Rickey and Robinson

by Harvey Frommer

  “He got to his feet as the final inductee,” Bob Broeg, sports editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, recalls. “He was inducted along with George Sisler and the late publisher of the Sporting News, J. G. Taylor Spink. He wove a tale of three types of courage: physical, mental, and spiritual. And he had just launched into a parable about a biblical tailor when he suddenly put his hand over his heart and said, ‘I don’t believe I can continue.’”

  The audience was stunned. Rickey had suffered another heart attack.

  “He sat slumped down at the head table in the modestsized dining room of the old Daniel Boone Hotel,” Broeg remembers. “He would have died at once if it had not been for the presence of a Kansas City doctor, Dr. D. M. Nigro, the last man to see his old friend Knute Rockne alive when he put the famed coach on the fatal plane in 1931.”

  An ambulance sped Rickey to Boone County Memorial Hospital. Placed in the intensive care unit, supplied continuously with oxygen, the dying Rickey lay, his wife keeping a constant vigil at his bedside.

  Branch Rickey died at 10:oo P.M. on December g. It was just eleven days before his eighty-fourth birthday. His father, of whom he often spoke, lived to the age of eighty-six and “until the very end was still planting peach and apple trees on our farm near Portsmouth, Ohio,” Rickey was fond of saying. “And when I asked him who would take care of the fruit, he said, ‘That’s not important. I want to live every day as if I’m going to live forever.’” The Deacon left behind his wife, five daughters, many grandchildren, and several great-grandchildren. Strangely, few blacks attended the funeral of the man who had given Jackie Robinson the chance to break baseball’s color line. Rickey had always refused to accept any public honors for signing Robinson. “I have declined them all,” he said. “To accept honors and public applause for signing a superlative ballplayer, I would be ashamed.”

  Jackie Robinson was ashamed and angered at the skimpy black representation at the funeral. He criticized black athletes. “Not even flowers or telegrams, and they’re earning all that money,” he raged.

  Monte Irvin felt “the warm feeling for Branch Rickey had worn thin. Seemingly since Jack had acted the way he did and become arrogant and alienated a lot of people, they might have associated Jack’s arrogance with his association with Branch. They were still grateful for what Branch had done, but the warm feeling wasn’t there the way it was at the beginning.”

  Roy Campanella still had that warm feeling, but he was physically unable to attend the funeral. “Mr. Rickey went out of his way to do so much to put blacks in the major leagues. He could tell you so many things, Mr. Rickey, just like my mother or father reading a book to me as a youngster. He made me a better catcher, a better person on and off the field. He made me a completely changed individual.”

  Among the mourners was Rickey’s good friend Bill Shea. He remembers his thoughts that day: “My friend, Mr. Rickey, there’s nobody in baseball like him. There never will be again. There’s nobody in any way like him.”

  On that December day in St. Louis in 1965, there were moments when Jackie Robinson’s mind traveled back twenty years to an August day in Brooklyn when he and Branch Rickey first met. The passing years had seen them go their separate ways. But their relationship had always been more than a business one.

  “The passing of Mr. Rickey is like losing a father,” said Jackie Robinson, who never knew his own father. “My wife and I feel we’ve lost someone very dear to us. Mr. Rickey’s death is a great loss not only to baseball but to America. His life was full, and I’m sure there are no regrets as far as fulfillment in life. I think he did it all.”

  In 1967, the teller of more than a thousand homespun tales, many of which he heard from his mother, was adjmitted to the Hall of Fame. His plaque reads:

  WESLEY BRANCH RICKEY

  St. Louis A.L. 1905-1906-1914

  New York A.L. 1907

  Founder of farm system which he developed for St. Louis Cardinals and Brooklyn Dodgers. Copied by all other major league teams. Served as executive for Browns, Cardinals, Dodgers and Pirates. Brought Jackie Robinson to Brooklyn in 1947.

  The Branch Rickey Physical Education Center on the grounds of Ohio Wesleyan was the first building to bear his name. “It is impossible for me to give back to the University what it gave me,” Rickey once wrote. “If it were not for my family, all I have or all I should leave at my death would go to the University. . . . Without the experience I had at Delaware, I would have been at best a trustee of Rush Township in Scioto County, and, hopefully, a good country schoolteacher.”

  Three years after the death of Branch Rickey, another symbolic and much-loved figure in the life of Jackie Robinson passed away. His mother, Mallie, died in Pasadena. Jackie received a phone call about her illness and flew out to California to be with her. When he arrived, she was dead.

  Robinson pressed on without Mallie and without Rickey. His job and social concerns kept him moving, and wherever he went, he met with the respect won by his achievements. At the first Martin Luther King game in Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, Ben Wade was supervising batting-practice pitchers. A Brooklyn Dodger from 1952 to 1954, Wade was a good friend of Robinson’s. “I had the locker right next to him. We talked a lot. He loved to play cards. We played in hotel rooms, in trains. We played poker. He was a very good bluffer.”

  Wade remembers somebody’s tapping him on the shoulder that day in Dodger Stadium. It was Jackie Robinson. “We talked a bit about the old times. He asked me how my family was. I told him everyone was fine and I mentioned that the boy catching batting practice was my middle son. Til see you later’ were his words that ended our conversation. The game was about to start. A little while later when my son came up to me in the stands, Robbie made it a point to come over and he said to my son, ‘You don’t know me. I’m Jackie Robinson. I used to play ball with your dad. He’s quite a guy.’ My son will never forget that.”

  “I guess I had more of an effect on other people’s kids than I did on my own,” Robinson once said. “I thought my family was secure, so I went running around everyplace else.”

  On June 17, 1971, driving his brother David’s 1969 MG Midget on the Merritt Parkway to his Connecticut home, Jackie Jr. lost control of the car. There was a crash, and he died. He was twenty-four years old. Three years earlier, the youngster who looked so much like his father, who had the same pigeon-toed walk, who had batted .500 in Little League baseball, had been arrested for possession of drugs. His addiction had begun when he was wounded in Vietnam. Convicted on a drug charge, Jackie Jr. was ordered to undergo treatment at the Daytop Drug Abuse Facility in Seymour, Connecticut, and recuperated. At the time of his death, he was working to help young drug addicts. “You don’t know what it’s like to lose a son, find him, and lose him again,” Robinson said.

  Early in June 1972, at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Sandy Koufax were reunited at a ceremony retiring their uniform numbers. The three Hall of Famers stayed at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. “I saw Jackie in the hallway,” Campy remembers. “His son David was with him, and a fellow was holding him by the hand. I called out to Jackie from my wheelchair, ‘Hi, Jackie,’ and that’s when he told me that he couldn’t see too well. That stunned me. Not that I couldn’t believe it. I knew all the time he played he had sugar diabetes. I knew our trainer had to sometimes get Jackie to take insulin. Still, I could never believe that we’d come out together to the Biltmore Hotel here in Los Angeles for an old-timers’ game, that Jackie would hardly be able to see and that I would be in a wheelchair.”

  At Dodger Stadium the two brothers Mack and Jackie got together just miles away from the Rose Bowl and Muir Tech, Pasadena Junior College and Pepper Street. “He told me that his legs were killing him,” Mack recalls. “His sight was bad-he could no longer drive a car because he was going blind. I was shocked. I didn’t know his condition was that far gone. I was on the field with him when some fellow threw a baseball to him out of the stands for
him to autograph. The ball bounced off the top of his head because he couldn’t even see the ball coming. He got a terrific headache from that, and I guess it bothered him a lot to have the public see how much he had deteriorated.”

  Mal Goode saw his old friend Jackie Robinson at a banquet luncheon at Mamma Leone’s Restaurant in New York City in July. “I was standing there talking, and he said, ‘That sounds like Mal.’ I was about a foot away from him. ‘That you, Mal?’ He was looking right at me. I knew then. You talk about something tearing you up.” Robinson was bleeding behind the eyes. Efforts to cauterize the ruptured blood vessels with laser beams had not been successful.

  At Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati in October, Jackie Robinson threw out the first ball in the second game of the seventy-fifth World Series. There was halting movement in his legs and his hair was pure gray. A fan brought him a baseball. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I can’t see it. I’d be sure if I wrote only to mess up the other names you have on it.”

  The fan pushed the ball forward. “There are no other names, Mr. Robinson. The only one I want is yours.”

  It was almost twenty-seven years to the day since he signed a contract to become the first black player in organized baseball. Robinson was still persisting, still pressing.

  Td like to live to see a black manager,” he said over national television. “I’d like to live to see the day when there is a black man coaching at third base.”

  Today Mal Goode winces at the uproar caused by those modest demands. “They asked him why he had to use the World Series to ask for things like that. And he said, ‘What better place? What better time?’”

  Nine days after his appearance at Riverfront Stadium, on October 24, 1972, Jackie Robinson collapsed in the hallway of his Stamford home. Rachel called the police. External massage and oxygen were administered to the stricken fiftythree-year-old Robinson. A fire department ambulance took him to the Stamford Hospital. He died at 7:10A.M.

  “I spoke to Rae,” Campanella recalls. “She said Jackie had gone to Albany to make a speech for Governor Rockefeller, and at the time, Jackie was bleeding from behind the eyes and she suggested to him not to go. But he said he had made a commitment and he had to go. He came back home still bleeding behind the eyes, and he died.”

  In California, on hearing news of Robinson’s death, Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty ordered all flags on municipal buildings flown at half mast.

  Mack, the brother who taught him to broad jump, notes, “One of the things that probably led to his early death was that he didn’t recognize the problems that diabetes could cause. At times he did not keep up with his diet, and there were the pressures of his son’s drug problems and death.” .

  While many felt the singular pressures of Robinson’s life caused his untimely death, Rachel Robinson, the one person closest to him, maintains, “He didn’t die of heartbreak or pressure. He died of a very virulent disease that may have been advanced by the stress.”

  At the Duncan Brothers Funeral Home at Seventh Avenue and One hundred thirty-fifth Street, the ones who stood on line, the ones who filled the bleachers, the ones who traveled on the subways to the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium and Ebbets Field came to pay their last respects. Mostly middle-aged or elderly, sad-faced and full of stories, they lined up outside the funeral home and passed in single file before the coffin. “The whites and fancy blacks will see him at Riverside Church,” one of them said. ‘’First they gotta give the poor people a look. This is all family here.”

  The funeral was held in Riverside Church at noon on October 27, a Friday. A congregation of more than twentyfive hundred filled the Gothic church, with its thirty-story tower that overlooks the Hudson River and Grant’s Tomb. Three daughters and the grandson of Branch Rickey were there, and so were Roy Campanella, in a wheelchair, Willie Mays, Monte Irvin, Hank Aaron, Joe Louis, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn. President Nixon sent a forty-man delegation to honor Robinson.

  Mal Goode was there and remembers thinking, “Jackie’s head was white when he was thirty years old—that came from the anger he was holding in. He didn’t run from a fight, but he ran from fights those first two years, and it helped to hasten his death, a psychological kind of death.”

  The Reverend Jesse Jackson stood near the silver blue coffin draped with red roses and delivered the eulogy. He spoke of how the body corrodes and fades away, but the deed lives on. “When Jackie took the field, something reminded us of our birthright to be free.”

  Television personality Ed Sullivan; baseball executives Peter O’Malley, Warren Giles, and Bill Veeck; political leader Sargent Shriver; civil rights leader Roy Wilkins, A. Phillip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin; singer Roberta Flack; and others listened as Jackson pointed out that on Jackie Robinson’s tombstone would be recorded the years “1919 dash 1972—but on that dash”—Jackson’s voice rose—“is where we live. And for everyone there is a dash of possibility, to choose the high road or the low road, to make things better or worse. On that dash, he snapped the barbed wire of prejudice.”

  The eulogy was couched in poignant baseball metaphors. Near the end of his remarks, Jackson’s words made many in the huge congregation break into tears or sobs.

  “His feet danced on the base paths,” said Jackson.

  “Yes, sir,” a woman’s voice toward the back of the church answered him. “Yes, sir, that’s right.”

  “But it was more than a game,” continued Jackson.

  “Yes it was,” the woman said.

  “Jackie began playing a chess game, he was the black knight.”

  “Yes, sir, go ahead, all right.”

  “In his last dash,” said Jackson, “Jackie stole home and Jackie is safe.”

  “Yes, sir, you’re right.”

  “His enemies can rest assured of that.” “Yes, they can, hallelujah!”

  “Call me nigger, call me black boy, I don’t care!” “Hallelujah!” The woman’s voice was joined by hundreds of others, and the Jackson eulogy was ended.

  Ralph Branca, Larry Doby, Junior Gilliam, Don Newcombe, Pee Wee Reese, and Bill Russell were the pallbearers. They moved the casket bearing the body of their friend into the waiting hearse. The funeral cortege moved solemnly through the streets of Harlem and BedfordStuyvesant. Tens of thousands lined the route. Jackie Robinson was laid to rest in Cypress Hills Cemetery, just a few miles from where he touched millions of people, where there used to be a ballpark named Ebbets Field.

  The meaning and the memory of Jack Roosevelt Robinson have remained strong through all the years with Irving Rudd, Jack’s brother Mack, his sister Willa Mae, and his wife Rachel.

  “While Jack was making world history I was basically a common laborer,” says Mack with some bitterness. “None of his fame really rubbed off on me. The city of Pasadena has not recognized Jack’s achievements, nor did they recognize my achievements. They chose not to lower themselves, as they would call it, by placing his name in any type of historical place here in Pasadena, We came from Georgia, but we lived in Pasadena. There’s no amount of money that Pasadena could ever spend to bring it the fame that Jack and I brought and continue to bring to this city. In the field of athletics our name will never die.

  “The one thing that has upset me more than anything else is that so many black players feel no commitment to what he did. We should never forget where we came from. If some of those players can wind up with a lifetime batting average of three eleven under those pressures, then they can say anything they like.

  “I was shocked to learn that the Pittsburgh Pirates had a statue of Roberto Clemente in their park and the Dodger organization didn’t think to place any importance in that type of recognition for Jack.

  “From time to time,” Mack muses, “I’m watching sporting events and I look at the TV screen and I see Jackie Robinson. I look at the whole spectrum of black America’s life from 1947 on, against that from 1900 to 1947· We’re no longer the butlers, the servants, the maids; we
’re senators and congressmen. We’re baseball managers. I trace it back to his breaking the color line and creating a social revolution in a white man’s world. Blacks have excelled in all areas because Jackie Robinson showed the world we could.”

  Willa Mae’s memories are more tender. “I can still see him in the house with the family or out with a bunch of kids playing ball in the field. I believe that your days are numbered, and when you get to a certain point you have to step aside. He had been ill, and he told me and he told others that he knew he was going. I can just picture him all the way through to his passing. I have people who stop me and say their brother, their son, should have been the one. I say involve me out. I tell them if your brother or son was going to be the one, he would have been, because Jack sure wasn’t looking for it.”

  Rachel continues the work begun by her husband. Five years after his death, thirty years after he broke baseball’s color line, the Jackie Robinson Foundation was formed “to perpetuate some of Jackie’s goals, including educational, cultural, and recreational opportunities.” Rachel was its inspiration and functions as chairperson of the board of directors. The foundation is located just around the comer from the old Brooklyn Dodger office on Montague Street where Rickey and Robinson :first met.

  “In remembering Jack,” Rachel says, “I tend to deemphasize him as a ballplayer and emphasize him as an informal civil rights leader. That’s the part that drops out, that people forget. My memories of him are very good, very satisfying to me.”

  Perhaps the ultimate commentary on Jackie Robinson, however, comes not from an intimate but from one who has been intimately associated with the world of sports for many years:

  “I’m sure that being the pioneer in baseball killed him,” says sports publicist Irving Rudd. “Black bastard, nigger, spade, coon-those were the words they called him, and there was all that time he could do nothing about it, and hehad a short fuse. I always used to think of who I would like going down a dark alley with me. I can think of a lot of great fighters—Ali, Marciano, gangsters I was raised with in Brownsville, strong men like Gil Hodges—but for sheer courage, I would pick Jackie. He didn’t back up.”