Wilmer Fields - Negro Leagues Baseball Players Association

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:

    I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,
    and made my manic statement,
    telling off the state and president, and then
    sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
    beside a Negro boy with curlicues
    of marijuana in his hair.
    Robert Lowell (1917–1977)

    By a knight of ghosts and shadows
    I summon’d am to a tourney
    Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end:
    Methinks it is no journey.
    —Unknown. Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song (l. 57–60)

    It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.
    Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)

    Yeah, percentage players die broke too, don’t they, Bert?
    Sydney Carroll, U.S. screenwriter, and Robert Rossen. Eddie Felson (Paul Newman)

    An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.
    Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)