How fast was James “Cool Papa” Bell? Fast enough to score from first on a sacrifice bunt. Fast enough to steal two bases on a single pitch. And, as Satchel Paige told the story over the years, fast enough to switch off the light and make it into bed before the room went dark.

“Cool Papa” Bell played with Satchel Paige at the peak of both of their careers. They were teammates on the 1930s Pittsburgh Crawfords, one of the best Negro League teams ever. In 1937 both joined the team of Dominican dictator Trujillo, winning a championship with help from Leroy Matlock, Sam Bankhead, and a dozen other Negro Leaguers.

Cool was there again for Satchel in the 1940s, teaching the aging pitcher to throw a knuckleball, which meant gripping the horsehide with the tips, nails, and knuckles of his middle fingers. Slower than his 1930s fastball, but just as hard to hit.

After he stopped playing, Cool Papa spent twenty-one years as a custodian and night watchman at City Hall in St. Louis, never joining Satchel in the Major Leagues. Satchel made sure, though, that Cool was not forgotten, at least in the Paige household. His children spent time with Bell and learned firsthand what it was like to travel in the segregated South, playing great ball despite the daily challenges of Jim Crow.

Like Satchel said, remembering him means remembering all the great Negro Leaguers, including the fastest of all, Cool Papa Bell.

I am jealous of those of you who got to meet Satchel Paige. I’d have given anything to do the same.

All the same, I feel like I got to know Satchel like I might have an old uncle I’d never met but heard so much about, or even a grandfather, by spending two years absorbed in his newspaper clippings and stats, talking to his friends, family and teammates, several of whom had never had a chance to tell their stories, retracing his steps through Mobile, Kansas City, Puerto Rico and beyond, and learning about his exploits over 40 years of baseball and three-quarters of a century living an amazingly full life.

Satchel Paige gave more to baseball than brilliant pitching. In 1968 he ensured a strong start for the then brand new Atlanta Braves, attracting fans as only a player of his stature could do, and building bridges that eased Atlanta’s racial tension.

William Bartholomay was a Chicago insurance executive who in 1962 bought the Milwaukee Braves and in 1966 moved them to Atlanta. Bartholomay care about Satchel enough to hire him as a pitcher-coach-trainer for long enough to meet his pension needs. In case there was any doubt about what he was doing, he assigned Satchel No. 65, the age at which his retirement salary would kick in. “Baseball would have been guilty of negligence should it not assure this legendary figure a place in the pension plan,” the owner said at the signing in 1968. Looking back forty years on, Bartholomay says Satchel justified his faith by performing sensationally as a goodwill ambassador, the way he had for Saperstein and his other benefactors.

He did it partly by signing autographs and spending time with fans. The team was new to Atlanta, and its fans were new to the team and often to baseball itself. Satchel helped with the adjustment. An even richer dividend from hiring him came during the summer of 1968, when riots were raging and cities burning in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Having a bridge-builder like Satchel was reassuring to Atlanta and to the Braves. He was not the only black on the team, just the best-known and most-trusted. He had suffered the Jim Crow injustices King railed against and embodied the preacher’s dream of an integrated America. “He came to us four months after the King funeral in Atlanta,” says Bartholomay. “Those were pretty tough times for African-Americans and the country in its entirety. Satchel understood that. He helped in a way that went way beyond baseball.”

Life with Satchel brought new touches to Atlanta’s start-up franchise. A rocking chair was installed in front of his locker. He had young teammates toting his fishing gear and serving as gophers. Names were more twisted than ever, intentionally or otherwise. “He called me Daffy,” says Dusty Baker. “I said, ‘My name is Dusty.’ He said, ‘Daffy, I know what your name is.”’ In spring training Satchel lived with friends, as was his wont, but this time it was at a funeral home. On the bus he broke the mournful quiet after painful losses, getting the team laughing with tales of Cool Papa Bell hitting a popup so high that it took a full day for it to fall back to Earth. On the plane he still carried his typewriter, along with a suitcase, clothes bag, and attaché case. Phil Niekro, the world’s most accomplished knuckleballer, recalls Satchel sitting at the back of the plane by himself with his case on the pull-out tray. “I was going to the bathroom and he said, ‘Niekro, sit down for a second. Do you drink?’ I said that I have one now and then and he said, ‘What would you like?’ Anything I wanted was there in his little case.” What impressed the Torre brothers was Satchel’s attitude about life. “He was always sort of being thankful for just being alive. He was thankful he got the opportunity to play in the Majors even as late as he got it,” says Frank. “It was all about life and Satchel enjoyed living,” agrees Joe, the ex-Yankees’ skipper now managing the Los Angeles Dodgers: “He never stopped thinking young.”

They called Satchel a trainer, but “he didn’t do any training,” recalls Dave Percley, the Braves’ real trainer. What he wanted to do was pitch. Bartholomay was concerned about his eyesight, “which was going pretty rapidly. We worried that he wouldn’t see a line drive coming back to him.” But Satchel proved that even at the age of sixty-two the crack of a bat was enough to tell him where the ball was headed, and he pitched a couple of innings in an exhibition game for the Braves’ highest-level minor league team, Triple-A Richmond. It was a face-off for the ages when fellow Mobilian Hank Aaron stepped to the plate: history’s greatest hurler against its greatest hitter. Satchel was smiling as he unleashed his first one, a slow arcing pitch. Hank had stepped out of the box, but too late. Strike one. The next was slower still. Hank dropped his bat into the dirt in disgust. Strike two. The future home run champ checked his swing on the next pitch, making the count one ball, two strikes. “Now Aaron, still glowering at his old friend, stepped forward in the box as far as rules would allow,” Wilt Browning, who covered the Braves for the Atlanta Journal, remembered years later. “Again Paige’s pitch came floating toward the plate out of the fading light of early evening. Aaron tried to time the pitch. He made a mighty swing. The ball clicked weakly against the top of Aaron’s bat and flew softly, with little arc, to the waiting third baseman for the out. The old man pounded his bony fist into his glove with the sort of youthful joy all of us could understand.”

The heyday of Negro Leagues baseball, the Homestead Grays and the instrumental role Satchel Paige played in filling the baseball stadium: take a look at this snapshot, which includes not just footage of players, but also of fans.

Gone But Not Forgotten

Just back from another series of talks, including one yesterday evening in my hometown, Lexington, MA. There were four people in the audience who had seen Satchel Paige pitch.

Here’s one of the best eyewitness accounts of what it meant to blogger Conrad Hake to see Satchel Paige in person in 1960. Work through the first paragraph and then read what Hake has to say here.

Did you see the great Leroy “Satchel” Paige pitch?

At almost every talk I give, someone asks how I pick topics as seemingly incongruous as the Pullman Porters, the Jewish Diaspora, the birth of public relations, mental health and Satchel Paige.

What ties them together is that they are important stories that are at risk of slipping away. Why? Because they have been forgotten or told incompletely. Because first-hand witnesses are aging and their experiences have not been recorded.

Getting to those witnesses is the first step. The next is collecting everything written about the people and the era, which generally amounts to thousands of magazine and newspaper articles, hundreds of books and endless unpublished material. For Satchel alone, I have 72 pages of printed footnotes and bibliography, with lots more online.

Last week at Boston University I joined other authors in talking about that process, as described by Bill Kirtz at Poynter.org.

The first of what organizers hope will be an annual Boston Book Festival was last weekend in Copley Square, and it was spectacular, at least from my vantage point. First, lead sponsor State Street Bank had me in for an hour-long signing where they gave away 200 copies of Satchel.

Then I did a panel with two of my sports-writing heroes: Jackie MacMullen, a former Boston Globe colleague who just did a great book with Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, and Glenn Stout, who has written more than 50 books on baseball and other sports topics. The moderator was the eloquent Bill Littlefield, moderator of the NPR show Only a Game.

Nice way to spend a Saturday.

In the last month or so I have done talks at a public library in Des Moines, a sports club in Brooklyn, two synagogues near Boston, and yesterday, at the first-ever Boston Book Festival. Tomorrow: a church in Concord, MA.

What do those audiences have in common? Only this: that Satchel’s story seems to resonate with all of them.

That is more a tribute to him than me. His story has something for everyone — from racial pioneer to poster child for graceful aging. There’s the baseball stuff, the human tragedy of the racially segregated, impoverished world in which he grew up, and his triumphing over all that. We talk a lot these days about needing stories of human inspiration; none is more inspiring than that of Leroy “Satchel” Paige.

This past Friday’s article in the San Francisco Chronicle notes the similarities in Babe Ruth’s and Satchel Paige’s formative years in reform school, and the dramatic differences between life for the Negro Leagues and Major League players each one became.

As Scott Ostler writes, “Ruth had it easy, eased into the big-league system like a man cruising onto a freeway. Paige was like the advance scout for Lewis & Clark. He made up the rules -and broke them – as he went.”

That says it all.

During the month of October, the scout.com St. Louis Cardinals online message board is sponsoring a contest for nominate the best message board post. The winner receives a copy of Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend.

Click here for more details.

To all of you baseball fans out there: post away.