Rickey & Robinson (26 page)

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.)

Rachel found the honeymoon with the handsome groom “decidedly disappointing.” First the newlyweds drove to San Jose to live in a home owned by one of Rachel’s aunts. “I had something less than a great time there,” she told me. “Some of Jack’s cronies showed up and reminded him that the Harlem Globetrotters were in town. We spent two nights watching them. Then some of Jack’s other friends invited us to join them in Oakland. What do you know? The Globetrotters now were coming to Oakland. So we went to see more basketball
again. We had some delightful honeymoons in later years, but the first one . . . well we just goofed and bungled our way through.”

Rickey meanwhile wrote to one of his deputies, Bob Finch, “It might be well for you very quietly to find out about [the Robinsons’ Florida] living accommodations. I don’t believe I would take it up with white folks to begin with. No use to stir around them unnecessarily. It seems that the first approach would be to some leading colored citizen who could be trusted with an inquiry.”

Rickey assumed, as most Northerners would have assumed, that the Robinsons’ journey from California to Florida would be uneventful. “But,” Robinson told me, “it turned out to be a passage through hell.”

The Dodgers made reservations on American Airlines from Los Angeles to Daytona Beach with a change of planes scheduled in New Orleans. Rachel packed a shoebox full of chicken and hard-boiled eggs and the couple boarded a night flight that arrived in New Orleans at seven in the morning. Their airliner to Florida was scheduled to depart at 11:00. An American Airlines clerk promptly told them that the 11 o’clock was fully booked, but he would try to get something for them later. “That’s when we found out that there was no place anywhere in the New Orleans airport for a Negro to take a rest or buy a meal,” Robinson told me. “No waiting rooms for Negroes. Nor any chairs. A black cabbie directed us to a Negro hotel that turned out to be dirty and dreadful. We telephoned American several times and finally an airline employee said there would be space on a one-stopper to Daytona Beach, with a layover in Pensacola.

“When we got to Pensacola, American Airlines kicked us off the plane. They said something about weight. With all the fuel, the plane would be too heavy with us aboard. We got off. A few minutes later two white men took our seats. I said pretty loudly, ‘I’m never going to fly American Airlines again.’

“Nobody gave a damn.”

The Robinsons found a bus terminal and finished their nightmare journey on a cramped and rattly bus, jammed into an overcrowded back row. Their food had run out. They were tired, harassed and hungry. At length Rachel, a strong, proud woman, began to cry. “I couldn’t help it. I cried as quietly as I could. I was trying not to upset Jack.”

As the Robinsons began settling in with a black family in a two-story house at 612 South Sanford Avenue, Rickey suddenly ordered the entire Royals squad moved to Daytona Beach. He had heard—he never specified from whom—that local men in Sanford, many of them members of the Ku Klux Klan, were planning a midnight march on the house where the Robinsons were staying. At the very least they intended to burn a cross on the front lawn.

According to reliable histories, a mob of white men in 1946 shot and killed two young African American couples near Moore’s Ford Bridge in Walton County, Georgia, 60 miles east of Atlanta. This murder of four young sharecroppers, one a World War II veteran, shocked most of the nation, but went unpunished. It was a key factor in President Harry Truman’s decision to push civil rights legislation. But for decades a thick cotton curtain—white Southern senators—blocked the way.

I later asked Rickey directly if he thought that in 1946 a mob of night riders in Sanford, Florida, Celery City, USA, might have lynched Jackie and Rachel Robinson. Rickey took in the question carefully and paused before he responded. “From reports that reached me,” he said, slowly, “that was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.”

Although Daytona Beach was relatively safe, Robinson’s problems with violent Floridians persisted. When the Royals traveled 20 miles to DeLand for a game against Indianapolis, Robinson singled in the first inning, stole second and slid home on another single. As he was dusting himself off, a local policeman burst onto the playing field and said, “Get off the field right now, or I’m putting you in jail.”

Robinson told me his first reaction was to laugh. “Ridiculous,” he said. “I thought the cop was just ridiculous.” But the crowd in the
stands rose to its feet. The Indianapolis players on the field stood stock-still. Clay Hopper, the Montreal manager, said to the policeman, “What’s wrong?”

The cop responded with a speech. “We ain’t having niggers mix with white boys in this town. You can’t change our way of livin’. Niggers and whites, they can’t sit together and they can’t play together and you know damn well they can’t get married together.”

Hopper had no answer.

“Tell your nigger to git,” the policeman said. He put one hand on his Colt .45. Robinson left silently. He spent the next few hours sitting alone on the team bus. DeLand city officials ordered the next Montreal–Indianapolis game canceled because “the ballpark lights are out of order.” The canceled game was scheduled for an afternoon.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

ROBERT CLAY HOPPER, A NATIVE of Porterville, Mississippi, a longtime successful minor-league manager, was undergoing a crisis of his own. When he heard Robinson had signed with Montreal he sought out Rickey. “Please don’t do this to me, Mr. Rickey,” Hopper said. “I’m a white man, been living in Mississippi all my life. I got a fine plantation there. If you do this to me, Mr. Rickey, you’re gonna force me to move out of Mississippi.”