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Show Volunteer Work on Levee Hastens Waddell's Death By JOE WILLIAMS Special to The Telegram NEW YORK, Jan. 281 haven't yet seen anything in the' flood news about Hickman, Ky. That's a little southern pueblo I'll never forget. I'll always look back on it with a warm feeling for a onetime one-time great ball player and with a red-faced embarrassment for my own dumbness. I was about 18 years old at the time, a cub In the sports department of the Memphis Commercial-Appeal. It was In late March and our Southern league baseball team had booked two exhibition games up the river with the Minneapolis team of the American association. The Mllders, as the team was called, were training at Hickman, a typical rural riverfront village with a brief main street, magnolia trees, white houses with colonial pillar and a makeshift mud levee. Old Joe Cantillion was managing the Millers. Nobody ever knew why he picked Hickman as a training base unless It was that the duck ahooUng was good. So was the fishing. Team of Veteran Old Jo had come to Minneapolis from Washington and pretty soon he had assembled himself a full roster ros-ter of veteran. There were o many veteran on the team the porta writers started calling It the old men' home. Either old Joe didn't like young ball player or he lacked the paUenc to work with them. At any rate, he had aurh venerable vener-able war hereea aa Rub WaddelL Jimmy Williams, Dave Altiser, a couple at Delephaatya, Tip Owens, KlUefer, Clymer, Patterson, etc Practically every man oa the quad had seen extended service In the majors; they were back la the minor now atrlvtng te stare off the Inevitable aa Long aa possible. pi Rube Waddrll . . . Wad re in river ine Kinaiy rora acaroorougn, sports editor, sent me up to Hickman Hick-man with the" home team on what waa my first out of town assignment. assign-ment. Richard Harding Davis never went to the battiefront flushed with higher excitement or higher resolves re-solves "Don't waste any words on fancy wriUng,1 Instructed Mr. Scarborough. "Keep It short and get the score right" The Mississippi waa on Its usual spring rampage, sullen, angry and bloated from the rain and the melting melt-ing snow up north. The river waa already at flood level when our train pulled into Hickman. The water had boiled over at some point, the flat lands were Inundated and the far stretches of the outfield of the tiny ball park were covered. Gets Score Right The gam waa played and I got my first and only look at the great Waddell In the box; he came close to being my sports Idol at the time. I knew his big league record backward. back-ward. His tremendous performances with the Athletics and later with the St. Louis Browns. The legend about his calling the three outfielders outfield-ers in and then striking out the side. I waa hoping he would do something some-thing like that thia afternoon, but he dldnt Ho pitched three in-IConttfiMd in-IConttfiMd oa Followias Pe Rube's Volunteer Levee Work Told (Continued from Pwetllng Past) nlngs with eonventiogal behavior and a whirring fast ball. The Memphis players didn't get run off him and my recollection Is they didn't get a hit either. In the end they were beaten and I romposed some sort of piece, the principal virtue of which waa the ecore waa correct. The two teams were to play again the next day. a Sunday. So that night the ball players sat around in the lobby of the two-story Merchants Mer-chants hotel and talked shop. I noticed no-ticed Waddell wasn't around. Somebody Some-body aaid he had a fight with his wife and had gone down to the village vil-lage saloon. He didn't have to work the next day, so apparently it didn't matter. Some two hours later the droning of the lobby conversationalists was the firehouse bell . . . "That means there's trouble down on the riverfront.' river-front.' the hotel clerk explained. "I guess the levee's busted again." The ominous music of the bell was a general call for volunteers, leobhy Empties The lobby was swiftly emptied. Everybody made for the levee. It wasn't a great distance. A full moon rode high in the placid sky, spotlighting spot-lighting the raw drama of nature below a silver smile that suggested cruel mockery. Thousands of burlap bur-lap bags packed with sand had been set aside for flood emergencies. The levee had broken all right and scores of negro laborers, most of them stripped to the skin, their finely chiseled bodies glistening in the half light, carried the bags out into the water to the original boundaries boun-daries of the caved in levee. An army officer commanded them. Soldiers Sol-diers kept the curious back. Nobody seemed frightened, not even concerned. The negroes chanted a familiar spiritual as they waded back and forth through the rushing torrent, now up above their waistline. This was sheer living drama, unmatched in any book, on any stage. A beleaguered village, a resrute unit of naked negroes, a melodious obbligato of chanting voices. White Man Appears I see all that in retrospect now. What I saw at the moment was the sudden appearance of a white man among the negroes; he. too, was stripped, his broad shoulders bent under the weight of a heavy aandbag and his voice raised in song as he staggered forward in the teeth of the lashing stream. It wasn't difficult to recognize him. It was Rube Wad-, dell. Along with the rest, the great old pitcher worked for hours worked until the crisis was over. He developed de-veloped a cold from the extraordinary extraordi-nary exposure, which soon developed devel-oped into a lung infection and he died before the season ended- An admirable fellow in his own way . . . and for myself, I was too dumb to realize I was on top of a story that waa infinitely greater thany any baseball game that was ever played. There isn't even any consolation In remembering-1 got the score right. |