Amid the brittle phone bills and medical records strewn on the floor of a family friend’s house, Randy Smith saw something on yellow cardstock that looked out of place.
It was a baseball program, and Smith didn’t believe what he saw when he opened the folded page: It was a hand-kept scorecard from the Brooklyn Dodgers’ and Boston Braves’ 1952 exhibition game at Lynchburg’s City Stadium, and it was autographed by baseball greats Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella, among others.
The scorecard will be on display starting April 5 at the Lynchburg Museum as part of “Lynchburg’s Pastime: Baseball in the Hill City,” the museum’s newest exhibit. The displays will be placed in the hallway by the double staircases at the museum in downtown Lynchburg and will include artifacts and photographs regarding baseball of all kinds: everything from Little League to professional ball.
“I’ve been finding all kinds of tidbits, and I can’t use them all,” Cathy Dalton, the museum’s guest curator in charge of the project, said.
But when she heard about the Dodgers and Braves scorecard, she knew it had to be included.
For one, it represented an important part of baseball history in Lynchburg. For decades, professional teams on their way north from spring training in Florida would stop in places like Lynchburg to play exhibitions. Well before Robinson’s Dodgers visited in 1952, teams had been coming through the Hill City for preseason ballgames in front of packed houses.
Dalton said she was surprised to learn “that Jackie Robinson had been in Lynchburg and Babe Ruth had been in Lynchburg, because those were names that I knew when I was growing up.”
Now a piece of that history will live in her exhibit.
Smith’s friend’s house was that of Robert Walter “Whirlwind” Johnson, a Lynchburg legend. Johnson was a prominent physician and community leader in the Hill City, but he is best remembered as the man instrumental to the integration of professional tennis. He took tennis greats Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe from training in Lynchburg to becoming the first Black woman and man, respectively, to win Grand Slam events. In the process, he became a world-renowned tennis instructor.
In Lynchburg, Johnson was a pillar of the Black community. His house was on the corner of Pierce and 15th streets, smack in the middle of one of the Black cultural centers in a segregated Lynchburg. Given his status, the home became somewhat of a museum over the years, filled with memorabilia pertaining both to sports (mainly tennis, but also others) and Lynchburg’s Black history.
“It was intriguing to me that all this history was just sort of scattered about,” Smith said. “I hate to think that there might be something valuable just laying on the floor.”
It turns out there was. Smith said his discovery belongs to the nonprofit Whirlwind Johnson Foundation, started by the late Johnson’s family with the goal of preserving his home as a part of tennis and Lynchburg history. The foundation is loaning the scorecard to the Lynchburg Museum for its exhibit.
Prior to the Braves’ move to Atlanta in 1966, there was no Major League Baseball south of Washington, Cincinnati and St. Louis. To fill the void with a baseball-crazed fan base throughout the country, teams sought out their share of Southern disposable income in various ways. The Washington Senators of the early 1900s made their spring training homes in Charlottesville, Hampton and Norfolk at various points in the first decade of the century. The Boston Braves, Boston Red Sox and Philadelphia Phillies also held camps in the commonwealth in those days. The 1914 Pittsburgh Rebels (named for manager Rebel Oakes) of the Federal League — the oft-forgotten “third major league” of the 1910s — did spring training in Lynchburg. Buffalo’s Buffeds were in Danville that same season.
Eventually, the Major League clubs found their way to Florida for a more organized spring training in the Grapefruit League. To satisfy the baseball appetite of Southern cities, they routinely played exhibition tours of the South on their way from Florida to their summer homes in the north. It was these tours that brought Yankee great Babe Ruth through Lynchburg in the 1920s when, as myth holds, Ruth hit a home run at City Stadium that allegedly rolled to the foot of Jubal Early’s grave in Spring Hill Cemetery, about 200 feet past the right-field fence. (The author chooses to believe this as gospel.)
Another of those tours brought the recently integrated Dodgers and Braves through the Hill City in 1952. Several National Baseball Hall of Fame members played in the exhibition at City Stadium on April 7, 1952. Jackie Robinson, who famously broke baseball’s color barrier with the Dodgers on April 15, 1947, batted fourth and played second base for Brooklyn. Fellow Hall of Famers Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella and Gil Hodges were also in the Dodger lineup. Braves great Eddie Mathews played third base, and pitcher Warren Spahn was there but did not play.
There were Black stars on both teams, and almost certainly a good chunk of the reported crowd of 5,005 came from Lynchburg’s Black community. The game certainly made an impression on Pierce Street, and apparently vice versa. Reports of the 1952 preseason tour of the South sound miserable for the Black Major Leaguers. Legendary Black journalist Sam Lacy wrote an April recap of the trip for the Baltimore-based Afro-American that described the Black Dodgers as “happy in the realization that their tour-of-the-Dixie hinterlands was behind them.”
Lynchburg, Lacy noted, was one of the high points because of friendly folks in town.
“And only because one or more members of the tan contingent had friends in Nashville and Lynchburg, were they able to obtain decent meals,” Lacy wrote.
(It is worth noting that minor league baseball in Lynchburg had not become so progressive; the 1953 Lynchburg Cardinals was one of just two teams in the Piedmont League that wasn’t integrated.)
Smith’s theory — and it doesn’t seem far-fetched — is that someone in the Johnson household, perhaps even Whirlwind himself, kept score at the ballgame and invited the teams’ six Black players to Pierce Street for a home-cooked meal. Very easily, Robinson, Campanella, the Dodgers’ Joe Black and Braves’ Sam Jethroe could have autographed the card while there. Campanella was the sixth Black player to debut in the MLB; a star catcher, he is one of just 11 players to win three Most Valuable Player awards, given to the best player each season. Black went on to win the National League’s Rookie of the Year award that season and became the first Black pitcher to earn a win in a World Series game. Jethroe, already a 33-year-old Negro Leagues veteran, played center field for the Braves for three seasons and led the National League in stolen bases in two of them.
The scorecard’s exact history may never be known, but that isn’t the case for all of Dalton’s museum exhibit. The history of professional baseball in Lynchburg, told in large part through exhibit photos, is well-researched thanks to Vince Sawyer. A retired banker and longtime supporter of Minor League Baseball in Lynchburg, Sawyer is the city’s self-appointed baseball historian. One of his treatises is on the history of pro ball in the Hill City, which began in earnest in 1886 with Lynchburg’s participation in the Virginia League. The league didn’t finish its season due to reported financial trouble, but the Lynchburg team led the standings at 19 wins and six losses at the time of its dissolution. From there, pro teams scattered about the city, often sponsored by local companies. For the next several decades, they held several nicknames: Tobacconists, Shoemakers, Grays, Senators. Sawyer said only Norfolk and Richmond have supported more pro baseball teams in their histories than Lynchburg.
In the 1940s, the St. Louis Cardinals brought its nationwide farm system — the model for modern-day Minor League Baseball — to Lynchburg, and the Lynchburg Cardinals competed in the Piedmont League for the first time in 1943. Affiliated baseball — that is, professional ball attached to a Major League team — has been in the Hill City nearly every year since, and Dalton’s exhibit will detail several of those teams’ stories.
One of the reasons baseball stayed integral to the city’s fabric is Calvin Falwell. Falwell, who ran a well-digging company in town, was heartbroken when the Cardinals pulled its farm team out of the city in 1955. He kept his ear to the ground with the hopes of luring another pro franchise to town, and in 1962 it paid off. The integrated Savannah White Sox were having trouble with racial tensions in the Georgia city. Falwell took the train down to Savannah and, over a weekend, persuaded the team to come north to Lynchburg in the middle of the season. Falwell organized a local ownership group, and the Lynchburg Baseball Corporation owned and operated the Minor League team in the Hill City from then until it sold in 2016.
Just as important as professional ball to the city’s baseball story, Dalton said, is youth baseball. One of her favorite artifacts was a ballcap belonging to late longtime Little League coach Wayne Hopper, whose impressive array of collector’s pins from various leagues across the South is displayed around the crown. Her research turned up more than a dozen fields in the city designated for youth baseball over the past century. Before integration, there were Black leagues and white leagues. In more recent years, the city’s teams have advanced to state and regional Little League Baseball competitions.
Things have been going well for the sport in Lynchburg recently, too. The local minor league team, the Lynchburg Hillcats, survived a reorganization of Minor League Baseball and will continue to play in the city as the Cleveland Guardians’ farm team indefinitely. University of Lynchburg won the NCAA Division III national championship in the sport last spring.
“It’s kind of amazing how baseball just permeated the city,” Dalton said.
For the next two months, the national pastime will permeate the Lynchburg Museum. The exhibit opens April 5.