A Headful of Baseball and Keys: Encounters with Joe Robichaux

My professional baseball career happened entirely inside my head. What went on in there may or may not interest you, but for me it—both the career and the brain-picture of it—was marked by an unforgettable encounter with a retired pro and a great pianist.

This will take some explaining, though.

My dad, Grauman Marks, was born in Louisville in 1903. I don’t know how much baseball he played in Georgetown, Kentucky, where he grew up, but by the time I came along, when he was 43, he had long ago moved to Cincinnati and rooted avidly for the Reds on the radio, and sometimes even went to games at Crosley Field; but I only remember him tossing the ball with me a couple of times.

Even my big brother Eddie was pretty old: born almost a year before Pearl Harbor, while I didn’t come along until a full year after Hiroshima; so the entirety of World War II fit comfortably between our births. He would gamely toss with me now and again, but I’m sure he eventually lost patience with my ineptitude.

I also had three sisters, but they couldn’t advance my career. Mary, the firstborn child, was so old that she was employed as the teacher’s aide when I went to nursery school. And I couldn’t discern any justification for my younger sisters, the twins Peggy and Helen, who threw like girls. (Please forgive me; you’re hearing from my mid-1950’s brain.)

At school and summer day camp there were games of softball, and eventually hardball—in which I generally did not excel—but a future major leaguer needs to practice between games. So I did, with the most available partner I could find: myself.

We lived in a leafy suburb, North Avondale, in a big, gracious old Italianate home (the only part of which I then understood was “old”) with a front and a side yard suitable for games of toss. For the purpose of my regimen of practice sessions with myself, though, the significant architectural feature was the front steps—six in number, concrete in construction—against which I could throw a rubber or tennis ball and get back an unpredictable array of liners, grounders, and popups. Clearly, these were the six steps up to major-league glory.

While I was in training, there were voices in my head.

The first belonged to Waite Hoyt, the old Yankee ace from the 1920s, who had hurled from the mound with Ruth and Gehrig backing him up, and now was the voice of Reds play-by-play on WLW radio. Old Waite kindly narrated my exploits to the world inside my head.

The other voice was permeating the neighborhood as well as the inside of my head: the kid across the street’s piano, which he practiced rather more assiduously than I did for my profession. Jimmy was serious about his piano. His first teacher was his mother’s sister, Estelle Joseph down the street, whom he fired: “Aunt Stell, you can’t teach me any more. You’re not good enough.” So he got fancier teachers. And he didn’t get much distracted by sports; I played in one pickup football game next door to his house, at the Waxmans’, in which Jimmy participated for precisely one scrimmage; he then picked himself up off the ground, said he had to protect his hands, and went home.

So these were the sounds I heard as I prepared for my major-league baseball career: Waite Hoyt trumpeting my every exploit inside my head, and in my ears the soundtrack of my youth: the pianism of Jimmy Levine preparing for his four decades as music director of the Metropolitan Opera.

But this was all preparation for my unforgettable encounter: tossing my baseball with Joe Robichaux, whose career as a professional pianist and bandleader started in 1918.

Some more background.

In 1953 my parents took a vacation in New Orleans. Somehow they fell in with a nest of bohemians at 726 St. Peter Street. The photo portraits they sat for there by the estimable Pops Whitesell now hang in my living room, but his landlord was the focal point of that countercultural nexus: the raffish art dealer E. Lorenz Borenstein, known as Larry, whose fabulous collection of pre-Columbian figurines had arrived there by routes of questionable legality. (Larry’s experience in Mexico had started when he was young, visiting and hanging around with the bodyguards of his uncle Lev Bronstein, aka Leon Trotsky.) There my parents heard a sound they had never heard, which could in fact be heard almost nowhere else: the music of the oldest generations of New Orleans jazzmen, many of whom had never left town.

Louise and Grauman Marks fell in love with what they heard.

Borenstein had persuaded these men (and a few women) to come to his gallery to play “rehearsals,” and then pay them from the kitty. Many hadn’t played for years; they had no venues open to them, as the tourist spots featured a more commercial version of jazz offered up by white musicians. A few years later Larry’s sessions were to become Preservation Hall, right there at 726 St. Peter.

They also met the eccentric percussionist, composer, and musicologist Bill Russell. Back in the late ’30s, while researching as co-author of a jazz history, he kept hearing from the likes of Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet about the legendary trumpeter Bunk Johnson, who had played with the earliest king of jazz, Buddy Bolden, but hadn’t been heard in years. Russell’s hunt ended fo in New Iberia, Louisiana, where Bunk had been supporting himself with manual labor—mostly picking cotton. Bill bought him a pawn-shop trumpet and a new set of teeth, and helped him set up a band that toured the country and sparked the Traditional Jazz Revival.

And Mom and Dad met Bunk’s clarinetist, George Lewis, who had taken leadership of the band and would continue touring with it into the late ’60s.

For another major trip in 1957—to an American Bar Association convention in London—my parents developed an interest in photography. For Mom, though, this hobby did not last long; on the sixteenth day of 1958, four days shy of her 50th birthday, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

I’ll tell you more about that sometime soon, when I’ve come to terms with it.

Dad got deeper and deeper into his darkroom in the basement, and got some really good results with his camera. And whenever he caught up with the George Lewis Jazz Band on tour or in New Orleans, he gave each of the musicians a number of 5×7 photographs of them. For his generosity and respect, and for other reasons—as he was a rather remarkable character in his own right—these old black jazzmen came to regard him, Kentucky drawl and all, as a friend.

When I was about 12 I was brought to my first George Lewis concert, at the Hotel Sinton (where several of the 1919 White Sox players had met with a henchman of a New York mobster and agreed to throw the World Series to the Reds: the Black Sox scandal). Many more such concerts would follow, as Cincinnati was one of their favorite towns to play. And there was always a sense of twilight over the joyful, celebratory sounds of their band; as George would announce, “This is no doubt one of the last times you’ll be able to hear this kind of music.”

And the affection extended to my dad went to me too; George asked me what my favorite tune was, and for years he’d strike up “Didn’t He Ramble” whenever he caught sight of me. I did nothing to deserve this gift; he was just that kind of man.

Alton Purnell had been the pianist in Bunk Johnson’s band, and had continued on under George, but by the time I first saw the band he had been replaced by Joe Robichaux. Born in 1900—like Louis Armstrong and George—Joe Robichaux had been playing piano professionally at least since 1918, first recorded in 1929, and led his own ensembles throughout the thirties, after which he performed as a soloist, accompanist, and sideman.

He wore a stocking over his hair for hours in his rather unkempt hotel room before a performance, but when he emerged his coif was resplendent and he was impeccably dressed. His features tended naturally towards a scowl, but when he flashed his smile it gleamed with an impressive array of gold teeth. During band breaks in the concerts he would often return early to the piano and attract a small group up to the stage to hear him alternate between remembered tunes and what sounded to me like improvisations, bending toward a cooler, more modern, even experimental sound; when the band returned, Joe returned to his support mode in the ensemble.

One of the band’s visits to Cincinnati was in late November, and Dad invited them to Thanksgiving dinner at our house—an event that was such a success that they accepted at least one other such invitation a few years later. After dinner the first time, they gathered around the nook where our old upright piano resided for a lighthearted jam in which some of the tunes were outside their normal repertoire, and they fooled around with whatever instruments we had in the house; the trombonist Big Jim Robinson played a guitar, George played Eddie’s alto sax, and Kid Howard played his $13 pawn-shop trumpet, which he liked so much that Eddie gave it to him. The Grauman Marks Photograph Collection in New Orleans has a photo of a later gathering, when they had brought their instruments, showing George Lewis at the upright bass; he had played it rather impressively for a few numbers, but eventually Slow Drag Pavageau stepped in to reclaim his instrument, which George reluctantly surrendered.

You can see the back of Joe’s head at the piano, watching the scene; there’s also a blurred figure on the right—likely belonging to Joe Watkins, the drummer and principal vocalist—and, beneath it, an eye, nose, and lip definitely belonging to me. The Archive dates the photo to 1965, making me 18 at the time, which looks plausible; but it would be extraordinary in that on the 17th day of that year Joe Robichaux suffered a fatal heart attack in New Orleans; it was probably a few years earlier.

But let me return to that first visit, that earlier Thanksgiving. Soon after they arrived, Dad got a mischievous look in his eye and went into the toy closet—I was impressed that he knew where it was—and pulled out a baseball, my Skeeter Kell glove, and—since Eddie is a lefty, and Joe was a righty—Dad’s own glove, an antique from before the innovation of lacing between the fingers. He asked Joe Robichaux if he might like to toss with me, and Joe graciously accepted.

Dad knew a fact so arcane that Google has not yet learned it: that Joe Robichaux—aside from his musical career—had played baseball professionally in the Negro National League, probably around 1920. And so it was that I got to enjoy the rare but simple pleasure of catching and tossing a baseball with an authentic old-timer, now—posthumously and belatedly—recognized by Coopertown as a Major Leaguer.

Joe and I went out the front door and down my training steps. The neighborhood was quiet; the Levines must have been having an early Thanksgiving dinner. We turned left down the semicircular sidewalk, through a line of young mimosa trees Mom had planted, to the side yard—and my once-in-a-lifetime game of toss was on.

Joe looked loose, and moved gracefully. His arm was still good, and his aim impeccable. He really seemed to be enjoying himself, and somehow I managed not to embarrass myself.

After quite a while, he said, “Do you want to see the underhand pitch we used to throw? It was legal then.” And he reared back and whistled one at me from an inch above the grass blades, a pitch looking more like an ultra-sidearm than what I thought of as underhand—and as the heater came at me a flashbulb went off inside my head, capturing a mental photo to last a lifetime: Beechwood Avenue behind him, his left leg pointed at a mimosa on my right, his sixtyish torso shooting absolutely horizontal, the tails of his brown jacket flapping in excitement, this elegant artist was bestowing on me a pitch from the deep past, from when the ancient glove on his left hand was up-to-date: a pitch that was a precious relic of a baseball world invisible to and disdained by white people, but intensely followed by a lot of black people who—against the unanimous opinion of the Major League and its followers—rightly believed that the baseball they were watching was as good as, or better than, any baseball played on earth.

I can’t show you that flash, but it’s been in my head for sixty years and I wanted to tell you about it.

The first and last time I had told this story was a quarter-century after the event, towards the back of the Preservation Hall tour bus on the West Coast. To my left across the aisle was the youngest (50ish?) member of the band, a bassist I didn’t know and whose name I’ve forgotten. He looked dubious. After a while he broke away and called out towards the middle of the bus: “Percy! Joe Robichaux?”

He apparently didn’t have to use any more words; on that bus, this was apparently the key to summoning the shades who had departed beyond the veil: hurl the name at the band’s leader and trumpeter, Percy Humphrey. Unlike his brother Willie, the band’s gregarious and garrulous clarinetist, Percy was a man of few words. He still played a mean horn, but otherwise he came off as a man of substance: a very successful insurance agent with a substantial girth and a ponderous gait. After a considerable pause, the answer came back: “Joe Robichaux? Hell of a piano player.”

And that was it. This particular ghost wasn’t going to make much of an appearance. My story had laid an egg, so back inside it went. Unexpectedly, Percy stirred again: “Hell of a bandleader.”

End of story. My conversation partner had turned left, watching Bay Area traffic rolling by. He was done with me. The bus kept on its course for a while in silence, but then Percy Humphrey suddenly stirred to life again and erupted:

“Hell of a ballplayer!”