Branch Rickey (4 page)

“Did you refer to Robinson as a nigger?”

“No, sir, I never did that.”

“Why did Robinson tell you what he would do if you referred to him as a nigger?”

“I don't rightly know, sir,” the man answered.

The court-martial board did not buy that. Of course the guard called him that name. The case fell apart. The jury was out for about a half hour and Robinson was found not guilty on all charges.

Branch Rickey never changes his tale. The fire in him to fix a nation began in 1904 on the practice fields at Ohio Wesleyan University, where he first saw Charlie Thomas play baseball.

There is an away game against the University of Notre Dame at South Bend, Indiana. Rickey, as student coach, booked his team into the Oliver Hotel there. Reservations were made well in advance. The hotel was delighted. After all, these were fine Methodists coming in. Maybe they weren't Catholics, but they knew how to behave.

The catcher for Rickey's team is Charlie Thomas. His sloping shoulders and thick neck proclaim him a hitter. The big, young black hands are those of a catcher. Charlie Thomas is the first of his race ever to play at Ohio Wesleyan. This puts the school only a half-century ahead of the good Catholics of Notre Dame.

The Ohio Wesleyan players came into the hotel cheerfully, Charlie Thomas among them. Then they reached the room clerk, whom Rickey described as being ready to defend his hotel to the death rather than let this young black man inside. The clerk suggested that Thomas go to the YMCA. Instead, Rickey sent the team manager to the Y to see about lodging for the entire squad. He reported back quickly that there were no rooms. Thomas, humiliated, said he would go back to school. Rickey took his arm and told him he was staying. He asked to see the hotel manager and mesmerized the fellow, reaching an agreement that Thomas could stay in Rickey's room until a suitable black family was found to house him. No such thing was ever going to happen. Rickey took Thomas up to his room, then ordered a cot and called down to the manager, “Under no circumstances will I allow Thomas to leave.”

Thomas sat in Rickey's room and began crying. He rubbed one big hand over the other, saying, “Black skin, black skin. If I only could rub it off and make it white.”

Rickey said, “Stop it. If you can't beat this, how do you expect me to?”

 

Rickey is out of the mud and stone of Scioto County in Ohio's southland. On his mother's side, the Brown family was among the first Americans, one of eight families that sailed from Scotland to Massachusetts in 1646. The head of the Brown family, Daniel, had a grandson, George, who founded the Methodist Church in America. Rickey's great-grandfather, David Brown, seemed off to a smashing start, too. He married Sallie Hubbard, whose family were weathly landowners that included a member of President Millard Fillmore's cabinet. But David did not quite fit in. He drank anything in a bottle and fought anybody who happened to be nearby, whether in a church pew or in somebody's parlor. He mortified his wife every sundown, when his thirst arose. He slipped through her passionate lectures against the drink and came out the other side clutching a bottle, his free hand in a fist. Any mention of politics was the sure start of a brawl. He said he was a Democrat and showed his loyalty to Andrew Jackson by breaking a leg in an election-day scuffle.

David went west with a pregnant wife and a quarter to his name. They went by horse and wagon to Pittsburgh, and then aboard a raft on the Ohio River to Sciotoville. The population was somewhat over zero. They had four children before going farther into the wilderness with a baby strapped to the side of the ox wagon. His wife, Sallie, had the reins. David walked ahead, chopping brush and trees with an ax. They stayed there for a decade, raising vegetables. Sallie had great faith in Jesus as the savior of all, and spread this wherever she went.

Their granddaughter Emily married a farmer's son, Jacob Franklin Rickey. The Rickeys came out of Tioga, New York, Baptists turned Wesleyan Methodists. Frank and Emily settled in Madison Township, Ohio, and had a family, including a son, Wesley Branch Rickey, born in December 1881.

Branch and his older brother, Orla, attended a school that was a four-mile walk from home. There was a bookstore fire in nearby Portsmouth, and the father bought eleven damaged books for a hard-to-come-by $2.25. He purchased Dante's
Inferno
, and
The Story of the Bible
and the New Testament and four volumes of Washington Irving. The father worked on his sons' reading and the mother on their belief in God.

On sandlot fields of Ohio, young farm people played for their towns, Turkey Creek and Duck Run and Lucasville. They paid a dollar for a bat and a nickel for a “Nickel Rocket,” which was a baseball that wasn't worth a dime. An official National League baseball went for a hard dollar and a quarter. The face mask Branch wore cost fifty cents and yielded to any foul tip or wild pitch, almost giving him a new face. His next mask cost four dollars and was the first thing that he grabbed at the end of a game so it wouldn't be lost or stolen.

Years later, one of Rickey's granddaughters, going through the oldest of old files and clippings from
The Columbus Dispatch
and
The Cincinnati Enquirer
, noticed accounts of people remembering her grandfather playing in a big game in town. Rickey crouches and catches for Orla, a powerful pitcher for Duck Run, against Dry Run. With the bases loaded in the final inning, Branch called for Orla's big one. The pitch was big and fast and high, too high for Branch to catch. It sailed over his head, and while he ran to get it three runs raced across the plate. Branch picked up the ball, saw the game was over, and walked straight home. It was a defeat that sat down in his mind and never got up.

Fifty years on, it is a glorious afternoon at Yankee Stadium in New York, shimmering with World Series tension, and simultaneously roars come up from the stadium's three packed tiers. Pigeons carrying film circle and then fly into the sky to the newspaper plants downtown. Rickey runs the St. Louis Cardinals, and he has one of the left-handers he loved, Ernie White, up from his famous farm teams, shutting out the Yankees. Shutting out the Yankees in the World Series. Shut them out for nine innings, because in those years pitchers worked a full game. White's pitches went over nobody's head. He cut the Yankees off with curves at the knees. It caused Rickey to reminisce in the newspapers about brother Orla's pitch.

That Cardinal team of 1942 was Rickey's, from the first day in spring to the last of fall. It was Rickey's team right to the uniform shirtfront featuring a pair of redbirds perched on a black baseball bat, copied from a sketch on a napkin left at a women's luncheon. It might have been the best team baseball ever had, down to the rookie he decided to put in the outfield, a kid named Stanley Frank Musial.

 

Next the Rickey family moved from Duck Run to Lucasville, population 150, because it had schoolrooms in a building, not a shack. The father continued his obsession with his sons' reading. Rickey's regular education in Duck Run had required long hours reading at the kitchen table. Many other families did not, or could not, read or write. When Branch came to Lucasville classrooms he was so shy that others believed him to be bone stupid. He immediately began to stutter. It took months of painstaking tutoring by James Finney, an Ohio Wesleyan teacher in training, to cure it. He slowed Rickey's breathing and tongue. He also left an Ohio Wesleyan logo imprinted on Rickey's mind.

Outside the classroom, Rickey learned a different lesson. This came in the form of the electric shock he received when Jane Moulton, daughter of the owner of Lucasville's general store, left a Valentine card under his door. Until then, Jane had been the fastest runner of all the girls in school. Her interest in finish lines waned as she began walking with Rickey. The Moulton family store had a sign stating, “Frugality, industry and sobriety are simple virtues any man can cultivate.” Rickey's family motto was “Make things first, seek the Kingdom of God and make yourself an example.”

If it had been left to Rickey's upbringing, he never would have seen Charlie Thomas or even a college classroom. Rickey goes to college against his father's will. Right up to the son's last dawn at home, his father insisted that he should be helping on the farm.

Jane Moulton attended college in Oxford, Ohio, and that was enough for Rickey. He applied to Ohio Wesleyan in the nearby town of Delaware. His baseball catching and football skills were not harmful to his application. At 5:00 a.m. of a chill March morning in 1901, he had breakfast, then took a newspaper, rolled it up, tied a string around it, kissed his mother good-bye, and was off to the railroad tracks. He stood alongside the rails until he heard a train coming out of the darkness. He lit the newspaper and swung it as a torch. The Norfolk and Western train headed for the state capital, Columbus, stopped for him, and he was on his way.

Ohio Wesleyan had twelve hundred students, mostly from deeply religious Midwestern families. Tuition they charged him was five dollars per semester. For another 50 cents a week, Rickey got a room so small his toes rested against a wall when he slept. In his first day of Latin class, the professor, John Grove, asked Rickey to read from Virgil. Rickey got up, missed words, and stuttered. Grove asked which grammar book he had studied before and Rickey blurted, “Yours.” Which was true. But Branch hadn't attended high school and knew Grove's book only from study at the kitchen table. The class shrieked with laughter, which stung Rickey to tears. In his mind he ran over the timetable of trains home; he had arrived with the Norfolk and Western schedule memorized. The next one to Lucasville was 2:10 and he was going to be on it.

The professor, however, was one of those who thought he was supposed to teach. He told Rickey to show up at 7:30 each morning for special help. This turned Rickey into a grateful Latin student. He now practiced his kitchen-table study habits on library wood and beneath real lighting, with great results. To survive, he waited on tables, which put him close to food, and tended furnaces.

One winter night I am in Delaware, Ohio, at the college library, and the librarian brings out envelopes holding the details of Rickey's life at the school. In one of them is a letter that Rickey wrote to an Ohio Wesleyan administrator in 1952.

“I never did go to high school and never saw the inside of one until after I went to Delaware,” Rickey wrote. “I was a preparatory student with two years of so-called prep work to do in order to become a freshman. I carried as many as twenty-one hours in one term and never did catch up with any class until the spring term of 1904. As you know, I did the preparatory work and the four years of college work in 3⅓ years. I often felt that I did not deserve my Bachelor of Literature degree because in many respects I did not work hard enough . . . No boy could have had less money than I had in my first year in college . . . During my first term at Delaware I had one pair of pants, and only one pair of pants, and nobody saw me wear anything else. I cleaned them myself and pressed them myself, and not infrequently, and they saw me through.”

The YMCA in Delaware, Ohio, had a speakers' program set up by its part-time secretary, Branch Rickey. They brought in figures such as Jane Addams, Jacob Riis, and Booker T. Washington, who delivered a detailed report on the condition of blacks in America. He was the first man of color Rickey ever heard speaking so. Usually, the role of judging black character was white work.

 

Rickey spent the summer of 1903 with the Terre Haute team of the Central League and then stepped up to LeMars of the Iowa-South Dakota League. He was now climbing organized baseball's shaky ladder. The Dallas team of the Texas League was without a catcher and somehow Rickey contacted them. They sent a telegram telling him to show up within three days. He could get $175 a month, which back then was bank robbery money. He took bus and train, but would have run if necessary. At Dallas he caught 41 games and hit .261.

By late August he was brought up to the big-league club, the Cincinnati Reds. He was twenty-two. Rickey walked on the field in awe and whistled in the clubhouse.

His mother had made one restriction. Professional baseball was the Devil's playground, the woman believed. She saw Satan prancing in the infield. She made Branch promise that he would never be in a baseball park on a Sunday. He made that the vow of a lifetime. “People believed it was a deep religious matter, but it wasn't that at all,” his grandson Branch III says. “It was a promise to his mother. He kept it.”

On a searing August Sunday, the Cincinnati Reds dressed and took the field without their rookie catcher. Manager Joe Kelley made inquiries. “He takes Sunday off,” somebody said.

“Tell him don't come back,” Kelley said.

Rickey went to the club owner, Garry Herrmann, a Republican-machine politician with an office in City Hall. Herrmann was sympathetic from the handshake. The reason why people are in the best hands when they give their problems to a politician is that the man does favors for a living. He asked Kelley to take Rickey back. When Rickey came to the dressing room, Kelley fumed and refused to let him in. Rickey went back to Herrmann. The politician could never let Rickey go away thinking that he had failed to deliver. He gave Branch $306.50 for his prorated monthly salary. It was the most money Rickey had ever earned, and he went home excitedly showing the check.

“If we pay him, we must use him,” Herrmann told Kelley, who sighed and allowed Rickey back in the clubhouse.

Rickey remained there until the next Sunday, when he went home to church again. Kelley told the owner, “This guy is making a fool out of us.” Rickey was gone by nightfall, his contract sold to Charles Comiskey, who had just bought the Chicago White Sox. Rickey asked to have a guarantee in his contract that he could have Sundays off. When he told Comiskey that this was because of a promise to his mother, Comiskey sobbed and wrote in the Sunday clause. When his manager heard, he told Comiskey, “I know Rickey is a religious fanatic, but I didn't think you were.” The agreement soon ended.