Greenville baseball prodigy Shoeless Joe Jackson has become something of an icon over the years, the subject or a character in at least two motion pictures and a one-man play, all in the past 25 years.
In 1888, Joseph Jefferson Jackson was born in Pickens County, the oldest of George and Martha Jackson's eight children. When little Joe was five years old, his father took a job with the Brandon Textile Mill in West Greenville and moved the family down from the hills into one of the Brandon Mill textile villages. A year later, at the age of six, Joe Jackson began working in the textile mills himself.
By age 13, in 1901, Joe made the Brandon Mill baseball team. After five years in the mill leagues, Joe was signed to the semi-pro Greenville New Leaguers. Two years after that, he was hired by the Carolina Association team, the Greenville Spinners. He hit .346 and led the league in batting.
It was while playing for the Spinners at nearby Anderson that Joe got his famous nickname. He found that his new shoes had given him painful blisters on his feet, but because the team only carried 12 players to begin with, and a number were already hurt, his manager insisted that he play. Joe slipped out of his shoes and played the rest of the game--the only game in which he ever did this--in his stocking feet. When he rapped out a triple, an Anderson fan stood up and shouted, "You shoeless son of a gun, you!" The name stuck, though Jackson never did like it.
In 1908, Jackson married Katie Wynn. And later that summer, the Philadelphia Athletics signed him and brought him up to the major leagues.
Joe played the next two years in the minors, but in 1910 he was called up to the Cleveland Indians and hit .387 over the last 20 games of the season. In 1911, his first full season, he batted .408, the highest average ever by a rookie. Amazingly, he didn't even win the batting crown that year, since Ty Cobb picked that same year to hit .420.
Jackson dominated the league for the next seven years. In 1919, while playing for the White Sox, he roomed with a member of the team who conspired to throw the World Series. Though Jackson himself batted .375 and set a record for number of hits, and fielded a perfect 1.000 fielding average, he was named as a co-conspirator in the 1920 Black Sox trial and, though found innocent, was banished for life from organized baseball.
Though Joe did continue to play organized baseball under various aliases for a number of teams through the ‘20s and ‘30s, he never considered himself the tragic figure that the press—and, later, novelist Thomas Kinsella and filmmaker John Sayles--made him out to be.
I have read now and then that I am one of the most tragic figures in baseball. Well, maybe that's the way some people look at it, but I don't quite see it that way myself. I guess one of the reasons I never fought my suspension any harder than I did was that I thought I had spent a pretty full life in the big leagues. I was 32 years old at the time, and I had been in the majors 13 years; I had a lifetime batting average of .356; I held the all-time throwing record for distance; and I had made pretty good salaries for those days. There wasn't much left for me in the big leagues.
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| Joe Jackson with Greenville youngsters, 1944. |
First of all, the conception of Shoeless Joe Jackson as a barefoot mill-town hayseed is way off. True, Jackson's education was limited; his signature is widely prized—partially because he only shakily signed his name a few times in his life—but many often ignore Joe's business success. Even before the scandal, Joe owned a successful valet business in Georgia. After the scandal, Joe and his wife moved to Augusta, and she ran the business while Joe played for the local ball club. After his mother died in 1935, the Jacksons returned to Greenville for the funeral—and stayed for the next 16 years, living at 119 E. Wilborn St. on the south side of Greenville, while Joe became successful owning a liquor store—though he didn't drink—and a dry-cleaning business.
Why did he allow folks to think he was dumb in his baseball days? Joe himself explained:
All the big sportswriters seemed to enjoy writing about me as an ignorant cotton-mill boy with nothing but lint where my brains ought to be. That was all right with me. I was able to fool a lot of pitchers and managers and club owners I wouldn't have been able to fool if they'd thought I was smarter.
When Jackson died of a massive heart attack in December 1951, he was buried in Woodlawn Memorial Park on Wade Hampton Blvd. in Greenville. You'll find his grave in Section V, plot 333. If you want to visit the site, stop by the office at Woodlawn and they'll be glad to give you directions.
In March 1996, the Shoeless Joe Jackson Memorial was dedicated at the old Brandon Mill baseball field. Later that year, the South Carolina legislature passed legislation to change the name of the road that runs near the Brandon Mill Baseball field to "The Shoeless Joe Jackson Memorial Highway."
On May 5, 1998, state legislator J. Verne Smith proposed--and the South Carolina state legislature passed—legislation asking the commissioner of baseball to reinstate Joe Jackson as a member in "good standing" of professional baseball. This is one of the necessary steps that must be accomplished before Jackson can be considered for the Hall of Fame.
To celebrate the 110th anniversary of his birth, Greenville Mayor Knox White declared July 1998 "Shoeless Joe Jackson Month." Plans were made for a public display all month at City Hall of Jackson memorabilia.
For an excellent Web site on Joe Jackson, see www.blackbetsy.com, home of the Virtual Hall of Fame. To see Joe portrayed by D.B. Sweeney as an "ignorant cotton-mill boy," watch John Sayles's fine film Eight Men Out. To see him played with a New Jersey accent by Ray Liotta, watch Field of Dreams. [Originally published in Moon Travel Handbooks: South Carolina.]
