Addicted to Playing Ball

Birth of the Junkies

It is any weekend of the long, sultry south Louisiana summer. The Stone Junkies have just won top place in a slow-pitch softball tournament in their hometown of Parks, Louisiana, southwest of Baton Rouge. After the presentation of trophies and a post-game meeting and celebration, the pride and joy of Parks’ 850 black residents meet at the Snowball Stand, the team’s headquarters, where friends and neighbors join them for a lively analysis of the latest triumph. Since forming nine years ago, the Stone Junkies have given Parks an important sense of identity. 

Nearly every black household in Parks, whether or not a member of the immediate family is on the team, displays at least one trophy won by the Junkies. Men in their forties and fifties wear Stone Junkies gold and black baseball caps with “S. J.” stamped on the front. Kids too little to swing a softball bat wear oversized windbreakers that belong to their uncle or brother and that boldly proclaim “Stone Junkies — Parks, La.” on the back. And girls and women of all ages wear gold and black T-shirts emblazoned “Junkettes” or “Property of the Junkies” on the front. As one player proudly remarked, “We have given our community a name.” 

It hasn’t always been that way. For a long time, the Stone Junkies had a hard time convincing their neighbors that softball deserved their attention and enthusiasm. And for an even longer time, the black community in Parks was split down the middle by the Bayou Teche, the slow-moving stream that divides the established families from the relative newcomers. The older black residents of Parks have lived on the west side of the bayou since at least the turn of the century. For decades, family members labored as domestics, railroad workers, farmers or sharecroppers. Some worked part-time on local construction jobs while others earned meager wages at the nearby sugar mill or cotton gin. 

On the east side of the bayou, other black families took up residence, starting in the late 1930s, when mechanization in agriculture began pushing sharecroppers looking for work into towns and cities. But over the next 30 years, the increased mechanization and automation in traditional places of employment, such as the sugar mill, made it increasingly difficult for both the older and newer residents to find or keep jobs. Large numbers of young adults, even entire families, packed up and left the area, while other families continued to move to the east side community, called Promised Land, in hopes of finding work. 

These once-distinct groups have largely merged to become the single black community that now exists in Parks. Through pride and dedication, not only to a sport, but to the concept of a community, the Stone Junkies have been an instrumental force in unifying the Parks black community. 

In 1970, Alton “Brose” Ambrose returned home from Viet Nam to his mother’s house in Promised Land. Having lost a leg in the war and with dim hopes of finding a good job, Alton decided to go into business for himself. He bought a small shack, had it hauled next to his mother’s house, and established the now-legendary Ambrose Snowball Stand. Offering ice cream, soda water, cigarettes, snacks and beer in addition to snowballs, the “Stand” quickly became a meeting place for all ages where sports was a favorite topic of conversation. 

Alton remembers that, in the beginning, even though people from both sides of the bayou stopped by his place, sales were not that great. “Nobody had money,” he recalls. “Most of the guys who are now on the team were still in school. The older guys didn’t have no jobs. Most of them would ‘job around,’ you know, hustle whatever they could get. They worked at the pepper factory, planted sugarcane and worked at the mill during harvest. And a lot of the young guys were planning to go over to Houston to find jobs as soon as they finished school. Times were tough.” 

Dave “Ku-Nook” Thibodeaux, 29-year-old coach of the Junkies, comes from a family long-established in the town. An avid sports fan like Alton and the others, out of school and unemployed, Ku-Nook remembers spending many hours at the Stand talking sports after playing hardball or football on the empty lot across the street. 

Ku-Nook recalls that now-historic evening in the spring of 1971 when the Stone Junkies were born. “It was funny,” he laughs. “We were all at the Stand and this guy just came here and said, ‘Hey, y’all want to play? We got a softball tournament.’ We actually didn’t know what softball was at the time, cause we were so used to playing hardball around here. So he asked us, ‘Would you be interested in playing for two or three cases of beer?’ We said, ‘Sure, fine.’ So we went in with the idea of playing for beer. We won two games and some beer . . . and we just kept on playing ever since.” 

That was all it took. The dozen or so who made up the first group decided to form a team and enter tournaments regularly. During this first part of their career, the Junkies played other black teams — usually from small rural communities or from plantations. Like these teams, the Junkies had very little money. 

Regardless, to keep on playing, they surely needed a manager and a name. The choice for manager was immediately clear. Dave explains, “Brose came in, well, he couldn’t play no more, so he just ran the team.” The name came next. Ku-Nook laughingly remembers how it was selected, “Oh, we were all talking in front of the Snowball Stand and one of the guys started singing ‘Stone Soul Junkies,’ the Curtis Mayfield song, and he just decided to give us that name. Now people ask why we picked Junkies, cause it’s supposed to be something that means you’re on drugs, but actually Junkie to us is that we are addicted to playing ball.” 

Their addiction to playing ball was enough to bring together the group of young guys who were either still in school or marginally employed in part-time or seasonal jobs, but they quickly realized that to play in tournaments they would need gloves, bats, balls, caps, team T-shirts, expense money and entry fees. To get the needed cash posed their first major obstacle.

 

Hustling to Survive

Hustling to survive was a way of life and practiced art for the impoverished black folks in the Parks area. Whenever money was needed, family and friends organized fundraising activities ranging from benefit dances and dinners to selling local delicacies such as gumbo or homemade boudin (a delectable sausage of pork, rice and seasoning). The Junkies, unemployed, without a sponsor and in desperate need of cash, had a range of tried and true fundraising activities to choose from. The problem was that, traditionally, funds were raised, and raised willingly, to assist a family in times of death, sickness or disaster, but a group of young men sponsoring benefits and selling food to raise money for a softball team was unheard of! And to make matters worse, softball was virtually unknown as an organized sport in Parks in the early ’70s. Miles “Wild Child” Potier recalls that this posed a problem for the Junkies. 

“When we first started,” he explains, “the elderly people, especially, looked at softball as something that took away from, you know, the hot dog, apple pie, baseball trend. Even though softball was a form of ball, they figured that baseball was the real, true measure of a kid’s ability. They looked at softball as something that took away from the tradition of baseball.” 

But the Junkies, stubborn in their enthusiasm for the game and dedicated to their survival as a team, were able to chip away at the reluctance of their elders. Wild Child, a former All-American hardball player at Southern University and now the most gung-ho of the Junkies, talks about that critical period: “After we went on for a while, the old people saw how much softball meant to people interested in it, and they started to have no other choice but to stick with it from that standpoint and like it. Softball was something that had to be accepted. There was more involvement in softball than in hardball, which was steadily declining in the area. Softball was a fun thing, you know. Everybody could get involved, even some of the mediocre players who couldn’t hit a baseball. It was something to do over the summer days and the weekends. And it started to catch on.” 

During that first year, the Junkies started to “catch on” in a big way. As “Junkie Fever” grew, people from Parks began bringing lawn chairs and coolers to any ballfield where the team was playing, settling in for an exciting game of softball. As one young lady put it, “It came to be that without the Junkies, nobody would be doing nothing.” 

With this growing community interest, the team was able to sponsor various successful benefits, raising just enough to get the equipment they needed with a few dollars left over for the next season’s tournaments. But nothing came easily. Junkies’ president, Julius “Big Boy” Ambrose, smiles when he thinks back to those hectic and pressured first days. “I remember, we used to get up at two or three in the morning. I used to hustle some hogsheads and some seasoning. We’d buy a head for two, three dollars and make boudin. Then we’d get on the street and sell it all over. We’d make us about $150 and put that in our treasury. That’s how we got our first T-shirts. 

“A lot of times we would just go to Dave’s house at night and try to figure out a way to keep the thing going. ‘Who thinks we can make money doing this and doing that?’ It takes up a lot of time, but we enjoy it. Remember, we’re a self-supported team, and we have to raise all the money ourselves.” 

Toward the end of their first season, the guys struck upon a novel way of raising that needed cash: sponsoring their own tournament. In 1971 they invited several area black teams to compete in “The First Annual S.J. Classic” at the hardball field in Parks. In the past six years the Stone Junkies have not played in their own tournament. They work full-time organizing the schedule, coordinating activities, umpiring and selling drinks and food, while the invited teams vie for tournament trophies. The Classic has become the Junkies’ biggest fundraiser, played for three days on three adjacent fields in the nearby town of Breaux Bridge, involving over 20 teams, some from as far away as Houston. Last year’s tournament netted over $1,500 for the treasury. 

The team soon learned that to sponsor such an affair annually and to compete regularly in other tournaments, they would have to form themselves into an organization. Big Boy describes it this way: “We got ourselves a president, business manager, manager, coach, treasurer and field captains, you know, infield and outfield captains. And we even got ourselves a team cook — Walter Phillips. He has a Junkies jersey with ‘Cook’ on it.” The addition of Mr. Phillips, a retired sharecropper and patriarch of one of the largest and most active families in Parks, cemented the growing love affair between the team and the community. The Stone Junkies were steadily becoming a cornerstone of the entire Parks community. 

Big Boy recalls the team’s first major road trip. “We went to Houston by school bus. We had this guy we used to hire who’d charge us something like $200, and we used to charge $10 a head. We’d bring all the players, plus outsiders. And we used to get a school bus full! We’d leave Parks Saturday morning about three. The bus went all night. Everybody would be all excited. They had taken their naps and everybody was up. We’d get there, stop at a station, and people’d go call their relatives to come pick them up. And we’d come back Monday or something like that.” Wild Child quickly adds, “Everybody went there like we was going for the World Series!” 

A trip to a city as far away as Houston gave the people from Parks, particularly the youngsters, experiences that they probably would not have had without the Junkies. Ku-Nook explains, “Through us they got opportunities, you know, that we didn’t have, cause through softball, when we go to Houston, everybody goes to Houston. They got guys who probably would never have gone to Houston if it wouldn’t be for softball. They got guys who would probably never have gone to Lake Charles, who never slept in a hotel, that have experienced it. Sometimes we go and take them on the beach. Spend the whole day on the beach.” 

Coach Dave continues, “By being with softball, you get to meet and know a lot of people. We walk around with our caps and our shirts and our jackets on, and a lot of people say, ‘He’s a Stone Junkie, you know!’ The name Junkies has carried us through a lot of different phases.” Miles adds how Dave, himself, once got a special boost. “One time,” he recalls, “Dave went into a department store in Lafayette. He was going to get something and ‘Say, aren’t you the Coach of the Junkies?’ And the guy gave Ku-Nook a 50 percent discount on a suit!” 

For a large part, though, the team plays in the tournaments for the status that it gives the town. As Miles explains, “To be known that the team is bringing some kind of glamor, some limelight to Parks! This might bring somebody, or something might accidentally be noticed through the Junkies. The name has brought not only prestige, but a lot of exposure to our community.” Ku-Nook adds: “Our team is mostly a home team. The guys on the team grew up together. When we play, we play with pride and dedication. When you’re winning and having people there praising you, and you’re getting trophies, it makes you feel good. You see, we ain’t got no sponsor. We depend on ourselves and there ain’t nobody who can come out there and say, ‘Well, y’all got to do this and that.’ We have guys on the team that graduated from college. They could’ve gotten jobs out of state, but tried their best to get jobs around here to keep it together. A lot of people are proud to be a Junkie. We have a name and we call ourselves a legend.” 

No one relates bits of the legend better than Miles, who loves to tell of the team’s greatest tournament comebacks. “One time we were playing in Lafayette. The Machines were supposed to be a powerhouse. They were more mature, bigger and older players. They knew the game. We got to the finals with the Machines, and they were tough. We had to beat them twice to win. They had a lead on us, and we started chipping away. I came to bat with runners at first and second. There were two outs. We needed runs. It was one and one on me. The pitch came, and I hit a shot. The ball was gone the minute I hit it! The guy went to the fence, tried to climb the fence, and he just hung on the fence and watched the ball go. Brose and them were jumping for joy! That demoralized the Machines; we broke their backs. We went on to the next game. We came up there and just pounded them to death. It was almost, what, two, three in the morning when the second game ended. Then, man, we started dancing, man, on the field. Just dancing!” 

Dancing on the field after a spectacular comeback victory is only one aspect of the Junkie legend. Another is singing. From a team born with the name of a song, what else can you expect! Dave explains: “Well, they’d be singing. Charlie would come up there and make up a few lines like: 

Everywhere we go, people want to know who we are. 

We say, we’re the mighty Junkies, 

Mighty, mighty Junkies, and we go, 

Ou, ah, cha, cha, cha, 

Ou, ah, cha, cha, cha. 

And everybody would sing, you know, they would just love that. And we sang before, after and during the game. People used to come out just to see 60 us sing!” Wild Child thinks back and is amazed at how the legend evolved. “We just started as guys getting together and just wanting to have a common goal of playing together. Then it started as a pride thing, which it still is, as well as fun. But the pride grew, and it kept on growing. And the Junkies turned out to be fun. It was fun and strong competition, like you were playing for the cup for your town. You know, who’s the biggest and the baddest, and you have to live up to that.” 

It didn’t take long for the Junkies to become the “biggest and baddest” black softball team locally. They were still playing under-financed local black teams. Ku-Nook remembers when the team was winning steadily after three seasons, and “Everybody said, ‘Well, why don’t y’all go big time?’ By big time, it means instead of playing St. John’s Plantation and Cypress Island, ‘why don’t y’all go to Lafayette and try to play against, you know, the white boys!’” 

 

The Big Time 

When they did try to go “big time,” the team had a rude awakening. In 1974, it took more than community support, organization, talent and desire for a black softball team to be able to break into all-white leagues and tournaments. The white leagues were generally highly organized and firmly established. Their teams had financial support and good equipment. 

Coach Dave describes what happened when the team tried to enter established tournaments in their own parish: “Now the St. Martin Parish League, they didn’t have no blacks. You see, they didn’t allow blacks to play. They would give a tournament in Breaux Bridge and we’d call and say, ‘Look, we want to get in.’ ‘Oh yeah, Dave Thibodeaux, Stone Junkies. . . . Oh, we’re full,’ they’d always say. ‘We’re full’ or ‘We don’t think it would be right for you to come here.’ But we’d just keep asking. You know, we’d go around and we’d say, ‘Well, why can’t we play here?’ We were just dumbfounded by the people saying, hey, cause we’re black, we can’t play there.” 

Shut out of the local white league, the Junkies sought out leagues and tournaments in nearby cities where the atmosphere was more hospitable. By 1974, they were playing in both all-black and integrated tournaments in Lafayette, Lake Charles, New Iberia and Houston. But even then, things did not always go smoothly. Ku-Nook explains: “We’d go to tournaments and we’d be THE black team. People expected us to fight and argue, but we were going there as we should, with respect. If the umpire would make a bad call, regardless if he was white or black, we wouldn’t argue. And if somebody would argue, I would argue,” asserts the usually calm coach. 

“In 1975, we joined a white league in New Iberia. It was a hassle for us to go way down there to play, but we just joined it to say, ‘They’re gonna have a black team.’ It took a while, but now we’re accepted. In fact, we have quite a few white players who back us now.” 

“When we first got to New Iberia,” Miles recollects, “they wouldn’t let us get in those tournaments on weekends because we were black. So when we did get in there, we had turmoil with calls. A lot of the calls would go against us, especially in the close games and when we were beating teams that were supposed to win. But through guidance by Coach Dave and Alton and Julius, we were able to keep our cool and maintain that athletic style. Like diplomacy, you know, maintain our cool and just play our game and beat them with the sticks and the gloves. 

“Like, one time we were coming back and beating a pretty strong team. We had a call at second base. Hypolite was running and he’d thrown a beautiful hook slide on the guy, and he completely eluded the tag. The umpire kinda turned his head and made the call. It was so obvious, even to the fans. All the guys started to get up and Dave told us to keep our cool and he said, ‘Let me argue.’ So he went up to them and talked to them in a mild-mannered way, because we weren’t established and we couldn’t afford to get anybody thrown out of the game or the tournament. Then Dave came back. He said, ‘We just got to go out there. We’re not gonna win anything close, so we just gotta go out there and put it out of reach.’ Eventually, we won that game.” 

In 1975, the Stone Junkies were invited to participate in the Louisiana State Slow-Pitch Softball Championship Tournament — the first time an all-black team had won such a distinction. Although they finished somewhere in the middle of the pack of the state’s 39 best teams, the trophy won at “State” is the most cherished of all. Added to the growing collection of the other team trophies on display, this one proved to them and their fans that the Junkies could play with the best. 

“You know,” Wild Child comments philosophically, “there’s personal pleasure in life. There’s more to life than monetary value. When people are happy and like what they’re doing and love the surroundings like I love the Junkies, well . . . you’ve ridden the low tides with them, from when they were just a pond of water. And now you’ve dug a bigger hole and made it a river. And now you’ve dug it again and now we’re riding the wave of an ocean!”  

 

The Challenge Today 

Toward the end of 1975, a sudden economic swing gave the people of Parks an extraordinary lift — with implications for the Junkies both as individual players and as a team. A textile mill just five miles from Parks, established locally in 1972 as a division of the Union Underwear Company, began in 1975 to expand its work force from several hundred to nearly 2,000 workers. Suddenly, and for the first time ever, regular, full-time employment, paying at least the minimum wage, was available close to home. Never mind the hectic pace of work and the round-the-clock shifts; it was guaranteed work, rain or shine, and for a people down so long, this was up. 

As rapidly as jobs were secured, the face of the community changed. Consumer credit became widely available to Parks residents. Houses were renovated and a host of consumer goods ranging from cars and motorcycles to furniture and household appliances were purchased. Cars meant unaccustomed individual mobility and cash-on-hand meant enjoying things long available but not accessible. By early 1976, the stunned community began to feel its way along the dizzying path of relative prosperity. Good times had arrived. 

At the same time, equal job opportunity laws and booming local growth in general opened up jobs in other critical employment sectors such as the oil industry, resulting in a phenomenon that no one in Parks would have believed could have existed: virtual full employment. 

This incredible change affected the Stone Junkies deeply. By the 1976 season, all the players, except the few still in school, were working. Two players who had previously left the team to work in Houston rejoined the Junkies when they procured jobs at the textile mill. Today, all of the 22-member Stone Junkie organization hold down full-time jobs, and almost all own cars. 

The changes of jobs, money and mobility have had positive and negative effects on the team. Certainly, the Junkies still have to hustle for money to meet team expenses, but, as Dave puts it, “Right now, we got it. It’s still not the way we want it, but at least now I’m working and everybody’s working. A lot has changed.” 

There’s more money in the treasury now to back up the sense of pride and friendship known locally as “Junkie Style.” The same ballclub that cares about winning has also built a tradition of caring off the field. “Whenever a relative of a player is sick, we send a bouquet of flowers to them,” explains 23-year-old Rodney “Port” Potier, the Junkies second baseman. “When there’s a wake in Parks, the Junkies are always there and always send flowers. I remember when my mother was sick. The team got together and sent a lovely bouquet to her. It really made her happy. If there’s not enough money in the treasury for something, we all chip in from our pockets.” 

The days of renting the school bus to go to Houston are over. “Everybody has a car,” Dave comments, “and we can get up and go to Houston in cars. We can stay at a hotel and put up $25.” The Junkies and their fans ride in a car caravan now and can go to tournaments more easily and more often. “It’s a little different in a way,” Wild Child says, “but we still travel together like one big, happy family.” 

Still, the changes have left their impact on the team in other ways, too. The Stone Junkies once again went to “State” in 1978; but Miles admits, “Since the latter part of the ’76 season, we have been in the middle of a decline.” Wild Child and his brother Rodney see a definite link between the new wealth and the team’s decline. In the early years, the team practiced at least three or four times a week. Nowadays, says Miles, “We haven’t practiced often, and the practices haven’t been taken that serious and as a team. We have the best talent we’ve ever had, but no matter how good you are and how much talent you have, once you don’t keep in time with your skills, you’re gonna lose the sharpness you have.” 

Rodney carries the explanation a little further. “In the early years, the guys didn’t have much to do, so we were almost always by the Stand in the afternoon, ready to practice. Now, a lot of times, work schedules conflict with practice. And guys have other stuff to do, too. A lot of the guys are married now, which puts more complications into it, since they have family obligations. Sometimes, some of the guys are just hard to find! Some of the guys are not as ready to go all out now because they’re afraid if they get hurt and miss work, it’ll mess them up.” 

For the players who work offshore on an oil rig, seven days on and seven days off, work schedules keep them from games as well as practices. Milton “Frenchie” Potier, one of three players in this position, complains, “Every darn time we have to play in District or State Tournaments, it’s when I’m stuck out on that oil rig. Every time! I’ve never made it to State yet!” 

Ironically, prosperity threatens the continued success of the Junkies today more than the obstacles of adversity in the past. But Joseph “Choc” Carnell, at 21 one of the youngest Junkies, sees the team becoming an even stronger force in the community. “A lot of the kids in Parks have talent, but they never have an opportunity to use it,” he explains. “Now is the time for us to establish a scholarship fund so we can send some of those kids through college. Guys on the team who have kids now should be real interested in that, cause maybe if we get this thing going by, you know, putting so much in an account every month, when their kids are ready for college, the Stone Junkies scholarship will be there.” 

And most players, including Wild Child, feel that the future is bright for the Junkies. After all, Miles reasons, “When you can ride the high and low tide with individuals this long, you have a certain attachment that you get, and even through all the turmoil you have, you manage to stick together. A lot of us now see the real significance of surviving through all this. Don’t worry, we’re coming back.”