Buck O'Neil on Segregated Travel (Covering the Bases)

BUCK O'NEIL: When you’d travel to a place, you would stop. Now, a lot of times, this would cut you, a lot of times. You would go to just say Oklahoma, and you would go to a place and the white ball players would have to go in the place to get food for you to eat, because you couldn’t go in that place when we were playing through some of them towns. Well, we couldn’t go into a place to eat, but the guys would go in and get sandwiches for us, which would kind of cut you, you know what I mean. These things would cut you. But, we were accustomed to these things, because we had gone through it. We trained in that and all of it. We were trained in the South, and play all through the South, a lot of it. But, the thing about it, we didn’t get cut too much because we knew the places to go. The only time it would cut you would be this, we would go into a filling station to get gas and the guy would see us coming and he might lock the restroom, which was a thing. Actually, after traveling so long, we knew the stations to stop to to get the gas, where you wouldn’t have these things. But, a lot of places we have gone, they wouldn’t let you in the restroom. Lock the restroom. A lot of places we would go, we were here, we would drive up here to get gas, and somebody else would drive up to another pump over there five minutes after us. He’d stop waiting on us and go wait on this person. See, all these little things would kind of get you. Yeah, they would get you. You’d feel like, oh, well, I want to do this and do that, but if you would, you were in trouble, because the police would come and put you in jail. Different things like that. But, all in all, it was quite an experience.