By Adam P. Frankel. This article appeared the Chicago Tribune.
Sometime in the mid-1990s, I wrote a letter to a woman named Gertrude Trammell. I was 12 or 13 at the time and living in New York City. Trammell was roughly 90, a resident of Greenville, South Carolina, which, in my adolescent eyes, might as well have been on another planet.
But a certain familial detail led me to spend some time tracking down her home address, back before Google or Facebook made such information accessible in seconds: Trammell’s older brother was Joseph Jefferson Jackson, or, as he is more commonly known to generations of baseball fans, “Shoeless” Joe.
One of the greatest players in baseball’s history — legendary Washington Senators pitcher Walter Johnson once called him “the toughest hitter to get out” — Jackson was forever banned from the game (and the Baseball Hall of Fame) after allegedly conspiring with some of his White Sox teammates to throw the 1919 World Series.
The full picture of Jackson’s complicity remains the subject of debate, and his defenders have long portrayed him as something of a naif, the illiterate country boy, unable to write his own name, who got mixed up with big-city gamblers, an unfortunate victim of his more nefarious teammates’ machinations.
I’d just about given up on hearing back from Gertrude when I received a long, handwritten reply from a certain Kate Anders of Easley, South Carolina, not far from Greenville. “Gertrude received your nice letter,” Anders began. “She really did appreciate your interest and kind words about her brother Shoeless Joe.”
Anders explained that she was responding on account of Gertrude’s “failing” health. Anders, along with her husband, Joe, I learned, were not only friends of Trammell — they’d also been friends of her older brother. In fact, Anders informed me, her husband had been a pallbearer at Jackson’s funeral.
So began a pen pal correspondence that continued over the coming months and years, right up until it became a casualty of the evolving interests of adolescence. “I tell Gertrude Trammell each time I hear from you,” Anders wrote in one of her letters, all of them filled with snippets about Trammell’s brother and the Anders’ friend.
Shoeless Joe “loved young people,” she told me. “(He) wanted to do something for them. There was a drugstore next door to his store, all the young boys would hang out there. That is where we would see Joe Jackson. He would buy all the kids ice cream. Show them how to hold the bat. Answer questions — a very kind man that everyone loved.”
Almost all of her letters referenced the scandal. Jackson, she impressed on me, was “a great, honest, humble man. He was done wrong.”
My budding social conscience was inflamed by this firsthand testimony of my hero’s character, and I embraced the cause as my own, tramping up and down the 17 flights of my Upper West Side apartment building, pleading with puzzled neighbors to affix their names to a petition calling for Joe’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
How, one might wonder, does a 12-year-old in New York City come to idolize a South Carolina ballplayer who last played in the majors more than a half-century before his birth?
The answer is simple: my dad. Dad’s own father was born in the Midwest in 1918, a year before the scandal, and passed on a love of baseball — and stories of the thrown series — to his son, who passed them along to me.
My parents divorced when I was young, and for a time growing up, every Wednesday night was spent at Dad’s apartment, watching — and rewatching — “Eight Men Out,” the 1988 John Sayles classic about Jackson and the other so-called Black Sox. And every Saturday was spent with him at the New-York Historical Society, scrolling through microfiche of old newspaper accounts of the series and players’ trial.
Other weekends included baseball card shows, where Dad and I paced the aisles looking for old Cracker Jack and tobacco cards of Shoeless Joe and his teammates, or road trips to Cooperstown, New York, where I submitted my petition and pored over archives of the series and Jackson’s career.
At the time, I saw my dedication, my conviction of Jackson’s innocence, as an expression of conscience. He was “done wrong,” as Anders herself had put it, and it was up to all of us — up to anyone with a sense of right and wrong — to clear his name.
But my campaign on Shoeless Joe’s behalf coincided with a bitter legal dispute between my parents. Dad and his family feared my mother might take me to California to live with a man she was dating, and brought a lawsuit against her.
Decades later, I would learn that my dad had considered a DNA test at the time to determine whether I was, in fact, his son. His doubts were well-founded. When I was 25, I discovered that Dad is not my biological father — a secret my mother had kept from me, from him, and from both sides of my family.
Was all of this, I now wonder, at play in my childhood obsession? Was Shoeless Joe a way of bonding me ever more closely to my dad at a moment when I was beginning to sense I might not be his offspring? An attempt to assert some sort of connection, to prove to myself that I was his kin — in interests, if not blood.
I can’t say for sure. But it certainly seems that way. My campaign to get Jackson into the Hall of Fame was, of course, unsuccessful. But perhaps that was never really the point. Perhaps, I now realize, it was the waging of it that mattered most all along.