The Last Rebel Yell

Ken Brooks traces the history of the lowest of the low of the minor leagues in an interesting bit of cultural history which chronicles the Alabama-Florida League. The AFL (936-1962) consisted of cities which in some cases were hardly more than villages in southeast Alabama and northwest Florida. The league spanned the paradigm shifts of World War II and the development of all weather roads, antibiotics, airplane travel, and the disappearance of basefall as a central focus of small town life. The day of these boys of summer on fields of sometimes less than meticulous manicure, of sometimes dingy lights and of single cold shower dressing rooms, was the time of the $.20 cent hamburger, $.20 milk shake, $.20 loaf of bread and the $.20 gallon of gas, and of $250 as a pretty good paying job. It was a pre-TV, pre-air conditioning era when what happened on a summer's eve on a baseball diamond would be the stuff of the next day's conversation in the cafe's and service stations and of the winter's "Hot Stove League". What happened on local league diamonds could be the stuff of memorial comparisons that transcedened decades. It was a time when bicycles were safely left unattended in public places, and cars were routinely parked unlocked with windows down. It was a time when local teams, the leagues in which they played, and the comparitive statistics which accrued were matters of civic and communal consciousness. The viability of the low minors on the terms in which it then existed was a phenoemnon on its way out through displacement by paradigmatic cultural shifts even it reached its peak. There was no reason not to think at the time local baseball interest would not recover from temporary aberrant challenges and carry forth its continuity. The AFL initiated play with teams in places like Troy, Ozark, Enterprise, Dothan, Adalusia, and Union Springs, Al. and Panama City, Fl. From our present perspective, Brooks observes, it is easy to underestimate the importance of a Class D team to towns in the pre-TVA era. Brooks begins his historical portrait with Paul Hemphill's gripping and poignant experiential account of his one game with the Graceville, Fla. Oiliers (1954) Graceville, a village of circa 1,000 population, was the most tiny of all towns in professional baseball in the lowest of the lowest of classifications, but Hemphill's tears had salt which burns through the years with a sting with which those who have in some context similarly felt the devastating nature of undesirable finality can easily emphasize. Brooks follows with a focus on Panama City as a Class D case history. The author includes interviews with more than a dozen persons who lived portions of the league's history. He presents the the statistics, the stadia, the death of a batting star from a beaning which almost destroyed the league, the administrative controversies, the playoffs and the great moments and the peccantries. Class D baseball, even in the lowest league in the lowest of classifications, was important it its own right. It was an integral expression of communal affiliation and association. The players were men who, as Bill James has expressed it, who played baseball. They were playing baseball there and then, and what they did there and then had its own meaning. Team compositions were likely to be composed of minor leaguers on their way down (sometimes as player managers), minor league journeyman whose experienes might span decades and experience in the more exotic places of the high minors, augmented by local coaches, law enforcement personnel, service station operators and novice players from who knows where. While the major leaguers of the era might be reknowed and admired nationally, and the magical creatures who cavorted under the arc lights on the tapesty of green and brown of the picture postcard diamonds of green cathederals like Rickwood Field in Birmingham or Ponce De Leon Park in Atlanta of the prestiguous Southern Association of major deep South metro areas might be reknowned regionally, the Class D ballplayers were equally were the glory of their times locally. In Brook's cultural history we meet men integral to the AFL -- the characters like Bo Belinsky, Bobby Bragan, Lou Pinella; the greats like Virgil "Fire" Trucks, Neal Cobb, Spencer "Onion" Davis; the journemen like Bobby Dews, Wayne Terwilliger, Cal Ripkin, Sr.; the sometimes notables like Bobby Cox, Steve Barber, Steve Dalkowski, Travis Tidwell, or Dixie Howell of the famous Ala. Crimson Tide combination of Howell to Don Hudson. If the last 1940s was the heyday of minor league baseball, it becomes clear by hindsight that even then incipient signs of an irreversible mortality were making themselves apparent. Even in the best of times franchise survivability was an ever present challenge. With the demise of the Class B Southestern League in the early 1950's, larger population centers like Montgomery, Selma and Pensacola replaced the more bucolic AFL entries. Even so, Graceville, Fla. lasted through 1958. By the league's last season (1962), the AFL had outlasted the historic and prestigous "major league of Dixie" (the Southern Association). Of the AFL league entries that last year, Pensacola, Ft. Walton, Selma, Dothan, Montgomery and Adalusia, only the latter had been an original league entrant, and that affiliation had not been consistent. Baseball is a something of seamless web. Persons and events connect with persons and events with an interconectivity of intriguing synchronicity and fortuity that reverberates with indivildual and colelctive memory. There is a sense in which the AFL lives on with memorial viability simultaneously with such displacement as an integral aspect of communal awareness and epxerience that knowledge of the location of the fields on which the leagues teams played has in some instances been lost to memory. Brook's THE LAST REBEL YELL is a graceful portrait of a vanished America. Reading the book is sort of like a diversionary drive on a two lane highway with its horse-shoe motels and neon lighted pre-fast food franchise drive-ins from an era when the highways went through all the towns, wherein in passing through one could see, sense and feel what the countryside was like, and in retrospect can remember how place existed once on such a lost and humane scale.

If you have an interest in minor league history, this book is a must-have. It's well-written with plenty of interesting photos that capture the small-town minor league experience of a by-gone era. In some e-books, if they even have images, the quality of the photos is poor, but the photographs in The Last Rebel Yell are excellent.As minor league history buff, this book piqued my interest, but to be honest, I expected a dry, year-by-year recitation of league history. I was pleasantly surprised and delighted to discover the light touch with which the author treats his subject. The prose is breezy, witty, and entertaining while at the same time insightful and informative.The chapter dealing with the integration of baseball in Alabama and Florida during the late-1940s, 1950s, and early-1960s is alone worth the price of the book.Be sure to read the whole book, including the epilogue and end notes. There are hidden gems here in the form of the author's personal reminiscences relating to his research and interviews.In short, The Last Rebel Yell is a 5-star effort and a worthy addition to my growing e-library of books on baseball history.

This book captures the essence of what baseball used to be while at the same time pointing out that even the purest of sports can be tinted, in this case by racism which ultimately brought the league down. This book is well written and captures the spirit of the times 1936-1962. I would recommend this book to anyone .