The Nashua Dodgers A Real New England Baseball Story

A book by Steve Daly called Dem Little Bums: The Nashua Dodgers tells the tale of how one baseball team played a vital role in the integration of the game and helped change the face of our national pastime.

(PRWEB) April 19, 2004 --As New England baseball fans brace for another summer full of wonder and inevitable disappointment, the story of an unlikely New England team comes to mind. Some 66 years ago, Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe helped to break baseballs race barrier playing for the Nashua Dodgers of the Class B New England League. Now, a book by Steve Daly called Dem Little Bums: The Nashua Dodgers tells the tale of how one baseball team played a vital role in the integration of the game and helped change the face of our national pastime.

When Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe were growing up, their hopes of playing major league baseball were nothing but a dream. Stonewalled by a "gentlemen's agreement" which prohibited African-Americans from playing in affiliated baseball, ballplayers like Campanella and Newcombe, Jackie Robinson and Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and Larry Doby, could only wonder what life in baseball's greatest ballparks was like.

Dalys book tells how in the mid-1940s, Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey was determined to break baseball's color barrier and put an end to racial segregation in the sport. In October 1945, Rickey signed Robinson to a contract to play with Brooklyn's top minor-league affiliate in Montreal. Months later, Campanella and then Newcombe agreed to join the Dodgers organization.

While Robinson tore up the International League in 1946, Campanella and Newcombe did the same for the Nashua Dodgers of the Class B New England League, becoming the first two African-Americans to play for an affiliated baseball team based in the United States in the modern era. Playing for future Hall of Fame manager Walter Alston, Campanella would win the league's MVP award in 1946; Newcombe would return to Nashua for the 1947 season and be a 19-game winner.

Just four years after helping to make history, the Nashua Dodgers were finished, a victim of baseball contraction and a foundering economy. And as television became a fixture in more and more homes across America, teams like the Nashua Dodgers were left to wage a losing battle for the entertainment dollar.

But in between, local fans were able to enjoy some of the best professional baseball the city had ever seen. Dem Little Bums: The Nashua Dodgers offers readers the opportunity to trace the early careers of Campanella, Newcombe and Alston, as well as future major league executive Buzzie Bavasi. Dem Little bums also profiles the lives of many players who didn't make it to The Show, but whose names still stir memories of the good old days.

"Roy and I talked about Nashua all the time," Newcombe recalled more than 50 years later. "We always felt comfortable there. From the start, we were treated like human beings, not two black men in town to play baseball. We felt right at home."

They weren't the only ones.

Dem Little Bums: The Nashua Dodgers, by Steve Daly is available at bookstores, and at www.nhbooksellers.com.

###

For artwork, interviews with the author, further information, contact:
George Geers, publisher
(603) 226-1020
(603) 785-4811
gnews@empire.net

To interview the author, contact:
Steve Daly:
Cell - 978.204.4723
Home - 978.453.8720
E-mail - dalys@telegraph-nh.com; Snipedog64@aol.com; Snipedog64@comcast.net