Dash of Pepper!: The Depression, The Hobo, and the 1931 World Series

Dash of Pepper!: The Depression, The Hobo, and the 1931 World Series is the first book about the 1931 World Series and its unlikely star, Johnnie Leonard Roosevelt “Pepper” Martin. Born in Oklahoma in 1904, Martin grew up in poverty, performing farm labor with his family and attending school only sporadically (he was eventually expelled for his lack of shoes). Local sandlots served as his introduction to baseball, bringing him into an unpretentious world of hand-me-down leather, battered balls bursting at the seams, and boyhood. He was immediately hooked.

Martin spent his adolescence working a variety of odd jobs and playing for even odder baseball teams before making a living as a player for the East Texas League beginning in 1925, the owner of which sold him to the St. Louis Cardinals later that year. Martin played for the Cardinals’ minor league affiliates for the next two years, all while continuing his boyhood habit of “hoboing” freight trains to travel to games. Promoted to the major leagues in 1927, Martin was sent back down to the minors two years later, making his return to the Big Leagues in 1931 and soon thereafter emerging as the star of that year’s World Series. Historians still credit Martin, with his .500 batting average, 4 doubles, 1 home run, and 5 RBIs, for the Cardinals’ taking the championship. 

Author Justin Wingerter documents the words of reporters from every state who told of a Depression-weary nation enthralled by the self-described hobo with endless hustle — “Don’t say Pepper, say STAR,” wrote The St. Louis Star (a play on its motto, “Don’t say ‘paper,’ say STAR”) after the Cardinals’ Game Three win. As Wingerter argues, Martin became a symbol of the forgotten man at a time when his fellow Americans needed a hero. His performance in the 1931 Series was followed obsessively by farmers, businesspeople, industrial workers, and even inmates, all of whom found in Martin a source of solace in a time of widespread misery. As one sportswriter opined in Waterloo, Iowa, “The Pepper Martins have a way of making us forget it all.” 

In Dash of Pepper!, Wingerter explores the 1931 World Series in the context of the era’s national mood, populating the book’s pages with a host of colorful characters reaching far beyond Martin: One-Eyed Connelly, the famed gatecrasher who eventually met his match; the masked assailants of the St. Louis Milk War, a violent labor action that shared the city’s frontpages with the Series; banking regulators rushing to save deposits at Philadelphia’s Franklin Trust, and more.

With Dash of Pepper!, Wingerter makes an original contribution to the field, its focus on American society making it particularly valuable to lovers of United States history in addition to baseball fans.