Photo credits: Richard Porter for Live in Everett
As a child growing up in the Kansas City Metro Area, I heard many stories about the historic 18th & Vine District and the city’s Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.
When I grew older, it was an absolute honor to meet the late great Buck O’Neil in person during a Black History Festival, which was co-sponsored by a few well-known nonprofits in the area. The stories I hear about O’Neil and the KC Monarchs of the legendary Negro Leagues still leave me in awe to this day.
As an avid sports fan who was born into a sports-loving family, finally visiting the 18th & Vine area’s Negro Leagues Baseball Museum was an honor. Several years ago, I had the pleasure of covering a local story for a magazine, which ran a cover story on the museum’s director in the same issue my article was featured. I lived in the KC Metro Area from 1986 to 2017.
Today, as a resident of the Seattle Metro Area, I just recently learned about an all-black sports team from this region, which was equally as legendary as the KC Monarchs. Before coming across the information I found online about Everett, Washington’s “Brown Bombers,” (pictured) I had never heard of them. I have been a resident of Everett, Washington since February 2017.
According to Richard Porter, a sportswriter, and local historian, the Brown Bombers were an all-black, semipro baseball team that played at Everett’s historic Paine Field during World War II. In Porter’s revised September 2020 article about this legendary black ball club, he wrote that the picture used to illustrate this report is probably the only existing photo of the Brown Bombers.
“The Brown Bombers were formed out of the 66th Aviation Squadron and they played semipro ball at Paine Field. Military baseball, or ‘service ball’ as it was called, was a popular pastime during the Second Great War,'” Porter writes.
To read Porter’s official report for the Live In Everett newspaper about Puget Sound’s mysterious all-black baseball team, click here.
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