Portsmouth got to see Buck Leonard twice.

In 1932, during the Great Depression, Walter Fenner Leonard had lost his job putting brake cylinders on boxcars at the railroad shop in his home town of Rocky Mount, N.C. He was 25 with only an eighth-grade education because there were no high schools for African Americans in Rocky Mount when he was young. Shaped by his youth on the sandlot, and urged by manager Doc Daughtry of the Portsmouth Black Revels, he turned to the game as a way to make a living, playing for $15 a week.

In 1953, at age 46, he came back and wore the uniform of the racially integrated Portsmouth Merrimacs of the Piedmont League. He played 10 games, got 11 hits in 33 at-bats for a .333 batting average and, after two years of Mexican baseball, retired. According to the Society for American Baseball Research, he was playing with a brace on his knee – but was still good enough to be voted Most Valuable Player in the Mexican Central League.

But with Buck Leonard, the real story was what he accomplished between his stints here in Portsmouth. Playing for the Pittsburgh-area Homestead Grays of the Negro National League he became known as “the Lou Gehrig of the Negro Leagues,” though, true to his modest and gentlemanly manner, said, “I didn’t think I ever measured up” to the comparison.

Still, the late baseball historian Ralph Berger said, as men of dignity and worthiness of personal respect “Gehrig and Leonard are, in essence, twins.”

In a 1981 Smithsonian News Service article (“The Negro Leagues: Gone, But Not Forgotten”), Leonard described the grueling pace teams endured to keep the underfinanced Black leagues afloat, playing almost every day during the season, and traveling constantly:

One year we played 210 ball games and travelled 30,000 miles by bus and train…Sometimes we played three times in one day. We’d play a doubleheader against a Black team at Yankee Stadium on a Sunday afternoon; then on Sunday night, we’d go out on Long Island and play a semi-pro white team.

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