"Sam Bankhead or Dan Bankhead?" Spearman asks.
"Bankhead," Duty says. "He was a great player. He could play third base, too."
That would be Sam Bankhead.
Ted Radcliffe, a Chicago White Sox fan who attended Opening Day, once tried to rekindle people's love for baseball after the shady scandal of 1919.
(Dudley M. Brooks -- The Washington Post)
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"I played a long, long time," Duty interjects, in effect a reminder that he knows his Bankheads -- there were several -- and just about everyone else who played in the Negro leagues.
"Double Duty" came along before the Wright brothers got their plane aloft and before Ford founded his motor company. Before there was a World Series, there was Duty. He was born on July 7, 1902, in Mobile, Ala., growing up there with Paige. The pair played ball together in a town that would produce many outstanding players, including home run king Hank Aaron. "I didn't care about anything else. Baseball was it," Radcliffe says.
He was one of nine children whose father was a house-builder. As a youngster, Duty learned to control his pitches by throwing a ball into a bucket.
Sometimes he got around by himself in a horse and buggy, but the sandlot was easy walking distance. He figures that, including their boyhood days, he caught Paige more than anyone. In later years, "Double Duty" would wrap a slab of meat in a handkerchief and slip it into his catcher's mitt for more padding to handle Satchel's screaming fastballs. Duty suffered a stroke last May that has slowed him and affected his speech, but his words are unmistakably clear on this subject:
"Nobody can be better than Satchel Paige. Satchel Paige is the greatest pitcher who ever lived."
Early in 1919, the year some White Sox players threw the World Series, Duty and his brother Alex rode the rails to Chicago, part of the black migration north. Their parents came later, settling on the South Side near old Comiskey Park. Duty would do his share, and then some, to rekindle people's love for baseball after the Sox scandal. As his biographer, Kyle McNary, observes in "Ted 'Double Duty' Radcliffe: 36 Years of Pitching & Catching in Baseball's Negro leagues," Duty played in exhibition games against Honus Wagner, who broke into the majors in 1897, and decades later against Willie Mays.
He began in Chicago by pitching batting practice for the great black team, the Chicago American Giants.
For most of the 1920s he played on semipro, traveling teams, reaching the Negro leagues in 1928, with the Detroit Stars. Soon he was playing on championship clubs such as the 1930 St. Louis Stars, the 1931 Grays and the 1932 Pittsburgh Crawfords.
"Double Duty" was a crowd-pleaser and a team spark. He was outgoing, often unsettling opposing batters by talking to them from his catcher's crouch, and sometimes when he was pitching he would shout down from the mound to the batter and tell him the kind of pitch that was coming, and still get a swing and a miss.
On one of his catcher's chest protectors was written, "Thou Shalt Not Steal."
He threw out Cool Papa Bell, whose speed prompted Paige's often-repeated quip that Cool Papa could turn off a light switch and be in bed before the room was dark.
