The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (5 page)

In 1946 Robinson had trained with the Montreal Royals in Florida. One day in Daytona Beach an armed sheriff walked on the field during an exhibition game. “Down here,” he said, “we don’t have nigras mixing with whites. Not marrying with whites. Not playing ball with whites. Now, nigra, git!” Robinson had to leave the game.

Rather than train his athletes in Florida again, Rickey moved both his Montreal and Brooklyn players to Havana for the spring of 1947. The racial climate of Cuba was less charged. He put the Dodgers and the New York sportswriters into the Hotel Nacional, which in those pre-Castro days was enlivened by roulette wheels, dice tables, and prostitutes from several continents. No ballplayer or journalist protested.

White Montreal players were quartered in cadet barracks at the Havana Military Academy. Campanella and Newcombe had been promoted to the Montreal roster. Along with Robinson, they were sequestered in a drab hotel fifteen miles from the Royals’ practice field. Robinson’s anger flared. “I thought we left Florida so we could get away from Jim Crow. What the hell is this, sticking us all out here, segregating us in the middle of a colored country, Cuba?”

Neither the Cuban government of Fulgencio Batista nor the Havana hotels demanded segregation. The idea of segregation inside Cuba sprang directly from Branch Rickey. He was concerned that fights might break out between the black players and the white players if the integrated Montreal squad was billeted together. Someone explained that to Robinson.

“I don’t like it,” Robinson said. “I don’t like it at all. But I’ll go along with Mr. Rickey’s judgment. He’s been right so far.”

Exported segregation was not Branch Rickey’s only curious idea. Another simply seems ingenuous. Rickey believed that Dodger players, seeing how gifted Robinson was, would clamor, petition, insist, demand that he move Robinson to the big squad. “Ballplayers love money,” Rickey told several votaries. “They love World Series checks. When they see how good this colored boy is, when they realize he can get them into the World Series, they’ll force me to make him a Dodger. After the players do that, one problem — Robinson’s acceptance by his fellows — will solve itself “

During the seven exhibition games between the Montreal Royals and the Brooklyn Dodgers — most played on a giddy tour through the Canal Zone — Robinson stole seven bases. He batted .625.

Sartre defined bigotry as passion; and passion is, of course, irrational. That is its nature, like lust and avarice. The core of veteran Dodger players was not roused by Jackie Robinson’s success. The veteran core felt passionate outrage. Bigoted ballplayers would hate Jackie Robinson even if he batted 1.000, which he damn near did. “How dare a colored fella be that good!”

In Panama the Dodgers were billeted briefly in an army barracks at Fort Gulick. There Clyde Sukeforth, called Sukey, a Maine man, went to Durocher with disturbing news. Sukeforth had been the primary scout assigned to watch Robinson in the Negro American League. Now, Sukey told Durocher, he had found out about a petition. A simple petition, really. The signers swore that they would never play on the same team as Jackie Robinson.

Fred “Dixie” Walker, the right fielder who was so popular that Manhattan sportswriters, making fun of Brooklyn speech, called him “the Pee-pul’s Cherce,” prepared the document. A native of Villa Rica, Georgia, who lived in Birmingham, Walker recently had led the National League in batting. Now thirty-six years old, he was the leader of the team. Walker did not glower in solitude. Hugh Casey of Atlanta, the best relief pitcher in baseball, supported the petition. So did a character named Bobby Bragan, from Birmingham, a third-string catcher but an influence because of his loud and caustic manner.

Confederates started the petition. Union forces did not lack for representation. Harry “Cookie” Lavagetto, the third baseman from Oakland who was almost as popular in Brooklyn as Dixie Walker, hurried to sign. Others who also signed included the kid center fielder Carl Furillo of Reading, Pennsylvania, and a fine second baseman out of Philadelphia, Eddie Stanky.

Harold “Pee Wee” Reese, of Louisville, underwent a crisis. He had grown up in a segregated community. Indeed, he remembered his father, a detective for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, taking him to a tree with strong, low branches. “This is the hanging tree,” the father said. “When a nigger gets out of line, we hang him here.”

In a quiet, non-evangelical way, Pee Wee Reese was a Christian. Now, he wondered, as a Christian, how could he deny Robinson the right to inherit a small portion of the earth? He could not and he would not. Reese was not comfortable opening his heart to Dixie Walker. Instead he said, “Look, Dix. This thing might rebound. I can’t take the chance of signing it. I just got out of the navy. I got no money. I have a wife and baby to support. Skip me, Dixie.”*

Although a few other Dodgers declined to sign, Reese’s statement was as close as any ballplayer came to challenging the preeminent establishment racists, Walker
^†
and Casey.

Leo Durocher was approaching what was probably the finest hour of his life. He could not sleep on the cot in the barracks at Fort Gulick in the Canal Zone. At one o’clock in the morning, Durocher decided that there was no reason why he should sleep. No reason at all. The petition was going to rip apart the ballclub.
Get the hell up!
In pajamas, Durocher roused his coaches and told them to bring all the players into a big empty kitchen behind an army mess.

The team assembled in night clothing and underwear. “Boys,” Durocher began, in the raspy, brassy voice that rattled spinal disks. “I hear some of you don’t want to play with Robinson. Some of you have drawn up a petition.”

The players sat on chopping blocks. They leaned against stoves.

“Well, boys, you know what you can use that petition for.

“Yeah, you know.

“You’re not that fucking dumb.

“Take the petition and, you know, wipe your ass.”

The Brooklyn Dodgers suddenly were awake.

“I’m the manager and I’m paid to win and I’d play an elephant if he could win for me and this fellow Robinson is no elephant. You can’t throw him out on the bases and you can’t get him out at the plate. This fellow is a great player. He’s gonna win pennants. He’s gonna put money in your pockets and mine.

“And here’s something else. He’s only the first, boys, only the first! There’s many more colored ballplayers coming right behind him and they’re hungry, boys. They’re scratching and diving.

“Unless you wake up, these colored ballplayers are gonna run you right out of the park.

“I don’t want to see your petition. I don’t want to hear anything about it. Fuck your petition.

“The meeting is over. Go back to bed.”

A few days later, the precise March date in 1947 is unknown, Frank Murphy of Michigan, an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, telephoned Albert Benjamin “Happy” Chandler, the commissioner of baseball. Murphy left no record of the conversation. He died in 1949, after nine years on the bench. Chandler, who died in 1991 at age ninety-two, offered a brief account. “Murphy was an honorable and honored man,” Chandler told the sports journalist John Underwood. Chandler reported this conversation:

Murphy was a pro-labor Democratic senator until President Roosevelt appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1940, moving toward a liberal, some said New Deal, Court. On the bench Murphy wrote few interesting opinions but he did assume a position newspapermen described as “the leading lay Catholic in the United States.” When Murphy spoke to Chandler, he brought to his words the full authority of a militant Church.

Unless Durocher were punished severely, twenty million Catholic children would be forbidden to go to ballgames during 1947. After Frank Murphy’s phone call, Happy Chandler had one thing he had to do. Find an excuse to throw Durocher out of baseball.

Morals? Perhaps. Business? Certainly. The business of the commissioner of baseball is business.

Articles, chapters, entire books have been written about Chandler v. Durocher, 1947. (Chandler’s own contribution is a book entitled
Heroes, Plain Folks and Skunks
.) The focus centers on specific episodes of that spring, which is naive. After the warning from the Catholic Church, Chandler was going to throw Durocher out of baseball. If the worst infraction Chandler found was jaywalking, so be it. Durocher was gone.

Chandler, himself a former senator, was country-slick. He knew that if he gave Durocher a chance, just a little time, Leo would walk into trouble, jaywalk into trouble along a road that now led nowhere.

Durocher lent his name to a column in the
Brooklyn Eagle
written by a smallish, rabbit-toothed newspaperman, Harold Parrott. “Shoulda been Harold Rabbitt,” everybody said. Parrott liked to whisper, giving what he said a suggestion of confidentiality and importance.*

The
Eagle
column was called “Durocher Says.” Durocher claimed that he had nothing to do with writing the material and “I didn’t always read it either.”

Larry MacPhail may or may not have asked Durocher to leave Brooklyn and manage the Yankees as the Era began. Durocher claims that MacPhail made the offer in 1946 and he turned it down. MacPhail did hire a gabby little coach, Charlie Dressen, who had been Durocher’s chief assistant. (As a Yankee, Dressen antagonized Joe DiMaggio with record speed.)

Durocher stayed in Brooklyn for 1947, but MacPhail had “stolen” a Dodger coach. Under the heading “Durocher Says,” Harold Parrott wrote:

This is a declaration of war. I want to beat the Yankees because of MacPhail and Dressen. MacPhail tried to drive a wedge between myself and all these things I hold dear. When MacPhail found I couldn’t be induced to manage the Yankees . . . he resolved to knock me and make life as hard as possible for me. . . . Surely people recognize it is the same old MacPhail.

“Just a little friendly controversy,” Durocher maintained later. “Just stirring some stuff up to sell some tickets.”

MacPhail disagreed. He wrote Commissioner Chandler in rage. “The New York Yankees request a hearing to determine responsibility for these statements.”

Then, just before a Dodger-Yankee exhibition game in Havana, an odd episode occurred. Larry MacPhail ordered his publicity man, Arthur E. “Red” Patterson, to leave tickets for a pair of gamblers, Max “Memphis” Engleberg, a bookmaker, and Connie Immerman, a heavy roller who owned the Cotton Club in New York. The two had been visiting the casino at the Hotel Nacional and had met the notorious mobster Lucky Luciano for purposes unknown.

“Don’t you know those guys?” Dick Young of the
Daily News
asked Durocher in the Dodger dugout. He pointed to Engleberg and Immerman.

“Damn right,” Durocher said, “but if I go near them, I’m dead. Where does MacPhail come off flaunting his company with gamblers right in the players’ faces? They’re sitting in his fucking box. If I even spoke to either one of them, MacPhail’s guests, Chandler would have
me
fucking barred.”

Young, a merciless reporter, printed a laundered version of Durocher’s comment.

Early in April, Chandler summoned Branch Rickey to his home in Versailles, Kentucky. As commissioner, Chandler maintained an office in Carew Tower, an early Cincinnati skyscraper. He liked to point across the brown Ohio River toward the Kentucky hills beyond. “God’s Country,” Chandler said.

This meeting was too important for the office. Too private. Chandler led Rickey into his Kentucky study, paneled in walnut. On the desk sat signed photographs from Roosevelt, Churchill, David Ben-Gurion.

Rickey believed that the meeting was to consider integration of the major leagues, now less than a month away. He came prepared to discuss his plans for Robinson and to ask for Chandler’s support. But integration was not on the agenda.

“Branch,” Chandler began, “I’m going to have to sit [suspend] your manager.”

“You can’t do that,” Rickey said.

“I have no choice.”

On April 9, Chandler announced that Durocher was suspended for the balance of 1947 “for [unspecified] conduct detrimental to baseball.”

The Brooklyn ballclub was fined $2,000.

The Yankee ballclub was fined $2,000.

Harold Parrott was fined $500.

By order of the commissioner, all parties were forbidden to discuss crimes, real or alleged, and punishment.

Durocher had been driven out of baseball. He looked at reporters outside a Manhattan hotel suite and told them he had only one thing to say: “Now is the time a man needs a woman.” Then he led Laraine Day into the suite. The couple remained within for forty-eight hours.

On April 11, the Catholic Youth Organization rejoined the Dodger Knothole Gang.

Chandler had kept his promise to Frank Murphy. The Church forgave Baseball for having sinned.

On April 9, a press release announced that Jackie Robinson was being added to the Dodger roster. He would play first base, a new position. But with Durocher exiled, who would lead the team?

Rickey pleaded with the deposed Yankee manager Joe McCarthy to take over. McCarthy declined. Casey Stengel, managing the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League, said he hadn’t been approached and wasn’t really interested. He liked California. Of course, he did have some nice Brooklyn memories. Stengel was never asked.

Clyde Sukeforth ran the Dodgers on Opening Day. Robinson went hitless. The Dodgers defeated the Braves. Then Rickey brought in an old boy from Ohio whom Rickey had known for forty years. Burton Edwin “Barney” Shotton would manage from the dugout in civilian clothes. At sixty-two, Shotton said he was too old to put on a uniform.

The Dodgers started well. Robinson seemed quiet, poised, swift. The Yankees were playing good ball. The Giants looked improved. The weather was cold, but ahead lay a summer of promise.