Charley “Sea Lion” Hall, pictured here warming up for the Red Sox in 1913, was born Carlos Clolo, of Mexican parentage, in Ventura, Calif.
As far as the ‘Sea Lion’ name, the only thing I ever heard was, ‘he had the voice of a walrus.’ ~ a baseball historian quoted at Wikipedia
Sea Lion Hall they used to call him. He had a raucous penetrating voice like a fog horn at sea, and when he roared, especially from the coaching lines, you could hear him all over the stands.
Hall pitched in the big leagues….when inelegant players referred to Charley as ‘the Greaser.’ He didn’t mind Sea Lion, rather relished it, but Greaser was a fighting word, and Charley was in plenty of fights. He capitalized on his ability with his fists and in handling rough customers. ~ The baseball writer Fred Lieb, quoted in a history of the St. Paul Saints
Image: Library of Congress
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The author Richard Rodriguez, himself of Mestizo (Indian and Spanish) descent, offers a fascinating and very useful perspective on the immigration controversy in his essay “Mexicans in America”:
Hispanic. In all the video footage I have seen of people crossing illegally from Mexico, of people arrested, the faces look more Indian than Spanish. Most of the illegal immigrants from Mexico may be mestizo, racially, but Indian features predominate. And isn’t that curious? The Indians are illegally coming into the United States. Indians will always wander in the Americas and they should.
Elsewhere he says:
I keep trying to tell people that Los Angeles is already the largest Indian city in the U.S., that there are Toltecs playing Little League baseball in Pasadena, Mayans making beds at the Marriott in Westwood, and Chichimecs driving buses in L.A. Los Angeles is a majority-Indian city. Of course, since we don’t see the Indian as a living figure — having turned the Indian into a kind of mascot for the ecology movement, a symbol of prehistory — we can’t see the Indian among us. But what really terrifies Americans right now is the prospect that the Indian is very much alive, that the Indian is having nine babies in Guatemala, and that those nine babies are headed this way. This is one reason why Americans hold on so dearly to the myth of the dead Indian.
Again, Richard Rodriguez — very much worth a read:
The Jury Box 