles.

“And I’ve got to give the Army credit, ’cause they sent me as far from Winston-Salem as they possibly could.”

To be specific, the U.S. Army sent 19-year-old Alvin Crowder to Siberia.

“That was one remote icebox.”

**U.S. Expeditionary Force in Siberia, 1919**

In Russia, Crowder was part of an insanely ill-fated expeditionary force sent by President Wilson right after the Russian Revolution to guard U.S. supplies and railroad trains in Siberia. Crowder carried a gun but never fired a shot, in no small part because many of the Army’s guns froze and broke in the brutal Siberian cold. Over a hundred of his fellow soldiers perished on the expedition, most from the cold and disease. A year later, his unfortunate unit was redeployed to the Philippines.

“After that fuckin’ icebox, I was ready to head back to Winston-Salem.”

Thanks to baseball, he didn’t have to.

“To get out of digging ditches in the Philippines, I tried out for the Army’s baseball team. Turned out I was pretty good, so they transferred me to one of their top teams on a swell base in San Francisco.”

Once Crowder’s time was served, he wound his way through the minors for three years, until the Senators picked him up and gave him his first start last July.

Sam Rice had an equally calamitous Naval career, according to the General, during which he also got to see up close the disastrous results of President Wilson’s inane foreign interventions.

“Sam’s tour was as much of a mess as mine. Before the Great War started, he found himself in the middle of that rhubarb in Vera Cruz, when Wilson sent in the Marines just because the Mexicans refused to raise our flag in their naval port. Twenty marines and sailors were killed, and about a hundred more wounded — not to mention a couple of hundred Mexicans killed — all because Wilson wanted to raise one goddamn flag.

“Sam watched some good friends die, up close. He heard bullets whizzing right by him and he told me he tasted the dust from building fragments as the bullets hit just behind his head. If he wasn’t so damn fast he probably would have ended up one of the dead.”

“Like I did in the Army, Sam started playing some ball in the Navy, and eventually Clark Griffith bought him for the Senators. Anyway, like I said, we’ve gotten close, and I thought I knew him pretty well — talking about the hell we went through in the services — and then all this flooding happened.”

I put my glass under the table and pour myself another shot. I look up toward the front of the restaurant and see the two policemen get up from their free meal and head back out into the night, without leaving a tip or saying a word. I wonder what the McDonalds get out of the deal. Protection of some sort? I look around, there’s no speakeasy here. Must be something else, some other deal McDonald’s has with the cops.

“General, we’ve been winding around a lot of roads — from Winston-Salem to Siberia, to the Philippines, to Mexico, to Washington, to New York. We’ve talked about dead soldiers, dead sailors, dead marines, and a bunch of dead Mexicans — what’s the big deal about the rain and Sam Rice?”

“Turns out Sam didn’t just join the Navy to see the world. He joined the Navy to get away from his old life.” The General reaches over the table and takes back his Lucky Strikes.

“Only a couple of people know this, Tommy. On the Senators, it’s just Walter Johnson and me. And I’m still not sure why Sam told me, except, like I said, maybe it’s the military thing. But earlier this month we were in Cleveland and we were rained out for three straight days. Sam doesn’t like to go to the movies, ’cause he thinks it will hurt his eyes, so — ”

The booze has made us both talky — so I interrupt the General and tell him how Ruth’s that way, too. The Babe’s made two Hollywood pictures now, but he hasn’t seen either of them. When they have those big premiers, as soon as the lights go out, he sneaks out the back. And all of his Hollywood friends think he’s seen their films, but he hasn’t seen a one. Instead, he gets us, his teammates, or Christy Walsh to tell him all about them, in as much detail as we can give him. To screw with Ruth, Hoyt sometimes makes some stuff up.

“Right, that’s Sam,” says Crowder. “No movies. Ever. So we’ve got three days of rain in Cleveland and not much to do. And we’re sitting around the hotel lobby, playing some gin — and mostly just lobby watching — and on the radio we hear there’s been a tornado back in D.C. Sam just puts down his cards and leaves, without saying a word. He heads back to his room. After an hour or so, I go up and knock on his door. He says come in. He’s just looking out the window at the rain. And it’s pretty clear he’s been crying.

“I ask him what was going on — I normally wouldn’t, but he said come in, so I figure he must want to talk. Then he tells me this story that’s … shit, Tommy, it’s had me drinking since.”

I just notice that the General has not only been knocking them back, he’s also been chaining his cigarettes. He’s smoking each one only about three quarters of the way down, and then he lights the next one up against it. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a couple of days.

Then he tells me about Sam Rice’s life before major league baseball.

“When Sam was a kid on the farm, he was married young — he was barely 18 and his bride was even younger, 16, and they lived near his parents’ place in this little town in Illinois — and pretty quickly they had their own farm and two kids. He was unbelievably happy.

“On the weekends he started playing sandlot ball, he was a pitcher back then, and he was really good, so he got invited to this tryout in a town about 150 miles away. And while he was gone for what he thought would be a week, his wife and kids moved in with his parents and his younger sisters, on their farm.

“On the second day of the tryout, Sam’s doing baserunning drills in the morning when suddenly everybody stops what they’re doing because coming straight across the ball field, tearing it up, is this Model T going about 40 miles an hour. The car stops right in the outfield, and two guys in the front seat are shouting his name, ‘Sam Rice! Sam Rice!’

“Sam gets off the dirt and runs over to the car and they hand him this telegram that says, ‘Tornado Struck. Family lost. Father in hospital. Return right away.’

“Sam pays the guy in the Tin Lizzy to drive him back home. He doesn’t even go back to the boarding house to get his clothes. He just heads back in his uniform. It takes them a long time, because the roads are mostly dirt, and he gets home at sunset. And there’s nothing there.

“No farm. No house. No animals. No family. Just this blood-red sunset coloring what used to be the corn fields. All around him it looked like the whole world was made of confetti — pieces of wood from the house and the barn, shreds of clothing and broken trees and corn stalks. The only things he could make out were pots and pans. There’s was no longer any wind at all.”

The General pauses to catch his breath. He opens up another pack.

“His wife and two children are dead. So is his mother. And his younger sisters. Their bodies have all been thrown hundreds of yards by the tornado. They were all found broken and naked — Tommy, the tornado had ripped their clothes from them.”

His glass is empty. I pour him another shot. I don’t bother to pour it under the table.

“His father was found stripped of his clothing, too, wandering naked down the road, carrying Sam’s daughter. She lived for about an hour after the neighbors found them, then she died in her grandfather’s arms. They were all — his mother, his sisters, his wife and his children — buried the morning after Sam got home. His father lasted a week before he died.

“Sam buried his father, then the next morning he up and left what used to be the farm. Didn’t even bother to sell the land. Just left it all behind. He says he drifted around the country for a couple of years — he just wandered, working as a farm hand, working on a repair gang on the railroads, just going whichever way the wind took him — South Dakota, Colorado, Kansas, West Virginia. Eventually he made it to the Navy yards in Virginia.”

The General leans forward, almost climbing over the table top. His eyes meet mine.

“Sam didn’t join the Navy to see the world, Tommy. He joined to try and forget it.”

Jesus.

Sam Rice has been playing ball all these years while living an endless nightmare.

Does he believe that he’ll see his children, his wife, his whole family again on the other side? What keeps him from trying to join them? He doesn’t play like he hates the world. I would. I would play fueled by hatred for the world for as long as I was still in it. If I were Sam Rice, I’d play like Cobb.

“But why now?” I ask the General. “Why after all these years? That tornado in D.C. didn’t do much damage.”

“What’s to say this is the first time he’s cracked up.”

“Yeah, but it’s never affected his game like this before.”

“I don’t know. Maybe Johnson does — like I said, Sam told me Walter knows. They’re real close. Hell, they’ve been teammates since before the war. But I’m no closer to Johnson than you are to Ruth — I can’t talk to Walter about it. I don’t know. I wish I could help him. I wish I — I just hope the old Sam can come back.”

We pay our tab and walk outside onto Broadway. I help the General into a cab. The rain has stopped. The odds are pretty good that we’ll be playing ball tomorrow. On the field before the game, the General and I will nod to each other, but team rules prohibit us from fraternizing at the ballpark. We’re major league baseball players.

I walk up Broadway, past Ruth’s home in the Ansonia Hotel. I wonder where he is tonight. The General is right, Johnson and Ruth are worlds apart from us. But Johnson and Rice have been teammates for over twenty years. I can’t think of any other players that have been teammates that long. I hope Walter can help Sam.

As I walk home I wonder what it will be like when I face Sam Rice in a game. Will I have any sympathy at all for him? I hope not.

Sam’s success at my expense could put me back on a train to Toronto, or to some other minor league town.

When I arrive home at Steven’s townhouse, I pour myself one last Scotch and lie in my bed wondering: What must it be like to be Ruth or Gehrig, and never have to think about the minors again? What must it be like to know that you will always be a major leaguer until the day you retire?

What must it be like to play the game without any fear?