📍Barrio San Antón, Carolina, Puerto Rico
1934 – 1954“I was born in August 1934 in Barrio San Antón, a poor, close-knit neighbourhood in the town of Carolina, east of San Juan, Puerto Rico, the youngest of seven children of Melchor Clemente and Luisa Walker. My father worked as a foreman in the sugar-cane fields, and also ran a small business hauling goods with a truck, and my mother ran a grocery shop and did laundry. We were poor, but our wooden house was full of love and discipline, and my parents taught me to respect everyone and to help others. I worked from a young age, delivering milk cans to our neighbours and loading trucks with my brothers to earn a few coins. Every spare moment I played baseball, in the streets and fields of San Antón, with a glove made from a coffee sack, a bat cut from a tree branch and balls made of rags and tin cans. I would squeeze a rubber ball for hours to strengthen my throwing arm. I listened to the Puerto Rican winter league games on the radio and dreamed of playing like the great Black players who came to the island. At Julio Vizcarrondo High School in Carolina, I ran track and played softball, and Roberto Marín, a local coach, recruited me for his softball team, Sello Rojo. At eighteen I signed with the Santurce Cangrejeros, and in 1954 the Brooklyn Dodgers signed me. With the Pittsburgh Pirates I won four batting titles and two World Series. In Carolina, where I grew up, the stadium and a sports city are named for me, and my statue stands there.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
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