We Called Him BUnny
It’s 1934. You’re fifteen years old. Your baseball team is competing in a national championship series in North Carolina. No sooner do you step off the train in Gastonia than the band stops playing. The bus waiting for you pulls away from the curb. At the hotel, you learn there’s no bed for the only black player on the team. His name is Bunny Taliaferro. He’s registered as the coach’s valet, and he has to sleep on a cot. Beds are for white people. When word gets out that the squad from Springfield, Massachusetts, has a black player on its roster, more than two thousand people show up at the team’s batting practice. You’re told if you take the field it will be the last time you ever put on a baseball glove. Then it happens: Bunny steps into the batter’s box.
Available at Levellers Press
A HOME RUN FOR BUNNY
The True story of an all-star baseball team from Springfield, Massachusetts. When racial prejudice threatens to keep Bunny off the field, the team must choose to follow their dream of playing in the championship or to stand up for their teammate.
Available at Amazon
Photo credit: Diane Lyn Andersen
About the Author
Richard Andersen has written twenty-nine books, including novels, critical studies, books on writing, a biography, a children’s book, and an examination of contemporary education: Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic.
A former Fulbright Professor, Karolyi Foundation Fellow, and James Thurber Writer in Residence at Ohio State University, Richard teaches writing and literature at Springfield College, where he was honored with the college’s Excellence in Teaching Award and nominated for the Carnegie Foundation’s United States Professor of the Year Award.
A sports enthusiast, Richard was a bronze-medal winner in the 1976 New York City Bicentennial Marathon and was a member of the 2004 silver-medal winning basketball team from Massachusetts in the New England Senior Olympics.
Richard and his wife Diane Lyn live in Montague, Massachusetts.
Website: RichardAndersen.net