NEWS
Museum to open in famed slugger's former home in Greenville's West End
By Larry Timbs
Published: Sunday, June 8, 2008, The Herald-Journal (Spartanburg, S.C.)
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"Shoeless" Joe Jackson's home opens as a public museum on June 21. The 950-square-foot house stands at 356 Field St., across from Greenville's West End stadium.
The red-brick, two-bedroom home of the man some baseball fans glorify and others vilify will open soon as a museum and baseball library.
"Shoeless" Joe Jackson's home opens June 21. It is across the street from the stadium where the Greenville Drive, a Class A minor-league baseball team, plays.
He lived in the 950-square-foot house for about 10 years and died there in 1951. His wife, Katie, also died there in 1959.
Moviegoers might recall Jackson as one of the spirits in Kevin Costner's cornfield in the 1989 Academy Award-nominated film "Field of Dreams."
Jackson tells dejected Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella, played by Costner, "If you build it, he will come." Kinsella, against the pleas of his wife and banker, takes his advice and builds a baseball field in the middle of his corn, where the ghosts of baseball's Deadball Era then appear and play.
About three years ago, the Jacksons' home was bought and moved in two pieces from its original site a few miles away by Charleston real estate mogul Richard Davis. It is now at 356 Field St. on the west side of town. The address just happens to match Jackson's lifetime batting average, .356, the third-highest mark in Major League Baseball history among batters with at least 3,000 plate appearances.
Jackson's rise and fall
Jackson was a strapping 6-feet, 1-inch tall with big ears, brawny shoulders, large, soft hands and perfect eyesight. He led the American League in triples in 1912; in slugging percentage (.551) in 1913 and batted .408 as a rookie, the highest ever for a first-season average. He might have thrown the ball harder than anyone else of his era. A baseball historian said he threw "like a shot out of a rifle."
His baseball career rose from meager beginnings. The son of a cotton mill worker, Jackson was a kid at heart. He also was illiterate and never forgot where he came from, spending as much of his time off as possible with the children of mill workers.
For sure, Jackson didn't - at least in his early professional career - let anyone down on the baseball diamond. He quickly rose to national fame as a power-hitting outfielder for the Philadelphia Athletics and the Cleveland Naps.
It was during his time with the Chicago White Sox in the 1919 World Series against Cincinnati that he encountered big trouble.
Though he batted .375 and amassed 12 hits, along with swatting the sole homer of the series, Jackson and some of his fellow Sox players were later accused of being bought off by gamblers. He was indicted but found not guilty at trial in 1921, steadfastly maintaining his innocence.
The not-guilty verdict didn't satisfy then-baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, though, who permanently banned Jackson and seven of his teammates from the majors. It was all known as the 1919 "Black Sox" scandal.
The scandal haunted him for the rest of his life.
Jackson, a man who some players - among them Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb - believed was the game's purest natural hitter, would go to his grave professing his innocence. Many fans maintain that he got a raw deal; even in death, he is barred from eligibility for baseball's Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.
Local fans enshrine homestead
Despite the scandal, Jackson's home will soon be a shrine for those who love the game and want to learn more about him.
"I refuse to argue the points … ," Arlene Marcley, executive assistant to the mayor of Greenville, wrote in a recent e-mail, "and if the documents, letters, memos and legal papers about the Black Sox scandal found a few months ago by Chicago-area collectors prove the case for Joe's innocence, then I'll have the last laugh."
Marcley, curator and foundation chairwoman of the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum and Baseball Library, wants people to remember the player legendary for his home runs - known as "Saturday Specials" - his "blue darter" stinging line drives, and his missile-like 400-foot throws from the outfield that nailed many a runner trying to score.
At his home, visitors will see some of the couple's personal items such as a large whistle from the Brandon Mill, where Joe worked as a 6-year-old sweeping cotton lint off the floors. It also has a life-size portrait of Joe and Katie on their wedding day.
The house is a plain, sturdy, functional dwelling bought by the Jacksons in 1940 or 1941 for about $2,500. Its features include original pinewood floors, a small brick fireplace and arched entrances. Original pine panel walls that formerly lined one side of Jackson's trophy room were converted into a baseball research library with more than 2,000 books.
The small kitchen features 1940s-esque retro decor. It honors Katie Jackson, who curator Marcley says stuck by her man "through thick and thin."
"This is something for the ladies," Marcley said of the room where Katie cooked. "I've been getting donations of 1940s-era kitchen appliances, linens and a coffee pot."
Visitors also will see artifacts, memorabilia and photos chronicling Joe's life and career, and books about the history of baseball. The donations came in part from a successful Internet appeal.
"People from all over the country sent in books," Marcley said, "and I have very few duplicates, I might add."
The Jacksons' home is a "standalone baseball library," Marcley said. She thinks it could be the largest of its kind in the Southeast, with the nation's largest at Cooperstown.
She said that, after what she's learned since working on the restoration, it's amazing how many people research baseball.
It's no accident visitors will see so many books there.
"Because of Joe's illiteracy, I wanted books in Joe Jackson's house," Marcley said. "He could neither read nor write. His wife answered all fan mail and read all the letters to him, and I believe that's one of the reasons Joe got in trouble in Chicago. He couldn't read the legal documents."
All books are read-only, meaning they can't be checked out, unless done so by appointment.
The Jacksons' last years together
Though Jackson's major-league career was cut short, the Jacksons were "very comfortable" in Greenville, Marcley said, partly because of their successful dry-cleaning business in Savannah, Ga., as well as their ownership of a local liquor store and barbecue restaurant.
It was at that liquor store where fellow baseball star Cobb, who was three years older than Jackson, paid a visit. Joe Anders, a pallbearer at Jackson's funeral, recalls the day.
Anders said Jackson said something along the lines of, "Joe, I want you to meet the greatest baseball player ever."
To which Cobb replied: "No. Joe Jackson was the greatest, not me."
Restoring Jackson's name
So, did "Shoeless" Joe really help throw the 1919 World Series, or is he one of the biggest scapegoats in the history of sports?
South Carolina baseball historian and author Thomas K. Perry has spent decades researching Jackson, the focus of "Just Joe," Perry's fictional but fact-based 2007 biography of the player, which is told from the perspective of Katie Jackson.
Perry is cautiously hopeful that recently discovered documents about the Black Sox saga will help clear Jackson's name. From what little Perry can gain from those documents, examined by the staff at the Chicago History Museum, he thinks there's evidence that Jackson and other White Sox players received poor legal advice from the team's owner, Charles Comiskey.
This "set them up to take the fall" and kept Comiskey out of the headlines, Perry said.
But even if the documents tend to exonerate Jackson, Perry thinks it will make little difference.
"I think people care, yes, but baseball does not," he wrote in an e-mail. "My confidence in (Bud) Selig, commissioner of baseball, is nil. ... I do not see (Jackson) being offered clemency, and, as Joe always believed, how can you say you're sorry for what you didn't do?
"People come down on one of two sides when it comes to Jackson," Perry added. "You believe him and support him, or you call him the biggest liar and cheat in the history of the game."
Perry said he started researching Jackson about 20 years ago, convinced of the slugger's guilt, but "after all the studying, listening and evaluating, I no longer believe that. Should he have been suspended for guilty knowledge? Perhaps. But it should have had limits."
Some Jackson believers note that he grew up poor but had honest, hardworking, Christian parents with high moral values, including a mother who refrained from cooking meals on Sunday. They wonder, given his upbringing, whether the man was even capable of lying or cheating.
But count Winthrop University baseball historian Bob Gorman, who co-authored the 2008 book "Death at the Ballpark," against that idea.
Acknowledging Jackson's greatness as a ballplayer, Gorman says "Shoeless" Joe took money from gamblers in the 1919 World Series, and that can't be ignored.
"I have the same problem with Pete Rose," Gorman said. "He did gamble while manager and player, and though he says he never threw a game or did anything but play his hardest, there's just something about it that smells.
"So I'm in the minority that says neither should get in the Hall (of Fame)," he said. "I won't slit my wrists if both or either get in, but to my mind, they don't belong."
To some extent, though, Jackson is already enshrined at the hall. Visit and you'll see his jersey, glove, cleats, watch and plenty of photos of the man Babe Ruth reportedly described as the greatest hitter he had ever seen and the player whose style he copied.
Meanwhile, museum curator Marcley has this challenge: "Let those who think he (Jackson) was guilty prove it ... Joe's 1919 World Series stats don't show that he took part in any plan to throw the series - not to mention, he was found not guilty in a court of law not once, but twice."
Why the nickname?
Jackson got his nickname early in his career, and it stuck with him till he died.
The story goes like this: In 1908, while playing semi-pro baseball with the Greenville Spinners in the Greenville Textile League, Jackson suffered painful blisters on his feet from his new spikes. So he tossed those shoes, walked to the batter's box and slammed a triple.
Running the bases without shoes on caught the attention of a fan, who shouted: "You shoeless son of a gun!"
The rest is baseball history, thanks to sportwriters, fans and friends who forever, and for the most part affectionately, called him "Shoeless" Joe Jackson.
Larry Timbs is a journalism professor at Winthrop University in Rock Hill.
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