Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  EARLY IN 1935, in the middle of the school year, Jack finished at Washington Junior High and enrolled at the John Muir Technical High School, where Mack and Willa Mae were also students (Mack would graduate in June). Once a vocational school, Muir Tech was now in every sense a typical high school, one of Pasadena’s two public high schools, with a full range of academic courses. Muir offered first-rate facilities, with handsome buildings designed in the local California Mediterranean style, and landscaping that made the most of its fine location, within sight of the San Gabriel Mountains. In addition, by 1935 Muir Tech had developed an outstanding regional reputation as a sports powerhouse. It would provide the backdrop for Jack’s first emergence as a star school athlete.

  Before the summer of 1935, he had established himself as the most versatile of the Muir Terriers. He also sang in the glee club, but sports were his mainstay. Light but nimble at 135 pounds and with excellent, even uncanny, hand-to-eye coordination, that spring he nailed down a spot on the baseball team as a shortstop in what one enthusiast called an “exceptionally good” infield. He then shone for Muir Tech as a star at the annual regional baseball tournament in Pomona, when the Muir Terriers went to the finals before losing to Long Beach. Despite conflicts with baseball and little time to train, he also earned honors that spring in both the broad jump (or long jump), in which Mack also competed, and the high jump. Even his casual efforts left him far ahead of most competitors. As he later recalled, he particularly loved the broad jump: “You [toe] the line and spring forward with all your strength. Then you jump—you really try to jump off the earth and your legs churn the air like you wanted to reach the moon. Then you come down to earth in soft sand and you have to remember to fall forward so that there are no marks behind the back of your heels.”

  In the fall of 1935, he went out for Terrier football but, still a lightweight, had to bide his time on a brilliant team that was dominated by the brothers Bill and George Sangster, two white youths who were among the finest athletes in Pasadena history; the Terriers went undefeated that year. (In all of Jack’s schools, most of his teammates were white, just as all the student bodies were predominantly white.) Late in the season Jack saw some action as quarterback, running and passing the ball, and showed “much ability,” according to one judge. When the football season ended, he switched at once to basketball, where Jack’s speed and deftness in ball handling, his aggressive play under the basket on both defense and offense, as well as his unselfish style, made him an outstanding guard and a “mainstay.” Contending all season for the league championship, the Muir Terriers lost it in the last game of the season.

  From basketball, he cycled back into baseball and track to establish his athletic routine of the next few years. In 1936, having lost several lettermen, Muir Tech had a mediocre baseball season, but Jack excelled despite moving from shortstop to catcher for the team’s sake. That year, he earned a place on the annual Pomona tournament all-star team, which included two other future Hall of Fame players: Ted Williams of Hoover High in San Diego and Bob Lemon of Long Beach’s Wilson High. In track, where the Terriers also struggled much of the season, Robinson was one of seven athletes hailed as “the nucleus of the squad.” He went out again for the broad jump but also competed for Muir in the pole vault. Not surprisingly, so much versatility led at times to inconsistent results. In the broad jump, for example, he won the Southland Class A title with a superb leap of 23 feet 1 inch. A week later, however, he failed to place in the California state championships.

  On September 6, 1936, just after Mack’s Olympic Games success, the legend of Jackie Robinson as a sports prodigy gained new life when he captured the junior boys’ singles championship in the annual Pacific Coast Negro Tennis Tournament. Jack played tennis only sporadically. His game was unorthodox; he relied on speed and guile and on his fierce will to win. Playing mixed doubles with his ambidextrous childhood friend Eleanor Peters, he refused to accept defeat easily. “Jack was always very competitive,” she said, “but of course we were all very competitive. Our parents all wanted us to achieve, to do something more with our lives.” Jack’s competitive fire helped her when she nervously faced the women’s singles champion in another Pacific Coast tournament. “Jack said, ‘You can play with her, you can do it,’ ” she recalled. “And I said, ‘No, I can’t.’ But he pushed me and pushed me, and I started to believe in myself. I didn’t win, but I gave her a run for her money. That’s what Jack was like.”

  Ray Bartlett, too, recalled the amazing drive Jack showed even in junior high school. “He was a hard loser,” Bartlett said. “By that I mean that he always played his best and did his best and gave all he had, and he didn’t like to lose. He liked to be the best, and he would be unhappy at school the day after we lost. He took losses very hard. The rest of us might shrug off a loss, but Jack would cry if we lost.”

  In the fall of 1936, as his young body developed, Jack’s football skills reached new heights. Although the Terriers started the season with almost every star of the previous year gone, they ran Muir’s record to eighteen consecutive league victories before losing in the last game of the season to Glendale, who won the league championship. Playing in the backfield on offense, Jack emerged as the star of the team. In the first game, before five thousand captivated spectators in the Rose Bowl, the “snake-hipped” quarterback (as the Pasadena Post called him) scored a rushing touchdown in the last minutes of the game to earn a tie against powerful Alhambra. In the third league game, against the Hoover High team from Glendale, he returned the opening kickoff fifty yards, then scored later as Muir won. Taking note, the Pasadena Post surprised its readers with a large picture of Jack, poised to hurl a football, on the front page of its sports section. Against Fullerton, “dusky” Jack Robinson scored the first touchdown as he “sped around right end” and “outraced the entire Fullerton team to cross the goal line standing up.” Against Pomona High, Muir Tech was down by thirteen points in the first half. “Then the fun started as the second half opened,” the Post reported. The Terriers struck back with a touchdown by Robinson to begin a rally that ended in a Muir victory.

  In its final game, however, against Glendale, the Terriers fell apart. Early—and perhaps according to a plan—Robinson was brought down, then “three Glendale boys piled on.” With cracked ribs, Jack staggered off the field and out of the game. His injury sickened the other Terriers, who proceeded to fumble the game and the championship away. Still, Muir Tech had enjoyed an excellent season, and Jack had established himself as a sensational quarterback and all-around football player, one of the finest prospects in talent-rich southern California.

  When his ribs finally mended, he rejoined the basketball team. Again, the loss of several stars made Terrier fans expect little for the new season; experts picked Muir Tech to finish fourth or fifth in its league. But the Terriers won almost all of their games and ended in second place. Closer now to his full height, which was just shy of six feet, Robinson started at forward instead of guard; he also began the league season as acting captain. In the first game, against the elite Hoover High team, he led the Terriers to an upset victory that set the tone for the rest of the season. Not only was Robinson Muir’s most reliable and prolific scorer, but his precocious sense of the importance of team play and his fearless desire to win also made everyone around him a better player. In the last sixty seconds of a crucial game against South Pasadena, Jack led a furious charge that brought Muir from behind to win the game. Leading his team’s scoring, he tallied 20 of his team’s 49 points.

  On January 29, 1937, he played perhaps his most dominating basketball game ever for Muir Tech; he was like a man possessed in a league encounter with archrival Glendale. Much was on the line. His Terriers entered the game with a tenuous hold on first place; but it was also the last scheduled game of Jack’s high school career. Rising to the challenge, he went all out for victory. “Robinson was all over the floor,” the Post marveled, “and when he wasn’t scoring points he was making im
possible ‘saves’ and interceptions, and was the best player on the floor.” His unselfishness stood out. “Many times,” according to the Post, “he fed the ball to teammates, giving them setups. And there were few times Glendale, even with a decided height advantage, could snatch the ball away from Robinson off the backboard.” The Terriers won, to tighten their grasp on first place.

  The day of the game against Glendale was Jack’s last at Muir High. Whatever his misgivings about Pasadena, he clearly loved his teammates and his high school and cared deeply about its fortunes and the nurturing role it had played in his life. As an athlete, he had given Muir Tech everything he had to offer, and knew how much he had profited from the giving. His efforts had been recognized even by those who took no pleasure in doing so. Even the powerful Pasadena Star-News, usually frigid to blacks and begrudging in its praise of his exploits, conceded finally that Jack Robinson “for two years has been the outstanding athlete at Muir, starring in football, basketball, track, baseball, and tennis.”

  Two days later, on January 31, 1937, he celebrated his eighteenth birthday. The next day, he enrolled as a student at Pasadena Junior College, across town. In the next two years, Jack would take his local fame to new heights. Through his amazing exploits in his four top sports, he would also bring himself, for the first time, to the attention of the wider world. But in these two years, he would also come close to disaster in his conflicts with himself and white authority, especially the police. He would come to the brink of killing the hopes his mother had nursed for him, and that he had been nurturing for himself during his boyhood in Pasadena.

  CHAPTER 3

  Pasadena Junior College

  1937–1939

  It was there that I lost most of my shyness.

  —Jackie Robinson (1972)

  ON FEBRUARY 1, 1937, when Jack Robinson made his way out to Colorado Boulevard to register for classes at Pasadena Junior College, he found a campus in a state of serious disrepair. Instead of green lawns and ivy-covered walls, he saw raw dirt that turned to dust under the hot sun or to mud in the rain; the bare walls of three unfinished buildings dominated the bleak scene. Robinson had come to enroll near the end of the four-year “tent era” of campus history, a time of reconstruction and makeshift facilities in the wake of the destructive Long Beach earthquake of 1933, which had rocked Pasadena. However, even as Jack arrived, workmen were finishing the construction of three gleaming white buildings that would form the heart of the new PJC.

  For Robinson and other students of his time, attending the junior college after leaving high school was fully expected; the local public school system was designed to lead them to PJC. Pasadena High School was part of its campus, as its lower division; and the following year, 1938, Muir Tech itself would become the lower division of a new western campus of PJC. Some students attended PJC in order to qualify for entrance into a four-year college or university; others sought simply to complete the first two years of college. The Depression made PJC a deal that few could resist; for the poor, like Robinson, it was a godsend. Tuition was free; and with no dormitories, most students lived at home. With teachers said to be first-rate, a lively student body, and a tradition of excellence in sports, PJC enjoyed a local reputation as one of the finest junior colleges anywhere.

  Important for Jack and the sixty or seventy other blacks in a student body that numbered about four thousand, PJC was also among the more liberal institutions in Pasadena. All classes and facilities, including the swimming pool, were open to all students; blacks could attend official school dances without hindrance. Only in dance classes was the color line openly drawn; blacks could enroll only as couples, not as individuals. On the whole, PJC offered a friendly, relaxed environment, where Jack saw many familiar faces from his earlier schoolboy days.

  Already known as an athlete, Jack nonetheless arrived at PJC decidedly in the shadow of his brother Mack, who was also enrolled that semester. Following Jesse Owens’s decision to turn professional, Mack Robinson was now the premier amateur sprinter in the United States; on campus, he was almost a god, although he was only a sometime student, concerned almost exclusively with sports. Since leaving Muir Tech two years previously, he had spent only one semester at PJC, in the spring of 1936, just before the Berlin Olympics. But Mack had stamped his name on PJC athletic history as the college’s “iron man,” who carried the school flag in at least five events—the two elite sprints (100 and 220 yards), the sprint relays, the low hurdles, and the broad jump. No one expected Jack ever to rival Mack’s record. The younger Robinson, slender and wiry in the winter of 1937, weighed little more than 135 pounds—hardly the body of a champion athlete. Still, as Jack settled in at PJC, he set his sights on stardom in three team sports: baseball, probably his first love; basketball, which appealed above all to his passion for team play; and football, which offered the best chance by far for glory. In addition, he expected to compete, with and against his brother, in the broad jump.

  That spring semester, Jack quickly made the baseball team, which played in the Western Division of the Southern California Junior College Athletic Association. With his flashy fielding, steady hitting, and aggressive base running, he soon became a favorite of the Bulldog coach, John Thurman, who had helped develop Jack’s skills the previous summer in a city-sponsored baseball school in Brookside Park. In addition to playing shortstop, Jack was his team’s leadoff batter. Lacking home-run power, but showing a remarkable eye for the strike zone as well as unusual patience, he seldom struck out; one way or another, he usually found a way of getting on base. Once there, in what would become his bedeviling trademark as a player, he was a constant threat to steal bases and induce paranoia in opposing pitchers.

  The Bulldog season started slowly; then momentum began to build. PJC crushed the freshmen of the University of California. The Bulldogs lost to Modesto Junior College, the champion junior college team in northern California; in the third inning, however, Jack Robinson “created a sensation” among the spectators, according to the Pasadena Post, which also ran Jack’s picture with the story, when he stole second, third, and home to score a run for Pasadena.

  In April, Robinson came into his own. Against the elite University of Southern California freshman team, he went three-for-four at the plate; he went five-for-six and also stole two bases in a defeat of Glendale Junior College. In the next game, against Los Angeles Junior College, he singled four times in five at-bats and stole a base as the Bulldog winning streak reached fourteen games. The streak ended there. In the following game, in a loss of form, Robinson went hitless, committed three errors, and failed to steal a base. Against Compton Junior College, a wild throw by Jack helped Compton to win the championship. But Robinson was now widely recognized as the premier shortstop in the league and a major contributor to what the Post called “one of the most successful baseball seasons in the history of Pasadena Junior College.”

  In the first semester at PJC, Jack also established himself as the college’s second best broad jumper, after “Iron Man” Mack Robinson. Dogged by injury at the start of the season, Mack stormed back late in March to tie the national junior college record in the 220-yard dash against UCLA; he also won the 100-yard sprint, the low hurdles, and the broad jump. In the broad jump, Jack lost every time to Mack, even when Mack jumped well below his best. Steadily, however, Jack’s leaps improved; by the end of the season he reached 23 feet 9½ inches. Spurred on, perhaps, by this rivalry, Mack enjoyed his best season ever as a jumper. At the famed Drake Relays in Des Moines, Iowa, he set a new national junior college record with a leap of 25 feet 5½ inches. Returning to a hero’s welcome on the campus, he led the Bulldog team to the West Coast Relays at Fresno, California, widely regarded as the unofficial state collegiate championships. There, Mack won two individual races, helped in two relay victories, and also won the broad jump. Once again, his brother Jack took second place.

  If this rivalry and these defeats caused Jack any discomfort, he admitted none. Losing to his older
brother was no dishonor, and he loved sharing in Mack’s glamour and traveling with him. What Mack himself thought of the rivalry is also unknown; probably he had no firm idea about Jack’s potential. In any event, Jack was proud and happy about his small share of the glory in what the Star-News saluted as “the greatest athletic season in Pasadena Junior College history.”

  AS JACK SETTLED IN at PJC, he made one friend for life, a sprinter named Jack Gordon, who quickly became his best friend. They were an unlikely pair in some respects. Although both young men were handsome and athletic, Gordon was small in stature compared with Jack; his skin was a light brown compared with Jack’s ebony; and he was as voluble and outgoing as Jack was reserved, especially with women. “Jack was kind of shy at times,” Gordon would recall. “I guess he didn’t have the personality to get along with most people. He didn’t talk much; he wasn’t really outgoing. He never pushed himself on you.” Left to Robinson, they might never have become friends. Gordon was standing in the middle of a motley group of black students when “I asked everybody and nobody in particular, ‘Is anybody around here going to have some waffles?’ Nobody said anything. And then Jack Robinson spoke up: ‘Did I hear you mention waffles? Let’s go!’ And that was it. From then on it was Little Jack and Big Jack.”