National Clothesline

Dirty laundry often played a role in the life of sports legend “Shoeless” Joe Jackson — both on and off the baseball diamond.

Most people aren’t aware that the sharp-eyed slugger once operated a booming drycleaning plant in Georgia called the Savannah Valet Service.

However, Maggi Hall will never forget that part of her uncle’s life. She still fondly recalls a memory or two about his venture in the cleaning industry during the 1920s.

“I was in my teens and growing up when he had the business downtown. He was very successful at it,” she said. “The office was on the corner of Drayton and State Street, on the northwest corner,” she added.

“It was where he would bring the drycleaning and leave it to have it done. They used to have a little shoe shine stand in the back where the men would come in and pull their trousers off and have them pressed while they were sitting there waiting. I think the building’s gone now.”

The location now houses a parking lot for the Mulberry Inn Hotel.

According to Murray Silver, author of Great Balls of Fire, Jackson started his pressing club in 1919 while he was still playing with the Chicago White Sox. The Savannah Valet Service had two locations at one time with as many as 20 to 30 total employees.

Silver is an authority on Jackson because he recently published Behind the Moss Curtain and Other Great Savannah Stories.

The book includes a section that chronicles “Shoeless” Joe’s life in Savannah. To obtain information for the project, Silver scoured through local newspapers printed between 1909 and 1932.

One strange bit of information that Silver discovered was that Jackson actually made more money in Savannah from his drycleaning plant and pool hall than he did playing professional baseball. Of course, the average Major League Baseball (MLB) player salary for 2002 was over $2.3 million, so times have changed.

Jackson purportedly leveraged a pay raise for himself from Charles Comiskey, the owner of the White Sox, by pointing out that fiscal anomaly to him.

Comiskey had long fostered a notorious reputation for underpaying his ballplayers, capitalizing on the fact that the “reserve clause” in their contracts prevented them from playing for other teams without his permission.

Compounding matters, it was widely reported that Comiskey often failed to keep promises he made to his players and he even charged them for the laundering of their uniforms after games.

At one point, the White Sox team fought back. They decided to stop cleaning their uniforms altogether — which lead to the team being referred to as the “Black Sox” for their grubby appearance. Comiskey solved that problem by removing the soiled uniforms from the team’s locker room and fining all of the players for their protest.

The ongoing battles between Comiskey and his players percolated for quite some time, and many baseball historians attribute the ongoing dispute as a leading cause for the “Black Sox Scandal” during the 1919 World Series.

A group of organized gamblers approached various players of the heavily-favored White Sox club, propositioning them to throw the Series. The gamblers offered eight White Sox players thousands of dollars a piece for each game they lost deliberately.

As fate would have it, the gamblers had debts of their own and couldn’t fulfill their end of the bargain. Though the Cincinnati Reds held a commanding four games-to-one lead early on, the White Sox suddenly played up to their potential, winning games six and seven.

The gamblers became increasingly desperate and even resorted to death threats against the players to cast them astray from their winning ways. Believing his wife’s life was in jeopardy, Chicago starting pitcher Lefty Williams supposedly performed badly on purpose in the final game of the series. Chicago lost by a score of 10-5.

For his part, Jackson was offered $10,000, and later $20,000, to participate in the fix, but he refused both times and requested to be benched for the Series so he could avoid any suspicion of wrongdoing. His request was flatly denied and he went on to play exceptionally, leading all hitters by batting .375 with 12 hits for the Series. He accounted for 11 of his team’s 20 total runs.

Yet, despite Jackson’s determination to play his best and avoid controversy, he was linked to the scandal by his “guilty knowledge” of it.

A Chicago jury eventually found Jackson innocent of any wrongdoing during a trial in 1921, but he had already been banned outright by Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis in 1919 when news of the scandal went public.

As the legend goes, one heartbroken kid approached Jackson on the steps of the courtroom during his legal battles, exclaiming: “Say it ain’t so, Joe!”

Author Murray Silver was motivated to write his “Behind the Moss Curtain” book because he felt the public fosters a misconception that Jackson simply disappeared following the 1919 baseball controversy.

“He didn’t disappear,” Silver explained. “He was in Savannah. People have forgotten these things.”

Though not a professional ballplayer anymore, Jackson tended to his local businesses and played in various sandlot and outlaw baseball games throughout the South.

His mythical status grew with stories of how he crushed a 500-ft. homer at the age of 40 and a 450-ft. homer at 54, after he had suffered two heart attacks. He was in his early 60s when he passed away in 1951, still banned from the sport he loved so much.

Nowadays, Silver hopes that his book will plead the case for Jackson to be inducted into the Greater Savannah Athletic Hall of Fame

If that happens, Jackson may also have a swinging chance at being honored at the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.

Statistically, it’s hard to argue against placing Jackson in the MLB Hall of Fame. He hit over .300 in eleven of his thirteen seasons in the majors, and his .356 lifetime batting average ranks third on the all-time list. He also lead the White Sox to a World Series championship in 1917.

His personal story is inspiring, as well. He grew up in the shadow of poverty and illiteracy. By the time he was 13 years old, he needed to work 12-hour days in the local textile mill. Despite it all, he refused to let go of his dreams of playing baseball for a living.

During his teenage years, he earned his popular nickname by running around in his socks during a baseball game.

Jackson’s feet became covered with blisters after he tried to break in a pair of spiked shoes. So, not wanting to miss a single inning, he opted to show up in right field wearing stocking feet. The crowd quickly caught on to his unusual fashion statement and the moniker “Shoeless Joe” sprouted up soon after.

Throughout his career, Jackson proved to be a quiet, affable player who spoke mostly with his trusty ol’ bat “Black Betsy.” He was a natural hitter whose phenomenal skills were admired by teammates and opponents alike; in fact, “Shoeless” Joe helped Babe Ruth improve his offensive game immensely by showing him a “pivot hitting” stance to use.

Yet, despite all of his legends and accomplishments, Jackson remains ineligible for the Hall of Fame unless his ban from MLB is lifted.

Maggi Hall believes that the time is long overdue for her uncle Joe to be let back into baseball — something former Cincinnati Red’s star Pete Rose is currently trying to negotiate, as well.

“They keep yakking so much about Pete Rose up there in Cooperstown,” she said.

“I hope they don’t do nothing about Pete Rose until they do something about ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson,” Hall said.

“Uncle Joe was exonerated of all those charges against him. Ol’ Pete Rose was found guilty and did time. They need not put him up in Cooperstown if they don’t put Uncle Joe up there,” Hall said.