Flood hero, former Negro League player honored by Good Samaritan

There’s a centuries-old saying about how “one good turn deserves another” — quid pro quo, if you will — but it took 82 years and a Good Samaritan from Troy to make that happen for W. G. Sloan.

It finally came about last week in a way that will make you proud of your fellow man, both one from long ago and one from right now here in the Miami Valley.

But that’s getting ahead of the story.

Back in 1913, Sloan was playing baseball for the Dayton Marcos, who barnstormed across the Midwest and was the only black team playing in the Ohio-Indiana League. It would be another seven years until they would become one of the eight clubs that formed the Negro National League.

In their heyday the Marcos drew crowds of 2,000 to their games to Westwood Field and when they played the popular Kansas City Monarchs at Assumption Park, they once drew 11,000.

Although well known on Dayton’s West Side, they got little or no recognition back then in the white-owned newspapers here, so much of the populace knew little about them.

That changed with the Great Flood. That’s when Sloan went from a starting left-handed pitcher to a guy known for his steel-nerved saves.

When the nonstop rains came in late March of 1913, the Great Miami River began rising at two feet per hour and soon the levees near Monument Avenue and Taylor and Webster streets were topped or had burst completely. The water that surged into downtown Dayton was more than the amount that flows over Niagara Falls in a month.

It would become the second deadliest flood in American history and Ohio’s worst-ever natural disaster. In an apocalyptic scenario, the rising waters were followed by explosions from ruptured gas lines and fires that consumed city blocks. More than 360 people were killed in the region and 65,000 were displaced.

Thousands of residents ended up huddled on rooftops, clinging desperately to trees and telephone poles or being swept panic-stricken through the fast-moving waters as they clung to debris.

Pistol in hand, Sloan commandeered a boat from a reluctant white owner who was refusing to help people and, for the next three days, the Marcos pitcher saved more than 300 people.

Back in 1988, writer Marc Bernstein wrote an Ohio Magazine story entitled “In Search of the Well-Known Colored Ball Player.” He began the piece with a newspaper passage:

“W.G. Sloan, the well-known colored ball player, was in the rescue work continuously from Tuesday morning until Friday on the West Side. He took the Caleb family of five persons from a raft on which they had been floating, tossed in the heaving and rushing waters for 48 hours. With Frank Thoro and George Crandall helping, Sloan saved 317 people during 68 hours of continuous work. He carried five cans of fresh water. Most of the rescue work was done with a steel bottom boat which he commandeered at the point of a revolver from a selfish owner at the handle factory.”

Sloan’s story was included in the 1997 play — “1913 – The Great Dayton Flood” — which was brought back to the stage early this year at Wright State.

But unfortunately, art didn’t imitate life.

When he died in 1931, Sloan was buried with no fanfare in the very back of Woodland Cemetery. He was then pretty much forgotten, although local historian and educator Margaret Peters searched for his relatives in the mid-1970s and found two, both of whom have since died.

A few years ago when we put together a sports tour at the historic 200-acre cemetery, we came up with several well-known sports figures buried there, people like Olympic silver medalist Dave Albritton, University of Dayton basketball coach Tom Blackburn and Flyers star Donald Smith, Stivers High and Ohio State icon Bill Hosket Sr., Harlem Globetrotter Al Tucker and his son, Al Jr., a college All American and NBA player.

We also discovered many lesser-known heroes like champion rodeo rider Maggie Doane, who was killed by a bucking bronc, world cycling champ and race car driver Earl Kiser and world-renowned sharp shooter Rolla “Pop” Heikes.

Sloan’s name was never mentioned. None of us knew he was at Woodland.

Last year someone got word to me that Sloan was among the more than 105,000 people buried at the cemetery, so I met with Woodland’s Debbie Mescher, who unfolded old maps, pulled out an aging, handwritten ledger and after some study surmised that Sloan was buried in an unmarked grave in Section 123.

We found the spot and I wrote a story that ended with this line:

“The curtains have now closed on that play and soon the centennial flood exhibits and tributes will end and W.G. Sloan will slip back to obscurity in that unmarked grave in the very back of Woodland Cemetery.”

And that’s where the Good Samaritan comes in.

He doesn’t want his name used because he said the focus should be on Sloan, not him. I agreed with his wish, but still think he deserves some mention.

I can tell you he’s a 55-year-old guy who graduated from Bethel High, moved away from the area for more than three decades and now has returned with his family and works at an area wellness center.

“Growing up here I never thought about the flood at all,” he said. “I rode over the dams on my bicycle and canoed up and down the Miami River, but I didn’t really have a great understanding of what happen in 1913 until we came back here this year.

“That’s when your story, the Wright State play and the exhibit at the Dayton Art Institute made me think about Mr. Sloan. My family’s also huge Reds fans and baseball fans in general – and that angle just sent me over the top. The guy shouldn’t be lying there in an unmarked grave and just slip back into obscurity.

“I called the cemetery, first to find out if there were rules or protocol against someone who is not a family member coming in to mark a grave.

“Then I did some research, but all the people identified as his relatives are long gone. That’s when I decided to get some kind of grave marker for Mr. Sloan. In the process, I understood if some family member did come along and said ‘We don’t want that,’ it would go away.

He purchased the stone and it was put in place last Thursday. It is engraved with this information:

William G Sloan

1890—1931

Southpaw pitcher for the Dayton Marcos

Hero of the 1913 Great Dayton Flood,

Saving over 300 souls.

“I wanted the epitaph to capture who he was,” the Samaritan said. “If 100 years from now somebody walks by that tombstone and tries to figure out who the guy was, I wanted enough gems to be there to catch their interest and maybe they’ll do some research of their own on him. Hopefully, he won’t be forgotten anymore. A guy like that shouldn’t be lost.”

Now he won’t be — same as the 300-plus souls who were not lost because of his efforts 100 years ago.

Quid pro quo — one good turn deserves another.

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