Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  Bruce Dudley, the president of the Colonels, had opposed Montreal’s signing of Robinson, but now he kept his opposition in check. Robinson’s contract had the tacit approval of commissioner Happy Chandler, himself, as we have noted, a Kentuckian. Chandler later claimed he sent a message to Dudley saying, “The colored boy has every right to play.” No sane minor-league executive who wanted to stay employed would dare to defy the commissioner of baseball.

  A second consideration for Dudley was simply practical. The first three games were scheduled for Parkway Field and total attendance would run to at least 50,000 customers, paying for tickets, then buying ballpark hot dogs and swilling ballpark beer. In the battle, racism versus receipts, cash triumphed. As Calvin Coolidge remarked, “The business of America is business.”

  The Negro section of the stands at Parkway Field had room for only 466 people. A good estimate is that 20,000 Louisville blacks wanted to buy tickets to see Robinson. Dudley refused to increase the number of seats available to blacks. He said he was afraid a large crowd of blacks inside Parkway Field would lead to a race riot.

  “I knew I was going to catch hell,” Robinson said. “This was a trying time. I was segregated away from my teammates and Rachel couldn’t be with me. She developed some problems with her pregnancy and flew home to California where her mother, Zellee Isum, could help look after her. As for me, I was pretty much alone that afternoon.”

  As soon as Robinson jogged onto the field, the whites booed. A number of fans chanted, “Get your black ass back to Canada.” Others shouted “watermelon eater,” “shoeshine boy” and, inevitably, “nigger.” Otey Clark, a veteran Colonels pitcher from Boscobel, Wisconsin, said, “Everything he did, they booed him. I remember our starting pitcher that day, Jim Wilson, knocked him down, and the fans cheered. Robinson didn’t seem to pay any attention to any of it, but if you cared about fair play, and I did, it made for one miserable afternoon.” That day Robinson went 0 for 5, but the Royals won, 7 to 5. The jeering continued in harsh crescendos for the next two days and the Colonels won both games. Robinson came to bat 10 times in Louisville. He made out 9 times.

  Although racism was popular in Louisville, it was not universal. The Courier-Journal published an editorial saying that “a blight” had descended on the baseball season. “The blight,” an editorial writer observed, “was inflicted partly by demonstrations of prejudice against Montreal’s fine second baseman. A more deeply bitter taste, which may last a long time, came of the management’s policies toward Negro patrons.” The paper also ran a letter signed by “A Group of Fort Knox GIs.” They wrote, with more passion than clarity, “Louisville has now emerged as a city of obnoxious futility.”

  One for 10 or 10 for 10, Robinson was changing the times.

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  IT HAD BEEN SNOWING in the province of Quebec. That happens in Montreal, a great winter carnival of a town, in September and it also happens in April. According to one of my Canadian friends, “The sort of storm that totally shuts down Washington, DC, is what up here we call a dusting.”

  The Royals returned to their home ballpark, Delorimier Downs on East Ontario Street, and found it choked under seven inches of snow. It had also been laid out for football. Plows cleared the playing area, but with football yard markers chalked along the base paths, the place had a schizophrenic split-sport appearance. Baseball, however, is decidedly malleable. You can play on cement, dirt, plastic grass and even in an arena marked for football. (To give old Delorimier Downs its due, before it was demolished in 1971—11 years after the wrecker’s ball destroyed Ebbets Field—Delorimier had been the home field for several baseball Hall of Famers, including Roberto Clemente, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider and Don Drysdale.)

  Montreal sportswriters had described the unfortunate behavior of Louisville fans in both English and French newspapers. “By this time,” the late columnist Dink Carroll told me, “Robinson was established as a genuine local hero. People felt that if you insulted Jack you were insulting Montreal. That was one point on which the Québécois and the Anglos stood together. And the Jewish fans of Montreal felt the same way.” Someone summed up the general feeling accurately if inelegantly: “Southern hospitality, my ass. The bums in Louisville showed our guy only Southern hostility.”

  Despite the snow and cold, a goodly crowd, 14,685 fans, paid their way into Delorimier on the night of October 2. They came to cheer Robinson and to hoot the Louisville Colonels. “It was something,” Al Campanis remembered. “When the announcer read off the Louisville lineup, the fans booed every single name. And face it, there were actually some pretty good fellers like Sam Mele [a Queens native] on that Louisville squad. But the fans hooted each and every one, and cheered for all of us. Jackie got a standing ovation.”

  Louisville broke well and moved out, 4 to 0. Going into the ninth inning Louisville held a 5-to-3 lead. But the Royals scrambled back, playing a waiting game as right-hander Otey Clark lost his touch and walked three men. Two scored. The second and game-tying run came home in the person of Jackie Robinson.

  In the bottom of the 10th inning the Royals rallied against relief pitcher Mel Deutsch. With two men on base, Nemo Leibold, the 54-year-old manager of the Colonels, chose deliberately to walk Marv Rackley and pitch to Robinson. Rackley was a decent minor-league hitter, but in retrospect Leibold’s decision suggests he was a candidate for a brain transplant. Cheered by his fans, challenged by his opponents, Robinson cracked a sharp line single into left that scored the winning run. Montreal, 6. Louisville, 5. The Little World Series was tied.

  The weather moderated the next night and the crowd for Game 5 reached 17,758 on a Canadian evening that belonged to Jackie Robinson. He doubled in the first inning and scored on Tom Tatum’s single. He tripled in the seventh and scored when Lew Riggs doubled. In the eighth, with Campanis on third, Robinson dropped a bunt along the line for a run-scoring single. The Royals won, 5 to 3, and stood within a game of the championship of the minor leagues. “I’m beginning to believe,” Dink Carroll said, “that if Robinson bunted every time he came to bat, he’d still hit .300. Is there anything that Jackie can’t do?”

  Old Curt Davis was lean and long. He came from Greenfield, a small town in rural Missouri, and he long retained his backwoods manner. Some nicknamed him “Coonskin Curt.” He threw sidearm, low stuff, breaking balls and sinkers, and his forte was control. He owned the outside two inches of home plate. When you watched Curt Davis pitch, as I did many times, you saw an artist.

  Because his stuff was not overpowering, Davis did not break into the major leagues until he was 30 years old. But once there he stayed around for 13 seasons and forged a distinguished career. He broke in with the Phillies, moved on to the Cubs and the Cardinals before coming to the Dodgers on June 12, 1940, in a memorable trade. The dealers were those two masters, Larry MacPhail in Brooklyn and Branch Rickey in St. Louis. The Dodgers acquired Davis and Joe Medwick, one of the great right-handed hitters of the time, in exchange for four lesser players. MacPhail tapped the Brooklyn Trust Company and clinched the deal by throwing in $125,000 borrowed from the bank. Rickey was pleased to get the cash. Most of Brooklyn was thrilled to get Medwick. “He’s the meanest, roughest guy you can imagine,” said mean, rough Leo Durocher. “He just stands up there and whales the ball—doubles, triples, homers, all over every park.”

  Just six days after the trade the Cardinals came to Ebbets Field, and Bob Bowman, a rangy right-hander from West Virginia, beaned Medwick. There were no batting helmets back then and as the barely conscious Medwick was carried from the field on a stretcher, the Brooklyn crowd erupted. Billy Southworth, the Cards’ manager, pulled Bowman from the game “to avert a riot.” As Bowman walked off the field toward the visitors’ clubhouse, MacPhail jumped out of his box and punched Bowman, knocking off the pitcher’s red Cardinal cap. Two Dodgers, coach Charlie Dressen and catcher Babe Phelps, then restrained MacPhail, who subsequently demanded that Bowman be arrested and charged with attempted murder.
Authorities declined. They said that they lacked conclusive evidence. Medwick recovered quickly and returned to the lineup within three days. But he was not again quite the fearsome hitter he had been. (Within four years Bob Bowman dropped back to the minors.)

  Coonskin Curt was as quiet a character as Ducky Medwick was flamboyant. During a World War II drive to donate blood to the armed services, one Dodger remarked, “Davis will give a pint of blood, if he has a pint of blood.” But he proved a durable pitcher for the Dodgers, starting as many as 32 games in a season. He twice was chosen to pitch on Opening Day and in 1941 he pitched the first game of Brooklyn’s World Series against the Yankees. Davis worked reasonably well but lost, 3 to 2.

  By 1946 Davis had reached the age of 43. Time had taken its toll on his strong arm and the Dodgers sent him down to Montreal. Baseball salaries were modest back then and pitchers kept playing ball as long as they could “to keep the pork chops coming to the table.”

  Clay Hopper knew Rickey’s credo—young position players and veteran pitchers—and he sent old Coonskin Curt to pitch Game 6. The largest crowd in the history of Delorimier, 19,171, piled in and the middle-aged hillbilly did not disappoint. Robinson cracked out two hits and scored the final run and Davis shut out the Colonels, 2 to 0. In the ninth, with Louisville threatening, Robinson ranged far to his right to start a game-saving double play.

  Champions now, the Royals fled to the safety of their dressing room. A joyous crowd overran police and ushers and crowded onto the field. They chanted and they sang, Il a gagné ses épaulettes (“He won his bars”).

  When Clay Hopper appeared in a dugout, the crowd lifted him shoulder high and carted him around the field. Davis appeared. The crowd carted him around as well. Robinson, happy but uncertain, remained in the locker room. The fans chanted his name over and over. Roh-been-son Roh-been-son. Finally a delegation of ushers came into the clubhouse and asked Jack please to make an appearance. “People won’t leave until they see you and until they leave we can’t close up the ballpark. The season’s over. We want to go home.”

  Finally Robinson emerged. “There came a demonstration seldom seen here,” wrote Sam Maltin. “The crowd was hugging Jack and kissing him. He tried to explain he had to catch a plane. They wouldn’t listen. They refused to hear him.”

  Finally Jack was able to burst free. He ran through an exit and down a street to a car that would carry him off. The crowd ran after him, shouting and cheering breathlessly.

  As Robinson ran, he began to weep. “I’ll tell you what made me cry,” he told me. “I realized here was a big white crowd chasing after a lone Negro, not with lynching in their hearts, but love.”

  Has there ever been a finer moment in sport?

  ELEVEN

  IT HAPPENED IN BROOKLYN

  RED BARBER, THE GREATEST OF DODGER broadcasters, was a formal, churchy man who seldom used profanity. But Barber summed up 1947 with expletive force. It was, he said, “the year all hell broke loose in Brooklyn.”

  Back then the black community in Brooklyn was confined to an east-central section called Bedford Stuyvesant. My great-grandmother, Lillie Lazar Weill, owned a formidable four-story brownstone in “Bed Stuy,” at 702 Greene Avenue. For years I was lugged there every Thursday afternoon, when the housekeeper was off, and Nana Lillie peppered me with advice. At the age of six, was I self-occupied. Nana Lillie said, “You ain’t the only pebble on the beach.” Was I rejecting family discipline? “You dasn’t do that,” Nana Lillie warned. “Gawd will punish you.”

  Unlike certain other members of my family, she was not intellectual. Her favorite song was no Schubert Lieder, but “On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine.” The book she loved most dearly was Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, a lightweight bestseller first published in 1901. But she was practical, living modestly, guarding her inheritance, and as she stared down at me through her pince-nez, a formidable grand dame.

  Nana Lillie died at a great age in 1936 and the family put the brownstone up for sale. Ten years later, it was no longer an imposing single-family home. Like most of the other brownstones in rapidly changing Bedford Stuyvesant, it was broken into a warren of single-room-occupancy apartments. My family was long gone. Now poor blacks lived and died there. Slumlords ruled.

  During the tormented 1930s a migration of blacks from the rural South to Bedford Stuyvesant coincided with the movement of whites to Long Island suburbs, made possible by the age of the automobile. This change of populace was sudden and dramatic.

  Depression times were hard for many and indeed for New York City itself. Industrial jobs were disappearing. Old trolley lines were being abandoned. Only the tracks remained as iron skeletons. Blacks from the Carolina countryside moving into Bed Stuy had few skills to meet such urban needs as existed. There were no fields to plow, no cotton to chop in central Brooklyn. Poverty surged and as it did, there came a sharp increase in poverty’s ancient handmaiden, violent crime. The streets, Gates and Throop avenues, once mostly languid, evolved into a battleground with muggers and drug dealers waging combat against others, including other blacks. Studies indicate that middle-class blacks were the main victims of black crime.

  The police presence became minimal. White policemen routinely were assigned to the 79th Precinct in Bedford Stuyvesant as punishment. Northern segregation was prevailing and in time the only whites to be seen on the byways of old Bed Stuy were brave social workers and angry cops. All this tumult broke within two miles of Ebbets Field.

  A concern heard in the cabinets of major-league baseball was the imagined behavior of black fans. Would blacks, attracted and turned hyperactive by the appearance of Jackie Robinson, show up drunk and bellicose, shoot craps in the bleacher aisles, get into knife fights and generally misbehave? Would they then intimidate white customers? This concern, publicly voiced by Larry MacPhail, who seldom had an unexpressed thought, was held privately by Rickey himself. He now sought help from religious leaders, mostly Baptists or followers of the African Methodist Episcopal faith. (The teetotaling Black Muslim movement was at the time insignificant in Brooklyn.)

  Carlton Avenue is an undistinguished urban street, running roughly north–south on the western edge of Bedford Stuyvesant. It was the setting for the modest but functional Carlton Branch of the Brooklyn YMCA. In later years I caught Joe Black there as he kept his arm loose during the winter months and I helped coach a young and fiery all-black basketball team called the Sugar Rays. The great boxer Sugar Ray Robinson had bought the squad uniforms and warm-up jackets. These were attractive in shades of white and blue. Dodger blue. This was Brooklyn.

  Blacks were welcome at the Carlton Y, as they were not at other Ys elsewhere in the borough, and Rickey chose the building as the setting for an unusual and contentious meeting on February 5, 1946. “I felt that if integration were to succeed,” Rickey told me, “the black fans would have to follow a code of discipline. I was, frankly, more concerned about them than I was about Robinson.”

  Crowd behavior is always an issue at sports events. I have sat beside drunks at Shea Stadium and heard them curse out visiting ballplayers for nine innings. I’ve seen fistfights in ball club parking lots and angry and violent shoving around concession stands. Police security details are essential and sometimes, as with the tragic beating of a Giant fan outside Dodger Stadium in 2011, they are over-matched. But Rickey’s mistake—and like so much about Rickey it was outsized—was to focus entirely on the behavior of those people in the crowd who were black. Some of his notes, and those of his deputy, Arthur Mann, survive in the Library of Congress and provide a vivid reading of a night gone wildly wrong.

  The Dodger organization had invited what it regarded as a representative black leadership group: teachers, lawyers, merchants, judges, dentists, doctors, morticians. No blue-collar workers were invited, nor were student groups. This was in a sense the elite addressing the elite. Rickey seldom stumbled through as bad an evening.

  Crowd control was and is a significant issue at ballparks. Many
ballgames are exiting, pumping up energy. Fans drink beer. Some behave badly. Off-duty policemen, armed with authority and sidearms, are as much a part of ballpark crowds as hot dog salesmen. The invitation, formally issued by the Carlton Y, stated that Rickey would address “the things which are on his mind as well as ours, in connection with the projection of what seems to be inevitable.” Robinson remained on the Montreal roster. For questionable reasons, Rickey was holding back on the announcement that Robinson would join the Dodgers.

  After a chicken dinner paid for by the Brooklyn organization, Rickey rose to speak to an audience of blacks. He had prepared a speech, which does not survive. However, he departed from that text. Arthur Mann reported what Rickey actually said.

  Rickey declined specifically to predict that Robinson would be promoted to the Dodgers. In retrospect it seems unthinkable that Montreal’s brightest star would be sentenced to another season in the minor leagues. But Rickey had a particular strategy in mind, which later proved to be shaky. “If Robinson does become the first Negro major leaguer,” he said at the Carlton Y, “the biggest threat to his success is the Negro people themselves.” He went on, “Every one of you will go out and form parades and welcoming committees. You’ll strut. You’ll wear badges. You’ll hold Jackie Robinson Days and Jackie Robinson Nights. You’ll get drunk. You’ll fight. You’ll be arrested. You’ll wine and dine the player until he is fat and futile. You’ll symbolize [sic] his importance into a national comedy and an ultimate tragedy. To prevent this, the black community must police itself.”

  In essence Rickey was telling a crowd of hardworking upper-middle-class blacks not to shoot craps in the aisles at Ebbets Field and, outside of the restrooms, to keep their trouser flies firmly zipped at all times. A similar talk to black leaders today would prompt hoots, jeering and walkouts. The reality in that long-ago winter of 1946–47 was that the biggest threat to Robinson’s success was not the community of black baseball fans, raucous or silent, drunk or sober. It was the pervasive collection of white bigots, the Klansmen of Sportworld, who wore not bedsheets but stylish uniforms marked “Cardinals” and “Phillies” and “Reds.”