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"They played the game of baseball Because they loved the game, Never did they think that it Would be harder to get into The Baseball Hall of Fame" -- Excerpt from the poem Negro League Black Men by Ernie Westfield Last week, Barbara Broome received letters from people from Connecticut and Colorado for a signature from her husband, former Negro Baseball League player Rochell Broome.


But Rochell Broom will not be able to answer those collectors as he passed away on April 6 from lung cancer.

"Letters come in once in a week and they are collectors who look for signatures from players," Barbara Broome said. "He was always willing to do that for people." Broome was born in Champaign but was raised in Danville. But when his playing career started, he started with the Champaign Eagles in 1956.

"I came up from Knoxville, Tenn. and I didn't really know anyone and our owner, Wardell Jackson, said Rochell was one of the people I should talk to," former teammate Ernie Westfield said. "The big thing we had in common was that we both loved baseball and were friends ever since." Rochell Broome, who was known as The Sweeper, then played for the Kansas City Monarchs in 1957. He was known for his hitting and his style on the field.

"His swing was so sweet, when he missed it carried a good breeze," Westfield said. "He had a swing almost like (Chicago Cubs Hall of Famer) Billy Williams." "He was different because he would have his uniform pressed before every game," friend Terry Townsend said. "He was the cleanest player out there and even when he struck out, he had a certain style to it." His sister, Marie Cunningham, was a young girl when she saw Rochell Broome play but does remember the times the team would play in many places, including Danville.

"We had a split family and my daddy was an umpire and we would always travel and watch Rochell's games," Cunningham said. "He was so tall and he just looked the part of a ball player. I knew he was a great player especially when people talked about him and what he did." After his career ended, Broome went to Roosevelt Law School in Chicago and earned a paralegal certificate. He would go on to work at the University of Illinois in many positions: Assistant varsity baseball coach, director of Community relations, Afro-America Commission and recruiter/counselor with Project Upward Bound. He was also the deputy director pf the Danville Community Action League.

"When he was at Illinois, it was in the late 1960's which was a tough time in our community," Townsend said. "He was a bridge between the U of I and the community and he was a leader.

"When he left, no one fill the spot for 30 years until recently when they hired three people to do his job for community relations and he laid the groundwork for that." Also what must be known is Rochell Broome was a giving person who wanted to help everyone.

"He was a paralegal but he returned home to take car of his mother and grandmother," Barbara Broome said. "Then when my father was having health problems, he helped him as well. He just had such a big heart and was willing to help everyone." "He was one of those guys who seemed to know everyone in town," Cunningham said. "He was a great in conversation and he would talk about everything from sports to politics to just everyday things." He was also a father of four children, grandfather of four and a great-grandfather of one.

"Since I was born after his career, I was able to see pictures and hear stories about his career. He also kept a lot of things about his career private," Rochell Broome's son, Richard Broome said. "He was a great father and he was a great man all around." Rochell Broome was recently inducted into the Negro Hall of Fame in Texas and Westfield, who spoke at Broome's funeral, said he and other Negro League veterans should be recognized more, especially for future generations.

"Recently a bill was passed naming May 20 Negro League Day," Westfield said. "In Danville they should celebrate it because it has a rich history of baseball and parents should tell children about the Negro Leagues.

"(Broome) was part of a movement that included players like Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays and Ernie Banks. I just think more people should know more about it."

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David Blackwell, a statistician and mathematician who wrote groundbreaking papers on probability and game theory and was the first black scholar to be admitted to the National Academy of Sciences, died July 8 in Berkeley, Calif. He was 91.

The death was confirmed by his son Hugo.

Mr. Blackwell, the son of a railroad worker with a fourth-grade education, taught for nearly 35 years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became the first black tenured professor.

He made his mark as a free-ranging problem solver in numerous subdisciplines. His fascination with game theory, for example, prompted him to investigate the mathematics of bluffing and to develop a theory on the optimal moment for an advancing duelist to open fire.

“He went from one area to another, and he’d write a fundamental paper in each,” Thomas Ferguson, an emeritus professor of statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Berkeley Web site. “He would come into a field that had been well studied and find something really new that was remarkable. That was his forte.”

David Harold Blackwell was born on April 24, 1919, in Centralia, Ill. Early on, he showed a talent for mathematics, but he entered the University of Illinois with the modest ambition of becoming an elementary school teacher. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1938 and, adjusting his sights, went on to earn a master’s degree in 1939 and a doctorate in 1941, when he was only 22.

After being awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship, established by the clothing magnate Julius Rosenwald to aid black scholars, he attended the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton but left after a year when, because of his race, he was not issued the customary invitation to become an honorary faculty member. At Berkeley, where the statistician Jerzy Neyman wanted to hire him in the mathematics department, racial objections also blocked his appointment.

Instead, Mr. Blackwell sent out applications to 104 black colleges on the assumption that no other schools would hire him. After working for a year at the Office of Price Administration, he taught briefly at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., and Clark College in Atlanta before joining the mathematics department at Howard University in Washington in 1944.

While at Howard, he attended a lecture by Meyer A. Girshick at the local chapter of the American Statistical Association. He became intensely interested in statistics and developed a lifelong friendship with Girshick, with whom he wrote “Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions” (1954).

As a consultant to the RAND Corporation from 1948 to 1950, he applied game theory to military situations. It was there that he turned his attention to what might be called the duelist’s dilemma, a problem with application to the battlefield, where the question of when to open fire looms large.

His “Basic Statistics” (1969) was one of the first textbooks on Bayesian statistics, which assess the uncertainty of future outcomes by incorporating new evidence as it arises, rather than relying on historical data. He also wrote numerous papers on multistage decision-making.

“He had this great talent for making things appear simple,” Peter Bickel, a statistics professor at Berkeley, told the university’s Web site. “He liked elegance and simplicity. That is the ultimate best thing in mathematics, if you have an insight that something seemingly complicated is really simple, but simple after the fact.”

Mr. Blackwell was hired by Berkeley in 1954 and became a full professor in the statistics department when it split off from the mathematics department in 1955. He was chairman of the department from 1957 to 1961 and assistant dean of the College of Letters and Science from 1964 to 1968. He retired in 1988.

In 1965 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

In addition to his son Hugo, of Berkeley, he is survived by three of his eight children, Ann Blackwell and Vera Gleason, both of Oakland, and Sarah Hunt Dahlquist of Houston; a sister, Elizabeth Cowan of Clayton, N.C.; and 14 grandchildren.

Mr. Blackwell described himself as a “dilettante” in a 1983 interview for “Mathematical People,” a collection of profiles and interviews. “Basically, I’m not interested in doing research and I never have been,” he said. “I’m interested in understanding, which is quite a different thing. And often to understand something you have to work it out yourself because no one else has done it."

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The cities of Champaign and Urbana honored Champaign residents Ernie Westfield and J.W. Pirtle Saturday afternoon as part of the National Negro Baseball League Recognition Day to be held Tuesday.

Both honorees played in the Negro Leagues during the '50s and '60s, including stints with the Champaign Eagles until the Negro Leagues dissipated when Major League Baseball became fully integrated.

The hour-and-a-half long program held at the City of Champaign Council Chambers focused on honoring the former players and informing the children in attendance about the 80-plus year existence of professional Negro Baseball Leagues. Eleven grade-school children wore their maroon Little League caps and shirts for the occasion.

"It's important to let the new kids that the future is there if they really want to go after it," said Pirtle, a former Champaign City Council member. "They don't know if you don't do something like this because there's not a lot of talk about (the Negro Leagues) nowadays. They can look on TV and see a baseball player, but they don't know how they got there."

Champaign resident Kimberly McCoy, 32, attended the event along with her three daughters: Sidney, 12; Tori, 9; and Madison, 8.

"I wanted them to see former players from the Negro Leagues," McCoy said. "You always hear about them, but you never get to see them in person ... They opened the doors for a lot of people."

Westfield said holding the event in Champaign was a "no-brainer."

"(Champaign) represents a lot of history," Westfield said. "A lot of the Negro League teams ended here in Champaign-Urbana. It ended here; we can do it here."

During a question-and-answer session, many of the little leaguers asked questions about how fast each player could throw a ball or how many home runs they hit.

Westfield and Pirtle recounted their playing experiences, including stories about Negro League greats Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. Pirtle said when he faced Hall-of-Fame inductee Paige he "got hit where I didn't want to get hit" as he pointed to his groin.

The event was part of a nationwide effort to acknowledge the accomplishments of Negro League players to the progress of African-Americans. Seventeen Negro League players were initiated into the Hall of Fame in 2006. No more will be admitted.

"It's just an American story that we went from having a group of people as slaves to now we have a black candidate for president," Urbana mayor Laurel Prussing said. "It shows the huge shift in attitudes."

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