Opening Day

by Jonathan Eig

  Showers fell throughout the day, but the skies started to clear two hours before the game, just in time for a lovely sunset and night baseball. The parting clouds added to the West End’s euphoria. “It was like a picnic, like a holiday,” recalled Donald Spencer, who sat with his wife, Marian, in the bleachers for that night’s game. Spencer was a teacher at the all-black Harriet Beecher Stowe Junior High in Cincinnati, moonlighting a bit in real estate, helping black vets use the GI Bill to buy their first homes. Spencer and his wife both knew how Robinson felt, knew what it meant to be black in a white person’s world. As undergraduates at the University of Cincinnati, they had fought to end segregation at school dances. Now, at Crosley Field, they stood and cheered every time Robinson stepped to the plate. If they embarrassed him with their overdone hoots and hollers, they didn’t care. “Listen, it was quite an affair,” Donald Spencer recalled. “It was kind of a revolution, you know?”

  The Dodgers by now were accustomed to seeing a lot of black faces in the stands. One newspaper report said about half of the twenty-seven thousand people at the ballpark that night were black. But to some of the Cincinnati Reds, it looked like more. “The place was packed—all blacks,” said Eddie Erautt, a rookie pitcher. “All Robinson had to do was foul a ball off and they cheered. You’d have thought he hit a home run.” In the Reds dugout, players joked about it, wondering aloud if Robinson would get a round of applause for tying his shoe or successfully relieving himself in the bathroom.

  The Dodgers played their sloppiest game of the year, walking eight, committing three errors, and going down by a 7–5 score. Twice the Reds robbed Robinson of hits on well-struck balls. Still, he came through with a walk, a single, a run scored, and a run batted in. But in the mythology of Robinson’s rookie year, there was one more bit of action. According to reports handed down across the years, Robinson on his debut in Cincinnati was taking horrible abuse from the white fans at Crosley Field, worse than anything he or his teammates had heard all season, when he went to his position at first base in the bottom of the first inning. Pee Wee Reese heard the cries, the story goes, and left his position at shortstop. He walked across the diamond to first base, where he put an arm around Robinson’s shoulder and spoke something in his ear, hushing the crowd with his gesture of brotherhood. Reese was a Kentuckian—“the Colonel,” Red Barber called him. Many of his friends and family had made the short drive to see him play in Cincinnati. He was more popular at Crosley Field than most of the Reds. His walk across the diamond, his embrace of Robinson, would be described years later as one of baseball’s most glorious and honorable moments.

  “I was warming up on the mound, and I could hear the Cincinnati players screaming at Jackie, ‘You nigger sonofabitch, you shoeshine boy,’ and then they started to go in on Pee Wee,” recalled the Dodger pitcher Rex Barney in Pete Golenbock’s book of Dodger oral history, Bums. “Pee Wee went over to him and put an arm around him as if to say, ‘This is my boy . . . .’ Well, it drove the Cincinnati players right through the ceiling, and you could have heard a gasp from the crowd as he did it.”

  Lester Rodney, reporting for the communist Daily Worker, said he remembered the incident because it occurred on the only road trip his editors permitted him to cover all season. “I saw the incident in Cincinnati,” he recalled. “A bunch of men before the game were shouting. Pee Wee dropped his glove at shortstop and walked over. I was there that day. That kind of drama, how do you measure it?” Rodney said he would kick himself years later for not writing about what he had seen.

  But no one else wrote about it either; not in New York, not in Cincinnati, not in white papers, not in black—not in 1947. In fact, the New York Post called Robinson “the toast of the town” after that game, and the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that he “was applauded every time he stepped to the plate.” Robinson, in his weekly column, called his visit to Crosley Field “a nice experience.” Even Rex Barney’s account, which he provided only many years after the fact, contains a significant flaw. Barney says he was on the mound warming up in the bottom half of the first inning when he saw Reese walk over and put his arm around Robinson, but Barney didn’t pitch that night until the seventh inning.

  In the days and weeks after the game, no newspaper stories placed Robinson and Reese together on the diamond. No photos of the incident have ever been identified. Commissioner Chandler, a strong supporter of Robinson, watched the game from a seat near the dugout and never mentioned the gesture or any unseemly behavior by Cincinnati players or fans. At season’s end, when Robinson sat down with Wendell Smith to write his version of the year’s events, he didn’t mention the purported incident, either. In fact, Smith and Robinson didn’t even cite Reese as someone who went out of his way to make the rookie feel welcome. In later years, as Robinson and Reese developed a genuine friendship, Robinson would talk about the role the Dodger shortstop played in making him feel a part of the team. Reese did indeed become a leader among the Dodgers in matters racial, embracing Robinson physically and emotionally. But not in 1947. In 1947, he was one of the boys. He was an ally, but not a strong one, and certainly not an outspoken one. Rickey and Robinson, in accounts written shortly after the 1947 season, both rated Eddie Stanky as Robinson’s earliest important backer.

  In a book written many years later, Robinson did describe an incident in which Reese walked over and put a hand on his shoulder to hush a bothersome crowd, but he set the drama in Boston in 1948. There’s no contemporaneous reporting and no photograph to support that account, either. It’s possible that the Robinson-Reese moment took place just as Barney, Rodney, and others remembered it, in 1947. But it seems unlikely. What’s more likely is that Reese and Robinson slowly became friends, and after Robinson became a second baseman in 1948, he and Reese enjoyed frequent chats on the infield between innings and during timeouts in the action. Perhaps Reese, as warm and kind a man as there was in baseball, sometimes put an arm around Robinson’s shoulder. Perhaps he even did so intentionally to show support when catcalls were raining down, or simply to remind fans that black and white men now played side by side. There were still plenty of fans abusing Robinson in 1948, and throughout most of his career, so the sight of these two men getting on well would have been a memorable one—memorable enough that some would place it in the mental file for 1947, when it would have resonated most strongly.

  The story of Reese’s embrace has become a sermon, a children’s book, even a bronze statue, dedicated in 2005 at Keyspan Park, home of the minor-league Brooklyn Cyclones, seven miles from the former site of Ebbets Field. “My father had done his own soul searching,” Mark Reese, Pee Wee’s son, said at the dedication of the statue depicting his father’s most famous moment, “and he knew that some fans, teammates, and, yes, some family members didn’t want him to play with a black man. But my father listened to his heart, not to the chorus.” Years later, Pee Wee Reese would make a point in interviews to say his role in the Robinson drama had been exaggerated, that he had never tried to be an activist, had never intended to make any grand gestures. All he had ever tried to do, he said, was treat Robinson the way he treated everyone else.

  “You know, I didn’t particularly go out of my way just to be nice to you,” he once told Robinson.

  “Pee Wee,” Robinson replied, “maybe that’s what I appreciated most.”

  • • •

  The Dodgers lost both games in Cincinnati, and Burt Shotton might have been forgiven for wondering what had happened to the team that had finished the regular season tied for first place in 1946. The Dodgers used eight pitchers in their two games against the Reds, and none of them looked good. Durocher had always been especially adept at juggling the pitching staff. Now some on the team began to wonder if Shotton knew what he was doing. Starting pitchers had completed only five of the team’s first twenty-two games, and the Dodgers used an average of almost three pitchers a game, an unusually high number by the standards of the time. In the two games at Cincinnati, the pitchers issued
thirteen walks. When Clyde King came in to pitch in the first game, three of his five warm-up pitches sailed high into the backstop behind home plate. It didn’t get much better.

  Pitching wasn’t the only problem. With Jorgensen hurt, the team once again found itself with no good third baseman. Shotton tried Cookie Lavagetto, Stan Rojek, and Arky Vaughan, but none hit. Pee Wee Reese was still slumping terribly at the plate, and Eddie Stanky was only slightly better. Pete Reiser, after missing time with an ankle injury, remained gimpy and in need of rest. If there was any consolation, it was that the entire National League thus far was a big clump of mediocrity, tightly bunched in the standings. Only the Cardinals were far behind. “Our team, baseballically speaking,” Branch Rickey told a Rotary Club lunch, “is the youngest I have ever had. It’s considerably different from the team we had last year.”

  Robinson was lucky in at least one respect. The Dodgers had so many problems that no one gave much thought to whether he was helping the team, even as he continued to struggle, and continued to torture himself. Don Newcombe compared him once to a boiler, always hissing and clanging, radiating heat. But in 1947, particularly early on, when he wasn’t hitting, he had no release valve. He just got hotter and hotter until he thought he would burst.

  “It is true that I had stored up a lot of hostility,” he wrote years later. “I had been going home nights to Rachel and young Jackie, tense and irritable, keyed up because I hadn’t been able to speak out when I wanted to.” And when he wanted to tended to be all the time. “That sounds as though I wanted to get even, and I’m sure that’s partly true,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been human otherwise. But more than revenge, I wanted to be Jackie Robinson.”

  ELEVEN

  THE GLORIOUS CRUSADE

  From Cincinnati it was on to Pittsburgh, where Wendell Smith would enjoy a homecoming. Smith was proud of his contributions to Robinson’s early-season success, and yet the sportswriter seldom bragged about his part in these historic events, not even to the beautiful young secretary at the Pittsburgh Courier, Wyonella Hicks, whom he would marry two years later.

  Smith’s stories on Robinson were a sensation. The paper’s circulation soared higher by the week, to more than 250,000, and Smith was the Courier’s biggest star. He was Robinson’s Boswell, his roommate, and his friend. Yet the young reporter with the receding hairline, chubby cheeks, and dainty mustache went about his business with calm determination, unimpressed by all the attention and uninterested in claiming celebrity status for himself. Back in Pittsburgh, he let his bosses spend time with Robinson, permitting them to revel in the celebration of the newspaper’s accomplishment, while he stayed in the office and finished up some stories.

  Smith and Robinson had a great deal in common. Each had felt imprisoned at times by the nation’s color caste system. Each had tried through the years not to let his white counterparts see how badly he had been hurt by segregation. Such feelings threatened to ruin black Americans in the 1940s. When he was a young man, wrote the scholar and activist W.E.B. DuBois, the first black person to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard, he viewed segregation as a challenge, as “a glorious crusade.” But the crusade wore him down before long. The fight was rigged, he discovered, and he grew resentful. He came to feel like a prisoner in his own country, the shackles growing tighter the more he strained to break them. Robinson and Smith were younger than DuBois, and each in his own way still felt the desire to struggle, Robinson hammering away with his Louisville Slugger, Smith scratching with pencil and pen.

  Like Robinson, Smith was a black man who had grown up surrounded almost entirely by whites. Smith came from Detroit, where his father had worked as a cook for Henry Ford. As a boy, Wendell sometimes accompanied his father to work at Fair Lane, the automobile mogul’s magnificent estate. Ford’s grandchildren—Henry II, Benson, and William—would play ball on the mansion’s plush lawns, and they invited young Wendell to join in. Yet even as a child he recognized the hierarchies in place. He knew that his father cooked for Ford but never ate with him. He knew that when the grandchildren grew tired of playing ball and moved on to the bowling alley or the pool, young black boys were not allowed.

  Later, as the only black student at Southeastern High School in Detroit, he became a star in baseball and basketball. He wasn’t terribly big or strong, but he was smooth and fast. “Everybody was great to me,” Smith recalled of his high-school sports career. “You’d naturally run into some jerks once in a while, but that never disturbed me because there wasn’t that much trouble, and I always had the feeling that if I had any problems the guys on the team were with me.” Smith felt that he got along well with his white classmates because he was the only black student in the school. Had there been more of his kind, the white students might have felt more threatened. Right though he may have been, Smith failed to account for the effect of his personality. He was ambitious and determined, but also, by nature, a compromiser. His white classmates liked him because he was so affable.

  When Smith was nineteen, he pitched in a big playoff game for his American Legion team, tossing a complete-game shutout. A big-league scout for the Chicago White Sox watched the game. But when it ended, Smith wasn’t approached. Instead, the scout offered a contract to Mike Tresh, the team’s white catcher. “I wish I could sign you, too, kid, but I can’t,” the scout said. Smith didn’t argue. He didn’t even answer. He simply went home and cried.

  Smith played baseball and basketball at his all-black college, West Virginia State. But he didn’t picture much of a future in sports, partly because of his color and partly because of his size. Instead, after graduating, he landed a seventeen-dollar-a-week job writing sports for the Courier, then the nation’s leading black weekly. The Courier’s influence was extraordinary. The nation’s big black papers helped speed the black migration, encouraging black farmers to make the move and, upon their arrival, helping them find jobs and homes. The newspaper functioned at times as a social worker, at other times as a cheerleader, and at still other times as a fire-breathing lawyer—but always as an advocate. If you were a black person of good character, the Courier was on your side. In 1932, the paper urged its readers to drop their traditional support for Republicans and vote for FDR, forever shifting the nation’s political balance. The paper’s writers attacked the popular Amos ’n’ Andy radio show for its racist portrayals of black characters. They chided the Red Cross for refusing to accept blood from black donors. And in the 1940s, the paper launched its extraordinary successful “Double V” campaign, demanding that black soldiers who risked their lives for victory in the war receive equal rights at home.

  Campaigns such as these helped boost circulation, but they did much more. They created a sense among black Americans that they had a voice, that they had power, that they were living through an era of rapid change—in Europe as well as in America—and that they had a chance to come out of it in better shape than they entered. But if they hoped to make gains, the paper said, black Americans needed to prove they were worthy of respect. They needed to stand up and fight rather than wait for white men to implement reforms according to their own terms and timeframes.

  Though he wrote sports, Smith saw no reason to approach his job any differently from reporters covering politics, crime, or the union movement. Late in 1938, just weeks after the Nazis attacked Jews throughout Germany in a night of broken glass and bloodshed that became known as Kristallnacht, Smith compared baseball’s segregationists to the Nazis. “While Hitler cripples the Jews,” he wrote, “the great leaders of our national pastime refuse to recognize our black players.”

  Thanks in large part to Smith, Robinson fast became the Courier’s favorite symbol of the struggle for equal rights. He was neither asking for nor receiving special treatment. His position on the team had been attained without a court order or armed guards. He offered a perfect symbol for the Courier and for supporters of the Double V campaign.

  There were other black men and women making their marks in the white wo
rld in the summer of 1947. Adam Clayton Powell, a Baptist minister, was already serving in Congress, representing the people of Harlem. A. Philip Randolph had already turned the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters into a powerful force for black workers. Ralph Bunche, a diplomat who helped plan the United Nations, made headlines that year as he began trying to negotiate peace between Jews and Palestinian Arabs in the Middle East, an effort that would earn him a Nobel Prize. Benjamin O. Davis, the army’s first black general, had received a Distinguished Service Medal in 1945 for his work in advising the War Department on maintaining strong morale among black troops. Powell, Randolph, Bunche, Davis, and the countless other black men and women working in white institutions as doctors, teachers, and engineers faced pressures unimaginable to their white contemporaries, but they didn’t have to perform in front of thirty thousand fans every day. Their performances weren’t reviewed daily by a dozen reporters, with batting averages printed every day in the paper to measure in crisp clarity their worth.