Jackie Robinson (7 page)

Whatever his reservations about his mother, she offered him unstinting maternal love and encouragement. In 1935, when he graduated from Washington Junior High School, her pride and joy at his achievement brought tears to his eyes. “
Through some miracle” (as he put it) Mallie had managed to secure for him as a graduation gift something he badly wanted—his first dress suit. “I remember I cried a little when I saw it,” Jack wrote. As always, Mallie gave all credit to God for everything. “My mother said she always believed the Lord would take care of us,” Jack went on. “Right then and there, I never stopped believing that.” This was not literally true. Jack’s real religious awakening would come about three years later. But the way to his rebirth as a believer had been paved assiduously throughout his life by his remarkable mother.

A
S HE GREW OLDER
, Jack turned naturally for his closest companionship away from his older brothers to neighborhood boys nearer his own age. These included youngsters like his cousin Van Wade, a powerful hitter who was often a teammate in baseball; Sid Heard, from his earliest days at the Cleveland School; the brothers Woodrow and Ernest Cunningham, who lived only a block away; and Ray Bartlett, who would play sports with Jack from kindergarten to college and beyond. In addition, Jack’s circle included Japanese-Americans, like the brothers George, Frankie, and Ben Ito, and Shig Kawai, an excellent football and baseball player; Tim and Bill Herrera, who were Mexican-Americans; and such white pals as George Spivak and Danny Galvin, a little fellow, younger than Jack, who was one of the most relentless scorers in Pasadena basketball.

Ernie Cunningham remembered that while Jack took a particular liking at one time to him and Ben Ito, Jack himself was not always liked. “At that time,” he claimed, “Jackie wasn’t a very likable person, because his whole thing was just win, win, win, and beat everybody.” Some, but not all, of these friends resolved themselves at one point into what passed into local lore as the “Pepper Street Gang.” Exactly when, and for how long, the gang operated is not clear—or even how democratic it was. “
Our gang was made up of blacks, Japanese, and Mexican kids,” Jack wrote just before his death; “all of us came from poor families and had extra time on our hands.” But others, such as Eleanor Peters Heard, who lived near the gang’s favorite street corner, would recall white members, including Danny Galvin. Another white friend of Jack’s, Warren Dorn, who later became an influential
political leader as mayor of Pasadena and a Los Angeles County commissioner, also claimed to have been a member of the gang.

Only its harshest critics thought the gang dangerous; for a city of its size, Pasadena’s juvenile delinquency rate was well below average. “
There was no drugs, no smoking, no liquor, no beating up anybody, nothing of that nature,” recalled Ray Bartlett, who knew everyone in the Pepper Street Gang but was forbidden by his mother to be a member. “
We never got into vicious or violent crime,” Robinson insisted, but indulged instead in pranks and petty theft. They threw “dirt clods” at passing cars, “snatched” balls on the golf course and often sold them back to the players; “swiped” fruit at produce stands; “snitched what we could” at local stores. Such activity was enough to make some parents wary, and to bring Jack into direct contact with the police. His first, but not his last, brush with the law came when he was once “escorted to jail at gunpoint by the sheriff” for taking a swim in the city reservoir, which he felt justified in doing because of the rules at the Brookside Plunge. In fact, partly because of his local fame as a schoolboy athlete, the Pasadena police came to know Jack fairly well; at one point, he seemed likely to become, as he himself said, “a full-fledged juvenile delinquent.”

“
Hardly a week went by,” Jack wrote, “when we didn’t have to report to Captain Morgan, the policeman who was head of the Youth Division.” Given the degree of racism and segregation in Pasadena, he was lucky in having to deal with Hugh D. Morgan. “
About nine feet tall,” as Ernie Cunningham remembered him, the burly, cigar-smoking former football player from Louisiana State University had migrated to Pasadena and joined the force in 1924. A student of juvenile delinquency control at the University of Southern California, Morgan relied on psychology and diplomacy rather than threats or brute force. “
He was always ready to give us advice,” Jack wrote in 1949, “and maybe a dollar or two if he thought we hadn’t had any breakfast that morning.” Willa Mae remembered Morgan coming to the house often, but not only to scold Jack; Mallie recalled going down
to his office “often” to bawl him out, as she put it, when she thought he was too hard on the boys. “
I think he did a good job at really keeping things in hand,” Ray Bartlett judged (he would become Pasadena’s second black police officer), “and actually pointed kids in the right direction.” Despite a bad habit of quietly urging members of each ethnic group to avoid members of the other ethnic groups as being beneath them, he carefully avoided showing racial prejudice. In 1939, as protests grew over Jim Crow at the Brookside Plunge and segregation in housing, he publicly defended young blacks in Pasadena against the charge that they posed any special problem as delinquents.

Morgan was one of several male figures of authority, especially his coaches, to whom Jack responded well, as a good son might to his father, even as he muddled through his adolescence. Another such person was a black man named Carl Anderson, who challenged Jack to move beyond the inanities of the Pepper Street Gang. “
He made me see,” Robinson later wrote, “that if I continued with the gang it would hurt my mother as well as myself.… He said it didn’t take guts to follow the crowd, that courage and intelligence lay in being willing to be different. I was too ashamed to tell Carl how right he was, but what he said got to me.” Only seven years older than Jack, Anderson worked as a car mechanic near the intersection of Mountain and Morton, where members of the Pepper Street Gang often loitered. As one of the unofficial leaders of the local black community, he tried hard to undo the psychological damage done to black youngsters by Jim Crow. When the local Boy Scouts refused to integrate their units, Anderson founded the first black troop in northwest Pasadena. “
He also organized a special group for us kids, that he called the Friendly Indians,” Sid Heard remembered. “We’d go over to his house every Friday night and listen to him tell stories and the like. He really liked young people.”

With each passing year, the cheering Jack heard at football and baseball games contrasted poorly with the pain of knowing what it meant to be black in Pasadena. At first, as a boy, he took Jim Crow in his stride; then he began to see and feel more intensely. “
I always thought Pasadena was a great place,” he recalled, “until I got more experience of life.” One episode involved the YMCA, which had fine sports facilities but refused blacks as members, and stalled and frustrated Jack when he applied for membership. Another was the Brookside Plunge: “During hot spells, you waited outside the picket fence and watched the white kids splash around. I honestly think the officials didn’t think the Negroes got as warm and uncomfortable as white people during the Pasadena heat.” Jim Crow dogged him in the movie houses, where blacks were forced to sit in one section only. At the Pasadena Playhouse, empty seats, if available, quarantined black patrons from whites. “
At the Kress soda fountain, you could sit at the counter and wait and wait and no one would serve you,” one friend would recall. “The same thing at Schrafft’s. You could work in the kitchen, but you couldn’t eat there, at least not without a hassle.”

The veteran Los Angeles
Times
sports journalist Shav Glick, who as a fellow Pasadena Junior College student would cover Jack’s exploits for the Pasadena
Post
for some years in the 1930s, wrote in 1977: “
The Robinson the world came to know, competitive and combative, aggressive and abrasive, impatient and irascible, was tempered on the streets, the schoolgrounds and the
playing fields of Pasadena.” But Glick stressed that this process of tempering went on inside, and was kept inside, by Robinson. The face Jack presented to the world, especially after high school, was on the whole calm. And then, as well as later, he almost never brought his anger home, as Willa Mae and others would attest. Jack could not and would not use profanity in his mother’s home, or rebel against her or his sister and brothers. “
The only curse word he would ever use,” Sid Heard recalled with amusement, “was ‘Dadgummit!’ When he said that word, that was it. Yessir, ‘Dadgummit!’ Then he’d go and beat your brains out!”

E
ARLY 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.