Jackie Robinson (39 page)

Meeting the public and doing a good job were parts of an expanded sense of self, a growing sense of social responsibility. Another part of this change was the Robinsons’ decision to drop anchor, as it were, and commit themselves to a new home, in the East. The winter of 1948 marked a turning point in Jack’s life, as he and Rachel made no move to return to California as in the past. In the spring, Rachel had written to Jack in the Caribbean to ask that they stay in the East during the winter; he had agreed at once. They now owned a piece of land in Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles, where they imagined that one day they might build a home; but for the foreseeable
future, New York would be home. Accordingly, Rachel began to house-hunt. By February she had found a place, in St. Albans, Queens.

In the late 1940s, the first signs of black migration into prosperous, all-white St. Albans had touched off massive white flight. One area in particular had attracted a number of black entertainers and other celebrities, including Roy Campanella, who had purchased a home and moved there. Jack and Rachel decided to follow Campanella’s lead. The house, stucco, was old and rundown, with discolored walls and floors that needed sanding; but it sat on more than ten thousand square feet of land, with shady trees and an abundant lawn. White families were on either side, but they seemed friendly. “
They are the kind of people,” Jack wrote enthusiastically, “who, when the delivery man calls at your house and finds you out, will ask him to leave the stuff in their house until you come home.” Only later would Rachel discover that one of her nicest neighbors had been vehement in opposing blacks on the street; slowly he had changed his ways and his friendship was genuine.

At some point later that year, but certainly by the middle of the baseball season, the Robinsons moved from their Flatbush apartment to the house on 177th Street in St. Albans.

E
AGER FOR A MORE
successful season in 1949, Jack was nevertheless determined to extract a large increase in salary from Rickey. He had a figure in mind—$20,000—which he saw as a reward for his own stimulating effect on the turnstiles. But when Jack mentioned inserting an attendance clause in his new contract, Rickey went deaf. “
Mr. Rickey may have heard me,” Jack reported later that year, but “he didn’t give me a single sign of recognition. He just kept on talking about something else. I didn’t have the heart to bring it up again.” According to the Brooklyn
Eagle,
he settled for $17,500.

This was far below the league’s best. That year, Cleveland’s pitching star Bob Feller, who had led the league in wins from 1939 to 1941 and, after military service, from 1946 to 1947, would earn $65,000 (down from $82,000 in 1948, when he was the highest-paid player in baseball but also had one of his poorer years). In 1949, Lou Boudreau, the player-manager in Cleveland, reportedly would earn $75,000, following his MVP season in 1948. However, compared with other Dodgers, Jack was doing well. In 1948, for example, Jack’s teammate Ralph Branca had earned $12,500. Offered $14,000 in 1949, he refused to sign. In 1948, Pee Wee Reese’s salary, the Brooklyn
Eagle
claimed, had been $18,000; given a moderate raise (and appointed team captain, the first since Dolph Camilli in 1943), he accepted Rickey’s 1949 offer without a quibble.

Setting the matter aside, and hungry to prove himself on the field after the Dodger failure of 1948, Jack reported on March 1 to Vero Beach. The camp was Spartan in its accommodations, but he was content with this austerity; his main concern was to lose weight, harden his body, and work on every facet of his game. Quickly, his sense of urgency landed him in the middle of a controversy. Two intersquad teams, one led by Reese and the other by Bruce Edwards, were playing a routine game when suddenly the mood turned nasty. After Robinson, playing under Reese, let an easy grounder roll through his legs, a “
leather-lunged” rookie, Gale Wade, ridiculed him, as “the two teams let go verbal volleys back and forth.” When a gangling minor-league pitcher, Chris Van Cuyk, came in, Robinson lined a single to left, then hooted at Van Cuyk as he headed to first base: “You’ll be a class D busher for twenty years.” Van Cuyk began to bristle. During Jack’s next time at bat, the pitcher raked him with a high inside fastball, then sent him hopping with a pitch that brushed his knees. Robinson was livid. “If you had hit me,” he allegedly told Van Cuyk, “I would have punched you.” The bad feeling did not last long. That evening, Jack took the lead as he and Van Cuyk shook hands, a reporter wrote, “and sheepishly admitted they had lost their heads.”

It was more than that for some writers. A day or so before the incident, when asked about the coming season, Jack had told the writer Herb Goren about opposing players: “
They better be rough on me, because I’m going to be rough on them.” Goren had reported Jack’s comment accurately, but other writers had picked it up and twisted it after the Van Cuyk incident. Commissioner Chandler then summoned Robinson (accompanied by Burt Shotton) to Miami to explain himself. When Jack pointed out that the two matters were not related, and that he meant no threat by his remark to Goren, Chandler accepted his word and dropped the matter. But Jack, seething with resentment at being singled out in this way, also blamed the press for distorting both the Van Cuyk incident and his innocent words to Goren. For the first time in his Dodgers career, Jack’s relationship with the white press became ruffled.

His links to the black press were also disturbed. In his column “Sports Beat” in the
Courier,
Wendell Smith openly accused Robinson of ingratitude. “This,
it seems, is time for someone to remind Mr. Robinson,” Smith wrote, “that the press has been especially fair to him throughout his career.” Were it not for the press, Robinson would be “just another athlete insofar as the public is concerned. If it had not been for the press—the sympathetic press—Mr. Robinson would have probably still been t[r]amping around the country with Negro teams, living under what he has called ‘intolerable conditions.’ ” Smith ended on a particularly crushing note: “Mr. Robinson’s
memory, it seems, is getting shorter and shorter. That is especially true in the case of the many newspapermen who have befriended him throughout his career.”

(Perhaps Jack’s relationship with Smith had become strained after the appearance of Robinson’s autobiography,
Jackie Robinson: My Own Story,
as told to Wendell Smith, in May 1948. Of the many errors there, perhaps the most embarrassing had Jack declaring, “
My family named me John Roosevelt Robinson”; he also gave his mother’s name as “Mollie.”)

A year before, in February 1948, after Jack failed to appear at the rally in Virginia and feuded with Durocher, Sam Lacy of the Baltimore
Afro-American
had also attacked him. Lacy had reminded Jack of his friend Joe Louis’s record. In his ten years at the top of boxing, Lacy pointed out tartly, “
he has NEVER had to deny having made a statement, he has NEVER criticized the people who gave him his chance, and he has NEVER blamed someone else for anything that happened.” Lacy’s advice to Robinson was to keep his mouth shut.

Unquestionably, Jack was becoming more assertive. He had now played three years in the Dodger organization. The idea would surface later, supported by Rickey, that at this point he formally released Jack from his 1945 agreement always to turn the other cheek and avoid fights. Rachel would deny that any special release was granted or sought; Jack had simply grown in stature and felt justified in asserting himself. “
The idea that Branch Rickey had kept Jackie Robinson from exploding,” Rickey’s grandson Branch B. Rickey would say, “is nonsense. Branch Rickey was not on the field when someone spiked or hit Jackie. Jackie was not on a leash. It was Jackie Robinson who kept Jackie Robinson from exploding. He had given a pledge he believed in and he stuck by it—that’s all.” In any event, Rickey’s response to the Van Cuyk affair, including Chandler’s intervention, suggests that he now saw Robinson as his own man. “
It was a tempest in a teapot,” Rickey told the press, in his familiar rhetorical mixture of paternalism, condescension, loyalty to Jack, and a measure of insight into racism. “It’s over the hill now and should be forgotten. Jackie’s the same high-class boy he was the first year we brought him up. He’s entitled to all the rights of any other American citizen. He’s a great competitor and resents any violation of those rights. Perhaps he has lost his temper occasionally the same as any white player would do. But he’s been sorry for it afterward and has used good judgment.… We couldn’t have picked a finer boy than Robinson for our experiment of introducing a Negro into organized baseball.”

Jack himself knew where blacks stood in the league. Perhaps black ballplayers were no longer seen as freaks, he told a reporter, but “
one bad deed by one player right now can set the whole movement back, and I hope
the boys coming up will be aware of that.” (By May, Rickey had twelve blacks scattered through the Dodger system, including Robinson, Campanella, and Newcombe in the majors, Dan Bankhead and Sam Jethroe at Montreal, and Jim Pendleton at St. Paul.) Progress was coming, but slowly. By September 1, after almost three seasons of integration, only seven blacks played in the majors: three with Brooklyn, two (Paige and Doby) with Cleveland, and two (Monte Irvin and, formerly with the Browns, Henry Thompson) with the New York Giants. Nineteen blacks were queuing up in the minor leagues across the United States.

At Vero Beach, Robinson threw himself into his work. First he practiced his sliding technique, which Shotton considered limited; agreeing, Jack labored in the sawdust pit with “the Wild Horse of the Osage,” Pepper Martin. Then, in a decisive move, Jack turned himself over to George Sisler, the Hall of Fame player (with a .340 lifetime batting average) hired by his mentor, Rickey, to teach hitting. With Jack spending hours hitting off a tee, Sisler followed up hard on Durocher’s work of 1948 to teach Jack to hit to right field. “
Sisler showed me how to stop lunging,” Robinson wrote, “how to check my swing until the last fraction of a second. He showed me how to shift my feet and hit to right.” Sisler also taught him how to prepare for the pitch, always looking for a fastball, never a curve; “I’ll never stop being grateful to him.” Immediately and in the long term, the results were spectacular. In sixteen games in the “Grapefruit League,” Robinson hit .521 in 48 times at bat. “
I feel right now I could hit Warren Spahn as if I owned him,” Robinson said, reaching for his ultimate compliment. “That sure will be the big test.”

Leaving Vero Beach, the Dodgers visited Oklahoma for a few games, then spent several days playing in Jack’s native Georgia, with games in Macon, Valdosta, and Atlanta. Since January, this visit had been overshadowed by the vocal opposition of the Ku Klux Klan. Predicting trouble, Dr. Samuel Green, Grand Dragon of the Georgia Klan, vowed to invoke any and all laws that would prevent integrated baseball in Atlanta, where Brooklyn was to meet the white Atlanta Crackers on April 8, 9, and 10. But Rickey had reacted with scorn. “
The only danger from mob violence,” he predicted, “would come from people with pens in their hands.” From cranks writing letters? “No, from autograph collectors.”

Jack, too, was unintimidated. “
I will play baseball,” he declared, “where my employer, the Brooklyn Dodgers, want me to play.” However, as the Georgia stage drew near, he felt a mixture of fear and loathing; he admitted that week that “I just hated the thought of putting foot on Georgia soil.” But as he stepped off the plane in Macon, two white girls sweetly approached and in a honeyed drawl begged for his autograph; “
I decided then that things weren’t going to be so bad after all.” Still, a volley of boos as he first stepped
up to the plate chilled Robinson: “I was really paralyzed when I went up there.” Frozen, he let two fat pitches go, then hit the third for a single. “After that, it was all right.” In seventeen times at bat, he had seven hits, and stole home once; and the happy crowds, among the largest ever seen at Georgia ballparks, fully justified Rickey’s confidence. Most had come to see Robinson. In contrast to him, Campanella seemed somehow to excite no special interest on the part of whites—or blacks—despite his brown skin and great talent. “Robinson,
on the other hand,” according to a writer, “was the center of every eye every minute he was on the field.”

Confident about every aspect of his game, Jack opened the 1949 season on April 19, against the Giants. His confidence seemed well placed that day; he hit a home run and two singles. Then he sank into a trance at the plate, as the team itself struggled. With the splendid tandem of Reese and Robinson at shortstop and second, the reliable Gil Hodges at first, and the incomparable Billy Cox at third, the Dodger infield was perhaps the best in baseball; Carl Furillo, Duke Snider, and Gene Hermanski anchored a solid outfield; many people already called Campanella the best catcher in baseball. But the pitching was something else. Rex Barney, projected as the ace of the staff after an excellent close to 1948, was sometimes overpowering, sometimes wild. As quick as Barney, Ralph Branca, who had won twenty-one games for the Dodgers in 1947, when he was twenty-one, started well but then weakened. The devious Preacher Roe had not returned to the form that had made him the top strikeout pitcher in the National League with the Pirates in 1945. Left-handed Joe Hatten, a dominant pitcher in 1947, was on the wane.

At first, Jack, too, seemed a shadow of himself; but although after thirteen games he was hitting around .200 (Campanella led the league with .463), he was confident enough to joke about his travails. “
The Dodgers will have a great club,” he predicted, “the day that Robinson joins them.” At last, a month into the season, Robinson showed up. In a six-game span, he had ten hits in twenty-seven trips to the plate. Before the end of May he was hitting .311, with four home runs, twenty-eight runs batted in, and six stolen bases. Even against Boston, with their aces Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain, who had befuddled Jack into a dismal .159 average in 1948, he was a terror. In one series he had six hits in twelve tries, including a two-run homer against his nemesis, the left-hander Spahn.