Rickey and Robinson (22 page)

The third game was played at Ebbets Field before 34,209. Johnny Padres, pitching for the Dodgers on his twenty-third birthday, faced Bob Turley of the Yankees. The record shows that Padres yielded seven hits and struck out seven and that Campanella collected three hits and three RBis to power the 8-3 Dodger victory. The box score doesn’t show how Jackie Robinson triggered Brooklyn’s win.

With the score tied, 2-2, he singled. Darting back and forth off first base, he so unnerved Turley that the Yankee hurler hit Sandy Amoros with a pitch. Padres came to bat. Again Robinson leaned, laughed, and taunted Turley. Padres dumped the ball down and reached first base safely on a bunt. Robinson was now on third base, Amoros was on second, and Padres was on first. Turley checked the runners. Ebbets Field was like an echo chamber of howls and squeals. Robinson feigned a dart toward home. Berra screamed to Turley to concentrate on the batter, not Robinson. The batter, Junior Gilliam, walked on four straight pitches. It was as if Turley had pitched to Robinson and not to Gilliam. Number 42 crossed the plate with a big smile on his face. The Dodgers led 3-2.

Casey Stengel was angry. He took Turley out and replaced him with Tom Morgan, who walked Reese, and the Dodgers led 4-2. Incredibly, two runs had been scored off the vaunted Yankee pitching staff, and the only ball that had been hit out of the infield was the lead-off single by Robinson.

The game moved along to the seventh inning, and the Dodgers were leading 6-3. The Dodger faithful were well aware that every run counted with . the Yankee batting power at work in their small ballpark.

Robinson slammed a Tom Sturdivant pitch off the screen in left field. Elston Howard fielded the ball cleanly and saw Robinson make a wide turn past second base. Robinson changed gears and apparently was making a retreat back to second base. Howard made a fundamental error by throwing behind the runner, firing the ball into second in an attempt to cut off what he thought was Robinson’s retreat. As the ball came in, Robinson lit out for third base. He slid safely into third, beating Billy Martin’s relay throw. A single by Sandy Amoros brought Robinson home with another run, an insurance run.

“The way Howard fielded the ball,” Robinson explained later to reporters, “I knew he would go through with his intention to throw to second, so I took off. If Irv Noren [the Yankees’ regular left fielder] was out there, I would’ve held up, because Noren could pretend to throw to one base and throw to another. A couple of years ago no slide would have been necessary. . . . That was quite a burst of speed by a gray, fat man, wasn’t it?”

The Dodgers went on to win games four and five of the Series. The Yankees won the sixth game, tying the Series at three games apiece.. On October 4, 1955, Johnny Podres, who had been a fifteen-year-old living in Witherbee, New York, when Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line, spaced out eight hits to defeat the Yankees 2-0 and give Brooklyn its only World Championship ever.

Robinson had batted an anemic .182 in the Series, but his four hits and five runs scored had come in the clutch. “He comes to win,” Durocher had said of him. “Robinson comes to beat you.” The kudos were for Podres and Amoros, Snider and Hodges and Campanella, but an old man in Pittsburgh, who had put most of the Brooklyn team together, knew how much number 42 had contributed to the Dodger victory just by being on the team.

The man who
Time
magazine said “talks like an evangelist in a voice that exploits the whisper as aptly as the roar” was delighted with the results of the 1955 World Series. His own Pittsburgh Pirates, however, brought him little joy that year. The Pirates had finished in last place, 38½ games behind the Dodgers.

The year before, mortgaging the present for the future, Rickey kept trading, bringing bodies and cash to the Pirates. Danny O’Connell was sent to Milwaukee for six players and $200,000; Murray Dickson was dispatched to the Phillies for two players and $72,500.

Ironically, while O’Malley stood smugly at the summit in Brooklyn, presiding over the powerful Dodgers that were built by Rickey, competitive and financial disaster in Pittsburgh led to Rickey’s departure after five years as Pirate general manager.

Forging a new dynasty in the city of steel had been difficult. The Pirates had finished in the cellar in four of Rickey’s five years with the club, but Rickey perceived the sparks of the future. Vernon Law and Bob Friend were the heart of an improving pitching staff. Friend led the league in earnedrun average, quite an accomplishment for a pitcher on a lastplace team. Dale Long and Frank Thomas combined for forty-one home runs, and a rookie from Carolina, Puerto Rico, who would star for the Pirates for the next eighteen years, took over in right field. Roberto Clemente would one day rank with other Rickey products like Jackie Robinson and Stan Musial.

Joe L. Brown, the son of the famous comedian Joe E. Brown, took over for the seventy-five-year-old Rickey. “Joe Brown,” Mal Goode points out, “was a real Rickey protege and the nearest thing to Rickey on the race problem. There were no blacks when Rickey came to Pittsburgh. In 1954, Curt Roberts was on the Pirate roster, the first black player the team ever had. Brown didn’t care if you were a bull moose; if you were able to play ball you played for Pittsburgh.”

With Brown on the scene, Rickey continued in semiretirement as chairman of the board of the Bucs. Freed from the laborious daily details of runiling the team, the Deacon spread his activities out into other areas.

There was m·ore time for family. Like some wizened patriarch, he presided over festive family gatherings at Fox Chapel. He delighted in being with his six children and their spouses, and seeing his sixteen grandchildren cavort atop the ponies that had been raised for their enjoyment.

There was more time for politics. Throughout his life, Rickey had been offered opportunities to run for the United States Senate, and then the governorship in Missouri. Baseball always claimed his first loyalty, although he was a dedicated Republican. In the summer of 1956, he hit the campaign trail on behalf of the presidential candidacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower, a man whom he admired and who was a good friend.

While Rickey was loosening his involvement with baseball in Pittsburgh, Jackie Robinson’s career was winding down in Brooklyn.

Reduced by injuries, by age, by time to a utility role, Jackie played seventy-two games at third base, twenty-two games at second base, nine games at first base, and two games in the outfield in 1956. He batted .275.

Duke Snider recalls Robinson’s presence in a game in that 1956 season. The man they affectionately called “The Duke of Flatbush” was at bat in the top of the ninth inning at Wrigley Field. The Dodgers were tied, 2-2, with the Cubs. Sam Jones, a black pitcher, was on the mound for Chicago. “Jackie was on deck,” recalls Snider, “yelling at Jones in that high voice he had. ‘Sam, you’re no good. . . . I’m going to beat you. . . . You’ve got no guts.’ I hit a high popup, and now it’s Jackie’s turn. He’s still taunting Sam and yelling. Sam is getting madder and madder. He hits Jackie with a pitch and now Jackie is on first. It’s the last thing Sam wanted.

“Jackie is dancing around and yelling at Sam, and Sam keeps throwing over to first and yelling louder and louder. Sam gets so mad he throws the ball right at Jackie. Jackie ducks and the ball sails down to the bullpen in the rightfield corner, and Jackie goes all the way to third. Sam is fit to be tied. Jackie is still yelling and laughing and dancing up the line. ‘Sam, I’m gonna beat you, you’ve got no guts.’ Jackie is infuriating him. Well, Sam is looking at Jackie and cursing at him and paying him more attention than the batter and he throws the next pitch into the dirt. It’s a short passed ball, and here comes Jackie charging down the line and sliding and it’s three to two Brooklyn and we win another. Yeah, even after all those years, that Jackie was somethin’ else.”

In the last World Series Jackie Robinson ever played in, “Dem Bums” went to the seventh game before losing once again to the New York Yankees while pickets milled about the Dodger office at 215 Montague Street carrying signs that announced: “O’Malley—Biggest Bum of Them All,” and “Keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn.”

O’Malley had begun to dispose of properties in anticipation of the move of the Dodgers to Los Angeles. Ebbets Field was sold in October to a Brooklyn real-estate developer. Shortly thereafter, the ballpark of the Montreal Royals was sold. And then, incredibly, on December 13, 1956, Jackie Robinson, who was for so many years the symbol and the style of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was sold to the New York Giants for $35,000 and pitcher Dick Littlefield.

“Giants Get Robinson But He May Not Play” was the headline in the
New
Y
ark Post.
Willa Mae, the sister he always confided in, maintains that “from the moment Jack became a major-league player, he never stopped looking for other employment opportunities. He never knew whether he was going to make it at first and then later how long it was going to last. He had already made up his mind that 1956 was going to be his last year in baseball.”

The trade was made while Robinson was negotiating with
Look
magazine for his official and exclusive retirement story. Pressed by reporters for weeks for a commitment as to whether or not he would join the Giants, Robinson remained evasive. In January 1957, Jackie Robinson announced his official retirement from baseball in an article in
Look.
“My legs are gone and I know it,” he wrote. “The ball club needs rebuilding. It needs youth. It doesn’t need me. It would be unfair to the Giant owners to take their money.”

Mal Goode is still bitter at the way the Dodgers disposed of his friend. “They treated him like an old shoe,” says Goode. “I called him and asked him to play one more year, one more year with Willie Mays. ‘I just want to see the two of you negotiating a double steal; play one more year, Jackie.’

“‘I’m not going to do it, Mal,’ he said. ‘Horace Stoneham offered me sixty-five, seventy thousand dollars—finally he handed me a blank check and told me to put in what I wanted for one year. I told him nothing doing. I wasn’t going to play anymore.’

“That was Jackie,” continues Goode. “He was a man of principle. He could have put one hundred thousand dollars down on that check and Stoneham would have paid him and he would have been happy to pay him. Stoneham was smart enough to know what Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson together would have done in drawing power. My God, it would’ve been a couple of million dollars in extra income. The Giants would have made a fortune with him on their team.”

The end came in a blaze of controversy. Buzzy Bavasi charged that Robinson’s retirement story was written only to enable Jackie to extract more money from the Giants.

“Personally,” Robinson said, “I felt that Bavasi and some of the writers resented the fact that I had outsmarted baseball before baseball had outsmarted me. Mter Buzzy said that, there was no way I’d ever play again.”

Rachel Robinson looks back over the years to put her husband’s decision in perspective. “Jack was a person of extreme loyalty and devotion to family, to friends, to his team. When you have a person like that, they can’t make changes that easily. He had always made up his mind that he would never play for any team but the Dodgers . . . and that coupled with the fact that he did not want to play anymore. He had looked for a way out of baseball for two years prior to the trade. The last couple of years he had trouble getting in shape. . . . He wanted to get into business, get on with the business of living. . . . He just didn’t see the sports arena as the place. It just could never have been.”

But what had been was past forgetting: the little mincing steps he took entering the batter’s box; the erect and almost military batting stance—elbows high, feet rather close together, arms extended out from the body; the bat, poised and still, raised high above the right shoulder; the tension, the chopping swing of a man who appeared to be musclebound; the wide, sloped shoulders and the strong, heavy legs; the runner’s walk—toes turned in, pigeon-toed gait; the top-heavy torso and the broad behind; the sensitive face and the wide forehead; the full mouth, the defined and determined chin, and the deep-set wide and flashing fierce eyes focused with twenty-twenty vision enabling him to pick up the ball and whip it where he willed.

Roy Campanella sits in his wheelchair in his modern

home in Woodland Hills, California, not far from Dodger Stadium. All the differences with number 42 are like stones smoothed by the running stream of time. “Jack was one of the only cleanup hitters who wasn’t a home run hitter. He was a line-drive hitter. He could bunt a man in from third, and it was impossible to throw him out, but the runner on third with two outs had to be alert to score. He could get the base hit when you needed it. He could steal a base when you needed it. He could make the fielding play when you needed it. Jackie could beat you every way there was to beat you. I have never had a teammate who could do all the things that Jackie Robinson could do. I could extend it even further—I have never seen a ballplayer that could do all the things that Jackie Robinson did. Except that he didn’t get the opportunity at a really young age. He could’ve been twice as good. He could think so much faster than anybody I ever played with or against . . . he was two steps and one thought ahead of anyone else.”

Chapter Thirteen

The Final Years

The public image of Jackie Robinson in retirement from baseball was that of a heavyset, gray-haired man in a business suit. Reports of his diabetes provoked many reactions in those close to him.

“Jack told me, ‘As soon as I get out of baseball, I’m going to find out what is wrong with me,’” Willa Mae recalls. “In the first week or two after he got out of baseball, he had to go having shots and all. He went into a diabetic coma and was in it for two weeks and more.”

Sidney Heard remembers, “As kids we were prone to injuries ‘cause we used to play hard. I noticed that when Jack did have an abrasion or scratch, it took an awful long time to heal. Our parents used to talk about how long that sore used to stay on Jack. We used to take dirt and put it on the wound and we’d heal, but he never did heal quick.”

Robinson coped with the diabetes as best he could and went on with the business of living. Still very much a celebrity, he was employed as a vice-president for Chock Full O’Nuts—the community-oriented fast-food chain that employed many blacks.

Jerry Lewis, who today is the director of the Jackie Robinson Foundation, was a Korean War veteran in 1959 and one of the few black students at Columbia University. “My friends and I used to go to Chock Full O’Nuts at One hundred sixteenth Street and Broadway. It was there I met Jackie Robinson. He would come to the restaurant every Thursday as vice-president of personnel and we would talk. When I was a kid, he was my idol, my role model, and here he was in the flesh. He was an ebony giant with a gentle voice, and he always had time to talk to me and the others there. He made me feel I was somebody. He was a man of class who gave me hope before the hard civil rights movement.”

Robinson became involved with Nelson Rockefeller. Their first contact came as a result of the Chock Full O’Nuts advertising jingle. Annoyed by the phrase “better coffee Rockefeller’s money can’t buy,” Rockefeller sought to have the reference to his family deleted. He met with Robinson and Bill Black, chairman of the board of the company. The jingle remained as it was; nonetheless, Rockefeller and Robinson established a personal relationship that resulted in their working together often in the years to come.

Rachel went back to college and received her master’s degree in psychiatric nursing. The children, Jack Jr., Sharon, and David, moved through their school years and childhood friendships and Little League games. Jack spread himself into other interests. There was a syndicated newspaper column, community and political activities, and friends.

“With success, there comes a change,” notes Sidney Heard. “Jack changed, but not to us. I have a letter from him where he planned to get involved with the Gibraltar Savings Bank. It didn’t pan out, but he told me to tell the gang that when it was going good, he would buy shares for all of us and let us pay him back later. He was not going to take any money from us.”

Writer Leonard Gross and his wife were close friends of the Robinsons. Gross tells a story that illustrates how Robinson “never took part in what he didn’t understand.” Rachel and Mrs. Gross shared a season box at the New York Philharmonic. Jack called Gross one day offering him tickets to a special performance.

“What’s the program?” Gross asked.

“Is there somebody named Bernstein?” “Yes,” said Gross.

“Well, he’s in it.”

ABC news correspondent Mal Goode remembers all the dinner-table conversations and visits. “We spent a lot of time together talking about politics and sports and the race issue. He was always full of fight.” The love that Jackie and Rachel had for each other still impresses Goode, along with the respect they had for each other’s accomplishments and differences. “Rachel was the backbone of his family,” notes Goode. “Jack counted on her heavily. When he was playing ball, he was on the road a lot, in different cities. It was lonely, and people were after him all the time. But Jack never did anything to embarrass Rachel. Jack’s life was his family; he always felt he owed something to his family first.”

“When we were younger,” recalls his daughter Sharon, “he had to travel a lot. He never stayed away long, and when he returned, the family was his focal point. We sat at the dinner table, taking it all in from this giant of a man who was also our father.”

His son David still feels his father’s presence. “The sound of the footsteps down the carpeted hall stopping at your door; the words were never long, never needed to be. . . . The grits were always made before I got up. I wouldn’t know when he made them or where he was, but by the time I reached the kitchen, they were there, hot on the stove. You were never asked twice to do a chore. If the grass had not been cut by Saturday morning, it was the sound of his tractor as you lay in bed that spoke his message: You had not done your job. But I never got a beating from him, and I never saw him angry.”

“He never forgot where he came from,” recalls Goode, “although he was sometimes kind of surprised at how far he had come. Once President Eisenhower crossed a crowded ballroom and approached him. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Jackie told me. ‘The president did it because he wanted to shake my hand.’”

The Robinsons were now serenely settled in a twelveroom redwood and fieldstone house set on a five-acre tract in North Stamford, Connecticut. Built on two terraced levels, it overlooked a private lake and was surrounded by tall New England pine trees. When Jackie, Rachel, and their three children had first moved to Connecticut, some blacks criticized them for living in a white enclave. Some whites sounded off in muted echoes of their Pepper Street counterparts those long years ago. But aside from one incident involving a private golf club, the Robinsons were an accepted part of the Stamford community.

Recommended for membership in that private golf club, Robinson lepned that some members had registered objections. He declined membership and chose instead to play the public course in Stamford with its two-hour wait on weekends.

He never used caddies. His swing was fast and came out of a small arc. Delayed wrist action, with cocked wrists suddenly uncorked on the downswing, enabled him to get all his power into his drives. The most he ever wagered was a dollar or two, but he always played all-out. He loved to compete.

Baseball was behind him. Red Schoendienst recalls meeting Robinson on a Manhattan street. “He told me that he didn’t miss the game one bit. That surprised me.”

When the wrecker’s ball began to demolish Ebbets Field, a reporter asked Robinson for his reaction. “They need those apartments that are going up in its place,” he said. “I don’t feel anything. They need. those apartments more than they need a monument to the memory of baseball. I’ve had my thrills.”

After 1956, baseball became merely ritualistic for Robinson, but for Rickey, the ritual of his life remained baseball. While the owl-faced executive could remark it was ridiculous for someone trained in law to devote himself to “something as cosmically unimportant as a game,” nonetheless, he did. Baseball was Branch Rickey’s love, passion, obsession.

He gave of his time to political causes. He devoted much effort to the civil rights movement, and in 1957 accepted an appointment as co-chairman of the President’s Committee on Government Employment Policy—a primitive precursor of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But these things were peripheral. Baseball, for Rickey, was where it had always been—the center of his life.

Now with an additional prop, a cane that complemented the bow tie, the horn-rimmed glasses, and the big cigar, he enjoyed his role as baseball’s elder statesman. With half a century of his life involved in the national pastime, he felt a responsibility to speak out on its status and direction. The announcement of the move of the Dodgers and Giants to California dismayed him. Rickey was highly critical of the franchise shifts and took some potshots at his old adversary Walter O’Malley. He argued that major-league baseball had a responsibility to keep National League baseball in New York City.

“It was a crime against a community of three million people to move the Dodgers,” Rickey charged. “Not that the move was unlawful, since people have the right to do as they please with their property. But a baseball club in any city in America is a quasi-public institution, and in Brooklyn the Dodgers were public without the ‘quasi.’ Not even a succeeding generation could forget or forgive the removal of the Dodgers to California. Oh, my, what a team they were!”

On January 28, 1958, Roy Campanella, bulwark of that team, was severely injured in an automobile accident. He had been set to move with the Dodgers to Los Angeles. The accident subjected the three-time National League Most Valuable Player to the agonies of multiple operations and rehabilitation treatments. He remains paralyzed from the waist down and is barely able to use his arms. Campy was placed in the Rusk Institute for rehabilitation treatment. In August 1958, the once-powerful slugger was given permission to receive visitors for the first time.

A stooped figure leaning on a cane entered Campanella’s room. It was early morning. The visitor had once had a deadly fear of flying in airplanes until he was cured by going up in an open-cockpit plane in the I 930s. Branch Rickey had suffered a heart attack just three weeks before. He had been told by doctors to remain in bed for three months, but when he learned that his old catcher could have visitors, he climbed aboard a plane. He wanted to be one of the first visitors.

“Well, Campy, how are you feeling?” The familiar voice was low. “It appears that the two of us have been having our troubles.”

Campanella’s eyes blinked. “Mr. Rickey, I wasn’t that good, but now that I see you, I feel just fine.” He smiled. “How are you?”

“There’s nothing much wrong with me,” Rickey responded in a stronger voice, “just a little battle with the old pump. These doctors, Campy, they can be a lot of trouble. But they do know what they are doing. You must follow their advice. Campy, tell me what they have you going through.”

Campanella went into much detail explaining the extensive and complex exercise program he was undergoing.

“Exercise like that,” Rickey said with the old conviction Campanella remembered from so many talks in the Montague Street office, “has got to help you. It’s like a bruised finger on a ballplayer. The player is told to soak it in hot water for long periods of time, but instead of giving it a half hour of soaking, he gives it only five minutes and thinks he has met his responsibility.

“Don’t do what some ballplayers do, Campy. Never give it less than what they ask. Continue to do more, and I know that when I see you the next time, I’ll bet you a quarter that you’ll be able to grab my hand instead of my having to reach out for yours.”

Campanella still remembers the visit. ‘1t made me feel wonderful,” he says. “That Branch Rickey just about determined my future. He was as close a personal friend as anyone I’ve ever had in my life. He was someone special, someone as close to me as my own father.”

The following year, there was a reunion of the Gashouse Gang in St. Louis. The twenty-fifth anniversary dinner of the 1934 team was a much more lighthearted get-together for Rickey than the one he had with Campanella. The seventy-eight-year-old Rickey praised Leo Durocher for “having the most fertile talent in the world for making a bad situation infinitely worse.” Continuing his wry commentary about the old Cardinals, he said, ‘Why, they loved the game so much, by Judas Priest, I believe those boys would have played for nothing.”

“By John Brown,” Pepper Martin cut in, “thanks to you, Mr. Rickey, we almost did!”

Rickey was not the only man protesting the National League’s abandonment of New York. William Shea, a Manhattan attorney, was appointed by Mayor Robert F. Wagner to head a committee to bring National League baseball back to New York City. Shea had first met Rickey when Shea was a young attorney working for the Brooklyn Trust Company. They had stayed in touch over the years.

“One of my first plans,” Shea recalls, “was to have Mr. Rickey bring Pittsburgh into Ebbets Field and occupy it while we were in the process of building a new stadium. That did not pan out.” Things, though, were beginning to “pan out” with the Pirates. The 1958 team finished in second place. The young talent that Rickey had signed and nurtured was maturing.

In 1959, Rickey resigned as Pirate chairman of the board. “He gave up a very fine contract with Pittsburgh,” says Shea. “He came over to work with us for expansion at a personal financial loss. He felt the need for expansion to give more players a chance to play, to make baseball more competitive.”

The gregarious New York lawyer and the sagacious former Latin instructor formed an imposing duo. The two men were together continuously from 1958 to 1961. ‘We spent much time in Washington lobbying to prevent the Senate from adopting legislation that was passed in the House that would have banned any baseball expansion except by existing leagues,” recalls Shea. “Mr. Rickey was always on the go. He had a heart condition, and he was always taking pills. He had several heart attacks, but he kept going forward all the time. I don’t know how the man was able to do so much at his age. I don’t think I ever worked harder in my life than the times I worked with him.

“Every time he went to a game,” Shea continues, “he kept his own notes. He was a doer. He loved life. He was not a cheap man, as some have charged. He was not an exponent of overpaying, but when he worked for someone, he felt he would pay employees what the value of these employees was to the owner. He was not generous to himself. He never held anyone up for any real monies. He used to get checks from Pittsburgh and stuff them into his pocket. . . . Two months later the checks were still there. He may have had three suits but not more than that. He had the same hat, the same bow tie.

“We were fighting to bring another team into New York City to replace the Dodgers and the Giants. We were turned down cold by the National League. They appointed a committee that never met. Mr. Rickey said the only thing to do was to create a third major league.”

Many baseball writers, politicians, and major-league executives were intrigued by Rickey’s ideas on the need. for a third league and its chances for success. He argued that the existing arrangement was too cumbersome, that too many teams were out of pennant contention, and that contention and competition were needed for financial success in baseball.