Jackie and Campy (23 page)

Robinson learned of Campanella’s diatribe while in St. Louis on a speaking engagement for the
NAACP
. Stating that he didn’t remember calling Campy “washed up,” Jackie clarified his position, contending that the Dodgers were right in worrying about the catcher’s condition after his hand operation. “It’s no secret,” he added, “that the club has for years been looking for a No. 2 catcher just in case Campy reaches the end of the line.” When asked to comment on Campanella’s remark that he was a “trouble-maker,” Robinson attributed the remark to jealousy, insisting that his former teammate had “always been envious of me for being the first Negro in baseball.” He also took a swipe at sportswriter Dick Young, a longtime nemesis: “It’s unfortunate that Campy let himself be suckered into this situation. But I’d like to congratulate Young for making such a sucker out of Campy.”
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Four days later Campanella responded. Citing Robinson’s undignified exit from baseball, he told the
Daily News
, “Jackie can’t hurt me. . . . He’s made quite a few cracks since retiring, but he doesn’t know everything. When it’s my turn to bow out of baseball, I certainly don’t want to go out like he did. It just wasn’t the dignified way to do it.” Campy also admitted what others had long known: that the two stars hadn’t been friendly since the early 1950s. “You can play with a guy, but not want to live with him. I always steered clear of Jackie when he was popping off in the clubhouse, and after a while, I just steered clear of him.”
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Apparently Robinson decided not to go public with any more opinions of Campanella after that. The breakup was complete.

Epilogue

Life was not kind to either Jackie Robinson or Roy Campanella after they parted ways in 1956. Both men struggled with poor health and family problems, while attempting to redefine themselves and their careers. At the same time, those struggles allowed each man to become more sympathetic to the other’s views on civil rights, enabling them to restore their friendship nearly a decade later.

After his retirement from baseball, Robinson channeled his energies into a new career as a businessman and community leader. In both capacities he became an important figure in the civil rights movement. Acting as a spokesman and fundraiser for the
NAACP
, he encouraged African Americans to become more active in business enterprises. Naturally he led by example, participating in black-owned ventures like the Freedom Bank in Harlem and the Jackie Robinson Construction Company in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. He also became an important advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. and assumed an active role in Republican Party politics in order to ensure that civil rights issues were a major consideration in that party’s platform. But Robinson’s support for presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1960 and later New York governor Nelson Rockefeller placed him at odds with the
NAACP
, which favored the Democratic Party, and reinforced the widespread impression that he was a political conservative.
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When the leadership of the civil rights movement changed during the 1960s Robinson struggled to adjust. No longer were traditional organizations like the
NAACP
and the Urban League as influential among black activists as newer groups like King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, composed of black college students. By the mid-1960s more radical men were chal
lenging King for leadership of the movement, including Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam and Huey P. Newton and Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panthers. Advocating black separatism and militancy, these groups distanced themselves from the integrated and nonviolent approach championed by King. They appealed to a younger, more assertive generation of blacks who had grown impatient with the inability of Congress and the courts to rectify race-related issues of poverty and other economic problems that were left unaddressed by simply ending segregation. They demonstrated their anger and frustration by rioting during the long hot summers of 1964–67.
2

Robinson found himself caught in the wide chasm between the nonviolent direct action he once pioneered and the growing militancy of these groups. Although he continued to head the
NAACP
’s Freedom Fund drive, he alternatively rebuked and defended the younger, more militant generation of black activists. In 1962, for example, he challenged a small group of black nationalists who were picketing a recently opened Jewish-owned restaurant. Chanting anti-Semitic slogans, the nationalists, who viewed the store as unfair competition for local black merchants, demanded that the Jewish owner relocate. Robinson condemned the group in the newspapers, stating that “black supremacy is just as bad as white supremacy” and that black people had been “fighting against this same thing all his life.”
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Similarly in 1969, when asked what he thought about black militants who advocated separatism, Robinson insisted that the militants “don’t represent the mass of American blacks.” Opposing the growing belief among urban blacks that “the whites of today should carry the burdens of their fathers and grandfathers,” he declared that the African American community must identify a “talented tenth of business leaders to uplift other, [less advantaged] blacks” and provide them with constructive employment instead of rioting and looting.
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His words not only echoed those of W. E. B. Du Bois two generations earlier but created a growing impression among younger black activists that Jackie was, as they said on the streets, an “Uncle Tom.”
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Ironically this militant generation perceived Robinson the very same way he viewed Campanella during their playing days in the 1950s. Jackie’s efforts to reconcile his differences with his estranged teammate during the 1960s may very well have been due to a newly discovered sympathy for Campy.

On the other hand, there were times when Robinson defended the young black nationalists. In September 1968, when ten Black Panthers were beaten up by a mob of off-duty Brooklyn police officers, Robinson excoriated the police as “trigger happy” and white people in general as having “their heads way down in the sand, hoping that things will pass over as long as we don’t rock the boat.” Stating that he too “could have become a Black Panther as a teenager,” Robinson insisted that the goals of the Panthers were “no different than those of other major civil rights groups: self-determination, protection of the black community, decent housing and employment, and express opposition to police abuse.”
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Robinson reinforced this message the following year, speaking before the National Conference of Christians and Jews in New York City and before a gathering of Black Panthers in Brooklyn.
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Perhaps his sympathy for their cause was due to his trying experience with his eldest son, Jackie Jr., a Vietnam veteran who became addicted to drugs and was in and out of trouble with the law after his discharge.
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Robinson blamed himself for the trouble, believing that he had neglected his son as a child, spending more time with baseball and civil rights. Through his son’s painful addiction and legal problems, he came to see the world through the eyes of a troubled young black man struggling to survive. Over a three-year period, Jackie Jr. recovered from his addiction only to die in a car accident.
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Devastated by the loss, the fifty-two-year-old Robinson, barely able to walk and blind in one eye because of diabetes, soldiered on.

During the last year of his life, Jackie returned to baseball. With the exception of his Hall of Fame induction in 1962, he had stayed away from the game after his retirement.
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But in 1972 he agreed to attend the ceremonies when the Los Angeles Dodgers officially retired his uniform No. 42 that summer and, in the fall, when Major League Baseball honored him on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first season. The latter event took place on October 15, 1972, just prior to the second game of the World Series between the Reds and the A’s at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium. Unwilling to ignore the fact that a quarter of a century had passed and there were still no African Americans in management positions, Jackie remarked that he was “extremely proud and pleased” to be honored, but that he’d be “tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look
at that third base coaching line one day and see a black face managing in baseball.”
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Just nine days later he died of a massive heart attack at his home in Stamford, Connecticut.

Campanella’s post-playing career was also marred by tragedy. His last year with the Dodgers came in 1957, their final season in Brooklyn. At thirty-six he looked forward to the Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles, but a car accident on January 28, 1958, ended his career. The crash nearly severed his spinal cord and left him paralyzed from the shoulders down. Unable to move his arms or lower body, Campanella spent the next three months strapped to a bed with a metal brace attached to his head and neck. Another six months of rehabilitation followed, during which time he learned to move around in a wheelchair and to feed himself. He remained paralyzed for the rest of his life.
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After he returned home in November 1958, Campanella was beset with family problems. His fifteen-year-old stepson, David, was arrested for burglary and other juvenile offenses. His wife, Ruthe, blamed Roy for her son’s problems, insisting that David felt the burden of “living in the shadow of a celebrity.”
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Unable to adjust to her husband’s new lifestyle, Ruthe left him in 1960. Shortly afterward Roy filed for divorce. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage three years later.
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Struggling for money, Campy was forced to sell his Glen Cove, Long Island, house at auction. He relocated to a Harlem apartment where he could be close to his liquor store, a business he had opened during his playing career. Estranged from his first wife, Bernice Ray, and their two daughters, Roy did his best to care for the three children he had with Ruth: Roy Jr., Tony, and Ruth.
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On May 5, 1964, Campy married his nurse, Roxie Doles, and his life finally took a turn for the better. The couple moved to suburban Westchester, New York, where they raised his three children and her two. He earned money through his liquor business, doing radio and television shows, and working for the Dodgers during spring training.
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It was also during this time that Campanella reconciled with Robinson.

In 1963 Jackie offered an olive branch to Roy when he asked his former teammate to be interviewed for a forthcoming book on black ballplayers’ experiences since integration. Titled
Baseball Has Done
It
, the book reflected Campy’s disillusionment with the lack of progress in civil rights, a sentiment he never would have voiced during his playing days:

Far from being an epiphany, Campanella’s newfound assertiveness was the result of the often violent backlash to the civil rights protests of the 1960s. Television images of black protestors being beaten unmercifully by southern policemen for simply riding an integrated bus across state lines and schoolchildren being fire-hosed for demonstrating against segregated public facilities made Campy realize that little had changed since his days in the Negro Leagues. He even began to speak out against the segregation that still existed in the Florida towns that hosted spring training camps, insisting, “If you play like a major leaguer, you should be permitted to live like one.”
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Campy’s conversion was also influenced by his son Roy Jr.’s more aggressive position on civil rights. An intelligent, articulate young man, Roy Campanella Jr. was attracted to Malcolm X’s emphasis on black pride, though he did not go so far as to advocate black separatism. After graduating from Harvard University, where he majored in anthropology, Roy Jr. became a successful television director and documentary film maker who focuses on issues of African American culture and interest.
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On May 16, 1964, Jackie visited his former teammate at Campy’s Harlem liquor store and handed him an autographed copy of his recently published book. Campy “greeted Robinson warmly,” and they conducted a two-hour discussion on race relations in America. During the discussion it became clear to Jackie that the two men now shared the same philosophy, namely, that there was no place for segregation, black separatism, or violence in the civil rights movement. Equal opportunity would come only through candid dialogue and active cooperation between the races. Attributing their former feud to the intrusiveness of the New York press, Robinson insisted that “Roy’s contribution to the cause can be as vital” because “what he is saying here today is an inspiration to kids all over the nation.”
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Another personal highlight of these years came in 1969 with Roy’s induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Although he was often mentioned as the best candidate for baseball’s first black manager, Campy, who possessed the knowledge, experience, and temperament for the job, never realized that dream because of his paralysis.
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In 1978 the Campanellas relocated to California, where Roy joined his former teammate and friend, Don Newcombe, in the Dodgers’ Community Service Department. That same year Campanella was named to the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s recently expanded Veterans Committee. Along with Monte Irvin, who was also on the committee, Campy made sure that several worthy Negro League players were enshrined at Cooperstown.
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In the years that followed, Campanella served as a popular speaker throughout southern California and an annual catching instruc
tor for the Dodgers during spring training. During the regular season he was the team’s biggest supporter, attending every home game, offering his encouragement to the players and disabled fans who came to meet him.
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Throughout these years Campanella wrestled with periods of depression, but he retained an optimistic attitude that was buttressed by his enduring love for baseball. “People look at me and get the feeling that if a guy in a wheelchair can have such a good time, they can’t be too bad off after all,” Campy told a sportswriter near the end of his life.
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He died of a heart attack on June 26, 1993, at his home in Woodland Hills, a suburb of Los Angeles. He was seventy-one years old.
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