Terror in the City of Champions (40 page)

Lowell Rushing disliked Charles Poole. Rushing and Poole, along with Gill and Harvey Davis, lived within a half-mile of one another, all within sight of the gleaming, six-year-old Ambassador Bridge that connected Detroit to Windsor. Rushing had despised Poole for as long as he had known him, since 1933, when Rebecca met him. She and Charles married seventeen months later. Maybe he loathed Poole for being a Catholic. Or maybe he felt Rebecca could do better. Rushing had grown up with Rebecca back in Danville, Tennessee, and he was closer to her age, twenty-one, than Charley, who was thirty-one. Poole had been mostly unemployed since losing his job around Christmas and was now working two days per week with the WPA. Over the years he had been a mechanic, a chef, and a shipman on the Great Lakes, but money always seemed tight. While Poole’s religion and job prospects didn’t endear him to Rushing, another factor played into his aversion. Its roots had been planted before Poole ever came on the scene. Some years back Rebecca had spent a summer in her sister Marcia’s home. Marcia was married to Owen Rushing, Lowell’s brother. Lowell had spent that same summer under the same roof and had become smitten with the pretty, kindly, ninety-pound Rebecca and her high-pitched, childlike voice.

The rumor of the beating had begun with Marcia, who had recently been sitting at the kitchen table in her home, talking about an argument between the Pooles. Rebecca, according to Marcia, was angry with Charles because he didn’t have a job, wasn’t hunting hard enough to find one, and seemed to enjoy spending time at their home as Rebecca worked hard for her measly wages. Ruby Lane overheard the rumor and shared it with Agnes Gill. Harvey Davis and Lowell Rushing were there when she repeated it. “If the organization is any good, it will take care of Poole,” one of the men said.

One day, while Marcia Rushing was at a beer garden on Junction Avenue, John “Scotty” Bannerman, another legion colonel, tracked her down and asked if the story was true. Had her sister married a Catholic who beat her? Marcia didn’t actually hate Charles Poole. She saw him regularly. She had gone with him on Sunday to visit his newborn. She even took care of his and Rebecca’s other daughter while Rebecca was in the hospital. But she had been drinking and there was no going back on her whopper. She answered yes, adding for good measure, “I’d like to kill him myself.” Her liquor-embellished story grew into the large tale that Col. Harvey Davis spread at the May 12 meeting, inflaming the men with colorful details, working them into a fervor. He asked finally, What should be done?

Davis already knew. Hours earlier he had laid the trap for Charles Poole. He went to Poole’s rental and found him and best friend Gene Sherman painting and doing plumbing. Poole lived in a four-family flat. The landlord was allowing him to stay free of charge temporarily with the understanding that he would pay him back when he found a job. Davis told Poole that given his talents as a baseball player he could get him a position that would include playing for the Timken Axle team. This would be convenient. Timken was located blocks from Poole’s place. Davis said he would send someone by later to take him to a team meeting to be measured for a uniform. It was not uncommon for some workers to be hired based on their ability to contribute on the athletic field in the competitive industrial leagues. Poole had talent at baseball. He was a catcher, like Cochrane.

The livid crowd inside Findlater Temple called for justice. They demanded a beating, a lynching, or a one-way ride for Charles Poole. Men volunteered. Col. Davis had already procured his gunmen, Ervin Lee and Dayton Dean. Others had done little with the Black Legion until then, like twenty-two-year-old Urban Lipps. He had come to Michigan from Mississippi a year earlier. Feeling lonesome, he had accepted an invitation to a party, hoping to meet friends and build a social life outside his job at Hudson Motor Company. Instead he was inducted into the legion. Robes, red lights, the Black Oath—the ritual petrified him. Over time and under pressure he returned for more meetings. One was a dance. Another was the current affair with the “white Russian” and Davis’s story about poor Rebecca Poole. Lipps had taken a bus to be there. “A fellow hardly knows how he gets into these things,” he would say. Davis enlisted him in the effort to lure Charles Poole out for a drive.

Poole loved that he had a new daughter. When he visited her in the hospital, he joked with Rebecca about the baby’s black hair, darker than his own and unlike Mary Lou’s bald head at birth. With his family expanding he worried more than usual about money. He chewed his fingernails to the quick. On Tuesday morning he had appeared at Marcia Rushing’s house to see his one-year-old daughter. He shared his concerns and committed to finding a job. He had scraped together money for a pair of shoes for Mary Lou. He returned an hour later with a high chair.

That evening Poole must have thought his life was finally taking a turn for the better with the baseball team and the job possibility. He may have wondered, though, if he had heard Harvey Davis correctly, for he and two pals went to three beer gardens near Fort Street looking for his baseball ride. They started out at Hayes Chop House around the corner from his flat. Poole usually didn’t drink but he had a beer to be social. They walked next to the Blue Ribbon Café, a mile up Fort. They proceeded to Joe’s Pavilion, a dancing spot across the street from Ternstedt Manufacturing. At each place Poole let the bartender know where he could be found if someone came looking for a ballplayer. He wasn’t taking chances with his wardrobe either. He looked smart dressed in a secondhand dark-brown suit, red tie, stylish pin-striped red-and-purple shirt, gray socks, and black Oxfords. He was sitting in Joe’s Pavilion with friends Sherman and Ralph Hyatt when blond-haired Urban Lipps came in and walked up to their table.

Lipps looked at Sherman and asked if he was Poole.

“No. I’m not Poole,” Sherman said, motioning to his friend.

“Are you going to the baseball party?” Lipps asked.

“Sure. Where is it going to be?”

“Out on the west side.”

The combination of a job and a baseball position sounded so good that all three men wanted to go to the meeting. Lipps said there was room for only Charles Poole. They left the bar. Lipps led Poole to Ervin Lee’s car. Poole slid into the backseat next to Dayton Dean.

Poole and Pidcock

A nighttime convoy of four cars headed out of Detroit along Fort Street. In the back of one vehicle between Dayton Dean and Urban Lipps sat the unsuspecting Charles Poole. He was excited to be going to a baseball meeting. Dean and Lipps kept up the charade by talking about the Tigers. Ever since the World Series, baseball had been a topic of choice around town. Earlier in the day the Tigers had shut out Boston. It was their second straight win. But they had been only average at best thus far. Dean said he didn’t think the Tigers would win this year’s pennant. Poole agreed. It certainly didn’t look good.

Hank Greenberg, fielding a wild throw at first, had fractured his wrist when runner Jake Powell plowed into him. Though Greenberg expected to return in a month or two, he wouldn’t. He would be gone for the season. Schoolboy Rowe lacked his usual pizzazz too. He had left the team for a week to be with his dying father. Over the winter, with his World Series winnings, he had bought his dad a restaurant to occupy his time, but it was for naught. In his first two starts of the season, Rowe had thrown complete-game shutouts. Upon returning from the funeral he had managed a combined two-and-a-third innings in his next two starts, surrendering twelve runs. Gehringer was also hurting and so was Pete Fox. Expensive Al Simmons was being described as “all washed up” and injuries were limiting Cochrane’s availability. A wounded throwing thumb, a reoccurrence of his eye troubles, a foul ball against his instep—all seemed minor but they were accumulating and he was missing games. On top of everything else, batboy Joey Roggin got an infection after being stung on the eyelid. Said Gee Walker: “That’s as far down the lineup as we can go, so maybe our bad luck is over.” It wasn’t. The Tigers fell into sixth place as the Yankees stormed to the top of division.

Two of the four cars made it over the Rouge River before the Fort Street drawbridge lifted. The others had no choice but to wait for a ship to pass. The river had long ago been widened and deepened to accommodate freighters carrying ore and other materials that Henry Ford needed for production at the Rouge complex. Sunset complete, the industrial skyline took on its eerie, ominous, menacing nighttime disposition. Floodlights—white, red, and amber—dotted land and sky, spreading orbs over looming cranes and smokestacks and throwing shadows across hard, hostile structures. Flames flared from narrow pipes and massive, forbidding buildings stood silhouetted against the sky. Ghostly clouds of illuminated smoke hovered around them.

When the bridge lowered eight to ten minutes later, the rear cars led by John Bannerman went to Wyandotte toward Roy Pidcock’s house, where Cecil Pidcock had come up from Toledo to visit his brother. Roy’s wife had told Cecil about his recent bizarre behavior, about his spending two nights outdoors and returning disheveled, paranoid, and emotionally broken. He had been acting queer, she said. The brothers exchanged small talk and then Cecil invited Roy for a drive, hoping to cheer him and to learn the source of his torment. They were gone for three hours.

Upon returning, Roy Pidcock stripped down and went to bed. He had a room to himself that night. Cecil told Nellie that he couldn’t figure what was on Roy’s mind and that he was heading home. As Cecil left for Toledo, Black Legion members watched from cars parked on the street.

Charles Poole noticed the moon. It shone large, a scuffed cue ball against a blue felt sky. Poole commented to Dean about it as they drove. They were heading to Dearborn, holding close to the Rouge River where possible. Poole talked about his wife and two daughters. Dean could tell Poole had high regard for them and he began feeling there was “something fishy” about Harvey Davis’s tale of the beating. But he had his orders and he knew he could be killed for not obeying them. It was a long ride and it wasn’t smooth. On a back road their car got stuck in mud. Davis’s vehicle pushed it out.

After forty-five minutes they stopped along Gulley Road. A branch of the Rouge River cut through the countryside and into a golf course, the border of which lay three hundred yards away. Lipps and Poole stayed in the car near the one-lane bridge. Dean and Ervin Lee got out to confer with Davis and the other men. They waited awhile, supposedly for the vehicles that had gotten separated at the bridge. (The original plan evidently had been for the men in all four cars to witness Poole’s punishment.) A bottle of liquor passed between them. Lee went back to the car and offered Lipps and Poole a drink. Poole declined.

“What is this going to be, a party out under the stars?” Poole asked.

Lee laughed and said yes.

Poole was growing concerned.

In Wyandotte the legionnaires either lured Roy Pidcock outside, perhaps vowing not to harm his wife if he came quietly, or they abducted him from his bed at gunpoint. Pidcock left barefoot and in his underwear, his pants and shoes still in the room. He scrawled a note under duress before departing. It read, “To all that know me, I love you all. Don’t worry about me. I can’t explain.”

Fleeing on Sixth Street, the cars would have thumped over the four rail lines that separated Pidcock’s neighborhood from Jefferson Avenue. The shoreline set just beyond. A motorboat waited there. Either before boarding or while on the boat, someone killed Pidcock. He was strangled with an electric cord. He might first have been hit on the head. They proceeded to Fighting Island and took him to an abandoned watchman’s shed on the north end. Ash dust covered the floor. They hoisted Pidcock into the rafters. His body dangled from a wire, making it look as if he had killed himself.