Maurice Wiggins didn’t look imposing on the baseball field in the early 1930s. But one of his friends knew the five-foot-six 137-pounder could play shortstop and invited him to practice with Gilkerson’s Union Giants, a semiprofessional team based in Bronzeville. The Giants’ manager was so impressed he moved the regular shortstop to the outfield and replaced him with Wiggins.
His mother died when he was ten, and he went to live with an older sister and started washing dishes part-time in a hotel. When he was 12 his father, a musician who cut hair in a shop on 43rd Street at Cottage Grove, sent him a letter promising to pay for his train fare to Chicago. The money never arrived, so Wiggins hopped a northbound freight train with two older boys and arrived in Bronzeville three days later. His father asked him to tell his siblings that the money for the trip had arrived. Later his siblings told him they’d given their father the money.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
By the early 1940s, Wiggins had quit playing, though he remained at the hotel for most of his working life–leaving only to do a five-year stint as a salesman with the John M. Smyth furniture company and two years in the navy during World War II. Among the guests he watched over at the Palmer were Nat “King” Cole, Carol Channing, Diahann Carroll, Sammy Davis Jr., and Jack Benny. “Celebrities asked for him personally when they ordered room service,” says his granddaughter Maurita Ward. “He would knock on the doors to make sure they got their food hot. When he picked up their trays after they were done he would bring a mint. He gave it that personal touch.” The hotel threw him a party when he retired in 1985.
