A photo of Shoeless Joe Jackson hangs in his home-turned baseball museum. Greg Beckner/Staff
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And finally.

On finding a calling

by Lyn Riddle

Published: Sept. 18, 2009, 1:48 p.m.

The passion nibbled and gurgled and grew little by little until it reached on-a-mission status.

A sideline to a full-time job, the passion filled 13 or more years, and like many such things it arrived unexpectedly.

Now Arlene Marcley is the nation’s public face – the spokeswoman – for Shoeless Joe Jackson, the Greenville native considered the greatest natural hitter in baseball history, but banned forever from the sport he loved because he was implicated in the fix on the 1919 World Series.

Documents found in the past few years and other investigations have all but cleared Jackson of the crime of taking money to ensure the White Sox would lose to the Cincinnati Reds. He tried several times to give back money left in his hotel room. He played flawlessly.

Marcley doesn’t need to know about research or game statistics. She believed his innocence from the first time she heard about him, sitting at her desk outside the mayor’s office in Greenville City Hall.

She hadn’t been administrative assistant to Mayor Knox White long, a few months perhaps, when two men came in, gave the mayor a large, pieced-together picture of Jackson and asked him to sign a petition asking the baseball commissioner to lift the ban and let Jackson take his rightful place in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

That was 1995. She wasn’t even a baseball fan. Knew nothing about baseball might say it more accurately.

Something about this man’s story resonated with her. The unfairness. The lifetime of shame. See, Jackson was 34 when Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis banned him, despite a Chicago jury’s acquittal.

Jackson lived 30 years more. He had been a hero to Greenville, a textile mill worker who played on the Brandon Mill team and then made it big. The legend of him playing shoeless because his new cleats hurt began at that little mill field off U.S. 123, now a renovated county park.

After the 1919 series, Greenville residents shunned him and his wife Katie. The Jacksons moved to Savannah to operate a dry cleaning business and then came back home where Jackson ran a liquor store in West Greenville.

Jackson had been dead 44 years in 1995 when Marcley realized no memorial existed. Anyone looking for history went to the mill ballpark or Jackson’s grave at Woodlawn, where they left socks, bats, balls.

Marcley staged a Jackson exhibit in the City Hall lobby every July – his birth month – for five years and every year packed up the memorabilia and put it in unused rooms at City Hall and her home.

Then, when the city was getting into the statue-erecting business, she broached the idea of honoring Jackson. She collected $60,000, and Doug Smith, an art professor at Bob Jones University, crafted during his off hours a life-size statue of clay. Schoolchildren would come to the City Hall lobby to watch and if there weren’t a lot of them Smith would let them knead the clay and put it on themselves.

“That was to be my last hurrah,” Marcley said.

The bronzed statue was erected at Main and Augusta in 2002.

But in 2005, Richard Davis, who made flipping houses for a living famous, walked into her office and said he wanted to buy the house Jackson owned – the place he died. Eventually, Davis donated the house for the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum, across the street from West End Field.

She had not a moment of design instruction other than the Martha Stewart shows she taped and watched at night. Yet the place she created with the help of her husband Bill has been praised by people who design museum exhibits for a living.

Marcley estimates 4,000 people have visited the museum, which is free because she believes Jackson would welcome anyone to his home.

She hasn’t given up hope that Jackson will get his due. She feels his spirit in the house. Sometimes she wonders – why me, Joe? – then she remembers.

“It’s just a story that takes hold of your heart.”

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