Pumpsie Green appears to have been a man who soldiered on and reached his dream of becoming a major league baseball player. We fought the Second World War to free the world from oppression, but fourteen years later Pumpsie Green couldn't stay in the same Arizona hotel as the rest of the Red Sox. Where was the Red Sox management to say to the hotel owners that Pumpsie stays in the same hotel as the team or the team doesn't stay at that hotel. I remember Pumpsie Green, but I didn't realize that he was the first black player for the Red Sox. I am a long time Red Sox fan and remember the Red Sox in the 1950s and early 1960s as being a bush league team with one real star, Ted Williams. They got lucky in 1967. Maybe, with other great black players of the time the Red Sox could have been a contender. Tom Yawkey, a southern, treated the Red Sox like a hobby. The team usually played in an empty Fenway Park.
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a comment on human nature and the human condition..... boston and MA in. general are now considered so liberal and blue..... but my own experience living there in the 70s was very mixed. yes. there are liberal institutions of learning..... facts have a liberal bias. yes. there was a blue collar, white, bigoted presence in Boston and surrounding communities...... somehow, at that time? we pretty much got along. the difference now is that the divisions have been identified and stoked..... to what end? we are discovering.
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Obits surely place our life and times in a capsule. Personally, I was born in Boston about three months after Pumpsie’s Sox debut. I recall the treatment and bitterness of certain black players, like the great Reggie Smith, through the 60s-70s. The backdrop of bussing in Boston and the intense societal turmoil of those times. Due to diversity, I was able to enjoy the best brand of baseball over my lifetime. My Dad, who lived and died with no Sox World Series, fought in WWII and worked in the defense industry, like Pumpsie’s. Fifteen years earlier black patriots and hero’s returned from WWII having to split from their white peers to exits ships in the “negro line.” Great American heroes are those soldiers and those citizens who reluctantly powered themselves through the barriers and risks to e.g., be the first black player on the last team to put one on their roster. Pumpsie says he just wanted to play and didn’t see his role as special, yet he was overwhelmed by it. And, he came back and contributed to the Red Sox family over the years. In Boston, a bastion of hypocritical liberalism, we witness part of our American story. I celebrate the huge progress we’ve made. I also recognize that we’re not all the way there. But I certainly see more material gains from those heroes who move us all ahead (as MLK understood) than those, today, who try to reignite hate and thrive on division. That’s actually the weak way out.
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There's been a lot of dissing Boston because the Red Sox were the last to bring a Black player tp the Majors. What is remembered in Boston, but seemingly not in the rest of the country was that Boston once had TWO Major League teams and the Boston Braves were one of the earlier teams to break the color line in 1950 when they brought up outfielder Sam Jethroe who at 32 became the oldest Rookie of the Year. He had tried out for the Red Sox in 1944 with Jackie Robinson, largely as a result of pressure put on Yawkey form Boston City Councilor Isadore Muchnick. From all accounts the Braves fans appreciated Mr. Jethroe's work on the diamond.The Braves did a lot of scouting of the Negro League and about the same time had Henry Aaron under contract as well as other Black players before their move to Milwaukee. The big difference was that the Braves were owned by Lou Perini a local Massachusetts guy and a construction company executive (his company built my parents' slab house in Framingham) and the Red Sox were owned by a reverse carpet bagger from South Carolina.
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And after the standing O Red Sox Nation retreats to its homogenous neighborhoods praying that no black family buys that house for sale down the street. Boston, the spirit of hypocrisy.
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@Kevin There are a lot of sections of Boston propper and the surrounding cities that are as diverse as any in the country. The former working class city of Somerville that borders Boston is sometimes called "Little Brooklyn" because of its hipsters and explosion of interesting restaraunts and shops. It could also be called "Little Queens" for its ethnicaly diverse population. Work needs to be done but your comment comes of as an anachronism to me.
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It may be news to some that today Ted Williams would be considered to be Hispanic. His mother was of Mexican descent.
Growing up in San Diego his peers were Hispanics, not Anglos...
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@HapinOregon:Yes but Williams was always self conscious about his Mexican inlaws, and it is said that when they would meet him when he arrived home from a game on the train, he would not want to be seen with them, and would walk ahead of them, hurriedly. Those were the times in which people lived.But family was nonetheless proud of him, and he was very generous to them.Red Sox in 1940's and 1950's had perhaps the best pitchers in the game in Jack Kramer and Ellis Kinder.
Truly a disgrace how long both the Yanks & Red Sox delayed in bringing up black players. RIP Mr. Green.
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Being a life long Red Sox fan, now in my 60s, and only being a kid then, I was totally oblivious to Yawkey,s obvious racism. It is a real blot on the teams history. Perhaps the team's curse for not winning a World Series for such a long period of time did not originate from trading the Babe, but was from the long term omission of black players and should be renamed the Yawkey curse.
Fortunately today the team is as racially diverse as any in baseball and has 3 World Series under their belt. Oh, and for Yankee fans 04 was especially sweet. Sorry had to get that in there.
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I’d like to know the name of that Boston city councilman who pressured the Sox to give Jackie Robinson a tryout. That sounds like a good story. It was also nice to read that Teddy Ballgame was welcoming to Green and that Green got an ovation when he got his first hit in Boston. Even with a racist owner and a city known historically for its hostility toward blacks, there were people with progressive attitudes toward race.
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@AlNewman Isadore Muchnick
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A true gentleman. We don't see many of those any more, from any race or color.
A long-time ago N.Y. Times sports writer wrote that the story of Babe Ruth having been rudely traded to the Yankees in 1919, 'hexed' the Sox from winning a World Series wasn't the reason for their 86 year old WS drought. He opined that the racism prevalent in the Red Sox organization at the time, such as not signing a major talent like Jackie Robinson in 1945 and continuing to not hiring any African-American player till 1959, was the real reason for their not winning a WS. Owner Tom Yawkey was no Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Bklyn Dodgers, who seized the moment in 1945 to sign Jackie to a contract that would lead him to the major leagues and the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
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EXCELLENTLY written obituary, and have always said that reading the "avis de deces"in the Times newspaper is to see what good writing, with pathos and respect for the departed,is all about. Sorry that Mr. Green was not able to break into the Majors sooner. Recall that the first copy of Sports magazine in 1948 had a picture of the great Larry Doby on the cover. But Green was also a great player, showing guts on the field and off!
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I find the author's interpretation of Green's reflection at the end of this obituary odd and inaccurate. Rather than not expressing "lingering bitterness," Green seems to be saying that he experienced racial prejudice in California as well as in Boston. This is an important distinction, given the widespread belief that racism existed only in the South.
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Pumpsie Green and Gene Conley and their great adventure was surely something I remember from my youth. I remember seeing Pumpsie play at Fenway when I was about 12 years old.
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Bumpsie, from the Nation, we’re glad you came along, we wish our Sox had been better on this, and Rest In Peace. You’ll always be one of us, friend.
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I'm almost 63 years of age, and lived on the Grand Concourse, six blocks from the Stadium until we moved to NJ in 1966. I was an avid baseball card collector as a kid and still have my Sox Pumpsie Green card in a binder. I never realized at the time that the Sox had "passed" on so many black future Hall-of-Famers. I've now lived in the greater Boston area for 45 years, yet remain a Yankee fan despite all the "pressure" of living in Red Sox Nation territory. I think I'll pull out that binder again...RIP Pumpsie.
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