Fleet

The name Arthur T. Packard was called out over the diploma line at the University of Michigan in 1882. As the young man came up to accept it, he didn’t realize he was halfway between friendships with two others who would be remembered in American history.  One was Theodore Roosevelt; and the other, Moses Fleetwood Walker, the first black man to play major league baseball.

Packard put his college education to use by starting a newspaper in a small western town.  As proprietor of The Bad Lands Cow Boy in Medora, North Dakota, he had a couple of ranchers who made good copy.  The Marquis de Mores said he had claims to the throne of France, while Theodore Roosevelt gave such a stirring Independence Day speech Packard asked him if he didn’t aspire to be president of the United States.  De Mores and Roosevelt, each twenty-five years old, went their separate ways after a few years; and when his print shop burned down, Packard returned to the Midwest as a sports editor.  In the early 1900s he would write a memoir about the president’s cowboy days for Life Magazine.

Visiting Medora, today a tourist attraction, I learned that Packard had pitched for Michigan’s baseball team in 1882.  On the other side of home plate, catching without a glove, was Walker.  According to David W. Zang’s book Fleet Walker’s Divided Heart (University of Nebraska Press, 1995), Moses Fleetwood had already started playing professionally the summer before.

This was a fascinating sidetrack of my first Lilly grant.  I found out that Michigan wasn’t the first team Packard and Walker played for.  At the beginnings of intercollegiate play, they were among the “Baseball Nine” of Oberlin College in Ohio.  The Oberlin-Michigan game in the spring of 1881 included a Walker wallop over the roof of a nearby building, and Michigan recruited the both of them.  Questions in Ann Arbor about admitting Fleet to the school seem to have been smoothed over by a letter of recommendation from Packard, whose father was a Civil War general and congressman.

The Toledo Blue Stockings of 1884: Fleet, seated left; Weldy, back row.

Fleet studied law at the university, but when baseball season rolled around, he was ready, batting .308 and helping the team to a 10-3 record.  That summer he joined the Toledo Blue Stockings of the Northwestern League.  (In 1881, he had been paid to catch a few games for the White Sewing Machine Company team in Cleveland).  His younger brother Weldy also played for Michigan and Toledo.  Fleet never graduated from college like Arthur Packard, but he did make as much as $2,000 a season from his sport.  Some of the cities in his league included Peoria, Quincy, and Springfield, Illinois; Bay City and Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Fort Wayne, Indiana.

In April 1885 he was in a game in Kentucky, and promptly arrested as a representative of the team for breaking a Sunday no-play rule. Released on bail, he sat in the courtroom ten days later and listened to the hearing.  The judge noted that the report was the game had been a good one.  “Yes, it was,” the county prosecutor replied.  “I was there!”  The case was decided in the team’s favor.

Fleet played for six years, ending his career with a team in Toronto called the Syracuse Stars.  Manager Cap Anson of the Chicago White Stockings obnoxiously forbid his players on several occasions to share the field with a black man.  By all accounts Fleet was a class act, a gentlemen, a charmer who would show kids how to hold their hands while catching to prevent broken fingers and thumbs.

After baseball, his trajectory went up: owning a theater, writing a well-regarded book called Our Home Colony, and getting a patent on an artillery shell.  Then it took a downward turn: accusations of mail fraud and the murder of another man by stabbing which resulted in one jail sentence and one acquittal.  He was married twice, but his children had none of their own, so there are no direct descendants today.  A grand-nephew and grand-niece attended a memorial service when a headstone was placed over his grave in Steubenville, Ohio, in 1990.  It was his induction into the John Heisman Club’s Hall of Fame at Oberlin College.

If Arthur Packard had only written a memoir about his college chum for Life, too.