What an amazing time in Colorado promoting The Widowed Ones: Beyond the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The lecture series ended last night at the Tesoro Cultural Center. The setting was spectacular and the sold-out crowd made the event memorable. The highlight of the trip was receiving the Willa Cather Award for Scholarly Nonfiction work from Women Writing the West for The Widowed Ones. Thank you Women Writing the West. I’m extremely grateful for the honor.
On July 18, 1911, under a blue and cloudless sky, the murderers, burglars, rapists, and confidence men that made up the Death Row All Stars emerged quickly from the baselines of the baseball diamond at the penitentiary and spread across the practice field for their first game. Warden Alston and a host of other prison officials, as well as inmates were on hand to watch. Inmates craned their necks to see the action from their barred windows and cheered the players on as they whipped the ball from base to base. Warden Alston had supplied the team with gloves, bats, and uniforms, and the ball club looked like a professional team.
It was evident after practicing with the other men on the team only a short while that Joseph Seng was an exceptional baseball player. News of the talented addition to Alston’s All Stars spread quickly throughout the area. Patrons who frequented the Turf Exchange, the Senate, the Elkhorn, and other watering holes in Rawlins, Wyoming, speculated on how well the team would do against more established ball clubs in the region. Inmate and captain of the Death Row All Stars’ George Saban encouraged such talk whenever he made stops at the saloons as part of his duties transporting items to and from the prison accompanied by prison guard D. O. Johnson in the penitentiary wagon. Security was always lax where Saban was concerned. He came and went from tavern to tavern as he pleased and boasted about the baseball team he helped manage.
Betting on baseball was commonplace in 1911, regardless of its legality. Partnering with a drifter named George Streplis, a man who had been arrested in March 1911 in Wyoming and held over for trial on gambling charges, Saban had plans to capitalize on the trend of betting on baseball games by urging patrons at saloons in Rawlins to bet heavily on the Death Row All Stars. Any ideas Saban had about placing bets on the penitentiary ball club were tabled, however, until he knew how long Seng would be at the Rawlins facility. He didn’t want to gamble on the team if Seng wasn’t going to be at the prison long enough to play with the All Stars. An appeal of his sentence had been filed with the governor immediately; on June 15, 1911, Governor Carey responded favorably to the appeal, and, on July 18, 1911, the Chief Justice Board of the state Supreme Court granted a stay of execution in his case.
The stories of the men who took to the field were varied. Shortstop Joseph Guzzardo had killed a woman in 1908 while shooting at a man who was threatening his life. Eugene Rowan, the first baseman, had been convicted of breaking and entering and attempted rape in Cheyenne. Right fielder and catcher James Powell had attacked a young woman. George Saban had pled guilty to three killings. And catcher and fielder Joseph Seng had been sentenced to death for the murder of a man in Uinta County.
Every time a player came to bat and slapped a ripping fastball on the nose for a solid hit to left field or someone snatched up a red-hot grounder and heaved it to the proper base to get an out, the All Stars forgot they were little more than caged creatures. The focus was the game. It was their path to righteousness.
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A few years back I did a documentary for the BBC with actor and knight Sir Tony Robinson and in the photos taken after the shoot of the two of us I look like Ruth Buzzi if she were stung by a thousand bees. Seriously, I look like Andre the Giant’s sister in ALL of the pictures.
I’ve always been big. My father used to try and console be about my height and general size by assuring me that I wasn’t fat just big boned. The last I looked there were no bones in the area in which I’m most concerned. But the effort, Pop, was most appreciated.
Now physical exercise is not the answer. Years ago, I remember watching a beefy President Bill Clinton exercising. He was living proof that physical exercise could be a complete waste of time. The more he jogged, the bigger he got. I recall thinking, if this guy is reelected, the leader of the free world will be Bib the Michelin Man.
I do notice I’m suffering from a chin crisis as I get older. If I don’t keep my head above sea level when pictures are taken, I resemble the dinosaur that got into the jeep with the lost traveler in the first Jurassic Park movie.
When I think about it, the only exercise program that has ever worked for me is occasionally getting up in the morning and jogging my memory to remind myself exactly how much I hate to exercise. Well-meaning friends have suggested I start walking. Walking? If it’s so good for you, how come my mailman looks like Jabba the Hut with a quirky thyroid?
I’ve thought about joining a gym, but honestly, I think they’re too complicated. You know, there’s nothing quite as humiliating as finishing a thirty-minute workout on a piece of gym equipment only to have the instructor tell you you’ve been sitting on it backward.
Growing up I wished I looked like David Cassidy’s sister Laurie from the Partridge Family. She was cute and a model in addition to being an actress. Models and movie stars are the aesthetic benchmarks against which we measure ourselves, regardless of how unattainable their beauty may be without access to personal trainers, extensive cosmetic surgery, and pharmaceuticals. Ask any little girl what she wants to be when she grows up. Chances are she won’t say president or astronaut or doctor. Chances are she’ll say “Supermodel.” I know I did. I also wanted to be a standup comic and marry Christopher Knight from the Brady Bunch. It’s safe to say I had different goals than Madame Curie or Joan Didion.
What does it say about our culture when Einstein’s original draft of the theory of relativity fetches less at auction than what a flat-line electroencephalograph Giacometti statue gets to stroll down a runway? And for crying out loud, isn’t it about time we passed an absolute edict forbidding these women from uttering the words “Modeling is hard work.”
I choose not to go gently into that saggy night! But what’s a giant to do?
What the heck has happened to our formerly pastoral pastimes? Sports in this country. Owners are rapacious and disloyal, players are spoiled, ill-mannered lowlifes, coaches are abusive psychopaths, hotdogs are $9.50…
It seems the level of sportsmanship in America is dropping faster than the balance in Prince Harry’s kid’s trust fund. If I see one more athlete make a routine play and do a wild banshee itchy dance I’m going to hurl myself into a trash compactor. And today’s fans aren’t much better either. Their rudeness makes it impossible to go to the stadium and enjoy the game. For example, why is it at every football game, even in Buffalo, where it’s twenty below in the sun, there’s always that guy in the stands with no shirt on?
And you know, the guy that takes his shirt off at the football game is always the guy that really really shouldn’t. Not only should this guy be wearing a shirt, he should be wearing a bra. He is why shirts were invented in the first place. He’s a huge man with large breasts, folks, and he’s standing on his chair with a giant beer in one hand a pile of nachos in the other, no plate, just nachos in his hand, and he’s screaming out the names of the players on the field. And the announcers say, “There’s a real Bill’s fan, he’s painted his body Buffalo Blue.” Hey, that’s not paint, the guy’s dying of exposure.
The inmates who played for the Death Row All Stars were good sports on the field. They patted each other on the back when they made a good play and they occasionally cheered for their teammates. They spurred one another on in a dignified manner because their very lives depended on a win. Wins meant stays of execution. They had to be magnanimous winners because there was no way for them to be gracious losers. I’d like to see some magnanimous winners and gracious losers in sports today. I’ve seen too many shirtless guys in the stands whose cup-size are larger than mine.
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The Death Row All Stars at Play
The Death Row All Stars had serious incentive to play baseball at Wyoming’s Crossbar Hotel. If they won they were given stays of execution. I would like to have seen them play. I like baseball, especially the Kansas City Royals, but it’s not as exciting as football. Just saying.
Truth be told, baseball is slower than Joe Biden trying to master trigonometry. Many people think baseball is a metaphor for life. What I want to know is whose life are they talking about? Last time I checked, life didn’t seem to last for an eternity. Life is short; baseball goes on forever.
Let’s face it, not much happens in baseball. Abner Doubleday gets credited with inventing the game, but Harold Pinter was the one who did punch up. The only thing worse than a bad baseball game is realizing that you have to stay until everybody leaves because you can’t remember where you parked.
Now football, that’s fast paced and probably why it’s replaced baseball as the number one pastime. I have one suggestion for baseball if they want to get back into the hunt. There’s a lot of unused space in the alley between right and center field. Why not have a football game going on out there to keep the fans occupied during some of the longer lulls in the baseball game.
There were very few lulls in a game in which the Death Row All Stars played. Even in practices, the Death Row All Stars played with gusto and even temperament. They worked together as one cohesive unit and made the sport look like the easiest game in the world. They seemed to cherish the smell of the leather glove, the snap of the ball smacking their palms, the sensation of letting loose a throw and kicking up a cloud of dust.
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No thrill equals that which comes when a home player sends the ball ringing off his bat safely to the outfield. As the number of bases gained by such a hit increases, so does the excitement mount. When one of those drives wins a game, its maker is a hero.
The American West of the early 1900s was the scene of great change. The trans-continental railroad cut a swath through the country, pulling the population away from the East, bringing progress to and signs of the coming industrial age. Boomtowns were turning into cities; the ways of the west were disappearing and giving way to the inevitable intrusion of change. But as life became more sophisticated and industrial, a simple and pure game captured the attention of a nation.
It would become a national pastime, but in Wyoming in 1910 baseball was an obsession. Every town, every camp had leagues or teams of their own. Every team had stars that could easily play alongside Honus Wagner or Ty Cobb. But there were no baseball stars as unique as the Wyoming State Penitentiary Death Row All Stars of Rawlins, Wyoming. And the star of the All Stars, Joseph Seng.
From the moment he arrived at the penitentiary, Seng was known more for his baseball prowess than his murder conviction. Within moments of his incarceration, prison officials got around to the task of creating a team and building a place to play.
The concept of prison reform and prisoner welfare was nonexistent in 1910. Time on the field was a precious escape from day-to-day life that could be both extremely hellish and (for some) lavishly privileged. Corruption and graft ran rampant. Prisoners were forced to work for little or no wages in the prison broom factory, denied basic necessities, fed rancid food, and forced to work road crews. Others were allowed to openly wander the streets of Rawlins, hunt rabbits outside the prison walls, and reap the monetary windfall of betting on the All Stars.
For the players, baseball was their life, their saving grace. Inside their cell, they were rapists, robbers, burglars, and thieves. But on the playing field, they were fast, hard, and possessed an inside fast ball no one could hit. Primarily off the strength of Seng’s arm (and his bat), the Death Row All Stars quickly became the talk of barrooms, brothels, and even political circles. Fortunes were being made by wagering in exchange for promises of time taken off their sentences and, for Seng, the possibility of a death penalty commutation.
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A fascinating and captivating story in which the game of baseball is a matter of life and death for the players.”
George Brett, Hall of Fame baseball player for the Kansas City Royals
Bestselling authors controversial baseball book will carry readers to the World Series. Based on the true story of the death row inmates in Wyoming in 1911 who played baseball in exchange for stays of execution, The Death Row All Stars is the tale of accused murderer Joseph Seng and the team of sluggers who took on all comers with considerably more at stake than just winning a game.
“Here’s a wild tale from the Old West, only instead of gunslingers it gives us convicted murderers, burglars, and rapists transformed into gentlemen playing the national pastime. This book puts a while new twist on the genre of a season in the life of a given team, one that seduces you into rooting for the Death Row All Stars.”
John Rosengren, author of The Fight of Their Lives and Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes
“Chris Enss and Howard Kazanjian do an excellent job of portraying some of the early frontier days in Wyoming, including their favorite sport-baseball.”
“It is ironic that the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins opened for business in 1901, the same year as the American League, but that is where comparisons end between these ‘outlaw leagues. The prison ballplayers knew real pressure, facing death if their defeat cost their jailers money in lucrative bets on the prisoners. Authors Chris Enss and Howard Kazanjian do a wonderful job of recreating the era and the prison system that put these Death Row All Stars on the playing field as black hats facing local nines throughout the Wild West.”
Matthew Silverman, author of Swinging 73: Baseball’s Wildest Season and Baseball Miscellany: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Baseball.
Published by TwoDot Books, The Death Row All Stars: A Story of Murder, Corruption, and Baseball by Howard Kazanjian and Chris Enss has been showcased in the New York Post and the Christian Science Monitor.
The Pinks: The First Women Detectives, Operatives, and Spies with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency is recommended for history, women’s issues, and sociology holdings with a special interest in law enforcement as it surveys the Pinkerton Detective Agency and the true stories surrounding the first woman detective in America and those who came after her. Chapters capture feats of courage, daring, and historical import as they follow female agents who pursue justice and whose exploits added to American history and early struggles for justice. No women’s history collection should be without this lively, important survey.
There’s nothing like Deadwood in the fall. I had a wonderful time at the South Dakota Book Festival and at the Brothel Deadwood Museum. Readers lined up to buy An Open Secret: The Story of Deadwood’s Most Notorious Bordellos. The incredible staff at Deadwood History Inc. and I will be working on a series of books about the infamous Bad Lands brothels focusing on each decade from the 1870s to 1980.
