Jackie Robinson (51 page)

On June 2, in the bottom of the fourth inning, an apparent counting error by umpire Lee Ballanfant gave a Brave hitter, Johnny Logan, first base on three balls. Jeered mercilessly from the Dodger dugout, an irritated Ballanfant ordered the bench cleared. In the top of the fifth, with Milwaukee ahead 6–2 and rain apparently about to end the game, Robinson, up to bat, felt free to taunt Ballanfant. “
Can I get a walk on three balls the way Logan did?” he inquired sweetly. “Get in there and hit,” Ballanfant said, “or get out of the game.” When Robinson continued his needling, Ballanfant ejected him. Disgusted, Jack turned away and headed for the bench. Near the dugout, he flipped his bat forward, aiming for the dugout; but the bat, slippery and wet from the rain, carried into the stands, where it fell among Milwaukee fans.

Widely reported, the incident triggered a bitter reaction by white fans across the country, although Ballanfant himself assured the league office that Robinson had not acted deliberately or even in anger. According to initial reports, the bat injured no one. (However, almost a year later, on May 11, 1955, an enterprising couple filed a $40,000 damage suit in Federal Court against Jack and the Dodgers claiming that they each had suffered a brain concussion, nasty headaches, abrasions, and cuts after being struck by the bat.) Thereafter, throughout the summer, Jack was booed and
jeered at every ballpark he visited; he became what
Sport
magazine later that year called “
the most savagely booed, intensively criticized, ruthlessly libeled player in the game.” According to
Sport,
“his every appearance on the field was greeted by a storm of boos, by cat-calls, by name-calling. No matter how hard others might applaud in order to balance the scales, Jackie’s ears were filled with the roar of the crowd getting ‘on’ him, giving it to him, needling him, insulting him.”

Eventually, Jack would try to give his side of the story in a three-part article called “Now I Know Why They Boo Me,” in
Look
magazine early in 1955. This was his own provocative attempt to match Milton Gross’s sympathetic essay “Why They Boo Jackie Robinson,” published the previous February in
Sport.

Early in August, Jack found himself in another fracas. This one came after his teammate Clem Labine knocked down the Braves’ Joe Adcock with a ball to the head. In retaliation, the Braves’ Gene Conley floored Robinson with a pitch that hit him; Jack then got into a confrontation with the Braves’ third baseman Eddie Mathews. Again, while several players were involved, the harshest glare fell on Robinson, with the Milwaukee radio announcer Earle Gillespie hotly denouncing him as “
an agitator.” This was a damaging remark, with overtones of Communist influence, for which Gillespie later apologized to Robinson privately; according to Jack, he “told me he was ‘emotionally upset,’ didn’t know what he was talking about.” (The blow from Conley marked the sixty-sixth time Jack had been hit by a pitch in the major leagues. “
If that’s a record,” he said later, “I’m not proud of it.”)

In Jack’s battles, he could expect little support from Walter Alston. Their regard for one another, deteriorating through the season, hit bottom with an incident at Wrigley Field in Chicago. In a game against the Cubs, Duke Snider hit a ball that carried to the left-field bleachers, into the hands of fans there, before falling onto the turf. When the umpire ruled the hit a double, Jack stormed from the dugout, screaming that Snider had hit a home run. He was on the field, protesting vigorously, when it dawned on him slowly that no other Dodger was backing him—neither his teammates in the dugout nor Alston, who stood impassively in the third-base coaching box. “
Out there alone, with the fans riding me more every second,” Jack wrote, “I felt foolish. I wanted to find a hole and crawl into it. The Chicago players in the dugout were enjoying my predicament. One held up his hands to show that the ball had cleared the wall by two feet. If the umpire saw the signal, they gave no sign. I was ignored and they waved the game on.” The next day, a photograph showed that Robinson was right; Snider had indeed hit a home run. When a contemptuous crack by Robinson about
Alston “
standing out there at third base like a wooden Indian” reached the Dodgers manager, the rift between the two men widened.

To many people, Robinson had no tender side worth noting. And yet the same Milwaukee stadium that witnessed the bat-throwing incident also saw the start that year of a warm relationship, entirely unpublicized, between Jack and an eight-year-old boy who brought little to their exchange beyond his hero worship of the ballplayer. The boy was Ronnie Rabinovitz, the adopted son of David Rabinovitz, an attorney and Democratic Party supporter from Sheboygan, Wisconsin. On his father’s office stationery, he had written a fan letter to Robinson, who agreed to meet him if he should ever come to see the Dodgers play in Milwaukee, about fifty miles away. Outside the dugout after a game in the spring of 1954, as his father watched, the boy effusively greeted Robinson: “Hey Jackie,
I’m Ronnie Rabinovitz. Remember me?” “Sure,” Jack replied quickly. “I got your letter.” Startled, David Rabinovitz gently objected. “You must get thousands of letters,” he said. “You don’t have to pretend you remember the one from my son.” “I do,” Jack responded. “It was the one that was on lawyer’s stationery.”

Thereafter, Ronnie and his father regularly attended Dodger games in County Stadium, with seats near the visitors’ dugout and visits with Jack; less frequently, they met at public dinners, and once, as a grown man, Ron lunched with Robinson in Manhattan. Starting in 1954, also, Jack and Ronnie corresponded with one another, with Jack sending the youngster around twenty letters. Sometimes these letters touched on civil rights and politics, usually with light jabs at the Democrats (David Rabinovitz, an ardent supporter of John and Bobby Kennedy, was rewarded with a federal judgeship in Wisconsin). Mainly Jack wrote about what seemed important to his young friend—from Ronnie’s struggle to lose weight to the happy occasions of his bar mitzvah and his graduation from high school. Underneath was a serious aspect; Jack knew that having accepted the boy’s trust, he was now morally obliged to him. Once, Jack summed up for Ronnie, as simply and eloquently as he ever did, his own fundamental view of life. “
I learned a long time ago that a person must be true to himself if he is to succeed,” Jack wrote. “He must be willing to stand by his principles even at the possible loss of prestige. He must first learn to live with himself before he can hope to live with others. I have been fortunate. God has been good to me and I intend to work as hard as I can to repay all the things people have done for me.”

This relationship, conducted away from the public eye, boosted Rabinovitz’s confidence but also helped, if in a modest way, to sustain and reinforce Jack’s own sense of self, his idealism and capacity for human sympathy, which many people did not want to see or would not
acknowledge, or was obscured in the heat and dust of competition. To Rabinovitz, the core of their friendship was not its improbability but its solid, concrete nature. “
The main thing,” he said about Robinson, “is that he was a real man. He was an important big hero in my life and yet he had time to talk to a kid. He had time to visit. I don’t know what it was. But right away he liked me and I liked him.” In 1972, he would write to Rachel, who knew nothing of the correspondence, about the impact of Jack’s courtesy: “
I learned from Jackie the true meaning of being a man. I learned how cruel and full of hate some people are to others. I learned never to back down on a cause you truly believe in.… I will always cherish those memories and recall the friendship between a man and a boy.”

This friendship was part of Jack’s lifelong attraction to young people; but his kindness was not limited to youngsters. The writer Roger Kahn would tell of Robinson’s immediate show of concern for a young journalist—probably Kahn himself—out of a job when his newspaper suddenly folded, and Jack’s care in arranging for the man to be offered some work. Robinson was sensitive again in telephoning Kahn’s wife immediately after he found out that she had suffered a miscarriage. “
I hope my bringing this up doesn’t upset you,” he told her, “but I just want you to know that I’m sorry.” “That was a particularly sensitive thing to say,” she told her husband. “It was a lovely way to say something that I know must have been very hard for him to say at all.”

But this aspect of Robinson was lost on many sportswriters, with whom Jack’s relationship had now deteriorated badly. Among these was the powerful Dick Young of the New York
Daily News.
Once a Robinson supporter, Young now found much to criticize: Robinson was hypersensitive, too quick to see racism, too grand and independent. Kahn described a chilling scene between the two men, after Young had written an unflattering story about Robinson. In the Dodger clubhouse at Ebbets Field, Young was talking to someone when Robinson suddenly started shouting, “
If you can’t write the truth, you shouldn’t write.” As Young continued to speak, unaware that he was a target, Robinson persisted: “Yeah, you, Young. You didn’t write the truth.” Other players, embarrassed, stared away as the two men shouted at one another. “Ever since you went to Washington,” Young screamed about Jack’s 1949 HUAC testimony, “your head has been too big!” “If the shoe fits,” Jack shot back, “wear it!” The shouting continued until, at last, it was time to play ball.

J
ACK HAD NOT BECOME ARROGANT
, but undoubtedly he had risen in the world. September 1954 found him and his family living no longer in
middle-class St. Albans but in a grand house in Connecticut. This house was not Jack and Rachel’s, but had been lent to them; clearly, however, the once poor boy from Pasadena was now at home amid luxury. But Jack lived there with a clear conscience; if he was making good money, he had earned it.

About a year before, Rachel had decided that it was time for the family to leave St. Albans for the home they would live in after baseball. “
Jack would have been satisfied staying in St. Albans,” she said. “I wasn’t. The public schools were going downhill, and I wanted our three kids to go to public schools. I wanted more space, and a better social life for the children. I started thinking about Connecticut, about fresh air and ponds and lovely old stone walls. The whole notion of living in New England seemed good to me, a step up in upgrading our lives.”

In moving to Connecticut, race was not an overwhelming factor. In St. Albans, the black presence, as the Robinsons experienced it, was still small. “
Most of the black people near us,” Rachel said, “had no children, or none the age of Jackie, Sharon, and David. Most of the kids were white. We could have joined a black church, but Sunday baseball made that difficult. So we were not leaving a strongly black environment for a white one. It was not so simple.” To many blacks who could afford it, a belief in racial integration and social justice in the mid-1950s demanded precisely such a move. Integration meant living where one wished to live if one could afford to live there. The Robinsons knew they were taking a step that might profoundly alter their lives and those of their children, but were confident that the change would be all for the better.

Accordingly, Rachel began to comb the real estate section of the New York
Times.
“I wanted a view of water,” she said. “I wanted beautiful trees. I wanted schools nearby, and good shopping, and a church. I had my dream place all clear in my mind.” With a broker, a bubbly white woman, she began to take trips north into Connecticut. Jack never went along; picking a house was Rachel’s business. But she soon realized that the task would be harder than she had imagined. A house in Port Chester, on the Connecticut border, seemed exactly right, even if some whites had stared coldly as she walked around the property. But when she boldly offered the asking price itself, the owner pulled the house off the market. In elite Greenwich, Connecticut, the owners of one house refused to show it to her. These snubs angered Rachel, and they riled her even more when she realized that her broker was probably colluding with the owners. The broker was also steering her away from one of the more desirable towns, Stamford, Connecticut. The broker herself lived there.

Then a reporter for the Bridgeport
Herald
got in touch with Rachel. Preparing a series on Jim Crow in housing, the newspaper had been told that Jackie Robinson’s wife was meeting prejudice in her attempt to buy a house. “The
Herald
definitely did not hear about it from me,” Rachel said. “When I was turned down, I just quietly went away. Brokers told the
Herald;
they also told the
Herald,
apparently, that I wasn’t a serious buyer, that I was trying to start trouble—just like Jackie Robinson, I guess.” The newspaper decided to target the town of Stamford—“which was unfair,” she insisted, “because other towns had been just as tough to get into. But once Stamford was targeted, it had to respond, and it responded well.” A group of concerned ministers got together, circulated pledges of nondiscrimination among their parishioners, and called a small meeting, to which they invited Rachel. The meeting was held at the country home of Andrea Simon, the wife of the publisher Richard Simon of Simon & Schuster. Telephoning Rachel, she arranged to meet her at an exit on the Merritt Parkway near Stamford.

Rachel liked Andrea Simon at once; Andrea, in turn, liked Rachel. Energetic, evidently strong-willed and yet sensitive, Simon promised to help Rachel with her house hunting. With four young children herself, she sympathized with Rachel’s desire for a better life for her own. Following her to the meeting, Rachel turned up a driveway in front of a beautiful white mansion that sat on over fifty acres of land, with a flourishing apple orchard in the front yard. The meeting with the ministers was pleasant. Murmuring their apologies, the men promised to try to stir their flocks to do their Christian duty.

At the end of the meeting, as Rachel rose to leave, Simon asked her to stay. Next, to Rachel’s surprise, a broker showed up, and the three women went off to look at houses. “I think Andrea herself thought that perhaps I was being difficult,” Rachel said; “I think she wanted to see what sort of places I was turning down.” They inspected five pieces of property. Each owner was willing to sell; but Rachel rejected them all. The broker then played her sixth card: a five-acre spread with the foundation of a small new house already in place. Here, the owner, Ben Gunnar, who was also a builder, was willing to sell. However, not long out of his native Russia and totally dependent on local credit, he feared he might be ruined, blackballed by every bank, if he sold to blacks. His fear seemed reasonable.