Negro Leagues Baseball Players Association
He retired in the mid-1980s, worked briefly as a security guard and then became part of the new Negro League Baseball Players Association. As president since the mid-1990s, Fields organized autograph shows and held benefit auctions to raise money for many of his former colleagues from the diamond. He also wrote a memoir, My Life in the Negro Leagues (1992).
Wilmer Fields died of a heart ailment at his home in Manassas, Virginia. He was 81.
Read more about this topic: Wilmer Fields
Famous quotes containing the words negro, leagues, baseball, players and/or association:
“the negro Babo took by succession each Spaniard forward, and asked him whose skeleton that was, and whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a whites.”
—Herman Melville (18191891)
“Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“Yeah, percentage players die broke too, dont they, Bert?”
—Sydney Carroll, U.S. screenwriter, and Robert Rossen. Eddie Felson (Paul Newman)
“They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practices and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.”
—Samuel Johnson (17091784)