With the Rangers’ mighty bats silent and the team down 3-1 in the World Series, things are looking grim here in Mudville, Texas. So let’s turn instead to a baseball story from yesteryear that we’re happy to remember …
In May 1959, Jerry Craft had just arrived home in Jacksboro on summer break from Texas Tech when he got a phone call from a Mr. Carl Sedberry, manager of the semi-professional Wichita Falls/Graham Stars. Sedberry wanted to know if Craft was available to pitch for the Stars.
Sedberry had scouted Craft the previous summer when the right-handed Craft had pitched in the semi-pro Oil Belt League. Good pitchers are hard to find anywhere, but they were especially hard to find in small-town Texas. And Craft had a nasty dropping curve and splendid control. The Stars sure could use him, Sedberry said. Would he be interested in giving the Stars a tryout when the team played its first game of the season, against the Abilene Blues?
Craft had never heard of the Wichita Falls/Graham Stars or the Abilene Blues. Sedberry assured him that the teams were part of a popular, established league. So Craft, whose only other prospect at the time was to work all day on his family’s cattle ranch, agreed to drive to Wichita Falls for the Stars’ game with the Blues and give the team a try.
He was in for a life-changing surprise. The Wichita Falls/Graham Stars was an all-black team, part of the seven-team West Texas Colored League. Twelve years may have gone by since Jackie Robinson integrated the major leagues, but in the segregated, Jim Crow Texas of 1959, teams and leagues were still white or black, and while black teams and white teams occasionally played each other, none was integrated.
Except, once Craft joined them, for the Stars.
With the help of Kathleen Sullivan, Craft writes about the two seasons he spent with the Stars in “Our White Boy” (Texas Tech University Press; $29.95). There are two changing, disappearing worlds in Craft’s book. We can bid good riddance to one, the racist, segregated world of 1950s Texas. But a nostalgia surrounds the loss of the other, the one in which summer for young men and men young at heart meant baseball, and dozens of small towns across Texas — towns like Haskell and Hamlin, Stamford and Aspermont — were thriving and vibrant enough to field their own baseball teams — before the big cities lured the young people away and television sealed everyone within the cocoon of their own living rooms.
It was a love of the game that prompted Craft to play for the Stars, not the need to make a statement of any kind. “The integration of the Stars is more meaningful to me now than it was in 1959,” Craft writes. “Back then, I was just happy to play baseball.”
Craft, 73, is a cattle rancher and the former mayor of Jacksboro, a small town halfway between Fort Worth and Wichita Falls. He was in Austin for last month’s Texas Book Festival. I had coffee with him and his wife, Pamela, and we spent a pleasant hour talking about his experience as the lone white player in an all-black league.
An edited transcript of our conversation follows.