Hailie Selassie

Growing up in the small mining town of Calumet, Michigan in the forties and through the fifties, names and places are learned and wondered about.  I had not heard of Haile Selassie until one day, my all time favorite neighbor Art Stellberg and I were playing catch with the remnants of my only baseball.  The friction tape was coming loose but it was fun just throwing the ball back and forth.

He was a bachelor in his forties and I about 10 years old.  We talked about the old time baseball players that he had seen play at old Briggs Stadium in Detroit where he worked during the war.  He built Cadillacs in the thirties and tanks in the forties up until the end of the war. He then returned to his home next door to live with his aging mother.  He was a skilled carpenter by trade and an avid hunter and fisherman.

He mentioned guys with nick names like Toochie Floogie (sp) and Three Fingers Brown.  Rabbit Maranville, and Shoeless Joe Jackson. I would find out more about these oldtimers and was amazed at what they did and what my neighbor knew.

One day he said that Haile Selassie was quite a ballplayer too. He kidded me by saying he thought he played for the old Boston Braves as a second baseman.  I thought it was a strange name and was sure to look him up.

I couldn’t find anything about him in baseball record books and so I thought I’d ask my mother if she ever heard of such a name.  She said of course, he was the Emperor of Ethiopia.   She may well have said he was the mayor of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and I would have believed her.

Quite a fellow this Selassie character.  A Christian leader, crowned king, emperor, modernizer of a nation on the Horn of Africa. He led his nation from 1930 to 174 when he was overthrown in a military coup and arrested and put in house arrest.  He died within a year and assignation by strangling was the most likely end of his life.

He was one of the most bizarre and misunderstood figures of the twentieth century. His body was found buried under a toilet and reburied with some respect in Addis Abba.

A strange life and death for such a strange man and a strange name.

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