Opening Day

by Jonathan Eig

  Saw you play in Wichita, Kan an also in St. Louis about 30 days ago. An dicided I wanted to name my expected child for the first negro in league baseball. An above that a good sport an gentleman. Something our race needs as bad as they do a square deal. Little Jackie Lee was born the 8-15-47—2 pm.

  A group of students in Connecticut addressed its letter to Commissioner Chandler’s office:

  We are members of the sixth grade and we have been thinking over the Jackie Robinson case. Many of us are fans of teams in both leagues. Not all of us are Dodger fans but we still think that Jackie Robinson should play on any Major team in the Leagues. All who are Americans have equal rights as American citizens and should be able to do as others can do, even if his race is different. We all are born the same, eat the same, and sleep the same, why can’t we play the same? Why not give everyone an equal chance? Since baseball is the national pastime we think that we should not allow any mention of race to hurt its future. We are the future baseball players and fans of the U.S. and for the good of baseball we think Jackie Robinson should continue playing in the Majors.

  No doubt there were angry letters, too. Rachel Robinson recalls many. But neither she nor the Dodgers saved them. Only a handful survive. One, addressed to Rickey from a Louisiana attorney, read:

  Your decision to break big league tradition by playing a negro on the Brooklyn team is indeed deplorable. In fact, it is inconceivable that any white man would force a Negro on other white men as you have done. . . . I tell you Rickey anything the Negro touches he ruins and your club will be no exception. His presence will create dissension on the Brooklyn team that will impair its efficiency and break its morale. You have many southerners on your team who are forced to keep silent but mark you they do not like this Negro in their midst. Remember southerners have been born and bred believing in the segregation of the races and your disastrous decision will not get it out of their bones. . . . You can compel them to play but you cannot compel them to accept.

  For Robinson, each game was not just a battle but a crusade. The weight of it at times seemed too much. His teammates would watch him come into the locker room, take his seat in the back corner of the room, and prepare himself emotionally as he pulled up his long blue socks and laced his shoes. Robinson had no problem being at the center of a storm. He’d shown that in the army. But in the army he’d been able to lash out at his attackers. He did so at some personal risk, but it was an equation he’d worked out to his satisfaction. Anger fueled his success. Now, however, he was unable to express the anger, and he suffered for it.

  “I can’t take it anymore. I’m quitting,” he told his sister, Willa Mae, in a telephone conversation that came in the early part of the season. His mood darkened. He made little or no effort to find friends among his teammates. The relationships were too complicated. Later, hitting golf balls would provide him momentary relief, but not in 1947. In 1947 he had nothing to do with his anger but swallow it. He withdrew, even at times from his wife. Rachel decided it was best not to try too overtly to get him to open up. He wasn’t capable of it yet. “He was the kind of person who if he had things bothering him, he’d be unusually quiet,” she recalled. “He was not stormy and he wasn’t tearful. He wasn’t shaky. Just very quiet. You had a feeling that he was figuring it out, so just let him figure it out.” There was no use asking how he felt or what he would do if the team blamed him for their losses or if he was sent back to the minors. He had to fight through these things in silence, and Rachel had to wait for him. “I learned that about him in those early days,” she said. “Let him work that out quietly on his own.”

  Rachel told the biographer Arnold Rampersad of tension in their little apartment on MacDonough Street, especially early on. Jackie changed wet diapers, but never soiled ones. He expected peace and quiet when he read his morning newspapers, and he wanted “a loving send-off” each day when he left for the game. Rachel could see he was anxious. She heard him mumbling in his sleep, watched him twitching beneath the covers. Though they had practically no space of their own, she did all she could to make their home a haven for her husband, to help him escape. And she waited.

  In the beginning of May he ordered a new batch of bats, half an inch shorter and an ounce and a half heavier than the ones he’d started with—an R-17 instead of a G-7, in the Hillerich & Bradsby nomenclature—and he seemed to like the new lumber. He was beginning to hit the ball hard. Some ballplayers never make the adjustment to big-league pitching, where fastballs fly so fast you can hear them buzz and curveballs break at unhittable angles. They never feel any sense of control at the plate. But Robinson, whose athletic abilities had thus far never let him down, knew he was starting to get the hang of it.

  But some of the other changes taking place around him were more subtle, and not necessarily apparent to him yet. Some of his teammates were beginning to think about what he was up against. “He was under such pressure, such tension and stress,” Ralph Branca recalled years later. Some respected him for taking his lumps. They appreciated the way he kept to himself instead of trying to force himself upon the group, the way he stared out the window on the train instead of elbowing his way into card games or conversations, the way he waited for an invitation before sitting down to eat with a teammate, the way he never pretended to be one of the boys and yet never berated them for not treating him more kindly. He didn’t care if the men liked him or not, Robinson said years later, recalling his first days with the team, just so long as they respected him.

  Some of the Dodgers had expected Robinson to play ball in the Negro-league style, running the bases recklessly, hamming it up, horsing around, taking unnecessary risks for the sake of entertainment. “I wasn’t much in favor of black players if they acted like black players,” said Jack Banta, a Dodger pitcher. “Sometimes they were inclined to showboat a little.” But Banta, like most of the other Dodgers, had never played with a black man. Coming into the 1947 season, all they had were their stereotypes. Robinson was not an easy man to figure out. His face revealed little of his emotion, high or low. He didn’t say much, either. But now some of his teammates were beginning to replace their stereotypes with flesh-and-blood images.

  Reporters, too, were subtly changing their approach, dropping some of the references to race that had routinely accompanied his name during spring training and the season’s first weeks. After the stories about the hate mail, the sportswriters were more likely to mention Robinson’s color only when they deemed it relevant. Maybe they simply assumed by now everyone knew he was black, or maybe they found the racial piece of the story too complicated to deal with. Integration was a new and daunting topic for white writers at the time. In his 1947 novel Kingsblood Royal, Sinclair Lewis described a white character’s perception of black America this way: “To be a Negro was to live in a decaying shanty or in a frame tenement like a foul egg-crate . . . to sleep on unchanged bedclothes that were like funguses, and to have for a spiritual leader only a howling and lecherous swindler. . . . It was to be mysteriously unable ever to take a bath, so that you were more offensive than the animals who clean themselves.”

  Robinson preferred newspapers and magazines to books. If he read Kingsblood Royal, his wife couldn’t recall it. Nevertheless, the issues raised in the book were familiar to him. Robinson was a race man, fixated on the effects of skin pigmentation. He wanted to be given a fair chance, same as any other player, but he didn’t want to see all mention of his color dropped from the dialogue. He wanted to be perceived as a black man and a fully nuanced human being. One or the other wasn’t enough. “I happen to be a bit proud of the fact that I’m a Negro,” he said once, reflecting on the early media coverage. “When they start talking about me . . . as a Negro they are certainly not intending to flatter me, but they are patting me on the back, as far as I’m concerned.”

  After the series in Philadelphia, Robinson and the Dodgers went back to Brooklyn on May 12 for one home game before shipping out west. That day, in an 8–3 win over the B
oston Braves, Robinson flashed some of the skills that made him special. In the first inning, after reaching first on a fielder’s choice, he advanced to third on a hit by Reiser. When Walker followed with a ground ball to first base, Robinson dashed toward home and then abruptly stopped, arms flailing, cleats kicking up clouds of dirt, as he put on the brakes, hoping to distract the Braves’ infielders. It worked. The first baseman gave up the easy out at first base and turned his attention to Robinson. But Robinson had the play measured perfectly. By the time the throw came in to third, he was back on the bag. Everyone was safe. Gene Hermanski followed with a single and the Dodgers had a 2–0 lead.

  With Branca pitching beautifully, the Dodgers coasted. Along the way, Robinson singled, walked, reached base after being hit by a pitch, stole two bases, and scored another run. From the box score, at least, it looked like the sort of game he might have enjoyed.

  NINE

  TEARING UP THE PEA PATCH

  Baseball’s great legends often turn out to be fictions, but here’s one that checks out: It really was possible in the 1940s to walk down certain blocks in Brooklyn at certain times of day and hear Red Barber’s delightfully soft voice echoing from one apartment window after another, as if God were speaking with a southern accent through tinny speakers and shilling for Old Gold cigarettes over WHN-1050 on the radio dial. Maybe it wasn’t every window. Maybe there were gaps that forced pedestrians to miss a pitch or two of the action as they strolled through Bushwick, Brighton Beach, and Bensonhurst. But Barber’s voice did indeed blanket the borough, competing with the cries of infants, the churning of heavy machinery, and the clattering of elevated trains.

  The voice didn’t fit Brooklyn. It was too calm, too respectful, and, most of all, too southern. But Barber’s drawl made baseball more magical, as if the game belonged to another place and time. The heartland had crickets. Brooklyn had Red Barber.

  In 1947, hardly anyone owned a television set. Some apartment buildings banned their installation that year for fear that rooftops would become congested with the enormous antennae required to get good reception. A few bars were beginning to install TVs, and the early reports were encouraging. One bartender reported that the television set attracted a dozen extra customers during day games. With the average customer buying ten beers at ten cents a beer, he noted, the bar cleared an additional forty dollars a week. But most people who watched television in 1947 still did so through the window of their local hardware store, where the latest models were displayed. With an RCA television set priced at about $375, or roughly 10 percent of the average family’s annual income, a glimpse through the store window would have to suffice. American manufacturers produced 20 million radios in 1947 but only 178,000 television sets. “People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box,” predicted Darryl F. Zanuck, head of the 20th Century Fox film studio.

  Before Red Barber came to town, baseball games in New York were seldom heard on the radio. Other cities enjoyed regular baseball broadcasts, but not New York, where the three ball clubs each were owned by old-fashioned men who believed fans were less likely to buy tickets when they could listen to the action at home. Games could be heard on Opening Day and during the World Series, yet seldom in between. But in 1939, the Dodgers decided to break ranks and embrace the new medium. They had the least popular team in New York and needed some kind of boost. They turned to Barber, and, suddenly, the team developed a passionate following, one that included plenty of men and women who seldom had the time or money to go to the ballpark. Baseball became a core part of the borough’s identity, like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Cyclone at Coney Island.

  Walter Lanier Barber was born in 1908 in Columbus, Mississippi. While attending the University of Florida, he tried broadcasting on the campus radio station, reading a paper entitled “Certain Aspects of Bovine Obstetrics,” and thrilled to the notion that he could communicate across long distances instantly and without wires. In 1934, after four years of radio work in Gainesville, Florida, he was hired by WLW in Cincinnati to broadcast baseball for the Cincinnati Reds. He had never seen a major-league game.

  Years later, it struck no one as strange that the voice of Brooklyn baseball was so heavily southern in accent. Perhaps it was because so many of the game’s players were southerners, or simply because New York listeners had never heard any other voice describing their ballgames. Barber was first, and he was awfully good. He was a small man, thin, with wispy curls of orange hair. He tended not to mingle after hours with the players, favoring the company of his wife, Lylah. Neither did he travel with the team, because the Dodgers were not yet offering live broadcasts of their away games. Instead, Barber would sit in a studio in New York and read the play-by-play as results came in from a teletype operator at the ballpark where the team was playing. He made no attempt to hide the fact that he was miles away from the action. His listeners didn’t care. Barber could describe the comings and goings of a parking lot and make it sound interesting.

  “We’ve got a great game today,” he’d say, “right he-ah in Brooklyn.” But it was his choice of words more than his pronunciation that really tickled fans. When the Dodgers were sitting pretty, Barber had them “in the catbird seat.” When they were scoring runs in a hurry, Barber said they were “tearing up the pea patch.” When things turned sour, he would say the Dodgers had “one foot and five toes in the pickle bag.” When he saw something astonishing, he might say, “Well, I’ll be a suck-egg mule,” the notion being that there were few things more amazing than a mule that could suck down eggs. A close game was “tighter than a new pair of shoes on a rainy day.” A bobbled ball was “slicker than oiled okra.” A hard-throwing pitcher “could toss a lamb chop past a hungry wolf.”

  It was Barber’s enormous popularity that inspired Branch Rickey to confide in him early in 1945, months before he’d made up his mind to sign Robinson to a minor-league contract. Rickey wanted to know if Barber would give his support to the team’s first black player. The broadcaster sang the praises of all Dodgers, no matter how weak, how old, or how inept. His job was to make the home team sound appealing, and he had never been anything less than loyal and enthusiastic. But the boss wanted to make certain that there would be no hint of disapproval, no subtle digs, no awkward moments of silence during Barber’s play-by-play when Robinson came to bat. The men went for a late lunch one afternoon at Joe’s Restaurant, around the corner from Rickey’s office on Montague Street, and sat down at a table in the back. Rickey stabbed at a roll with his butter knife, scattering crumbs, as he told a story that he would go on to recount dozens, if not hundreds, of times in the years to come. It was the story of a college ballplayer named Charlie Thomas whom Rickey had coached at Ohio Wesleyan. Rickey described Thomas as “a fine young man, fine family, good student and my best player.” One day, he said, when he and his players were checking in to a hotel in South Bend, Indiana, the desk clerk informed Rickey that Thomas would not be welcome. Only when Rickey agreed to share a room with Thomas did the clerk relent. Later, when Rickey went to his room, he said he found Thomas, “this fine young man, sitting on the edge of a chair, crying. He was crying. He was pulling at his hands as though he could tear the very skin off. ‘It’s my skin, Mr. Rickey. . . . If I could just pull it off.’ ”

  Rickey started to stab at another roll and told Barber he’d been haunted for years by that scene and had made up his mind to do something about it. He didn’t want to see other Americans shamed the way Charlie Thomas had been. Now he knew what he had to do. He looked Barber in the eyes and said, “I’m going to bring a Negro to the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

  He dabbed some butter on his roll and took a bite.

  Barber said nothing. He offered no support and made no complaint. He simply stared. He was an open-minded man, active in his church, pleased to use his fame to help raise money for homeless families. But the taboos ingrained since childhood gripped tightly. “He had shaken me to my heels,” Barber recalled.

  Rickey had told no one but hi
s wife and children of his intention to breach baseball’s color barrier (and his wife and children all thought it a mistake, or so Rickey liked to tell it). But he wanted Barber to be on board early, or at least have time to think about it, because he recognized the broadcaster’s extraordinary ability to sway public opinion. Barber always said he had been raised to treat black people with respect and warmth, but he was also raised to believe that there was a line between the races, and the line was not to be crossed.

  “I’m going to quit,” Barber told his wife when he got home to Scarsdale that night. “I don’t think I want . . . I don’t know whether I can. . . .” Usually, his sentences flowed fast and smooth, but now he was tongue-tied. Then he repeated: “I’m going to quit.”

  His wife urged him to wait. After all, the team hadn’t hired a black player yet. There was no need to do anything rash, at least not for the moment.

  “Let’s have a martini,” she suggested.

  Time went by, and the matter was never spoken of again. “It tortured me,” he wrote years later. “I finally found myself doing something I had never really done before. I set out to do a deep self-examination. I attempted to find out who I was. This did not come easily, and it was not done lightly.” He decided he wasn’t afraid of losing his job. He loved the Dodgers, loved Ebbets Field, but there would always be another team, another ballpark, another radio station. From there, he took the next logical step, asking himself why the thought of a black ballplayer troubled him so? “What was it that had me so stirred up?”

  “Well, I said, I’m Southern. I’m trained. . . . I was a product of a civilization: that line that was always there was indelible. . . . And then—I don’t know why the thought came to my mind—I asked myself the basic question that a human being, if he is fair, ought to ask. How much control did I have over the parents I was born to? The answer was immediate: I didn’t have any. . . . Then I figured out that I didn’t have anything to be so proud of after all, this accident of the color of my skin.”