It may have been the depths of the Great Depression, but the Apollo Theater was jumping on the night of May 26, 1934. It was packed to the rafters with folks draped down for the big Courier benefit. Anybody who was anybody was there. And Ernest Gooden was most certainly somebody.
Just a few days before Gooden had jumped into a car in Pittsburgh and headed to “New Yawk.” He was joined by two friends: Bill Nunn & Wilbert Holloway.
Nunn (I, that is, for those who know II & III), was not just a newspaper man he was managing editor of the Pittsburgh Courier – THE Black newspaper of the day. And Holloway was not just a cartoonist, he was THE cartoonist, the man who would ink the Sunny Boy Sam, the second longest-running Black comic strip. And then, of course there’s Pud, as Ernest Gooden was sometimes known. Gooden wasn’t just an editor of the Courier, he had started another (short-lived) Black newspaper in the city, The American. And before that Gooden was a star ballplayer.
Pud debuted with the Homestead Grays in 1921, before moving on to the Pittsburgh Keystones, the Toledo Tigers, Cleveland Tate Stars, & the Detroit Stars, teams whose names have faded but were iconic in their day. Pud would be remembered as “one of the greatest young ball players that the Pittsburgh district ever produced.” His “sinewy arm could throw with the accuracy of a rifle” and whose “hawk-like eyes could solve the cleverest pitchers’ most deceptive deliveries.” He lit up the diamond.
So, when Pud died at age 34, just a few months after the epic night at the Apollo, his buddy Nunn eulogized him & sent him off with a nod to those baseball glory days. He wrote: “May he be ‘safe’ in that land where the Great Umpire officiates.”
