by Roger Kahn
On August 2, 1960, Roy instituted a suit against Ruthe for legal separation. Through his attorney, Harold Stackel, he charged that Ruthe had said “she doesn’t love me, I’m a helpless cripple, I serve no purpose in her life and she intends to come and go as she pleases.” Campanella cited occasions when he was cuckolded “in Atlantic City,” in “another man’s apartment,” and “once at 2 A.M. outside our home she got into a car with a man and they embraced passionately and made love with abandon.” When he complained the next morning that the children had heard her cries, Ruthe “raised a fork to me and said, ‘I’ll give my body to anybody I desire. You can’t do anything about it.’”
Ruthe underwent surgical sterilization because “I want to enjoy life.” She drank heavily, Campanella said, and sometimes struck him during arguments, although he was unable to raise his arms and defend himself, much less strike back. After the charges produced headlines in New York’s tabloid press, Campanella temporarily withdrew his suit.
But by spring, 1962, Roy had moved into an apartment in Lenox Terrace, a complex of high-rise apartment buildings inhabited by middle-class blacks that rises near his liquor store. Ruthe remained in Salt Spray, which Roy sought to sell. The house was too costly now that the marriage was spent. Between 1960 and 1963 the Campanellas shuttled in and out of court at least three times. Ruthe complained he had taken away her charge accounts. Roy said she was irresponsible, but paid her more than $800 a month for child support. Meanwhile Ruthe’s romance with a musician fed the gossip which babbles through the bars and living rooms of Harlem.
On November 27, 1962, Salt Spray was sold at auction. Thirty-one people bid. The house had been appraised at $60,000. But trouble—others’ knowledge of family trouble—undercuts the price of a house. The best bid was $47,000, which did not leave much cash after fees were paid to the auctioneer and lawyers and after a bank equity of $29,000 was satisfied. One scene remained to crown the tragedy. On January 26, 1963, Roy and Ruthe were talking by telephone. He heard a gasping sound and a crash. Ruthe had suffered a fatal heart attack.
When she died, she was forty years old.
Surely, he had been the manchild with toy trains and pet fish in the promised land of baseball, but time had torn at him and now he could no longer hit or run or walk. In June 1964 the tabloids reported that he had married his Lenox Terrace neighbor, Mrs. Roxie Doles. May 5 was the wedding date; the newspapers had missed it at the time. “She lives right next door,” a tabloid columnist wrote in June, “so all wunnerful Roy has to do to have family life again is to break down the walls.”
“How has he weathered these tragedies?” I’d asked Joe Black in Chicago.
“For a time bad, now good,” Black said. “He’s got a nice house up near White Plains and this wife is very good for him. Used to be, when Camp was in trouble, and you had a chair for a hundred and fifty dollars, he’d have to buy one for two-fifty. The department stores loved that. But this wife has settled him down. Don’t worry about a visit being depressing. You’ll probably enjoy the day.”
When I telephoned the liquor store months later, Campanella said, “I know what you been doing. I heard about it.” The old piping voice was lower, more breathy. Paralysis cuts a man’s wind. “I’m real busy at the store, but Saturdays is good. I try to take Saturdays off. The house is close to Tarrytown Road. I’m gonna look forward to talking about the old times.”
“You don’t sound like an old-timer.”
“Buddy,” Campanella said, “I was born in 1921. I’m fifty years old right now.”
The large, brick house sits on a knoll, close to others in a comfortable suburban cluster. Roxie, a pretty, soft-voiced woman who looks to be in her thirties, met me at the garage. A Cadillac bore the license plate “ROY—39.” “That’s Roy’s elevator over there,” she said, pointing. “We have some ramps inside. He gets around just fine.”
She led me upstairs into a rectangular living room, walled in wood, with a raised fireplace facing a picture window. “Roy said why didn’t you talk in the den. It’s brighter and some of his baseball things are hanging there.”
The den, an airy corner room, was bright with early afternoon sunlight. The walls flashed the jewels of a great career. The three Most Valuable Player plaques, 1951, 1953, 1955, hung close together. Nearby in a framed cartoon, Campanella stepped into a pitch, the right knee trailing low, power bursting from the vital frame. A mix of bronze and silver awards celebrated later work with disabled children. A twenty-five-year-old photograph of Jackie Robinson, lean-faced and intense, smiled from a table. A pair of spikes cast in dull bronze made the most elaborate display, above a caption that read: “The last pair of shoes worn by Roy Campanella as a player; Brooklyn Dodgers vs. Philadelphia Phils, September 29, 1957.” The spiked shoes that would not be worn again hung above everything else, dominating.
A whir announced his coming. Campanella rides a battery-powered wheelchair and he has just enough control over the heel of his hand to move a control stick back and forth. His hair was black. He had grown a mustache. His legs were withered. He greeted me with an odd little wave and it was an instant before I realized that he can move his arms from the shoulder, as in the beating of a wing, but the hands and forearms are dead.
“Good to see ya,” he said. “Real fine. Roxie, this is one of my real favorite writers.”
“Helluva ball player,” I said, but I was shocked by the beating wing, and surprised that he had said I was a real favorite.
“The writers was fine,” Campanella said. “I’ve had a lotta time to think and you know I got a lot of people wanting me for this thing and that thing but when I heard it was one of the old Dodger writers, well—this day, I just set aside.” He beamed out of the wheelchair and I felt a rush of warmth and I remembered Carl Erskine talking about his own tears and I said quickly, “Roy, you look fine.”
“Oh,” he said, “I am. I am. I got something I want to get across if it’s all right.” His torso looked sturdy but not stout.
“These awards all around here didn’t mean so much to me, but today, what is it, thirteen years later, they mean so much I can’t find the words, just like Ebbets Field does, in my memory. I didn’t realize at first when I did get the opportunity but, gee, how it dawned on me later. To talk to my sons—I have three boys—and some of their friends from high school and college. Being one of the first blacks to play in the major leagues with this, as they say, revolution taking place today, these teen-agers refer back to Ebbets Field. And I tell them the press, the white press, really helped me, and the fans across all the years, I never had a single racial slur happen to me from the fans, nothing out of the way, and maybe they been listening to people talking about hate and I want to tell them it isn’t all hate, hate don’t do good and I have no hate but”—he paused and looked about—“no hate but friends. Would you put that better and write it for me?”
“You put it fine.”
“I wasn’t never that good with the words.”
“What do you tell these kids when they ask you how it was?”
He paused, frowned in thought and said, “You was there. I was one of the first. And when I was startin’, I was a black man giving signals to pitchers, telling them what to throw. Now there was some fellers on the Brooklyn Dodgers which didn’t care for a colored feller telling them anything. Hugh Casey. When I was catching Hugh Casey, who come from Georgia, if I called for a curve, he’d want to throw a fast ball. And if I called for a fast ball, he’d want to throw a curve. He’d shake me off, no matter what I called. I always tried to study and I thought I was a pretty good analyzer of the other fellows. Like one time with Robin Roberts. I never will forget, it was an All-Star Game at Detroit. When I hit against Roberts, he threw this fast pitch that would always slide away from me. At the All-Star Game I’m his catcher and I said on a certain pitch, ‘I’ll give you a sign for a slider.’ He said he didn’t have one. I told Robin, ‘Hey. Wait a minute. Don’t get cute with me. I hit against you, budd
y, and you throw it to me.’ He said, ‘Roy, that’s my fast ball.’ I said, ‘Robin, they’re all fast, but you throw one straight and another breaks. If you expect me to catch it, I better be expecting it.’ Well, turned out he didn’t realize hisself that with some fast balls he’d twist the wrist a little. He said, ‘Roy. You know you’re teaching me something.’ So I knew something about what they was throwing. Hugh Casey didn’t have to be shakin’ me off. But he did. Later the poor guy killed hisself, Lord forgive him.”
“You used to say they threw at you because you were black. Do you tell kids that?”
“If they ask. I had this run-in with Lew Burdette.” A chuckle rumbled in his chest. “Little run-in, is what I tell them. It was in Milwaukee and he threw at me twice in one turn at bat. After the second one I hollered, ‘Now damnit, throw the ball over the plate.’ Burdette said, ‘Nigger, get up and hit.’ I got so damned mad I missed the next pitch. He called me ‘nigger,’ then he struck me out. And I was goin’ out there. But you know after I was paralyzed and retired from baseball Burdette seen fit to come to my office at the store and ask how I was feeling. I didn’t want to be called ‘nigger’ by no one. I was gonna fight him. But now I can’t swing a bat, or nothin’, he comes by. I tell ya, hate don’t get you nowhere. Don’t keep hate stirring down inside. The onliest thing I want to remember about Lew Burdette is that whatever he called me, and he shouldn’t have, later on he come all the way to Harlem to say hello.”
Sometimes a man who has endured great pain acquires a curious gentleness. I saw that in the eyes of a football player named Ernie Davis who was dying of leukemia at twenty-two. People were haggling over the terms of a contract for his life story; Davis listened, tolerant, disinterested, beyond contentiousness. He had left such things behind and he was living out his span utterly alone, but tranquil, at peace with life and at peace with death. Campanella radiated a similar transfiguration. He is mobile in the wheelchair, beating the dead arms, twisting his trunk, growling, smiling, shrugging as he tells a story. No harshness lingers in his voice or in his words.
“Nicetown,” he said, under the bronzed spikes. “That’s where I come from in Philadelphia. That’s what they called the section. It was integrated when we moved there, my father had a grocery store. There were few other colored in the neighborhood, but a lot of Polish people.
“I never had any idea I was gonna be a ball player. I loved to play. I mean any sport. Gee, I played baseball, basketball, football. But I was gonna be an architect. I would have loved that, drawing plans.”
“Can you hold a pencil now?”
“No, but I can feed myself. I’ve learned to do that. Most of the time for autographs,-Mrs. Campanella signs. She writes the name as good as me. But I control my wrist pretty good and if I have to, they strap something to my arm with a pen in it and I can write.” He made a little shrug. “You get so you’re glad for anything you can do.
“I used to like to run. I was on the track team at Simon Gratz High School. It wasn’t more than 10 percent black. But the first baseball uniform I got came from a colored paper. The Philadelphia Independent. The owner lived in our neighborhood and all us paper boys asked this man to buy us uniforms because we wanted to have a team. And he did. It said ‘NCAC’ on the shirt. ‘Nicetown Colored Athletic Club.’
“I played outfield and infield and sometimes I catched, but I thought I couldn’t see through a mask. I was a catcher without a mask until one day a foul ball popped me right in the center of my forehead. I run home to Mama. Oh, my goodness. I had a big knot on my head. And Mama said, ‘Oh, what happened?’ I said, ‘I been hurt the worst ever.’ That taught me to catch with a mask. I found out the next time I could see through a mask just fine.”
He chuckled at his own story and asked if I wanted a Scotch. Mrs. Campanella mixed drinks and served canapés. “I’m not supposed to drink,” he said, “but now and then I take a small one. See, with so much of me paralyzed, I’m not supposed to strain the kidneys any way. But you go ahead, if Chivas Regal is all right.”
“It’s all right.”
“I was not thinking about college, but my family was. I had a big sister who run off to Tuskegee Institute down in Alabama. But while I was still in high school a team, the Bacharach Giants, asked my mother if I could play with them for a weekend and go to New York. I’d get out of school Friday and they’d see I was back Sunday night. Mama said okay. The first game we played was in Beach Haven, New Jersey, on Friday night. Then we went to New York City to stay over. Saturday we played a double-header at Torrington, Connecticut, and Sunday we played a double-header at Hartford and we drove back to Philadelphia and I went to school on Monday. I caught five games and they gave my mother twenty-five dollars. Holy gee, but that was good.
“Now while we had stopped at this hotel in New York, the Woodside, the Baltimore Elite Giants of the Negro National League was there. One of the fellers with our club told Biz Mackey, who was the catcher and manager for the Baltimore Elites, ‘We got a fifteen-year-old kid with us, and you should see him catch and throw.’
“Biz Mackey got up early Saturday morning and said did I want to go with them. They was asking a fifteen-year-old boy into the colored big leagues. But I was a kid and my mother had only give me permission to play with the Bacharachs. So I told Biz Mackey, no, no, no.
“He took my name and address and got in touch with my parents, Ida and John Campanella. Mama didn’t want to hear nothing about that. She was thinking of college.
“I used to go and sit up on a roof back of Shibe Park in Philadelphia. You paid a quarter to a superintendent and you could watch the old Athletics. I saw some great ones. Jimmie Foxx, Doc Cramer, Max Bishop, Mickey Cochrane, and the visiting players, Babe Ruth. I saw Lou Gehrig. That old right-field fence was no higher than this ceiling, and when Connie Mack found out how many people were seeing his games from the roof, he built that high right-field fence to block the view.”
“You hit some against that fence,” I said.
Campanella nodded vigorously. “And over,” he said. “They talk about hitting in Ebbets Field. The ball carried even better in Philadelphia.”
“Did you know that the game was all white, that there wasn’t any place for you?”
He thought, and pushed a flat lever with the heel of his right hand. The motor whirred and the wheelchair moved back, then forward. “Yes,” he said, “by the time I was in my teens. But it didn’t faze me. I was young. I even went to the Phillies for a tryout. Hans Lobert was managing; they were a bad team and needed help. Lobert didn’t know how to tell me no, so he referred me to the owner, which was Gerry Nugent, and he didn’t know what to tell me neither. He said there weren’t going to be tryouts that day. After I got to the Dodgers, they hired Lobert as a scout. One day I saw him sitting in our dugout and I said, ‘See what the Phillies missed. A pretty good catcher.’ “ Campanella smiled and shook with soft laughter.
“I played twelve years in the colored league. I started out with the Elites at sixty dollars a month and I went up slowly. I used to tell stories, but in later years I was really getting six hundred a month, plus expenses, for six months. Then I’d play all winter in South America and get pretty near the same. I never had to pay room and board and I wound up getting about seventy-five hundred for playing every day around the calendar.
“The Elites was good, but so was the team Josh Gibson caught for, the Homestead Grays, and so was the Newark Eagles. They had Monte Irvin and Newcombe and Larry Doby. Satchel was with Kansas City. That was out in the Negro American League. The National League was in the East. Western teams played in the American League. Jackie played with Kansas City for a year, and I got to know him.”
“Was he angry then?” I said.
Roy shook his head. “No.” He paused. “Let me see.” Another pause. “I want to put this right. You see, playing in the colored league, he wouldn’t have all those things to be angry about.”
The picture of Jackie stared at us from a wa
ll. He wore a baseball cap and an undeterminable uniform. He was young, fine-featured, black-haired. The smile curled mysteriously from the corners of his mouth.
“A lot of people try to take different sides with me or Jack. I didn’t push hard enough. He pushed too hard. Well, Jack had his moods and I had my moods, but deep down I believe we were always friendly. On a day off, Jack liked to go to the racetrack. I wasn’t a racetrack man. You’d never see Jack or me together. You might see Newk and me at a movie. On a day off at Chicago, I’d be in Shedd Aquarium. I’m just crazy about tropical fish. That’s not Jack’s speed; him and Pee Wee and Duke would go to the track or play golf. I never did that either. My legs had enough work getting up and down catching every day. So people figured that because me and Jackie didn’t pal around together that we were always having words. It wasn’t true, whatever people said. Jackie comes over here now when the weather is good for cookouts. You know I admire him. I know how it was. And I think Jack knows I admire him, too.” He looked at me evenly. “It wasn’t easy for any of us,” he said.
“How did you hear about Jackie’s signing?”
“We was in a hotel together in New York. We were both on a black all-star team that was going out to play twenty-five games in Venezuela. I’d just played for the all-star team against major leaguers in Ebbets Field. It was right after the season of 1946. Ralph Branca was the major leaguers’ pitcher. Charlie Dressen was their manager. Charlie said did I know my way to the Brooklyn Dodger offices on Montague Street. I said no. He said could I be in their office at ten the next morning. I told him, ‘Mr. Dressen, I may have some trouble finding it. I don’t know my way round the subways of New York well enough to get to Brooklyn, but if the Brooklyn Dodgers want to see me, I’ll find the way.’
“When I got there, holy gee, Mr. Rickey had a scouting report on me a whole loose-leaf book thick. They’d had Clyde Sukeforth following me and they knew how I catched and hit and threw and Mr. Rickey told me everything from school to my mother and father to what I did off the field. And he signed me and then he signed Newk.
