Jackie Robinson (57 page)

On the baseball field, true to his fighting spirit, Robin-San became the first Dodger ejected by an umpire from a game in Japan (an American umpire, Jocko Conlan). Japanese baseball was then a decorous affair compared with its American counterpart, but the local fans understood what he had represented, including the samurai warrior spirit Robinson to some extent embodied in his career. But before Jack left Japan with the Dodgers, the United States ambassador, John M. Allison, sent him a special message of thanks for “
what you have done while in this country.” Allison praised Jack’s “magnificent sportsmanship,” which had helped to strengthen the ties “between the people of Japan and the people of America.”

Returning to the United States, Jack took to the links with pleasure, but was soon on the road as a speaker, mainly for the NCCJ. The most important address came in late November, when he acted as master of ceremonies at a $100-a-plate dinner organized by the regional NCCJ at the Palmer House in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley also spoke. But Jack was also about to make a major change in the focus of his volunteering. Without breaking with the NCCJ or the Harlem YMCA, he decided to pay far
more attention to the NAACP. Across the South, the association was under serious pressure and in desperate need of funds. In Alabama that year, for example, after it refused to allow hostile local officials to examine its books, the NAACP was fined $100,000 and forbidden by court order to operate within the state. In many other places, membership in the association was a dangerous business. Jack decided that this was where he should direct his efforts. Late in the year, accordingly, he agreed to become national chairman of the annual Fight for Freedom Fund campaign of the NAACP and to make an extended tour in the winter in that capacity.

The turning point for him probably was a notice he had received earlier in the year, in June, that the NAACP had decided to accord him its highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, given annually to a black American whose achievements had brought credit to the race. Robinson would be the forty-first person but the first athlete to win the medal, which in the past had gone mainly to artists, scientists, and civil rights leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Marian Anderson, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, A. Philip Randolph, and Ralph Bunche. To Jack, it was welcome evidence that he had transcended athletics in the course of his long career as a sportsman, and made the kind of lasting impression on American society to which he had long aspired. On December 8, at a gala luncheon at the Hotel Roosevelt in Manhattan, before a gathering of prominent civil rights leaders and their supporters, Jack proudly accepted his medal. On hand were the former president of the NAACP, Arthur B. Spingarn, and Amy Einstein Spingarn, whose late husband, Joel E. Spingarn, also a past president, had funded the award. Jack was introduced by his friend the network television star Ed Sullivan, and presented with the award by Channing H. Tobias, the chairman of the board of the NAACP. According to its citation, the medal came “
in recognition of his superb sportsmanship, his pioneer role in opening up a new field of endeavor for young Negroes, and his civic consciousness.”

In accepting the medal, Robinson thanked various individuals, including his mother, his wife, and Branch Rickey; but also mindful of the harsh criticism he had been receiving, he seized the moment to justify the correctness of his fighting attitude over the years in facing injustice. “
I am now quite convinced,” he declared, “that the way I have played and the way I have tried to conduct myself was the right way.” Many people had advised him “not to speak up every time I thought there was an injustice. I was often advised to look after the Robinson family and not to worry about other people.” Sometimes the “biting criticism” left him doubting himself. Moreover, “many times I have been told that I should just let things work themselves out without involving myself in them. If I did so, many honors and awards would come my way.” But if he had lost some prizes, “I am
pretty certain now that what I have tried to do was in keeping with the spirit which the Spingarn Medal represents.” The NAACP was “the tireless champion of the rights and well-being of the Negroes of America. It is even more than that, because its cause is the cause of democracy, which makes it the champion of all Americans who cherish the principles on which this country was founded.”

Then, within a day or two of the medal ceremony, his life took an even more decisive turn. Martin Stone’s efforts to find the right job in business for Jack finally paid off. Around December 1, Jack received a telephone call from William H. Black, the president of a popular chain of coffee shops, Chock Full o’ Nuts, asking that Jack join him for lunch in Manhattan. Within a week of their meeting, Black decided to offer Jack the job of director of personnel for the entire operation. At first glance, the proposed job seemed far removed from Robinson’s interests and capabilities; but Black was convinced that he was the man for the position. Initially skeptical, Jack quickly became fascinated by the prospect of a position that would put him in charge of the welfare of more than a thousand people, most of them black.

Black’s story was American to the core. An engineering graduate of Columbia University but with no job in the offing because of a recession, he had started out humbly around 1922, selling nuts at a stand under a staircase in a building at Forty-third Street and Broadway. Soon he had several small nut shops. Then, in 1931, with nuts suddenly a luxury in the Depression, Black converted several shops into “restaurants” specializing in a five-cent cup of coffee and a popular, five-cent nutted cheese sandwich made with whole-wheat raisin bread. By the 1950s, Chock Full o’ Nuts was a city institution, selling its own line of roasted coffee and baked goods but noted also because of Black’s humane rules of employment, which included generous annual holiday allowances, a day off with pay on each worker’s birthday, a substantial Christmas bonus, and health, life insurance, and retirement plans at no cost to the employees. Black had also made sure that he employed both blacks and whites.

According to him, it was his idea to approach Robinson, whom he had never met, about coming to Chock Full o’ Nuts after a vacancy suddenly arose in personnel. “
From what I had read about Jackie,” he said, “he was just the man for the job. I arranged to have lunch with him.” The lunch went well, he told the press; “I was convinced he is the man for us.” He then arranged for Robinson to make a day-long tour of the Chock Full o’ Nuts empire. As Black had hoped, Robinson began to see himself in the position. Black probably did not share with Jack one of the main reasons for his interest in him: the owner’s hope that Robinson would act as a buffer between
his employees and the trade union movement, which Black feared as a businessman. According to Stone, who remembered the sequence of events differently, Black had mentioned to some friends of Stone “
that he was having trouble with his employees over a trade union. He didn’t want his work force unionized. In the shops, most of the employees were black. I went to see Black in the hope that he would select Jack to take charge of personnel matters.”

In any event, on December 10, Black and Stone (“
just about the best friend I have,” Robinson declared happily the following month) met to negotiate terms. As vice-president in charge of personnel relations, Jack would be paid $30,000 a year along with a company car and stock or stock options. The initial agreement, commencing on March 4, 1957, would be for two years, at the end of which, if reappointed, Robinson would get a five-year contract—although, Black insisted, “
I told Jackie that as far as I am concerned, this is a lifetime job.” Stone and Black agreed that Robinson, if he agreed to the terms, would come to Black’s office in Manhattan two days later, on December 12, to sign the contract.

For Jack, this was not a tough decision to reach; he was eager to accept the offer. As for Rachel, she “
didn’t try to influence me one way or the other,” he insisted the following month. “She wanted this to be my decision.”

Jack then faced two prime, possibly conflicting, obligations. One was to tell the Dodgers he would not be coming back; the other was to share the news with the weekly magazine
Look,
so as to comply with an agreement he had reached with the magazine two years before, in connection with his three-part article there, to give
Look
exclusive rights to the story of his retirement. In return,
Look
would pay Jack a fee of $50,000 (in reality, a two-year sports consultantcy at $25,000 a year).

Suppressing the story until
Look
could publish it guaranteed that Jack’s departure from baseball would be controversial; but neither
Look
nor Robinson could have anticipated the next turn of events. On December 11, the day before Jack was due in Manhattan to sign his contract with Black, a Dodger employee called to say that Buzzie Bavasi wanted to see him in Brooklyn at 11:00 a.m. the next day. Robinson, who was scheduled to be at the
Look
office at that time, promised to telephone Bavasi. The next morning, at the breakfast table, he told his children what he was about to do. Jackie Junior burst into tears, and David followed suit; only Sharon, knowing that Dad would be home more, beamed. Jack and Rachel then drove from Stamford to the
Look
office in Manhattan. Around three o’clock, Robinson finally reached Bavasi on the telephone. Bavasi, evidently not free to talk, offered to visit Jack at home later. When Robinson said he was entertaining that evening, Bavasi then agreed to telephone him again. Around
four o’clock, Jack and Marty Stone proceeded to the Chock Full o’ Nuts headquarters at 425 Lexington Avenue. There, Bill Black greeted them warmly. While they were waiting to sign the contract, Bavasi tried to reach Robinson. According to Stone, “
I told Jack, ‘Don’t you dare answer that telephone until we are done with this contract!’ ” Around five o’clock, as soon as Jack signed the document, Stone gave the all-clear: “Now you can call Bavasi.”

Stone listened in as Robinson made the call. “Jack, I have news for you,” Bavasi said. “You’ve been traded to the New York Giants. It’ll be in all the papers tomorrow. Congratulations!” In return for Robinson, Brooklyn would receive the left-handed relief pitcher Dick Littlefield, along with $35,000.

Jack heard Bavasi’s message with a widening smile, because its timing seemed to confirm the wisdom of his decision to quit baseball. Still, the news rocked him, even as it soon rocked his family, his teammates, and legions of Dodger fans. The idea of their Jackie being traded was bad enough; the notion of him going to the archenemy, the Giants, was almost inconceivable. Even by baseball’s chilly standards of conduct in such matters, the trade seemed arctic. “
We made the deal,” Bavasi would explain, “because we want to play one of our youngsters. As long as Jackie was on the club, the manager was going to play him. And you couldn’t blame him.” He and O’Malley had sent Robinson to the Giants because they felt “obligated to Jackie to trade him to a New York team.” After all, Jack had long made it clear that he would not play away from New York. (Thirty years later, a New York
Times
writer, Dave Anderson, would offer as a theory long held that O’Malley had traded Robinson to avoid taking him home to Los Angeles, where Jack had been a hero.)

To some extent, Jack still had room to maneuver, even to change his mind. Although he had signed a contract with Chock Full o’ Nuts, Black made it clear that he would release Robinson if Jack wanted to return to baseball. Jack probably also had time to cancel his deal with
Look,
where the story would not appear before January 8. But he apparently never wavered. However, to maintain the appearance that joining the Giants was possible, even probable, and thus to give a heavier punch to the
Look
exclusive, he masked his intentions. When the Giants’ president, Horace Stoneham, telephoned Jack to express his delight with the trade, Robinson was gracious if also restrained: he would be delighted to play for the Giants, if he played for anyone. He also asked Stoneham to keep the news quiet for a while. That was impossible, Stoneham said. Too many people already knew.

Accordingly, Jack acted as if he might be joining the Giants. “
I’ll give the Giants everything I’ve got, just as I have the Dodgers,” he allegedly told
one reporter. “I’ve got no hard feelings against the Dodgers but I’m going to do everything I can to beat them next year.” Certainly he seemed to enjoy the knowledge that O’Malley and Bavasi, without knowing it, were now chasing their tails. “
There was a kind of revenge in it for us,” Rachel admitted forty years later; “we felt that the top people had hurt us, and we were getting back a little at them.” When the questions came too close to the truth, Jack set out for California; the idea came from
Look,
which paid for the trip.

Keeping up the charade, Jack was all humility in dealing with O’Malley, Bavasi, and Alston. In turn, their initial letters to him were gracious, even if their own main intention was to ease him off the premises quietly. On December 13, when Bavasi sent Robinson his “Official Release Notice,” he took pains to assure Jack that he had acted reluctantly. Praising Jack for often helping the team to scout and sign certain players, Bavasi hinted at a possible management role for him. Baseball was more than playing—“
I think you know what I mean.” O’Malley, thanking Jack for his “
courageous and fair and philosophical” response to the trade, also saw a possible “future intersection” of their paths. Alston, too, made sentimental noises. The press had exaggerated their differences; Alston had “
always admired your fine competitive spirit and team play.”

If there was duplicity here, it existed on both sides. For his part, Jack was misleading not only O’Malley and Bavasi but also his own innocent admirers, many of whom had rallied indignantly to his side with the news of the trade. Fans pointed out that Cleveland had kept its pitching hero Bob Feller on the payroll long after he ceased to be effective; why hadn’t Robinson been accorded the same respect? His teammates paid their tributes, each in his own way. Erskine expressed his undying gratitude to Jack for welcoming him years before to the Dodgers; Campanella wondered what needling Robinson would be like now. Both players assumed that Jack would be a Giant, as did a popular columnist in penning a feverish but shrewd tribute to Jack. “
You are Jackie Robinson,” Jimmy Cannon wrote, “who is consumed by rage and pride. You’re a complicated man, persecuted by slanderous myths, using anger as a confederate. No athlete of any time has been assaulted by such an aching loneliness which created your personality and shaped your genuine greatness.” As for reporting to the Giants: “It’s a challenge and you won’t back down.”