Richmond’s Own: Oscar “Reddy” Foster

  The evening of March 14, 1908 was not a quiet one, and under overcast skies many families who lived in the now vanished Richmond neighborhood of Fulton were spending an uneasy night on their porches and patrolling their alleys. On Louisiana Street, between Sixth and Seventh, residents were particularly tense with the sound of voices and people walking up and down the cobblestones. The Richmond Police had been put on alert, extra patrolmen were assigned to Fulton, and everyone was wide awake late into the night and talking about the man who threatened to burn down the whole of Louisiana Street, starting with his wife’s home. In the close-set frame houses of Fulton, the danger of fire was not something to be taken lightly and they all knew the source of the threat, too, making the image of blazes sweeping across Fulton valley even more believable. “The neighbors stood guard for some time, ready to move their chattels at a moment’s notice and to vent their anger,” reported the Richmond Times-Dispatch in an article headlined, “Neighborhood in Uproar..”

 

A view of the town of Fulton asReddy Foster knew it, ca. 1910.

 

  The residents, the police, and his family were all looking for Oscar “Reddy” Foster: baseball player, Richmond native, would-be arsonist, wife beater, and notorious mean drunk. Foster didn’t add to his fame and carry out his threat against Fulton, although he was spotted sulking through the streets of the neighborhood. “Foster was seen to pass the place several times,” reported the Times Dispatch, “but no match was struck, and he was allowed to depart in peace.” Hardly an admirable figure, Foster was nevertheless one of the few Richmonders who made it, albeit for only one shining afternoon, to play in the big leagues in the rough and rawboned world of late-nineteenth century American baseball.

  That March night Foster was enraged that his former wife had claimed all the pay from their son’s job at the nearby Richmond Cedar Works, leaving the aging ballplayer nothing for the week. Foster’s oath to exact revenge on her and the entire neighborhood resulted in that nocturnal panic in Fulton. It was one more example of the drunken Foster being famous in Richmond, but not for his skill or achievements but rather his drinking and his temper. Even a history of baseball’s early players is quick to note Foster “was known as a hard-drinking, rough and ready ballplayer whose temper usually got the best of him.” In 1908 Foster appeared in Richmond Police Court to answer for beating up both his sister and her husband after they made disparaging remarks about Foster’s mother, and he was released after paying a $35 fine. The news was reported under the heading, “Old Player Fined,” further adding to the image of Reddy Foster as being a has-been and washed up at age 44 and no doubt adding to his rage and frustration.

  Foster also had a reputation of taking out his shortcomings on Mary, his long-suffering wife. “Reddy’s continued abuse after team losses became so commonplace that his wife came up with an ‘early warning system,’” wrote one historian of the era. When Foster’s team won, she would be home when he got there as he was then a “happy drunk.” When the team lost, she would arrange for someone to get word to her so she could flee before the drunk and belligerent Foster got home, and she would wait safely at a neighbor’s house for him to sober up.

Oscar “Reddy” Foster, pictured in the Richmond Dispatch in 1895.

 

  The baseball statistics website, “Baseball Reference” names a team in Lebanon, Pennsylvania as the first team Reddy played for in 1890. It goes on to list eighteen different teams he was on, teams with names that reflect the colorful and often hard-scrapple places they called home. The Richmond Bluebirds, the Allentown Peanuts, the Bristol Bell Makers, and the Waterbury Rough Riders were among the stops on a long journey of boarding houses, hotel rooms, train rides, beer joints and rural baseball diamonds attended by crowds just as drunk and rough-and-ready as the players. It was an alcohol-fueled sport filled with personal rivalries, where fistfights were common and sliding to a base often meant coming in with spikes up to do as much damage to the other player as possible. “Reddy Foster should be heavily fined when he gives such exhibitions of temper,” wrote one chronicler of a game played on the evening of September 15, 1894, where his petulant behavior helped cost the Richmond team the game. “A few fines and he might be able to control himself.”

  The same baseball history that termed Foster abusive noted that once upon a time, “Foster was a star catcher in the Virginia State League when he was discovered by a scout for the New York Giants.” Despite his famously bad temper, Foster was signed by New York and prepared for the move north, but before leaving Richmond, Fulton’s own Reddy Foster was honored by a baseball game in his honor on November 23, 1895. The Richmond team played a volunteer group, and the game itself was termed “passing dull.” Nevertheless, many turned out to watch Fulton’s most famous son’s last game before he headed off to the majors and what everyone hoped would be a long and promising profession. In a foreshadowing of Foster’s meteoric rise and fall, a New York coach O. P. Claytor commented that Reddy was not much to look at but “he has the appearance of a fighter, and, as a whole, Claytor thinks he will do.”

  Later in life, he must have looked back at that time with the Giants and that one summer afternoon on June 3, 1896, that Reddy Foster played in the major leagues as a lofty pinnacle that he’d never see again. Not that the game itself was a sterling example from which warm memories were made. The New York World said the Giants played poorly all around and their pitcher “fretted, fumed and fussed” because things were not going his way. The whole game was “one of the sort which leaves a bad taste.” New York lost 14-8. Foster’s presence was not mentioned in the newspapers, and he never played in the majors after that one game.

  Dismissed from the New York Giants, Foster eventually returned home once again to Fulton and apparently kept the peace. He was welcomed back to a local team, the Richmond Lawmakers, after turning down a coaching job in Connecticut. The local newspaper reported the offer and even they seemed surprised he would not take it: “Foster declined to accept the position, although it has a good salary attached to it.” In 1902, “Oscar (Reddy) Foster, a star of the old Virginia League. was spotted in Fulton, resting before headed to his new post as coaching in Wheeling, W. Va.” Reddy eventually signed with a Portsmouth team and later returned as a player to Richmond, but even his hometown had grown tired of his ill-mannered behavior. His cursing on the field and other vulgar behavior was soundly criticized in the press. “Reddy wants to wake up to the fact that Richmond people don’t tolerate such conduct,” sniffed the Times Dispatch..

  By the spring of 1906, Reddy Foster was on a downhill trajectory. When he came back to Richmond, unlike in the past when he might have first gone carousing, instead he went directly from the train station to his mother’s house in Fulton. “’It’s been five years since I saw her sweet face, and I wasn’t coming uptown to get mixed with a crowd before I had a good long talk with her,’ said the auburn-haired backstop, who is known to all of Richmond.” Reddy was in pretty good shape, commented one reporter. “He played excellent ball last year with the Greenville (Miss.) team, and was offered a larger salary there this year, but wanted to get back to Richmond.” Among the few constants in Reddy Foster’s life, aside from his famously bad attitude, was his mother and the Fulton neighborhood where he was born, and it was always a powerful draw.

   Two weeks after he returned home, the end came for Reddy Foster’s baseball career during a game between the Lawmakers and the opposing Lynchburg Hill Climbers. The Cooperstown Chronicles generously claims Foster “always demanded the best from his players and teammates on the field: incompetence was something that was totally unacceptable to him,” and that it was his sheer exasperation with the quality of play is what made him throw down his catcher’s gear and stalk off. Rather than a noble quest for excellence, it was more likely hard liquor and a famously bad attitude that caused Foster to curse, leave the field and the park entirely, never to return. “There are those who think that he will be given another show, but this is a mistaken conclusion, for the player who quits, sulks, or gets bad in any way, hasn’t got any sleeping apartment with the Lawmakers, it is said.”

 

The grave of Oscar “Reddy” Foster in Richmond’s Oakwood Cemetery.

 

  The next year found Foster still playing ball, but now back with the same amateur team he started with as a young man. The sporting public was informed that, “The old Fulton baseball club has reorganized with a strong list of players, and Mr. C. Linwood Wade has been elected captain, to whom challenges should be sent at No. 20 Orleans Street.” Far from the beautifully manicured field at the Polo Grounds in New York, Foster now loped around the bases in the valley he called home, his ill-fitting unform once again stained with the red clay of Fulton.

  Things began badly in 1908 after the arrest in February when Foster beat his sister and brother-in-law, followed by the incident where he threatened to burn down Fulton. It was said that Reddy returned to his neighborhood and continued to “dissipate.” On a Sunday late in December, when most Richmonders were thinking about the upcoming Christmas holiday, the ballplayer was on a bender. He was drinking with Lee Poklington, who lived in Fulton on Louisiana Street and was probably among those on alert at a window the year before, watching for his old buddy Reddy coming up Louisiana Street with a can of gas. In late afternoon on December 19 the two walked to the Fulton waterfront, both no doubt knowing every path and alley in the valley from a lifetime of making their way through Fulton to the river. They carried with them a bottle of whisky and, for some reason, a double-barreled shotgun.

  Foster and Poklington stood a while on the shore of what was known as the Fulton Flats and watched the James River roll by as they passed the bottle back and forth. It was growing dark, reported an account of Reddy’s afternoon, “at that hour between day and night when a man’s thoughts turn toward retrospect and when nature wears a melancholy attitude.” The lengthening shadows and growing gloom could have only added to the baseball player’s troubled mind, and he had a long pull off the whisky.  Handing the bottle back, he took the gun and said, “watch me.” Poklington turned away from the view of the river and toward his friend standing beside him just as there was a flash and a roar. Reddy had put the gun under his chin and both barrels of the shotgun fired, blowing most of his head off and all over the rocks on the Fulton shore.

Richmond Times-Dispatch, December 20, 1908.

 

  The sudden death of Fulton’s troubled favorite son was front-page news in Richmond. “Once Famous Ball Player Blows Top Of Head Off With Shot Gun” trumpeted one newspaper - a headline leaving little room for sentiment in its description of the grisly method of suicide. The accompanying article explained that long ago, the crowds roared in approval for Reddy who had “an arm of iron.” “His red head shone like a blaze behind the bat, and the people fondly gave him the name which afterward distinguished him more than his own.” His rise to the major leagues was recounted as the top of an arc that began and ended beside the river, in Fulton. “He was a great man with the bat, especially towards the umpire, and people resented his unruly wildness… At last, when he was down and out, when he had grown physically weak and his career was a wrecked, he saw one more finish, one more run – that one more home run he could make – and he committed suicide.”

  It seemed that over the years Foster had finally worn out his welcome in his native city, and his passing was not noted other than with the account of his sensational death.  There was no obituary for Oscar “Reddy” Foster, no call for grieving family and friends to meet at Oakwood Cemetery for his burial. Maybe Lee Poklington, termed Foster’s “last friend” in the newspaper, really was the only person he had left, and perhaps that was the reason Foster had Poklington accompany him that afternoon on his last stroll through his old neighborhood. The still-shaken Poklington may have been among the few mourners that went to Oakwood to see Reddy buried in what is today an isolated area of the cemetery, long forgotten and carpeted with crabgrass. Weeds grow up through the cracked vault lid covering the grave of one of Richmond’s most famous early ballplayers.

- Selden.