This is an opinion column.

I met Lou Brock as a kid. A couple of times maybe—though the specifics are now a bit hazy.

I met him at my dad’s store, Kyle’s Sundry, in Tulsa. I’ve previously called it a Black “Happy Days”, a community gathering spot with a soda fountain and jukebox on Greenwood Ave, the heartbeat of “Black Wall Street”.

I met him because the Tulsa Oilers were the St. Louis Cardinals’ AAA baseball farm team, one step from the bigs. Towards the end of spring training every season, the Cardinals came to town and played an exhibition against their aspiring brothers. My dad often took me and my baby brother to games at Oiler Park and almost always to that exhibition, which always sold out.

While Cardinals were in town, the Black players almost always stopped by the store, often with Black Oilers—guys like Bobby Tolan and Walt Williams, both of whom had solid big-league careers. (Williams’ nickname was “No-Neck” because his head seemed to sit right atop his squatty 5-foot-6-inch frame; turns out it was caused by a typhus shot he received as a baby when his hometown, Brownwood, TX, was hit by a flood and the government ordered injection to prevent the disease from spreading.)

My mind’s eye recalls seeing Brock in the store, Bob Gibson, too. (Gibson is still, in my book, the most bad-ass pitcher ever to take the mound.) The players sat and laughed and enjoyed soda fountain fare—ice cream floats, banana splits, or just a Coke or two—while filling the jukebox with a river of quarters to keep the music flowing.

There were laughs and, Lord knows, there were stories. Though my ears, alas, were still too young to decipher them.

This was the mid-1960s. Major League Baseball, just like America, was still wrestling with race, nearly two decades after Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. It wasn’t until 1959, 12 years later, that the Boston Red Sox signed its first black player, the last MLB team to do so. (The Cardinals signed their first Black player, Tom Alston, in 1954 after team owner Gussie Busch to go find a Black player because his brewery, Anheuser Busch, sold more beer to Blacks than any other beermaker and he feared a boycott.)

In between, MLB teams variously signed players from the Negro Leagues, usually stars. Or young talents plucked from stellar college careers, often at a Black college. The signings riled white fans, surprisingly not. Not all, but some. Enough that there was, so baseball lore goes, an unspoken quota of Black players teams dared not exceed.

In 1964, the Chicago Cubs had five Black players, including a young outfielder whom the team had signed in 1960: Lou Brock. The former Southern University star made his major-league in 1962, a year after winning the Northern League Batting title. He did not fare as well initially with the Cubs. Or some of their fans.

Negro League icon Buck O’Neil was then a Cubs scout. In 2002, he wrote an essay for a book published for the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Baseball as America. He wrote of the Cubs’ quota system and of his encounter with Cubs general manager John Holland was about to trade Brock. During the meeting, Buck recalled, Holland pulled out letters from angry fans. O’Neil’s words: “And you know what those letters went on to say? ‘What are you trying to make the Chicago Cubs into? The Kansas City Monarchs?’”

I have no memory of the trade that landed Brock in St. Louis in 1964. I was just eight years old. In the ensuing years, he was just a boy’s sports hero, as were all the Black Cardinals. My parents, like many Black people of their generation, were Dodgers’ fans, for obvious reasons. Not me. Once each season, my dad drove me and my baby brother the nearly 400 miles to St. Louis for a weekend series at Busch Stadium, with the towering Gateway Arch in the background.

In 1967, the year the Cardinals became World Champions, there were six Black players on the roster: Al Jackson, Alex Johnson, Curt Flood (his absence from the HOF is shameful), Tolan, Gibson, and Brock. To that young boy, there might as well have been eight. Orlando Cepeda and Julian Javier, players with olive-toned skin from, respectively, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic were “Black” before I learned of Latin America’s profound influence on the game.

So much changed between 1967 and 1978. Too much to fully recount here. By then, my father had passed away and Greenwood Ave was essentially gone, a victim of changing times and changing lives. Brock was in the 19th and final season of a Hall of Fame career, and I was in my first year as a sports journalist—as a reporter (a fact-checker, really) at Sports Illustrated.

One of my first assignments was fact-checking a celebratory tome on Brock penned by one of our senior writers. There was no Google, of course. Few, if any resources to confirm names, dates, places, and the like. So, to verify details in stories, we went back to the source, to the subject of the story.

I had to interview Lou Brock. I was nervous as hell.

The team gave me a telephone number, the clubhouse number. Call at a certain time and ask for Brock, I was told. I did, and just a few moments after a clubhouse worker said, “Hold on,” a voice said, “Hi, this is Lou.”

Yeah, the kid almost had an accident. Right there on the phone. I don’t remember much about the chat. No, I don’t remember a damn thing. I presume I pulled it all off; the story was fact-checked, and I still had a job afterward. And a career.

Idols from our youth don’t live forever, of course. Brock died Sunday at the age of 81.

The news made me smile and become that kid on the phone again, 41 years ago.

Hi, this is Lou. Nervous as hell. Again.

A voice for what’s right and wrong in Birmingham, Alabama (and beyond), Roy’s column appears in The Birmingham News and AL.com, and occasionally in the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register. Reach him at rjohnson@al.com and follow him on Twitter.