The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw

The Ticket Out

Darryl Strawberry

and the Boys of Crenshaw

MICHAEL SOKOLOVE

SIMON & SCHUSTER

NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY

Also by Michael Sokolove

Hustle: The Myth, Life and Lies of Pete Rose

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Copyright © 2004 by Michael Y. Sokolove

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Portions of this book were first published in an article in The New York Times Magazine entitled An American Tragedy by Michael Sokolove, dated April 15, 2001.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sokolove, Michael Y.

The ticket out : Darryl Strawberry and the boys of Crenshaw / Michael Sokolove.

p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Strawberry, Darryl.   2. Baseball players—United States—Biography. 3. Crenshaw High School (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Baseball. 4. Youth league baseball—California—Los Angeles.   I. Title.

GV865.S87S65 2004

796.357′092—dc22

[B]

2004041745

eISBN-13: 978-1-439-12904-3

ISBN-13: 978-0-743-22673-8

For my parents

Contents

Author’s Note

Prologue

Chapter 1

Paradise

Chapter 2

Go West, Then Keep On Going

Chapter 3

Crenshaw

Chapter 4

No Way We Lose

Chapter 5

Chasing Darryl

Chapter 6

Leaving L.A.

Chapter 7

Called Out on Strikes

Chapter 8

The Good Stuff

Chapter 9

Family

Acknowledgments

A Note on Sources

Index

Author’s Note

This book evolved from a profile of Darryl Strawberry that I wrote for The New York Times Magazine in 2001. Even after I had completed that story, I wanted to know more, not so much about Darryl, but about where he came from and what produced this tragic American icon. And I wanted to explore our sports obsession—America’s; my own—through Darryl Strawberry and his 1979 Crenshaw High baseball team, which I knew to be a collection of amazingly talented young ballplayers.

What became of the rest of them? Were the less celebrated ones, those who weren’t showered with all that fame and adulation, better off in the end? For all of them, how did their lives turn out after the applause died?

This book is their story, the story of the Boys of Crenshaw. It is also the story of my own journey, a quest to get sports right in my own head.

As a boy, I was virtually inhabited by sports. It is what I did, what I thought about, who I was. If I had a baseball game to play on a spring afternoon, I sat in class all day long staring out the window and up at the sky—on high alert against some rain cloud that might float into the picture and wash out my game. In the winter, my friends and I shoveled snow off the outdoor basketball courts and played in gloves. We could think of nothing better to do. I still think there was nothing better to do.

When we weren’t playing sports, we were watching it, endlessly: back-to-back college football games on Saturday afternoons, with a dose of Wide World of Sports and frequent breaks to burst outside and reenact what we had just seen.

I gobbled up the sports pages and read the stories as little morality plays. The players who worked the hardest reaped the rewards. Sports, for sure, rewarded character. It built character. This is what we were told, and what we were eager to believe.

The sports pages, then and now, included a kind of separate story line for black athletes. Sports for them was redemptive. It was a savior, the way out of a bad situation. All of this buttressed a powerful myth, sports as salvation, perhaps the only salvation.

Plenty of black athletes bought into this, or just played along, testifying in print that without sports they would surely be on the streets, maybe in jail, perhaps dead.

I wanted to get beyond the myths that we so comfortably embrace, beyond this well-worn narrative. Sports does, indeed, uplift. But it also distracts, disappoints, and holds out false hope.

I was, briefly, what one might call a real sportswriter, a beat writer who covered a big-league baseball team for one season. I carry a lot of memories from that year, most of them sweet ones, foremost among them the pure pleasure of sitting in the ballparks of the National League night after night and taking in more than 150 baseball games.

But I also saw things that made me wonder if sports really built character, or attacked it like some insidious virus.

I have written about many other subjects besides sports: life in inner-city America; a presidential campaign; the Internet stock bubble; eco-terrorism. But I keep coming back to sports, dipping in and out, trying to find the good, trying to reconcile what I see through my adult eyes with what I believed as a boy.

This book, for me, is a way to go back to the beginning. I wanted to recapture baseball as this group of boys experienced it: fresh, and full of possibility. And I wanted to know them as they are now, to learn how it all came out.

Prologue

On a warm afternoon in the spring of 1979, fifteen boys knelt in a semicircle on a baseball diamond that had been picked clean of pebbles, then obsessively raked and dragged to minimize bad hops. The grass had been watered and nurtured to a green lushness. Four hundred feet away in dead center field, and 315 feet down the lines, a high chain-link fence served both to define the outfield boundaries and to wall off school property from the streets of Los Angeles.

This was the beginning of a new baseball season at Crenshaw High School, and the boys wanted, immediately, to have bats in their hands. They wanted to take their mighty cuts, to run under fly balls, to make bullet throws and hear the fine splat of baseballs smacking into freshly oiled leather. They had groomed this field themselves, made it the finest damned diamond in all of inner-city L.A., and they were ready to play on it.

Brooks Hurst, the streetwise white man at the center of this black semicircle, pointed toward the gates in the outfield fences, which were locked against girlfriends, buddies, cousins, gang members, and all other forms of distraction and disorder. This is our world, he told them. Our turf. Just us and baseball.

Menace and temptation outside the gates could destroy this team for sure, but a powerful, countervailing influence bound these boys and carried them onto the Crenshaw High diamond: The neighborhood had baseball in its blood. It had fathers and grandfathers who had played the game on rock-filled fields and parched pastures in the rural South, and in some cases were still playing it on the L.A. sandlots. The boys had grown up with a notion that baseball could somehow set things right—a vague, unexpressed but persistent hope that even if life was rigged, baseball might be fair.

Thedo Jones, the father of a Crenshaw player, had moved from Marshall, Texas, on the Louisiana border, to Los Angeles, specifically to be where Major League Baseball was played—in the city of the Dodgers, the franchise that had employed the great Jackie Robinson. Mr. Jones was among that generation of black men you saw wherever the Dodgers played—quiet men in Dodgers caps who nursed a beer, kept a scorecard, and stayed locked in silent, prayerful homage to the team that had broken baseball’s color line in its Brooklyn incarnation. Thedo had four boys, and from the time they were little, his way of greeting any of their friends who walked into his living room was to clear away the furniture, hand them a bat, and say, Let me see your swing, boy.

On this first day of baseball practice, Thedo’s son Carl, the Crenshaw catcher, was kneeling smack in the middle of the semicircle. He was maybe the happiest of all that a new season had dawned. Carl lived in his dirty baseball gear, lived to play ball, He was already chewing his tobacco. At least half the Crenshaw team chewed, but Carl alone had the distinction of both chewing and not brushing his teeth.

Carl’s mitt was stuffed under his belt, up against his lower back, as it always was when he wasn’t catching—as if he otherwise couldn’t keep it close enough. During games, when a Crenshaw pitcher tried to get too cute and nibble at the plate with breaking balls, Carl would rip off his mask, march to the mound, and say the same thing every time: Punk, throw a fastball!

Never was the next pitch not a fastball.

Kneeling next to Carl Jones was Cordie Dillard, a plumber’s son who called himself the original varsity player. What did that mean? It was impossible to say, but somehow it fit him. Cordie Dillard, the original varsity player. He was a combination of an ultra-cool guy, a smooth man with the ladies, and a ballplayer’s ballplayer. Cordie insisted on playing three days after his father’s death on the day before the funeral—and hit two home runs.

Big Marvin McWhorter, by the time he finished at Crenshaw, had read Ted Williams’s The Science of Hitting four times and committed long passages to memory. He saved his change and made long trips to batting cages in the city of Downey, ten swings for a quarter.

Marvin, his teammates would tease him. Is that all you like to do—hit?

Yep, he would answer.

Marvin was nestled right next to his best friend George Cook, with whom he had a standing date every Saturday morning. George and Marvin. The two of them would sit side by side on the overstuffed sofa in Marvin’s living room and stare at the television, transfixed by Mel Allen’s This Week in Baseball. George liked the clever middle infielders—Dave Cash, Joe Morgan, and especially the Angels’ Bobby Grich, whose name he incessantly chirped and somehow shortened. Bbby Grch, Bbby Grch, he’d repeat as he stepped into the batter’s box. Marvin favored big fellas like himself—Willie McCovey, Jim Rice, Greg Bull Luzinski—men constructed to crush baseballs.

The identical twins Darryl and Derwin McNealy were rail-thin whippets, so indistinguishable that they were addressed, always, as Twin. Their mother, who until they were a year old wrote their names in Magic Marker on their butts, moved them from the Bay Area to Los Angeles when they were eight years old, because that’s where the ballplaying was, and I figured that’s where they needed to be to get noticed.

The twins were inseparable but sometimes at each other. One day around the batting cage, they got into it and one said to the other, You ugly. The other replied, No, you ugly! They began to fight, one got the other on the ground and roughed him up pretty good, and the rest of the Crenshaw players laughed for weeks over the fact that they had no idea which twin got his ass whupped—or which one was uglier.

Some of the players fidgeted while Brooks Hurst laid down the rules for the season. They were eager to get going, or just by nature not comfortable with someone talking at them. But Reggie Dymally looked straight on at his coach; he didn’t nudge anybody or make whispered jokes with teammates. Reggie was the most focused player on the team, and through his daily regimen of push-ups and sit-ups, he was also the strongest. Not everybody was buddies with Reggie—he wasn’t an easy guy to know—but they all respected him.

On either side of Reggie were two of the other quiet players: Fernando Becker, the lone Hispanic on the team; and Nelson Whiting, a gifted musician and the most talented of any of them off the field.

Standing, not kneeling, with his baseball glove on top of his head like a hat was Chris Brown. Chris was a hardhead who did not like to listen; he was also the team’s flat-out genetic freak, a born ballplayer right out of the womb who twice won football’s national Punt, Pass & Kick competition. (Being a naturally gifted player and a hardhead were not unrelated.)

The Crenshaw players loved to toss around baseball clichés, and one they always applied to Chris was that he could wake up in the middle of the night, rub the sleep out of his eyes, and hit a home run. He probably could have, along with just about any other athletic feat you could imagine. If someone had put a pair of skates on Chris when he was little, he’d have been an all-star in the National Hockey League. If you’d given him a pool cue, he’d have been Minnesota Fats, or maybe South Central Chris.

The other one standing up in this clot of young ballplayers was Chris’s great rival, Darryl Strawberry. At Crenshaw, Chris was the sturdily built, sure-handed third baseman; Darryl was the lean, graceful right fielder. Chris was widely considered the better player, but in no way could he compete for attention with Darryl, whose combination of talent and vulnerability—not to mention the resonant name itself: Strawberry—made adults battle for him like a trophy.

No one ever could take their eyes off Darryl Strawberry. He might hit one of those majestic, game-breaking home runs that lifted off his bat like a space shot. Or he might, without warning or provocation, break down and cry.

At eleven years old, Darryl Strawberry bolted one park-league team to join another when a rival coach offered him unlimited postgame chicken and sodas. By the time he reached Crenshaw, Darryl was much as the public would later come to know him—beautiful, delicate, gifted, flawed, doomed.

These were the Boys of Crenshaw. The greatest collection of high school baseball talent in history. Nearly an entire roster drafted into pro ball. Two future Major League All-Stars.

They were headed that spring to the city championship game, held annually at the mecca, Dodger Stadium—and beyond that, they knew for sure, to fame, glory, and fortune. They were pure ballplayers, believers in the game, investors in America’s Pastime. They loved baseball with a piercing intensity, and whenever that love was not returned, it hurt like physical pain.

CHAPTER ONE

Paradise

In the tiny backyard of the Strawberry house at 6034 Seventh Avenue, a grapefruit tree produced an abundant harvest each spring. Darryl and his four siblings—two brothers, two sisters—would pluck the fruit off the tree, peel the dimpled skin back, and slurp it down right there in the yard. Then they would run back out on the street or to the nearby park and resume playing ball, juice still dripping from their faces.

Their house, in the middle of a block lined with tall palm trees, looked like tens of thousands of other dwellings in inner-city Los Angeles: a stucco-faced bungalow with three bedrooms, a small kitchen and eating area, and a patch of green in front and back. (The smallest of these types of houses came prefabricated from an outfit called Pacific Ready-Cut Homes, and were sometimes referred to as democratic bungalows.)

Most of the Strawberrys’ neighbors also had at least one fruit tree in the yard—grapefruit, fig, avocado, orange—along with some shrubs and at least a modest patch of flowers. This was typical of just about any neighborhood in Los Angeles; the city was developed, above all, around the ideal that it should stand as a bucolic alternative to New York and the other old cities back East—that it must never become just another teeming metropolis. And what better way to make this point than to give even the poorest residents at least a sliver of paradise?

The poor live in single cottages, with dividing fences and flowers in the frontyard, and oftentimes vegetables in the backyard, Dana Bartlett reported in The Better City, which was published in 1907. Bartlett observed that Los Angeles had some slum people, but no slums in the sense of vicious, congested districts.

The Strawberrys had come up from Mississippi. The Dillards, a whole family of plumbers back in Oklahoma—fathers and sons, cousins, in-laws—migrated en masse to start life and business anew in Southern California. The Browns made the pilgrimage from Mississippi, the Whitings from Texas, the McWhorters from Alabama.

With just two exceptions, the families of the Boys of Crenshaw all came from down South, post-World War II. In Los Angeles they lived in single-family houses, rented in most cases. They drove cars and had driveways. Most kept a little garden plot to grow vegetables and greens.

The sense of roominess in Los Angeles, all the attention given over to flora and natural beauty, was not a ruse, not precisely. Much about Los Angeles really was superior to the crowded cities of the East and Midwest, and still is. Even now, the common reaction of a first-time visitor to L.A.’s inner city is to look around at the greenery, the rosebushes, the purple-flowering jacaranda and statuesque birds of paradise, and say: This is South Central?

But there was also something undeniably slippery about the landscape; the whole L.A. experience seemed a violation of some truth-in-packaging law. Historian Carey McWilliams seized on this in Southern California: An Island on the Land, a 1946 book still considered a standard text on the development of Los Angeles. McWilliams wrote of the extraordinary green of the lawns and hillsides, while adding, It was the kind of green that seemed as though it might rub off on your hands; a theatrical green, a green that was not quite real.

It is not easy to keep in mind how young a city Los Angeles still is, with its current tangle of freeways, its nearly four million residents, and its dense concentrations of wealth, glamour, and power. Its history begins in 1781, five years after the American Revolution, when forty-four pioneers ventured north from the San Diego area, at the direction of California’s Spanish governor, to establish a settlement on the banks of what is now called the Los Angeles River.

The land was exotic—a desert that faces an ocean, McWilliams called it—as well as impractical. For its first century and beyond, Los Angeles would have two great needs: water and people. These were, of course, related; the city could only grow as it found new sources of drinking water.

When California passed to Mexican control in 1821, the population of the city was only about 1,200. It was still entirely Spanish and Mexican in character, with the gentry consisting of the big landholders, or rancheros, whose names still grace many of Los Angeles’s major thoroughfares.

California came under U.S. control in 1848, after the Mexican-American War, and two years later became the thirty-first state. The 1850 census counted 8,239 residents of Los Angeles, and the city was still a couple of decades away from establishing police and fire departments, or building a city hall and library.

A series of real estate deals—or land grabs, as they have often been described—brought much-needed water. Under the direction of city water superintendent William Mulholland, snow melt from the Sierra Nevada was captured from the Owens Valley, some 230 miles to the northeast, and sent flowing toward Los Angeles via aqueduct beginning in 1913.

The job of populating the new city was as blunt an undertaking as the land grabs. Railroad, real estate, and other business interests aggressively marketed the region’s natural beauty and healthful living, selling Southern California as the once-in-a-lifetime chance to remake oneself in a new land—creating what came to be known as the California Dream.

The Dream was certainly all true in its particulars. Southern California was lovely, new, different. In what other American city could you eat grapefruit right off the tree? You sure couldn’t do that in New York or Philadelphia, or anywhere in the vast midsection of the nation from where California attracted so many of its new arrivals.

But right from the start, the dream was hyped way beyond reality, sometimes comically so.

California is our own; and it is the first tropical land which our race has thoroughly mastered and made itself at home in, journalist and public relations man Charles Nordhoff wrote in California: For Health, Pleasure and Residence—A Book for Travellers and Settlers.

Commissioned by the Union Pacific Railroad and published in 1872, Nordhoff’s book was an early articulation of the California Dream and a naked sales pitch to entice people to the sparsely populated land. There, and there only, on this planet, he wrote of Southern California, the traveller and resident may enjoy the delights of the tropics, without their penalties; a mild climate, not enervating, but healthful and health restoring; a wonderfully and variously productive soil, without tropical malaria; the grandest scenery, with perfect security and comfort in travelling arrangements; strange customs, but neither lawlessness nor semi-barbarism.

Nordhoff and other promotional writers served to domesticate the image of Southern California, according to Kevin Starr, the leading historian of the state. They sought to convince would-be settlers that the land was inhabitable., and further, that it afforded an unimagined ease—allowing a farmer from the East, for example, to reinvent himself as a middle-class horticulturalist.

As the California Dream was refined and expanded over the next half century, the public came to imagine the state as a 365-day-a-year vacation and spa—with bathing and boating on the coast, and golf, hiking, and polo inland. California represented the seamless integration of work and play, the promise that life need not be so crushing. Surfing was invented in Southern California, and so was the new popular trend of suntanning. (A new phenomenon, the deliberate suntan, became a badge of beauty and health, Starr wrote.)

An early settler in Southern California, Horace Bell, noted in his diaries that he found a land of mixed essences—Mexicans, Indians, and Spaniards who were various shades of brown, red, and white. What today we would call multicultural. But a lesser-known element of the dream was the selling of the new land as a racially pure haven: Southern California as an Anglo wonderland, the city of Los Angeles as a refuge for a class of über-whites, a fresh start for those smart enough and motivated enough to flee the immigrant-infested cities of the East.

New York receives a constant supply of the rudest, least civilized European populations, Nordhoff wrote, that of the immigrants landed at Castle Garden, the neediest, the least thrifty and energetic, and the most vicious remain in New York, while the ablest and most valuable fly rapidly westward.

Nordhoff and other like-minded writers helped establish an intellectual foundation for hatred and bias, and this peculiar strain of racism was not confined to journalists for hire. Much of the new city’s elite, including its academic elite, believed in and propagated these theories.

Joseph Pomeroy Widney, a former dean of the medical school at the University of Southern California, published Race Life of the Aryan Peoples in 1907, in which he argued that the people of Southern California, enhanced by their exposure to the sun and toughened by their conquering and taming of the frontier, constituted a new superrace. He called this blessed tribe the Engle people, a variation of Anglo. He urged the city’s business leaders to be the first captains in the race war.

Robert Millikan, a former president of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1923, was another proponent of the philosophy (such as it was) that Southern California stood as a bulwark of racial purity. He argued that Southern California was as England [was] two hundred years ago, the Westernmost outpost of Nordic civilization.

The Los Angeles historian Mike Davis has written that the city in the early part of the twentieth century distinguished itself as a national, even world center of Aryan revival in contrast to the immigrant dominated industrial cities of the East.

The hypocrisy and ludicrousness of this, in a region filled with brown-skinned people—and with major streets named for Francisco Sepulveda, Andres Pico, and other rancheros—was somehow overlooked. Millikan even urged that Los Angeles rebuff Italians and other ethnic Europeans who might want to resettle from the cities back East, as the city had the exceptional opportunity to be twice as Anglo-Saxon as any other great U.S. city.

The architecture and emerging lifestyle of Los Angeles, meanwhile, were nothing if not Mediterranean. As Davis, the historian, wrote: Southern California, in other words, was [to be] a Mediterranean land without any pesty Mediterranean immigrants to cause discontent.

*  *  *

It is doubtful that anyone of any class or color, who emigrated in any decade, would say that Charles Nordhoff’s California-—the tropical land that was restorative and never enervating, that had strange customs but no lawlessness—is what they discovered upon arrival. But this vision of paradise was especially far from the Southern California of the Boys of Crenshaw.

Blacks began arriving in the L.A. area early in the twentieth century, in trickles at first. They came for the same reasons as other migrants: a fresh start, a conviction that they would find something better than what they left behind.

Some were lured by the chamber of commerce—packaged dream, the booster copy produced by Nordhoff and his heirs. (Although not, of course, by the tracts recommending California as an Aryan refuge.) Many others were attracted by entreaties from relatives who had already moved there, newcomers to California who sold the state with the zeal of religious converts.

In 1920, Mallie McGriff Robinson, the daughter of freed slaves, was living as a tenant on a plantation in rural Georgia with her five children. Her philandering husband had moved out. A woman of energy, ambition, and, by the norms of her time, an advanced education—sixth grade—she was not content to raise her children where they had no prospects for bettering their lives.

On May 21, 1920, she loaded her possessions and her family into a buggy and headed for the train station in Cairo, Georgia, near the Florida state line. The youngest of her children, just eighteen months old, was Jack—Jackie Robinson—the future baseball star, soon to become a child of Southern California.

In his 1997 biography of Jackie Robinson, Arnold Rampersad recounts how the Robinsons came to point themselves west. The story is in many ways the classic tale of westward migration: California as the bailout from a hopeless situation, the land of rebirth and renewal.

A way out for Mallie came with a visit to Grady County by Burton Thomas, her half brother, who had emigrated to Southern California, Rampersad wrote. Elegantly garbed and exuding an air of settled prosperity, Burton expounded to one and all on the wonders of the West. ‘If you want to get closer to heaven,’ he liked to brag, ‘visit California.’

That first small wave of blacks who came to Los Angeles did find greater opportunity than they had left behind. With the city still thinly settled, people with skills and energy were desperately needed, and initiative could pay off regardless of your skin color. One black man at the turn of the century worked his way up from ranch hand to real estate speculator and was said to be worth $1 million. Blacks earned far better wages than they could down South. Their neighborhoods were planted, just like those of the white folks, with tall palms, cypress and pepper trees, and all sorts of other flora imported from Europe and South America.

Mallie Robinson settled her family in Pasadena, just north of Los Angeles. On the day she arrived, she wrote to relatives back in Georgia that seeing California for the first time was the most beautiful sight of my whole life.

She got work as a domestic—working hard, nights and days—and was rewarded for it, ultimately owning not only her own home but two others on her street.

Her son Jackie starred in five sports at racially integrated Pasadena High, becoming the greatest athlete ever at a school with a long history of sports excellence. But even as he brought championships and glory to his town, he had to stand outside the fence at the municipal pool while his teammates splashed in water he wasn’t allowed to enter. At many Los Angeles-area public pools, blacks were barred from swimming on all but one day of the year—the day before the pool was drained.

The city of Pasadena had no black cops and no black city employees of any kind, not even a janitor. Several incidents during Jackie Robinson’s youth left him feeling harassed by the Pasadena police. The barely concealed anger that the nation’s baseball fans would see when he reached the big leagues was first seared into him in Southern California, by what Davis has called the psychotic dynamics of racism in the land of sunshine.

The end of World War I in 1918 actually made life worse for L.A.’s black residents. Tens of thousands of returning veterans needed work, and blacks, whose labor had been prized, were the first to be sent off the job. This, combined with an influx of white migrants from the South, made L.A. begin to feel uncomfortably like Alabama. The coastal towns made their beaches whites-only. A private bus company put out a flyer urging that blacks not be allowed to ride so your wife and daughter are not compelled to stand up while Negro men and women sit down.

The population of Los Angeles doubled in the 1920s, from 577,000 to nearly 1.25 million residents. Hughes Aircraft and other aircraft manufacturers set up headquarters in the region, which combined with the proximity of engineers at the California Institute of Technology to make L.A. the nation’s aviation capital. But only in boom times were nonwhites hired for those good factory jobs.

A pattern took hold, which persists to this day, of blacks in Los Angeles getting shunted to the bottom rung as other newly arrived ethnic groups stepped over them. Even the seeming inapproachable shoe-shining field was competed for by Greeks, noted researchers from the Federal Writers Project when they conducted interviews in the L.A. ghetto in the 1930s. Trained English butlers succeeded them as valets and butlers…. In 1922, the employment situation was alleviated somewhat, especially for those who sought domestic employment. A larger percentage of Southern whites coming to live in Los Angeles preferred Negro servants, resulting in an increase in domestic jobs, such as cooks, laundresses and private maids.

In Hollywood, blacks were part of the background, obtainable on short notice and at bargain rates. Their place in the movies paralleled their status in real life: useful when called upon, but otherwise easily ignored. Negroes have been employed in the motion picture industry for a number of years, the Federal Writers Project reported. The major portion of these have been and still are employed as extras to create atmosphere in jungle, South Seas island and South American scenes as natives, warriors, etc. Lon Chaney, the silent film star, used two hundred black extras in the 1926 movie Road to Mandalay, and praised their utility and adaptability: You can pull any one of them out of the mob and they can act. It is only a matter of makeup and costume to create anything from a Chinaman to an Eskimo. They require no interpreters and are always available in large number.

In the early 1930s, Los Angeles County began deporting tens of thousands of Mexican nationals who came to be known as repatriados. The gentry continued to anglicize the area, to try to make L.A. a white man’s land and,