James "Cool Papa" Bell

After retiring from baseball, Bell received offers to play with Major League teams, but he declined them. "I got letters from everybody, every team," Bell told Associated Press reporter R.B. Fallstrom. "I said, 'I'm through.' I broke every record there was and I still could hit but my legs were gone. I used them up." Bell worked at St. Louis City Hall as a custodian and security guard for twenty-one years and he and his wife lived on Cool Papa Bell Avenue in north St. Louis for more than thirty-five years. There the Bells kept a collection of Negro league memorabilia and Cool Papa was happy to regale visitors with stories of old-time baseball. In 1974 Bell was inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame, one of the first players to be so honored in a belated effort to recognize the ability of deserving Negro league players. "Contemporaries rated him the fastest man on the base paths," reads Bell's plaque in the Hall of Fame. Indeed. Bell once explained that in a match-up against Olympic sprinter Jesse Owens, Owens could win the straight one-hundred yard dash, but it was he, Bell, who was the faster rounding the bases. Once the two sprinters were supposed to race between games of a doubleheader in Cleveland, Ohio, but when the time came, Owens declined. "He said he left his track shoes at home," Bell said in a video clip at the Major League Baseball Web site. "I didn't have any track shoes." When Bell learned that he was to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, he said that his election was his highest honor, but his biggest thrill "was when they opened the door in the majors to black players," wrote Robert McG. Thomas, Jr. of the New York Times.

In his later years, Bell suffered from glaucoma. Clara preceded him in death on January 20, 1991, and Bell suffered a heart attack in February and passed away at University Hospital in St. Louis on March 7. He was interred at St. Peter's Cemetery in St. Louis. Yet Bell's feats linger still. In 1996, to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of Negro league baseball, Bell and two other Hall of Fame players from the Negro leagues were featured on limited edition boxes of Wheaties cereal and on "historic" baseball trading cards. Many baseball fans were pleased to see even such late recognition. For his part, the unassuming Bell had simply played the game he loved within the confines society placed on him. "When I was young, all I wanted to do was play," Bell is quoted as saying by Dixon. "And, thank the Lord, I got the chance to play for half my life, even if it wasn't in the majors. … I didn't think about major league baseball. It wasn't just baseball then; it was everywhere. I don't feel regrets. That's how it was when I was born. I had to live in that time."