Category Archives: U.S.

by Joel | 26 December 2014 · 11:01 am

Serbs Stymie UN, NATO, NGOs, 1994

From Logavina Street, by Barbara Demick (Spiegel & Grau, 2012), Kindle Loc. 2413-2434:

Whatever semblance of order the United Nations had brought to Sarajevo disintegrated in the last week of May. Serb soldiers marched into a UN-guarded compound and rode off with confiscated tanks and heavy artillery that were off-limits under the latest cease-fire. In protest, NATO warplanes bombed a Serb ammunition depot near Pale.

The Serb retaliation was pitiless and highly effective. They shelled a strip of outdoor cafés in the northern Bosnian city of Tuzla, killing seventy-one people, mostly teenagers. (Unlike the February 5, 1994, market bombing in Sarajevo, nobody bothered to deny it. Serb commander Ratko Mladić boasted that the shelling was punishment for the NATO air strikes.)

Across Bosnia, the Serbs captured hundreds of UN peace-keepers as a deterrent to further air strikes. Pale television flaunted the Serbs’ captives, broadcasting footage of the peace-keepers shackled to poles and bridges. On June 2, a U.S. F-16 flying above the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Banja Luka was shot down and disappeared.

“They are the UN Protection Forces, but they cannot even protect themselves,” said Bosnian prime minister Haris Silajdžić.

It was almost unbelievable. The Republika Srpska, with a population of 800,000—about the size of Greater Pittsburgh—had brought the combined powers of the United Nations and NATO to their knees.

…

The roads northwest of Sarajevo that the United Nations had been using for land convoys were now shut down. The Serbs stepped up their attacks on the Mount Igman Road, opening fire with anti-aircraft guns on the armored cars of journalists and aid workers. With the siege tightening, there was no flour or sugar for sale anywhere in Sarajevo.

I ran into Suada’s sister-in-law, Aida, who was desperately looking for powdered milk. She had had a baby in May and her breast milk had dried up from poor nutrition. The monthly distribution of humanitarian aid had dwindled to one cup of oil and half a pound of dried peas, beans, and rice per person.

“Believe me. The person who is eating only that humanitarian aid is dead already,” declared Jela.

The sense of abandonment was acute. “The whole world is protesting three hundred UN peacekeepers in chains while we, an entire nation, have been in chains for three years,” complained Esad Taljanović.

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Filed under food, NGOs, U.N., U.S., war, Yugoslavia

by Joel | 23 December 2014 · 11:32 am

Hoping for D-Day in Sarajevo, 1994

From Logavina Street, by Barbara Demick (Spiegel & Grau, 2012), Kindle Loc. 1930-75:

Enough was enough. The shelling of Sarajevo had to stop. Led by the United States and France, NATO issued an ultimatum: The Serbs were to withdraw their heavy-caliber weapons twelve miles away from Sarajevo or place them under the control of United Nations forces. Any weapons left within striking distance of Sarajevo would be subject to air strikes. The Serbs were given ten days to comply. The deadline was set for one o’clock on the morning of February 21—D-day as the Sarajevans were calling it, giddy with anticipation.

The planes were invisible, obscured by the persistent cloud cover of a Bosnian winter, but they made an impressive roar, drowning out normal conversation and rippling the plastic sheeting taped across the broken windowpanes. Sarajevo shuddered, but nobody complained about the noise. They looked up to the fog-shrouded skies with anticipation that the roar was a message from above and redemption was on its way.

“I’m so happy. I’m trembling when I hear the airplanes,” said Delila, her eyes glittering with excitement.

NATO forces had been patrolling the skies over Bosnia since 1992 as part of a limited mandate to enforce the no-fly zone, and to provide air cover for the UN troops on the ground. The United States had the largest number of planes in the NATO fleet, and Sarajevans had cherished the belief that these Americans would eventually come to their rescue. It was a hope nurtured by a steady diet of American films, television, and recollections of World War II.

Alija Žiga, the seventy-two-year-old head of the mosque behind the courtyard, had just finished leading services for the start of Ramadan when he came out to talk to some neighbors. He had fought with Tito’s partisans. “I was behind the front lines. The Germans had us surrounded and they were trying to starve us to death. Then, all of a sudden, these American planes flew overhead and they dropped—you are not going to believe this—hot goulash.”

Some had darker recollections. In 1943, when the Allies tried to bomb a Nazi headquarters housed in the Razija Omanović school, they mistakenly hit the Hajrić house two doors down. Suad Hajrić’s father was killed in the accident.

Almost all anybody could talk about was how the Americans were about to liberate Sarajevo. They imagined it would be a cross between the Normandy invasion and the Desert Storm bombing of Iraq in 1991. Nermin Džino declared, “The Americans missed a few targets in Iraq. I want the air strikes, even if they end up bombing my backyard by mistake.”

Delila agreed. “If I get killed by an American bomb, I won’t mind so much as if it’s a Chetnik bomb.”

As the deadline grew closer, and the Serbs continued to balk, the NATO planes flew lower and more frequently, buzzing the Serb artillery positions in warning. Everybody was convinced the Serbs would be bombed into submission. Delila was out of control. Four nights before the deadline, she ran out of the bomb shelter in the orphanage at midnight to cheer at the NATO planes flying low through the clouds.

“Come on! Come on! Do it!” she yelled, until a policeman walked by and urged her to go back inside.

Tarik Kaljanac woke up one morning, stumbled into the kitchen as his parents were watching the television news, and asked Minka, “Mom, is this the end of the war? Are the Americans really going to help us?”

The weekend before Monday, February 21—D-day—police knocked on doors up and down Logavina Street, advising people to take precautions in case the air strikes missed their targets, or, more likely, the Serbs sought retribution. A rumor swept Sarajevo that the Serbs had a new weapon, a poison gas they planned to unleash on the city. The police showed residents how to fashion a gas mask out of dishwashing liquid and a cotton rag.

After one police visit, Minka confessed she was more afraid than ever. “I worry that the Chetniks will be so angry they have to withdraw that they’ll shell us with all they’ve got. They are sore losers.”

As darkness descended on Sunday evening, Minka hung a heavy blue wool blanket over her living room window, which faced Mount Trebević. You never wanted any light glinting out to make a target for the gunners in the hills. She packed sleeping bags for the family, bread, and a canister of water in case they needed to take cover in the basement of the school. The dishwashing liquid was on the kitchen table, just in case.

The anticlimax should have been predictable. First, the Serbs balked at the conditions set by NATO and Sarajevo filled up with television crews from around the world who were expecting a rerun of the Persian Gulf War. Then Russian president Boris Yeltsin offered to send Russian troops to secure areas from which the Serbs had withdrawn. The Serbs viewed Russia as their political ally and accepted a deal under which most of their heavy weapons were delivered to UN-monitored collection sites.

Ekrem and Minka had stayed up until 1 A.M., playing cards and listening to the radio. “You always expect something to happen, and then the next morning, it is just the same old crap,” Ekrem complained the following day as he wolfed down a lunch of rice and canned meat.

Kira was also annoyed, having stayed up all night not to await the NATO bombardment, but because the baby was fussing. “Let me tell you about the world,” she said wearily. “I’ve heard all of it before. They always make promises they don’t keep. They said they would attack—they didn’t do it—and now, whatever they do or say really doesn’t interest me.”

Yet it couldn’t be denied: The shelling had stopped. Sarajevo was quiet again. You could even hear the birds. Sure, there was an occasional burst of gunfire around the Holiday Inn, or an odd boom from the direction of the front lines, but Sarajevo was, for the most part, safe.

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Filed under France, U.N., U.S., war, Yugoslavia

by Joel | 23 December 2014 · 11:05 am

Dreaming of Salina in Sarajevo

From Logavina Street, by Barbara Demick (Spiegel & Grau, 2012), Kindle Loc. 766-804:

Television stations in Japan, Britain, Italy, Germany, and the United States broadcast the film of Berin at the brewery [mortar attack]—without the more gruesome scenes—and footage from the funeral. A retired couple in Salina, Kansas, were watching and arranged to evacuate the boy so he could live with them. It all happened so quickly Berin barely had time to say good-bye. Victor Jackovich, the U.S. ambassador to Bosnia at the time, accompanied Berin on a UN flight. An ABC crew filmed the hurried good-bye in the courtyard on Logavina Street. Berin wrote Delila a letter the day he was airlifted out of Sarajevo. “I have just taken a hot shower. I ate five bananas. I watched television,” Berin said in the letter written from the Frankfurt airport while he was en route to the United States.

Delila talked about Kansas incessantly. Her English grammar book and dictionary were always on the kitchen table. She would curl up on a rug-covered divan in the kitchen studying as her grandmother read the Koran. She kept an atlas open on the kitchen table with a circle drawn around Salina, Kansas.

When I first met Delila in January 1994, the kitchen was the only room in the house warm enough to sit in. It was an old house to begin with—slanty floors with bright Oriental rugs, hand-printed wallpaper curling at the edges. Plastic sheeting was taped over the broken panes of a window. A tiny aluminum stove was jerry-rigged on a stack of bricks. Berin’s cat curled up to it for warmth. Delila wore a baggy maroon sweater over three layers of T-shirts. Everything hung loosely on her tall, underweight frame.

“Physically, I am in Sarajevo, but in my mind, I am in America,” Delila said. “Everything that comes from America, I am interested in. I saw a television program about Bill Clinton that was great.”

The retired couple in Kansas did not realize initially that Berin had a sister still alive. After Berin’s arrival, they tried to bring Delila out as well. “They know how close we are. My brother is very attached to me. He used to take my cigarettes, hide them, and say, ‘I’ll give you one back when you give me a kiss,’” she said.

Delila’s recklessness completely vanished with the promise of emigrating to the United States. Suddenly, she was always frightened. She worried she would die before she could leave Sarajevo. She was afraid to take flowers to her parents’ graves across the street. She would only go on days when fog obscured the cemetery from sniper fire. The brewery shelling had left Delila with four pieces of shrapnel in her body, and she worried that if she slipped and fell on the ice, the shrapnel would shift and hurt her.

Outside the Lačevićs’ front gate, small children from the apartment next door used to sit on the stoop and play with dolls. Delila would yell at them to go back inside. “The kids hate me, but I don’t care what the neighbors say. I chase them away, and tell them, ‘Look, you can see Trebević like it is the palm of your hand.’”

Delila no longer disregarded the mortar shells that came crashing down from the mountain. When the shelling started, she said she could feel her shrapnel itching and she would run, not walk, to the bomb shelter, usually carrying the cat.

“I can run fast, when I’m scared. I’ll tell you, Carl Lewis is nothing compared to me,” she said. “When I get to America, I’m going to start running professionally.”

Delila planned out her future. She wanted to eat at McDonald’s and study medicine. She promised to give up her two-pack-a-day cigarette habit as soon as she got to America. (“I won’t be nervous anymore, so I won’t need it.”)

Once she left Sarajevo, Delila declared adamantly, she would probably never come back. Her brother had written her that his English tutor had asked if he missed Sarajevo. “He said no. If he ever came back, it would be as a tourist—and maybe not even then. I feel that way, too. I have to go somewhere where I can relax, physically, mentally. I don’t know that I would ever return.”

Delila’s sixty-nine-year-old grandmother had been listening to Delila speak, quietly weeping. I asked if she was afraid she might never see her granddaughter again. “No,” she replied, without hesitation. “I am looking forward to it. I will be happy when Delila leaves.”

Delila couldn’t count the days. For security reasons, people being evacuated usually had only a day or two’s advance notice. So she kept her bags packed and her documents folded neatly in an envelope in the bedroom with her few precious possessions. Her grandmother had given her a farewell present, a gold four-leaf clover that she always wore around her neck.

Delila practiced her good-byes to family members. She didn’t bother with her friends. “I told them that one day if I’m not around, I’ve either been killed or I’ve gone to America.”

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Filed under education, food, language, migration, U.S., war, Yugoslavia

by Joel | 26 October 2014 · 2:26 pm

Hawaiians in the American Civil War

One of my earliest blogposts was on the American Civil War in the Pacific, which focused on the Confederate raider CSS Shenandoah sent to the Pacific Ocean to attack American whalers, most of whom were from the New England states.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend a small ceremony at Oahu Cemetery honoring one among at least 119 men from the Hawaiian Kingdom known to have joined the war effort, mostly on the Northern side. The ceremony dedicated a headstone for the grave of PVT J. R. Kealoha, who sailed to Pennsylvania in 1864 to enlist in the 41st Infantry Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, then fought at Petersburg and Appomattox, and returned to Honolulu, where he died in 1877. His burial site had been entered in the cemetery records, but no grave marker had survived. Two of the organizers of the event, Justin W. Vance and Anita Manning, recently published an article I highly recommend, “The Effects of the American Civil War on Hawai‘i and the Pacific” (World History Connected, October 2012).

At least a score of those who enlisted in Massachusetts regiments were descended from Protestant missionaries from the Bay State who had attended schools in New England. But at least 49 Native Hawaiians also served in either the Union or Confederate military, half of them at sea, where their sailing skills were highly valued. They had to use anglicized aliases, like “Friday Kanaka,” which make their records hard to track, and most of the soldiers served in the U.S. Colored Troops. Ten Hawaiian sailors were forced to enlist in the Confederate Navy after their whaling ship, Abigail (from New Bedford, Mass.) was captured by the CSS Shenandoah, which finally surrendered in England many months after the war ended. The most unusual Asians in the Confederate ranks were Christopher Wren Bunker and Steven Decatur Bunker, sons of Chang and Eng Bunker, the original “Siamese twins,” who migrated from Siam via Boston, where they were moved to adopt the name Bunker, to North Carolina, where they became tobacco-planting slaveholders and strong Southern sympathizers.

The Western National Parks Association is due to publish a book on Asians and Pacific Islanders in the Civil War some time this winter (2014–2015), and the Hawai‘i Sons of the Civil War are planning to a documentary film.

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Filed under Hawai'i, migration, military, Pacific, U.S., war

by Joel | 24 October 2014 · 10:53 am

Private Markets for Food Aid

From Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, by Blaine Harden (Penguin, 2012), Kindle Loc. 1129-1146:

Food aid from the United States, Japan, South Korea, and other donors mitigated the worst of the famine by the late 1990s. But in an indirect and accidental way, it also energized the market ladies and traveling entrepreneurs who would give Shin sustenance, cover, and guidance in his escape to China.

Unlike any other aid recipient in the world, North Korea’s government insisted on sole authority for transporting donated food. The demand angered the United States, the largest aid donor, and it frustrated the monitoring techniques that the U.N. World Food Program had developed around the world to track aid and make sure it reached intended recipients. But since the need was so urgent and the death toll so high, the West swallowed its disgust and delivered more than one billion dollars’ worth of food to North Korea between 1995 and 2003.

During these years, refugees from North Korea arrived in the South and told government officials that they had seen donated rice, wheat, corn, vegetable oil, nonfat dry milk, fertilizer, medicine, winter clothing, blankets, bicycles, and other aid items on sale in private markets. Pictures and videos taken in the markets showed bags of grain marked as “A Gift from the American People.”

Bureaucrats, party officials, army officers, and other well-placed government elites ended up stealing about thirty percent of the aid, according to estimates by outside scholars and international aid agencies. They sold it to private traders, often for dollars or euros, and delivered the goods using government vehicles.

Without intending to do so, wealthy donor countries injected a kind of adrenaline rush into the grubby world of North Korean street trading. The lucrative theft of international food aid whetted the appetite of higher-ups for easy money as it helped transform private markets into the country’s primary economic engine.

Private markets, which today supply most of the food North Koreans eat, have become the fundamental reason why most outside experts say a catastrophic 1990s-style famine is unlikely to happen again.

The markets, though, have not come close to eliminating hunger or malnutrition. They also appear to have increased inequity, creating a chasm between those who have figured out how to trade and those who have not.

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Filed under democracy, economics, food, Japan, Korea, NGOs, U.N., U.S.

by Joel | 23 October 2014 · 8:02 am

Political Implosion Journalism

From Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, by Blaine Harden (Penguin, 2012), Kindle Loc. 178-195:

As a correspondent for the Washington Post in Northeast Asia, I had been searching for more than a year for a story that could explain how North Korea used repression to keep from falling apart.

Political implosion had become my specialty. For the Post and for the New York Times, I spent nearly three decades covering failed states in Africa, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the slow-motion rot in Burma under the generals. From the outside looking in, North Korea seemed ripe—indeed, overripe—for the kind of collapse I had witnessed elsewhere. In a part of the world where nearly everyone else was getting rich, its people were increasingly isolated, poor, and hungry.

Still, the Kim family dynasty kept the lid on. Totalitarian repression preserved their basket case state.

My problem in showing how the government did it was lack of access. Elsewhere in the world, repressive states were not always successful in sealing their borders. I had been able to work openly in Mengistu’s Ethiopia, Mobutu’s Congo, and Milosevic’s Serbia, and had slipped in as a tourist to write about Burma.

North Korea was much more careful. Foreign reporters, especially Americans, were rarely allowed inside. I visited North Korea only once, saw what my minders wanted me to see, and learned little. If journalists entered illegally, they risked months or years of imprisonment as spies. To win release, they sometimes needed the help of a former American president.

Given these restrictions, most reporting about North Korea was distant and hollow. Written from Seoul or Tokyo or Beijing, stories began with an account of Pyongyang’s latest provocation, such as sinking a ship or shooting a tourist. Then the dreary conventions of journalism kicked in: American and South Korean officials expressed outrage. Chinese officials called for restraint. Think tank experts opined about what it might mean. I wrote more than my share of these pieces.

Shin, though, shattered these conventions. His life unlocked the door, allowing outsiders to see how the Kim family sustained itself with child slavery and murder. A few days after we met, Shin’s appealing picture and appalling story ran prominently on the front page of the Washington Post.

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Filed under Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Korea, publishing, U.S.

by Joel | 22 October 2014 · 10:52 am

Advent of Night Baseball

From The Greatest Minor League: A History of the Pacific Coast League, 1903-1957, by Dennis Snelling (McFarland, 2011), Kindle Loc. 2436-2453:

The concept of baseball played at night was nothing new; barnstorming teams had done so for years. There had been experiments with temporary lighting beginning in the late 1800s, including an exhibition held at Athletic Park in Los Angeles in 1893. In June 1927, two New England League teams played a seven-inning game at Lynn, Massachusetts, under temporary lights before several thousand people who were surprised at how well they could follow the action and noted that players seemed able to react quite well to the ball.

Lee Keyser, owner of the Des Moines Demons in the Western League, had attended a number of college and high school football games at night and was impressed with the quality of lighting at those events. Confident that a permanent set-up would work for baseball, he invested twenty thousand dollars to install 146 floodlights mounted atop a half-dozen ninety-foot-tall poles at the Demons’ stadium and then announced that Des Moines would open its 1930 home season on May 2 at night against Wichita. “If the game is successful … I look for most of the minor leagues to follow the example of Des Moines and install floodlights for night baseball,” said Keyser. “If it is unsuccessful, it will mean that sooner or later the minor league clubs will have to go out of business due to steady decrease in patronage.” Several major league executives made plans to attend the game and a national radio audience tuned in to the contest, which was carried by the National Broadcasting Company.

Twelve thousand fans crowded into the stadium, and while the game was a less-than-artistic Moines jumped out to a 12-0 lead after three general consensus was that the quality of baseball was as good as it would have been during the day. Problems remained to be solved, including dark spots along the foul lines, and a fielder lost one pop foul in the lights, but Lee Keyser was undeterred. He addressed the national radio audience between the sixth and seventh innings and declared, “My reaction to night baseball is that it is glorious and wonderful. The players are happy, the crowd perfectly satisfied, and it means that baseball in the minor leagues will now live.” The Chicago Tribune agreed with Keyser that night baseball might well be a “life saver” for the minor leagues.

Continuing to struggle in Sacramento, Lew Moreing took notice. He quickly ordered lights and had them installed. On the night of June 4, 1930, at precisely 8:31 P.M., Moreing flipped a switch, generating a buzz from forty banks of lights, each carrying a trio of sixty-thousand-watt bulbs. The lights slowly grew brighter, illuminating the playing field as hundreds of people in their automobiles, surrounding the stadium to witness the spectacle, began honking their horns in celebration.

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by Joel | 19 October 2014 · 10:23 am

Early Days of Baseball Radio Broadcasts

From The Greatest Minor League: A History of the Pacific Coast League, 1903-1957, by Dennis Snelling (McFarland, 2011), Kindle Loc. 2224-2241:

Radio was becoming wildly popular, and in 1927 two important developments accelerated growth in the fledgling industry. First, radio manufacturers reached agreement with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) to use company patents that were essential in mass production of radio sets. Second was the development of the alternating current radio tube, which made it possible to manufacture radios that could be plugged into a standard electrical outlet.

Mass broadcasting to the general public was on the horizon and sports were to be a major beneficiary of this new technology. Baseball had been broadcast on radio since 1921, and the New York Yankees had aired the World Series for several years, more or less in the same play-by-play fashion as today. However, most baseball coverage consisted of a simple recitation of wire accounts sent by telegraph to the local station, providing only the actual details of the game without commentary.

KHJ in Los Angeles broadcast play-by-play results of the World Series in 1925 to great fanfare, relaying results from three thousand miles away almost as they happened. By 1927 KPO radio in San Francisco was using a direct line from Recreation Park to provide play-by-play details of every game. In Oakland and Seattle, game accounts and scores were provided nearly every day except Sunday. William Wrigley, who had a direct telegraph wire into his home on Catalina Island so he could keep abreast of his Chicago Cubs, took notice of radio’s potential to promote the last-place Los Angeles Angels. Hoping broadcasts would drum up interest in an otherwise uninteresting team, Wrigley announced that KHJ would cover the Angels every day.

There would be lively debate about radio in the PCL [= Pacific Coast League] over the next few seasons – Bill Lane for one remained there was no turning back. At the league meeting following the 1928 season, a resolution was defeated that would have banned radio from the ballparks. Though yet in its infancy, radio would soon become as inseparable from baseball as newspapers were.

Ironically, at the same time radio was becoming established, a new invention was being developed on the second floor of a warehouse at 202 Green Street in San Francisco, near Telegraph Hill. This new all-electric technology would further revolutionize broadcasting and the world of sports. In January 1927, Philo T. Farnsworth, the twenty-year-old son of an Idaho farmer, met with Crocker Bank vice president James J. Fagan and pitched his idea. Fagan, whose son would later own the San Francisco Seals, was able to convince W.W. Crocker, president of the bank, to invest in it. Nine months later, Farnsworth completed the first successful demonstration of his new technology at the Green Street warehouse. On that day in San Francisco, modern television was born.

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Filed under baseball, publishing, U.S.

by Joel | 18 October 2014 · 8:50 pm

Grandfathering the Spitball, 1920–1934

From The Greatest Minor League: A History of the Pacific Coast League, 1903-1957, by Dennis Snelling (McFarland, 2011), Kindle Loc. 1520-1526:

In late October 1919, American League president Ban Johnson proposed that “trick” deliveries, such as the spitball and shine ball, be declared illegal. At the major league meetings in February 1920, both the American and National leagues adopted the proposal, allowing a one-year grace period to pitchers identified by their teams as those relying on the spitter for their livelihood.” The Pacific Coast League followed suit, ruling that players currently in the league could continue to throw the spitter, but that pitchers new to the PCL could not. At the end of that first year, St. Louis Cardinals spitballer Bill Doak was among those asserting that banning himself and fellow spitballers from using their best pitch would likely end their careers.

Doak’s argument carried the day and the spitball remained a legal pitch for seventeen men during the remainder of their careers, including Ray Fisher, who did not play after 1920. This group continued as an endangered species of sorts until 1934, when Burleigh Grimes threw the last legal spitter in the major leagues.

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by Joel | 13 October 2014 · 4:19 am

Ethnic Minorities in the Old Pacific Coast League

From The Greatest Minor League: A History of the Pacific Coast League, 1903-1957, by Dennis Snelling (McFarland, 2011), Kindle Loc. 1314-1328:

Although Asians were not welcome to play with or against whites on the Pacific Coast, mixed-blood Hawaiians could, provided they were of the right mix, unlike Lang Akana. Pitcher Barney Joy had been the first, joining the San Francisco Seals in 1907. “Honolulu” Johnnie Williams was a pitching sensation for Sacramento in 1913; the Detroit Tigers offered eleven thousand dollars for his contract and he played briefly for them the following year. Williams then returned to the Pacific Coast League until arm problems led to his release by Los Angeles during the first week of the 1916 season.

Latins had never been represented in numbers reflecting their interest in the game, although a few had been allowed to make their mark. Esteban Bellan, a native of Cuba, played in the National forerunner of the National 1871 to 1873. Sandy Nava caught Charlie Sweeney in the major leagues. Cuban Armando Marsans played in the majors even though he was fairly dark-skinned. Fellow countrymen Dolf Luque and Mike Gonzales had long careers in the major leagues. Pitchers Jose Acosta and Ignacio Rojas, outfielder Jacinto Calvo (whose father was a rich sugar planter in Havana) and infielder Louis Castro were among the few Latin-born players to appear in the Pacific Coast League during its first couple of decades. Pitchers Frank Arellanes and Sea Lion Hall (born Carlos Clolo [apparently not true; see note 27 at the link—J.]), also pitched in the PCL and were of Mexican heritage but born in the United States. Hall gained notoriety as one of the first relief pitchers in the major leagues and threw four no-hitters in the minors. He earned his nickname because of his loud, barking voice. He was also called “The Greaser” by those less genteel, who quickly learned those were fighting words.

Consistently derided about their racial heritage, Native Americans were nevertheless considered valuable drawing cards. Louis Sockalexis was one of the first, starring at both Holy Cross and Notre Dame and then with Cleveland in the National League in the late 1890s. The New York Giants employed catcher John “Chief” Meyers. Brooklyn’s star outfielder Zack Wheat was half-Cherokee, although he did not advertise that fact. Albert “Chief” Bender of the Philadelphia Athletics was one of the game’s best pitchers. The great Jim Thorpe was playing in the major leagues of both baseball and football. There had been several Indians in the PCL, most commonly pitchers, including Casey Smith, Ed Pinnance, Sammy Morris, Louis LeRoy and George “Chief” Johnson.

Because Indians enjoyed relative acceptance among the public and their teammates, there were occasional but almost universally unsuccessful attempts to masquerade black players as Native Americans.