Branch Rickey

by Jimmy Breslin

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  Bibliography

  PUBLISHED TITLES IN THE PENGUIN LIVES SERIES

  Karen Armstrong on the Buddha

  Larry McMurtry on Crazy Horse

  Sherwin B. Nuland on Leonardo da Vinci

  Nigel Nicolson on Virginia Woolf

  Jonathan Spence on Mao Zedong

  Marshall Frady on Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Peter Gay on Mozart · Edna O’Brien on James Joyce

  Roy Blount, Jr., on Robert E. Lee

  Garry Wills on Saint Augustine

  Douglas Brinkley on Rosa Parks

  Carol Shields on Jane Austen · Paul Johnson on Napoleon

  Elizabeth Hardwick on Herman Melville

  Bobbie Ann Mason on Elvis Presley

  John Keegan on Winston Churchill

  Thomas Cahill on Pope John XXIII · Mary Gordon on Joan of Arc

  Ada Louise Huxtable on Frank Lloyd Wright

  Martin Marty on Martin Luther

  Thomas Keneally on Abraham Lincoln

  Edmund White on Marcel Proust

  Laura Shapiro on Julia Child

  Louis Auchincloss on Woodrow Wilson · R. W. B. Lewis on Dante

  Francine du Plessix Gray on Simone Weil

  Patricia Bosworth on Marlon Brando

  Wayne Koestenbaum on Andy Warhol

  Jane Smiley on Charles Dickens

  Robert V. Remini on Joseph Smith

  Kathryn Harrison on Saint Thérèse of Lisieux

  Tom Wicker on George Herbert Walker Bush

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Jimmy Breslin, 2011 All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Breslin, Jimmy.

  Branch Rickey / Jimmy Breslin.

  p. cm.—(A penguin life)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47603-1

  1. Rickey, Branch, 1881-1965. 2. Baseball team owners—United States—Biography.

  3. Brooklyn Dodgers (Baseball team)—Presidents—Biography. I. Title.

  GV865.R45B74 2010

  796.357092—dc22

  [B] 2010035008

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  For Charles V. Feeney, aka Pally

  PROLOGUE

  Beautiful. When they ask me to write a book about a Great American, right away I say yes. When I say yes I always mean no. They ask me to choose a subject, and I say Branch Rickey. He placed the first black baseball player into the major leagues. His name was Jackie Robinson. He helped clear the sidewalks for Barack Obama to come into the White House. As it only happened once in the whole history of the country, I would say that is pretty good. Then some editors told me they never heard of Rickey. Which I took as an insult, a disdain for what I know, as if it is not important enough for them to bother with.

  So now I had to write the book.

  Simultaneously, I had a problem for a writer as bad as sprained hands. The rule I followed from my first day as a copyboy in the sports departments was that you couldn’t write about a game unless you went to see it. These people who tried reporting by watching television were killing readers with lifeless stories. It still is like this, except there are many fewer readers to murder.

  The trouble is, I spoke to Branch Rickey only once in my whole life. I am with my friend Rusty Wilde at Ebbets Field, where maybe two hundred spectators sit in a big rainstorm watching the Brooklyn Dodgers football team play against the Chicago Rockets. I was a copyboy after school at the old Long Island Press and got the tickets from the sports department. The newspaper is gone as are both teams.

  Into the seat behind me comes Rickey, the Dodgers owner, in a yellow slicker, with lackeys to the left and right. He says, “Hello, boys.” I am on my high school football team and must show how much I know. I ask him why his star quarterback is playing what was known as a single wing formation. They start each play by passing a wet ball back to him, and in all this mud you can’t handle the ball so good.

  “He ought to be in a T,” I say. “We got the best T quarterback ever to live from around here.”

  Rickey says, “Who is that?”

  I say, “Sidney Luckman.”

  Rickey says, “I’ve heard of him.” He was playing me for a fool. Luckman was already a legend.

  I say, “He comes out of Erasmus Hall High. At Flatbush and Church. My uncle took me to see him play Lincoln, down by Coney Island.” I was as smart as they come. Rickey now ignores me and I don’t pick up half of what I could have. I wanted to go back to the sports department at the school newspaper and show off with what I heard him say. When I did overhear him, I concentrated totally on every word. I hunched over and wrote a couple of key words on a sheet of copypaper that was folded in three. That was the way the big reporters did it. The paper was cheap city room newsprint. I wrote “concept of education?” and “leading characteristic match their ability.” If I had paid attention like this in school I would have had a full scholarship to Oxford.

  I never saw Branch Rickey again and now I am going to write a great book about him. I was sure I had a lifesaver. Jack Lang, whom I know for maybe fifty years, has been writing newspaper stories about Rickey for a long time. I am going to see him next week. Then I am in the shower and my wife hollers, “Jack Lang died.” I said a prayer. After a period of mourning, I started again. I called Emil “Buzzie” Bavasi at his home in
San Diego. He was an assistant to Rickey and was in the room when they decided to bring up Jackie Robinson. “Come out and we’ll go over the whole thing,” he said. Two days later I pick up the paper and read that Buzzie died.

  I figured I would be able to rely on big-name historians whom I have yet to read and that this would be immensely pleasurable. And then I read the books. History writers should be put not in the jail but under it.

  The only books on the subject you can tolerate are Branch Rickey: American in Action, by Arthur Mann; Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman, by Lee Lowenfish; First Class Citizenship: The Civil Rights Letters of Jackie Robinson, edited by Michael Long; Branch Rickey, by Murray Polner; Jackie Robinson, by Arnold Rampersad; Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, by Jules Tygiel; and Notes on Duels and Duelling, by Lorenzo Sabine. As you read them, you become exhausted realizing the work these men have done. Polner is a friend, but I would save and reread his work even if I hated him.

  In addition to reading, I used my two legs, which always have taken me through confusing jobs. Walk the streets, find old addresses, climb stairs, go to a nursing home or a saloon. Find somebody whose grandfather was there. Listen.

  I also bring to this book, readers all, a full love of topic, plus humor and skepticism. Herewith, a look at the life and times and accomplishments of Branch Rickey.

  CHAPTER ONE

  This is a January morning in 1943 and Wesley Branch Rickey is standing outside his house at 34 Greenway South in Forest Hills Gardens, Queens, New York City. At age sixty-one, his hair remains thick and dark. His eyebrows jut like rocky ledges, like something from an old photo of John L. Lewis, the labor leader. Rickey’s face shows eagerness and excitement even after all his years in baseball. He has asked God for help and believes that is exactly what is happening now.

  Delightful chimes only Rickey can hear come from high in the sky, sounding softly and clearly through the bare limbs of the trees lining the street. He waits in cold, fresh air for his ride to downtown Brooklyn, where he runs the Dodgers baseball team. While this does not sound so vital, especially in time of war, today he is doing the work of the Lord with all his heart and mind and these large, gnarled hands he waves. He is going to a crucial meeting with the banker who holds the mortgage on the Dodgers baseball team.

  Rickey carries with him a Midwestern Christian religious fervor as strong as a wheat crop, and a political faith in anything Republican. Already he is a familiar figure at his new church in Queens, the Church in the Gardens, only steps down the narrow street from his house. It is a place of worship as lovely as it sounds, built with stone from Europe. On Sundays, Branch Rickey brought with him to church a prayer book and a background of Methodist studies from Ohio Wesleyan University, and sometimes he delivered the sermon. In one, he announced he was here to run the Brooklyn Dodgers and to serve the God to whom they prayed, and the Lord’s work called for him to bring the first black player into major league baseball.

  You held the American heart in your hand when you attempted to change anything in baseball. If a black was involved, the cardiograms showed an ice storm.

  Baseball was a sport for hillbillies with great eyesight. Rickey read books and as a young man was the catcher in town games and made it to the big leagues, but only for a very short time. He never went to high school, but his first job was as a schoolteacher. Later he taught college freshman English, Latin, Shakespeare, and Greek drama, and read for the law in his free time. Sometimes, in directing his players, he mixes all these things together. Then he brings it down to their level in a drill for pitchers by putting a twenty-dollar bill atop a hat on home plate and telling them to hit it.

  Rickey is here just a few months from St. Louis, where he put together the Cardinals teams that won six National League pennants and four World Series, one of them just last fall against the Yankees. The only thing he couldn’t do in St. Louis was move black fans out of the broiling one-hundred-degree sun of the bleachers and into the shaded grandstand. When Rickey asked the Cardinals’ owner Sam Breadon to get rid of the segregated-seating rule, Breadon, from Greenwich Village in Manhattan, knew Rickey was right, but not as right as the gasoline that people in that near-Southern city would splash over the wooden stands in order to burn them to the ground. “Business is business,” he told Rickey, turning him down.

  In no calling, craft, profession, trade, or occupation was color in America accepted. The annals of the purported greats show that everyone was paralyzed with the national disease: color fear.

  But here on this street corner stands Branch Rickey, a lone white man with a fierce belief that it is the deepest sin against God to hold color against a person. On this day he means to change baseball and America, too. The National Pastime, the game that teaches sportsmanship to children, must shake with shame, Rickey thought. Until this morning in Forest Hills, there has been no white person willing to take on the issue. That is fine with Rickey. He feels that he is at bat with two outs and a 3-2 pitch coming. He is the last man up, sure he will get a hit.

  At 7:00 a.m. on this same morning, George V. McLaughlin leaves his duplex at 35 Prospect Park West, Brooklyn. The great park lawns across the street brittle with frost. He still hasn’t the slightest idea of what beyond team finances Branch Rickey wants to discuss. Right away there is the pealing of bells from St. Saviour’s Catholic Church nearby. They ring for what he would accomplish on this day.

  McLaughlin had climbed a ladder of religion, politics, and hard work. His father was a ferryboat captain and young McLaughlin’s schooling in Brooklyn stressed showing up on time for work. One of his early jobs was at a bank and simultaneously he got a degree at night from New York University. Then he went to law school and taught accounting after hours before becoming a lawyer, police commissioner, state banking superintendent, and now president of the Brooklyn Trust Company, to which the Dodgers owe $800,000. He wants to get paid.

  McLaughlin and Rickey were raised to call to God from under different roofs. Rickey was a proclaimed Methodist, devout conservative, and Prohibitionist. George V. McLaughlin had heard of people other than Roman Catholics but couldn’t tell you if he had met many. His temporal belief consisted of the Brooklyn Democratic Party. He said that anyone in Brooklyn who didn’t vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt should be committed. McLaughlin was called “George the Fifth” because he was in charge wherever he went and if he took a drink of Scotch that was none of your business.

  Rickey is from the hills and swamps of southern Ohio, and was raised singing Methodist hymns in a wagon going to church on Sunday. Wesley Branch Rickey was named after John Wesley, who founded Methodism in England in 1739, a precept of which was “Think and let think.” The scriptures mention a “branch” that helped make Wesley a saint. Rickey’s religion and politics were inseparable, and made it only natural for him to campaign for the Eighteenth Amendment, which was Prohibition. Get out there and break all those whiskey bottles that cause men and, yes, women, too, to become filthy pigs and wallow in the worst of sins. He finally stopped supporting the amendment but only because it didn’t work. He told the Brooklyn Rotary Club, “The cause of prohibition, a most worthy one, was thrown back a hundred years by the Volstead Act.”

  Even in a ballpark where everybody but the third baseman drank big cold beers, Rickey remains openly against drink. There is the night when sportswriter Arch Murray of the New York Post sees Rickey in a box at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh and runs through the stands to get to him. Every day of his life, Arch wears a Princeton tie in honor of his old school and conducts a one-person tailgate party. His breath requires corking. Rickey inhales once in his presence and immediately begins talking vigorously, waving his hands. Arch nods and listens intently. Seeing this, the other reporters become anxious, saying, look, Rickey is giving Arch an exclusive. Arch returns from his private audience muttering, “He’s right. He’s right. He’s right.”

  “What is he right about?” someone asks.

&nbs
p; “I should stop drinking.”

  So here this morning is Rickey, a man of total abstinence and an active member of the St. Louis Grace Methodist Episcopal Church, with strong ties to the St. Louis City Evangelical Union, taking his dreams to a Brooklyn banker. This man, Rickey thinks, doesn’t agree with me on everything. Still, Rickey is sure where George V. would be in a decent fight. George V. had a great aversion to moving backward. You could find him at lunch each day in Room 40 of the Bossert Hotel, where anybody who was a name in Brooklyn business or politics came to show respect. When George V. raised a thumb on your behalf, you had unbeatable support.

  At the Brooklyn Trust Company, McLaughlin had in his hands the accounts of the large pharmaceutical company started by Charles Pfizer, and sprawling real estate empires and construction companies, too. As the head of the financially creaky Dodgers baseball team, McLaughlin walked through a world of smiles, claps on the back, and congratulations. If you were prominent enough, you could get players’ autographs from George V. and become a towering figure with your kids. In his Brooklyn, only rosary beads blessed by the Pope could mean more.

  For the meeting with McLaughlin, Rickey arrived on crowded Court Street, which sloped down to the East River and the big, brawling Brooklyn Navy Yard, source of thousands of warships with crews as white as their uniforms. Rickey and George McLaughlin held their meeting four years before the armed forces were desegregated by Harry Truman, years before Brown v. Board, decades before the Civil Rights Act and the great American law, Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Voting Rights Act of 1965 (and that is exactly how it should be printed in the books). On this day Martin Luther King, Jr., was a junior at an Atlanta high school.

  McLaughlin was not famous for working with or socializing with blacks. This was no surprise to Rickey, and so he looked right past it to find any strength that could get him home. Usually he judged a man’s ability to hit behind the runner; this time he was measuring a guy at a desk. Going in, his scouting report on McLaughlin was brief: a crackerjack. Where is he on civil rights for blacks? It doesn’t matter where he is when it starts. Look for where he’ll be at the finish.