Leonard, Buck

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Buck Leonard

1907-1997

Baseball player

Buck Leonard was one of the first African Americans inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Leonard was drafted by the Pittsburgh Homestead Grays of the National Negro Leagues and played a record seventeen years for the team, winning ten Negro National League pennants (nine consecutively) and appearing in a record twelve East-West All-Star Games.

Grew up in a Railroad Town

Walter Fenner "Buck" Leonard was born in 1907 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, a small town with a population of just over 7,500 and an economy based on railroad construction and tobacco farming. Leonard was the eldest of six children born to John Leonard, a railroad fireman, and homemaker Emma Leonard. The family lived in the Little Raleigh neighborhood of Rocky Mount, on a small farm where they raised chickens, geese, ducks, and hogs. Leonard left school after completing eighth grade at Lincoln Junior High School because no local secondary school accepted black students. He received the nickname "Bucky," or "Buck," during childhood from a younger brother who had difficulty pronouncing "Buddy," the nickname Leonard's parents had given him.

When Leonard was eleven years old, his father died in the influenza epidemic of 1919, and Leonard assumed responsibility for the family. He found work making stockings at a textile mill, and when the mill closed two years later, he began shining shoes at the local railroad station. He worked in a variety of positions with the railroad for the next nine years, from picking up trash in the terminal to installing brake cylinders on box cars.

A talented athlete, Leonard became a bat boy for the local African-American semiprofessional team, the Rocky Mount Elks, and later joined the team. As a player, he patterned himself after Lou Gehrig, both in terms of his performance on the field and his general composure and attitude. When he was seventeen, Leonard and his friends had a chance to watch Gehrig play through the fence at Griffith Stadium in Washington, DC, an experience that Leonard would cherish until his death.

After losing his job with the railroad during the Depression, Leonard spent two years working in a funeral home, where he met Sarah Wroten, the woman who later became his first wife. In 1933 Leonard was offered an opportunity to leave Rocky Mount and pursue a career in professional baseball. It was a busy year for Leonard, who played briefly with the Portsmouth Firefighters and the Baltimore Stars teams before he was drafted by the Brooklyn Royal Giants and finished the season in New York.

Achieved Records with the Homestead Grays

In 1934 Leonard was drafted by the Homestead Grays, headquartered in a small mining town outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Leonard had been recommended to team owner Cumberland Posey by Smokey Joe Williams, a retired pitcher who had seen Leonard perform with the Giants. Leonard was an immediate success and, over the course of his first two seasons, helped the Grays to become the second-ranked team in the Negro Leagues. In 1935 Leonard was chosen to participate in his first East-West All-Star Game.

The Grays were one of the most heralded teams in the league, and Leonard quickly became the team's star and captain. However, life for African-American baseball players was challenging. According to former teammate Wilmer "Red" Fields in a 1997 interview with National Public Radio, at the height of his career Leonard was one of the highest-paid players in the Negro Leagues but was still paid no more than $4,500 per year, as opposed to the salaries of most white players, which ranged from $10,000 to $30,000. Negro League players sometimes played up to three games in a single day. "Sometimes we'd be travelin' in the bus and goin' from one city to another, and didn't have time to eat," said Fields. "And then sometimes we'd be checkin' in in a black restaurant to eat—especially in the South, there wasn't enough room in there for the whole team. So some of the ballplayers had to go to the grocery store and get groceries and come back to the bus and eat in the bus."

In his third season with the team, Leonard posted 33 home runs and a .432 batting average. Though career records are difficult to compile, it is believed that Leonard maintained a .300 average for his career. In a 1997 obituary in the New York Times, Leonard was quoted as saying, "Some white newspapers told us they would run the scores in their paper if we mailed the scores in to them every night, but sometimes we weren't near a mailbox, so that idea never really worked out."

In 1937 the legendary catcher Josh Gibson joined the Homestead Grays, and he and Leonard soon became the best hitting duo in the Negro Leagues. While Gibson became known as the team's star slugger, and had a batting average slightly higher than Leonard's, Leonard, who was known as a quiet, modest man, seemed content to be second in the team's lineup. Buck O'Neil, a rival first baseman for the Kansas City Monarchs, remembered Leonard in his 1994 biography I Was Right on Time as a studious player who often shunned the nightlife that appealed to his colleagues.

Leonard married Sarah Wroten in a ceremony held on New Year's Eve in 1937, and the couple remained together, living in a small house in Rocky Mount, until her death in 1966.

Compared to Lou Gehrig

During the height of their careers, Leonard and Gibson were nicknamed the "thunder twins" by the black media, and drew comparisons to the duo of Gehrig and Babe Ruth. While Gibson was known for his crowd-pleasing home runs, Leonard, like Gehrig, was consistent and smooth, and known for his line drives. The Grays won ten Negro League pennants (nine consecutive between 1937 and 1945) and three Negro League World Series. Though Leonard was proud when the media dubbed him the "black Lou Gehrig," fellow player Monte Irvin noted in the New York Times that "Buck Leonard was the equal of any first baseman who ever lived. If he'd gotten the chance to play in the major leagues, they might have called Lou Gehrig the white Buck Leonard."

During World War II, when a number of white athletes had left the major leagues for military service, Leonard and Gibson were approached by Clark Griffith, owner of the Washington Senators, who was considering them for a place on the Senators team. Though both Leonard and Gibson were interested in the offer, Griffith later changed his mind, and the color line in professional baseball remained in place until Branch Rickey, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, drafted Jackie Robinson in 1947.

Gibson left the Grays in 1946 and played for a year in the Mexican leagues. He died in 1947 of a stroke related to a brain tumor. Leonard remained with the Grays and netted his most lucrative season in 1948, earning $10,000 during the summer and winter seasons and winning the Negro National League batting title at the age of forty-one. After Jackie Robinson broke the race barrier in 1947, interest in Negro League baseball quickly waned, and the league disbanded in 1948. Leonard remained with the Grays, which endured as an independent team, for an additional two years before leaving to pursue further opportunities in the Mexican leagues.

At a Glance …

Born Walter Fenner Leonard on September 8, 1907, in Rocky Mount, NC; died November 27, 1997, Rocky Mount, NC; son of John and Emma Leonard; married Sarah Wroten, 1937 (died 1966), married Lugenia Fox, 1986. Religion: Baptist.

Career: Baltimore Stars, 1933; Brooklyn Royal Giants, 1933-34; Pittsburgh Homestead Grays, 1934-50.

Awards: National Negro League Pennant, Pittsburgh Homestead Grays, 1937-45; National Baseball Hall of Fame, 1972; North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, 1974; Washington Sports Hall of Fame, 1981.

After two years in Mexico, Leonard was approached by Bill Veeck of the St. Louis Browns, who offered him an opportunity to attend spring training. Leonard turned down the offer, saying later in his autobiography, "I was too old and I knew it." Leonard made a brief appearance in integrated baseball in 1953 when, at age forty-six, he took a position with the Portsmouth, Virginia, minor league team and played ten games before returning to Mexico. Despite his age, Leonard posted impressive performances in Mexico, reportedly achieving a batting average better than .400. Leonard remained in the Mexican leagues until 1955, when he decided to retire.

Inducted into the Hall of Fame

After returning to Rocky Mount, Leonard pursued a number of jobs, working as a truant officer and later a physical education teacher for the school system. Leonard also found time to complete his education, receiving his high school equivalency and taking classes through correspondence. Leonard took part in founding a Rocky Mount minor league team, the Rocky Mount Leafs, in the Carolina League and served as the organization's vice president during the early 1960s.

Robert Peterson's landmark book, Only the Ball Was White (1970), which documented the history of the Negro Leagues, brought about a public debate over inducting members of the Negro Leagues into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. The Hall of Fame directors decided in 1971 to create a special Committee on Negro Baseball Leagues, which selected Satchel Paige as the first inductee to the Hall of Fame that same year.

On February 8, 1972, Leonard was inducted into the Hall of Fame. In his autobiography Leonard described his induction as one of the happiest days of his life. "We in the Negro leagues felt like we were contributing something to baseball, too, when we were playing," Leonard said at his induction ceremony. "We played with a round ball and we played with a round bat. And we wore baseball uniforms and we thought that we were making a contribution to baseball. We loved the game and we liked to play it."

Leonard was inducted into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame in 1974 and became a local celebrity in the changing cultural landscape of Rocky Mount. Leonard was asked to contribute to a variety of books and publications documenting the history of the Negro Leagues and the struggle of African Americans in sports. His contributions culminated in the publication of his autobiography, Buck Leonard: The Black Lou Gehrig, which was published in 1995 when Leonard was eighty-seven years old.

Leonard met and began courting Lugenia Fox in 1969 and they married in 1986. Having no children, Leonard and his wife lived a quiet life until his death in 1997. While the players of the Negro Leagues were heroes in their own right, few were able to achieve the fame enjoyed by white players of the same era. Leonard's career was waning at a time when opportunities for African-American baseball players were becoming more common. In his autobiography, Leonard expressed no bitterness at having been banned from the major leagues, only a deep regret that he was unable to test himself against the best players of his age. "We had our own league, like another world," he said in his biography, "and we played like no other league existed."

Sources

Books

Leonard, Buck, and James A. Riley, Buck Leonard: The Black Lou Gehrig, Carroll & Graf, 1995.

Snyder, Brad, Beyond the Shadow of the Senators: The Untold Story of the Homestead Grays, McGraw-Hill, 2003.

Periodicals

Chicago Sun-Times, January 29, 1995; November 28, 1997.

New York Times, November 29, 1997.

Philadelphia Daily News, July 7, 1996.

Washington Post, November 30, 1997.

Online

"Buck Leonard," National Baseball Hall of Fame Online, http://www.baseballhalloffame.org/hofers/detail.jsp?playerId=492575 (accessed February 24, 2008).

"Walter ‘Buck’ Leonard," Negro League Baseball Players Association, http://www.nlbpa.com/leonard_buck.html (accessed February 24, 2008).