Baseball legend Felton 'Skipper' Snow finally gets a headstone at Eastern Cemetery grave

Snapshots. That’s about all we have left of Felton “Skipper” Snow. There’s that photo of him kneeling, front row center, in a team picture labeled “Barnstorming Champions in Caracas, Venezuela, 1945.” Among those gathered ‘round are Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Buck Leonard and Sam Jethroe, all wearing jerseys with “American All Stars” emblazoned across the front.

Snow was a professional major league baseball player, an All Star, with a long and storied career that started with the Louisville White Sox of the 1931 Negro National League and ended with the Baltimore Elite Giants in 1947 when he was a 41-year-old player manager. Meanwhile, young Jackie Robinson returned from that Venezuela tour and signed a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers that very year, first joining Brooklyn’s top minor league team, the Montreal Royals, where he tore up the circuit in 1946, then making his historic debut with the Dodgers in 1947.

The MLB ballplayer most famous for befriending him was Louisville’s own Pee Wee Reese. For his part, Felton Snow is credited with helping Jackie as he prepared to break through that daunting color barrier, so it fairly can be said that one Louisvillian escorted Jackie right up to the line, while another greeted him on the other side, changing the sports world forever.

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If you pay a visit, as you should, to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, you will see, in the outer hall, a portrait of Felton Snow. Inside the museum, you’ll see photographs of “East-West All-Star” teams, with Mr. Snow appearing in several of those. They know all about Felton Snow there in Kansas City, but here in this tradition-rich baseball town we seem to have forgotten him.

After Felton retired, he came back to his hometown, and for a good stretch was a minor celebrity, working in a barbershop in Saint Matthews and gaining a burr-headed fan club of starry-eyed little leaguers who he regaled with stories of days past, telling them how far Josh Gibson could hit the ball, how Cool Papa Bell was so fast he could turn off the light and be in bed before darkness fell and all about the great and unhittable and joyfully irrepressible Satchel Paige. Those little leaguers, now older than Snow was at the time, remember him as warm and personable with a deep resonant storytelling voice, generous with coaching tips they dutifully absorbed; they later commemorated that unique friendship by naming a team after him at St. Matthews Little League that lasted for twenty years.

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When Mr. Snow died in 1974 at age 68, he was buried in an unmarked grave at Eastern Cemetery, a former pauper’s field. In 1989, it came out that the cemetery’s owners had reused graves and committed other abuses, and since that time the property has been tied up in liability and litigation. With the help of Larry Lester, cofounder of the Negro Leagues Museum, the Louisville Urban League, the Louisville Slugger Museum, the Louisville Bats, the Frazier Museum, Felton’s nephew Billy Snow, the Friends of Eastern Cemetery, numerous members of the Pee Wee Reese Chapter of SABR and others, we are now in a position to correct that injustice.

On September 1, at 1 p.m., a gravestone dedication ceremony honoring Mr. Snow will take place that will be open to all. The Louisville Bats game the following evening will also honor Mr. Snow, along with Negro Leagues baseball in general, as part of “The Nine,” a multiyear minor league baseball initiative that takes its name from Jackie’s number with the Montreal club.

The ballplayers in that 1945 team picture were All Stars, that’s undeniable, but despite the words stitched across their jerseys they may not have believed they’d yet been granted full status as Americans. Late can be heartbreaking, but for Felton Snow, it’s better than never.

Tad Myre is Commissioner of the Pee Wee Reese Chapter of SABR; Partner at Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs in his spare time.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Louisville Baseball legend finally gets headstone at Eastern Cemetery