BY SCOTT JENKINS
SALISBURY POST

KANNAPOLIS — Willie Sheelor just can’t help but smile when he talks about opening the mailbox and finding someone has written asking for his autograph or sent him a baseball to sign.

“Makes me feel like I’m important,” he says, chuckling. “Makes me feel good.”

Sheelor, a 73-year-old Kannapolis native, and men like him have gained importance the past several years as baseball and black America look to reclaim a once-neglected piece of their shared heritage.

Sheelor played four seasons — four glorious, sun-drenched summers — for the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro American League. From 1952 to 1955, he started at second base for one of the last all-black teams in the last all-black league.

Though his playing days came after the heyday of the Negro Leagues, after Jackie Robinson broke in with the Brooklyn Dodgers and broke down organized baseball’s color barrier, the memories lack no luster for Sheelor.

“We played it because we loved it,” he said recently at his home on Beaumont Avenue in the Little Texas Community.

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Sheelor graduated from high school in 1947, the same year Robinson became the first black player to take the field for a Major League Baseball team.

Robinson’s success opened the dugout for other black players in the mainstream game, signaling the end of Jim Crow baseball, and with it the eventual demise of organized blacks-only teams.

The once-thriving and profitable Negro Leagues, which at their height included American and National leagues with teams all over the country, immediately felt the blow.

Attendance dwindled as Major League teams siphoned off talent from the Negro Leagues and black fans started following the on-field exploits of Robinson and those who followed him.

By the early 1950s, most Negro Leagues teams had batted around for the final time, leaving a handful to play in a reorganized American Negro League.

For half a century, blacks played in the shadow of organized white baseball.

Teams with names like the Kansas City Monarchs, the Baltimore Elite Giants and the Homestead Grays, as well as the Memphis Red Sox and the Birmingham Black Barons, could count on loyal and proud fans.

For 30 years, they had their own leagues, their own World Series, their own All-Star Games.

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Sheelor was born in a section of Kannapolis known then as “Georgia Town.” His father labored at Cannon Mills, the textile giant that built the mill village, and his mother cleaned houses.

Sheelor played basketball at Carver High, the black high school in the segregated system, but Carver didn’t have a baseball team. So he got his hardball experience in local sandlot games.

After graduation, he followed his father to the mill, where for decades just about any young Kannapolis man who wanted to could find work. He spent his days loading boxes onto trucks in the shipping department.

Life wasn’t all work, though. Sheelor joined an amateur baseball league with teams in Concord, Charlotte and other area towns that played on Saturdays. He stayed in that league until the summer of 1952.

A scout walked up to Sheelor after a game in Kannapolis that year and asked if he’d like to play professional ball.

“He just asked me would I be interested in leaving home and playing for the Memphis Red Sox,” Sheelor recalled. “And I hadn’t heard of no Memphis Red Sox at the time.”

He’d never been away from home, either. The offer to travel, getting paid to do something he loved, sounded pretty good.

“I told him I would if my mother agreed to it,” he said.

She said yes, and the next day the scout drove Sheelor to Memphis, Tenn., to join his new team.

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Sheelor arrived at the Memphis ball park in April, about a month after the season started, and he played the following day.

Six weeks later, he took over as the team’s starting second baseman.

Summers in the Negro Leagues were busy. The team played almost every day during the March-to-September season and rarely stayed in any town more than a day. After games, the players loaded up on the team bus.

“Sometimes we had to ride all night to get to the next town where we played,”Sheelor said. “I really enjoyed it, though, seeing different towns, how different people lived.”

Before games, the team would ride around town in its bus advertising that day’s contest.

Many teams had their own ballparks, while some shared fields with white minor-league teams, Sheelor said. A black doctor owned the Red Sox, who their own stadium, and a nice one, he said.

Some teams weren’t so fortunate. Sheelor remembers playing in some parks where only a low-lying wire fence marked the end of the outfield, a hazard for players chasing long fly balls.

Pulling into a new town, the team would stay in a boarding house because most motels wouldn’t rent rooms to blacks. Most gasoline stations where they fueled the bus wouldn’t let them use the restrooms, either.

“A lot of times, we had to stop on the side of the road and hit the woods,” Sheelor said.

But Sheelor says he doesn’t recall much more about the racism he and other black players faced, doesn’t really care to. He remembers the game, mostly, and the feeling of being a hero, at least to some. “It seemed like people respected you more,” as a professional ballplayer.

Sheelor doesn’t know if any records of his statistics still exist. A resurgence in interest in the Negro Leagues has hit hurdles because of poor record-keeping.

And though he can’t remember his pay exactly, he knows it was more than he made working in the mill, where he returned to the loading dock during the off-season.

But it wasn’t just the money that kept Sheelor’s mind on Memphis during those winter months hefting heavy boxes. It was baseball.

“I couldn’t wait ’til the summer to go back,” he said.

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Sheelor didn’t immediately return home after each regular season. He joined teammates and other black players on barnstorming tours.

A tradition in the Negro Leagues, barnstorming allowed players the chance to make extra money by staging exhibitions and splitting the gate receipts with organizers.

Before integration, teams of black all-stars would travel the country playing white all-star squads. By the time Sheelor broke in, that had ended and only black major leaguers returned for the exhibitions.

During those tours Sheelor played against a young outfielder named Willie Mays, who starred for the New York and San Francisco Giants and is enshrined in the Baseball of Hall of Fame.

Mays reigned on the base paths, Sheelor said.

“He stole bases ’bout all the time, and he could hit the ball good,” he recalls. “We always tried to trick him — pitch out and catch him off base — but we never could.”

Sheelor also wonders at the memory of a young Hank Aaron, who played for the Negro Leagues’ Indianapolis Clowns before moving on to the Milwaukee Braves of the National League.

Aaron already displayed the prowess in the batter’s box that he’d use to hit 755 home runs and set the all-time career record in the Major Leagues.

“He hit the ball out of the park two or three times a game,” Sheelor said. “He was something, I tell you.”

Not all the eventual all-stars Sheelor knew gained their fame at home plate or in the field. A young man named Charley Pride pitched two years for Memphis and roomed with Sheelor for a season.

Sheelor remembers Pride, now a country-music icon, bringing his guitar on the bus and leading the entertainment between towns. He also recalls him as a tough, determined ballplayer.

“If a team beat him today, he’d be wanting to pitch the next day; he didn’t give up,” Sheelor said. “He always told us he was going to be somebody, and it happened.”

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It’s not hard to imagine Sheelor patrolling his turf between first base and second, diving to rob a batter of a sure single or snatching up a sharply hit ground ball and starting a double play.

Though gray hair wanders out from beneath his cap and a gray mustache sneaks off to the corners of his mouth, he still moves easily on his wiry second-baseman’s frame.

And he still smiles easily, and laughs often, when talking about his diamond days.

His professional baseball career ended after the 1955 season, but it was effectively over more than a year earlier. In 1954, Sheelor suffered a broken leg sliding into home plate in the eighth inning of mid-season game.

Sheelor scored the winning run but collided with the opposing team’s catcher, who blocked the plate as hard as he could. Sheelor spent the rest of the season in Kannapolis, recovering.

During that time, he met Helen, who would become his wife. When he returned to Memphis the next summer, the leg bothered him all season, and it still hurts sometimes.

After the ’55 season, he came back to Kannapolis for good. He married Helen, they had three sons and he worked for Cannon Mills for another 37 years.

Sheelor came along late in the game, after famed Negro Leagues pitcher Satchel Paige became the oldest rookie ever in Major League Baseball, after black stars like Roy Campanella and Ernie Banks made the leap into the mainstream.

At 5-foot-9 and 160 pounds, he wasn’t much of a long-ball threat. And though he could field with the best of them, he says, the major league scouts were looking for power hitters and great pitchers.

If he has one regret, it’s that he never got the chance to compete against some of those guys and against white players. He would “love to have played against the best.”

Still, he adds, what he didn’t do doesn’t tarnish the few summers he got paid to do something he would have done for free.

And on reflection, he says, “I love the game ... Back then, I was just glad to play.”

Contact Scott Jenkins at 704-797-4248 or sjenkins@salisburypost.com .