Before Jackie: A Novel

By Larry Harper

In this heartwarming novel, meticulously researched and based on true stories, a group of nine kids in post-World War II California are brought together by baseball. Free of adult prejudices and united by their love of the game, the kids overcome all obstacles—poverty, racism, physical disability—to become a vision of America’s joyous, diverse future. This is an uplifting story with a twist, where the friends, who call themselves The Nine, find themselves on a quest to dig up a communal grave in order to right a wrong. Through their adventures, friends are loyal above all else—to each other, to the team of Negro League players who befriends them, to their teacher, Ms. O’Doul, and to the great American pastime of baseball that makes all things possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Larry Harper
• Release date: Nov 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9780578574684

Book preview

PROLOGUE

It is October 27, 2010, a calm 62-degree day in San Francisco, as The Nine settle into luxury suite number ten at AT&T Park. It is game one of the World Series, pitting the American League Champion Texas Rangers against the hometown Giants. From the suite, The Nine are reminded of the beauty of the area, with panoramic views of San Francisco Bay and the Oakland Hills. The South Beach address of 24 Willie Mays Plaza pays homage to the greatest player of them all.

The group has just enjoyed John Legend’s rendition of the national anthem and a patriotic F-22 fighter-jet flyover from Travis Air Force Base, just a few flight minutes east of the city. There is a special buzz in the city—could this be the year that the San Francisco Giants win their first-ever World Series? Fifty-two years and thousands of games with some of the greatest players the sport has ever seen haven’t yielded a championship. San Francisco’s landmark Coit Tower, the Ferry Building, and City Hall are all illuminated with the glow of orange lighting in celebration of the home team. The Nine, lifelong friends, now in their eighties, grew up in the 1940s playing the game they love just a few miles south in Colma, San Francisco’s foggy neighbor. They are together for their annual reunion. And what else would they do but enjoy the grand old game?

World Series Game 1

The old friends peer onto the field at 4:54 p.m. to see Cleo Baldy Benson, the 1946 player-manager of the San Francisco Sea Lions of the West Coast Negro Baseball League, as he shuffles to the mound with the help of Niko Tanaka, one of The Nine. The 43,601 in attendance look on with curiosity as the two make their way slowly to the center of the field. Niko, now part-owner of the San Francisco Giants, escorts her dear friend to the mound, where he’ll throw out the ceremonial first pitch to kick off the World Series. Niko has spearheaded the effort to pay tribute to the West Coast Negro Baseball League, an important piece of forgotten baseball history. Cleo, ninety-nine years old, holds Niko tight as they pass home plate and arrive in front of the pitcher’s mound. Buster Posey, who was just named Rookie of the Year, is in his traditional crouch awaiting this historic pitch.

Once the game starts, the Rangers take an early 2–0 lead in game one, but the Giants roar back with an 11–7 victory behind a brilliant pitching performance by Tim Lincecum. The Nine stay in the suite, reminiscing on the way fate brought them all together shortly after World War II. Although the game ends just after 8:30 p.m., the gang stays in the suite until nearly midnight. Every one of the nine friends still resides within twenty miles of the stadium, and Niko has arranged transportation for their safe return home. As each year passes, it gets harder and harder for them to say goodbye.

CHAPTER 1

Niko Tanaka was the ninth and final kid to join the group back in October of 1945. She wasn’t sure about the rest of the group’s obsession with baseball, but the gang nevertheless appealed to her. They were eight kids from different backgrounds, geographic locations, and cultures who got together every day for fun. She’d never witnessed anything like it. She realized that it was the love of baseball that allowed this group to thrive as friends, because of and despite their diversity.

Niko’s father was the grounds superintendent at Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Colma, California, where the group gathered every afternoon to play baseball. All the kids’ families had migrated to the Westlake neighborhood of Daly City, formerly known as Vista Grande, for more prosperous working conditions. Daly City was named for the famous dairy farmer in the area who came west during the Gold Rush. The Westlake neighborhood was a modern grouping of new houses built by developer Henry Doelger; in 1946, a two-bedroom home was a cool $5,900.

Despite her initial reservations, baseball would soon be part of her everyday life. Niko was born in 1933 in Sacramento to Japanese parents who’d come to the United States in 1911. She had a modest but comfortable childhood growing up on a farm on Routier Road fifteen miles east of town. Back then, farmland near Mather Air Field was cheap. Her family grew Napa cabbage, carrots, berries, wild spinach, and walnuts. They planted some bamboo so they could knock the nuts from the trees and make frames to fly kites. Niko’s mom used old bedsheets for the kite fabric and strips of rice sacks for the tails. Niko always had the brightest kite in the sky because her mom soaked the fabric in Clorox liquid bleach. Clorox was this amazing product invented in 1913 by five guys in Oakland, and Niko’s mom used it on everything.

The farm was prosperous enough for the family to buy a greenish-brown 1932 Studebaker. The Studebaker was a popular automobile brand in the early 1900s, and the first German-designed car made in the United States. Phone lines had not been run out to the Japanese farming section of Sacramento, so any phone call had to be made from Oshima’s Grocery Store, a dusty two-mile walk.

Niko’s father spent hours every evening working with her on perfecting her ability to read, write, and speak English. By age seven, she was fluent enough to attend Kelly School, a three-mile walk down a gravel road to the one-room school house. At the end of each day, as her mind settled, she often turned to thoughts of her distant relatives in Japan, which was at war with the United States. She would calm herself each night by playing with her Kewpie doll. The popular Kewpie dolls, with their cherubic faces, were derived from a comic strip from the early 1900s. Created by Rose O’Neill, the comic strip was originally featured in Ladies Home Journal, with the theme that people should be merry and kind to each other.

Niko’s entire life was turned upside down when she walked in the front door of her farmhouse after school on December 7, 1941. Within days of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese submarines were attacking merchant ships off California’s coast, reinforcing fears that an attack in California was imminent. The Tanaka family had mixed emotions, since Niko’s brother was in the US Army. But for Niko’s family, America was their home country now. An immediate curfew was put in place by the US government, and all of a sudden the family could not be out of their house after dark. In March of 1942, large Caucasian men with fancy hats came to Niko’s home and rifled through every cherished belonging. All Japanese Americans were ordered to report to control stations. Most Japanese people living in California were moved either to Santa Anita or to the Tanforan Racetrack.

Niko’s family was brought to Tanforan Racetrack in San Bruno, originally built in 1899, just a couple of miles south of Colma on the El Camino Real. The racetrack made famous by the great Seabiscuit was now sadly operating as an internment camp. By late spring of 1942, Tanforan had processed nearly eight thousand Japanese Americans, including Niko’s family, who slept as a family in a small horse stable and were given a stipend of $19 a day. From there, the Tanakas were transferred to the Pinedale Assembly Center in Fresno, California, which had eight guard towers that constantly stared down on them, even as they used open latrines that amounted to just holes in the ground. The smell that was generated by the hundred-degree Fresno summers blistering down on the feces was too much for Niko to take. She made every effort to limit her visits to the latrine, and if she had to go, she’d go in the early mornings.

Tanforan Internment Camp

President Roosevelt had signed into law Executive Order 9066 to relocate anyone with one-sixteenth Japanese blood going back five generations, so that a single drop of Japanese blood would not contaminate the state. Wherever she went, Niko felt the daggers of hate and the chants of I hate Japs. Even the often-persecuted Chinese proudly wore bright-colored buttons with the words I am Chinese