February 28, 2006

Excluding O’Neil upsets neighbors

By J. BRADY McCOLLOUGH
The Kansas City Star

Rameshia Charles makes a point of knowing who her neighbors are. On Monday afternoon, standing on her front steps, she can’t say enough about her 94-year-old neighbor, who lives two houses down on the corner.

First of all, she says, he shows respect to everyone, whether you’re 2, 10 or 50 years old. He’s never met a child he wouldn’t help and has even been known to hand out $1 bills to kids who ask politely enough.

Charles’ neighbor, Sheila Lewis, walks out to her car. Lewis has lived on East 32nd Street her whole life, so she should know more about this John “Buck” O’Neil.

“Hey, Sheila!” Charles calls out across the street. “Do you want to talk about Mr. O’Neil?”

“Did he get in?” Lewis inquires, referring to O’Neil’s possible election Monday to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

“Nope,” Charles responds.

“I can’t believe that,” Lewis says. “You’re playing, right?

“Nope. They didn’t ask us, did they, Sheila?”

“I just want to cry,” Lewis says. “That hurts. Why wasn’t he already in there?”

Lewis plants herself in Charles’ yard and has put off her errand. She knows nothing about baseball, but to her, O’Neil’s exclusion from the Hall makes no sense.

“He should be there just because …” Lewis says. “Just because.”

Lewis has known O’Neil her whole life. She remembers when she was a little girl and she and her friends went to O’Neil’s pale green house on Halloween. He had the best candy on the block, the Hersheys and the Mr. Goodbars.

Decades have passed, and now Lewis lives in her childhood home with her husband and two daughters. O’Neil is still living on the corner. That means something here, where nobody seems to stay anymore.

“I look at it, and this man could live anywhere he wanted to,” says Carl Lewis, 50, Sheila’s husband. “But he chooses to live right here in the inner city on 32nd Street.”

On Monday afternoon, 32nd Street is alive with the things O’Neil values most: youth and vitality. School is just getting out, and it doesn’t take long before boys are practicing their dunks on a portable street hoop.

Another boy elects to sit on Charles’ front steps and studiously does his homework. Charles, who runs a small day-care operation from her home, said as recently as last summer, O’Neil came over to her house with fresh fruit and doughnuts for the kids.

“With young people, they don’t have a lot of respect,” Charles says. “But they do have respect for Mr. O’Neil.”

O’Neil would be proud of a young boy who passed by Charles on the steps and said “excuse me” as if it were second nature.

“There’s a lot of ugly in this world,” Charles says, “and you’d be surprised what an ‘excuse me’ can get you. That’s why Mr. O’Neil brings them things. It makes a difference.”

Most of the kids don’t know they’re in the same room with a legend when O’Neil visits. Charles tells them later that he was a Negro League baseball star.

“It inspires some of them to read more about him,” Charles says.

Through his charity, O’Neil has effectively created his own alarm system. Charles has heard youth from the neighborhood yell if anyone suspicious is on O’Neil’s front lawn.

“The kids keep an eye on Buck’s house,” Charles says. “They’ll say, ‘Don’t go over there! That’s Buck O’Neil’s house!’ ”

Some of Carl Lewis’ favorite Buck moments are from when O’Neil invited the neighborhood kids to his house for story time. They were sucked in by O’Neil’s charm.

“There’s nobody like him,” Lewis says. “He went from the horse and buggy to segregation to integration, the whole ball of wax that makes the country what it is. Yet, the man holds no hostility and shares his life with everybody.”

Lewis grew up in Kansas City in the 1950s and knew of O’Neil, right along with Negro League stars Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. More and more, as he talks on Monday, Lewis becomes that little boy again, the one who went to Municipal Stadium to watch his favorite players.

“I feel like a kid myself every time I get to hear him speak,” Lewis says. “He’s just magic like that.”

Lewis is disappointed for O’Neil, but he — like everyone else on the block — expects O’Neil to go right back to normal after not making the Hall.

And normal for O’Neil is not normal for 94. The Lewises’ oldest daughter saw him driving recently and mentioned it to Sheila.

“Mr. O’Neil was turning those corners like a young man,” she said.

Spring is on the way, which means baseball season is inching closer. It won’t be long before O’Neil will be out picking up the newspaper in his front yard and yelling over to Carl.

“Hey, neighbor!” O’Neil will say. “When are we going to get those kids to the baseball game?”

For the last four years, O’Neil has gotten 25 free tickets to a Royals game for kids in the neighborhood, and Lewis helps coordinate the outing.

“We didn’t ask him to do that,” Lewis says. “He does what he does because he loves Kansas City. He doesn’t care about the Hall of Fame. He just loves baseball.”

To reach J. Brady McCollough, sports reporter for The Star, call (816) 234-4363 or send e-mail to jmccollough@kcstar.com

J. Brady McCollough - jbrady@coveringsports.com (email) - 816-868-2621 (cell)