Read The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World Online

Authors: Roger Kahn

Tags: #SPORTS & RECREATION/Baseball/Essays & Writings

The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (4 page)

BOOK: The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World
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“Red Smith . . .” I began.

“He didn’t go to Dodger games,” Snider said. “You were there. He wasn’t with you.”

“Jimmy Cannon wrote that Jackie Robinson was the loneliest man he ever saw in sport.”

Snider was wearing eyeglasses. He, who could see a baseball flicking a bat 350 feet away, see it and react in microseconds, was wearing steel-rimmed spectacles.

“I liked Jimmy,” Snider said. “And I liked Jackie. I learned so much from Jack . . .”

“Such as?”

“And I hope he learned a bit from me.”

“Such as?”

“How did Cannon know that Jack was lonely? Did Jack wear his loneliness on the outside?”

Duke lost twenty-five pounds after the coronary bypass. He wears a blue baseball cap marked “Cooperstown” and, with just a little imagination, I see Duke playing ball tomorrow, adding to his 407 home runs. But on this California morning, Snider is sixty-five, beyond ball playing and approaching wisdom. Two presidents, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, have sought his autograph. That thrills Snider, but also leads him to wonder about fame.

“Playing in Brooklyn once or twice I didn’t go down to first as hard as I should have. I started hard and then pulled up. Jackie called me aside, just the two of us. This wasn’t black and white. This was two ballplayers.

“‘Duke,’ Jack said. ‘Home to first base. That’s ninety feet. Not seventy-five . . . ’

“I used to watch Robinson get into uniform. Jack could joke and kid and talk about the racetrack. But as he pulled on the Brooklyn shirt and the blue Brooklyn stirrups, and the Brooklyn pants and the blue Brooklyn cap, he just got more and more serious. He was putting on his game face. Jack had a helluva game face. Take no prisoners.

“How did Jimmy Cannon know what he was seeing? A lonely athlete or the best game face in the world?”

* * *

Robinson played for the Dodger farm team at Montreal in 1946. “The beanballs kept coming and coming,” says Homer Elliott “Dixie” Howell, a Kentuckian who caught for Montreal that season. “The pitchers kept throwing fastballs at Robinson’s head, trying to get the black guy out of baseball forever, maybe clear out of this world. It was about the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”

“I was at Montreal for a while in ‘46,” says George “Shotgun” Shuba, who later pinch hit a home run in the 1953 World Series. “It was something the way the other players went at Robinson with their spikes. Looking back, I’m amazed that he wasn’t maimed.”

You did not learn such things from the press at that time. “It probably isn’t fair to say that the sportswriters and the newspaper editors then were downright bigoted against Robinson,” Al Parsley, an excellent Montreal newspaperman, once said. “Let me put it this way. When it came to Jackie Robinson, they were belligerently neutral.”

Robinson played his first game for Montreal at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City on April 18, 1946. He hit a home run, went four for five, and stole two bases. Beat writers, men regularly assigned to the Montreal Royals and the Jersey City Giants, covered the game. So did three reporters from the black press, papers such as the
Baltimore Afro-American
. None of the major New York newspapers thought to send a man twenty miles to note Jackie Robinson’s spectacular debut. The first appearance by a black in organized baseball since 1891 was overlooked, with belligerent neutrality. Montreal defeated Jersey City, 14 to 1.

Robinson batted .349 that year, stole forty bases, and led the International League in scoring runs. After one triumphant late-season ballgame in Canada, a swarm of white fans pressed toward Robinson on the street outside Montreal Stadium. Unnerved, Robinson began to run. The crowd ran after him. Before outdistancing his pursuers, Robinson was weeping.

“These people,” he said years later, “wanted to pat me on the back. There was no menace in them. When I was running, nI started to think, here I am a black man and these people are running after me, not to lynch me. These white people are running after me to shake my hand. When I thought that, how wonderful that was, I started to cry.”

Such episodes went unreported at the time.

To judge by the papers in 1947, Leo the Lip was the biggest news story in all sport. While Judge Dockweiler was considering whether to charge Laraine Day Durocher with bigamy, Durocher telephoned the judge in chambers. “Your Honor,” said the Lip to the judge, “the least you can do is give me and my wife an opportunity to come to your office [
sic
] and explain.”

Dockweiler acceded and a few hours later the judge found himself being treated like an incompetent umpire. “The position of the court,” Dockweiler said, “is that by marrying before Miss Day’s divorce was final, just the act of getting married constitutes adultery, whatever else you people did or did not do.”

“Lemme ask you somethin’,” Durocher said. “Would you be makin’ this damn fuss if our names were Sarah Zilch and Joe Blow?”

“Obviously not. I’m not a watchdog. The court cannot watch everyone. But there’s one thing I can do. I can make an example of you two.”

“Oooh,” Durocher said, “you condone what you say is adultery in other people, but you’re not gonna condone it in us. Maybe the only thing you’re interested in, Judge, is publicity for yourself.”

“My concern,” Dockweiler said, “is the dignity of my court and you people have made my court look very undignified.”

Durocher began to shout. Then he and Laraine stalked out of the chambers to a crush of waiting reporters and a blur of photographers. “That judge,” Durocher told the assemblage, “is nothing more than a pious, Bible-reading hypocrite.” Then Leo fled California.

Within baseball, charges against Durocher had been accumulating for some time. He was playing high-stakes card games with ballplayers, and the games were rigged. He was cleaning out his own team, taking serious money from farm boys. In Hollywood he ran with George Raft, possibly the worst actor ever to sustain a career as a leading man. Raft was said to be close to mobsters Owney Madden and Bugsy Siegel, and it was a mobster, specifically Arnold Rothstein, who rigged the 1919 World Series. Rumor — and there was apparently no evidence to back it up — cried that Durocher deliberately mishandled Dodger pitching in 1946 and handed the pennant to the Cardinals in a gambling coup.

Durocher told me in 1990 that the rumor was outrageous. No one ever wanted to win more than he did. But Durocher loved to play cards, shoot craps, make bets, and run up debts, and he was at the very least careless in choosing associates. That was all the pulp that the rumor mills needed.

In two hundred newspapers, Westbrook Pegler, the famous right-wing columnist, described Durocher as “a moral delinquent.” Against this background, Durocher announced to the world that Judge George Dockweiler was a Bible-reading hypocrite.

Durocher had been raised in a devoutly Roman Catholic neighborhood in West Springfield, Massachusetts. His mother, Clara Provost, was born near Montreal. Hard as it is to believe, Durocher the child wore a surplice and served as an altar boy with his oldest brother, Clarence.

By 1947 Durocher, then forty-two, was expanding the definition of lapsed Catholicism. He had been divorced twice. He flouted the dogmas of his youth with swaggering, practically public fornication. He had lost the right to receive communion and have his confession heard. As he put it, he didn’t give a damn. Princes of the Church were not amused.

A popular promotion throughout the major leagues brought youngsters into ballparks free on slow afternoons. Small boys admitted without charge may mature into ticket-buying adults. The Brooklyn version was a heavily promoted venture called the Knothole Gang, from the distant days when children watched ballgames free through the knotholes of wooden outfield fences. The leading single participant in the Dodger Knothole Gang was the Brooklyn Catholic Youth Organization, directed by a zealous priest named Vincent J. Powell and supervised by Monsignor Edward Lodge Curran.

Father Powell gained an audience with Branch Rickey and said that Durocher was a bad example for Catholic youngsters, and indeed for youngsters of all faiths.

“Doesn’t your church,” Rickey said, “still dispense mercy and forgiveness?”

Vincent Powell had not traveled to the Dodger office at 215 Montague Street near Brooklyn Heights to discuss comparative religion with a Methodist. If Durocher remained as manager of the Dodgers, the priest said, he would have no choice but to withdraw the Catholic Youth Organization from the Knothole Gang. He stopped barely short of threatening a Catholic boycott of the Dodgers.

Another matter was dominating Rickey’s thoughts. The integration of baseball. When the young priest left, Rickey summoned the Dodger lawyer, a Roman Catholic, to deal with what he assumed to be a single rigid cleric. The club lawyer, stout, bespectacled, cigar-smoking — caricature of a Tammany Hall sachem — was named Walter Francis O’Malley.

Walter O’Malley was a political creature, and activity in the Catholic Church, as in the Democratic party, was part of his public presentation of himself Actually he was not prominent in either. Outside of baseball O’Malley was simply a collection lawyer for a bank.

O’Malley spoke to Father Powell in Durocher’s behalf but had no more success than Rickey. On March 1, 1947, Powell issued an announcement: “The Brooklyn Catholic Youth Organization is withdrawing from the Dodgers’ Knothole Club.” Leo Durocher “is undermining the moral training of Brooklyn’s Roman Catholic Youth. The C.Y.O. cannot continue to have our youngsters associated with a man who represents an example in complete contradiction to our moral teachings.”

It may seem surprising to have Walter O’Malley, the Big Oom, the most overpowering baseball executive in history, enter the story losing his first case.

“It doesn’t surprise me,” said William Shea, the late Manhattan lawyer and power broker for whom the Mets’ ballpark would be named. “Walter was one lousy lawyer.”

We were walking toward Gage and Tollner’s, a gaslight restaurant in downtown Brooklyn, on a spring evening after a meeting at the Brooklyn Historical Society.

“How can you say that, Bill? O’Malley made more money out of baseball than anyone in history.”

“That’s right,” Shea said, “but he was one lousy lawyer. O’Malley was the most brilliant businessman I’ve ever met, but we were talking law here, weren’t we?

“Of course he lost when he tried to plead Durocher’s case to that priest. He wasn’t
trying
to lose to embarrass Rickey. He just lost.

“I wouldn’t have let O’Malley plead a parking ticket for me.”

We move, in our time warp, back to the approximate present, at La Jolla, California, where Emil J. “Buzzie” Bavasi, a man who kept the secrets, has retired to a towering hill. From his living room, Bavasi watches migrating whales stir the surface of the metallic blue Pacific Ocean. “Of course I’m comfortable,” Bavasi says in his affluence. “Always have been. But I worked in baseball for forty-six years and now that it’s over I don’t get a pension. Not a dime. Did you ever hear of anybody else in baseball forty-six years without a pension? Assistant trainers get pensions. Not me.”

Bavasi is bitching without malice, comfortable bitching to someone he first befriended in 1952. “I’m gonna tell you something nobody knows,” Bavasi says. He is heavier than he should be — thirty-five pounds too heavy, he complains — but his eyes flicker with youthful amusement. “You’ve gotta get it right. Well, maybe you won’t, but you gotta try. Agreed? You know Ford Frick brought me into baseball, in the Brooklyn organization, right after the war. So I was there, I was working there, when the idea to integrate baseball hatched.

“This is what
really
happened. For damn near half a century, Branch Rickey has gotten all the credit and that isn’t right. Rickey owned a quarter of the Dodgers. Twenty-five percent. The other partners were John Smith, who owned Pfizer Chemical; Jim Mulvey, a power at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and our buddy Walter O’Malley.

“There was no way we [the Dodgers] were going to hire a black player without all four partners agreeing. We knew it would be something like a revolution. You had to have the four partners standing together, standing tall. And they did. Give them credit. Give all of them credit, not just Rickey.

“Now, we’d been scouting numbers of black players. There was never a plan to integrate the major leagues with more than one, but to find the right one we scouted all over the old colored leagues.

“I remember the meeting. Lem Jones. Fresco Thompson. A lot of solid baseball people. The scouts agreed that the one best prospect in colored ball was Don Newcombe. Six feet four. Two hundred twenty pounds. A good hitter. Intelligent. And, of course, just an overpowering right-handed pitcher.

“Rickey went with the scouts. He hadn’t seen any of the prospects personally. Practically speaking, at that time, the president of the Dodgers could not go to a Negro League game himself.

“He was accepting the scouts’ recommendation until he got to the entry for Newcombe’s age. Newk was only nineteen. Too young for what he’d have to take, Rickey reasoned. No nineteen-year-old could survive the racist garbage.

“That’s why we integrated the major leagues with Jackie Robinson. He was in his middle twenties. But from a strict baseball viewpoint, Jackie was our second choice.”*

Rickey had been spending many days with a variety of clerical people. He intended to put Robinson on the Dodger roster by Opening Day 1947. That would attract black fans to Ebbets Field and Rickey was concerned about their behavior. He sought out ministers from Brooklyn’s black churches and told them individually what he thought. “Not only will Jackie Robinson, a lone colored man, be on trial next season. So will the entire black community. I want to urge you to impress that on your parishioners. We welcome colored fans, we surely do, but, please, no drinking in my ballpark, no rowdy behavior, no switchblades. If the colored fans act up, it will work to the disadvantage of them and to my team and to my colored ballplayer.” Rickey spoke to seventeen black ministers. Every one agreed to spread his message from the pulpit.

BOOK: The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World
11.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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