Slugging and Snubbing: Hugh Casey, Ernest Hemingway, and Jackie Robinson—A Baseball Mystery
"The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject. ..." Ernest Hemingway By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches from Four Decades Spring comes early to baseball. For most people living in the Northern Hemisphere, spring arrives officially on or about March 21, but for professional baseball players it starts in February when they gather to begin training for the upcoming season. Nowadays, major-league clubs train in Florida or Arizona, but years ago, trips to more exotic places were not unusual. Thus it was that in 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers and their top minor-league club, the Montreal Royals, found themselves training in Havana, Cuba. This was not the Dodgers' first excursion to the island nation. After making brief visits to Cuba in 1900, 1913, 1921, and 1931, they had trained there full-time in 1941 and 1942. But this trip was unusual, with a purpose much greater than getting players into shape. (1) The 1947 Dodgers were on the verge of doing something truly historic. Just before Opening Day, April 15, Brooklyn's president, Branch Rickey, announced that Jackie Robinson was being promoted from Montreal to the parent club, making him the first African American to play major-league baseball since 1884. The Dodgers had signed Robinson to a contract in the fall of 1945 and assigned him to the Royals. In 1946, both Brooklyn and Montreal had trained in Florida: the Dodgers in Daytona Beach, a relatively progressive southern city thanks to the heroic work of civil rights pioneer Mary McLeod Bethune, and the Royals in Sanford, a small town forty miles south and considerably less enlightened. Despite Rickey's hopes, the Montreal club ran into legal segregation every step of the way. Law enforcement officials cancelled a number of Royals games in several Florida cities and also in Savannah and Richmond as the team traveled north to open the season in Jersey City. Robinson encountered few problems once he and his wife Rachel reached Montreal. They were welcomed into the community, and he had a terrific season. His manager, Mississippian Clay Hopper, and his teammates adjusted. They had little choice. (2) Rickey wanted 1947 to be different. He kept Robinson on the Montreal roster, but he knew that the former UCLA student and Army veteran would be a Dodger when the season began. Aiming for spring training to be free from racial strife, he picked Cuba, a country where he believed the color of a player's skin would not be an issue. Still, when the players arrived in Havana, they noticed a peculiar housing arrangement. The players on the major-league roster stayed at the Hotel Nacional, a stately structure designed in an Andalusian-Moorish style and built in 1930. White members of the minor-league club stayed at the nearby Havana Military Academy. But Robinson and three other black players trying to make the Montreal roster were housed separately, away from their white teammates, in "a musty, third-rate hotel in the heart of town." Robinson, catcher Roy Campanella, and pitchers Roy Partlow and Don Newcombe endured this humiliation together. Robinson at first blamed the Cuban government for the segregated housing, but he soon learned that the idea was Rickey's. "I can't afford to take a chance and have a single incident occur," said the Dodgers executive. "This training session must be perfectly smooth." He was wary, he said, that some white Royals new to the club or American tourists staying at the Nacional might raise a stink. "I wasn't even allowed to go in the lobby of the Nacional to see Mr. Rickey on baseball business," Newcombe remembered. "I had to get permission from the bellhops. In fact, one [white] bellhop put me out of the lobby." (3) Rickey also wanted spring training to make a profit. He enticed three other major-league clubs--the Boston Braves, New York Yankees, and St. Louis Browns--to come to the Caribbean for exhibition games. …
Hemingway’s Cuban Son, Reflections on the Writer by His Longtime Majordomo (review)
Ernest Hemingway has been dead nearly fifty years. After all of this time, one would think that all of the memoirs by family and friends had been written and there would be little new to be said. But then comes the memoir from the person, excluding his wives, who perhaps knew him best during the last twenty years of his life. In 1939, René Villarreal was a ten-year-old boy living in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, playing baseball outside of a walled estate when Ernest Hemingway drove up to visit the estate with the intention of possibly buying it. Villarreal began running errands and feeding the dogs and cats at the Finca in 1940 and, in 1947, at age seventeen, he was promoted by Hemingway to the position of estate manager. After Hemingway’s death, when his widow Mary Hemingway gave the estate to the Cuban people, Fidel Castro insisted that Villareal remain to manage the estate as the Museo Hemingway. In the mid-1960s, while still in Cuba and serving as administrator of the Museo Hemingway, René Villarreal wrote a memoir. When he left Cuba in 1972, he entrusted his manuscript and numerous photographs, letters, and other Hemingway memorabilia to others who either stole the items or lost them. For the next 25 years he declined all requests for interviews and, in fact, there were conflicting rumors about where he was actually living. Then, in 1996, his son Raul began a series of interviews with him about his life working for Ernest Hemingway. Those interviews occurred over the course of two years and are the basis for this book. René Villarreal’s first person account of life at the Finca is an important addition to Hemingway scholarship. There have been a number of other books, both fiction and non-fiction, written about Hemingway’s years in Cuba. Hemingway in Cuba by Norberto Fuentes and Ernest Hemingway in the Romano Archipelago by Enrique Cirules both provide valuable insights into Hemingway’s Cuban years, but neither is in the first person. Mary Hemingway’s How It Was is a fine chronicle of life in Cuba with Hemingway, but she didn’t arrive in Cuba until 1946. Villarreal provides a detailed picture of life at the Finca. With the eye of an historian interested in pro1 5 6 • T H E H E M I N G W A Y r E V I E W
Urban Identities and Catastrophe: Izmir and Salonica at the End of the Ottoman Empire*
Two huge fires dramatically influenced the urban development of Salonica and Izmir, in 1917 and in 1922, respectively. These catastrophes occurred after the Ottoman Empire fell, and Salonica and Izmir had shifted into new national contexts. The fires mainly destroyed the districts that were transformed during the late‐Ottoman period. These districts became the cosmopolitan façades of modern Izmir and Salonica. The post‐fires' tabula rasa provided an opportunity for Greek and Turkish politicians and European planners to change the urban identity of both cities. Moreover, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 transformed their multicultural societies also. Reconstruction plans had been thought to de‐Ottomanize and remove the previous idea of the towns and their multiplicity, interpreting new cultural and nationalist feeling. Here, I emphasize how modernity was interpreted before and after the fires, and point out contradictions between ideological aspects of planning and how the first urban districts were built during the 1920s.