Rickey and Robinson
Page 24
Afterword
This story appears in It Happened in Brooklyn,1 the oral history I wrote with my wife Myrna Katz Frommer:
MAX WECHSLER: When school was out, I sometimes went with my father in his taxi. One summer morning, we were driving in East Flatbush down Snyder Avenue when he pointed out a dark red. brick house with a high porch.
“I think Jackie Robinson lives there,” he said. He parked across the street, and we got out of the cab, stood on the sidewalk, and looked at it.
Suddenly the front door opened. A black man in a short-sleeved shirt stepped out. I didn’t believe it. Here we were on a quiet street on a summer morning. No one else was around. This man was not wearing the baggy, ice-cream-white uniform of the Brooklyn Dodgers that accentuated his blackness. He was dressed in regular clothes, coming out of a regular house in a regular Brooklyn neighborhood, a guy like anyone else, going for a newspaper and a bottle of milk.
Then, incredibly, he crossed the street and came right towards me. Seeing that unmistakable pigeon-toed walk, the rock of the shoulders and hips I had seen so many times on the baseball field, I had no doubt who it was.
“Hi Jackie, I’m one of your biggest fans,” I said self-consciously. “Do you think the Dodgers are gonna win the pennant this year?”
His handsome face looked sternly down at me. “We’ll try our best,” he said.
“Good luck,” I said.
“Thanks.” He put his big hand out, and I took it. We shook hands, and I felt the strength and firmness of his grip.
I was a nervy kid, but I didn’t ask for an autograph or think to prolong the conversation. I just watched as he walked away down the street.
At last the truth can be told. I am blowing my cover. That kid, MAX WECHSLER, was me, Harvey Frommer, and it now seems to me that morning moment on a street in East Flatbush was when the seeds for Rickey and Robinson were first planted.
It is gratifying to see this book, written more than twenty years ago, back in print. I have written many other books since then, but Rickey and Robinson remains one of my favorites. Perhaps it is because I was fortunate enough to interview such special people for this work: Rachel Robinson, Roy Campanella, Mack Robinson, Irving Rudd, Monte Irvin. Perhaps it is because this story is such a significant piece of American sports history and culture. Perhaps it is because it traces the lives of two very different people who came together on common ground to shatter baseball’s age-old color line.
1. Harvey Frommer, and Myrna Katz Frommer. 1993· It Happened in Brooklyn: An Oral History of Growing Up in the Borough in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Appendix