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Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Category Archives: Early Life

Charleston Chronology

25 Sunday Nov 2018

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Biography, Brown Dodgers, Cuba, Early Life, Harrisburg Giants, Homestead Grays, Indianapolis ABCs, Indianapolis Clowns, Lincoln Stars, Managing Career, Philadelphia Stars, Philippines, Pittsburgh Crawfords, Toledo/Indianapolis Crawfords

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Oscar Charleston

I had intended to include in Oscar Charleston: The Life and Legend of Baseball’s Greatest Forgotten Player a chronology of Charleston’s life. I thought it would be particularly helpful in Oscar’s case, given how peripatetic he was, and given the errors floating around in the online ether. But including it would just make the darn book too long, said the University of Nebraska Press, no doubt wisely. So I have now included that chronology here. You can navigate to it using the top menu of the site.

As always, if you spy any errors or have any questions, please let me know.

Oscar in the Baseball Research Journal

16 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Biography, Early Life, Indianapolis ABCs, Philippines

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Baseball Research Journal, Donie Bush, Indianapolis ABCs, Oscar Charleston

My piece on Oscar’s rookie season with the Indianapolis ABCs, including a detailed account of the brawl he helped spark in an October 1915 contest versus the Donie Bush All-Stars, is now out in the Baseball Research Journal‘s print edition.

It’s not online yet, but I suspect it will be before long.

If you just can’t wait, looks like you can buy the issue here.

And if you also just can’t wait for the bio to be published…well, the manuscript is coming along. The University of Nebraska Press will be the publisher.

Charleston’s first appearance in the papers

24 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Early Life

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Bullet Joe Rogan, Manila League, Oscar Charleston, Philippines baseball

On February 28, 1914, the all-black 24th Infantry baseball team played its first game in the Philippines’ semi-professional Manila League. The club included two future Hall of Famers in Bullet Joe Rogan and Oscar Charleston.

That was the official start of Charleston’s professional baseball career. But the 24th actually began to play Manila League teams several weeks earlier, as part of the city’s Carnival celebration. Their first game against a Manila League team came on February 8. Here is the story from the next day’s Manila Times.

manila-times-020914-11

Neither Rogan nor Charleston had a hit, but Rogan did strike out ten batters. Not a bad way to announce yourself. (By the way, the paper routinely referred to the All-Filipinos team as the “Brownies”–referring to their skin color, of course.)

Charleston–who was only seventeen and a half years old at the time–started slow at the plate, but he did go Rogan one better on the mound a few weeks later, after official league play had begun. I think the following game of March 15, 1914, may have been his first professional appearance as a pitcher (but I’m not sure about that). If so, how many pitchers can say they struck out four men in the first inning of their first game?

manila-times-031614-2

 

Oscar Charleston’s Birth Site

26 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Early Life

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birthplace, Indianapolis history, Oscar Charleston

From time to time it has been reported that when Oscar Charleston was born his family was living at 1636 Bundy Place (then called Guffin Street) in Indianapolis, or even that he “grew up” at that address. That is not the case. Newspaper announcements of Charleston’s birth make clear that the Charlestons were living on the 200 block of Yandes Street when he was born. This address was on the northeast side of the city in the Martindale neighborhood. The Charlestons then went on to live in no fewer than 12 separate houses before Oscar joined the Army. Oscar grew up first in the Martindale neighborhood, and later in the Indiana Avenue neighborhood.

Today, what was in 1896 the 200 block of Yandes is, I am fairly certain, the 1200 block of Yandes. Here is what that street looks like now.

1289 Yandes c

Where the trailer is sitting is where the street was. Obviously this is no longer really a street, and all the houses are long gone. The street sign is still there, though, although no one is delivering any pizzas down here.

sign at Yandes intersection

For context, here is 1287 Yandes located on a Google map.

Virtually no one lives in the immediate vicinity today, although a quarter-mile or so up the street one finds a few residences. Needless to say, there is no mention of Charleston anywhere. I’d like to say that Indianapolis ought to erect a plaque of some kind, but no one except semi-truck drivers and folks up to no good would ever see it.

Charleston’s birth on October 14, 1896, provided the first occasion for mention of his family in the papers. In the October 21 issue of the Indianapolis News, under “Birth Returns,” it was reported that to Thomas and Mary Charleston, 287 Yandes, had been born a boy. No name was reported, but Thomas and Mary let it be known where their sympathies in the forthcoming election by giving Oscar the middle name of McKinley.

The address given for the Charlestons by the News, 287 Yandes, is different from the one given by the Indianapolis Journal on the same date, which was 299 Yandes. And both are different from the address given for Thomas Charleston in the 1897 Indianapolis city directory, which was 289 Yandes.

To further the confusion, an 1895 city ordinance ordered some of Indianapolis’s streets to be renumbered, but the address of 287 (or 289, or 299) Yandes seems to have been given under the old system, as the north-south Yandes then had its southern terminus right about where the east-west 2nd street would have come through had it been extended from the west. This same part of Yandes appears to be numbered 1200–1299 today.

By the way, the 1600 block of Bundy Place (old Guffin Street) is an alley today. The only home that remains on the alley that might have stood when the Charlestons lived there is this one:

house near 1636 Bundy Place -- could've been like

The home where the Charlestons lived appears to be completely gone, as does every other house he lived in before joining the military.

Roy and the drugstore

19 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Early Life

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Cannon Ball Brewing Company, F. X. Erath, Roy Charleston

As I drove around Indianapolis looking up old Charleston-related addresses last week, I came across a ghost sign on Bellefontaine that rang a bell. The painted words “F. X. Erath” were faintly visible on the side of an old brick corner building. Frank Erath, I remembered, was the grocer who discovered and held Oscar’s oldest brother Roy in July 1900 after Roy had broken into the drugstore next door–apparently in order to steal a baseball, among other things. Here was the Indianapolis News’s story of July 24.

 

Ind News 072400 Roy C crop

Roy was only 11, but he was booked for burglary and petit larceny. In November, after a grand jury returned an indictment, he was committed to the Indiana Reform School for Boys. Things turned out alright for Roy, fortunately. He became a champion prizefighter (locally) and a beloved father.

Today, the Erath grocery is being redeveloped by Cannon Ball Brewing Company. I believe the building across the street, which is being redeveloped by the brewery owners into a restaurant, is the drugstore that Roy robbed.

Exterior FX Erath c

Clipping of the Week

21 Saturday May 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Early Life, Philippines

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24th Infantry, Indianapolis Freeman, Manila Times, Oscar Charleston, Philippines

Going to try to make this a regular feature.

In this clipping (click to enlarge), from January 1, 1916, the Indianapolis Freeman reprints a short piece from the Manila Times informing Philippines readers about Charleston’s whereabouts. Oscar had left the islands in March 1915, when he was 18 years old. Apparently he was not too young to have left quite an impression on the local baseball fans.

Also, no one is naming their kids Nimrod anymore. Pity.

Freeman 010116

 

Basic training

21 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Early Life

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Angel Island, Fort McDowell, Oscar Charleston

After he enlisted in the Army in 1912, Oscar Charleston’s first stop was Fort McDowell, which encompassed the whole of Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. All things considered, not a bad place to do your basic training. But how different it must have been for a 15-year-old who may never have left Marion County, let alone Indiana.

392108-angel_island

A dirty city

17 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Early Life, Uncategorized

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Booth Tarkington, National Avenue, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Turmoil

The Indianapolis of Oscar Charleston’s youth was notable for its dirt. In the early 1900s soot would become so integral to the city’s landscape that it served as a literary device in the books written by Indianapolis native Booth Tarkington about the era, especially his Growth-trilogy novels: The Magnificent Ambersons, The Turmoil, and National Avenue. Black soot streaks the city’s statues and residents’ curtains in The Magnificent Ambersons. At times it is so thick it can be shoveled.

True to the booster spirit, the city’s new-rich industrialists take great pride in the dirt. The Turmoil’s capitalist protagonist, Dan Oliphant,

was the city incarnate. He loved it, calling it God’s country, as he called the some Prosperity, breathing the dingy cloud with relish. And when soot fell upon his cuff he chuckled; he could have kissed it. “It’s good! It’s good!” he said, and smacked his lips in gusto. “Good, clean soot: it’s our life-blood, God bless it!” The smoke was one of his great enthusiasms; he laughed at a committee of plaintive housewives who called to beg his aid against it. “Smoke’s what brings your husbands’ money home on Saturday night,” he told them, jovially. . . . “You go home and ask your husbands what smoke puts in their pockets out o’ the pay-roll—and you’ll come around next time to get me to turn out more smoke instead o’ chokin’ it off!”

Oliphant’s words were no mere fictional fancy. In Indianapolis as elsewhere smoke was often regarded as a tangible symbol of progress—and Indianapolis had progress in spades. As one resident recalled, smoke fell from the sky so thickly that “if you rocked on the back porch all morning and then went in for lunch, when you went out again after lunch you had to clean the chair thoroughly again.” Anti-smoke ordinances passed in the late 1890s and early 1900s provided little if any abatement of the nuisance.

The city’s ubiquitous smoke signified an obsession with growth. In Tarkington’s portrayal, turn-of-the-century Indianapolis was fairly frenzied by a “profound longing for size” such as that which drove Dan Oliphant. “Year by year the longing increased until it became an accumulated force: We must Grow! We must be Big! We must be Bigger! Bigness means Money! And the thing began to happen.” The factories and, just a bit later, the automobile were the primary instruments by which the “thing began to happen,” argued Tarkington. Together they brought “Death [to] the God of Things as They Are.”

Charleston enlists

02 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Early Life

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Oscar Charleston, United States Army

A century ago no less than today, the military looked like a damn fine option to poor, undereducated young men wishing to escape, or at least delay, a life of occupational drudgery. By early 1912, Oscar Charleston had decided that for him the Army made a lot of sense—and that his being only fifteen years old was no reason to wait. So, listing his birthday as October 14, 1893 (the right date, but the wrong year, which was actually 1896), he enlisted on March 7, 1912. Indeed, though when fully grown he would be 5’11”, Oscar’s youth is indicated by the fact that he is listed as just 5′ 5 1/2″ on the enlistment rolls. In the record shown here, Charleston’s name appears about halfway down the page.

Charleston army enlistenment 1912

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Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

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