Former Negro League Baseball Player Honored

GREENSBORO -- When his baseball playing days ended unnoticed in 1955, Joe Siddle couldn't have dreamed that 50 years later his likeness would be sculptured on a plaque mounted outside First Horizon Park.

Sadly, most who pass the downtown marker probably ask, "Who's Joe?"

On the plaque, Siddle represents the many black baseball players who spent prime years playing in virtual obscurity in the Negro Leagues during the Jim Crow era.

He died Sept. 25 at 85 in Oak Ridge, where he lived most of his life and where he was buried Thursday in Oak Ridge First Baptist Church's cemetery.

His baseball career started in 1937 with the Goshen Red Wings, a black semipro team formed in 1935 in the Goshen community south of Greensboro.

After service in World War II, where he played on an Army team in Italy and earned the nickname "Jumpin' Joe," he spent time in 1946 with the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues.

The next year he returned home and rejoined the Goshen team, by then called the Greensboro Red Wings. He worked various jobs, cooking at an airport restaurant and heading the custodial staff at the old Burlington Mills employees club.

His death leaves, as best can be determined, only two living former Red Wings: James Tonkins and Robert Rankin.

"He was definitely a team man,'' Tonkins said. "He wanted to win. He didn't take losses lightly. He tried to keep team morale up. He was a leader."

The Red Wings competed against barnstorming Negro League teams that came to War Memorial Stadium. They also beat a talented white industrial league team in a game played without publicity to avoid protests from segregationists.

In a 2003 interview with the Northwest Observer newspaper, Siddle recalled Kansas City Monarch teammate Satchel Paige, a pitching genius with amazing accuracy, saying he was going to aim a fastball at Siddle.

Paige promised the ball would only touch the edge of Siddle's uniform.

"I stood in there and, sure enough, the ball grazed my pants and didn't hit me at all. When he threw, the ball looked like an aspirin pill."

Siddle said Buck Leonard, a legendary Negro League player, hit a ball at him at first base that, when he caught it, knocked him flat on his back.

The Monarchs won the 1946 league title but lost in the Negro League World Series to the Newark Eagles, led by Larry Doby and Monte Irvin. Doby later became the second black player after Jackie Robinson to play in the white Major Leagues.

As Negro League history received more attention in recent decades, Siddle's daughter, Cozette Smith, says her father often received mail with requests for his autograph.

Ten years ago, the city honored Siddle and about 30 other former Red Wings at a ceremony downtown. Organizer Diane Bellamy-Small, a City Council member, wanted Greensboro to be aware of these players who went unnoticed in their time.

Bellamy-Small says she's glad the commemoration was when it was. Most Red Wings are gone. She plans a resolution honoring Siddle at the Oct. 17 council meeting.