Sister Lenore Gibb and the Real Big Leagues
By Colman McCarthy
San Pedro de Macoris,, Dominican Republic—If you have a yen to talk insider baseball and are in the hemisphere’s most rabid baseball nation, the aficianada to spend time with is Sister Lenore Gibb. As a member of the Grey Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, one of Catholicism's most progressive orders with 158 women teaching, nursing, rescuing and agitating in three countries since 1926, Sister Lenore’s canny knowledge of the game is traced to her enduring ties to Dominican beisbol players.
In 1959, as a 23-year-old nun in the first fervor of missionary life, she came to Consuelo—a town of 40,000 in the province of San Pedro de Macoris. In the classrooms of Divine Providence public elementary school, it was by a touch of the Lord’s providence itself that she would become a teacher of future baseball stars.
Among the name players who first romped gloveless and often shoeless on the hardpan ball fields of Consuelo are Sammy Sosa, Jesus (Pepe) Frias, Julio Cesar Franco, Rico Carty, Alfredo Griffin, Juan Samuel, Nelson Norman, Alberto Lois, Rafael (el Gallo) Batista, Victor Davis, Hector Eduardo, Jaime Davis, Manny Acta and Clemente Hart. If baseball statisticians had a place in the books for the school which has had the most major and minor league ballplayers—peloteros—as children in the classroom, Divine Providence Elementary would be the undisputed record holder and Sister Lenore in a league of her own.
If you need to be caught up on the latest stats—batting averages, earned run averages, slumps—or are behind on recent trades, the nun is a walking Sports Illustrated. As a classroom teacher, she encouraged her children to be as gracious off the field as they are competitive on. As a mentor, she reminded them that if they did make it to the big leagues never to forget the poverty from which they rose.
And rising it was. Sosa, born into the destitution that marks Conseulo as one of the most impoverished towns in Latin America’s second poorest country, had to leave school at age 8 to grub pesos as a shoeshine boy. Griffin was a 17-year-old 6th grader when he signed his first pro contract. When a biography of Rico Carty was published last year, the outfielder who hit .299 in 15 seasons in the majors, sent his old teacher a copy with this inscription: “To Sister Lenore—Take care of yourself. Thank you for your efforts and teachings to our children. Thank you, thank you.”
According to Alfredo Medina, the author of two books on Dominican baseball and the only professional writer in Conseulo, Ozzie Virgil of the San Francisco Giants was the first to make it to the majors, in 1956. Some 320 would follow, with more than 70 on big league rosters now, and several hundred in the minors. Medina believes that per capita no other nation has produced more major and minor leaguers, and no other area more than San Pedro de Macoris.
Sister Lenore joined the Grey Sisters in 1953 after hitting and throwing right as a schoolgirl softball player in Windsor, Canada. In mid-June she observed her 50th anniversary of joining her religious order, with a Golden Jubilee celebration at the Grey Sisters motherhouse near Ottawa. At 67, she is slender, long-striding and tall—the build of the left-fielder she once was. If needed, she was a catcher. On a recent afternoon in the common room of the Divine Providence convent that is on the quad of the school and around the corner from Conseulo’s largest ball field, the nun recalled the September day in 1959 when she and two other Grey sisters arrived in the community. They had been invited at the request of the priest at St. Ann’s parish who saw education of the poor as an essential ministry. “It was difficult at first,” Sister Lenore said. “The local people didn’t understand what we were here for. We were white, we were women, we were foreigners. We wore long religious habits. But the children were athletic, and so was I. It was almost natural that we started playing baseball together, volleyball and basketball, too. Another sister was musical. That was her way of connecting.”
Consuelo, which translates to consolation in English, is 50 miles east of Santo Domingo on the south central coast of the country. A smoke-belching sugar mill, once owned by a U.S. company but now run by Dominican businessmen, dominates the town where unemployment is over 90 percent. Like a daily Vesuvian eruption, the mill’s chimney spews ashes that darken the sky and float to the earth in a free-fall of flaked pollution. Narrow unpaved lanes, shared by unhelmeted scooterists (the local taxi service), donkey carts, Nubian goats, listless chickens and mongrels, wind through neighborhood’s cramped with dwellings only a slim cut above huts. Like an orchid among weeds, a gaily painted, spacious and well-windowed home occasionally breaks the pattern. It’s a house bought by a multi-millionaire big-leaguer for his relatives.
Surrounding Conseulo are thousands of acres of cane fields, worked seasonally by low-paid and injury-plagued cutters. One of the busiest local shops is Western Union, into whose office survival money pours from New York and elsewhere to the families back home. A few miles east of Consuelo is Casa de Campo, a tourist resort for wealthy North Americans and Europeans and where room rates of $280, and $180 greens fees at the Teeth of the Dog oceanside links are higher than the yearly incomes of many Consuelans.
What began in 1959 with one woman’s use of baseball to lower barriers has expanded into another story, one that has as much to do with service, spirituality and scrappiness as with a game. That year, 30 students and one teacher were in the elementary school. Space was shared with a barbershop. This school year, just ended, more than 10,000 students were receiving quality education in four large schools in town and 13 satellite schools spread throughout the sugarcane fields in communities called bateyes.
Like the sweetness that springs from the fertile Dominican earth in high cane stalks, the growth in education means that children must be schooled in shifts: 8 a.m. to noon, 2 to 6 p.m., and 6:30 to 10:30 p.m. Most teachers take two shifts and are paid the equivalent of $100 a month for each. The wage, paid by the government, comes to about $1.10 an hour.
The increase in student population is the result of the Sisters going into Consuelo’s neighborhoods to preach the gospel of education, and then backing up the talk by blistering their hands from shaking assorted money trees: the Dominican government, the bishop, the Grey Sisters, donors, family and friends. Sister Lenore began as a first grade teacher and taught in all the grades before becoming principal of Divine Providence in 1987. Ten years later, she accepted the government’s invitation to be the school district superintendent. It meant less time with children, but with an administrative chance to bring first-rate education to a remote part of the world where much else in the lives of the dispossessed families is third or fourth rate.
After years of teaching, Sister Lenore realized that more was needed than quality schools. Thirty five per cent of Consuelo’s high school graduates enter college, mostly in Santo Domingo, but only a few have the money to finish and get a degree.
What happens then? Throughout Conseulo are some answers: buildings, ones in which are programs funded by scholarships Sister Lenore created for those who can’t make it on their own. In 1997, a job training program was started where skills in baking, sewing, plumbing, electricity, hairdressing, tourism and hotel work are taught. A health center, and near it a home for the elderly, are operating. There is the Committee of Hope, which builds houses and supplies food and clothing for the destitute. A half-finished cultural and performing arts center has gone up, to be finished when $240,000 is raised. In one of the center’s classrooms the other afternoon, two Japanese musicians—volunteers in a Peace Corps type of program—led eight Consuelo children in an informal violin concert for some guests. They belong to the recently formed Consuelo orchestra which is giving concerts throughout the country.
For Sister Lenore, and the two other Grey nuns serving here, the buildings and the programs are small signs that economic development is possible, now matter how crushing the poverty. Salaries are paid to the Consuelans who staff the programs. “People here want to work,” Sister Lenore argues. “If First World countries could help developing countries create jobs, whether it be industry or service work, and not just give or lend money, it would help stabilize the economy. Foreign investment, focused on helping a developing country while respecting its sovereignty and the dignity of the people, would be a source of employment and a sound way to combat poverty and misery. What’s needed is to allow the workers to become part-owners, so then they have a stake is running a successful company. Everyone will be interested because they will benefit personally. The work will supply meaning, not only a salary.”
As easily, and as proudly, as Sister Lenore mentions the famous baseball players who came through her classrooms, she speaks also about the other big leaguers she and the Grey Sisters have taught: the teachers, doctors, health care workers, lawyers, politicians and other professionals. Ninety five percent of the teachers in Consuelo’s 17 schools are former students of Sister Lenore: “they’re also my big leaguers.”
“If we produced another Sammy Sosa,” she says, “sure, we’d be happy. But I believe what’s more important is the person who is well-balanced in all parts of life. I’m happy for someone who has talent to play baseball and make a living at it. But I believe the wealth of a community is truly found in the good mothers and fathers who take seriously the responsibility of a family, who reverence and respect life, and are committed to helping the poor and are working to reform the economic system that keeps the poor poor.”
One Consuelan who fulfills that hope is Pepe Frias, a longstanding ally of Sister Lenore and who played nine years in the major leagues. An infielder from 1973 to 1981 for the Montreal Expos, Atlanta Braves, Los Angeles Dodgers and Texas Rangers, he is one of the few players who returned home to San Pedro and Conseulo. Local politicians showed their gratitude by naming the street where he lives with his wife and two children “Pepe Frias Boulevard.” The youngest of 15 children, whose father earned $1.50 a day cutting cane, Frias left school in the third grade to work in the sugar mill. For recreation, he played baseball. Gloves were made of scraps of canvas or cardboard. Frias didn’t own a real glove until age 19.
That was 1967 when a San Francisco Giant scout spotted a skinny kid who had quick hands, fast feet and deep reserves of desire. He was signed for $500, money his family would live off for two years. In 1970, after being released from three minor league teams, but refusing to give up because “I was the only hope for my family,” Frias gambled on playing for a semi-pro team in Canada. A Montreal Expo scout saw him and offered a contract but no money. In 1973, after three years in the bushes, the Expos brought him up.
As much as Frias benefited from baseball, he knows, as does Sister Lenore, that only a few Dominicans make it to a big league roster. Too often, they are seen by scouts and agents as commodities in the billion-dollar U.S. baseball industry. Whether they can read and write means little to the signing agents and teams panting to be enriched if the teenaged kid becomes the next Sammy Sosa. The Dominican Republic, with a population over eight million, is a nation packed with former baseball players who made it to the minors but not the majors and are now without the education or job skills to escape the poverty into which they have sunk back. Across the street from Frias’s home is the largest ball field in Consuelo, where children show up early and play late. They keep one eye on the ball and the other on scouts who might notice—who must notice, who will notice—future greatness.
The other afternoon, Pepe Frias went with Sister Lenore to the Sister Lenore Gibb Elementary School a mile outside of town. A kempt baseball field is there, overseen by Frias and Luke Mullins , a Washingtonian and former Peace Corps volunteer in Mauritania. While Frias went to the field, where six and seven-year-olds swarmed around him as if a sun god had come among them, Sister Lenore went inside the school to visit her teachers and school children. Future big-leaguers were there, too: maybe an outfielder, maybe a teacher, or a pitcher or a social worker.
A colorful mural on one of the walls on the Divine Providence quad depicts the life of St. Marguerite D’Youville, founder of the Grey Sisters and the early days of the order in Canada. The inscription reads , “A past to celebrate, a future to reveal.” Sister has invited the muralist to paint another on the opposite wall, this one to tell the Consuelo story and the inscription to read: “The whole world is filled with God’s love. All are chosen to reveal His love, here and now.”
Expressed by an educator who takes as much joy in having taught millionaire athletes as in those who have an honest job that earns a few pesos for the next meal, this is a stable piety toughened by a half-century of effective service. Whether it was taking batting practice with the children in 1959, or going to bat for all of her programs in the four decades since, this is a woman who came to play.
Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace, and teaches courses on nonviolence at three Washington-area universities and three public high schools. His recent book is “I’d Rather Teach Peace.”