Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  Long after Beecher’s sudden death in 1887, the pulpit of the Plymouth Church remained a podium for social reform and a prized spot for Congregational ministers. The Reverend Dr. L. (for Lawrence) Wendell Fifield, a tall, bespectacled and rather solemn theologian, became pastor at the Plymouth Church in 1941 and stayed through 1955, the year the Brooklyn Dodgers finally won the World Series. Fifield was 10 years younger than Rickey, but the men shared a Midwestern background: Fifield had graduated from Oberlin College, not far from Rickey’s beloved Ohio Wesleyan. He rose to prominence as pastor of the Plymouth Congregational Church in Seattle where, among other activities, he presented weekly book reviews on Wednesday evenings, open to the public and widely attended. He headed a Red Cross emergency drive, served on a committee charged with handling the problems of servicemen and, in 1940, received an award from the King County Association of Realtors as “First Citizen of Seattle.”

  He and Rickey, successful, high-achieving, outspoken religious Christians, bonded when Rickey came to Brooklyn. The first person to learn of Rickey’s momentous decision to sign Robinson was his wife, Jane Moulton Rickey. Walter “Red” Barber, a great sportscaster but a distressingly self-important man, long claimed that he was the first person outside the Rickey family to get the news. “Mr. Rickey took me to Joe’s, a very fine restaurant on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn,” Barber told me in 1972, “and outlined his daring plan. He wanted to know if I would come aboard. I can still see those strong catcher’s hands of his, trembling with intensity as he began to break a hard roll.”

  Barber had a worshipful following in Brooklyn and his background in the segregationist South was widely known. “The Ol’ Redhead,” as he liked to call himself, spiced his broadcasts with phrases he had picked up in the rural South. A player doing well was “sittin’ in the catbird seat.” The Dodgers rallying late were “tearin’ up the ol’ pea patch.” He spoke and of course broadcast with a refined but unmistakable Southern drawl.

  From the start, Barber championed Robinson and the cause of baseball integration. Early in 1947, Robinson’s rookie season in Brooklyn, Barber delivered a brief, powerful statement during an afternoon game. Turning away from the action, he said he found Robinson to be not only a fine ballplayer but beyond the diamond a fine human being. With great fervor, Barber concluded, “I hope he bats 1.000.”

  Robinson’s signing was a lightning rod for controversy, and since Rickey’s relations with the New York media were uneven, Barber’s support was indispensable. But the Ol’ Redhead was not the first person beyond family to hear about Rickey’s grand design. Convinced that in signing Robinson he was following the path of righteousness, Rickey still grappled with concern and doubt and worried about his survival in the racist world of baseball. That led him to the study of the Plymouth Church and a memorable meeting with the Reverend Fifield.

  June Fifield, the minister’s wife, composed a description of the meeting for a book she hoped someday to write. As far as I know that book was never completed. The account that follows, written in 1965, has not previously been published.

  BRANCH RICKEY’S “DAY OF DECISION”

  By June H. Fifield

  News of the passing of Branch Rickey, a treasured friend of my late husband, Rev. Dr. L. Wendell Fifield, came to the world on the day that I sat writing an anecdote about a game we saw with him at Ebbets Field, for one of the chapters of a book based on my husband’s life and works.

  It was a strange, mystical experience to me to have been so surrounded by the spirit of Mr. Rickey that I should be writing about him at that time. It seemed, somehow, a sign that the time had come to tell a story I had long hesitated to write because it seemed privileged material. Dr. Fifield had shared the feeling that Jackie Robinson and the rest of the world should know the story but that it should not be told in Rickey’s lifetime without his permission.

  I had always felt that Mr. Rickey would be the first to approve, for his own life was so bound up in this young man, his affection so deep and his expectations so high. His affection, shared by his wife and “Auntie,” the sister in her eighties who never missed a game and kept an impeccable box score, was evidenced to us many times. “Auntie” gave us her own witness once when we dined at the Rickeys’ home. She said, “When we have the team over for refreshments, Jackie is the one who offers to lend a hand, and he unfailingly says a word of appreciation when he leaves. He has the best manners of the bunch!”

  I write this in the spirit of a tribute and a plea: a tribute to Branch Rickey and L. Wendell Fifield—two men, strong of character, pastor and parishioner, whose rapport was a quick mutual outpouring of meaningful forces that drew them together inextricably as friends; a plea to Jackie Robinson to realize what went into the launching of his career—that someone cared enough to grope for wisdom beyond himself, to call upon God’s guidance—and that the man who did this was, in common erroneous parlance, “white.”

  One day, as my husband sat working at his desk in the study of the church house, his secretary buzzed to say, “Mr. Rickey is here and asks to come in.” No appointment was ever necessary for someone with an urgent problem, and my husband’s “Certainly, show him in” carried with it more than casual interest. He was always warmed by the presence of this friend whose busy schedule of travel and activity allowed him little time for communication on a social level. In high hopes of a long chat, Dr. Fifield rose to greet him at the door.

  “Sit down, Wendell,” said Mr. Rickey. “Don’t let me interrupt. I can’t talk with you. Keep right on with your work. I just want to be here. Do you mind?”

  Without another word, Branch Rickey began to pace the floor. He paced, and he paused, he paced and he paused. Occasionally he gazed out the window at the sooty gloom of Brooklyn Heights, slightly relieved by the church garden struggling for beauty below. Pace, pause, pace, pause; turn, gaze, pace, pause.

  Once in a while my husband glanced up from his work, but he spoke no word. He knew that whatever brought Mr. Rickey to his presence was an extremely important and personal matter, and he gave him the privacy of his struggle. Mr. Rickey stood with eyes closed and seemed to draw his great frame up to a new height. Then he’d sag again and pace. As the pauses grew longer, my husband once caught a kind of glow about Mr. Rickey as he stood in silence. Then, back to the pacing and pausing—and silence.

  Forty-five minutes of this can be a long, long walk. I believe, on the average, allowing for pauses, about three miles. It proved to be a mighty significant three-mile hike, in the equally significant atmosphere of a minister’s study. At the end of the time, Branch Rickey, his face aglow under those famous outthrust eyebrows, bent over my husband’s desk, his eyes piercing, and cried:

  “I’ve got it!” He banged his huge fist on the desk, rattling everything from fountain pen to intercom. “I’ve got it!” he banged again, elated, transported.

  It was too much for Dr. Fifield. He’d waited long enough to know what was going on in his own home base. “Got what, Branch? How much longer before I find out what you’re up to—pacing around here and banging on my furniture and keeping the whole thing to yourself? Come on, out with it!”

  Branch sank, exhausted, into the nearest chair, fortunately big and overstuffed, as he was himself in those days of generous teeming good health and vigor.

  “Wendell,” he said, “I’ve decided to sign Jackie Robinson!”

  Moisture glistened in Mr. Rickey’s eyes. He blew an emphatic blast of his famous big nose, while my husband awaited the rest of the story.

  It scarcely need be pointed out to anyone who reads that, in 1945, Jackie Robinson was the first Negro major league basball player to be signed, a step in professional athletics that had worldwide repercussions and opened the way to careers for Negroes in virtually every phase of the sports world hitherto denied.

  “Wendell,” Branch said, when he regained his composure, “this was a decision so complex, so far-reaching, fraught with so many pitfalls but filled with so mu
ch good, if it was right, that I just had to work it out in this room with you. I had to talk to God about it and be sure what He wanted me to do. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Remembering this, I understand better a remark a young friend made recently when I chided myself at still missing my husband so terribly 18 months after his passing. He said, “What can you expect of yourself? It was a great experience for anyone just to be in the same room with him. Of course you’ll miss him—forever.”

  Mr. Rickey straightened his bow tie and reached for his old battered hat. “Bless you, Wendell,” he said, and was off. He went from the study that day out into the fray where he loved to do battle, armed with a strength from his God whom he trusted. He revolutionized athletic practices and attitudes in this country and beyond, during that forty-five minute walk with God in the warmth of my husband’s presence in the environment of the church study. He had humbled himself and sought to communicate with a Presence and a wisdom and a power beyond his own, for he knew that, alone, he was insufficient to the task of knowing right from wrong, as we all are.

  He went from that encounter in confidence and in faith. In the certainty of God’s guidance, he launched a young man, Jackie Robinson, who rose to great heights, and has taken thousands of his brothers with him, earning the respect and adulation of all races.

  I hope Jackie will see his fellow man in a new light, knowing this story. May he ever remember Branch Rickey’s soul-searching in the presence of the God of us all, on his own “Days of Decision.”

  Unfortunately Mrs. Fifield did not provide the date of this remarkable meeting, and now all the principals, including Mrs. Fifield, are dead.

  When considering Rickey’s motive in signing Robinson, the words of June H. Fifield are convincing. It was overwhelmingly a moral decision, indeed a modern revelation, as powerful, in its way, as the revelation on the road to Damascus that knocked St. Paul off his horse.

  FOUR

  THE BATTLE LINES OF THE REPUBLIC

  INTEGRATION IN AMERICA SURGED FORWARD throughout the 10 major-league years of Jackie Robinson. During Robinson’s turbulent and triumphant seasons, baseball was the unquestioned leader of American sport and Robinson was its most exciting player.

  Briefly to summarize—later we will see him in more detail—I here cite a passage from The Boys of Summer:

  Robinson could hit and bunt and steal and run. He had intimidating skills, and he burned with a dark fire. He wanted passionately to win. He charged at ballgames. He calculated his rivals’ weaknesses and measured his own strengths and knew—as only a few have ever known—the precise move to make at precisely the moment of maximum effect. His bunts, his steals, and his fake bunts and fake steals humiliated a legion of visiting players. He bore the burden of a pioneer and the weight made him more strong. If one can be certain of anything in baseball, it is that we shall not look upon his like again.

  Once Tim McCarver tried, with reasonable amiability, to sandbag me during a television interview. “You said in one place that Jackie Robinson was the greatest player you ever saw. Somewhere else it was Willie Mays. Which is it?”

  Mays had the greatest raw ability of anyone in my time. Speed, power, defense, throwing arm. Probably, although one can’t be sure of this, even greater skills than Joe DiMaggio. But Robinson was the most exciting player. No episode in baseball was as rousing as Jackie Robinson caught in a rundown, sprinting, stopping, sprinting, dodging, sprinting and finally breaking free. Of course there was mighty symbolism in the play. Quoting from a Negro spiritual, “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.” But symbolism (and music) aside, it was wonderful baseball.

  During Robinson’s playing years, spring training concluded with a cavalcade of exhibition games. Two teams traveled together for 10 days or so in private Pullman cars and shuttled from place to place in the southern states, moving northward and giving thousands their only chance to see major-league baseball firsthand. The Giants, who trained in Phoenix, moved out with the Indians, who trained in Tucson. I journeyed with them when they spent six days traversing Texas. Two Pullman berths became your apartment, the lower for sleeping, the upper for storage. Personally I prefer seven rooms, river view.

  The Dodgers, based in Vero Beach, matched with the Braves, who started in Bradenton. The primary purpose of these little odysseys was not to condition the ballplayers. They had already grunted and strained their way into shape among orange groves or desert sands. The purpose, as with all road shows, was to harvest cash. Everywhere, Robinson was the prime gate attraction. As a late sportswriter, the talented Wendell Smith, wrote:

  Jackie’s nimble,

  Jackie’s quick.

  Jackie’s making the turnstiles click.

  Apartheid ruled the American South well into the 1950s. The famous Supreme Court decision demanding integration of public schools did not come until 1954. Three years later Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas defied the Court and ordered National Guard soldiers, armed with rifles, to stop African American students from attending Little Rock Central High. Apartheid was persistent, like a plague, and it still was raging when Robinson retired from baseball in 1956. But his career smoked out the bigots almost everywhere they lurked and then revealed America’s homegrown racism in a blazing, inextinguishable light.

  The Brooklyn where I grew up was hardly free from bigotry. Much of the hatred was channeled into sewer anti-Semitism promoted by pseudo-religious Roman Catholic groups such as the Christian Front. Some priests preached about Jewish plots to dominate the world. (Perhaps they should have been talking about Hitler.) Others maintained that communism was an international Jewish conspiracy.

  A teammate on the Froebel football team, “Fats” Scott, once snapped at me, “You’re a dirty Jew.” I ignored Fats, but I did not ignore Donald Kennedy, the team captain, who started to laugh. “Then you’re a dirty Presbyterian,” I said. Kennedy stopped laughing and we grappled.

  A passerby once snapped at me and a friend as we shot marbles on a sidewalk, “You’re Jews, huh? Wanna own the world, huh!” At the time, we were nine years old.

  Many Catholic clerics looked back in anger at the crucifixion. “All right, already,” one exasperated Jew is said to have cried out to a threatening mob of Christian Fronters. “We did kill Christ. All right, already. But wouldn’t he have been dead by now anyhow?”

  Jews were visible, accounting for a significant portion of the total Brooklyn population of two million. Contending with the ambient anti-Semitism gave many Jewish people a feeling of identity with other victims of discrimination, including blacks. Brooklyn Jews rooted for Jackie Robinson to succeed as passionately as Alabama Klansmen rooted for him to fail. In turn, Robinson became a ferocious foe of anti-Semitism. When I once sneered at a Dodger utility player as “the dumbest Jew I’ve ever met,” Robinson laced into me for 10 minutes.

  In long-ago Brooklyn you seldom saw blacks. A cleaning woman and a postman were the only blacks I encountered as a child. During my four years at Erasmus Hall I attended class with only one black student. That was second-year Latin and the black youngster, totally isolated, performed poorly. From the towers of the Ivy League down to street corners and gutters, the North exuded a bigotry of its own. But Southern racism was a thing apart.

  Public water fountains throughout the South, gathering places for children on hot summer days, were marked “White” and “Colored.” So were toilet facilities. No leading Southern hotel or restaurant accepted blacks. A black man couldn’t even buy a beer at a working-class bar. In refined Southern social circles the term nigger was shunned, but neither did you hear the then acceptable word Negro. Southern ladies and gentlemen referred to blacks as “nigras,” pronounced NEE-gras. Nowhere, except at a Klan meeting or a lynching, was Southern bigotry more evident than at the ballparks.

  During Robinson’s 10 major-league springs the Dodgers played in a wide variety of Southern ballparks. To cite a few, the spring cavalcade brought them to Hartwell Fiel
d in Mobile, Pelican Stadium in New Orleans, Ponce de Leon Park in Atlanta, Sulphur Dell in Nashville and LaGrave Field in Fort Worth. These parks varied in size and appearance. The one constant was segregation. Good seats were available only to whites. This rule was enforced not merely by ushers, but was also supported by state troopers carrying pistols.

  When the Dodgers and Braves came to Pelican Stadium one April day in 1953, the sections reserved for whites did not sell out. The black stands were overflowing. Gathering notes, I was standing on the field with Robinson, who was playing catch with Reese when the Louisiana troopers made a decision. They opened up a few corridors of empty white seats to black fans. The blacks swarmed in, then burst into cheers for the white troopers.

  Robinson stopped playing catch. “You stupid bastards,” he shouted. “Don’t cheer those fucking cops. They’re only giving you what’s rightly yours.” He continued shouting until Reese said in his gentle way, “Jack. Did you come out here to warm up or make a speech?”

  At Hartwell Field no seats were available for black fans. Attendants strung rope in center field and the blacks who wanted to see the Dodgers play the Braves had to see it standing behind rope. Of course this changed the dimensions of the playing field and distorted the game. Any ball hit into the outfield crowd, but not over the fence, became a ground-rule double.