Lessons Coming To Life With A 30-City Bicycle Tour -- Seattle's Sealth High Students Are Digging Up Forgotten History, Decades After Negro League Baseball Barnstormed The West

Circuses weren't the only form of entertainment that roamed the countryside, delighting rural and small-town America in the days before television.

There was also Negro League baseball, whose players barnstormed their way through the Midwest, up and down the West Coast and into western Canada, playing the game they loved.

No matter how good these professional athletes were - and some were the best in the game - Major League Baseball wouldn't let them play on the same field as whites.

That history, in danger of being forgotten, is getting a boost thanks to a group of students at Chief Sealth High School in West Seattle. Since last year, students in Gary Thomsen's sports and events-marketing classes have been studying the history of the Negro Leagues and the barnstormers who played west of the Mississippi River.

Now they're preparing to follow in the footsteps of the athletes with a 4,500-mile bicycling trip from Victoria, B.C., to Kansas City that is expected to raise national awareness of the African-American leagues that flourished during a half-century of the sport's segregation.

Next summer, on the 100th anniversary of the first barnstorming games, top baseball players recruited from high schools in Seattle and western Canada will bike to games in 30 cities and towns, some with names such as Trail, Moose Jaw, Medicine Hat and Spearfish.

They will be looking for former major-league and minor-league players to join them in those games.

With the help of corporate sponsors and local partners in five U.S. states and three Canadian provinces, the students plan to hold baseball clinics, celebrity golf tournaments and concerts to raise money for the Buck O'Neil Education and Research Center at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo.

O'Neil - former first baseman for the all-black Kansas City Monarchs, the first African American to coach a major-league team, chairman of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and godfather of Ken Griffey Jr. - arrived in Seattle today to meet the Chief Sealth students and promote their project.

He will take back to Kansas City three boxes of newspaper clippings, interview transcripts and baseball memorabilia, mostly gathered on a road trip last summer by Thomsen, Chief Sealth sophomore Paul Byrne and former minor-league player Trevor Strandlund.

`They weren't the right race'

One of the students eager to meet O'Neil is junior Elizabeth Boe, who carries with her a copy of O'Neil's autobiography, "I Was Right on Time: My Journey from Negro Leagues to the Majors" (Touchstone Books, 1997).

She is particularly touched by a photo of the retired ballplayer receiving an honorary diploma from Sarasota High School 69 years after it refused him admission because of his skin color.

Not only was O'Neil's generation shut out from the best schools, some of the best baseball players in the country were banned from the major leagues.

"They had the talent, but they weren't the right race," sophomore Virginia Gonzales explains.

So they barnstormed across the land, playing either local teams or other barnstormers for whatever purses were offered. One of the top teams, the Chicago American Giants, toured through Seattle every year from 1913 to 1916, reports Lyle Wilson, a Mill Creek attorney and author of "Sunday Afternoons at Garfield Park" (Lowell Printing & Publishing, 1997).

Black semipro teams played at Garfield Park - near today's Garfield High School - from the 1920s to the 1940s. Two professional black teams were in Washington, the Yakima-based Washington Browns from 1937 to 1938 and the Seattle Steelheads, founded in 1946 as part of the short-lived West Coast Negro Baseball League.

Even if the West Coast league had been adequately funded, it probably wouldn't have survived long because it was founded a year before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Even the most stable teams and the biggest Negro League stars barnstormed. When legendary pitcher Satchel Paige's team once ran low on cash while barnstorming in Alberta, Thomsen reports: "They had to stay in a farmer's barn. He put them to work for three or four days before they could go to Kansas for the rest of the tour."

Byrne was amazed to learn about the baseball tournaments organized in the 1940s by Indian Head, Saskatchewan, a town of 1,400. Everybody in town was involved in organizing games, food and lodging for the extravaganza that briefly swelled the town's population to 20,000 people who came for the baseball games, carnivals, music and other attractions.

Museum staffers are delighted

Sealth High School's upcoming barnstorming tour has excited the small staff of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Dubbing the project "Legends of the Road," the students hope to raise a budget of $300,000 to $600,000.

"The more we delve into this thing and start to plot and plan and solicit corporate support, the more it becomes a major, major event. The most remarkable thing is that it's being orchestrated by young folks," says Bob Kendrick, marketing manager for the baseball museum.

Kendrick and O'Neil were impressed when Thomsen and his two traveling companions visited them in Kansas City last summer and spread their boxes of documents across a table at the museum.

"What they have uncovered already and will uncover is incredible," Kendrick says. "It's absolutely first-rate documentation of these athletes being in parts of the country we did not think Negro League baseball players would have been."

Baseball historian Wilson is equally impressed. "Somebody like myself would be like a kid in a candy shop to go to Kansas City and say, `Where do you have that stuff from the kids in Seattle? Where are the boxes? I'll dive into them and come back up for air in eight hours.' "

A map on the wall of Thomsen's classroom is thickly dotted with pins showing towns and cities where barnstormers are known to have played. The map is already out of date, as the students have identified more than 200 locations.

Their attention is no longer focused on that map, though, but on the more limited route of next summer's tour. How can a handful of teenagers pull off a project so big and complex that it would give many professional-events organizers the willies?

Teacher's using his own money

Thomsen takes a deep breath when asked about their task. He's already sinking plenty of his money into it, paying a core group of seven students $7 to $8 per hour after school to assemble information packets for potential sponsors, write letters, make phone calls, create a multimedia CD for prospective partners in 30 towns and cities, and work on a Web site.

Cash is routed through Thomsen's nonprofit organization, CopperCreek Productions.

Thomsen, a mustached former semipro baseball player and one-time consultant to Major League Baseball team owners, says he's confident that, even if they don't pull off a media event and fund-raiser as big as they would like, there will still be a successful tour next summer.

After all, Thomsen's marketing classes pulled off a 3,000-mile in-line-skate trip in 1997 and a 2,200-mile bike trip in 1998 to raise money for the John Stanford Book Fund.

"I've always been raised saying your schoolwork will directly help you with your future career, but this to me is like it's going to help you really directly. This is teaching us how to produce an event. This could literally land you a job directly in production," sophomore Jonathan Anderson says.

And, of course, they're learning an important piece of history.

"It's not just baseball history, it's American history," Boe says.

The history of men like O'Neil, who refused to accept his exclusion from the American Dream.

Keeping that history alive is "redemptive," says Wilson. The barnstormers demonstrated the talents of black players - talents that white ballclub owners eventually realized they couldn't do without.

The heroism of the pioneering black players is demonstrated to Wilson by O'Neil's response when he's asked if he's disappointed he wasn't allowed to play the best players, those in Major League Baseball: "His response is, `Who says I didn't play in the major leagues? Who says I didn't play against the best?' "

Keith Ervin's phone-message number is 206-464-2105. His e-mail address is kervin@seattletimes.com