Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  The silence of the mainstream press proved fatal. Our Sports did not survive the season. Today few copies can be found. The Library of Congress issues an imposing purpose statement:

  The Library’s mission is to support the Congress in fulfilling its constitutional duties and to further the progress of knowledge and creativity for the benefit of the American people.

  I could find no copies, not one, of any issue of Our Sports in all the files and warehouses of knowledge and creativity that constitute America’s national library. Until now it was almost as if Jackie Robinson and I wrote the Our Sports stories between midnight and 4:00 a.m., then put them into a bottle and shipped them out before the sun rose into a dark and endless sea of silence.

  TEN

  NORTH OF THE BORDER

  “Do you really think a nigger is a human being, Mr. Rickey?”

  —CLAY HOPPER, Montreal manager, during spring training 1946

  “Robinson must go to the majors. He’s a big-league ballplayer, a good team hustler and a real gentleman.”

  —CLAY HOPPER at the conclusion of the 1946 season

  GLENN HALL, THE GREAT HOCKEY GOALIE WHO grew up in Manitoba, succinctly described Canadian attitudes on black and white. “We are nice to our Negroes in Canada,” Hall told me. “Both of them.” (It is a touch ironic that the first Canadian inducted into the American Baseball Hall of Fame was the fine right-handed pitcher Ferguson Jenkins. An Ontario native, he made Cooperstown in 1991. Fergie Jenkins is black.)

  Actually, the Anglo-Canadian Establishment discriminated against both Eskimos and Native Americans and was constantly at odds with the proud French-speaking minority that was clustered mostly in the province of Quebec. But the kind of sweeping antiblack segregation that infested the United States was unknown.

  On the afternoon of October 23, 1945, a cadre of 15 Canadian sportswriters gathered at the offices of the Royeaux de Montréal, the Montreal Royals, of the Triple A International League. They had promised “a major announcement.” Dink Carroll of the Montreal Gazette told me, “We’d heard that the Royals were going to announce that they’d hired Babe Ruth to manage. That would have been one helluva story. What awaited us was one helluva different story.”

  At the appointed hour Hector Racine, the portly president of the Royals, entered a conference room followed by Branch Rickey Jr., now director of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ superb 22-team minor-league farm system. The Montreal press corps had previously encountered both men. But the third entrant was a surprise, even a shock. He was a muscular, athletic-looking black man named Jack Roosevelt Robinson. “Here is the newest member of the Brooklyn Dodger organization,” Racine said. “Last year he was the star shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs. He will have every opportunity to make the Royals for the upcoming season, 1946.”

  “There was no applause,” Al Parsley of the Montreal Herald told me, “and neither were there hostile outbursts. I’d sum up the reporters’ approach in two words: belligerent neutrality.”

  Rickey Jr. read a prepared statement: “Mr. Racine and my father undoubtedly will be criticized in some sections of the United States where racial prejudice is rampant. We are not inviting trouble, but we will not try to avoid it if it comes. Jack Robinson is a fine type of young man, intelligent and college-bred. And I think he can take it, too. Some players may protest. A few may even quit. But they’ll be back in baseball after they work a year or two in a cotton mill.” Then, in a long-distance howitzer shot at Jimmy Powers and the nickname “El Cheapo,” Branch Jr. said, “We believe that Jackie Robinson is the right man for this mission and we have spared no expense in trying to make sure of that. The cost of scouting Negro players has run to over $25,000.”

  Next Robinson stood up. “Of course I can’t tell you how happy I am that I am the first member of my race in organized baseball,” he began. “I realize how much this means to me, my race and baseball. I can only say I’ll do my best to come through in every manner.” He smiled a disarming smile. “I guess I’m just a guinea pig in a noble experiment.”

  A reporter called out, “Are you going to try and take Stan Breard’s job?” Stanislaus Breard, a Montreal native, was expected to be the Royals starting shortstop.

  “I’m not trying to take anybody’s job. I’m just going to do the best I can.”

  Summing up, Dink Carroll commented, “I wouldn’t say that he turned all the pagans into Christians right there and then. Lloyd McGowan of the Star said there was no need for him in baseball. But Robinson made a more than decent start. I know some were impressed just by the clarity of his diction.”

  Jack was only beginning his long assault on the stereotypical Negro, exemplified by the comic actor Stepin Fetchit, who on the screen was invariably wide-eyed and afraid of ghosts and answered questions by saying, “Yowsah, boss.” (Fetchit’s real name was Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry. He is said to have been the first black actor to become a millionaire.)

  The response to the Robinson announcement was volcanic and, to put this charitably, mixed. Jimmy Powers wrote in the New York Daily News, “Robinson will not make the grade this year or next. . . . Robinson is a 1,000-to-one shot to make the grade.”

  Bob Feller, the great right-hander, had pitched against Robinson in barnstorming games. “He won’t hit,” Feller said. “He has too much upper-body muscle. He isn’t supple enough to get around on high inside fastballs.”

  “This move,” said Clark Griffith, longtime owner of the Washington Senators, “is a bad one. It’s going to kill the Negro Leagues.” (Griffith, whose teams were seldom contenders, made important money renting the Washington ballpark to teams in the Negro Leagues.)

  Alvin Gardner, president of the Texas League, said, “You’ll never see any Negro players on any teams in the South as long as the Jim Crow laws are in force. And that may be forever.”

  The president of the National Association, the umbrella group covering the minor leagues, was one William Bramham, a former Rickey protégé and a Carolina native. “Father Divine will now have to look to his laurels,” Bramham told reporters, referring to a popular, oddball black evangelical minister who claimed to be no one less than God. “Soon we can expect to see a Rickey Temple erected in Harlem.”

  “This whole thing is okay with me,” said Herb Pennock, the general manager of the Phillies, “as long as Rickey doesn’t bring the nigger to Philadelphia. We’re not ready for him here [in the City of Brotherly Love].”

  “I have no problem with this,” said Dixie Walker, the Dodgers skilled and popular right fielder, “just so long as I am not asked to play on the same team as Robinson.”

  Commissioner Happy Chandler claimed in later years that he championed integration. But on this day, when the issue was hot and words were so very important, Chandler had no comment.

  Billy Werber, a scrappy big-league infielder for more than a decade, was a graduate of Duke University and a man of strong opinions. He telephoned Rickey Sr. in Brooklyn and spoke in controlled anger. “A large segment of the ballplayers who contribute to the success of major-league baseball are of Southern ancestry or actually live in the South,” Werber said. “To attempt to force them to accept socially and to play with a Negro or Negroes is highly distasteful. You are for some unaccountable reason discriminating against the majority.” Rickey controlled his own anger and thanked Werber for the call.

  On November 1, 1945, the Sporting News printed a harsh editorial.

  MONTREAL PUTS NEGRO PLAYER ON SPOT

  In signing John Roosevelt Robinson, 26-year-old Negro native of Georgia, and former all-round athletic star at UCLA, the Montreal club of the International League, through Branch Rickey, president of the parent organization in Brooklyn, touched off a powder keg in the South, unstinted praise in Negro circles, and a Northern conviction that the racial problem in baseball is as far from a satisfactory solution as ever.

  In New York, there is a feeling that the engagement of Robinson is, in the main, a legalistic move. Last July 1
, there became effective in the state of New York what is known as the Anti-Discrimination Law. This has to do, in part, with the barring of Negroes from jobs and professions.

  Rickey virtually admitted the legal facet of the Robinson signing when he said that, before long, every professional baseball club operating in the state of New York would be forced to engage Negroes.

  But how? Col. Larry MacPhail of the Yankees, who some time ago wrote a long report on the Negro-in-baseball question to the Mayor’s Committee in New York and Rickey himself, admits there is not a single Negro player with major-league possibilities for 1946. Satchel Paige, of course, is barred by his age. Nor could he afford to accept a major contract, even if he were 10 years younger. Robinson, at 26, is reported to possess baseball abilities which, were he white, would make him eligible for a trial with, let us say, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Class B farm at Newport News, if he were six years younger.

  Here, then, is the picture which confronts the first Negro signed in Organized Baseball as a Negro:

  (1) He is thrown into the postwar reconstruction of baseball, and placed in competition with a vast number of younger, more skilled and more experienced players. (2) He is six years too old for a chance with a club two classifications below the Double A rating of Montreal. (3) He is confronted with the sweat and tears of toil, with the social rebuffs and the competitive heartaches which are inevitable for a Negro trailblazer in Organized Baseball. (4) He is thrown into the spotlight, the one man of his race in any league under the jurisdiction of Commissioner Albert B. Chandler, and will be expected to demonstrate skills far beyond those he is reported to possess, or to be able to develop.

  Granted that Robinson can “take it,” insofar as points 2, 3 and 4 are concerned, the first factor alone appears likely to beat him down.

  The war is over. Hundreds of fine players are rushing out of service and back into the roster of Organized Baseball. Robinson conceivably will discover that as a 26-year-old shortstop just off the sandlots, the waters of competition in the International League will flood far over his head. One year ago, with baseball suffering from manpower stringencies, Robinson would have faced a better chance on the technical side of the game.

  The Sporting News believes that the attention which the signing of Robinson elicited in the press around the country was out of proportion to the actual vitality of the story.

  The Sporting News also is convinced that those players of southern descent who gave out interviews blasting the hiring of a Negro would have done a lot better by themselves and baseball if they had refused to comment.

  “It’s all right with me, just so long as Robinson isn’t on our club”—the standard reply—is unsportsmanlike, and, above all else, un-American.

  Meanwhile it would be well for the players to keep their opinions to themselves and let the club owners work out this perplexing problem.

  Years later some Sporting News staffers denied to me that this editorial actually appeared. Others, better informed, simply were embarrassed.

  Although I have not found editorials in any major newspapers acclaiming Rickey and Robinson, there was no shortage of positive comments. Bill Corum, an affable Missouri-born columnist for Hearst’s New York Journal-American, wrote, “Good luck to Rickey! Good luck to Robinson! Good luck to Baseball, which may be a little slow on the uptake, but which usually gets around to doing the sensible thing in the long run.”

  Al Laney of the Herald Tribune discussed the move with Jimmy Odoms, a retired Pullman car porter who supplemented his pension by sweeping the floor of the Tribune’s fifth-floor newsroom. He was the closest available Negro. “Pick out just one good boy,” said Odoms, a passionate baseball fan. “Put him in the minors and let him come up. He’s gonna make it and when he does the stars ain’t gonna fall. They’ll be plenty kids ready to try it after Robinson makes good.”

  Writing in the Baltimore Afro-American, Sam Lacy made a powerful and ultimately accurate prognostication. “Alone, Robinson represents a weapon far more potent than the combined forces of all our liberal legislation.”

  Red Smith, then working for the long dead Philadelphia Record, presented a thoughtful overview in his gentle and eloquent way. “It has become apparent that not everybody who prattles of tolerance and racial equality has precisely the same understanding of the terms.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  WHY WASN’T BRANCH RICKEY himself, the Baseball Liberator, presiding at Robinson’s titanic press conference or at least present there to work his polysyllabic spells? “As you know, I have never run from appropriate publicity,” he told me, “nor have I consciously sought it. I was experienced enough to realize that, had I attended, flurries of questions would have been hurled in my direction, placing me, so to speak, in the public glare. But October 23, 1945, was not a day that belonged to me.

  “That day belonged to Jackie Robinson.”

  Now in his mid-60s, Rickey, far from slowing down, was taking on the challenge of a lifetime. Many years earlier he had contracted tuberculosis, recovering slowly at a sanitarium in the Adirondack Mountains. But otherwise his health had been excellent and his energy seemed to be unlimited. Except for Sundays, he reached the Dodger offices on Montague Street at 8:00 a.m. and worked long into the night. Like his interests, his circle of friends extended beyond baseball, and included Frank Tannenbaum, an Austrian-born professor at Columbia University whose historic study, Slave and Citizen, won Rickey’s profound admiration. “That book,” Rickey told Arthur Mann, “is a wonder. We would all do well to memorize a passage.”

  Physical proximity, slow cultural intertwining, work their way against all seemingly absolute systems of values and prejudice. . . . Time will draw a veil over the black and white, the record of strife, and future generations will look back with wonder and incredulity. For they will not understand the issues that the quarrel was about.

  (Important as this approach was to the Jackie Robinson experience—proximity did indeed break down walls—it completely collapses when considering the prejudices underlying the Holocaust. The physical proximity between German Jews and German gentiles never modified in any way the Nazis’ murderous systems. In Rickey’s later years, this, and the Holocaust itself, greatly troubled him.)

  Lowell Thomas, an immensely popular network newscaster, was another good friend, and on Sundays Rickey often drove north where Thomas lived in the manicured Quaker Hill section of Pawling, New York. Other Quaker Hill residents included Edward R. Murrow, Norman Vincent Peale, Thomas E. Dewey and Pherbia and Raymond “Pinky” Thornburg, world travelers and fellow graduates of Ohio Wesleyan. Rickey relaxed with conversation or by playing bridge and chess. His favorite parlor trick delighted the children of Quaker Hill. Somehow he could balance three baseballs, one on top of another on top of another. He was so good at checkers that no one would take him on. “Here’s a valuable rule,” Rickey said. “Never play checkers with a man who carries his own board.”

  According to the Rickey papers in the Library of Congress, he traveled incessantly after the Robinson signing. The Dodgers bought a plane, a twin-engine Beechcraft, and Rickey flew about St. Paul, Fort Worth, Cincinnati, pursuing prospects and reviewing outposts of the Dodgers’ great minor-league system. His quest for talent was relentless. On one occasion, when he was trying to fly into Dubuque, Iowa, the pilot said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Rickey. There’s a bad squall line ahead. I’m going to set her down. We’ll have to wait to reach Dubuque until tomorrow.”

  Rickey had an appointment with the prospect. “Look,” he told the pilot. “You fly us through that squall line. I’ll take the responsibility.”

  Attending the winter baseball meetings in Chicago that December, Rickey suddenly was overcome with vertigo. He returned to New York and went by ambulance first to the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital and then to Peck Memorial Hospital nearby. The dizziness persisted. Rickey decided that he was suffering from a brain tumor. But after a number of workups doctors diagnosed the ailment as Ménière’s disease,
an affliction of the inner ear. It causes ringing in the ear and varying degrees of dizziness. There is no cure, but a number of medications palliate the condition.

  “I was relieved, of course,” Rickey told me, “but even with medication the darn thing kept coming back. I had just left my office on Montague Street one night when a wave of dizziness hit me as I was on the sidewalk. I clutched a lamppost to keep from falling. I held on, swaying until the attack passed.

  “Numbers of people walked by. Nobody offered to help. I heard one woman say to her companion, ‘Be careful. Stay away from that old drunk.’”

  A doctor told Rickey that stress appeared to worsen the disease. “I’d suggest you cut down on your workload,” the doctor said.

  The Robinson adventure was underway. Rickey looked at the doctor and said, “Impossible.”

  Before Rickey established the remarkable self-contained spring-training base called Dodgertown on the western edge of Vero Beach, Florida, Brooklyn’s minor-league affiliates trained at an east-central Florida town situated in a rural agricultural belt. As a tribute to the prime local crop, Sanford bore the nickname of Celery City, USA. It also, coincidentally, was the community in which the noted Dodger broadcaster Walter “Red” Barber spent his boyhood.

  In the South, “rural” meant racist, passionately racist, and Rickey concerned himself with the living and dining arrangements for Robinson in Florida. With Rickey’s enthusiastic support, Jack had decided to marry Rachel Odom, a bright and attractive nursing student he met at UCLA. “I knew organized baseball was going to be rough,” Robinson told me, “but I felt sure that I was going to make it. I told Rae that if she married me and stayed by my side during the tough early going, when I had it made down the road, I’d build her a home with everything a woman could want.” (So he did in North Stamford, Connecticut, a handsome mansion of stone and timber. But at the time of his death in 1972, Jack was several months behind in his mortgage payments.)