Read Online A Well-Paid Slave by Brad Snyder - Free Book Online

help noticing the little guy and how clever he was,” Powles told Sports Illustrated in 1968. By the time Flood reached McClymonds a few years later, the other players recognized that he and Powles shared a special bond. “George was the coach, and Curt was his pet,” recalled Jesse Gonder, a catcher for eight major league seasons. “Curt was more mature than any of us at his age.”
    Curt made extra money on Saturdays and during school vacations lettering signs, moving furniture, and setting up window displays for a downtown Oakland furniture store called E. Bercovich and Sons. A woman walked into the store one afternoon and asked Sam Bercovich, “Where is your Negro salesman who helped me pick out a piece of furniture?”
    â€œWe don’t have a Negro salesman,” Bercovich replied.
    Bercovich realized that the woman was referring to Curt, who knew nothing about furniture but everything about dealing with people. When Curt was 15 or 16 years old, he drew a pen-and-ink portrait of Bercovich. Beneath the portrait, Curt wrote: “To Sam, Your Friend Always, Curt.” It still hangs in Bercovich’s Bay Area home.
    If Flood had two baseball benefactors, the first was Powles, and the second was Bercovich, whose family’s furniture store sponsored decades of Oakland’s youth baseball teams. The biggest problem Powles and Bercovich faced was how to keep Curt on their Bill Erwin team. The Oakland high schools were divided among nearly a dozen American Legion teams. Powles’s McClymonds students had to play for the Colonel Young Post, whereas his Bill Erwin team could draw players only from Oakland Tech and St. Elizabeth’s. Powles initially pulled the same trick with Curt that he had used with Frank Robinson: Curt joined the Bill Erwin team at age 14 before he entered the 10th grade at McClymonds. Even at 14, Curt led Bill Erwin in hitting.
    Powles and Bercovich hatched a plan. They persuaded Curt to transfer schools by moving in with his older sister, Barbara. Bercovich bought Curt a new $8 bicycle so that he could get from Barbara’s house to his new school, baseball games, and the furniture store. The mother of twin boys, Barbara was separated from her husband, John Henry Johnson, a Hall of Fame running back with the San Francisco 49ers and Pittsburgh Steelers, among other teams. Barbara and Curt became extremely close after Curt and Carl had begun to go in different directions. Curt moved into her North Oakland home ostensibly to look after her young children while she worked at night, but mostly so that he could play for the Bill Erwin team by attending Oakland Technical High School.
    The same year Curt enrolled at Oakland Tech, the Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education . In Oakland, southern-style segregation did not exist. Oakland was a multiethnic, multiracial city of blacks and whites, Italians and Portuguese, Mexicans and Japanese. “I recall little discussion and no excitement in 1954, when the Supreme Court supposedly outlawed the segregation of schools,” Curt said. McClymonds was almost all black. Oakland Tech was 75 percent white. Curt’s transition, however, was a seamless one. He thrived in Tech’s art classes, designed sets for school plays, and painted banners for school assemblies. He joined the Art Club. He “fooled around, like most kids” but described himself as “an above-average student.”
    Flood’s dream of leading Powles’s Bill Erwin teams to glory came true. The 1955 team captured the American Legion state championship. As members of one of the state’s few integrated teams, the players were as close as brothers. They won the state championship despite enduring racial slights along the way, such as being excluded from the team cafeteria at the state playoffs in Fresno and hearing racist catcalls directed at Flood during the regional playoffs in