MIAMI (CBSMiami) – Memorabilia from her father’s career in the Negro Baseball Leagues is displayed on the walls and on a table in a special corner of Mary Colzie’s Coconut Grove home.
A baseball jersey hangs on one of the walls among posters and framed newspaper clippings.
As she looks at the collection, Mary comments, “He was full of a lot of stories of what happened in his life.”
Jim Colzie was a World War II Veteran. After the war, he played baseball for the Indianapolis Clowns—a team with deep roots in Miami and one of the best-known teams in the Negro Baseball Leagues.
Colzie, who played Negro League Ball for 10 years, was a pitcher and also played second base.
As a little girl, Mary Colzie remembers she could not figure out why her father was signing autographs at age 70 or 80 years old.
“I later found out that, hey, my dad was famous,” Colzie said with a proud smile.
Late in life, Colzie like the Negro Leaguers of his day who never had a shot at playing in the Majors finally got the recognization they deserved.
Major League Baseball, authors, historians got the story out and a market developed for autographs and signed baseballs.
Major League Baseball accepted statistics from the Negro Leagues as “Major League,” an acknowledgment that the Negro League quality of play was indeed “Major League.”
Mary Colzie told CBS News Miami, “People were coming in for interviews, for books, autograph signings, he took trips to different places for the Negro Baseball Leagues.”
In the 60s Jim Colzie and family settled in Coconut Grove, there were six kids including Mary Colzie, all were high school and college athletes.
The Colzie name was well represented in the local sports pages especially Neal Colzie, a Miami Dolphin.
“My parents were so proud of him because he went to Coral Gables and to Ohio State to play football,” said Mary Colzie.
Neal Colzie enjoyed an 11-year career with the Miami Dolphins, Oakland Raiders, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Yet, with all the athletic and scholastic success that would be considered the ingredients of the American Dream for the Colozie family, reality was not far away during the Miami Jim Crow Era when the Colzie’s were the first Black family to move into a white Coconut Grove neighborhood.
Mary Colzie remembers, “During that time, they used to throw eggs at the house. They threw fire, trash. Everything but my dad stood strong.”
Jim Colzie and his wife would get up early, clean up the eggs and garbage, so the children would not see the vestiges of hate.
No surprise for a pitcher nicknamed “Fireball,” whose career highlight was winning a pitching duel with Negro League legend Satchel Paige and a father that worked in the dry cleaning business for years in Coconut Grove. All the while sending his six kids to college.
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