"These people are paying tribute to me for what they say that I did to them in the community," Eddie "Porky" Brooks said. "All I did was raise hell."
Friday evening, Peorians honored Brooks, a longtime resident who played for the Negro Leagues' Kansas City Monarchs in the early 1960s and went on to coach for decades at Woodruff and Manual High Schools.
The celebration at Q4U restaurant on MacArthur Highway marked the release of the biography Major League Dreams, Minor League Memories: The Life and Times of Eddie “Porky” Brooks, written by Kim Elaine Gordon, alongside a limited-edition tribute T-shirt from Black Ball NLB Sportswear.
Dan Ruffin, who owns the restaurant, said his connection to the honoree goes back decades, and he was glad to provide the space to celebrate Brooks' biography and his induction into the Black Sport Hall of Fame.
"I was one of his little leaguers," Ruffin said. "He coached against me when I was in high school. I've known him all my life."
Marc Anthony Porch of Black Ball NLB and Black Ball Diversified organized the celebration. His company has been telling the story of Black baseball through apparel since opening a Negro League Baseball store in Northwoods Mall in 1995.
As a kid in the 1970s, Porch said Brooks was the coach everyone wanted.
"I wanted to play Little League for this man. Forget football, forget basketball," Porch said. "We was ahead of [practice] time — maybe two, three hours ahead of time — just to get that opportunity to play little league for him."
Porch said Ruffin told him, "We need to give him his flowers while he's here."
He wants the recognition to keep going.
"Let's give him a proclamation. Let's give him a street renamed after him," Porch said, adding that Brooks "needs to have that honor on center stage at that diamond downtown."
Brooks grew up in Peoria and played ball at Manual High School before starting college at Western Illinois University and getting the call.
"I got a call from the Kansas City Monarchs that they had a spot open for me to catch a bus, meet them in Cedar Rapids, Iowa," Brooks said. "So I went with them, saved my money."
By then, the Negro Leagues' days as a major league were over. Integration had pulled Black stars into Major League Baseball after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947, and league play faded through the 1950s. Some minor league teams like the Monarchs lived on into the ‘60s.
"They were letting a few Blacks in by then. I can name them: Henry Aaron, Willie Mays," Brooks said. "I was young, putting on that Monarch uniform... it didn't get real important to me until after I was through playing. Then I got older and I realized, hey, these people were real important."
His teammates included Satchel Paige and Goose Tatum, the Harlem Globetrotters star who also played for the Monarchs. But Brooks said some of the most important lessons those men taught him weren't about baseball. They were about surviving a Southern tour as a Black man in the early 1960s.
"The first thing they told me is what I couldn't do," Brooks said. "Like give right away to the sidewalk if you see a white man and a white woman coming. We got a per diem every day — I got nine dollars every day to eat — and he said, by no means, go to a white establishment and try to eat. I was from Peoria, and I can go anywhere I wanted in Peoria. But down there, you couldn't do it."
Brooks eventually returned to Western Illinois to finish his degree, then came home to coach at Woodruff and Manual.
"Couldn't make it as a player, so I thought I'd try to teach other people," he said. "Other than playing it, there's no better thing to do than to coach it."
Gordon, the biographer, spent weeks with Brooks recording his stories.
She said one story stuck with her: At 14 or 15, Brooks was invited to spend a summer traveling with a Negro League team — and his mother refused to let him go. It was just two years after the murder of Emmett Till, who was born almost exactly a year before Brooks.
"That was affecting Black parents," Gordon said. "They were like, no, I'm not letting my child out of my sight. And going down through the South? Are you crazy?"
For Porch, that history is why this current celebration matters.
"This is beyond sports," Porch said. "The kids and the community really need to hear his story."
Brooks kept his message to young Peorians simple: "Get your education. If you want to be a ball player, try that, but have something to fall back on."
