Chet Brewer--Hall of Fame, April 1, 1984
Baseball great Brewer joins Register 'Hall'
By RON MALY and
JOHN HOLWAY
Register Staff Writers
04/01/1984
Chester Arthur Brewer -- better known as Chet -- threw smoke, and often pitched against the legendary Satchel Paige. But his timing was all wrong.
Unlike Paige, Jackie Robinson and other black men who were pioneers in organized baseball, he was never able to play in the major leagues.
However, Brewer says he has no regrets.
"I couldn't have been the Jackie Robinson of big league baseball," he explains. "I wouldn't have been able to take the insults he did, and would have been kicked out of baseball."
But today Chet Brewer isn't being kicked out of anything. Instead, the man who managed Robinson in a Los Angeles winter league in 1945 is becoming the 104th member of The Des Moines Sunday Register's Iowa Sports Hall of fame.
Brewer, now 77 and living in Los Angeles, moved with his family to Des Moines from Leavenworth, Kan., as a second-grader. In the years that followed, he demonstrated his skills in baseball and other sports in the state, around the nation and even in foreign countries. In 1966 he was named to the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame.
There are those who say Brewer was as talented a pitcher as the more famous Paige. Old-timers say Brewer was equal to Satchel in ability.
In his days in the old black leagues, Brewer faced Paige on the mound often.
"Sometimes he won, sometimes I won," Brewer says. "But it was always a scuffle. None of the rest of us got any publicity when Satchel was there because he got it all. But I beat everyone he did."
Brewer, who comes back to Des Moines occasionally to visit friends and relatives, was among the honored guests recently at the fifth annual Negro Baseball Leagues Reunion in Ashland, Ky. On hand to toast Brewer and others were Iowa-born Hall of Famer Bob Feller, former Chicago Cubs star Ernie Banks, baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and other veterans of the black leagues.
BREWER, WHO attended old West High School here before embarking on his long baseball career, says his biggest thrill was beating Paige with a no-hitter in the Dominican Republic in 1936.
Later, Brewer and Paige were teammates on the Monarchs, one of the best black teams around.
Brewer considered Monarch shortstop Jesse Williams better than Robinson, and urged Jackie to shift to second base, the position he later played with the old Brooklyn Dodgers.
Brewer's Los Angeles winter league club played Feller, Bob Lemon, Mickey Vernon, Ken Keltner, Stan Musial, Mike Garcia, Johnny Sain and other major leaguers in 1946.
"You know," he says, "we beat those guys as many times as they beat us."
Allen Ashby, 79, of Des Moines, is a friend of Brewer's who thinks there's no doubt the 6-foot 4-inch, 200-pounder could have pitched in the majors had he gotten the opportunity.
Ashby recalls that when Brewer was at the top of his game, "One catcher said, 'You could catch Chet in a rocking chair. He would throw 100 pitches, and 90 of them would be in the strike zone.'
"CHET WAS A great athlete around Des Moines," Ashby said. "He was an excellent basketball player and a good football player. He and I played on basketball and football teams together, but I couldn't carry his baseball shoes.
"Chet was taller than most kids his age in his young years. He enrolled in the old Olive McHenry School. At that time, the Des Moines grade school athletic system was divided into four parts, and games were held between schools in each district, with the four winners playing for the city title.
"Brewer pitched his team to the final game, but lost, 1-0, after striking out 17 batters in seven innings. He then was 12 years old. He pitched around the city with kid teams, and rarely lost because nobody could hit his fastball.
"At 15, he was traveling out of town, pitching for black semipro teams. Then clubs from around the state began to hire him to pitch, and soon he was making what then was good money simply by pitching baseball."
Brewer calls the move by his family to Des Moines one of the best things that ever happened to him.
"We were in Leavenworth -- and if you say the penitentiary, I'll shoot you," Brewer said with a laugh. "But one of my father's brothers moved to Des Moines because things were kind of slow in Kansas.
"Des Moines was like a breath of fresh air to us. We got rid of a lot of racial prejudice we found in Kansas. Everything there was either all-white or all-black. We lived in an integrated neighborhood and I went to integrated schools in Des Moines. We blacks could go to movies in Des Moines and not have to sit back with the projector.
"I have very fond memories of Des Moines and West High School. As teen-agers, some of us organized an athletic group called the Dashing Eagles, and we backed ourselves. We gave 15- and 25-cent dances to hustle up money so we could buy equipment."
ALTHOUGH BREWER had an assortment of pitches, he says his strikeout delivery was "an overhand curve -- something we called a 'drop.' It started high and dropped low. Now they call it an overhand breaking ball."
Brewer joined the Monarchs in the mid-1920s. Club Owner J.L. Wilkinson even assigned Chet to get Paige to the games on time. Brewer recalls Satch driving "a big Airflow Chrysler, saying, 'Don't worry, if the red lights are gonna make us late, I won't stop for any more.'"
Paige leaned on the horn and stepped on the gas, dodging oncoming cars on one-way streets, making U-turns across pedestrian islands and overshooting the park by three blocks before he could hit the brakes. They walked onto the field in the fifth inning with angry customers demanding their money back.
Now, Brewer told Wilkinson, "Instead of one pitcher being late, you've got two late. I don't want to ride with Satchel anymore. He's going to get both of us killed!"
Brewer recalls barnstorming with a team called the Tennessee Rats, a team he compares to one in the film "Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars."
"We'd come into a town in our Model-T Ford and go up and down the street with a megaphone," he said. "We slept in tents, played and clowned. It was the only way we knew to make money."
They did their laundry before the game and lived out of shaving kits. "It was a tough life, but I see these big leaguers complaining nowadays, too."
Brewer's team encountered prejudice in both the South and North, and was ordered out of one hotel in Wisconsin at gunpoint.
"Just think of the life we have to live," he said. "Paving the way for the guys today who are making all that fabulous money, and none of them thinks of doing anything for the old ballplayers. They never thought about getting up a fund, and some of the old-timers are in pretty bad shape.
"I'm just fortunate enought to have a scouting job, and I saved some of my money when I had it."
BREWER CALLS Bullet Joe Rogan, manager and star pitcher of the Monarchs, "the best pitcher I ever saw -- black or white -- and I saw Feller, Dizzy Dean, Satchel and Smokey Joe Williams. Who in the world had a curveball like Rogan? Jeepers, he could throw the curve faster than most pitchers could throw a fastball.
"Some of those old-timers ... it's a shame baseball wasn't open to them. Man, oh man, we'd have rewritten the record books back in our time."
In Brewer's rookie season with the Monarchs, he had a 12-1 record in the 100-game Negro National League schedule. In the Depression, the leagues broke up, so Brewer pitched for a white semipro team in Crookston, Minn. -- "one of the most beautiful summers I ever spent," he recalls. The townspeople furnished him a house and car.
He also barnstormed with Dean, who became upset if he thought the blacks weren't getting their fair share of the receipts. Dean gave Brewer a 1934 St. Louis Cardinals championship jacket, saying, "From one good pitcher to another."
Brewer says the toughest hitter he faced was Buck Leonard, the "Black Lou Gehrig." Chet says, "I could get Josh Gibson out, but Leonard hit me like he owned me."
The same year Brooklyn signed Robinson, the Cleveland Indians farm club at Bakersfield, Calif., signed Brewer. He was nearly 40 at the time. George Troutman, the minor league commissioner, approve the deal but, Brewer says, Cleveland General Manager Roger Peckinpaugh turned it down.
TODAY, BREWER IS recovering from a stroke, but before that he called himself "the busiest 77-year-old man you'll ever see."
He runs a semipro youth baseball league in Los Angeles, a showcase for talent for the major-league scouting bureau. He has sent Enos Cabell, Ellis Valentine, Bob Watson, Reggie Smith, Bobby Tolan, Willie Crawford, Dock Ellis and Joe Black to the majors.
More important, he feels, he has helped keep hundreds of kids off the street and out of trouble.
He and his wife, Tina, also supervise a boys' club. "I feel good when I see those boys staying out of trouble and doing something for themselves," he said.
The kids call him "Pops" or "Papa Chet."
Times have changed a lot in baseball, of course, since Brewer left the game. He recalls the time during World War II when the majors were so hard up for talent they hired a one-armed white man, Pete Gray, but wouldn't sign any of the great two-armed black men available -- Paige, Gibson, Leonard and others.
"Shoot," Brewer syas, "the only thing a one-armed man could do as good as a two-armed man is scratch the side that itches."
He remembers one manager in California who repeatedly refused to let a black kid try out for the team. Finally, hoping to humiliate him, the manager sent the boy in to pinch-hit against the league's best pitcher.
The kid hit a line drive off the fence and tore around the bases. "Man," the manager said, "look at that Cuban run!"
By RON MALY and
JOHN HOLWAY
Register Staff Writers
04/01/1984
Chester Arthur Brewer -- better known as Chet -- threw smoke, and often pitched against the legendary Satchel Paige. But his timing was all wrong.
Unlike Paige, Jackie Robinson and other black men who were pioneers in organized baseball, he was never able to play in the major leagues.
However, Brewer says he has no regrets.
"I couldn't have been the Jackie Robinson of big league baseball," he explains. "I wouldn't have been able to take the insults he did, and would have been kicked out of baseball."
But today Chet Brewer isn't being kicked out of anything. Instead, the man who managed Robinson in a Los Angeles winter league in 1945 is becoming the 104th member of The Des Moines Sunday Register's Iowa Sports Hall of fame.
Brewer, now 77 and living in Los Angeles, moved with his family to Des Moines from Leavenworth, Kan., as a second-grader. In the years that followed, he demonstrated his skills in baseball and other sports in the state, around the nation and even in foreign countries. In 1966 he was named to the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame.
There are those who say Brewer was as talented a pitcher as the more famous Paige. Old-timers say Brewer was equal to Satchel in ability.
In his days in the old black leagues, Brewer faced Paige on the mound often.
"Sometimes he won, sometimes I won," Brewer says. "But it was always a scuffle. None of the rest of us got any publicity when Satchel was there because he got it all. But I beat everyone he did."
Brewer, who comes back to Des Moines occasionally to visit friends and relatives, was among the honored guests recently at the fifth annual Negro Baseball Leagues Reunion in Ashland, Ky. On hand to toast Brewer and others were Iowa-born Hall of Famer Bob Feller, former Chicago Cubs star Ernie Banks, baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and other veterans of the black leagues.
BREWER, WHO attended old West High School here before embarking on his long baseball career, says his biggest thrill was beating Paige with a no-hitter in the Dominican Republic in 1936.
Later, Brewer and Paige were teammates on the Monarchs, one of the best black teams around.
Brewer considered Monarch shortstop Jesse Williams better than Robinson, and urged Jackie to shift to second base, the position he later played with the old Brooklyn Dodgers.
Brewer's Los Angeles winter league club played Feller, Bob Lemon, Mickey Vernon, Ken Keltner, Stan Musial, Mike Garcia, Johnny Sain and other major leaguers in 1946.
"You know," he says, "we beat those guys as many times as they beat us."
Allen Ashby, 79, of Des Moines, is a friend of Brewer's who thinks there's no doubt the 6-foot 4-inch, 200-pounder could have pitched in the majors had he gotten the opportunity.
Ashby recalls that when Brewer was at the top of his game, "One catcher said, 'You could catch Chet in a rocking chair. He would throw 100 pitches, and 90 of them would be in the strike zone.'
"CHET WAS A great athlete around Des Moines," Ashby said. "He was an excellent basketball player and a good football player. He and I played on basketball and football teams together, but I couldn't carry his baseball shoes.
"Chet was taller than most kids his age in his young years. He enrolled in the old Olive McHenry School. At that time, the Des Moines grade school athletic system was divided into four parts, and games were held between schools in each district, with the four winners playing for the city title.
"Brewer pitched his team to the final game, but lost, 1-0, after striking out 17 batters in seven innings. He then was 12 years old. He pitched around the city with kid teams, and rarely lost because nobody could hit his fastball.
"At 15, he was traveling out of town, pitching for black semipro teams. Then clubs from around the state began to hire him to pitch, and soon he was making what then was good money simply by pitching baseball."
Brewer calls the move by his family to Des Moines one of the best things that ever happened to him.
"We were in Leavenworth -- and if you say the penitentiary, I'll shoot you," Brewer said with a laugh. "But one of my father's brothers moved to Des Moines because things were kind of slow in Kansas.
"Des Moines was like a breath of fresh air to us. We got rid of a lot of racial prejudice we found in Kansas. Everything there was either all-white or all-black. We lived in an integrated neighborhood and I went to integrated schools in Des Moines. We blacks could go to movies in Des Moines and not have to sit back with the projector.
"I have very fond memories of Des Moines and West High School. As teen-agers, some of us organized an athletic group called the Dashing Eagles, and we backed ourselves. We gave 15- and 25-cent dances to hustle up money so we could buy equipment."
ALTHOUGH BREWER had an assortment of pitches, he says his strikeout delivery was "an overhand curve -- something we called a 'drop.' It started high and dropped low. Now they call it an overhand breaking ball."
Brewer joined the Monarchs in the mid-1920s. Club Owner J.L. Wilkinson even assigned Chet to get Paige to the games on time. Brewer recalls Satch driving "a big Airflow Chrysler, saying, 'Don't worry, if the red lights are gonna make us late, I won't stop for any more.'"
Paige leaned on the horn and stepped on the gas, dodging oncoming cars on one-way streets, making U-turns across pedestrian islands and overshooting the park by three blocks before he could hit the brakes. They walked onto the field in the fifth inning with angry customers demanding their money back.
Now, Brewer told Wilkinson, "Instead of one pitcher being late, you've got two late. I don't want to ride with Satchel anymore. He's going to get both of us killed!"
Brewer recalls barnstorming with a team called the Tennessee Rats, a team he compares to one in the film "Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars."
"We'd come into a town in our Model-T Ford and go up and down the street with a megaphone," he said. "We slept in tents, played and clowned. It was the only way we knew to make money."
They did their laundry before the game and lived out of shaving kits. "It was a tough life, but I see these big leaguers complaining nowadays, too."
Brewer's team encountered prejudice in both the South and North, and was ordered out of one hotel in Wisconsin at gunpoint.
"Just think of the life we have to live," he said. "Paving the way for the guys today who are making all that fabulous money, and none of them thinks of doing anything for the old ballplayers. They never thought about getting up a fund, and some of the old-timers are in pretty bad shape.
"I'm just fortunate enought to have a scouting job, and I saved some of my money when I had it."
BREWER CALLS Bullet Joe Rogan, manager and star pitcher of the Monarchs, "the best pitcher I ever saw -- black or white -- and I saw Feller, Dizzy Dean, Satchel and Smokey Joe Williams. Who in the world had a curveball like Rogan? Jeepers, he could throw the curve faster than most pitchers could throw a fastball.
"Some of those old-timers ... it's a shame baseball wasn't open to them. Man, oh man, we'd have rewritten the record books back in our time."
In Brewer's rookie season with the Monarchs, he had a 12-1 record in the 100-game Negro National League schedule. In the Depression, the leagues broke up, so Brewer pitched for a white semipro team in Crookston, Minn. -- "one of the most beautiful summers I ever spent," he recalls. The townspeople furnished him a house and car.
He also barnstormed with Dean, who became upset if he thought the blacks weren't getting their fair share of the receipts. Dean gave Brewer a 1934 St. Louis Cardinals championship jacket, saying, "From one good pitcher to another."
Brewer says the toughest hitter he faced was Buck Leonard, the "Black Lou Gehrig." Chet says, "I could get Josh Gibson out, but Leonard hit me like he owned me."
The same year Brooklyn signed Robinson, the Cleveland Indians farm club at Bakersfield, Calif., signed Brewer. He was nearly 40 at the time. George Troutman, the minor league commissioner, approve the deal but, Brewer says, Cleveland General Manager Roger Peckinpaugh turned it down.
TODAY, BREWER IS recovering from a stroke, but before that he called himself "the busiest 77-year-old man you'll ever see."
He runs a semipro youth baseball league in Los Angeles, a showcase for talent for the major-league scouting bureau. He has sent Enos Cabell, Ellis Valentine, Bob Watson, Reggie Smith, Bobby Tolan, Willie Crawford, Dock Ellis and Joe Black to the majors.
More important, he feels, he has helped keep hundreds of kids off the street and out of trouble.
He and his wife, Tina, also supervise a boys' club. "I feel good when I see those boys staying out of trouble and doing something for themselves," he said.
The kids call him "Pops" or "Papa Chet."
Times have changed a lot in baseball, of course, since Brewer left the game. He recalls the time during World War II when the majors were so hard up for talent they hired a one-armed white man, Pete Gray, but wouldn't sign any of the great two-armed black men available -- Paige, Gibson, Leonard and others.
"Shoot," Brewer syas, "the only thing a one-armed man could do as good as a two-armed man is scratch the side that itches."
He remembers one manager in California who repeatedly refused to let a black kid try out for the team. Finally, hoping to humiliate him, the manager sent the boy in to pinch-hit against the league's best pitcher.
The kid hit a line drive off the fence and tore around the bases. "Man," the manager said, "look at that Cuban run!"
posted by ronald wesley maly at 1:35 PM
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