Rickey and Robinson (25 page)

Willa Mae’s memories are more tender. “I can still see him in the house with the family or out with a bunch of kids playing ball in the field. I believe that your days are numbered, and when you get to a certain point you have to step aside. He had been ill, and he told me and he told others that he knew he was going. I can just picture him all the way through to his passing. I have people who stop me and say their brother, their son, should have been the one. I say involve me out. I tell them if your brother or son was going to be the one, he would have been, because Jack sure wasn’t looking for it.”

Rachel continues the work begun by her husband. Five years after his death, thirty years after he broke baseball’s color line, the Jackie Robinson Foundation was formed “to perpetuate some of Jackie’s goals, including educational, cultural, and recreational opportunities.” Rachel was its inspiration and functions as chairperson of the board of directors. The foundation is located just around the comer from the old Brooklyn Dodger office on Montague Street where Rickey and Robinson :first met.

“In remembering Jack,” Rachel says, “I tend to deemphasize him as a ballplayer and emphasize him as an informal civil rights leader. That’s the part that drops out, that people forget. My memories of him are very good, very satisfying to me.”

Perhaps the ultimate commentary on Jackie Robinson, however, comes not from an intimate but from one who has been intimately associated with the world of sports for many years:

“I’m sure that being the pioneer in baseball killed him,” says sports publicist Irving Rudd. “Black bastard, nigger, spade, coon-those were the words they called him, and there was all that time he could do nothing about it, and hehad a short fuse. I always used to think of who I would like going down a dark alley with me. I can think of a lot of great fighters—Ali, Marciano, gangsters I was raised with in Brownsville, strong men like Gil Hodges—but for sheer courage, I would pick Jackie. He didn’t back up.”

Afterword

This story appears in
It Happened in Brooklyn,
1
the oral history I wrote with my wife Myrna Katz Frommer:

MAX WECHSLER: When school was out, I sometimes went with my father in his taxi. One summer morning, we were driving in East Flatbush down Snyder Avenue when he pointed out a dark red. brick house with a high porch.

“I think Jackie Robinson lives there,” he said. He parked across the street, and we got out of the cab, stood on the sidewalk, and looked at it.

Suddenly the front door opened. A black man in a short-sleeved shirt stepped out. I didn’t believe it. Here we were on a quiet street on a summer morning. No one else was around. This man was not wearing the baggy, ice-cream-white uniform of the Brooklyn Dodgers that accentuated his blackness. He was dressed in regular clothes, coming out of a regular house in a regular Brooklyn neighborhood, a guy like anyone else, going for a newspaper and a bottle of milk.

Then, incredibly, he crossed the street and came right towards me. Seeing that unmistakable pigeon-toed walk, the rock of the shoulders and hips I had seen so many times on the baseball field, I had no doubt who it was.

“Hi Jackie, I’m one of your biggest fans,” I said self-consciously. “Do you think the Dodgers are gonna win the pennant this year?”

His handsome face looked sternly down at me. “We’ll try our best,” he said.

“Good luck,” I said.

“Thanks.” He put his big hand out, and I took it. We shook hands, and I felt the strength and firmness of his grip.

I was a nervy kid, but I didn’t ask for an autograph or think to prolong the conversation. I just watched as he walked away down the street.

At last the truth can be told. I am blowing my cover. That kid, MAX WECHSLER, was me, Harvey Frommer, and it now seems to me that morning moment on a street in East Flatbush was when the seeds for
Rickey and Robinson
were first planted.

It is gratifying to see this book, written more than twenty years ago, back in print. I have written many other books since then, but
Rickey and Robinson
remains one of my favorites. Perhaps it is because I was fortunate enough to interview such special people for this work: Rachel Robinson, Roy Campanella, Mack Robinson, Irving Rudd, Monte Irvin. Perhaps it is because this story is such a significant piece of American sports history and culture. Perhaps it is because it traces the lives of two very different people who came together on common ground to shatter baseball’s age-old color line.

Appendix