Opening Day

by Jonathan Eig

  Mike Royko, who would become Chicago’s best-known newspaper columnist, was fourteen years old at the time. He was half Polish, half Ukrainian, and 100 percent Cubs fan. On the morning of the game, he and a buddy walked five or six miles to the ballpark to see what all the fuss over Robinson was about. Years later, Royko remembered it this way:

  As big as it was, the crowd was orderly. Almost unnaturally so. People didn’t jostle each other.

  The whites tried to look as if nothing unusual was happening, while the blacks tried to look casual and dignified. So everybody looked slightly ill at ease.

  For most, it was probably the first time they had been that close to each other in such great numbers.

  We managed to get in, scramble up a ramp, and find a place to stand behind the last row of grandstand seats. Then they shut the gates. No place remained to stand.

  Robinson came up in the first inning. I remember the sound. It wasn’t the shrill, teenage cry you now hear, or an excited gut roar. They applauded, long, rolling applause. A tall, middle-aged black man stood next to me, a smile of almost painful joy on his face, beating his palms together so hard they must have hurt.

  When Robinson stepped into the batter’s box, it was as if someone had flicked a switch. The place went silent.

  He swung at the first pitch and they erupted as if he had knocked it over the wall. But it was only a high foul that dropped into the box seats. I remember thinking it was strange that a foul could make that many people happy. When he struck out, the low moan was genuine.

  I’ve forgotten most of the details of the game, other than that the Dodgers won and Robinson didn’t get a hit or do anything special, although he was cheered on every swing and every routine play.

  He was right, Robinson didn’t do anything special. In the first inning, he struck out on a big curve by Johnny Schmitz. The Chicago Daily News noted that Robinson “trudged back to the dugout, just like any white gent, to the jeers of a partisan Cub crowd.” He went hitless in three more tries, snapping a fourteen-game hitting streak. Though he dropped a routine throw at first base, Robinson and the Dodgers still managed to win the game, 4–2. Afterward, thousands of black fans waited outside the clubhouse door and climbed all over the team bus, trying to get one last glimpse at their hero.

  Shotton thought that Robinson, despite some recent success, was still too tentative at the plate. He talked to him in the clubhouse about loosening up, relaxing, about taking a more powerful swing, especially when he was ahead in the count. He wanted him to take the same aggressive approach at the plate as he did on the bases.

  The Dodgers were tied for third place, with a 14–12 record. Shotton was desperate for some offense. With Walker slumping, Reese swinging feebly, and Stanky trying to get by on nothing but a sneer and hard slides, the team wasn’t scoring runs. And if the hitting was weak, the pitching was worse. Only Ralph Branca was throwing well with any consistency. “The current Brook staff has about as much depth as a shot of whiskey in a clip joint—and half the potency,” wrote Dick Young in the Daily News. Some of the writers blamed the manager, saying he was taking it all too calmly. Durocher had used fear tactics to get more from his modestly talented players, but Shotton was content to let the boys work things out on their own. He was such an unimposing presence that many fans outside Brooklyn didn’t know his name. In Chicago, a radio station offered to give $375 to anyone who could answer the question, “Who is Burt Shotton?” The prize went unclaimed.

  • • •

  Somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis, Robinson and Smith got word that they might not be welcome at the Chase Hotel, where the rest of the Dodgers planned to stay. They were hardly surprised. Smith knew when he signed up for the escort job that he would often be called on to make contingency plans. So when the team’s train snorted to a stop at Union Station, Robinson and Smith peeled away from the rest of the Dodger entourage.

  They spent the night at the home of one of Robinson’s old army pals, Joe Neal, who ran a community center for some of the city’s poor and working-class children. The next morning, heavy rains drenched St. Louis. There would be no baseball. Over at the Chase Hotel, players slept late. Once they were up and informed of the rainout, they broke into groups based on mutual interests. Groups of card players, movie-goers, drinkers, and skirt chasers each went separate ways. As for Robinson, recalled Gene Hermanski, no one gave him much thought. “We didn’t see much of him on the road.”

  At some point that day, May 20, Robinson checked into the Deluxe Hotel, where the manager of the hotel turned over the keys to his own Cadillac and told Robinson to use it as much as he liked. Almost every black celebrity stayed at the Deluxe when visiting St. Louis, and there was a pretty fair chance they also rode in a Deluxe Cab, bought records at the Deluxe Music Shop, and ate at the Deluxe Café, the Deluxe Chicken Shack, or the Deluxe Barbecue Shack. Many of the Deluxe operations were in the process of renovation or expansion in the years just after the war, its proprietors convinced that black consumers were on the verge of unprecedented economic good fortune.

  The skies over eastern Missouri cleared on the morning of May 21, and Robinson went back to work. His first game of the season at Sportsman’s Park came only twelve days after news of the Cardinals’ strike threat had broken in the New York papers, but by now the writers barely mentioned it. More than sixteen thousand fans came out to see the game—about six thousand of them black—giving the Cardinals their biggest weekday crowd of the season. In the top of the first inning, Robinson showed patience, working a walk from Harry “The Cat” Brecheen, the Cards’ best pitcher, and went to third on a single by Reiser. When Carl Furillo cracked a ground ball to first, Stan Musial grabbed it and stepped on the bag. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that Robinson was staying put, so he turned and threw to second, hoping to catch Reiser there for the double play. When Musial pivoted, Robinson, taking a chance, broke for home, scoring the first run of the game.

  “Robinson was cheered each time he went to bat and the Dodgers as a team received more vocal encouragement than they usually get at Sportsman’s Park,” the Post-Dispatch reported. The only hint of trouble that afternoon was a skirmish, seemingly harmless, between Robinson and the Cardinals’ catcher, Joe Garagiola. But even seemingly harmless skirmishes were tricky business in 1947, when black and white ballplayers remained almost entirely unacquainted. Garagiola was twenty-one years old, six feet tall and pudgy, the son of Italian immigrants. He was playing in just his second year with the Cards, and still trying to prove he belonged. His anemic hitting was one of the reasons the team had been struggling in the early part of the season. From the moment they met, Garagiola and Robinson clashed, according to Wendell Smith’s account.

  “Watch this guy!” the catcher shouted to third baseman Whitey Kurowski as Robinson stepped up to bat. “He gets all his hits bunting. That’s the only way he can get them.”

  Garagiola kept it up. “This guy can’t hit!” he said, as Robinson dug his cleats into the russet soil of the batter’s box.

  “What’s your batting average?” Robinson asked the catcher over his shoulder.

  “Oh, about two points lower than yours,” he answered. “But if I could run as fast as you I’d have a real good average.”

  In fact, Garagiola was hitting .167, about a hundred points lower than Robinson.

  “No matter how fast you run, Joe,” Robinson shot back, “you couldn’t hit as much as you weigh.” Garagiola squatted behind home plate at about two hundred pounds.

  Smith didn’t bother to tell his readers how that at-bat turned out. Robinson went hitless in the game, but his aggressive base-running in the first inning proved important as the Dodgers won it, 4–3, in ten innings. After the game, Robinson and his teammates piled on to a bus and headed yet again for the train station, Brooklyn bound at last. Robinson had no hits in his last three road games, and the Dodgers lost five of eight on the trip, leaving them in a tie for fourth place. Still, among the men in
the clubhouse, attitudes had begun a subtle shift during their two weeks on the road. Ralph Branca noticed the Dodgers still weren’t talking much to Robinson, but they were talking about him more. They weren’t saying they liked him. They weren’t debating the merits of integration. They were talking about him as a baseball player, about his improvement as a first baseman, about the peculiar straight-armed way he swung the bat, about his speed and temerity on the bases. It seemed to Branca like a positive sign, a sign of acceptance.

  Bobby Bragan, one of the opponents of integration who had refused to back down when confronted by Rickey before the start of the season, still hadn’t made any effort to reach out to Robinson, nor did he have any intention of doing so. But he had been thinking a good deal about him, and Bragan admitted to himself now that some of the things he’d worried about in spring training had been no cause for concern after all. He’d shared a locker room and a shower room with a black man, and neither he nor his parents had dropped dead from shock. A black man had joined a team of white players, and no riots had ensued. Robinson had taken a job that otherwise would have gone to a white man, and the nation’s social structure had not collapsed. Bragan wasn’t ready to join the NAACP or to invite Robinson to dinner, but two things were slowly dawning. The first was that the world was changing. The second was that he could probably live with the change.

  THIRTEEN

  UP AND DOWN MACDONOUGH STREET

  The spring of 1947 slid toward summer. As they took their meals at a small table in the kitchen and looked out the back door, the Robinsons watched the sky brighten. Life was getting better. Jackie was playing without pain, his shoulder healed. More important, he was playing well. Jack Jr. had recovered from the illness that had marked his arrival in New York. Rachel, while lonely, had thrown herself completely into the role of housewife. She made sure her husband’s clothes were clean and ironed, that there was food in the cupboard, that their bedroom was cleared of clutter, their full-size bed neatly made, their crazy little closet-sized home in some semblance of order. She felt important. She felt like part of the team.

  The 500 block of MacDonough had but a few wispy trees, all of them now fully in bloom. Other signs of summer were more abundant. Over on Ralph Avenue, Abe Kutner stacked melons, plums, and peaches on wooden tables in front of his fruit and vegetable store. Bicycles tilted against the window at Bill McDonald’s sweet shop, where the kids came for egg creams, cream soda, and penny candies. The smell of baked bread wafted on warm air from the Capitol Baking Company.

  When her husband was on the road, Rachel busied herself with long books and long walks through the neighborhood. She felt isolated at times, but never bored, as she recently recalled. She listened to the Dodgers on the radio and waited for the mailman to slip her husband’s letters in the mailbox. But neither Red Barber’s broadcasts nor her husband’s handwritten notes on hotel stationery supplied the details she craved. She learned from Barber how well her husband was playing, but she had no sense of whether the fans and players were accepting him. She learned from Jack’s letters, which began with “Darling,” that he lusted and longed for her, but she didn’t get any idea of how he was bearing the strain.

  The Robinsons were still largely untested as a couple. As they padded about the apartment on MacDonough, Rachel discovered that Jack, though he loved to play with his son, was not much help with the cleaning, washing, and feeding. Rachel also noticed that her husband didn’t like to spend money. He had earned $3,500 playing with the Montreal Royals in 1946, which was better than the national median family income by $500, and more than twice the national median for a black family. A barnstorming tour in the fall of 1946 had brought him another $3,500 or so (although some of the checks bounced and Robinson, taking advantage of his newfound prominence, turned to Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP for help in recovering what he was owed). Even if he didn’t collect it all, it had been a good year. And now, with a salary of $5,000, he was making a solid income—not in the same ballpark as Hank Greenberg, to be sure, but well in line at least with a good many college professors, architects, and accountants. Still, he skimped. He bought no clothes. He bought no car. He treated his wife to no fancy nights on the town, no jazzy dresses, no ornate hats to match those worn by the more established Dodger wives. Even in later years, when his salary soared and he owned a big house in Connecticut and his family’s future had been well secured, he would remain tight at times with cash. He would leave his home for the drive to Ebbets Field with twenty-five dollars in his pocket, and when he returned at night, he would brag about how much of the twenty-five dollars remained. Rachel didn’t mind. He loved his family and took care of them, and that was all that mattered to her.

  Other aspects of the marriage, however, were more complicated. In Montreal, Jack and Rachel had each been secretive at times, hiding their thoughts and feelings. When Rachel had been feverish during her pregnancy, she’d kept it from Jack, preferring not to worry him. When Jack had felt burdened by the pressures of the game late in that season, he’d lost sleep and quit eating. But he didn’t open up to his wife. He had made up his mind to handle it on his own.

  Now, with her husband back from his first road trip, Rachel was learning how to unlock his thoughts and feelings. Patience was the key, she found. If she came right out and asked him what was on his mind, he would burrow deeper into his shell. So she would offer a game of honeymoon bridge, played atop their mattress, whispering the bids and passes so as not to wake the baby. There was no real competition between them; Jack was the stronger player by far, and that was fine with Rachel. If he managed to relax, that was victory enough for her. When they weren’t playing cards, they would sit down to eat, and Rachel would exhibit a powerful appetite for the details of her husband’s most recent ballgame.

  Before Jack signed with the Montreal Royals, Rachel had never seen a baseball game. Now she became an avid student and an “active listener,” paying close attention and, in the manner of a psychologist, gently moving the conversation in the direction she wanted it to move. How much did personality play into the game? If two infielders didn’t get along, did it affect their ability to turn double plays? Were some hitters more selfish than others, always trying to make hits when perhaps a sacrifice bunt might be more helpful to the team? What effect did a coach’s decisions have on the game’s outcome? Why were some players used only occasionally while others played every day, and how did that affect morale? The questions were designed to help her learn the game but also to decode her husband’s state of mind. They reflected her greater interest in human psychology than in athletics.

  Baseball was so much slower and more thoughtful than basketball or football. So much more strategy was involved. Rachel never ran out of questions, and she soon discovered that her husband never tired of talking about the game. What’s more, once he got going, he found it much easier to talk about how he felt. His sense of well-being, she discovered, was inextricably linked to events on the field. His batting average proved a pretty fair indicator of his happiness.

  That spring, Rachel began taking classes several mornings each week at the New York School of Interior Decorating. An old friend who was studying piano at Juiliard would come by the apartment to watch Jack Jr. After class, she would come home and, if there was a day game at Ebbets Field, get the baby ready to go. Each game helped her think of new questions to ask her husband. Jack lectured patiently, interpreting her interest as a token of her love, as she hoped he would. Once, Rachel had aspired to be a doctor. Later, when she decided that a career in medicine would make raising a family too difficult, she steered toward nursing instead. She had always looked forward in five-year intervals, imagining where and how she would be living. In 1947, she still clung to the belief she would one day work outside the home, yet she was not sure anymore if that would be in five, ten, or fifteen years. Both her parents had been entrepreneurial by nature, and they’d always made her feel, even as a little girl, that the household could not operate witho
ut her help. Sometimes as a child she had felt like Cinderella. She washed her brothers’ dirty clothes, she tended to her father when he became too sick to work, she scrubbed pots and pans for her mother’s catering business. She knew that working around the house still counted as working—and at that moment in 1947 she couldn’t think of any job more important than supporting her husband. It required a great deal of selflessness, especially given the enormous attention Jack was getting. Some wives—especially a strong, smart one such as Rachel—might have grown jealous. But Rachel wanted the glory to go to her husband. His pride was hers.

  They had almost no social life, as best she could remember in interviews almost sixty years later. The baby was a light sleeper and Rachel a heavy worrier. When Jack Jr. slept, his parents tiptoed around in the dark. When Jack Jr. cried out in the night, it was Rachel who got up to feed him, ensuring that her husband would get his rest. Leisure time meant a long walk or a ride on a bus or trolley. There were squabbles, Rachel remembered, most of them attributable to their tight quarters, but she couldn’t remember what they were, and, in retrospect, none seemed too severe. “The excitement, the joy, the growing confidence . . . it kept us going,” she recalled.

  The stress wounded Jack at times, but Rachel didn’t see the fuming, tormented soul others have described. Most of the writers commenting on Robinson’s emotional state didn’t understand that baseball occupied just one part of his mind. He had wanted a family as much as he had ever wanted to play in the major leagues, maybe more. The fulfillment of that wish went a long way toward providing him peace of mind. “We were very, very much in love and we’d waited a very long time to get married—five years—so we had that, the strength of that going,” Rachel recalled. The attacks by opposing players and managers made him furious, but he’d been hearing racial epithets all his life. He knew how to handle them. The racism of his own teammates pained him, but it never forced him to question his self-worth. He didn’t lose sleep wondering if people liked him. His main concerns were those he could control, namely hitting and fielding.