Infamous America - BLACK SOX Ep. 8 | Mike Nola Interview: Shoeless Joe Jackson

Episode Date: September 25, 2019

Mike Nola is the official historian of the Shoeless Joe Jackson virtual Hall of Fame at BlackBetsy.com. He relates stories of the most famous member of the Black Sox in a free wheelin’ interview that chronicles Joe’s life and career. In addition, he talks about the Shoeless Joe film that is moving through the pipeline in Hollywood. For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From Black Barrel Media, this is the final episode of Season 2 of the Infamous America Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this week I'm really excited to bring you an entire episode of stories about Shulis Joe Jackson. Mike Nola is the official historian of the Shulis Joe Jackson Virtual Hall of Fame at Black Betsy.com, and he sits on the board of directors of the Shulis Joe Jackson Museum in Greenville, South Carolina. As you'll hear, he loves to talk about Joe, and he's a lot of. He's got stories for days. You'll hear highlights of Joe's early career and find out what life was like for Joe after he was banned from professional baseball and hear about some poignant moments toward the end

of his life. And you'll also hear some brand new information about the potential to get Joe into the Hall of Fame as well as some new details about the Shoeless Joe movie that's in the works. So let's get to the stories. Here's Mike Nolan. relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind. I lay in bed at night with my mind racing from one thing to another, and then of course I have a brainstorm about something new. That lights the fire, and then I'm in real trouble. To calm my mind, the only things that have

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Florida. So thank you for being on the show and agreeing to do this interview about Shulis Joe Jackson. I appreciate it. Oh, yeah, no problem. I'm glad I could help, Chris. Thank you. Yeah. And so we, as we discussed in some emails previously, this is going to be a very much of a freewheeling story time conversation with Mike Nola about stories about Joe Jackson. So we want to get to know the man who people sometimes think they know, but they probably don't. So I'm basically going to tee you up with some really easy questions and just let you roll with some stories. How does that sound? That sounds fine, Chris. You can ask my wife, I'll talk to the wall about Joe Jackson if I think it'll listen. Perfect. Well, hopefully we have some more captivated listeners than the

wall, but you never know. We'll see what happens. So, but before we jump into those, I do want to mention something that you also brought to my attention. I think it's really fun, and I'm sure the listeners will want to know about because it's coming down the road at some point. So can you tell me about the project that you're involved in right now and say as much as you're allowed to say? I know you've got to keep some of it under wraps, but what's the project you're working on right now related to Shulis Joe?

Absolutely. I was about a year ago, a little over a year ago, I was retained by producer Renee James as the historical consultant for a movie that is going to be made about Shulis Joe Jackson. We've got Billy Bob Thornton. I'm sure folks know him. We've got him on board. He wants the movie to be made.

He's supporting us 100% with that. The script is being written by the award-winning writer Angelo Pizzo. He wrote, I'm sure your list is probably familiar with the movie Rudy and the movie Hoosiers. He wrote those. He also wrote the game of their lives. It's about a soccer match, I think, that was played back in the 1950s. My All-American and a host of others, too numerous to name. But he's currently in the process of writing the script for that.

And we wanted to get the movie in the can and ready to go and be released around this year's World Series to kind of celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the movie. Black Sox scandal, but due to some little snags here and there, I'm learning a lot about making Hollywood movies, and it's not as easy as it might sound. We're not going to be able to make that deadline, but the movie's going to get made. One way or the other, the movie's going to get made. Perfect. That's fantastic. I'm sure a lot of people will look forward to it. And luckily, I think as I've talked to Jacob Pomerinkie about, who was in the interview episode right before this one, there's actually three years of anniversaries coming up.

This story extends beyond just 1919, and certainly for the players themselves, it goes way beyond 1919. So there's going to be plenty of time. It'll be fun to have something to look forward to after the 100-year anniversary. Absolutely. Absolutely. So you're right. I guess in that aspect, yeah, there are some other anniversaries. I won't say they're good anniversaries, but there are some other anniversaries that will come to follow the year 2019 for years.

Yeah. Unfortunately, there's nothing. so much that maybe should be celebrated, but at this point we're 100 years removed, so we'll take what we can get, I guess. Right, absolutely. All right, well, cool. Thank you for telling us about that. Everybody start looking forward to that, hopefully in the next couple of years.

Let's hope it comes out in the next couple of years. So while we're on the topic, obviously we're just going to talk about Joe and some of his go through basically three periods of his life. So let's start in the earlier days. So what are some of the interesting highlights you can tell me from Joe's earlier career when he's playing semi-pro baseball, and then maybe even up through his first professional contract with the Philadelphia Athletics.

You know, he, Joe started out in 1903. He was playing, he started out playing for the Brandon Mill, which is a cotton mill there in Greenville, South Carolina. He started out playing there with the age of 13 because the older men at the meal had seen him playing, and they knew he had some great talent, and they wanted him on their team.

So they asked his mother, Martha, for permission to allow him to play. And he started out of the pitcher, but he threw the ball so hard he was hurting people. I think he broke a catcher's hand or arm or something, so they decided to put him in the outfield and get him away from pitching. He was – I won't say he was wild, but he just threw so very hard that he was hurting people. and when he hit home runs, his brothers would run through the stands with a hat and collect money

because the fans wanted to donate money to Joe for the home runs that he hit. So he kind of got a reputation in Greenville. And he played for several teams from 1903 until he was discovered by one of Connie Mack Philadelphia Athletic Scout in 1908. And they bought his contract for, from the Greenville spinners for, I think it was 325, if memory serves me correct.

I mean, that was a lot of money in 1908. And they tried to take him to Philadelphia, and he got homesick before they ever got to Charlotte. And so he jumped the train when they stopped to get water for the train. At a station in Charlotte, he jumped the train and caught a train back to Greenville. And a lot of people say he was homesick, But I tend to think he was more missing his wife. He had just gotten married about a month earlier in July,

below 19th in 19080, got married to his sweetheart, Katie Wynn, and he was missing her, I think, more than he was missing his home or Greenville. But Connie Max sent a ball player down to Greenville, and he gave him strict orders to come back with Jackson at all cost. The player did get him back, and Joe played five games with Philadelphia in 1908 before he got homesick and took a train back to Greenville. So Connie Mack assigned him to Savannah the next year in 1909, and Joe did really well in Savannah.

That's because he was in his native South, and people weren't making fun of him. The players in Philadelphia made a lot of fun of Joe because Joe never learned to read or write because at the age of about six years, six or seven years old, he had to go to work in the cotton mill to help his family. And that was common practice in those days. There were no child labor laws. So Joe, like all the other kids, he went to work and helped his family, and he never had the opportunity to go to school to learn to read and write.

So the players in Philadelphia made a lot of fun of him because they wanted to intimidate him because, In those days, when a new player came to a team, the old players, the veterans, saw it as a threat. You know, here's a guy who's going to try to take my job, and they did a lot of things to try to prevent that young kid from taking their job. I mean, they would ride them hard, and they rode Joe pretty hard, and he didn't like it. So he did better in Savannah in 1909, and then Connie Mack at the end of the season in 1909 brought him up. and Joe played another five games for Philadelphia before he got homesick, and he went home to Greenville.

Matt got tired of that in the off-season, and he traded him to Cleveland. And Cleveland assigned Joe to New Orleans, and again, he'd been in the South. He did really well in New Orleans. And at the end of the season, 1910, Cleveland brought him up, and he did real well in Cleveland. And then 1911 was Joe's first full. season in the big leagues and he batted 408 as a rookie and that is a record that still stands to

this day for a rookie batter. That's a lot of his early career in a nutshell. I mean, there's a lot more but I don't want to bore people. No, no, that was great. That's exactly what I was looking for because I think as we're going to get to the very next question. Most people focus almost entirely on his Chicago years. If they know a little bit, I'm sure they know that he was with Cleveland, but I don't know how many people know some interesting stories about his semi-pro years. And to be quite honest, I've heard some of that with the research that I've done. But this is going to be a fun learning experience for me, too. I'm looking forward to hearing all these stories, just like I hope the audience is. So some of this is going to be new to me. So I'm fascinated by all of it. Tell whatever you

want. I think it's all great. I will say that one thing I'd like, I like to clear up with people when I talk to them about Joe Jackson for the first time, is that they know that Joe was banned from the game in 1921. But what they may not know is that everybody thinks he was banned for life, and that's just not the true issue or the true fact of the deal. He was only

banned from by baseball's first commissioner, Judge Kennesaw-Mountain, he was only banned from ever playing professional baseball again. None of those men ever played organized professional baseball again. And if you take Landis's two-paragraph Edith,

to the legal letter of the law, then Joe should have been reinstated into baseball's good graces at such time that he could no longer have played at the professional level. That would have been sometime around 1932 to 19, I mean 1930 to 1932 in my opinion. But then, you know, he died at 10 p.m. on Wednesday, December to 5th, 1951, and it became a ban in perpetuity. So, you know, that's a misconception that, that people have as they think he was banned for life, but he wasn't.

He was only banned from ever playing professional baseball again. There's also another misconception that the Hall of Fame has kind of perpetrated or whatever you want to call it since they instituted a rule against Pete Rose in 1991 that said anybody on Major League Baseball's ineligible list cannot be considered for induction into the Hall of Fame. but by baseball, by Major League Baseball is on admission, they do not punish a deceased player. There's only an ineligible list for living players or living entities.

And Joe Jackson ceased to be a living entity at 10 p.m. on Wednesday, December the 5th, 1951. And they no longer punish a deceased ball player. So Joe is not really on any ineligible list. And quite honestly, he's eligible to be put on the, a ballot for the Hall of Fame. We just got to convince the Hall of Fame that. But by Major League Baseball's on admission, he's not being punished by them and he's not on an ineligible list. And a lot of people think that he has to be cleared off of some list before he can be considered for the Hall of Fame. And that's simply not true. And I like to clear up those two points about how long

he was actually banned and that he's really not ineligible. Yeah, I'm really glad you did because I did not know either of those. Hopefully our listeners have just learned something also, or they already knew those things. That's really interesting. So maybe it's time for people to start getting a campaign going to get Joe into the Hall of Fame. I just assumed, I mean, I knew what Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis's edict was,

and I guess I'd never realized what you just stated, that, yes, once a person ceases to be able to play professional baseball, in Joe's case, he might then be eligible to be reinstated, but he never was. and now he's, now that he's deceased, he is not on an ineligible list anymore. So at this point, they don't seem to be any reasons why he can't be in the Hall of Fame. Do I have that correct? You have that correct.

And the other thing, the other little misconception is, is people will say Jackson needs to be reinstated by Major League Baseball. Reinstatement from a legal perspective from my understanding, talking with lawyers, reinstatement only applies to a living entity and reinstatement does not apply to a deceased individual because unless you believe in that field of dreams thing, Joe Jackson's not going to come up out of the grave and walk out of a cornfield and start playing baseball. So he's done.

I mean, and to be honest with you, Joe Jackson could care less about being in the Hall of Fame. He never tried to get in it. I mean, he was eligible up until 1991, and he received about three or four votes over all those years since 1936. But he never petitioned anybody, and in fact, he never petitioned for Judge Landis to reinstate him. Now, there were several efforts made by some of Joe's friends or business associates. associates, they're actually, you know, a movement to have his name reinstated to the good graces of Major League Baseball.

But Joe himself never petitioned anybody for that. He didn't feel like he did anything wrong in order to have to ask for forgiveness. And, you know, I always tell people, I could care less that Joe Jackson's in the Hall of Fame. He's, quite frankly, he's a heck of a lot more famous outside the Hall of Fame. than he ever will be inside it. Once they put him there, if they ever do that, he'll be forgotten like the other greats of the game and only talk about occasionally.

But now people are talking about Joe Jackson a lot. And, you know, he's more relevant now outside the Hall of Fame looking in than he ever will be in it looking out. Well, that's another good point. Yeah, his name is perpetually spoken because he's not in the Hall of Fame. I'm sure it gets brought up to some degree every year when the new Hall of Fame ballots come out

and everyone starts talking about it, it's always when if, is it possible that Joe Jackson could ever get in? So just out of curiosity, like if, if, you know, hopefully I don't show my ignorance here, but if someone, if fans wanted to start a campaign to get him into the Hall of Fame, how would they do that? What's the process like for trying to get Joe in at this point? Well, you know, I've been doing this since 1982, and we, back then we did petitions and got signatures. that kind of stuff and then mailed them in the major league baseball and they never went anywhere they never got any traction you know they just they just never went anywhere it was a lot of the waste of time and i still think that's true today i don't i don't think petitions uh signature petitions

uh really work in this kind of environment with major league baseball we've got to convince the hall of fame i don't that that's the thing is i think we were we were looking at the wrong people all this time. I mean, up until recently, I was thoroughly convinced that Joe was on Major League Baseball's ineligible list, but then I talked to somebody inside a Major League Baseball, and I won't name any names,

but this person is in a position to absolutely know what he's talking about. And he said Joe Jackson is no longer punished by Major League Baseball, as he is a deceased player, they do not punish deceased ball players. So he said, I need to go to the Hall of Fame and petition the Hall of Fame. So we've kind of been going about this in the wrong way, and we're kind of – we're basically in the process of backing up and punting, so to speak.

We're going to start looking at what we need to do as far as getting the Hall of Fame's attention. I mean, that's a tall order in itself, because they've always wanted to throw the buck back on Major League Baseball, because they – and for good reason. They didn't want Pete Rose petitioning them every single. six months to get into the Hall of Fame. So they made up what's called the Rose rule. It was to prevent Pete from going to them and saying, hey, I want to be on the next ballot. So that's the real reason we petitioned.

You know, we went back towards Major League Baseball because the Hall of Fame made that rule to throw all the buck back to Major League Baseball. And until, I mean, like within the last six months, this became apparent or was revealed. to me by this person inside of Major League Baseball. So now we're going to back up punt, like I said, and go another direction and go at the Hall of Fame instead of going after Major League Baseball. Wow, that's really interesting. Yeah, I didn't know any of that.

And obviously, it's very recent, basically just as I've been working on this series about the Black Sox, that's really interesting. So best of luck to you, and whatever happens, certainly check back in. I hopefully will stay in touch, and I can follow the progress of this little adventure you're on. Absolutely. I'll be happy to talk to you anytime, Chris, for sure. And so I guess we can, you know, that was, again, as we said in the very beginning, this was going to be a freewheeling conversation.

I had no idea we were going to go there, and that's awesome. So I guess the one last thing that I wanted to ask you about then, well, I guess I wanted to ask two more things. One we had already talked about, I definitely want to hear one specific story. But there is one thing since you somewhat have brought it up in the field of dreams movie. And certainly most people who are listening to this, if not ever, everyone listening to this has seen the movie eight men out. And so they know how the movie begins, it ends with, certainly with the ending with Joe Jackson playing in the outfield of an outlaw team or a semi-pro team. And it looks like he's maybe trying to hide his identity. And it's a,

you know, it's a poignant, dramatic moment for the movie. But can you shed some light on what Joe's career was like after he was no longer able to play professional baseball anymore? He did play for semi-pro teams and outlaw teams. What was that experience like for? Joe. Right. The movie that you're referring to, it actually happened. I mean, he played in 1922. I think they have it in 1925 in the movie, if I remember correct.

But it actually happened in 1922. He played for Westwood, New Jersey. And he played under the name Joe Joseph. You know, I guess people may not understand how he could have done that, but they need to remember. There wasn't a whole lot of radio in those days, and there was absolutely no TV. So no ESPN broadcasting his photograph and his likeness all over the airwaves.

So a lot of people didn't know what Joe Jackson looked like. They had no clue. And so he could sneak in these towns and play under an assumed name. A lot of people think he played his whole what we call outlaw ball, and we call it outlaw ball because it was in little leagues that weren't governed by Major League Baseball because Landis put down an edict that said any man playing on a team with or playing against any of those Black Sox players could also be banned from ever playing professional baseball. So Joe tried to, in 1922 he tried to play a lot of games under assumed names,

but when he made it to America's Georgia in 1923, he was playing under his own name. and from then on to the rest of his career when it ended in 1937, he played under his own name. He played, like I said, he played 1922 in the New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania area. He played a bunch of games. We're still trying to track a lot of those games down. Jacob and I have a lot of them rounded up, but there's still a lot that he played in under names that, you know, we may or may not ever know if it was him or somebody else. Like I said, in 1923, he played America's Georgia,

but he actually played about 32 games in a little town in Louisiana, Bass Trop, Louisiana. And they say Eddie Seacott, who was a pitcher for the Black Sox or for the White Sox, played with him for several games under the name more, and he played under the name Joe Johnson. So he took that team and brought it to America's Georgia, and they played 32 games for America's, and they took the America's team to the Georgia Little World Series,

and they won the title. And then he moved to Waycross and played the final two games of the Waycross season in 1923. And then in 1924, he came back to play for Waycross, and here's an interesting thing. And here's how I got interested. in Joe Jackson. My dad was born in Waycross, Georgia in 1915, and he saw Joe play when Joe came to Waycross

in 1924 and 1925. He saw Joe Jackson play, and he told me how good Joe Jackson was how far he could hit a ball, how far he could throw a ball. And the interesting part about the 1924 season was Joe had a player by the name of Ernest Wingard that played for him in America. and Ernest got drafted or signed by the St. Louis Browns. So in 1924, Joe went with Ernest right outside of St. Louis and worked with him and got him a good start in the major league.

And so Joe didn't get to America until July of 1920, I mean to Waycross until July of 1924. The Waycross team didn't have a uniform to give Joe because they'd given them all. out. So Joe wore his 1917 World Series uniform. And my dad remembered it. My dad said he wore his uniform that had American flags on both sleeves

and it had a red, white, and blue socks on the upper left breast of his uniform. And the only uniform that ever looked like that for the white socks was their 1917 World Series uniform. So

my dad said that that's what he wore. for the rest of the season in Waycross. And apparently, at some point in time after that, maybe 10 or so games he played that way, Katie removed his wife, Katie removed the socks off the chest of the uniform. And I actually have a picture of Joe up close, and you can actually see the outline of where the socks, you know how when you've got something sewn on a uniform,

and it gets worn, and you take that, if you take that number off or you take that emblem off, you can see where it used to be because of the newness of the uniform under there. You can actually see the socks still on the uniform, even though the logo was removed. And she did that to kind of subdue Joe's exposure, so to speak, so that people wouldn't recognize that that was Joe Jackson of White Sox fame. And he was real sensitive that.

He didn't want to draw a lot of heat down on. people that played with him or against him. He didn't want anybody to be banned because they played with him or against him. So he tried to lay low, but he did play under his real name in Waycross. And like I said, from 1923 in America, he played under his real name all the way up to 1937 when he, the last season he played ball. Man, that's great. I had no idea about your father's story.

So you have a genuine personal connection to this story. I knew that you were, you know, you'd been fast. fascinated with this for a long time. I did not know it went that deep. Yep. And from 1926 to 1931, he didn't play any ball that we can find. And I talked to his niece before she died in the early 2000s, and she said she believed the reason why he didn't, he wasn't able to go play ball in the summers because he had a dry cleaning business in Savannah. and they were so busy until he just couldn't afford to take the time away from the business and go play ball like he had in years past.

But in 1932, he returned to his hometown in Greenville, South Carolina, and he was signed to play with Greenville Spinners for $100 a week. And that was a lot of money in the Great Depression, $100 a week. So he played about 10 games for the spinners, and he batted 407 now. he was 45 years old at the time. 407 is a pretty nice baton average if you're 22, much less 45. So he played, and then he came back in 1933. He'd already moved back to Greenville for good.

He sold his dry cleaning business in Savannah, and he moved back to Greenville. In 1933, he played 15 games for Poe meals, and Poe was a meal in the Greenville area. And he was 46 years of age at the time, but he could still hit the cover off of baseball. He batted over 800 in those 15 games. Yeah, I've read some of those numbers late in his career. He was still a man among men. Yeah, he had much game. In 1934, he played for Winsborough, and I don't know how much he played for Winsborough.

There wasn't a whole lot of accounts in the Greenville newspaper, but he did play for him. He didn't play in 1935 and 36, and I suspect he was basically for the same reason. He was running a barbecue restaurant and a liquor store, so he didn't have much time to get out and play ball. In 1937, he came back, and he was a player manager for the Woodside Mill, and Woodside Mill was another textile mill in the Greenville area. And that was his last season in baseball, except for an occasional exhibition game that he played. he actually was called out of the stands in 1941 during a middle league game. And I talked to a guy that was there, a fellow by the name of Joe Anders.

And Joe told me that they called Joe out of the stand to hit, to show him how he hit back in the day. And the pitcher threw a ball and Joe swung and missed. And so he said all the, all the, players were getting on and they were ragged him real hard. Talking about, oh, man, you can't hit. I mean, this is 1941. He already had a heart attack at that point.

So the pitcher threw him another pitch. He swung and missed it big time, and so the players are really getting there. Even the bench jockeys are getting into it now. So the pitcher threw another pitch, and Joe got a hold of it and deposited over the center field fence about 400 and something feet away. And he just dropped the bat and turned around, walked back in the dugout. But there wasn't nobody else. dragging him at that point. They shut up. He could still hit a baseball of country mile.

That is fantastic. He didn't even bother with the bases, just went straight back to the dugout. He proved his point. No, no, he was past running. Like I said, he'd already had one heart attack, so the doctor wasn't, the doctor didn't even want him to go out there and swing a bat, but he just, he was a natural. He just wanted to do it. Somebody told him to come out there, and so that's what he wanted to do. No question. And you've already set up three pieces of the final story that I would love for you to tell the audience. They've already heard my condensed version of this story, but you just mentioned Joe Anders and of course the liquor store that Joe owned toward the end of his life. And then the fact that he was sensitive about, you know,

his identity and bringing other people into his orbit with the stigma of being banned. So can you now please tell us the more full version of Joe and Ty Cobb's reunion in Joe's liquor store in Greenville late in his life? Yeah, absolutely. It actually happened in April of 1947. Ty Cobb was riding back with sports rider Grantland Rice. They were headed back to Charlotte, North Carolina. They were coming back from Augusta, Georgia. They had just attended the Masters Golf Tournament.

And so Ty knew that Joe had a liquor store, and he was in a need of a fifth of liquor. And so he decided that he would, he would stop in and talk to talk to his old friend, his old rival. And so they stopped, and Ty walks in. Now, according to Ty Cobb's biographer, Al Stump, who portrayed the meeting as Cobb finding the press, downtried and broke, Joe Jackson, and that's as far from the truth as you can get. Al Stump wanted to make it look like Joe didn't want to talk to Ty Cobb, et cetera, et cetera.

And some of that is true, but Joe did it more for, you know, Joe was a, I want to say Joe was a class acting. He didn't want to embarrass Ty Cobb in front of his friend, Grantlin Rice, by speaking to him. He wanted to let Cobb speak to him first. He figured if Cobb speaks to me, then it's okay that I talk to him, and not he won't embarrass grantly rice. Joe was uneducated, but he was far from stupid. A lot of people don't understand that. They think because you're uneducated, you're stupid.

Joe, Joe had a lot of common sense, and he had a lot of smart, street smarts. So he, uh, Cobb goes in and walks around and he sees Joe and Joe's busy. Joe sees him and Joe keeps busy stocking his shells and wiping down his shell. and it kind of aggravates Ty Cobb, according to the story. And finally he got tired of it, and he's like, he asked Joe, he's like, Joe, you don't know me, Joe? And Joe's reportedly replied, sure, Ty, I know you. I just didn't think, you know, anybody that knew me up there would want to know me now. And supposedly, Cobb said, sure, Joe, I came to see you and talk about the old days.

And that's when the meeting became really good between the two rivals, the old rivals. Joe actually got on the phone and called his Joe Anders, the guy I spoke about just a minute ago. Joe Anders was an up-and-coming ball player in the late 30s, early 40s. And Joe Jackson took him under his wing to try to teach him, mentor to him, hitting, and the finer arts of the game, you know. And so he always wanted to include anything baseball.

he wanted to include Joe Anders in it. So he called Joe Anders on the phone, and he told him, come down there to the liquor store. He had somebody wanted to meet. And Joe told me when he got there, Joe Jackson said, come here, Joe, I got somebody I want you to meet. He introduced him, Ty Cobb. He said, this is the greatest hitter of all time.

And Cobb, Joe Anderson said Cobb stopped him. Dead in his tracks and said, no, son. Joe Jackson is the greatest natural hitter of all time. and so at that point Joe Anderson took Ty Cobb all around Greenville introduced him to his friend his business associates and they just had a really good visit

and it was far from what Al Stump's story was and that is that Cobb found Joe Jackson a depressed downtrod and beaten, broke man and that was farthest from the truth because arguably Joe Jackson was one of the most successful of any of those actually was the most successful

of any of those men that was associated with the Black Sox scandal. When his wife died in 1959, she left over $30,000 to two South Carolina charities. And in 1959, $30,000 was a pretty good chunk of change. So he was far from a broke, depressed, downtrodden man. The thing about Joe Jackson is a lot of people think that about him, but Joe Jackson simply got on with life. He did. he was down for a little bit about the Black Sox scandal being kicked out of baseball because he loved it.

But he just found another place to play ball. I mean, they didn't let him play in one ballpark. He went to another ballpark to play. And he played until 1937. And he lived that very, very happy life. And there's a famous picture. I always tell people this. There's a famous picture of Joe Jackson.

And he's in his kitchen and he's cooking eggs. And he's got this big, big grin. and you can see it on the virtual Hall of Fame website. He's got this big grin. He's sitting there and he's frying these eggs up in a pan, and he's just happy. And back when I started doing my research, there wasn't a whole lot of information. I'm obviously no Internet or nothing like that, so you had to actually go to a car and go to a library

and dig through stacks and stacks of newspapers to get anything out of any information out. So I didn't know a whole lot about what happened to Joe Jackson after he was banned. but when I saw that picture, that picture spoke to my heart. I cried like a baby. I'm not ashamed to admit it. I cried like a baby because that picture spoke to me and said, hey, here's Joe Jackson in 1946, 47, and you're looking out at me, and he's smiling at me, and he's telling me, I'm good.

I had a great life. Baseball didn't get me down. I just moved on, went on, and did what I needed to do, and I'm happy. And that picture speaks to me to this. day. I mean, if I was looking at it now, I'd probably start crying. But he just got on with life. He didn't let it get him down. And so I always like people to know that the Al Stump version of that meeting in the liquor stores is not 100% true. There's parts of it that are that actually happened, but the majority of it didn't. Well, thank you, sir. That was a fantastic rendition of that story. That was

great. I appreciate you ending on a great no-for-s. That's exactly what I wanted to hear. Now you got me tearing up a little bit. Now I've got to go find this picture. I've been to your website numerous times and I'm sure I will have said this on the podcast before, but there is a wealth of information on your website about Joe Jackson and early baseball. Definitely go there to check out all these great photos. There's gallery after gallery of photos. So please go there and check them out, including that one. I can't wait to go see that one. Somehow I've missed it. But I'll definitely be going to find it right now. So thank you, Mike. I appreciate the stories. These were fantastic. This is exactly what I wanted to hear. And I couldn't think of

a better way to wrap this whole thing up. Thank you very much for your time. Absolutely, Chris. Anytime, my friend, I enjoyed it. And like I told you earlier, my wife says I will talk about Joe Jackson to the wall. And I hope your listeners got something out of it. And you know where I'm at and I'm available to talk to you to give updates anytime you wish. I was about saying, be on the lookout for emails for me with people right in saying I need to interview Mike. I need to get a hold of him. So hopefully your interview requests go up after this. That's fine. That's what I do. Perfect. Thank you, sir. We'll talk to you in the future.

All right. Thank you now. That wraps it up. Thank you for listening to Season 2 of the Infamous America podcast. We'll see you down the road for season three. And as always, if you enjoyed the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. This story was produced with the help of the Sabre Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. If you want to know more about the people and events you've heard about,

out here, go to saber.org for a wealth of articles. That's sabr.org. And for more details, please visit our website blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrell Media on Twitter. Thanks again. We'll see you next time.