A relentless competitor, Rogers Hornsby--arguably the finest right-handed hitter in baseball's history--was supremely successful on the baseball field but, in many ways, a failure off it.
In this biography, Charles Alexander turns his skilled eye to this complex individual, weaving the stories of his personal and professional life with a lively history of the sport.
A relentless competitor, Rogers Hornsby--arguably the finest right-handed hitter in baseball's history--was supremely successful on the baseball field but, in many ways, a failure off it.
In this biography, Charles Alexander turns his skilled eye to this complex individual, weaving the stories of his personal and professional life with a lively history of the sport.
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
A relentless competitor, Rogers Hornsby--arguably the finest right-handed hitter in baseball's history--was supremely successful on the baseball field but, in many ways, a failure off it.
In this biography, Charles Alexander turns his skilled eye to this complex individual, weaving the stories of his personal and professional life with a lively history of the sport.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466856189 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/05/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 401 |
| Sales rank: | 675,047 |
| File size: | 759 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Rogers Hornsby
A Biography
By Charles C. Alexander
Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 1995 Charles C. AlexanderAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-5618-9
CHAPTER 1
Stockyards Boy
If there had been any baseball connections in his ancestry, Rogers Hornsby might have talked quite a lot about his numerous forebears. Since there weren't any, he ignored everybody named Hornsby before his parents' generation.
In fact, Hornsby's family line was long, well documented, and if not truly distinguished, at least distinctive — as well as thoroughly Texan. Early in the eighteenth century, English-born Leonard Hornsby settled in Wales, where he married and raised a large family. Four of his sons migrated to the colony of Virginia, then went their separate ways. Moses Hornsby, born in 1759 and apparently the youngest of the brothers, moved to northwestern Georgia shortly after the end of the Revolutionary War and married Katherine Watts, who bore six sons. All except one (who settled in Louisiana) ended up in Texas.
Reuben Hornsby, born near Rome, Georgia, in 1793, first moved to the rich delta country of Mississippi, where he married Sarah Morrison. Eight children were born to them during their stay in Mississippi; two, both sons, died in infancy. In 1830, wittingly or not, Reuben Hornsby's family became an instrument in what would soon be proclaimed the American people's "manifest destiny" to acquire everything that lay between them and the Pacific Ocean. Along with thousands of other Anglo-Americans (including, sooner or later, four other sons of Moses and Katherine Watts Hornsby), Reuben and Sarah Morrison Hornsby sought the cheap land being offered by the Republic of Mexico between the Trinity and Colorado Rivers, in the Mexican state of Coahuila and Texas.
Landing at Matagorda Bay on the Gulf of Mexico, the Hornsbys followed the Colorado River to the northwest, first locating at the settlement called Mina (later Bastrop), where Sarah Hornsby bore the last two of her ten children — of whom five sons and two daughters survived to adulthood. In 1832 Reuben Hornsby explored still farther upriver, finally deciding on an enormous tract of land — some 4,700 acres in all — about twelve miles from Mina, in a horseshoe bend in the Colorado. With title secured from the Mexican government, the Hornsbys built a cabin overlooking an expanse of tall grass stretching along the river and started clearing and cultivating what travelers soon called Hornsby's Bend.
The Hornsbys were the first Anglo family in what was to become Travis County, Texas. The area was rugged, remote, and frequently menaced by roving bands of American Indians, particularly the fierce and fearless Comanches. Reuben Hornsby took no active part in the rebellion against Mexican rule that flared in the winter of 1835–36, although he and his family joined thousands of others who fled east during the Runaway Scrape precipitated by the annihilation of the Texan garrison at the Alamo.
After Sam Houston's hastily gathered forces routed the Mexican army at San Jacinto and won independence for the Republic of Texas, the family returned to Hornsby's Bend, again to encounter deadly Indian sorties. Two young Kentucky natives, recruits of the newly formed Texas Rangers, were killed by Comanches as they worked in a field in sight of the Hornsby cabin; they became the first persons buried at Hornsby's Bend, in a grove where generations of Hornsbys would subsequently come to rest, about seventy-five yards from the original homesite.
For more than a decade, life remained precarious for the Hornsbys and the growing number of other families in the area. Hornsby's Bend became a semimilitary post with a fortified stockade, and Reuben Hornsby sometimes served as a guide for expeditions of Rangers. Nineteen-year-old Daniel Hornsby, Reuben and Sarah's seventh born, died in an Indian fight in 1845, and his older brothers William and Malcolm took part in several bloody raids on the Comanches.
By the late 1840s the relentless efforts of the Rangers and local militia units had virtually ended Indian resistance in east-central Texas. The county of Travis had been organized, and about twelve miles northwest of Hornsby's Bend, the little frontier outpost of Austin, the republic's seat of government from 1839 to 1845, had become the capital of the new state of Texas.
Reuben Hornsby outlived his wife and all but one of his children, dying in 1879 at the age of eighty-six. By that time scores of Hornsbys and Hornsby relatives lived in Travis and neighboring counties. In his old age Reuben Hornsby presided over Sunday afternoon gatherings at which aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins picnicked, visited, and tended graves in the steadily populating family cemetery.
The one offspring who survived him was the veteran Indian fighter William Watts Hornsby. Born in Mississippi in 1817, Billy, as family members called him, married Lucinda Burleson in 1839 and fathered eight children — four boys, four girls. The next-to-last of their offspring was Aaron Edward (known as Ed), who on March 25, 1882, at the age of twenty-four, married Mary Dallas Rogers, from the nearby community of Rogers Hill. One of eight offspring herself, she wasn't quite eighteen.
Although their first child died at birth late in 1882, within seven years Ed and Mary Rogers Hornsby had four more children: Everett in 1884, Emory the next year, William Wallace in 1887, and Margaret in 1889. By then, Travis County had become relatively crowded, at least for young people seeking affordable and fertile farmland. Then, too, with railroads being built farther and farther west, cattle-raising seemed to offer more opportunity than the cotton cultivation that dominated the eastern half of Texas, especially when agricultural prices fell sharply beginning in 1893. The days of the open range were over, but good grazing country, they'd heard, was still available in western Texas.
Ed Hornsby's older brother Daniel already owned a section of land (640 acres) in Runnels County — a couple of hundred miles northwest from Hornsby's Bend and some forty miles south of the bustling cattle town of Abilene. In the spring of 1894 Daniel Hornsby deeded the land to his younger brother for $1,000 in cash and Ed's promise to meet four notes of $604 each at 10 percent interest. That autumn Ed and Mary Hornsby and their four children arrived in Runnels County and occupied their new homesite — a cabin with outbuildings on a rise about two miles northwest of a little settlement called Winters.
For the next four years the Hornsbys raised a few cattle and a little wheat and corn, and struggled to make a life for themselves on the windswept, thin-topsoiled plain that was broken only occasionally by stands of squat trees and distant mesas.
On April 27, 1896, still another Hornsby came into the world: a boy they named Rogers, after his mother's family. He possessed blue eyes and light brown hair that would darken as he grew older. One day, two and a half years later, the little boy was called in from playing in the yard and told to say good-bye to his father. Of causes apparently never recorded, Aaron Edward Hornsby died on December 17, 1898, at the age of forty- one.
Left with five children, of whom the oldest was only fourteen, and far from family and friends, Mary Rogers Hornsby did about the only thing she could. After burying her husband in the family cemetery at Hornsby's Bend, she resettled in Travis County. During the next four years, while Everett, Emory, and William grew big enough to start earning a living, the six Hornsbys resided with Mary's parents on a farm about nine miles outside Austin.
Frequently they joined the Sunday afternoon picnics and cemetery work parties at Hornsby's Bend; long afterward, a few elderly members of the vast Hornsby clan remembered how the young people would play baseball on the bottomland near the river until it was too dark to see. Some even remembered Rogers Hornsby — a little boy in overalls with a bandana hanging from his rear pocket — who insisted on being allowed to play with the big kids. "As I look back to my youngest days," he recalled more than half a century later, "I can't remember anything that happened before I had a baseball in my hand."
Sometime in the winter of 1902–3, Mary Hornsby and her daughter and four sons put themselves and a trunkload of personal belongings aboard a train at Austin and headed for the little city of Fort Worth, 200 miles to the north. The Hornsbys' decision to move — the transforming event in the life of six-year-old Rogers Hornsby — was a consequence of recent events that proved transforming for Fort Worth, Texas, as well.
Fort Worth had hitherto been a shipping point for West Texas cattle bound for the slaughter pens and packinghouses of Kansas City, Chicago, and St. Louis. Now it was about to become the greatest meat-processing center in the Southwest. In the fall of 1902, local citizens promised to build a bank, an exchange building, and a stockyards rail line; to concede two-thirds ownership of the stockyards facilities; to incorporate the stockyards area into the separate municipality of North Fort Worth; and to do whatever else was needed to induce the giant Swift and Armour corporations to establish packing plants there.
The quickly spreading news that "the packers" were coming to Fort Worth convinced the Hornsbys that they should abandon their rural roots and become city folks. Together, Everett, Emory, and William could earn enough at the packing plants to support the family in reasonable comfort. So the Hornsbys joined the millions of Americans leaving farms and villages to work for wages in industrial towns and cities — an historic migration that, both in numbers and consequences, matched the massive immigration from Europe of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Centered on Exchange Avenue and Main Street and bounded by Grand Avenue to the west, the Santa Fe railroad tracks to the east, Marine Creek to the north, and the winding Trinity River to the south, North Fort Worth quickly grew to about 5,000 people and employed twice as many men, women, and children as Fort Worth itself, which numbered close to 27,000 in the 1900 census. Most people worked in the stockyards and packing plants (and the canneries added in 1906); others made a living from the hotels, cafés, saloons, and whorehouses that lined Exchange Avenue. Every morning at 5:30, North Fort Worth residents awoke to the whistle signaling the change of shifts at the packing plants.
The Hornsbys moved into a little rental house across Marine Creek from the meatpacking complex. While the three older Hornsby males went to work, Rogers Hornsby attended elementary school and played with neighborhood children — always baseball, if his memory is to be believed. By the time he was nine, he was the leader of a semiorganized local team whose uniforms (complete with removable sliding pads) were sewn by Mary Hornsby. Wearing their blue flannels, Hornsby and pals sometimes traveled to their games by trolley; usually they walked to play against boys in outlying areas such as Diamond Hill and Rosen Heights.
Young Hornsby was hardly exceptional in having a passion for baseball, ambitions to make it a profession, or dreams of being like Ty Cobb or Honus Wagner. It was a time when baseball, in numbers of both spectators and participants, was virtually unchallenged as the nation's foremost sports activity. All over the United States — on school playgrounds and vacant lots, on college campuses and military posts, in small-town "semipro" competition and municipal and company-sponsored industrial and commercial leagues — millions of boys and men played baseball, not only for the sheer love of it but sometimes with visions of professional careers. Especially for working-class youths such as Rogers Hornsby, baseball might be a route to something better — if not to riches and fame, then at least to more money and some kind of recognition.
What made Hornsby exceptional was the natural coordination he exhibited even at that early age. At ten, when he went to work after school and during the summer months as a messenger boy at the Swift and Company plant, he first looked after bats and balls and then served as substitute infielder for one of the several teams made up of stockyards and packing-plant workers. Right-handed all the way, he couldn't hit much as yet, but he held his own anywhere in the field.
By the time he was fifteen, he was good enough to play with grown men on the North Side Athletics in the Fort Worth city league, as well as occasionally to hire out to other teams in the area. In 1911, for example, he played twelve games for a team at Granbury, southwest of Fort Worth, receiving two dollars per game plus rail fare and room and board. Thirty years later H. L. Warlick, who managed the Granbury outfit, remembered Hornsby as a cocky kid. When Warlick praised his second-base play after a victory at Weatherford, Hornsby replied, "Yeah, and there are eight other positions I can play just as good."
The next year a promoter named Logan J. Galbreath brought to Dallas his Boston Bloomer Girls — one of several touring women's baseball teams of that period. Finding himself shorthanded, Galbreath advertised in local newspapers for two players under the age of eighteen — sex unspecified. Hornsby and a friend caught the interurban electric train over to Dallas and looked up Galbreath, only to learn that they were expected to wear wigs and bloomers and pretend to be female. Apparently any chance to play ball and make a little extra money was worth taking, so the two lads acted their parts as Bloomer Girls while the team met its Dallas dates, then appeared in towns along the rail line north. When the team reached the Red River, they collected their pay — seventy-eight cents apiece after expenses — and headed home.
Baseball teams multiplied in and around Fort Worth at about the same rate as the city's growth. Boosted by the annexation of North Fort Worth in 1909, Fort Worth became Texas's fourth largest city (behind San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston), with an officially reported 1910 population of 73,312. Although the remaining wooden structures on Main Street had been condemned and torn down, most Fort Worth streets were still unpaved, as was the road to Dallas thirty-five miles to the east. Travelers to Dallas usually took the interurban railway, although in 1904 three intrepid Fort Worthians made the trip by automobile in a remarkable one hour and thirty-five minutes.
By 1910 Fort Worth registered 959 automobiles and enforced a ten-mile-per-hour speed limit, as well as an ordinance requiring motorists to sound their horns at least 100 feet from street crossings. Theodore Roosevelt visited the city in 1905 as president and again in 1911, the year before his unsuccessful effort to regain the White House. Most Fort Worthians saw their first powered aircraft early in 1913, when touring Swiss and French aviators gave a flying exhibition on the western outskirts of the city.
If any of the Hornsbys were among the estimated 15,000 at the air show, it would have been a rare occasion when they mingled with the elite families of bankers, merchants, and cattlemen concentrated on Quality Hill, at Lancaster Street and Summit Avenue. At the other end of the social scale were Fort Worth's black inhabitants (18 percent of the local population in 1910) and the smaller numbers of Mexican-Americans, Bohemians, Poles, Serbs, and Slovaks who came looking for work in the packing plants. As native-born whites — Texans of Deep South ancestry — the Hornsbys absorbed and sustained the racial and ethnic prejudices that were an elementary feature of American life.
In 1909 Rogers Hornsby entered recently constructed North Side High School, where he played on both its baseball and football teams. Like many other city schools, North Side High had already succumbed to the football fever that would sweep the whole of Texas within a couple more decades. North Side's football coach was Robert L. Myers; his star player was Alvin "Bo" McMillin, who in 1921, having been recruited to little Centre College in Kentucky by athletic director Myers, would lead the "praying Colonels" to a legendary victory over mighty Harvard University. (From Centre, McMillin would go on to a career as a professional football player and college and professional coach.)
Hornsby later said that he played in the same backfield with McMillin; if so, it wasn't for long. Perhaps because baseball was his first love and North Side emphasized football, because he needed to start earning a full- time income to support his mother and sister, or because he just had had enough of school, he dropped out after two years and got a job as office boy for J. P. Elder, superintendent of the Swift and Company plant.
Spending nearly all his working time around Elder, Hornsby came to know the day-to-day operations of the stockyards, packinghouses, and canneries. "I could run a packing plant today," he bragged in 1926. "I could go back and get a job anytime with Elder and believe me I could run the whole works. But I'd rather play baseball than run a packing plant and I guess that's why I'm here instead of on my way to the presidency of a big packing company."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rogers Hornsby by Charles C. Alexander. Copyright © 1995 Charles C. Alexander. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Epigraph,
Prologue: Beaumont, Texas, Summer 1950,
1. Stockyards Boy,
2. Making It,
3. Toward Stardom,
4. Best in His League,
5. Troubles,
6. .424 — and Cardinals Manager,
7. The Summit,
8. Touring the National League,
9. "Enough of Second-Guessers",
10. Browns Blues,
11. Vagabond Years,
12. Making It Back,
13. "As Changeless as Gibraltar",
14. "I Belong in Baseball",
Epilogue: "What Else Is There?",
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,
Also by Charles C. Alexander,
Copyright,