by Jonathan Eig
It helped, too, that Branch Rickey remained so determinedly on Robinson’s side. The Robinsons knew that Rickey was doing everything he could: hiring a manager friendly to the cause, making certain that Robinson played every day, spinning the media for sympathetic coverage. Rickey and Robinson met often that season, usually in the boss’s office, and usually before games. They talked baseball. Perhaps they talked religion, too, a subject that stirred passionate feelings in both men (although the Robinsons never attended church that year, according to Rachel). Whatever the topics of conversation, Rachel noticed that the chats boosted her husband’s confidence.
She realized something else about her husband that spring, something that eased her worries considerably. Despite his vow to avoid confrontation with his opponents, Jack had already found a way to fight back. Rachel might not have noticed it if Jack hadn’t been teaching her the finer points of the game’s strategy, but now she saw that her husband was playing a breathtakingly aggressive style of baseball unlike that of the other men on the team. If he’d wanted to fit in and maintain a low profile, at least until he’d become better established, he could have done so. He could have pounded out hits, advanced to the next base when the batter behind him moved him along, and at all times kept his mouth shut. Instead, he glared at his opponents. He crowded closer to the plate when pitchers tried to back him off. He stole bases and took wide turns even in games that weren’t close, just to show that he could, playing at all times with the confidence of a man who knows something his opponents don’t. The approach made him dangerous even when he wasn’t hitting the ball particularly well. It made him the focus of attention. It sent jolts of electricity through the crowd. It stoked anger in some players and fear in others. It was, on her husband’s part, a deliberate and cunning attack.
Rachel recognized that her husband was bringing a little bit of Negro-League baseball to the majors, and she loved him for it.
• • •
A few days after their return from the season’s first long road trip, Robinson and the Dodgers traveled again to Harlem for a game against the Giants, the first night game of the year at the Polo Grounds, where some white fans preferred not to venture after dark. A bright quarter-moon shone in the cloudless sky. It was May 27. The Giants, to everyone’s surprise, were in first place, thanks to a barrage of home runs by Johnny “Big Cat” Mize. The Dodgers now trailed by a game. Though the season had a long way to go, Dick Young of the Daily News wrote that this contest carried with it the flavor of a World Series. Reserved seats sold out weeks in advance.
At game time, the paying crowd was announced at 51,780, the biggest audience that had ever seen a night game at the Polo Grounds to that point. Across the Harlem River, less than a mile away, two top Negro-league teams, the Homestead Grays and the New York Black Yankees, were preparing to play at Yankee Stadium. It was, as Daily Mirror columnist Dan Parker put it, the first time since the advent of Jackie Robinson that “a battle was underway for Harlem’s patronage.” It turned out not to be much of a battle. Black fans—eight thousand of them, by Parker’s estimate—began lining up outside the Polo Grounds six hours before the Dodgers-Giants game. At Yankee Stadium, meanwhile, the turnstiles clicked a mere twenty-six hundred times, hardly enough to turn a profit. Parker wrote that Robinson, while helping make money for the owners of the Giants and Dodgers, “will harm the Negro league whenever it comes within the orbit of his influence.”
Harlem’s loyalties were tested many times over that night. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the tap dancer and actor who would become a symbol of the age when black stars settled for demeaning roles in white-operated productions, told a friend before the game that he rooted for Robinson to play well so long as he didn’t play well enough to beat the Giants. His friend agreed that was the way to go, saying “that if Booker T. Washington himself was playing first for the Dodgers, I’d still have to root for the Giants.”
Others who had not been so strongly attached to the Giants became instant Dodger fans. Sidney Poitier, twenty years old and recently arrived in Harlem from the Bahamas by way of Miami, knew nothing of baseball but kept hearing about Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers everywhere he went. The struggling young actor went to Ebbets Field to see what the fuss was about and instantly became a Robinson rooter. Kenneth B. Clark, a resident of Harlem and professor of psychology at the City College of New York, was usually too busy to trifle with baseball. Among other things, he was working on an experiment in which black and white children were asked to play with black and white dolls. It was of enormous concern to Clark that the black children, when asked which dolls were nicer and prettier, generally chose the white ones. It was a sign, he believed, that black children were being taught to believe in their own inferiority. But Clark took time from his studies in 1947 to cheer on the Dodgers, a team he had never cared about before Robinson’s arrival. He took his four-year-old son, Hilton, to a few games, and though the boy was too young to understand what was happening, he never forgot the sight of his mild-mannered father, a slightly built man, on his feet, screaming at the top of his lungs, and cursing like a soldier, cheering on the only team he would ever love.
• • •
Robinson and his wife had only the vaguest idea of what was happening. New York was a big, complicated place, and they didn’t see much of it from their little mouse hole on MacDonough. They sheltered themselves, as if the burden were great enough without firsthand knowledge of its precise weight.
Back in the winter, when Branch Rickey had gathered some of Brooklyn’s leading black citizens for a pep talk, a few of those in attendance had determined to help the Robinsons get acclimated to their new home. One of the men at the meeting thought the Robinsons ought to get to know Lacy and Florence Covington, who lived in a big brownstone on a tree-lined stretch of Stuyvesant Avenue, roughly four blocks from the Robinsons’ place. Lacy Covington, forty-six years old, was a bricklayer and part-time minister, a big, handsome man with a full head of curly hair. Florence, thirty-nine, an elegant woman with a high-pitched, rippling laugh, stayed home and took care of the house. She shopped at thrift stores for linens and crystal and set an elegant table in her dining room. The Covingtons were one of those families that made a neighborhood feel like a community. Florence had four sisters, all of them single at the time, and the five women kept the house buzzing. They had a formal parlor for entertaining on the second floor, but everyone was more comfortable squeezed into the first-floor dining room, where Lacy held court at the head of the table and Florence, never sitting down, flitted around carrying glasses and plates and what seemed like a never-ending stream of hot, greasy, southern-style dishes. No matter how crowded the room, no one was ever turned away. The Robinsons became regulars at the Sunday dinners. The Covingtons treated Jack warmly but casually, as if he were nothing special. Every so often, though, another dinner guest would react in amazement to Robinson’s presence at the table, gushing about how much the ballplayer meant to his race, how proud everyone was, how astonishing it was to see him there in the flesh.
Robinson caught glimpses of his impact on the community. He noticed the kids who followed him home on the subway just to bask in his glow. He spotted the gaggle of elderly women, black and white, who waited for him outside Ebbets Field just to say, “Good game!” or “Good night!” But there were other scenes he could never have imagined. He could not have dreamed that George Marchev, owner of the Gordos Corporation in Bloomfield, New Jersey, would watch the Dodgers play in 1947 and decide to integrate his electronics factory. He didn’t know that Lou Brown, the black man Marchev decided to hire, would show up for work every day in a shirt and tie, even though his job was to load and unload trucks and required no formal attire and even though none of the white men doing the same work were so sharply dressed. He didn’t know that Brown felt the same responsibility as Robinson, that he sought to represent his race proudly every time he lifted a box of relay switches and set it down again. He didn’t know that Marchev and
Brown would become lifelong friends. Nor did he know that at Brown’s funeral years later, Marchev would eulogize Brown this way: “Jackie Robinson opened the door of baseball and all sports to all men. You opened the door for countless men and women in our lives. I think we got the better of the deal, Mr. Brown.”
World War II reshaped the country’s culture like nothing since the Civil War. Brooklyn, big and broad and beautifully complicated, full of Italians, Poles, Irishmen, and Jews, was the perfect place to explore the possibilities inherent in that transformation. In the South, local politicians were feeling the heat from the federal government to go after lynch mobs, to stop excluding black voters from primary elections, and to end segregated interstate busing. In the North, radicals were pushing businesses to hire more black workers. In both regions, the issues were contentious. Ground was lost and gained in such small increments that it was still tough to say which way things were going, forward or back. But Brooklyn was ever changing. People came and went. Transformation wasn’t just possible, it was inevitable, which helps explain why Robinson’s arrival was handled with such aplomb.
It also helps explain his special connection with Brooklyn’s Jewish population. While Jewish Americans were better off than black Americans in 1947 by almost any statistical or anecdotal measure, Jews still faced enormous bias. When President Roosevelt banned discrimination in hiring by defense contractors and formed the Fair Employment Practices Committee to take complaints, Jewish workers filed 43 percent of the grievances in New York. Just as the war had prompted many black men and women to take up the fight for equality on the home front, it compelled Jewish activists to attack anti-Semitism. Members of both minority groups hoped the war for freedom in Europe would help spread equal rights at home, and, often, their causes overlapped. Strong links were forged. And since the Dodgers had no great Jewish player (Sandy Koufax was eleven years old), Robinson became the hero of choice for a second ethnic group. He, too, knew persecution. He, too, knew suffering.
At 1574 Fiftieth Street in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, Henry Foner’s family invoked Robinson’s name that year in their Passover Seder. As the youngest at the table, Henry asked the traditional question, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” and went on to answer it himself. This night was different, he said, because Jackie Robinson had ascended to the major leagues, to baseball’s promised land.
“When Robinson came among us,” author Pete Hamill wrote years later, “you saw what he meant in the stands of Ebbets Field, where we saw the games with free tickets from the Police Athletic League. In 1946, the crowds were almost all white. A year later, the African-Americans, after too long a time, finally joined the other Brooklyn tribes in the stands. Jews and Irishmen and Italians and blacks all roared together for the team. This was seven years before Brown vs. Board of Education, ten years before anyone in New York ever heard of Martin Luther King. Robinson’s arrival as the first black player in the major leagues added another dimension to being a Dodger fan, although as kids we could not name it. That dimension was moral. It was about right and wrong. ‘This is America, godammit,’ my father said. We became the most American place in the whole country.”
• • •
One evening that spring, the Robinsons decided to have dinner at the Orange Blossom Inn on Ralph Avenue. They brought the baby. The Orange Blossom was a new restaurant, opened after the war by an army cook, Willie Moore, who was eager to show he could whip up more than hash and beans. Moore dressed his waitresses in orange uniforms with green and white trim, and he alternated three sets of tablecloths—orange, green, and white—depending on his mood and which ones were cleanest. He served fried chicken and brisket and thick steaks, everything with a southern accent. When the Robinsons sat down to eat that night, word spread through the neighborhood, and Dodger fans started flocking to Ralph Avenue, squeezing into the restaurant and lining up on the sidewalk for a chance to meet the neighborhood’s seldom-seen star.
Soon the waitresses couldn’t move between the tables. Moore invited the Robinsons to come back the next night and promised to shut the restaurant for two hours so they could eat in peace. The Robinsons accepted his offer. After that, Moore would occasionally send food free of charge to the Robinsons’ apartment. He would arrange the provisions carefully on his finest plates, and then he would look around for someone to bring it over to 526 MacDonough. Clarence L. Irving, twenty-three at the time, was one of the regulars at the Orange Blossom. He liked to drink coffee in the back of the restaurant and drop nickels in the jukebox, killing time between work and chasing girls. When Moore asked for a volunteer, Irving’s hand shot up. He said nothing to Robinson upon delivering the food. He sought no tip. He was proud to have played the tiniest of parts in the great athlete’s success.
“You have to remember something,” recalled Irving. “Brooklyn was ready for Robinson. What I mean by that is this: It probably couldn’t have happened any place else on earth. Most of the people who came to Brooklyn, their parents came from the South or they came from Europe. Everybody wanted to be Americans, and they were a little too busy to really hate anybody. . . . You can say Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, but you’ve also got to say it was the people of Brooklyn who were ready to do that.”
FOURTEEN
A REAL GONE GUY
In early June, Branch Rickey tried again to trade Dixie Walker. This time, an outfield wall got in the way.
The Dodgers were playing the Pirates on a cool, cloudy Wednesday night at sold-out Ebbets Field. The Bums were leading, 7–2, top of the sixth, bases empty, when Culley Rikard of the Pirates sent a fly ball deep to center. Pete Reiser turned his back to home plate and started running. Most men would have played the carom, but not Reiser. Still fast as a jackrabbit at twenty-eight, and accustomed by now to running on a tender ankle, Pistol Pete thought he had a chance to make the catch. He almost always thought he had a chance. As he neared the center-field wall, fans started screaming, trying to warn him. They’d seen this act before. If Reiser heard them, though, he didn’t listen—and he wouldn’t remember later.
Ebbets Field had no warning track on its outfield. Man, ball, and wall came together simultaneously. Ball met glove. Man met wall. Down went man.
Gene Hermanski, the left-fielder, was the first to reach his fallen teammate. He didn’t notice the blood leaking from Reiser’s head, not right away. What he noticed was the ball, which had rolled out of Reiser’s glove and into the grass between Reiser’s body and the wall. Quickly, Hermanski tucked the ball back in Reiser’s glove and raised his teammate’s arm to show the umpire. The ump, running across the outfield, called Rikard out. Only then did attention turn to the outfielder’s condition.
“Hell, fellas,” Reiser said, as if apologizing for his recklessness, as his teammates gathered around. Shortly thereafter, he blacked out. It was the fourth time he’d done battle with a concrete barrier, and, not surprisingly, the fourth time he’d lost. In the Dodger dressing room, two priests and a doctor stood by his side. Reiser’s condition appeared so dire that one of the priests administered last rites. But the patient quickly rebounded, and by the time an ambulance arrived, he felt well enough to ask for a cigarette.
“What happened?” he asked, as he took a puff and tried to smile.
That week, Rickey had been working out a deal to send Walker to Pittsburgh. Some reports said the Dodgers would get Jim Russell, a switch-hitting outfielder who had played well during the war years but whose numbers had steadily dropped ever since. Others said the trade was for Nick “Jumbo” Strincevich, a right-handed pitcher who had won ten and lost fifteen the year before. Whether it was for Russell or Strincevich, Rickey reportedly had settled on the trade until Reiser hit the wall. With one of his best hitters out of the lineup, possibly for a long stretch, the boss had to think again about his plans. He also had to think about investing in some rubber padding for the outfield walls, or a warning track. Eventually, though, he decided it would be cheaper to
ask Reiser to wear a helmet.
• • •
The Dodgers enjoyed a long home stand to start the month of June, and played pretty well, winning seven of eleven. Pee Wee Reese finally started to hit. Spider Jorgensen came back from his injury and helped make up for the loss of Reiser’s bat. The rookie Duke Snider filled in for Reiser and showed some promise. The clubhouse was relaxed. “How ’ya doin’, Pete?” the men would ask when they walked past Reiser’s empty locker in what became a running joke. The pitching improved, too, although not enough. There were no stars among the starters, and that meant the hard-throwing reliever Hugh Casey, no sure thing, was called on too often to bail the team out. The Dodgers weren’t playing great baseball, but in a well-balanced league, they were doing enough to hang around. The most impressive thing about the home stand was the attendance, with an average of almost twenty-six thousand fans turning out for each game.
Wendell Smith explained the big crowds in verse:
Jackie’s nimble,
Jackie’s quick,
Jackie’s making
The turnstiles click
Smith had it right. The Dodgers did not have a great home-run hitter. They were not in first place. Their biggest celebrity, Leo Durocher, was out in California chopping down trees. The only explanation for their popularity, the newsman said, was Robinson. Brooklyn’s fans were a sophisticated bunch well tuned to the subtleties of human drama. Black fans were coming out to cheer Robinson, which was simple enough and not unexpected. There may have been some white fans scared off by the presence of all those new black spectators, but there were nevertheless plenty still eager to see the Dodgers and Robinson play. Before each game, white kids stood on the sidewalks around Ebbets Field selling pins that read “I’m Rooting for Jackie Robinson.” After each game, Robinson would have to dash from the stadium to the subway to avoid the mobs of autograph hunters. He hadn’t won over all his teammates yet, and he hadn’t persuaded the fans in St. Louis and Cincinnati that integration was here to stay, but in Brooklyn he was doing fine.
