(Originally published in the Agate Type newsletter.)

In 1924 the Indianapolis A.B.C.’s took spring training at West Baden, Indiana, and this note appeared in the Afro-American:

Several of these players are pretty obscure, and this little item (plus several other similar ones that appeared across the Black press that spring) has proved to be a crucial text for understanding who they were and what they accomplished in baseball.

Research based on this piece can go (and has gone) in all sorts of directions. I’m going to start with the California-linked players, and first up is Goldie Davis, who played for the 1924 Indianapolis ABCs and the 1926 Dayton Marcos.

The Afro-American calls him “Golder Davis…of California,” but elsewhere he was known as Goldie Davis. Less than a month earlier, he was mentioned in a Stockton, California, newspaper piece about the Oakland Pierce Giants:

Davis can be found in the late 1910s and early 1920s playing for West Coast teams such as the Pierce Giants, Alexander Giants, and Shasta Limiteds. Here he is discussed in a passage from an article about an upcoming series between the Alexanders and the Halton-Didiers, a white semipro club, that year:

His boxing career can be traced in Oakland papers back at least to 1915, and he began to play semipro or pro baseball by at least 1919. Here he is in a 1919 photo of the Shasta Limiteds published in the Oakland Tribune, alongside Jimmy Claxton, Carlisle Perry, and Chet Bost, among others:

Ron Auther posted a better version of the photo at his great Shadowball Express blog. Here is a detail of Goldie Davis from Ron’s image:

Goldie Davis is listed as a ballplayer in a Los Angeles city directory in 1921, a year in which he played for the Alexander Giants of Los Angeles.

As noted in the Afro-American piece we started with, in 1924 Davis went to spring training with the Indianapolis ABCs of the Negro National League, along with several other West Coast players. He made the team, starting as a left fielder batting eighth. In five league games he actually hit .412 (7 for 17) with one triple, but he was released in mid-May while the ABCs were in Kansas City and sent back to Indianapolis. A few weeks later he got a reprieve. With the ABCs short of pitching, he was sent to the mound against the Cleveland Browns.

Despite this decent beginning, Davis lost his next two starts before being cut loose for good in mid-June.

The following year he played left field for the Twin City Colored Gophers and, later in the season, Dick Hart’s Peerless Colored Giants of St. Joseph, Missouri. In 1926 he caught on with the Dayton Marcos, newly reentered in the NNL, as a pitcher.

He appeared in a couple of games in May, but was soon released (the Marcos using 43 players in league games that year). He returned to St. Joseph to work in the Swift meatpacking plant and play for the All-Star Colored Giants, but seems to have been best known as a boxer that year.

Within a couple of years Davis had settled in Omaha, where he played for the Cudahy Rex team, a Black semipro ball club, well into the 1930s. It was sponsored by the Cudahy Packing Company, headquartered in Omaha, and named after the company’s Rex brand of beef extract.

Davis registered for the draft in Omaha in World War II, giving his name as Goldie George Davis:

Checking back in the World War I draft cards, we find his name given as George Goldsmith Davis.

By the late 1930s Davis was employed by the Omaha Athletic Club, where over the years he moved from doorman to bartender as he became a pillar of the community.

He passed away in 1969.