El Profe: Gotta Go Meet Millito

He was about to celebrate his 90th birthday, or so I heard. Maybe he had recently celebrated the birthday. In either case, I had received word that Emilio “Millito” Navarro, the first black Puerto Rican to play in the Negro Leagues, would be attending the annual John Henry “Pop” Lloyd Weekend in Atlantic City.

Logic dictated that the opportunity to meet and interview a boricua born in 1905 and who had played in the Eastern Colored League with the Cuban Stars in 1928 and 1929 would not come around too often.

And at 90, how much longer would Navarro be around?

Chances like this require a researcher to act. This was a no-brainer. I had to go meet Millito, even if it meant missing a week of classes as a doctoral student.

Decision made. Since I was still in graduate school, this meant getting into a car with fellow Negro League historian Dick Clark and driving from Ann Arbor, Mich., to Atlantic City, N.J.

Dick shared the same name as that other Dick Clark — the legendary host of “American Bandstand” and the longtime face of the annual New Year’s Rockin’ Eve celebration live from Times Square.

Negro League Seminar

But to those of us who studied Negro League baseball, Clark was the most knowledgeable and generous researcher one could get to know. Because I was a second-year graduate student at the time, riding in the car with him for 12 hours was the best seminar I could have taken about the history of the Negro Leagues.

First, there were his tales about meeting Negro League greats Buck Leonard, James “Cool Papa” Bell and Monte Irvin. Just as mesmerizing were his stories about the early days of researching black baseball before electronic databases and digital research. That was the time of digging through musty archives, private collections and local libraries to locate box scores and articles about Negro League games.

Then there were the accidental discoveries of troves of Negro League documents. Such was the case of how the records of the Newark Eagles — now known as the Effa Manley Papers, named after the team owner and the only woman enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum — were found in the basement of a Newark brownstone that was undergoing renovation. The contents, discovered in a steel safe encased in concrete, disproved the long-held contention that Negro League owners did not keep records of their business transactions or correspondence.

Clark became a mentor as I started researching Latino ballplayers in the Negro Leagues, a subject that inspired my first book, “Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Colored Line.” He provided leads on Negro League players who lived in the Ann Arbor area, which is how I was able to interview Melvin Duncan, who pitched for the Kansas City Monarchs and Detroit Stars, and Chester Gray, a reserve catcher with the 1945 Monarchs who had roomed with Jackie Robinson.

And it was Clark who had informed me about Millito Navarro.

Millito Navarro

We left Michigan at the crack of dawn and arrived in Atlantic City that night. In conjunction with the Pop Lloyd celebration, a Negro League research conference was taking place. It was during the conference that I got to meet Navarro, as well as Armando Vázquez and Carlos Santiago. The trio sat on a panel about Latinos in the Negro Leagues, giving voice to the experience of Puerto Ricans and Cuban players of that era.

Navarro was going through a renaissance of sorts. After playing in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and the United States, he had lived in relative obscurity. But, finally, he was receiving recognition for his pioneering days in the Negro Leagues.

The vast majority of Negro Leaguers lived in obscurity after their playing days. This was particularly true for most Latinos, who moved back home to the Caribbean and the rest of Latin America after they playing in the black circuit. In Navarro’s case, he worked as a physical education teacher and later as an administrator at the Francisco “Paquito” Montaner Stadium in his native city of Ponce. He was known in Puerto Rican baseball circles, but not much beyond that.

Jackie Robinson changed things for black baseball in many ways. Coverage of the Negro League circuit and of its history was minimal. The focus typically was on black players integrating minor league and major league teams.

Lack of press coverage was even more the case for Latinos in the Negro Leagues like Navarro. Language played a big role. Most sportswriters did not speak Spanish and could not interview black Latinos in their native language.

Pioneers no longer forgotten

Interest in the Negro Leagues spiked within the mainstream press in the early 1970s. Ted Williams’ 1966 Hall of Fame induction speech partly inspired the curiosity. The closing of Williams’ speech startled the attendees, New York sportswriter Maury Allen told me.

“I hope that one day Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame, as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren’t given the chance,” Williams said.

Five years passed as the Hall of Fame figured out how to act on Williams’ call to consider Negro League greats for enshrinement. Researchers and baseball historians like John Holway, John Coates and Jim Riley began to document the history of black baseball, interviewing surviving Negro League players.

But for Navarro, attention did not truly come until the work of Dick Clark and Larry Lester. The pair cofounded the Negro Leagues Committee of the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) in 1971. Their committee’s express purpose was researching and preserving the history of blacks in baseball. They assiduously compiled a record of every living and deceased Negro Leaguer, many of whom had fallen into relative obscurity.

Their work made it possible for me to meet Millito. He had so many stories to tell about his amazing baseball life: About his friendship with Francisco “Pancho” Coimbre, Roberto Clemente’s idol and the batter that never struck out. About fellow ponceño Pedro “Perucho” Cepeda, the father of Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda and arguably one of the greatest hitting infielders ever. About the early years of Puerto Rican baseball.

Meeting Millito Navarro encouraged me to dig deeper into the history of Latinos in the Negro Leagues, expanding the focus of my first book and giving voice to long-forgotten pioneers and players. Ironically, despite my haste to meet him, Millito would not only celebrate his 90th birthday at the Negro League conference in Atlantic City, but he also went on to mark his 95th, 100th and 105th birthdays in his native Puerto Rico. I took advantage of those extra years. Not only was Millito a fountain of youth, he was a fountain of stories.

Featured Image: Adrian Burgos Jr.

Inset Images: Jorge Fidel López Vélez