HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

For almost 400 years now, Boston has never needed much prompting to start a riot. There have been anti-Catholic riots, anti-immigrant riots, anti-Catholic immigrant riots, anti-draft riots, pro-draft riots, anti-slavery riots, pro-slavery riots, bread riots, busing riots, and police riots. In the 20th century, sports began to be a driving factor behind riots in Boston. Long before Victoria Snelgrove was killed by a police pepperball after the 2004 World Series, before the fires and overturned cars after the 2001 Super Bowl, there was the Gamblers’ Riot. 103 years ago this week, gamblers at Fenway Park got mad at the umpires, at Babe Ruth, and at the Chicago White Sox and stormed the field.

Please check out the transcript and full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/189/

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The Gamblers’ Riot

• “Call the Game! The 1917 Fenway Park Gamblers Riot,” a reprint of his article in Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game (McFarland & Co., Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring 2012). This episode wouldn’t have been possible without Pomrenke’s terrific research.
• “Fans Crowd on Fenway Diamond,” Boston Globe, June 17, 1917.
• “Loss of Punch Beats Red Sox,” Boston Globe, June 17, 1917 (the cartoon below is taken from this page).
• “Ban Johnson Deserves Support,” Washington Times, June 19, 1917.
• A week later, Babe Ruth punched an ump, got ejected, and Ernie Shore pitched a perfect* game.

The only known photo of the riot From the Boston Globe, June 17, 1917 Boston Book Club

Baseball fans remember Ted Williams as “the splendid splinter,” one of the greatest hitters of all time. He had a reputation as a surly and standoffish star when dealing with the press and masses of fans, while simultaneously working behind the scenes tirelessly to support children with cancer and almost single-handedly launching the Jimmy Fund.

Like many of his peers in Major League Baseball, Williams was drafted into the military. Unlike most of those peers, he chose not to spend the war years playing exhibition baseball for the Navy service team. Instead, he went to flight school for the US Marine Corps, and ended up as a flight instructor in Pensacola, Florida, and was on his way to fight in the Western Pacific when the war ended. Seven years later, he was called up from the Marine Reserves to fight in the Korean war, where he flew 39 combat missions and was shot down once.

Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team That Helped Win World War II by Anne R. Keene focuses on a brief window in Ted Williams’ long career when his worlds of baseball and military service collided. Here’s how the publisher describes it:

In 1943, while the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals were winning pennants and meeting in that year’s World Series, Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky, and Johnny Said practiced on a skinned-out college field in the heart of North Carolina. They and other past and future stars formed one of the greatest baseball teams of all time. They were among a cadre of fighter-pilot cadets who wore the Cloudbuster Nine baseball jersey at an elite Navy training school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

As a child, [author] Anne Keene’s father, Jim Raugh, suited up as the team batboy and mascot. He got to know his baseball heroes personally, watching players hit the road on cramped, tin-can buses, dazzling factory workers, kids, and service members at dozens of games, including a war-bond exhibition with Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium. Jimmy followed his baseball dreams as a college All-American but was crushed later in life by a failed major-league bid with the Detroit Tigers. He would have carried this story to his grave had Anne not discovered his scrapbook from a Navy school that shaped America’s greatest heroes including George H. W. Bush, Gerald Ford, John Glenn, and Paul “Bear” Bryant.

With the help of rare images and insights from World War II baseball veterans such as Dr. Bobby Brown and Eddie Robinson, the story of this remarkable team is brought to life for the first time in The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team That Helped Win World War II.

Upcoming Event

Cornell professor Mary Beth Norton is a historian of the Colonial era and a past president of the American Historical Association. She has written extensively on the roles women played in colonial America, and her latest book is 1774: Year of Revolutions. She’ll be giving an online author talk for the Massachusetts Historical Society at 5:30pm on Wednesday, June 24. Here’s how the MHS describes her talk:

Mary Beth Norton will give us a preview of her new book, a narrative history of the “long year” of 1774, or the months from December 1773 to April 1775, which have tended to be overlooked by historians who focus instead on the war for independence. But John Adams, who lived through that era, declared that the true revolution took place in the minds of the people before a shot was fired at Lexington. The year 1774, Norton argues, was when that revolution occurred.

The online event is free, but you must register in advance to get the Zoom connection details.