Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  A few days later, he took another big step away from baseball, into the world of real-estate development. At this time, Robinson knew little or nothing about this field, but it would claim his attention, on and off, for the rest of his life. After discussions over the course of a year, he signed an agreement with a real-estate developer to construct a project, the Jackie Robinson Houses, on a site in or around New York City. The developer, Arnold H. Kagan, would supply the start-up funds, up to $250,000, and almost all the expertise; Jack’s main contribution would be in using his fame to help secure a mortgage for the project under Section 213 of the U.S. Housing Act of 1949. (Kagan would get seventy-two percent of the profits, Jack would receive sixteen percent, and attorneys would get the rest.)

  Although Jack hoped to make some money here, he had other motives as well. Perhaps equally important was his desire to help poorer blacks as they faced the postwar housing crisis in the New York area and elsewhere. The Housing Act of 1949 had set lofty goals; its central aim was to provide “a decent home in a suitable living environment for every American citizen.” Under Title 1 of the act, developers could purchase slum property at drastically reduced prices; with this incentive, Congress expected them to build new housing for the poor and middle-class. Already the reality was proving to be somewhat different; many dilapidated dwellings were being razed by developers and replaced, all too frequently, by luxury apartments. The Jackie Robinson Houses, Robinson and Kagan hoped, would be built in the true spirit of the Housing Act of 1949.

  (Ten years after its passage, in 1959, the number of housing units torn down under the provisions of Title 1 of the Housing Act far exceeded the number of new units. Taking the brunt of this imbalance in the major cities, including New York, were people of color, especially blacks. Easily displaced, they were also the least likely to find new housing. Less than two percent of new housing from all sources, including those sponsored under Title 1, would go to blacks.)

  IN VERO BEACH, after the disappointment of 1950 and the disaster of 1951, the Dodgers faced the 1952 season with no bravado, only a feverish determination. “I think every player on the team,” Robinson said, “will be putting out a little more this year because he feels that we let the fans down in bad finishes in the two previous years.” This training camp was different in another way. Clyde Sukeforth, the veteran coach who had escorted Jack to Brooklyn in 1945 to meet Branch Rickey, was gone; unfairly, some people blamed him for the choice of Branca to relieve Newcombe in the last, fatal inning of 1951. Whatever the reason for Sukeforth’s departure, Jack had lost his most reliable friend among the Dodger coaches, a man who had treated him from the start with decency and respect. Still, Jack’s relationship with Walter O’Malley and, especially, Buzzie Bavasi remained sound. On January 9, when he signed his 1952 contract for $42,000, again the top salary on the team, he had declared himself “perfectly satisfied with my contract.” O’Malley and the Brooklyn organization, Jack said publicly, “have treated me fairly.”

  At Vero Beach, a chastened Dressen, in greeting the team, openly thanked Robinson for his sturdy public support during the off-season. The Dodgers had nothing to be ashamed of, he told the club; they had been unlucky. But the bad luck seemed to continue when the Korean War claimed Newcombe, who entered the Army for a two-year stint. Fortunately, the Dodgers found two stellar pitching replacements. One was black—Joe Black, a handsome, six-foot-two-inch player from Plainfield, New Jersey, formerly with the Baltimore Elite Giants of the Negro leagues, then with St. Paul and Montreal in the Dodgers organization. A college man like Jack, Black was an alumnus of Morgan State with a degree in psychology and physical education. The other promising pitcher was white—Billy Loes, a young New Yorker of eccentric ways and an idiosyncratic curve ball. Roommates bonded further by race and education, Black and Robinson quickly became friends; but against all reasonable expectations, Loes slipped past Robinson’s normal standards to become one of his favorites on the team.

  Black was sitting in their room nervously waiting to meet Robinson when the star walked in. When Black asked Jack which bed he wanted, Jack brushed aside the question. Instead, he sized up Black’s powerful body. “Can you fight?” he asked. “Yeah,” Black answered. “But,” Robinson insisted, “we’re not going to fight.” This was Robinson’s reprise of Rickey’s speech to him in 1945. Black must not strike back, Robinson warned. The first challenge came soon enough. Playing exhibition games in Montgomery and Mobile, Alabama, in particular, the heckling by whites was vicious. “I don’t mind the booing,” Robinson told a writer. “What got me was when some of them started to holler, ‘Hit him in the head.’ ” But there were also signs of progress. In St. Petersburg, Florida, for example, blacks were finally admitted to the grandstand with whites. Another wall had fallen in a region of walls.

  When the season opened, the Dodgers started slowly, in part because Campanella, for one, was mired in a prolonged slump, but also because Brooklyn had not yet discovered Joe Black. At first, Black seemed not much more than mediocre. If his fastball was impressive, his curve ball seemed modest; a wartime injury had damaged fingers on his right hand. And two pitches comprised his entire repertoire. But after Black pitched two excellent innings against the Cincinnati Reds in Brooklyn, to bring his record to seven innings without giving up a run, Dressen saw the light and announced that he would rely on Black in relief in the future. On June 1, when the rookie preserved a victory, the Dodgers also moved into first place for the first time in 1952. Eventually that season, as the heart of the Dodgers pitching staff, Black appeared in fifty-six games, won fifteen, saved fifteen, and lost only four.

  The season was still young in May when Jack found himself embroiled again in controversy with umpire Frank Dascoli. After a report that certain Dodger players had taunted Dascoli, Warren Giles, the newly elected president of the National League, sent an official letter of rebuke to Chuck Dressen. Deploring ethnic slurs allegedly hurled at Dascoli, Giles singled out Robinson as “a greater offender than others.” Upset by the charge, which he strongly denied, Jack protested to Giles in person. Giles ignored him. He then had both Martin Stone, his business manager, and O’Malley write formal letters of complaint to Giles about the error. Giles, no fan of Robinson, responded only to O’Malley. “I am satisfied that the matter is ended,” O’Malley soon announced, “and that Jackie Robinson did not address anyone in uncomplimentary terms.” But on May 13, visiting Brooklyn to present Campanella with the 1951 MVP trophy, Giles surprised his listeners by adding a brief, gratuitous bow to Jack to his praise of Campanella: “The National League is also proud of Jackie Robinson.” This sly, patronizing response to his protests served only to annoy Robinson, who made it clear that he considered Giles’s praise as an apology.

  Apology or not, the Dascoli charge further damaged Jack’s reputation. Although he was elected to the All-Star Game, where he and Campanella represented Brooklyn, some fans there booed him. July also brought a clash in Cincinnati, after an umpire declared a runner safe at second base and Robinson exploded. Leaping up and down, he threw ball and glove to the turf, then dispatched his glove with a vicious kick; the Associated Press photograph of Robinson punting his hapless glove was widely circulated. After the incident, as usual, Jack was contrite. “I know it’s wrong for me to lose my temper,” he confessed. “It doesn’t do me any good and I really make an effort not to. The wife is after me about it all the time, too.” But “when an umpire makes an obvious mistake it seems I automatically blow up. I just can’t help myself.”

  He had other troubles. Earlier, when Joe Black entered a game in St. Louis, insults from certain Cardinals became so graphic that Robinson and Dressen protested to the league about the rabid use of the term “nigger,” linked to obscene and other demeaning terms. (The targets were only Black and Robinson; Campanella made it clear that no one had insulted him.) When Eddie Stanky, now managing St. Louis, dismissed the nasty language as typical baseball teasing, and the team president, Eddie Saigh, brushed
off the protest as “too much fuss over nothing,” Robinson disagreed. Race baiting, he insisted, had no place in the game. “You’d think that after six years they would cut that stuff out,” he said. “I thought I had proved that those names don’t hurt my play a bit.”

  And indeed, Robinson was once again leading the Dodgers in hitting; by the end of June his batting average was .327, with five home runs and eleven stolen bases. Once again, he was fighting with Stan Musial for the batting crown.

  THROUGH THE SQUABBLES and skirmishes of the 1952 season, Jack found a refuge waiting for him at the end of most days at home in St. Albans, which the Robinsons now shared with Rachel’s older brother, Chuck Williams; his wife, Brenda; and their son, Chuckie. At Jack’s direct invitation, the Williamses had migrated from California; he saw them as the essential nucleus of the inner circle of his and Rachel’s friends and supporters, who would make much easier their decision to live in the East. Through Jack, Chuck found a job with Schenley Liquors, where he eventually became a vice-president and, later, a member of the board of directors. In 1952, Brenda, a graduate of Xavier University in New Orleans, arrived from California pregnant with twins; to ease the transition, she and Chuck lived with the Robinsons for about a year. Later in 1952, Jack also invited his best friend and Pasadena Junior College buddy, Jack Gordon, to move east with his wife, Bernice, and their son, Bradley. Gordon would also find work through Jack, first in his clothing store, then with the Manischewitz wine company, where he too enjoyed a long career. Still later, Jack would convince Rachel to invite her mother to give up California and come to live with them.

  In 1952, Rachel, too, was pregnant. On May 14, 1952, after the Dodgers lost a game to the Cardinals at Ebbets Field, Jack hurried to Doctors Hospital in Manhattan for the birth of his third child, a boy. Like the pregnancy itself, the delivery was uncomplicated. Rachel and Jack were ecstatic about the birth of their second son, David. She wanted to have at least four children, with as many boys as girls; Jack’s idea of a family was probably even grander. But Jack’s joy soon vanished when Rachel fell sick with nephritis, or an acute infection of the kidney, and had to remain in the hospital for several days. Needing help with David, Jack turned to Florence Covington’s sister Willette Bailey, who gladly took David home to St. Albans.

  To Jack’s relief—although her doctor warned her that because of the nephritis, she should probably have no more children—Rachel recovered quickly. Thus, a short time later, he was unprepared when, in St. Louis to play the Cardinals, a telephone call from New York brought troubling news of a medical emergency. Rachel was back in the hospital, awaiting an operation. She had discovered a lump in her breast; a surgeon, diagnosing the growth as probably malignant, ordered surgery as soon as possible. Stunned by the news, Rachel’s main thought was to keep it from Jack. “I decided that with all he was going through,” she said, “he didn’t need to know about the operation.” But the surgeon insisted. “He asked me right away, ‘Where is your husband? Why isn’t he here?’ We argued a little but then he put his foot down. He wouldn’t operate unless Jack knew about it.”

  In St. Louis, Jack hung up the telephone in the hotel room he was sharing with Joe Black and quietly told him that Rachel was ill. “I think I’m going to go home,” he said. “And when he said that,” according to Black, “water just came down his eyes, right down his cheek.” By the time he reached the hospital he was in a state of nervous tension that only grew worse as the doctors talked to him. “They scared him to death,” Rachel recalled, “with talk about how tumors have characteristics, about their size, their configuration, their mobility, and how certain factors suggest malignancy. They told him they thought mine did. I didn’t think so, but they did.” Jack took the news hard; he was not at his best waiting to find out the answers to possibly damaging questions. “I would never have told him any of that,” she said. “Jack was badly frightened, because he was never, ever, able to tolerate anything being wrong with me. I had to be there, up and ready and able, managing. Anyway, it turned out to be not a tumor at all. I hadn’t nursed, and the gland formed, became hard, and felt like a tumor. They just took it out and that was the end of it. Jack had been upset for nothing. He had come from St. Louis for nothing. But he wasn’t angry about that. He just had a tremendous sense of relief.”

  Some teammates believed that Jack took a long time to recover fully from this scare. By July, although he had some good hitting days, he had slipped into a slump. At one point, he had only two hits in twenty-five at-bats, as his average fell below .300 for the first time since 1948. Astutely, Dressen made the connection between Rachel’s surgery and the slump. “Before he left the club to see his wife, he was swinging just right,” Dressen pointed out to the press, “and he hasn’t been the same since.” Gradually, however, Jack regained his form, in a reversal of his pattern of previous years. By late August he was back over .300; the Dodgers, behind the excellent pitching of Black and Preacher Roe, held on firmly to first place. Then, with nine losses in twelve games, Brooklyn seemed ready to fold again; but four straight defeats of the Cardinals set Brooklyn back on course. “Don’t you worry,” Jack assured a reporter, “we won’t blow our lead this year. We’re going all the way to the World Series. The Giants caught us last year but that won’t happen again.”

  It didn’t; Brooklyn won the pennant. Still, disputes continued to dog Robinson’s steps. On August 13, when rain stopped a game between the Dodgers and the Cubs at Ebbets Field, he and Cubs manager Phil Cavarretta started a nasty shouting match conducted from their respective dugouts. The next day brought reports—completely false—that Jack and the Dodgers coach Cookie Lavagetto had to be restrained from punching Cavarretta. As usual, Jack’s denials had little effect on the growing sense that he was out of control. His frustration on this score reached its peak on September 4 in Boston, with an incident that also involved Campanella and two umpires, Larry Goetz and Frank Secory. In the eleventh inning of a tied game, ruling that Johnny Logan of the Braves had been hit by a pitch, Secory awarded him first base even as Campanella angrily insisted that Logan had foul-tipped the ball. When Logan then scored the winning run, Dodger Rocky Bridges bitterly asked Secory if he had shaken Logan’s hand as he crossed the plate. Robinson, too far away to hear the remark, then told Secory: “What he said goes double for me.” He also told Goetz: “I didn’t hear what he said, but he’s right.”

  Acting on the umpires’ complaint, Ford Frick, now the commissioner of baseball, then levied fines of $100 on Campanella and $75 on an incredulous Robinson, who flatly refused to pay up without a hearing. “Before I’ll pay that fine,” he told reporters, “I’ll take my spikes off and never play another game.” His defiance, practically unheard of in baseball, was not well received by fans. Away from Ebbets Field, the booing of Robinson became intense even as he insisted on his right to a hearing. Apparently, only a trusted reporter’s argument that Jack’s inevitable suspension would be an unfair and perhaps a selfish blow to his teammates led Jack to back down. “I never thought of it that way,” Robinson told the reporter. “I’ll pay the fine.”

  In October, for the third time in Jack’s six Brooklyn seasons, the Dodgers faced the Yankees in the World Series. For the third time, he failed to shine. In 1952, he was as eager as ever to do well. “The main thing is to beat the Yankees,” he admitted. “But I’d like to come through with one really good World Series, and I know I’m not going to have many more opportunities.” In the first game, Joe Black, after starting only two games all season, shocked the Yankees with a win. After the Yankees took the second, Preacher Roe then won in Yankee Stadium when the usually reliable Yogi Berra let a ball go by and two Dodgers scored in the ninth. Black pitched brilliantly again in the fourth game, yielding three hits and one run over seven innings; but Allie Reynolds was even better with a shutout. As a hitter, Jack touched bottom in this game; frozen by Reynolds’s wicked curves, he was out three times on called third strikes. (“I couldn’t argue about them,” he
conceded. “The umpire was right in calling them.”) The fifth game went eleven innings before the Dodgers won, but the Yankees then tied up the series. The seventh inning of the seventh game found Robinson with an excellent shot at redemption: he came up to bat with the Dodgers down, 4–2, the bases loaded, and two men out. Redemption almost came. Jack swung hard; the ball skied over the pitcher’s mound; the infielders seemed hypnotized. Then the Yankee second baseman Billy Martin, in a memorable play, stormed in to snatch the ball just before it hit the ground. Once again, the Yankees beat the Dodgers.

  Proud to have helped bring another pennant home to Brooklyn, and happy for Black, who became the fifth black player to be named Rookie of the Year in the National League, Jack had performed well once again in Dodger blue. Still, as the season ended he was talking more and more about retiring from baseball. Would he quit? “I certainly might,” he speculated on the radio in the course of an interview. “There’s no getting around that.… Just say I’m considering it.”