The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [49]
By Franco’s time, Major League Baseball knew about San Pedro and the scouts were out looking. “If you were an outstanding player,” he recalled, “word got around and you got recognized.”
Franco “got recognized” by another legendary Dominican scout, Quiqui Acevedo. Acevedo was ready to sign him to the Philadelphia Phillies when Franco was seventeen. He was to stay in a hotel in Santo Domingo and begin his baseball training. But Franco’s mother thought that he was too young to drop out of school and start his career. Yes, it was an opportunity, but he would not have an education, he would be taken away at a young age, and the odds were against his ever getting to the major leagues. Families in San Pedro were beginning to understand that most boys who got signed would not succeed.
But after three months, Julio’s older brother, Vicente, persuaded their mother to let Julio go to Santo Domingo and take a chance at stardom. She agreed, only on the condition that Julio be brought back home every weekend. And so Franco signed with the Phillies for $4,000, which was only slightly less than what his father earned in a year on his good salary. Like most young Macorisanos who first get their hands on some Major League Baseball money, he gave it to his mother.
Franco trained at the University of Santo Domingo, “the oldest university in the Americas,” he proudly pointed out many years later. George Bell, a lean but broad-shouldered and muscular kid from the Santa Fe sugar mill in San Pedro, was also there, as was Juan Samuel from Barrio Restauración, where Tony Fernández grew up. All were signed by Acevedo to the Phillies.
George Bell was born in a neighborhood near the Tetelo Vargas Stadium, but he grew up in Santa Fe, where his father was an engineer on a locomotive that carried the cane from the fields to the mill. In the dead season he worked in the mill as a mechanic. The Bell family, like Julio Franco’s in Consuelo, had a modest but above-average income; in San Pedro they were considered middle-class. Bell’s father’s salary of 360 pesos a month—minimum wage was 90—was the envy of most Santa Fe workers. The sugar mill provided them with a three-bedroom house for their family of seven. Franco’s mother sold food to sugar workers out of her home.
George Bell was pure cocolo. His father’s father was from the little British colony of Anguilla, where he had lived with a woman named Bell from the volcanic island of Montserrat, also British. According to family legend, Anguilla had so little that when Franco’s paternal grandfather went to Santo Domingo to buy a machete and saw that the island was bigger and wealthier than his, he took a job cutting cane in San Pedro. His son, George’s father, took George’s paternal grandmother’s name. George’s mother’s family was from Nevis, and George grew up speaking that uniquely San Pedro English with an accent that is part West Indian and part Spanish.
Bell said of his childhood in Santa Fe, “We played ball—any kind of ball.” His father’s first love was cricket. “I remember when I was eight years old, my dad took me to a baseball field to see a cricket match. He and his friends played a lot of cricket and a lot of golf.” There was a golf course in Santa Fe for the sugar executives.
The boys of Santa Fe played a game they called cricket with a sock ball and four players in two-man teams: one to bowl and one to bat. The bowl was underhanded or sidearm, and there was an old license plate on the ground that served as a wicket. If the bowl hit the plate, you were out. There were three outs to a side. If you hit from one side to the other, it was a run. They played twelve-run games. A variation on this game, called plaquita and sometimes two-man baseball, is still played by the youth of San Pedro—cocolos as well as Spanish Macorisanos. They carve their own wooden cricket bats with machetes, the all-purpose tool of the cane fields.
When playing baseball, George always got hits and always won. He also boxed a little in