Cobb (7 page)

TYRUS RAYMOND
Cobb was part of the South's postwar crop of youngsters who were replacing the approximately 258,000 Confederate soldiers killed in the war. By the last part of the century, Georgia's population had slowly made a comeback to 1.7 million. A newly designed state flag had been adopted. Blacks were unable to vote or be elected to office, and without many exceptions were unable to hold better than straw-boss positions in agriculture.

Automatically, Tyrus didn't play with black children, although by order of his father he worked alongside them in seeding and crop harvesting. Professor Cobb, the respected school supervisor of Franklin County and part-time land investor, had acquired leases on one-hundred-odd acres of tillable soil. He needed all the help his family could provide. Connected with farming was the need felt by W. H. Cobb to knock a rising arrogance out of his son. It did not become a Cobb to strut, break rules, and boast. One way to bring Tyrus into line was to sweat him behind a plow or hay reaper. There was plenty of that work doled out.

The first signs of Ty's uncontrollable temper appeared during his school days; it was a condition that would dangerously worsen. In North Carolina, Squire Cobb handed out none of the rebukes and penalties regularly issued by Ty's father. The old gent was forgiving of all sins except “hard cussing.” He only shook his head when he heard that ten-year-old Tyrus was suspended from Royston District School for a few days after hitting and kicking a classmate friend for missing a word in a spelling contest between boy and girl teams. When the girls' team won, Tyrus was so burned that he beat up the teammate. His punishment for that was mucking out cowsheds. Many years later he said of the school incident, “I never could stand losing. Second place didn't interest me. I had a fire in my belly.”

When he paid boyhood visits to the North Carolina farm of the Squire, a series of letters reached Tyrus. In many of them a worried Professor Cobb sharply warned his offspring to “stop your unsuitable acts,” to overcome his fierce temper, and “defeat the demon who lurks in all human nature.” Tyrus took it hard. “Father doesn't like me,” he grieved.

“No,” counseled the Squire, “Your pa wants you to go on to a university, to be liked, and be a success.” In this matter the eldest Cobb could point to his own six children, most of whom he had sent to a church college. He suggested that Ty might return to his parent's good graces by writing something original on man's relation to the natural world, and sending it to the weekly Royston newspaper, owned and edited by Professor Cobb. It might be printed.

Tyrus titled his article “Possums and Myself.” After praising possums for their finer points, he continued to tell how past midnight Old Bob had been “bellering in the woods,” how he'd dragged himself from
sleep, how they'd treed “Brother Possum,” and how he'd shot, killed, gutted, and skinned him “who felt no pain and made a fine cap for wearing.”

Ladies of the Royston sewing circles may have found the story too stark, but editor Cobb was pleased and showed it in a following letter: “You are making good progress in aligning yourself with the grand outdoors, yet always remember to remain in control of yourself, to be dutiful, to be proud but courteously proud.” He enclosed a clipping of Tyrus's article, with the author's byline above it.

In the 1910s and 1920s, when Cobb was cutting down infielders with sharpened steel spikes and throwing punches and vitriol at those who crossed him, the Georgia Peach would show business associates some of the “be good, be decent” letters of W. H. Cobb that he had retained. The associates would either wince or go somewhere to laugh.

Long on animal spirits, the young Cobb generally was humorless, with growing antisocial tendencies. “Get off your high horse,” he was often told. Bud Bryant, a boyhood chum, once was asked by a press correspondent to sum up Cobb at ages ten to fifteen. Bryant said, “Oh, we had some fights, toe-to-toe stuff. He'd win one, next time I'd get the best of it. You couldn't make the little bastard stay down. Born to win. Touchy and stubborn about the smallest things. There were times he'd disappear or climb a tree and stay there for hours because his mother made him wash some kitchen pots or sing in church. Could never laugh it off when the joke was on him. Ty was damned serious. Concentrated on whatever he did. He had a stammer he couldn't overcome.”

I also consulted Bryant. “My God, how he loved himself—and his father,” added Bryant. “But there was a way about him that made us think he'd go far. Would become a big man at something. He had these piercing pale eyes, for one thing.”

Bryant and others were asked about Cobb's mother. By their recollection, Ty seldom mentioned Amanda, the ex–“baby” bride. She was overshadowed by her erudite, ambitious, classics-quoting husband. Amanda was small and pretty, with Ty's pinkish skin and fair hair, said witnesses. She was a homebody who didn't go to dances and such things very often.

Schoolmates dared to call Tyrus “Squeaky,” for his high-pitched voice. Not for long, however. “Squeaky” almost assured another fist-fight.
Ty drew pleasure from putting down any challenge. A Royston sporting figure of the day, Bob McCreary, remembered him: “He could throw a rock out of sight at twelve or so and outwrestle any of us at catch-as-catch-can not long later. He was always thinking of new things to try. Once, down at the pond, Ty said he could hold his breath underwater longer than any of us. We lasted maybe a minute, while he was still down there. Someone, probably Ty, invented the crazy trick of laying on a railroad track and being last to roll off before the locomotive got there. He didn't lose that one often.”

Would-be athlete Tyrus, at a skinny thirteen, sent away to Atlanta for a book,
How to Sprint
, by champion American dashman Dan Kelly. On a regular basis, for he was disciplined even if lacking in obedience, he practiced snap starts and running with his knees pumping high. He won at least one recorded event—a fifty-yard race at a Franklin County fair—and wore the blue ribbon on his shirt for months.

Next to contesting, he was most interested in his lengthy roster of prominent ancestors. Previous Cobbs had been fighters of the Cherokee, pro- and antislavery exponents, academicians, statesmen, and generals. The tribe dated back to Joseph Cobb, an emigré from England in 1611 who eventually becaoe a tobacco tycoon, owning Cobbham, a Virginia estate. There also had been Thomas Willis Cobb, a Revolutionary War colonel who was said to have counseled George Washington and reportedly reached 111 years of age. Another, Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb—Ty's favorite on the family tree—had been
facile princeps
at the University of Georgia, codifier of Georgia law, organizer of the state's first law school, and a brigadier general killed by a shell-burst at Fredericksburg. Long afterward, Ty informed interviewers that this same Thomas R. R. Cobb wrote a large part of the Confederate Constitution. “Which would have worked,” he insisted, “if we'd had more troops and cannon. At this Cobb's burial, General Robert E. Lee said, ‘Know ye not that a prince and great man is fallen this day?'”

From studying the Cobb genealogy, Ty was equally familiar with Thomas Cobb, an 1824 U.S. senator from Georgia, after whom Cobb County was named. And he was much aware of Howell Cobb, Georgia's governor in 1851 as well as a general who gamely held out with three thousand ragged militiamen until overwhelmed by the Federals at Macon in 1865. One historical note on General Cobb quoted President Andrew Johnson as saying at war's end that he most wanted to
capture and hang by the neck until dead three particular Secessionist leaders, one of them Howell Cobb.

The Professor's well-stocked library was open to Ty; he boned up on so many battles and their strategy as to cause concern by W. H. and Amanda Cobb that his eyesight might be harmed. In his early teens he came to interpret the war and his forebears' roles in it in terms of defiance by an oppressed, underdog society. He
knew
that northern historians gave a false picture. “We won at Norfolk, Chicamauga, Antietam, Yorktown, both times at Bull Run, and a hell of a lot of other places, didn't we?” he reminded schoolboy friends.

A concerned, impatient W. H. Cobb felt that his offspring was smart enough to qualify one day for a career in the law, as a physician, or perhaps in engineering. Yet Tyrus showed no sign of real interest in any of these professions. To encourage the fourteen-year-old, W. H. asked an attorney friend, Colonel W. R. Little, to advise the youngster. Little, who resembled Buffalo Bill with his bulky body and long, shaggy hair, invited Tyrus to visit his office. To be sure that Ty didn't duck out, his father went along. Little mentioned Blackstone. “Sir William Blackstone,” he said, “was an English judge who did much to create our common law. You can start with his dictionary, learn some terms lawyers use.”

“How long will that take?” asked Tyrus.

“All the spare time you can find,” said the Colonel.

For days a conscripted Tyrus struggled with Blackstone, finding him as boring as watching a hen peck corn. To W. H.'s considerable disappointment he gave it up and never returned.

Medicine was a possibility—either that or an appointment to West Point. Professor Cobb, thirty-seven years old, had been elected Royston's mayor and by 1900 was the proprietor of the Royston
Record.
His eye was trained on election to the Georgia senate, a goal he would soon reach. He was seen by politicians beyond his town and county as smart and well known—maybe even a future governor. Through his contribution to establishing a public, tax-financed educational system in northern Georgia, W. H. was acquainted with influential people in Virginia, the Carolinas, and beyond. He might well be able to secure an appointment to West Point for his footloose offspring.

Tyrus foresaw that regimentation would be his fate at a military academy, and he was too free-swinging for that. Doctoring, he guessed,
might work for him. An area physician, Dr. Sam Moss, encouraged the idea. Moss had first noticed Tyrus when the Doc's services had been needed at Grandfather Squire Cobb's farm. While out ridge-running for wild pigs, Ty drove a tree prong through his big toe. Grannie Cobb, with a reputation for her use of roots, barks, and herbs as healing potions, fed him a foul-tasting brew. He came through without infection. But then his bowels went on a spree. “It'd hit me so fast that I'd barely have time to run for the Chic Sale in the back orchard,” he wrote in a 1961 memoir. “And I'd spend the rest of the day there.” In came Doc Moss to apply a cure.

Not long after, a white boy of Royston shot a black boy in the belly. Moss and another doctor invited Tyrus to observe the surgery. By flickering oil lamp on a kitchen table, they went to work. Moss told Ty, “You're the anesthetist,” and handed him a dousing mask and a bottle of chloroform. Cobb's account of the surgery went like this: “I put the boy under without much trouble and the docs opened him up. After failing to locate the bullet, they began searching for a perforation of the intestine. Both being elderly men, their eyes grew tired under the oil lamp. ‘You look, Tyrus,' said Moss. ‘Blasted if I can find any puncture.'

“I went over the intestine until I found a bruise, but no hole. ‘Aha,' said Moss, ‘the bullet slanted off somewhere into his side. He's lucky.'”

Sewed up, the patient survived. Tyrus discovered that bloody tissue and exposed intestines did not make him faint. The experience had been exciting. Yet he felt no call to become a country healer.

Professor Cobb maintained the pressure. By now, he insisted, Tyrus should have discovered some upper-class ambition, scored better in school, and left off drifting. Once more the Professor brought up the idea of a West Point education. Tyrus remained uninterested. Nevertheless, W. H. put out feelers in political circles.

Fifty years later, in a 1950 interview with the baseball legend,
Los Angeles Times
columnist Braven Dyer asked about Cobb's refusal of an appointment to West Point.

Dyer remarked, “If you'd gone to the Point, the U.S. would have had two General MacArthurs.”

Cobb: “No—it would have had two George Pattons.”

Feeling guilty at letting down his father, Ty nonetheless continued to mosey through the days. Some nights, unable to sleep, Tyrus would go hiking in the hills with his dog, Old Bob. Why was it that a way of
life he didn't want was expected of him? Why were adults so damned serious? What next?

Enter still heavier farm labor. From the time he had left short pants, he'd decided that it was out of the question that he would become a farmer of clay-belt cotton and corn. That didn't require brains, only endurance. To be a farmer meant to do stoopwork and cultivating in ninety-degree heat, side by side with black croppers. That left blacks his virtual equal. W. H. Cobb, short of hands on his acres, also used his son to plant and harrow. To make sure Tyrus kept the furrows straight he was under supervision of a black foreman, Uncle Ezra.

Tyrus didn't care to be seen by girls while working in the fields. When a special girl from school passed along a road bordering the fields, he would hand Ezra the horse's reins and hide from sight in a ditch. He considered himself a Cobb of standing, a “townie.” He didn't belong out here, breathing clay dust. Manual labor was the lot of Negroes and poor whites.

W. H. Cobb's temporary answer to the career question was to find his son a summertime job in nearby Carnesville, apprenticed to a cotton factor. In the commission agent's sheds he learned about the maturing of bolls, ginning, grading, and the product's shipment to market. His effort there somewhat pacified his father, but the 120-pound junior Cobb saw no future in weighing and hoisting bales for a livelihood.

By 1901, at fifteen, losing his freckles, growing rapidly, with fuzz sprouting on his chest, Tyrus considered running away to Atlanta, where a friend of his clerked in a Wells Fargo office and made a good eight dollars per week. Tyrus hesitated, and in the end he wasn't up to the move. The Professor's dominant shadow over him, parental loyalty, and home ties were too deeply implanted for him to turn runaway. Had he skipped to Atlanta then, he believed years later, baseball never would have known him. “Might have become a pool-hall hustler,” he guessed in retrospect. “Or gone out west to homestead.”