"Enriching The Lives of Children"
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"Enriching The Lives of Children" |
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HISTORY HISTORY OF THE MOHAWKS
Mr. & Mrs. Jesse Norwood, Sr. Executing a Dream: Jesse Norwood, Sr. In 1957, using only the middle and high school boys in his immediate neighborhood, Jesse Norwood Sr. started a baseball organization that within a handful of years would become the envy of every other team playing in the area and would have a profound effect on every person involved with the organization, the Prichard Mohawks. Friends and family can remember Jesse talking about the idea, a dream, really as early as 1954. He would spend evenings sitting out on the stoop of his home at 1609 Bullshead Street watching the 20 to 25 young boys of the neighborhood congregate beneath the mighty branches of a giant oak tree on the corner of Rich Avenue and Bullshead, outside Randolph’s store. These boys had nothing else to do with their time. There were no recreational facilities, no clubs, no after school programs. In that complete absence of any other options, Jesse created an opportunity for these boys that some of them today will testify saved their lives. Some will say, moreover, that Jesse Norwood was instrumental in integrating the baseball fields of Mobile County long before the edicts of Brown v. Roe took effect along the Gulf Coast. He started out organizing and umpiring stickball games there on the hard-packed dirt road in front of his house, the same stickball that Hank Aaron credits for his “hammering” style of hitting and Frank Bolling cites as his most valuable hitting exercise-swinging lopped off broom handles at soda water caps. At the end of these games, after it became too dark to see anything along the lamp less street, Jesse called the boys over to his stoop and talked to them about baseball, and about life. Jesse Norwood was already a successful, self taught, self-made man with many lessons to impart. Born in 1918 in Albany, Georgia, Jesse dropped out of school in the sixth grade in order to support his younger sister and mother by selling coal, pulling wagon loads door-to-door to through the streets of Albany. At 16, he raised enough money to transport himself and his sister to Mobile to join their mother who moved in search of work in the darkest years of the depression. Shortly after that, he joined the Merchant Marines and went to sea. He returned to Mobile and went to work at Brookley Air Base and would become a manager there. This perseverance and success despite lacking any formal education would be the formula he would employ over and over again, becoming one of the earliest resident business owner/operators in Prichard-an early successful rock and roll promoter and a baseball manager. What practical baseball experience Jesse possessed prior to 1957 was limited, at best. No one can recall him playing the game, though former Mohawks do recall him gathering them together when they were very young, in the early 50’s, and taking them to see games at the old Mitchell Field, where Hank Aaron and Billy Williams attracted major league attention, and Prichard Park to watch athletics through gaps in wood planked fences. These boys remember Jesse instructing them to chase down the errant foul balls and return them to stadium officials in exchange for entrance, already instilling in them a kind of entrepreneurial approach, which would become one of the core lessons repeated over and over throughout the intervening years. A concerned father and community member, this is no doubt where the idea for the Mohawks took root, at a time in Mobile when baseball was being played on almost every available sandlot and open field and there was a greater concentration of talent playing on those fields in that generation than has ever come out of any other area of the country. Together with Albert Lomax and Robert Emanuel, Sr., workmates and neighbors, the Mohawks first started playing in an open lot across from the Emanuel home there in the neighborhood. Despite field players younger than most of the competition they could find, that lot would not hold the crowds who gathered to watch the games, so they rented a field along Dozier’s Alley, behind the old Lincoln Funeral Home, later that first year. Their final move was to a field off of Ruby Lane, in what would become Trinity Gardens, where Mohawk Park was built, carved out of an old corn field, funded by money earned through selling roasted peanuts out of the Norwood kitchen, concession sales, and Jesse’s good name. The Mohawk ball field has a backstop, dugouts, concession stands, a grass outfield and groomed dirt infield, not the norm for most sandlot teams. But that was the standard Jesse Norwood set from the very beginning. If they were going to play baseball, they were going to play the best possible game they could, which required organization, preparation, discipline and desire. Those “little bitty babies,” as they were heckled, would get beaten routinely in their early years. They would be laughed off the field in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and discriminated against in Pensacola, Florida, and through it all Jesse instructed them that they would get better at baseball and the culture of Jim Crow south would change. Their task was to concentrate on the game and be ready, ready to step through that door when it opened. It would not stay open long, he knew, and told them repeatedly, so they had to be ready. Success in life, just as it is in baseball, is often the creation of opportunity. Before they were done, the Mohawks organization featured a minor league developmental team, the Apaches, home and away uniforms, team vehicles, a scouting system and platoon players. They held clinics and provided the kind of competition many major league scouts looked for when gauging a young big league prospect, like an Amos Otis. They regularly piled up the best record in the area. They returned to Pensacola to play the white Seagulls for a version of the Gulf Coast regional championship. In 1963 they were awarded a special Mobile Civic trophy for both their baseball prowess and their community involvement, the moment, Jesse said, when his dream was realized. But, it was not Jesse’s dream. It was everyone’s. Robert Emanuel, Jr. the team’s captain, says the success of the Mohawks showed everyone how to act on a dream and achieve it. Community members still talk about the caravans that would accompany the Mohawks on the road, about how proud they were to see those boys about town wearing their Mohawks warm-up jackets and ball caps. Other exceptional baseball men in the area, James Harris, who managed three of Mobile’s Hall of Famers, and Dr. Jimmy Knight, who played professional ball, credit Jesse and the Mohawks with forcing everyone else to elevate their organizational and competitive level. Sheriff Jack Tillman tells of how Jesse called him and invited his Semmes team to come and play at Trinity Gardens in the mid 60s. And, how once they took the field hardly anyone thought about color differences; it was just the best baseball to be found. For the 40 or so former Mohawks, who are now successful businessmen, coaches, and ministers, to a man they will say that they would not be where they are if it were not for Jesse Norwood and their time under his tutelage as a Prichard Mohawk. Joe Formichella |
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