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Neil Lanctot. Campy: The Two Lives of Roy Campanella. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. 516 pages, including notes, appendix, and index, no bibliography. Hardcover, $28.00.
Readers of Neil Lanctot's award-winning Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution expect a high standard of research and writing from him and he does not disappoint in the first full biography of Hall of Fame catcher Roy Campanella. Utilizing an impressive number of sources, including interviews with many of Campanella's contemporaries, Lanctot crafted a book rich in detail and a strong narrative flow. He chronicles the career of Campanella from the Negro Leagues to the majors and in the final two chapters, he writes in moving depth about the automobile accident that leftCampanella a quadriplegic yet ultimately made him a symbol of regeneration and hope.
Not surprisingly, given Lanctot's profound knowledge of Negro baseball history, the opening chapters move along briskly. We learn that Campanella was born in 1921, the youngest of five siblings raised by John and Ida Mercer Campanella, an inter-racial couple who lived in the blue-collar north Philadelphia neighborhood of Nicetown (named after the deNeus brothers, Dutch Huguenots who settled in the area centuries earlier). Though he was raised in a diverse ethnic area, Campanella endured his share of "halfbreed" taunts in the schoolyards and at times responded with his fists. Early on his mother counseled him never to forget that he was as good as anybody.
As Lanctot makes clear, education was not a goal for the Campanella children nor was it for most African American children in segregated America before World War II. It was thus fortunate that young Roy Campanella had exceptional skills at baseball. Lanctot chronicles the Campanella's rise from playing on semi-pro teams in the Philadelphia area to becoming a full-fledged member of the prominent Negro National League Elite Giants...